Vizconde Case is not yet over

Former senator Freddie Webb says the recent decision of the Supreme Court to junk the appeal of Lauro Vizconde has "closed the Vizconde massacre case". Not quite.


Webb must remember that President Aquino himself ordered a re-investigation into the case, and the Department of Justice is leading the charge. Fact is, Justice secretary Leila de Lima even dared his son, Hubert, to go and have a lie detector test.


Lauro, for his part, is fully determined to heighten the campaign against the real killers of his family. He believes that Webb's son and his friends perpetuated the crime, the most brutal and the most gruesome back in 1991.


There are still many groups out there which believe in the guilt of the people exonerated by the Supreme Court and the possibility of having a direct collision exists. This Vizconde case is getting bigger by the day.


Gruesome crimes are rising and this is a symptom of a worsening economic and social condition. Many poor people are getting desperate, and are resorting to crimes against property and life. The landscape is beginning to be very harsh, and police is helpless in stemming the crime wave. This is the flipside of food riots, the overt signs of a rising undercurrent of dissent affecting the country.


Ordinary Filipinos are not as brazen as other nationalities. Other people will militate and use the streets to express their desperation. 


In our country, people express their outrage and their desperation by breaking every law there is. Hungry people knows no law, says former President Joseph Estrada. This explains what is happening in the Philippines today.


Force is never used to placate the rumblings of the gut. It is thru an effective economic policy of the State that these things are solved. 


When you ask a General, what is happening to our country, that General would just point upwards and say, Mr. President, what is happening to our country?


Desperate people commit desperate crimes. In these desperate times, ordinary people suffer from the inner outrage of other people who lost opportunities in a fast-changing landscape. 


No one is safe. No one.