CHAT, FLERY AND PHANTOM COMMISSIONS

ICANNOT now recall when I might have first met Charito “Chat” Planas, who left for a better world last December 7. But when I edited

our issue of February 28, 1978, listing the 21 Laban candidates for the Batasan in Metro Manila, carried this thumbnail sketch of her: “Charito L. Planas - Remarkable civic leader and philanthropist; relentless defender of the oppressed and the poor; lawyer and political detainee. Ninoy Aquino [who headed the 21] calls her `our Joan of Arc,’ and hails her `fortitude and patriotism, tested in the teeth of oppression’.”

Sen. Lorenzo M. Tañada was the general campaign manager in what he called “a mad adventure.”

Macoy would lift press restrictions, in his game of pretend, as he harbored grudges—remember the oft-told tales of Nalundasan and Tibo Mijares?— during electoral exercises such as the 1978 polls although from the onset of martial law, some of us openly pamphleteered, led by Uncle JovySalonga, with his regular messages of hope.

For Tanny Tañada, it was Resist! Resist! Resist, also from the start, not giving Macoy the ben the nation of sheep did.

I do recall that when I was in the US in 1982 (which was when I met Ninoy as a US State Department human time also, in Washington, D.C. (There I also met gutsy and cash-strapped Simbulan and Severina Rivera, if my

Not self but country

For Chat and Justice Flery, Not self, but country. Our rotten luck to be with politicians who rush to join the PDP-Laban juggernaut, thinking of the next elections, not the next generation.

That Flery was and is not talked about negatively in coffee shops is one measure of her integrity. Who in the Supreme Court are talked about the most today? Sad that its housekeeping intrams have gone out.

Goodbye and thank you, Chat, which I also would like to say to Justice Flerida (I assume the name came from Romero. I got to know her up close in the Palace Guest House in 1986. I met Hall, one of the few hospitable and welcoming venues open to one such as I, whose head was not properly and tightly screwed on; I openly labelled Macoy “a criminal genius”, for the world to hear. Flery, not a whiff of scandal was she linked to. Times may

On May 10, 1982, Macoy accepted the resignation of all 14 Supreme Court justices, for corruption; we had no high court for almost a week Maybe the justices had not even known they had resigned. (Like Erap who was told by the SC he had resigned: “I did?”— he wondered in did not like being caged. In 1981, he “lifted” martial law, giving us a wider cage in which to roam.

- tive and half-baked measure. It may - sponse. What about the indispensable positives? Like improving salt-mine conditions, such as providing better health care and pension programs, the secret elsewhere. Prosecuting all (save would not work. Due process and equal protection matter.

Last August, Digong named and shamed seven judges and countless local executives and active they been charged and given due process? Excluding of course those