MANILA (Mindanao Examiner / Jan. 24, 2014) – The Samahan ng Ex-Detainees Laban sa Detensyon at Aresto or SELDA has strongly criticized the recent visit of former First Lady Imelda Marcos to ex-President and now congresswoman Gloria Arroyo at a hospital in Quezon City.
SELDA said it was a “macabre meeting of plunderers and rights violators.” Marcos is the wife of former Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos, and Arroyo is facing a string of criminal charges, and is under arrest at the Veterans Memorial Medical Center.
“Adding twist to their unremorseful plunder of the nation’s coffers was a prison visit by the widow of the former martial law dictator president Ferdinand Marcos. Peculiarly, in both cases, the public similarly tagged them as conjugal partners of their respective husbands in raiding the wealth of the nation. What a morbid and macabre twist of events,” SELDA chairperson Marie Enriquez said in a statement sent to the regional newspaper Mindanao Examiner.
Marcos has slammed the government for Arroyo’s continued stay in the hospital and called her condition as “inhuman” and said she must be freed.
But Enriquez said both Imelda and Arroyo enjoy freedom from accountability from their crimes of plunder and human rights violations against the people.
“They call the supposed imprisonment of Arroyo as unfair treatment, when in fact they are actually both coddled by the state and the plunder cases against them seem to go nowhere. While they remain untouched, victims of torture, illegal arrest and detention, massacres and other atrocities of both the Arroyo regime and Marcos dictatorial regime have not been given any justice.”
“Martial law victims are still suffering so much in their advanced years, and dying one by one, as the purported law that seeks to recognize the martial law victims’ sufferings is not being implemented. This certainly sends an alarming message that impunity will go on, as what is happening now,” she said.
Enriquez said Marcos’ martial law victims are waiting every single day for justice and recognition, while political prisoners who struggle for their rights rot in dingy, subhuman prison cells, plunderers and human rights violators are being treated like queens in palace.
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