Lawbreakers

If you break the law, you must pay for it.

This concept is often difficult to grasp in this country. The difficulty is on display again in the case of Leandro Aragoncillo, the Filipino-American who has ruined his promising career as an intelligence analyst in Washington by stealing classified information from the files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Philippine politicians who received the stolen information that Aragoncillo had reportedly passed on to Michael Ray Aquino have made light of the espionage case. This is easy for them to do, since they’re not the ones facing a prison term of 15 to 20 years.

When this story broke, the recipients of the stolen information had pointed out that the reports had nothing at all to do with the United States, so what was the fuss about?

Later, they said the stolen information was merely recycled by the US Embassy in Manila from Philippine news reports.

Now that Aragoncillo has pleaded guilty to espionage and faces a stiff prison term, and the Arroyo administration is naughtily egging on the Americans to go after the recipients of the stolen information in the Philippines, it is finally dawning on the politicians that Aragoncillo is being punished for the act of stealing classified information. The content is immaterial.

America is still on war footing against terrorists. With failure of intelligence blamed for the 9/11 attacks and grievous miscalculations in Iraq, there is a continuing shakeup in US intelligence services, with the Central Intelligence Agency undergoing a change of leadership. The Directorate for Intelligence under John Negroponte is continuing the intelligence overhaul.

For a nation at war, espionage and theft of classified information from FBI files are serious offenses. Aragoncillo has implicated Michael Ray Aquino, a former police senior superintendent who fled the country after EDSA II when he was linked to the murders of publicist Salvador "Bubby" Dacer and driver Emmanuel Corbito.

Aquino and Cesar Mancao, another police senior superintendent who is being held in the United States for violating immigration rules, have been ordered arrested by a Manila court for the twin murders.

The arrest for murder Filipinos can understand. But being arrested for downloading information about the Philippines from FBI computers?

There’s a law against it in the United States, Aragoncillo broke it, and now he must suffer for his crime.

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We, on the other hand, cannot even pin down Aquino and Mancao for two murders.

And some of our prominent politicians still cannot grasp why Aragoncillo is being punished.

I can understand the cluelessness of deposed President Joseph Estrada. And Sen. Panfilo Lacson, the former boss of Aquino and Mancao in the national police, has prudently learned to keep his mouth shut.

But some of the lawmakers who continue to keep yapping about the case should know better. Then again, their attitude is understandable, considering that most lawmakers think one of the perks of their office is exemption from many laws.

To be fair, these lawmakers are not alone in believing that laws are meant to be broken.

Many Filipinos have trouble complying with laws, especially because enforcement is lax and the justice system is weak.

Filipinos have learned that people can get away with ignoring or breaking the law, from the most minor city ordinance to tax regulations and laws on poll fraud and plunder.

Foreigners often ask me why this is so. Their most common question: How come no one has been sent to prison for amassing ill-gotten wealth during the Marcos regime?

I wish I could give them a logical answer.

Here is a voluble official of the Presidential Commission on Good Government, announcing that Imelda Marcos is promising to share her family’s wealth if a compromise is reached with the Arroyo administration. Based on what the PCGG official has said, that wealth could be worth over a trillion.

Even if Ferdinand Marcos had truly found the fabled treasure of Japanese war general Tomoyuki Yamashita, I doubt if the wealth could have amounted to a trillion bucks.

Even if we dismissed Imelda Marcos’ purported claims about the amount of her wealth, shouldn’t the government take a look at that case involving the late dictator’s $40-million account with New York-based Merrill Lynch? The account was reportedly opened in 1972 with a deposit of $2 million. Where did the Marcoses get that money?

Marcos’ heirs have often said that any money believed to be theirs and recovered by the PCGG, the government can keep.

The current focus is in fact on wealth recovery and no longer on punishment. These days the PCGG seems to be in a mad scramble to reach a compromise agreement with the Marcos family.

It is a pragmatic approach, considering the failure of successive administrations to prosecute those responsible for the abuses of the Marcos regime. Even a case filed in New York against Imelda Marcos was thrown out by a jury.

But what message does this send to Filipinos?

If corruption never went away with the fall of the Marcos regime, and if his heirs can now say that corruption is even worse these days, one of the biggest causes is our failure to make anyone pay for the abuses of the dictatorship.

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The biggest punishment for abusive officials here is to be ousted from office. But this is seen as a political process, and not the consequence of a functioning judicial system.

Even our effort to prosecute Joseph Estrada for the capital offense of plunder has turned into a farce. Erap is allowed to stay overnight at his San Juan home after being downed by diarrhea. Erap is digging his own grave, literally. Cute, but when will we ever see justice in his plunder case?

And of course it doesn’t help that President Arroyo herself is being accused of breaking the law, or at least going around it.

With policy-makers and prominent personalities breaking the law with impunity, the disregard for the law goes all the way down to the grassroots.

Thus traffic rules are ignored and pedestrian lanes are seen as nothing but street decoration. People cheat on their taxes. People think requiring rally permits is a human rights violation.

And lawmakers cannot understand why stealing classified information constitutes a crime.