CA and Aquila Legis/ GMA ratings down

I am angry. In fact I am outraged. That long, full-fisted,smouldering anger I felt many years ago in the wake of the primitive killing of Lenny Villa by the Ateneo law fraternity Aquila Legis is back. And it is back because the court of Appeals just last Friday, instead of wielding justice, acquitted 19 Aquila members of the charge of homicide – and set them free. Anticipating public anger, the Court declared it "will never be swayed by the public outcry for revenge." The decision was written by Associate Justice Eulogio Verzola, concurred in by Associate Justices Rodrigo V. Cosico and Eliezer R. de los Santos.

Revenge, Mr. Justices?

Why don’t you tell the truth? The fact is it took you almost 10 years to reach this decision, justice deliberately delayed – in my opinion – to allow time to mitigate the horrible crime and blunt its devil horns, The fact is, like the US Congress vis-à-vis Israel, the Court of Appeals is widely known as territory occupied by the Aquila Legis whose alumni are therein entrenched. There they flaunt the fraternity’s evil gospel of Neanderthal brutality in its hazing rites. The fact is, former Solicitor General Raul Goco, a high priest of Aquila Legis, once admitted to me he had written the Court of Appeals to take it easy on the convicted Aquila felons. The fact is, two deputy Solicitor Generals in tandem with Goco also wrote the Court seeking the same privileged treatment for the Aquilans. The fact is not a single member of the convicted cabal spent a single day in jail since Judge Adoracion Angeles in 1993 found them "guilty beyond reasonable doubt" and sentenced them to a minimum of 10 years and a maximum of 14 years imprisonment. The fact is they were not blackballed by our judiciary, two of them gaining prestigious entry into the MalacaÒang office of the notorious "Jimpol", namely Jimmy Policarpio, an Aquilan himself who manned the Legislative Liaison Office of President Joseph Estrada.

Want more, mynheers?

So stop all this pretense of dealing out justice. In so doing, you look dubious, devious, and utterly duplicitous. In your acquittal verdict, you were quoted as saying the Aquila initiation rites were conducted to "test and inculcate in the neophytes a sense of commitment, strength of character and humility." You nuts? Since when was kicking, slapping, smashing, gouging, boxing, pounding, pummelling, clubbing a neophyte during an Aquilan ritual a test of strength of character? Since when was torturing them to the pits of hell equivalent to inculcating a sense of commitment in the victim, a sense of humility? You must be mad.

And so what if Lenny Villa voluntarily subjected himself to the rites of initiation? If I must quote a previous column, "Did that justify killing him? Did that justify the Bicol Express where Aquila hoods spooled out of their pitchforks of a leering Lucifer to ride bloodhound on the prostrate bodies of Lenny Villa and their other Ateneo neophytes? And the neophytes were flogged with their consent so there is no crime? No crime, mynheers, when the rites become barbaric, a cesspool of evil deeds dishonoring and betraying the Christian gospel, debasing, degrading, diminishing the human being? When Aquila Legis rites are secret, hidden from society, precisely because they are intended to dig deep into almost all forms of bestialty? And these are students of Ateneo Law University, the Jesuits’ elite institution to spread the untold blessings of Christianity?

And let me repeat what I wrote before about this Aquila Legis evil:

"We never imagined that the skunks had come to roost, that the beast in man had been given full play in these rites, that the foul gurgle of some subterranean recess of the human kind would unload its spittle onto the rites, that the whole thing would smell like a Gestapo charnel house."

Come, come, Mr. Justices of the Court of Appeals. You have proved once again that justice in the Philippines is only for the rich, the sons and scions of the mighty, that the poor because they are helpless and have no money and influence crawl like vermin in our prisons, that they can languish and die in these prisons without any squawk from you, while the convicted Aquilans, foul and bestial as they may be, are the favored of the earth, to be spared even the smell of jail and the sight of prison bars.

