Running around in circles
Anti-Marcos cases filed in reactionary courts are going nowhere
Millions of people are now observing the 31st anniversary of the declaration of martial law in the Philippines. Thirty-one years have passed but the thousands of victims of human rights violations by the dictatorship continue to be denied the indemnification they and their families deserve.
These past few months, maneuvers by the Marcos family and their collaborators in congress to water down the bill that would ensure the victims' recovery of the dictator's stolen wealth have been the focus of intense criticism. Among the Marcoses' shameless collaborators is Rep. Loretta Ann Rosales of the reformist Akbayan who formally filed a bill alloting the Marcoses' stolen wealth not only to victims of the dictatorship but also to those of subsequent regimes.
Such a confluence in the antipeople interests of the Marcos family and the reformists has further dimmed any hope that the Marcoses' stolen wealth can be recovered and justice attained for the victims of the fascist dictatorship any time soon. This is on top of the sluggish pace taken by the cases filed against the Marcoses which can be attributed to the reactionary government's lack of resolve to pursue the recovery of the stolen wealth.
Not one of Aquino, Ramos, Estrada and Arroyo regimes ever seriously sought to give back the Marcoses' loot to the people. On the contrary, these successive regimes have even obstructed the process of recovery. It has been almost two decades since the fall of the dictatorship but the cases filed by the government against the Marcoses have hardly made any headway.
Several criminal cases against the Marcoses have been dismissed by the Ombudsman. The Ombudsman has also filed several motions to withdraw some of the cases already filed in court. The Sandiganbayan has already dismissed some of them.
So far, 11 cases have been dismissed, four are leading to the acquittal of the Marcoses and eight more are pending. In 1993, Imelda Marcos was found guilty in two cases, but the Supreme Court reversed the decisions in 1998.
Four cases filed in 1995 concerning wealth hidden by the Marcoses in five foundations acting as fronts were dismissed by the Sandiganbayan supposedly for lack of evidence. When ordered by the court to gather and present their evidence, the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG), the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Office of the Solicitor General "agreed" to withdraw three of the cases instead.
As this circus went on in the reactionary court, the government in recent years has been shamelessly bargaining with the family of the late dictator, resulting in various compromise agreements that have been concealed from the public. Thirty-seven compromise agreements have been forged between the reactionary government and the Marcoses, according to the PCGG in 2001.
The Marcoses and their accomplices continue to maneuver to retain control over their stolen wealth. On August 19, Patrick Foetish, the Marcoses' Swiss lawyer, arrived in the country to appeal the Supreme Court decision to forfeit in favor of the Philippine government $683 million deposited in Swiss bank accounts owned by the Marcoses. On September 2, their attorneys, in collusion with Robert Swift, the opportunist lawyer of Claimants 1081, succeeded in derailing the cases involving human rights violations under the dictatorship. They found an ally in Judge Manuel Real of the Hawaii District Court who ordered an injunction against the implementation of the Supreme Court decision. This same American court ordered the Marcoses in 1994 to compensate their victims.
The democratic and progressive forces are determined to pursue the fight to bring the criminals to justice even in the face of the deliberate inutility of successive regimes and the schemes hatched by the Marcos family. The collusion of antipeople forces to reverse the verdict of history must never be allowed.
What the victims demand, however, is beyond the pale of the legal arena. No amount of money can compensate for it. In the end, it is only the revolutionary movement that can mete punishment on the Marcos family and its cronies thoroughly and with finality.
| 
