Revenge is best served cold

If it’s not a human rights issue, as legal luminary and Inquirer columnist Raul Pangalangan says, then it’s political persecution that the Aquino administration is doing to Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

Nobody can question the issue of political persecution.

Many people believe it’s also personal vendetta because GMA ordered the Department of Agrarian Reform to intervene in the Hacienda Luisita labor problems  after President Noy’s  late mother, Cory C. Aquino, called on Gloria to resign in the wake of the “Hello Garci” scandal.

GMA also withdrew the security detail of Madame Cory, a former president herself, and therefore entitled to bodyguards, because of her call for GMA to resign.

Revenge is best served cold, according to a character in a movie, the title of which I now forget.

But vengeance is not for statesmen and people who are devout Christians like President Noy.

Only pusillanimous souls engage in vengeance.

* * *

“In my long years of the practice of law, this is the first time I’ve come across a warrant of arrest being issued minutes after a case was filed against a respondent.”

That statement came from a friend, a litigation lawyer, who doesn’t want his identity revealed.

He was referring to the warrant  issued by a Pasay City court judge against Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo yesterday.

My  lawyer-friend said that even during the unlamented martial law years, it took judges  days to issue a warrant of arrest after a criminal case was filed in their courts.

* * *

What’s happening to Gloria and her beloved husband Mike is karmic or poetic justice.

What they did to their critics, especially journalists, at the height of their power has come back to them full circle.

I should know because I was a victim of their brand of justice when Gloria was in power.

When Mike Arroyo filed libel cases against journalists who crossed him, the cases were “raffled off” to judges friendly to him.

The result was that arrest warrants were issued on the beleaguered journalists in no time when normally it took time for a judge to issue a warrant.

A libel case filed  by Mike Arroyo in Manila—one in eight libel cases he filed against me in different courts—ended in the sala of a judge whom I had criticized for tardiness and absenteeism.

But the judge  wasn’t so at the time he  was hearing my libel case.

The judge held hearings of my case almost every week when normally hearings on a libel case are spaced two or three months because of the backlog of court cases.

What goes ’round comes around.