A relative of one of the executed drug mule in China, snapped at a journalist at the airport,”Are you happy with what you are doing?”
Noli de Castro and other broadcasters and journalists who feasted on this story of the drug mules should answer that.
In my prayers for the families of Sally Ordinario-Villanueva, Ramon Credo and Elizabeth Batain for strength as they try to cope with the loss of their loved ones, I also ask that God touches the conscience of TV networks personalities who sensationalized the deaths of the three to boost their ratings.
The networks obviously wanted to replicate a Flor Contemplacion situation, a media event in 1995 that violated all rules of journalism, ignoring the facts of the case and reported based on emotions.
I watch ABS-CBN and Noli de Castro was a turnoff. His attempt to influence viewers towards his distorted view was obvious.
In the man-on-the street survey of TV Patrol last month whether the three deserved to be executed, Noli de Castro couldn’t hide his disappointment that 80 percent answered in the affirmative. Last Monday, they asked their viewers if they thought that the government had done enough for the three, 45 per cent said “No” and 55 percent said “Yes.”
De Castro still couldn’t take it. He said, “Halos tie lang.”
He didn’t stop there. He said the government (was he referring to the Department of Foreign Affairs?) failed in explaining to the public the case of the three drug mules. “May gusto kasing pumapel kasi.”
Yes, there’s one who is trying to exploit the situation: De Castro and his ilk.
I’m reprinting here the column of former UP dean of the College of Law, Raul Pangalangan, “Drug mules: Even in grief, we are confused” in the Philippine Daily Inquirer. It puts the issue in the proper perspective.
Even our unrequited prayers for the three executed Filipinos show that we fundamentally misunderstand the problem that we face. We were half-hearted in objecting to the death penalty. We called the drug mules OFWs when in fact they were not. We lump them together with Flor Contemplacion and Sarah Balabagan, and fail to discern the differences in their cases, or ask if we could have timely asked the Chinese courts to mitigate the penalty. Protest banners call for “Justice for Credo, Villanueva and Batain.” I’m sure the Chinese will say, “Well, that’s exactly what we gave them!”, and argumentatively our only rejoinder will be to impose our own standards of justice upon the Middle Kingdom.
Of course we must grieve that three Filipinos, forced by poverty to serve as drug mules, have been executed in a foreign land. As a nation, we must ensure that our government reaches out to vulnerable Filipinos on trial before foreign courts and ensure that they have proper legal assistance. As a people, we must look inward as well, and ask ourselves why millions of our countrymen sacrifice so much just to give their families a decent life, while top dogs in government corporations reward themselves obscene sums and top generals leave office with million-peso “pabaons.” All these, while a passive nation led by its ombudsman looks the other way.
In sum, we empathized viscerally but maybe our brains lagged behind our hearts. We need to reconcile our official position which is to plead for mercy, with our public rhetoric which is that of moral outrage. To start with, we should have been outraged at the death penalty itself. We were not, because deep down within the Filipino heart, we actually approve of it in the first place. Look at the historical record. We abolished capital punishment in the 1987 Constitution “unless, for compelling reasons involving heinous crimes, the Congress hereafter [restores] it.” And in 1993, restore it Congress did, as a facile response to the rise of kidnap for ransom gangs. In April 2001, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo effectively suspended the death penalty by automatically commuting all sentences. By 2003, Arroyo lifted the de facto moratorium. In early 2004, Pope John Paul II asked us to stop all executions, and Arroyo obliged. In June 2006, on the eve of Arroyo’s visit to the Vatican, she signed RA 9346 abolishing the death penalty once again. There have since been periodic attempts to restore the death penalty.
For us, the death penalty debate has been mere political football, bereft of any deeply held moral consensus. And for the current football season, the death penalty argument would not have swayed the Chinese, who apparently have the highest rate of executions worldwide and, even worse, are instinctively resistant to international pressure. But handled well, we could have capitalized on the global consensus against the death penalty, the same consensus that we mobilized to save the life of Sarah Balabagan, the Filipina in the United Arab Emirates who stabbed and killed her employer who was raping her.
Two, there is a stark difference between the cases of Contemplacion and Balabagan vis-à-vis the drug mules in China. For Contemplacion, accused of murder, we argued that she made her first confession without the benefit of counsel. For Sarah, a rape victim, we argued self-defense. In none of our pleas to China do we even plead the innocence of the convicted Filipinos. For the Xiamen and Shenzhen executions, the best we could muster is to fix the blame on the drug traffickers fronting as job recruiters, because the actual drug carriers were apparently complicit in the crime.
Three, I sense an initial ambivalence by our government on the issue of drug mules on trial abroad. Did we earlier give them legal aid during their trial? Even after conviction, was there any room for the judges to mitigate the penalty? Was there any room for executive clemency for the executive branch to pardon or reduce the penalty? The one-month stay of execution gained by Vice President Jejomar Binay was a feat, because China is itself building up its “rule of law” institutions, and appeals from the political branches of the Philippines addressed to China’s judicial agencies were an uphill battle to start with. In other words, the execution of convicted drug traffickers is what we call “national treatment,” i.e., how China treats its own citizens similarly situated, and what we were asking for was special treatment for our nationals.
Fourth, I am troubled by protest banners that call for “Justice for OFWs on death row.” Genuine OFWs must object to being lumped together with the drug mules. For certain they have similarities: the pressures of economic insecurity, their vulnerability in an alien land, the spirit of self-sacrifice for spouses, children and parents. But the similarities end the moment the drug mules carry contraband on their persons and enter the Naia. By putting them all in one basket, we expose bona fide OFWs to increased monitoring (paid for by increased regulatory fees) for crimes not of their own making, and to increased harassment abroad by hostile and predatory airport officials.
Moreover, we confuse justice with mercy, or to be more precise, the Philippine brand with the Chinese brand of justice. We were surprised that in the Chinese Supreme Court, decisions can be final. We have been so used to eternal flip-flopping, the Filipino notion that due process of law means endless process. We also mistakenly thought that an unabashed plea for mercy unadorned by legal argument would suffice, and that human drama would trump legal doctrine as handily in China as it does in the Philippines.
