(An open letter to Vice President Leni Robredo)
ALLOW me to congratulate you for your admirable decision to quit the Cabinet of President Rodrigo Duterte after you have been unceremoniously and discourteously told by the President’s subaltern to stop attending Cabinet meetings.
While it is the prerogative of the President to dismiss Cabinet members, elementary courtesy dictates that the President should have called you by phone or should have summoned you personally to inform you of his decision. But the final act of humiliating you was left to the Presidents’ subordinates, which showed his misogynistic character and his total disrespect for etiquette and protocol.
The cavalier and supercilious manner by which you were treated by the administration had pushed you to the wall, leaving you with no other honorable option but to resign your Cabinet position.
I was not surprised to learn how the President’s pathetic propagandists tried to justify his decision to bar you from attending Cabinet meetings. Duterte’s mouthpiece said that you should not be in the Cabinet because of the “irreconcilable differences” between you and the President. Yes, such irreconcilable differences are too glaring. Here are at least three of them:
President Duterte idolizes Ferdinand Marcos and he approved the burial of the body (or any waxen remains) of the late dictator at the hallowed grounds of the Libingan ng mga Bayani (LNMB). You have taken the stand to oppose the burial of the late strongman at the LNMB because this is an insult to the thousands who were murdered, tortured, disappeared, persecuted and detained during the Marcos dictatorship.
President Duterte wants to solve the drug problem by his open support and encouragement of extra-judicial killings, and even threatened human rights advocates and lawyers of drug pushers and users of extermination. You want to solve the drug problem not through the barrel of the gun but through the rule of law and due process as enshrined in the Constitution.
President Duterte and his minions in the House and some incongruous senators like Manny Pacquiao and Tito Sotto (who both opposed the Reproductive Health Law, saying it is murder of the unborn to use condom but allow full-grown human beings to be murdered) want the re-imposition of the death penalty. You have taken the stand together with the Catholic Church that capital punishment violates the commandment of God and that death penalty, under a lopsided and antiquated justice system, will surely benefit the powerful but will only work against the poor who cannot afford to hire high-caliber lawyers.
Madam Vice-President, after your resignation, you have become the unifying force of the opposition that has been enfeebled by the shameless political opportunism of many party members. I agree with you that it is now the time for courage and conviction in the face of relentless assault upon the basic rights of our people.
Timidity, apathy, and fear are the greatest enemies of democracy. Tyrants and despots will emerge because of the passivity of the population and I agree with the ancient Roman poet Juvenal when he said that “a society of sheep is an invitation to a government of wolves.”
You have always been a reluctant candidate from the day you were drafted as the congressional candidate in Camarines Sur in 2013, until you were endorsed by President Aquino as vice-presidential bet in the 2016 elections. In October 2015, I predicted that despite your being in the bottom of the heap, you would win the vice-presidency and my prediction came true.
Now, my gut feeling is that someday, in the not so distant future, you will be summoned by destiny to lead our country and start healing the wounds of this tormented land.--from Democrito C. Barcenas