Why am I so riled up? Because from the very beginning, I took up the cudgels for Lenny Villa in 1991, commiserated with his parents Romy and Gerrie. I listened helpless and wordless, almost on the verge of tears, as Gerrie told me about many sleepless nights after Lenny died, where she rolled in bed, crying, wailing in broken sobs, reminiscing endlessly with photos of Lenny clutched to her breast, their only son. Lenny was young, only 19, he was bright, he was a good and exemplary youth. Why did the Aquilans have to kill him?. In fact, they broke his spine. And don’t any of them tell me, certainly not the Court of Appeals tell me it was an accident.

Sirs, that was murder most foul. The crime of one was the crime of all. There was complicity.

* * *

And so now the Pulse Asia survey of UP Professor Felipe Miranda tells us that public approval for President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has dropped because (to quote the front-page story of The Philippine STAR) "most Filipinos felt that their quality of life deteriorated in 2001." This proves more than anything else that the president’s repeated claim that our economy is now on the high road, we Filipinos are well on the way to stability, that the future is coming up roses, is a lot of bunk.

And if the year 2001 was that bad, then you can expect 2002 to be worse, perhaps much worse. The domestic economic crisis, which started with the disgraced presidency of Joseph Estrada, got into worse straits when the international economic crisis spun almost crazily from 9-11, the day Muslim terrorists shattered the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the twin symbols of America’s superpower might. Since then almost 1.6 million American workers and employees have been laid off, the energy giant ENRON collapsed, the economies of Germany and Japan badly bleeding, Germany’s particularly, the economic locomotive of the European Union.

Even as I write, the top story of the International Herald Tribune announces that Ford Motor Co., that erstwhile indestructible automaker, will cut 35,000 jobs worldwide and close five plants " to reduce losses and eliminate losses." The ENRON bankruptcy (the biggest corporate bankruptcy in US history) is particularly significant because it reeks of "scandal" which could involve the presidency of George W. Bush. If the American economy should dive any further, and Japan continues to be trapped in an economy that simply refuses to get out of a decade-old crisis, then the Philippines will continue to slump. Combined, the US and Japan comprise the great majority market for our exports, electronic products, garments and the like.

Promise as she will, pump-priming our ailing economy can never be a substitute for the huge export loss, which is equivalent to hundreds of millions of dollars fleeing our country. To boot, China’s exports of virtually the same products have become a giant dagger in our back because the Chinese sell much, much more and they sell cheaper.

I notice that Couples for Christ is now taking out full-page ads. Couples only does so when the darkness deepens in our country, and they have to ring the bells. Read: "We are assailed by the same old problems. Politicians looking after their own interests rather than the country’s. Unrest among civil society; small, loud groups making noises to promote self-interest or the agenda of politicians manipulating them. Media sensationalizing bad news and making us all feel how hopeless things are. Saber-rattling by some in the military, scaring away business and everyone else to inaction. Pious posturing by those charged with serious crimes against the people."

However much Couples may blame media for sensationalism, the fact is – and it stares at all of us like snake-eyes in the face – that the situation is bad, even critical. I have said in past columns – backed up by solid and substantial historical and factual evidence – that I have not seen the Philippines in worse straits in 50 years than it is today. Many readers agree, but they prefer to look the other way, hoping it will go away like a bad dream. Well, that is the incorrigible Filipino failing, if it is not a vice.

Well, it won’t go away.

And it won’t go away because primo, our government and our leaders refuse to admit we are in the face of a full-blown crisis, and consequently, secundo, apply mercurochrome and scotch-tape when what is needed, tertio, is the surgeon’s knife. There is nothing wrong with admitting there is a national crisis. President George W. Bush has frankly admitted there is a national crisis in America, it is serious, he will cope with it. It is when you admit there is crisis, that there is opportunity. And then emerges the grim heroic struggle, the forces and energy necessary, the will, the courage, the imagination to wage war on the crisis.

Let’s go up that hill, Mrs. President, plant your flag and fight for all you are worth. Forget 2004.