The ongoing investigation in the Senate headed by Senator Leila De Lima has become a farce. Officially, the investigation is supposed to find out if the recent deaths allegedly associated with the government’s current anti-drug abuse campaign are state-sponsored extrajudicial killings. De Lima’s numerous press statements suggest that she has already made up her mind that President Rodrigo Duterte is behind those deaths.
From the start of the political campaign in 2016, De Lima, who was running for a Senate seat under the Liberal Party of then President Benigno Aquino III, was so beholden to Aquino that she served as the LP mouthpiece in their relentless character assassination of Duterte, who was an early frontrunner in the presidential race.
Even when she was still justice secretary, De Lima had already publicly accused Duterte of being the brains of the so-called Davao Death Squad, an alleged vigilante group responsible for extrajudicial killings in Davao City. De Lima promised to conduct a thorough investigation but, as expected, no investigation took place because De Lima was busy preparing for her senatorial campaign.
De Lima also created a national controversy on the eve of her departure from the Department of Justice. The Iglesia Ni Cristo religious sect accused her of undue interest in a criminal investigation involving some ministers of the sect. When De Lima denied taking undue interest in the investigation, the INC staged a large-scale picket outside the DoJ headquarters in Manila. Later on, the picket moved to Edsa and Shaw Boulevard, where the demonstrators denounced De Lima.
Because the anti-De Lima rally caused a traffic nightmare in the metropolis, President Aquino intervened, and a closed-door meeting took place between him and some INC officers. After the meeting ended, the INC declared a victory and the rally dispersed peacefully.
Surprisingly, Malacañang made a similar claim to victory, but President Aquino and De Lima refused to disclose to the public what the government agreed upon with the INC. Even as of this writing, De Lima refuses to reveal what actually took place during that meeting.
The public got more curious if there was an exchange deal between the administration and the INC when the television news media aired a segment of De Lima, who was already an LP senatorial candidate, visiting the INC central office to seek the support of the sect in the elections. Although De Lima was politely received, she failed to get the INC nod. Her surprising win, placing last in the list of 12 successful senatorial candidates, did not erase the public’s curiosity.
De Lima refused to be interpellated by her colleagues right after she delivered her first privilege speech as a freshman senator, and she gave no reason for her refusal. However, after Manny Pacquiao, another freshman senator, delivered his first privilege speech on the death penalty, De Lima asked Pacquiao numerous questions, all obviously designed to reveal that Pacquiao knew nothing about constitutional law.
For one who asks a lot of questions, De Lima sure dislikes being questioned.
After getting settled in her new job, De Lima virtually proclaimed herself as President Duterte’s nemesis in the Senate, even if Duterte had not yet served a hundred days in office. By taking on the highest elective official of the land, De Lima was probably projecting herself as a crusader to make up for her having placed 12th in the Senate race. What hogwash!
Nonetheless, even before De Lima could gain a momentum in her probe, the ghosts of her past came back to haunt and discredit her.
First, De Lima is currently facing a separate investigation undertaken by the DoJ regarding anomalies in the national penitentiary which took place when she was still the justice secretary. Those anomalies pertain to the extraordinarily special treatment afforded by prison officials to the convicted drug lords, including air-conditioned spacious quarters, catered meals, and access to modern appliances, laptops, mobile phones, firearms, drugs, cash, and the like. President Duterte himself accused De Lima of receiving large sums of bribe money from the imprisoned drug lords.
Second, it has been alleged that De Lima’s personal driver is also her secret lover, and that her driver collected, on her behalf, the bribe money from the drug lords. A photograph of a large house in Pangasinan which De Lima supposedly gifted her driver appeared in the print media.
Unfortunately for her, De Lima’s ambivalent and seemingly equivocal denials have not done anything to dilute the public ridicule against her in the social media.
To all intents and purposes, therefore, De Lima’s Senate probe was going nowhere on account of the credibility problems faced by De Lima herself. On one occasion, she was virtually labelled as damaged goods.
Last week, De Lima made full use of the weeklong lull in her Senate probe and produced a witness, Edgar Matobato, who claims to be a former member of the Davao Death Squad. Testifying in De Lima’s probe, Matobato attributed many deaths in Davao City to President Duterte when he was still the city mayor.
For whatever the testimony of Matobato is worth, its timing is awfully suspicious. What took De Lima so long to produce this surprise witness, considering that she had been chairman of the Commission on Human Rights and, after that, Justice Secretary for the longest time? If De Lima knew of Matobato back then, her delay in producing him in her probe suggests that she had been harboring a fugitive from justice. Now, if De Lima knew of Matobato only recently, then her overnight reliance on his anti-Duterte testimony is post-haste, self-serving, and reckless.
Allowing Matobato to testify in the Senate probe under such suspicious and anomalous circumstances, as De Lima has done, makes the Senate probe a farce, and increases the low regard thinking Filipinos have for the current Senate.