The death of Maria Catalina Cabral, a central figure in the corruption scandal now gripping the nation, has brought  our misguided sense of priority into sharp relief.

Taking her secrets to her grave, one would have thought, would automatically fuel our outrage further. Apparently not; we’re just too nice for our own good, although we did get some help from our police. By pronouncing the death a suicide, a personal tragedy, all too soon, even before an autopsy, they hit the right sensibilities among us patsies; they provided us with an excuse to step back and allow private space for grieving. 

Even when an autopsy was suggested, as an apparent afterthought, Cabral’s husband questioned it as a sort of desecration, or a denial of some natural entitlement: What more would anyone need from her now that she’s dead? And, again, the police more or less conceded.

And so, for a moment there, the order of priority was suspended. Of course, Christmas also served as a fitting season. In any case, no active investigation was undertaken as promptly as would have been the proper case. 

But how may this concession of giving distance, of suspending the operation of law, even only for the moment, be justified in the context in which this all-too-obviously suspicious death occurred?

Not only was Cabral one of those named as a beneficiary from the diversion of hundreds of billions of taxpayer pesos allotted for flood-control projects into the pockets of officials (among others, apart from the likes of her, senators and members of House of Representatives, budget officers, auditors, and engineers) and government contractors; as undersecretary for planning and public-private partnership at the Department of Public Works and Highways (since 2014), she was simply too strategically positioned to avoid suspicions of complicity. In fact, she was accused as an inside facilitator, a point person for the conspiracy.

Hours before her death, she had asked to be left alone on a cliffside road, an intimation that would have been unmistakable to anyone who had known what she had been going through. Just the same, all that apparently had been lost on her driver, her lone companion at the time: he not only left her out of his sight, but left her by herself. Presently, her broken body was found lying on the rocks below. 

Escaping liability

A picture of her sitting on a roadside battlement, taken by her driver before he left her alone, may inspire endless curiosity and speculation about what thoughts preoccupied her at the time. For sure, those thoughts were worth more than a lousy penny, such that those of us who only wish that everyone got their deserved justice would likely end up feeling doubly cheated probing into her antemortem contemplations. 

By dying, she escapes all earthly liability, and, by her eternal silence, her co-accused are themselves helped with their own chances with the law. Thus, the recovery of the stolen taxpayer money, which makes for the concrete essence of justice especially for those condemned to perpetual privation by corruption, becomes far more difficult than it might have been if she had come clean, through voluntary restitution and testimony.  

Invariably, though, coming clean is the last option. And in a culture where corruption has come to be perpetrated by cross-institutional conspiracy, yielding ever bigger easier money, the temptation to hold out, I’d imagine, is particularly difficult to resist.

Trust the perpetrators to first try to bribe their way free, or run and hide, or strike deals with the law, or, as in Cabral’s rare and extreme case, sacrifice their lives on the chance that the ill-gotten fruits of that sacrifice remain untraceable and inheritable, unrestituted. – Rappler.com