STUDENTS who researched corruption cases for their Araling Panlipunan projects would often ask their teachers, “Why do the biggest cases never seem to end with accountability?” That question says as much about the system as it does about any single person. Enrile’s story, in this sense, is not solely about one man. It is about the conditions that allow a person to return to power again and again, regardless of scandal, age, or public memory.
The difficulty with writing about Juan Ponce Enrile’s death is that grief is socially coded. When a former senator dies, a certain script unfolds — half-mast flags, official statements, honorifics, televised tributes.
But ordinary Filipinos do not live inside those scripts. They live inside their experiences. A factory worker who still recalls the fear of soldiers barging into their barangay will not react the same way as a young lawyer who admired his sharp questioning during the Corona trial. A guidance counselor whose aunt disappeared in 1975 will not mourn him in the way a political ally might. A public school principal in Iloilo who had to manage tensions during coup rumors in the late 1980s will feel a different texture of memory from someone who only knew him from his late-career Facebook posts.
This diversity of reactions is not disrespect. It is recognition that a public life creates public consequences. And, as ethics literature often notes (Beauchamp & Childress, 2013), moral evaluation is most authentic when it considers both intention and impact.
It is tempting to narrate Enrile’s life as a cycle of rise, fall, and reinvention — a kind of political odyssey shuttling between power and survival. But that cycle, when stripped of embellishment, also reveals what political scientists describe as the infrastructure of impunity. His ability to outlive legal cases, rebuild influence, and remain central to power well into his late nineties is not solely due to personal brilliance. It is also due to a political culture that rewards resilience more than remorse, and reinvention more than reckoning. When Enrile returned in 2022 as Chief Presidential Legal Counsel to the son of the dictator he once helped topple, many teachers described the moment in class with an almost weary shrug — “Philippine politics talaga.”
But behind the shrug is fatigue. It is difficult to explain to students why a nation can hold both memory and forgetfulness at the same time, why the figures who shaped the nation’s darkest hours can return as senior advisers decades later. This is the emotional terrain educators navigate when discussing Enrile’s legacy — not bitterness, but exhaustion at the circularity of national history.
As the country debates how to remember him, what matters most is the discipline of complete memory. Remember the few moments when he stood on the right side of history — EDSA 1986, the vote to end US bases, the clarity at some points of legislative leadership.
But remember, too, the weight of the years that brought suffering: documented torture cases, extrajudicial killings, warrantless arrests, forced disappearances, and the decline of institutions under Martial Law; the early destabilizations of the Aquino government; the corruption allegations; the legal inconsistencies; the shifting alliances that shaped national trajectories.
Memory, like character formation, requires the courage to see things as they are. This is the same principle educators try to impart to students: that growth requires truth, that accountability is not the opposite of compassion, and that complexity is not a burden but a path to understanding.
In the end, the question, “Should we mourn Enrile?” is not a test of patriotism. It is a test of honesty. Mourning is personal; memory is collective. One can acknowledge his sharp intellect without overlooking the human rights violations during the era he helped architect. One can recognize his role in EDSA without erasing his role in the machinery that made EDSA necessary. His longevity can be admired, but it isn’t proof of innocence.
A life as big and complicated as Enrile’s doesn’t call for applause or anger — it calls for truth, spoken without malice. Death closes a door, but not the conversation about what his choices meant. What remains is the task of making sure the next generation does not inherit only the edited version of his story. Because remembering fully is the only way a country moves forward without repeating the same shadows.
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Doc H fondly describes himself as a ”student of and for life” who, like many others, aspires to a life-giving and why-driven world grounded in social justice and the pursuit of happiness. His views do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions he is employed or connected with./PN
