MANILA, Philippines—Sympathizing with his predecessor’s current health condition, President Benigno Aquino could only wish former president and now Pampanga Representative Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s full recovery from her ailment.
But the President also indicated his government’s determination to pursue graft cases against her despite her condition.
Speaking to reporters after attending the 2011 National Science and Technology Week at the SMX Convention Center in Pasay City, Aquino said he only learned about Arroyo’s ailment from what he read and heard from the news, in reference to the announcement by her doctors of her need for immediate surgery on her damaged cervical spine.
“Any Christian would surely want that, whatever ailment she has, she would be able to get through to it and be fully healed,” the President said.
Asked whether Arroyo’s illness could stall his administration’s drive to prosecute her on corruption allegations, he said: “Regardless of her condition, the wheels of justice will have to move and to turn.”
But he also stressed that “my parents thought me not to impute anything on a person who is sick and to say anything more. Maybe that would be un-Christian.”
Asked whether he would grant her hospital or house arrest if she were indicted, he said that this was for the courts and not the executive to determine.
“The courts will be the one to determine if she was to be arrested, where she will be detained. That’s all under the purview of the court. It is not something the executive determines under our systems of the law. Will it have a bearing? Shall we cross the bridge when we get to it?”
He reiterated he alone could not change the detention site without the court’s blessing because “that is the law.”
Interviewed Tuesday night on GMA News TV, Aquino said he wished Arroyo’s health would improve with her surgery.
“I will have to ask.. through intermediaries if she will be given more discomfort if I send her well wishes. But I am extending the same, and also to her family that hopefully everything goes well,” the President also said.
rroyo’s doctors have diagnosed the former President as afflicted with a “damaged cervical spine with multi-level cervical spondylosis” and that she needed surgery or she could be paralyzed.
The surgery was meant to realign a portion of the former President’s spine at the neck and free up nerves that transmit signals to her upper extremities.
Arroyo has been confined at the St. Luke’s Medical Center in Taguig City since Monday shortly after Aquino delivered his second State of the Nation Address, where he stated that he expected his government to file its “first major case against the corrupt and their accomplices” now that he has named retired Supreme Court Justice Conchita Carpio-Morales as the new Ombudsman.