She could have been the country’s beloved Santa Claus this year: she knew who were the country’s naughty and nice. She could have told the nation ,well before President Marcos’ deadline for the country’s colored-feathered crooks in public works anomalies expired.
Blow the trumpet. It would have been the loudest nation’s biggest sigh of relief instead of a mixed grief and more profound mystery about the greatest unwieldy heist in government thievery that has gripped an impoverished people.
Alas and alack. Now, with her untimely, tragic death, for many—family, friends, co-workers, including PBBM—it must have felt like a painful long ice age. The captain, or the planning chief, is cold and dead. There were no Sherlock Holmes in the young Marcos time.
Listen to the former presidential adviser of the former president who has been denied an interim release for the nth time in The Netherlands.Had the current government provided security to an important witness to flood control corruption that threatened to bring it down, the untimely death would have been prevented. Both person and documents/records would have been preserved.
Who knows what would happened?
She must have been a pillar in the agency she worked for 40 years. She was a virtual wind vane through four administrations which brought different wisdom and priorities, even moralities, to their leaderships—the controversies of the Arroyo’s , the honest-to-goodness approach of the Aquino’s,. the big bang , shoot–from-the hip style of the Duterte’s and the traditional, disarming, if deceptive, welcoming optimism of the Marcos administration.
Her simple conservative name Catalina, which means pure and unblemished, was shorter than her impressive, long resume. She held a doctorate degree, two masteral degrees and bona fides that explained her powerful perch. She could have comfortably retired but remained with the agency until the most damnable corruption in her agency was exposed.
She was a top technocrat, usually seen as intelligent people more of a brain than a heart, been there, done that. She must have met along the way politicians of different varieties, from the sublime to the paralytic. Given her longtime exposure to these creatures, she could probably small an avant garde political artist masquerading as well-meaning, even God fearing, public servant a mile away.
It was only a matter of a time before a colleague in the agency blew the whistle on her. She was supposed to be as clean as a whistle before that hearing in the Senate or the House where higher, bigger names were implicated. On the day, she was invited to a meeting with the Independent Infrastructure Commission but she didn’t show up. She had other plans: she met her Maker in a tragic way, instead.
The tragic setting of her exit into the life beyond reminds one of a similar death of a trusted man 2,000 years ago who fell headlong into a ravine after hanging ,and died , his body broken.
The President had spoken , loud and clear days before: some people involved the massive public works corruption anomalies will go to jail before Christmas. The scheduled meeting with the ICC was, in this context, would not be uneventful this time, It was going to be a showdown. It was going to be an encounter between an irresistible force against an immovable object
As investigation reports show, Cabral stopped near a ravine on the way to Baguio City and asked her driver to be left alone for a while. It was a risky place to be there, looking down 30 meters down; previous interviews revealed she feared heights the most. Why she insisted to be left by her lonesome in the slippery terrain, will continue to be a big puzzle to many.
The facts tell what likely had happened: she fell off the rock, feet first . Which is why her limbs were broken. Her head was injured.He was still unconscious and irresponsive when found. But rescuers took four hours or so before she was brought to a hospital. By that time, she was already lost – and with it, all hopes of making a difference in this wild and murky probes of what may be called the most scandalous corruption event of the century.conspiracy theories had imagined.
Many think that conscience was too heavy a burden for the slim, even frail looking, woman. Shakespeare gives us an idea or two: conscience doth makes a coward of us all or is a word the cowards use, devised at first to keep the strong in awe.
In reality, conscience makes us feel weak, prone to indecision and poor decision making, when doing the right thing seem great a burden to bear and our worst instinct pushes us to take the easy way out. Michael Easely, an American Christian pastor once explored why people with unbearable pain take their own life. He, a long-time sufferer of chronic pain, said he understood why. Chaim Potok, an American rabbi,once said that a hooked fish cannot be understood by an unhooked one. Paul,in his letters to the Corinthians said he once asked God to remove his thorn in the flesh. He was told that grace was sufficient for him.
The day Undersecretary Cabral chose to skip that meeting with the ICC in what would amount to a tell all confession, would have been her opportunity to be a heroine in the historic flood control scandal in her lifetime.
Two roads diverged in a wood and I, poet Robert Frost , wrote , took the one less travelled by. Certainly, the lynchpin’s death will make a difference, for better or for worse, in the life of the nation.
