HE said — SHE said

Political families still prevail and it does not look that they would be gone soon. They are here because we allow them to stay.

They are not silhouettes of the past but very vivid pictures of crime still present.

The Ampatuan massacre of 58 people, and the subsequent murder of others which could have been related to the murder of the century will linger on in our minds for years. It is not impossible that we will be counting more bodies in the next days and months as the guilty verdict on the key players of the carnage does not stop impunity.

In fact, it has grown stronger through decades of warlordism as Philippine politics remains as infantile as it was when the Americans left us to vote for our leaders ourselves.

The Ampatuans’ (or any other warlord and their families’) carte blanche was not restricted by Judge Jocelyn Solis-Reyes of the Quezon City Regional Trial Court Branch 221. Her hands tied to just the one case she had heard and decided on, her decision only derailed the once strong march of the Ampatuan family in the fiefdom its members have already reclaimed.

Judge Solis-Reyes declared brothers Andal Ampatuan Jr. and Zaldy Ampatuan guilty of the massacre. Three other members of the clan — Anwar Ampatuan Sr., Anwar Ampatuan Jr. and Anwar Sajid Ampatuan — were also found complicit to the murder along with many others, some of whom remain at large.

Other members of the Ampatuan family were freed and declared innocent and non-participants to the crime.

They are the lucky ones who were given a second look by the families of their victims.

For who could forget the images of that slaughter?

Photographs of feet strewn in the land where the country’s bravest people once roamed.

Cars buried underneath the soil with the dead bodies.

Raped women with bullet holes in their heads.

The bloodied pens and bags of 32 journalists who accompanied Esmael Mangundadatu’s wife and relatives in hopes of getting a good story about a strong challenger to the Ampatuans who have ruled Maguindanao for more than 20 years.

They were only doing their jobs. But on orders of the Ampatuan patriarch, they were annihilated in the manner Adolf Hitler killed the Jews.

To be blunt about it, it was the journalists’ murder that kept the case alive even after a decade of justice’s slow grind.

Members of the media did not let impunity pass. They stood guard for justice to be served to their brothers and sisters, whose lives and rights were violated in the name of one family’s pride and power.

The clenched fists. The lit candles. The painted calls for answers.

A lasting image, too, was that of a photographer’s lens planted on Zaldy Ampatuan’s face when he was brought to Manila following his surrender. We are that angry.

That lens was our only weapon then. We should have struck him with our pens.

They were the silent images of camaraderie and industry support.

Mangudadatu also did his own quest for justice, beginning right on the day of the massacre.

All he needed was a confirmation that his pregnant wife and their relatives were murdered.

During one of the commemorations of the massacre, Mangudadatu shared how then Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte let him use the President’s helicopter to assess the crime scene from above.

He knew then that a turning point in his life has come.

Ten years, and the families left by the Ampatuans’ victims still yearn for their loved ones.

Was he a good father? Was she a loving sister? How life would have been had he not join that ill-fated convoy?

In the end, it was the guilty members of the Ampatuan family who wailed. It is now the end for them, but not for the other members of their family who will carry on the name and power and money and spunk that was left by the evil Ampatuan patriarch.

But there are many Ampatuans in our midst.

The warlords are scattered everywhere, many of them clinging to power like it is the end of all.

Political families still prevail and it does not look that they would be gone soon.

They are here because we allow them to stay.

It took a decade to close a shocking chapter in recent history.

Ten years it took, going through countless witnesses and piles of documents, before a verdict was laid out.

In all caps, the glaring headlines hit our sights one December day, and we remembered another vision — bloodier and simply, utterly unbelievable.

And yet there it was. Soil and blood and death, imagined screams and cries and violent ends.

For many, the decision meted out by Quezon City Judge Jocelyn Solis-Reyes of the Regional Trial Court Branch 221 was worth the wait.

For the cynics who grew in number and the hope that died little by little after four key personalities walked free from the pork barrel scam in the span of a decade, the verdict evinced a raised brow.

For the critics who have bashed the broken justice system, the verdict was a cause for more pithy remarks.

For the people who have waited and still wait for something in their Filipino lives to happen, it was a surprise.

A lot can also NOT happen in the same span of time.

In it, wars are begun, economies soar or drop, the earth changes.

In our individual lives, 10 years can bring gain or loss — deaths and births, failures and wins, heartache or joy.

For the families of the Ampatuan massacre victims, no doubt it has been intense and life-changing, and the ordeal of waiting coupled with pangs of loss.

And so, the kilometric decision — all 761 pages on the Maguindanao multiple murder case — may have come too slow for some, but the fact that it did in our lifetime is significant.

It may have sparked some hope for the Philippine justice system, always bogged down by “traffic” or the sheer volume of cases versus various impediments like lack of manpower and always lack of time.

For the Maguindanao massacre case, for example, it is said the length of the ruling is mainly “due to the sheer number both of the victims and defendants involved: 58 items of information for the 58 people killed, lodged against almost 200 suspects,” a report says.

The courts were always running after time in this historic case.

It took some time, for example, for the Court of Appeals to issue the order to freeze the assets of the powerful Ampatuan clan, so that by the time the order came, a number of properties had been sold off.

To recall, the freeze order was “against 597 bank accounts, 113 real properties, 142 firearms and 132 motor vehicles allegedly owned by the Ampatuans.”

Because the order came “18 days too late,” as some news outlets found, “at least eight Ampatuan real properties had been sold off as early as 19 May 2011, or more than two weeks before the Court of Appeals could issue its freeze order, raising questions as to whether other properties have also been dissipated, distributed, or sold off in the last three years.”

And it is what we waste every time we let go of chances to live as we should because we choose to live as we may.

We roll with the minutes, counting hours and longing for days when time would stop to give us reprieve.