First posted: Jan ’08
It is the principle of buoyancy, but this Archimedes was found floating in a pool of his own blood. In August, 1977, two months before his 22nd birthday, Archimedes Trajano was beaten, tortured and killed for asking a question in a public forum of Imee Marcos. Imee was giving a talk on the Kabataan Baranggay at the Mapua Institute of Technology. There was an open forum and Archimedes Trajano stood up and asked a question which apparently irked Imee. Archimedes Trajano never got an answer and was forcibly taken out by the bodyguards of Imee.
He was found days later on a Manila street, dead, his body and face badly bruised and swollen. His mother, Agapita was informed by the police that her son was killed in a dormitory fight but witnesses said that Archimedes Trajano never returned to his dorm after he was dragged out of the forum. Fearing for their safety, the Trajano family left the Philippines.
After the People Power revolution, a class action suit was filed by human rights victims against the Marcos family. Seeking justice for her son, Agapita Trajano joined the litigants. Her case was taken by American human rights lawyer Sherry P. Broder. Broder was deeply moved by Trajano’s case and represented the family pro bono. In 1993, Hawaii court Judge Manuel Real found Imee Marcos liable for Trajano’s murder and ordered her to pay $ 4.4 million to Trajano’s heirs….Justice finally? A summons was served to Imee in 1993 by the Pasig Regional Court. At that time, Imee’s known address was at the Alexandra condominium in Pasig. A court sheriff served the summons but only a caretaker of the condominium had received the papers. To make a long story short and to cut through all the legal mumbo-jumbo, the summons was never “received properly” and the summons lapsed. All Imee had to do was to claim that she was not a resident of the Alexandra condominium where the summons was served…and that’s exactly what she did, filing a motion to dismiss before the Pasig court, showing her Philippine passport and a “disembarkation/embarkation” card issued by the Singapore Immigration Service to show she was a resident of Singapore at the time. Nice.
In 2006, the Supreme Court voided the civil proceedings before the Pasig courts where the Trajano family was seeking the enforcement of the US court ruling ordering Imee to compensate them for the murder… All because the courts could not “effectively serve” the summons. Well geez, from the time Imee returned to the country, wasn’t she on the cover of every glossy magazine, interviewed by all the major networks, even having a short stint as a comedic actress opposite Rosanna Roces in a telenovela? How hard was it to track her down at her known address? I suppose Imee would just pop up for those photo shoots and interviews and then vanish into thin air huh? And we wonder why we pardon and free murderers, plunderers and rapists?
Source: http://indiosbravos.blog.com/2011/04/11/hello-world/
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