The patronization of Delsa Flores

Everybody by now has heard about the case of Delsa Flores, the Davao City court interpreter dismissed from service and deprived of her benefits for failing to report a market stall in her statement of assets, liabilities and net worth as the law requires.

Everybody now knows of Flores because senators in the recently-concluded impeachment trial of Renato Corona repeatedly cited her case as they explained their vote to convict and remove him from office as chief justice.

The mantra had been that if a lowly court employee can be fired for failing to declare a market stall in her SALN, why not the chief magistrate of the land who admitted to not declaring millions in dollars and pesos.

What nobody is saying, and perhaps because it simply did not occur to anyone, is that nobody really cared about Delsa Flores until she became a convenient cushion to blunt the impact of what amounts to nothing less than a political execution.

Let us not kid ourselves. Did you for a moment ever believe, that if Corona had been an ally of President Aquino, that he would suffer the fate of being the first ever Filipino official to be impeached and removed from office?

Some of Aquino’s friends are not impeachable officials. But they are still punishable by law nevertheless. Yet have you ever seen or heard any of his erring friends get more than a mere slap on the wrist for law infractions?

If Delsa Flores got dismissed for a violation that can not alter the course of this nation, why cannot for instance Ronald Llamas, the political adviser who has the ear of the president and thus holds a far more sensitive position, be made to answer for his infractions?

Llamas was found to have a virtual arsenal of high powered firearms and caught on camera buying thousands of pesos worth of pirated DVDs, infractions and violations that, by virtue of his lofty position and close proximity to the president, deserve more than just an admonition.

Corona, of course, deserved to be impeached because he admitted to his own wrongdoing. But his removal was but a foregone conclusion. Remember what Ombudsman Conchita Carpio Morales said? If Corona gets acquitted, a new impeachment will be ready by December.

That means Corona was bound to be removed one way or the other. If no evidence was to be found against him, it will be manufactured. We must not ignore how many of the early evidences were manufactured if they did not exist, and embellished in case they did.

So let us stop this hypocrisy about Delsa Flores because the world never gave a damn about her until Corona got impeached. In fact, nobody gives a damn still, only that there is now an important role for her to play, and that is as a crutch for our collective conscience.

Delsa Flores is being used to sustain the charade about going after crooks in government when in fact only the crooks who are political enemies of the president are being prosecuted. Poor Delsa Flores. She thinks she sees equal justice. She does not know she is being patronized.

If Delsa Flores had any inkling that she is just being used, she probably would have suffered far worse than she originally suffered. But she does not realize it, that is why she is somewhat reluctantly enjoying a little of the residue limelight from the impeachment.

Good for her that she is clueless. Far more discerning people would have resented being unceremoniously thrust into the limelight to expose old wounds resurrected for no other purpose than to windowdress a very ugly sight.