Being Estrada’d

By LUIS V. TEODORO

THE CONVICTION and sentencing–to a maximum of 40 years in prison–of Joseph Estrada would have been the historic milestone it’s been endlessly said to be were it not for the context in which it has happened.

Estrada was the first former president of this land of woe to have been accused of what was, in 2001, a capital offense. He is now the first to have occupied that high office to have been convicted of anything. The same people who gave us such linguistic atrocities as “senatoriable” can henceforth use “estrada” as a verb. “Being estrada’d” can now mean being convicted of plunder.

But take note that Estrada’s is not the worse crime against the nation presidents have committed, and that the festering legitimacy issue against Gloria Macapagal Arroyo includes accusations of systematic corruption and plunder.

The offense of which Estrada has been convicted, plunder, was described by the Senate version of the law as “the use of high office for personal enrichment, committed thru a series of acts done not in the public eye but in stealth and secrecy over a period of time…. The acts and/or omissions sought to be penalized do not involve simple cases of malversation of public funds, bribery, extortion, theft and graft but constitute plunder of an entire nation resulting in material damage to the national economy.”

The necessity for the Anti-Plunder Act (RA 7080) was thus explained by Supreme Court Justice Josue Belosillo in patriotic terms: plunder has to be punished because unrestrained corruption can “spread like a malignant tumor and ultimately consume the moral and institutional fiber of our nation.”

Some may argue that corruption in both the public and private spheres is way past spreading like a malignant tumor and has not only damaged most of the country’s institutions (the courts, the military, the police, the civil service, the media, even the Church), but has also made theft and cheating second nature among much of the population. But that’s just me–and several million others.

The Act was nevertheless clear in its intentions, and was presumably welcomed by those Filipinos who, at the time the law was passed (on July 12, 1991), had been wracking their brains trying to find some way of preventing the repetition of the looting the Marcos era was noted for.

That some of the country’s worst looters in the House and the Senate were among those who made the bill into law wasn’t a good sign, however. It suggested that, like most laws in this country, RA 7080 was not likely to get anyone but the small fry–or to go beyond the usual words, words, words.

But Estrada’s arrest in 2001 and subsequent trial for plunder was crucial because it marked two firsts: it was the first time a past president had been arrested for any offense, and the first time the plunder law was being used against such a personage. Hopes were up that, having shown the world that the government could arrest a former president, it would also proceed to demonstrate that it could try one fairly.

But the new government–the beneficiary of Estrada’s ouster in January that year–had itself been resisting Estrada’s arrest, having accurately predicted that it could lead to the rioting that erupted in metro Manila in late April that year.

To mix metaphors: already comfortably ensconced in Malacanang, Arroyo (the glory, not the joker) didn’t want anything to rock the boat, and saw a plunder trial as providing the Estrada forces a host of opportunities to do precisely that as, like many other trials, it stretched on into infinity. Except that there were all these civil society, church and other groups that were insisting on arresting Estrada and charging him with plunder among other offenses to the law, taste, and plain good manners.