Former President Joseph Estrada was not one of my favorite elected officials. Although assured that he had hired a brilliant team of advisers, my first thoughts upon his election was that cunning politicians will use his naivette against him.
I watched as they impeached him. I watched as a new regime took over. I watched his day-to-day battle from prison to house arrest to a guilty of plunder ruling.
The funny thing is during the six years that he was imprisoned, I grew to admire Erap (as he is fondly called by his constituents) as a person. I watched how the masses, his followers, supported him all throughout his trial. I watched testimony after testimony of underprivileged people proclaiming that he had helped them.
I admired him the most when he chose not to go into exile. A lot of presidents have done it, even the genius who ran the Philippines for decades had resorted to fleeing the country. But Erap stayed, he had wanted to prove his innocence.
A lot of his friends ratted him out, washing their hands of him and going out in public declaring that they are better men - but their actions to me speak louder than their words. You know the quality I liked most about the former president was that he never muddied anybody else's name. He did not point the finger. He never said it was somebody else's fault.
As he said in a July interview for Kababayan LA, "I'm not perfect. I know I have made mistakes in my governance of the country, but I fulfilled my sworn duty to my country."
The guilty verdict made me sad. It's not because I do not want those who are guilty of plunder to be punished - it just feels wrong. That here is someone who served only 3 and 1/2 years, maybe he did get money when he was president - because he was president, but we had a dictator who had gained a lot more because he ruled for over 20 years and he was not given a guilty ruling and punished. We had a president who cleaned out the treasury during his regime, not one word was said about plunder. The current president's husband has been tried numerous times on graft and corruption charges and had always escaped unscathed. But here is a man, maybe not as educated as some of our other presidents, who came from show business and rose from being mayor of his home town to being the President of the Philippines because the masses loved him - and what did we do? The first chance we get, we make him the scapegoat, the one who had to take the fall to show the world that we can prosecute even those who ruled our country. Why him? Because he was not perfect? I think that is very sad. | |
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