Partial justice

A person convicted by a trial court is entitled to an appeal. So the guilty verdicts in the Maguindanao massacre are not yet final.

Principal perpetrators Andal Ampatuan Jr. and his brother reportedly plan to forgo a motion for reconsideration before the Quezon City Regional Trial Court, and instead go straight to the Court of Appeals.

Nena Santos, legal counsel for relatives of several of the 57 officially recognized victims, hopes the appeal will be brought directly to the Supreme Court, just to shorten the path to a final ruling, but she knows the appellate court cannot be bypassed in the process.

Santos wants the process speeded up because, with the Ampatuans seeking a reversal of their conviction, she says there are efforts to harass or persuade prosecution witnesses to recant.

There are valid fears that the longer the case drags on, the more vulnerable people can be to threats and positive inducements to retract their testimonies. With the convicted brains and direct participants facing life in prison without parole plus the payment of damages totaling P155.6 million, they can be expected to exhaust all avenues for saving themselves from damnation.

The Ampatuan clan is one of the largest in the country, and some of the members have lamented the stigma attached to their surname. But the massacre did not doom the clan’s political fortunes. Sajid Islam Ampatuan, who was cleared of the massacre in 2019, was elected last May as vice mayor of Shariff Saydona Mustapha town.

Last month, the Sandiganbayan convicted Sajid Islam – not in connection with the massacre, but on four counts of graft and four counts of malversation of public funds, committed when he was Maguindanao governor before the massacre was perpetrated. He was sentenced to 170 years in prison and ordered to pay fines totaling P79.75 million. Perhaps the notoriety of the surname helped secure that verdict.

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Local executives especially in less developed areas use a combination of patronage (often at state expense) and armed muscle to control nearly all aspects of life in their turfs.

This feudal setup surely nurtured in the Ampatuans the belief that they wielded the power of life and death over the people of Maguindanao.

With such a stranglehold on the people, the clan could promise to deliver votes during elections. The national leadership looked the other way; the clan members might be homicidal, crooked SOBs, but as long as they were the administration’s SOBs, they were OK.

This mindset persists to this day. Politicians accept the support of anyone who can deliver votes, disregarding imputations of brazen corruption and any criminal activities for that matter – jueteng, smuggling, swindling, sex trafficking, and even rape and murder.

Gloria Macapagal Arroyo cultivated the support of the Ampatuans during her presidency. In the initial hours following the massacre, GMA hesitated to condemn the Ampatuans, until grisly details began trickling out and the abominable crime became undeniable.

Security forces had long talked about the brutality of Andal Junior in particular in dealing with anyone who got in his way. But even this proved to be an asset to the clan, as the national government considered it an effective foil to the threat posed by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and other armed troublemakers.

The MILF at the time was still working with the Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah, the Indonesia-based terror cell loosely affiliated with al-Qaeda. So there was no political will to crack down on the abuses and brazen corruption reported in Maguindanao attributed to the Ampatuan warlords.

That kind of tolerance for wrongdoing can create in the beneficiary a feeling of invincibility, a belief that one is untouchable.

Andal Jr. and his minions clearly believed they could get away with murdering 58 people including 32 media workers. One of the two media vehicles, which clearly bore the UNTV mark, was found crumpled in the mass burial site. Official reports said most of the female victims had their pants unzipped, and many had been shot in the genitals and their faces mutilated.

I thought I had become jaded to stories and scenes of murder and depravity, having covered the crime beat for a long time, but that massacre shocked me.

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In the early hours of the massacre on Nov. 23, 2009, we in the newsroom were trying to verify the authenticity of reported phone calls and text messages crying out for help as the convoy was waylaid and the killers closed in on their victims.

Hours later, an Army team finally arrived and found over 20 of the victims still not buried, with several shot dead in their vehicles. The soldiers began checking out the loosely packed soil in the mass grave crudely and hastily created using a backhoe of the provincial government.

The picture of a horrific crime began to take shape. It was only in the succeeding days, however, that the scale of the atrocity became clear.

Will the judiciary, notorious for delivering the best justice that money can buy, disregard all the grisly documented evidence and clear the Ampatuans on appeal, or at least lift their ineligibility for parole?

The possibility is always there, in this land of injustice. Nena Santos told “The Chiefs” on One News that to this day, some relatives of the victims continue to receive threats.

Apart from waiting for a final ruling affirming the guilty verdict, relatives of several victims are also moving to receive bigger damages from the perpetrators.

Considering the mansions of the Ampatuans dotting one of the country’s poorest provinces, their fat bank accounts and fleet of over 100 vehicles, the higher amount being sought is peanuts: from the minimum total of P300,000 set by the court to about P900,000.

The amount sought is not even a million bucks. Life is so cheap in this country. Will the victims’ families have to wait another 13 years to get the amount?

Snail-paced adjudication, whether of court cases, tax deficiencies or electoral protests, is one of the biggest factors that breed impunity. Even when final judgment is rendered, the ruling is not implemented.

Prolonged litigation allows offenders to evade punishment and enjoy the proceeds of crime, or occupy public office won through fraud. Proof of this sorry state of the nation is all around us.

Even in the country’s worst case of election violence, and the worst attack in the world against media workers, the aggrieved must settle for partial justice, after over a decade.