Sen. Leila de Lima.
INQUIRER FILE PHOTO/LYN RILLON
Buying former President Ferdinand Marcos at the Libingan ng mga Bayani (LNMB) in Taguig City is moving on “but only for crooks, trapos, cheats, and all other villains in public office,” Senator Leila de Lima said on Wednesday.
De Lima, one of the petitioners to the Marcos burial case, said the Supreme Court “grossly erred” when it came out with a decision on November 8 that paved the way the for Marcos burial at the heroes cemetery.
“What is being attempted with the Marcos burial is not the vindication of Marcos alone but the exoneration of each and every plunderer, thief, murderer, human rights violator, and torturer in government since the death of Marcos,” she said in a statement.
“Burying Marcos at the Libingan is not moving on and uniting the nation. It is moving on, but only for crooks, trapos, cheats, and all other villains in public office, because the burial will justify every immoral and unlawful act that these public officials have done,” the senator added.
De Lima filed a 10-page motion at the Supreme Court Tuesday, asking it to reconsider its decision, citing its long line of rulings that held the former dictator and his family accountable for the accumulation of ill-gotten wealth.
“A Decision in this case will only deprive his skeleton a cold crypt at the LNMB, and his family the satisfaction that they have once again cheated the Filipino people of their collective honor as the patrimony of a nation,” she said.
“Ferdinand Marcos has been rendered the highest possible conviction ever— the judgment of a people given a free and public expression as a direct act of their sovereignty, through an exceptional gesture of a revolutionary people’s uprising.”
READ: Answer motions, SC tells gov’t, AFP officials, Marcos family
De Lima, former Justice Secretary, also argued that the guidelines of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) used by the High Court on the Marcos burial case were “incomplete, whimsical, and capricious.”
“In its Decision, the Honorable Court has chosen to turn its back on this historic mandate vested upon it by the post-dictatorship EDSA 1987 Constitution…with singular task of ensuring that such dictatorship and thievery is never honored again and does not make a comeback in this country,” she said.
The senator also refused to accept what she called “moral relativism” and “historical revisionism” being imposed upon the Filipino people by the present administration to cleanse itself of its own record of human rights violations.
The administration, she said, is also attempting “to exonerate its own legacy of the murder of thousands in advance in the name of his national purge which he led us to believe is a war on drugs.”
“This is how a nation falls into the trap of forgetting its past and losing its soul to the perpetuation of lies,” De Lima added. CDG
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