Scandals mar Cebu gubernatorial race!

With barely 10 days, the May 10 elections will be upon us. At this point in the election campaign, you’d think we’ve heard or had enough of all that mudslinging that gets into the local or national news on a daily basis. Last week, we reported about the gubernatorial race in Cebu where the three candidates, namely former Agriculture Undersecretary Celestino "Junnie" Martinez Jr., Gwen Garcia, daughter of Gov. Pablo Garcia, and Vice Gov. John-John Osmeña, son of Sen. John "Sonny" Osmeña, are all supporting President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (GMA), while in turn she hasn’t anointed a "chosen" one… at least not yet!

As of press time, nothing much has changed and all three candidates for governor are still supporting GMA, and when she was in Cebu last Tuesday, she still didn’t anoint any of the three as her "chosen" one. At this point in the game, I doubt if the President will ever do so. That means all three candidates would have to fend for themselves to win the governorship of Cebu or use the last remaining campaign days to destroy each other so that the last man — or woman — standing wins the race!

It is for this reason why we’ve been seeing so many scandals popping up in this election campaign. One was targeted at Vice Gov. John-John Osmeña — the so-called "Perdido Lex" scam, where public funds were allegedly waylaid via a fictitious non-government organization with people linked to the vice governor. But while this controversy "tarnished" the vice governor, it would take some time to bring all this to court. Meanwhile, John-John has turned the guns against no less than Gov. Garcia for a possible frame-up job. Apparently, the fun ain’t over yet!

Meanwhile, a scandal also struck the Martinez camp when a couple of weeks ago, Bogo Mayor Celestino "Tinning" Martinez III was tagged by military intelligence as one of the candidates who gave "revolutionary taxes" to the New People’s Army (NPA) — a measly P50,000! While we don’t know how accurate this intel report is, people here believe that P50,000 is just too minuscule to be believable. But we will get back to this later.

Then last Sunday, a bigger scandal exploded when The Freeman came up with the scoop that P26 million from the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) of Rep. Clavel Asas Martinez (fourth district, Cebu) was given to the Girl Scouts of the Philippines. To clarify this controversy, Rep. Martinez called a presscon, which also landed as the headline of all the local dailies, saying she had placed some P11.5 million of public funds in her personal bank account! Wow! Now the whole issue has blown up in the media; after all, a mea culpa like this one coming from a politician does not happen everyday.

Honestly, I don’t know what Rep. Martinez could have gained by publicly admitting that she deposited P11.5 million of the P26 million in public funds in her personal bank account. The reason she gave was that she did it to hasten the release of this fund, which sounds innocent enough. But even the village idiot knows too well that public money has no business being deposited in a congresswoman’s personal bank account. Rep. Martinez probably forgot that old quote, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions!" She’s a lawyer and in making her mea culpa, she knows the big political risks involved.

As an added attraction to this controversy, one couldn’t help but notice that P1.5 million of Clavel’s PDAF went to Rep. Crispin Beltran (party-list Bayan Muna) for the use of Bayan Muna in the province of Cebu. I’m just thinking aloud here but wasn’t Bayan Muna one of the party-list groups that National Security Adviser Norberto Gonzales exposed as front organizations of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP)?

So when military intelligence tagged Bogo Mayor Tinning Martinez III for giving "revolutionary taxes" to the CPP in that measly amount of P50,000, people didn’t believe that story and thought it was just simple mudslinging. But now it can be told that Bayan Muna got P1.5 million from Rep. Martinez’s PDAF and we’d like to know if this is a "legal" way to channel public funds to organizations that have allegedly helped destabilize this nation as revealed by the National Security Adviser? This ought to be investigated thoroughly!

There’s no doubt that Clavel’s mea culpa is politically damaging to her or her husband’s campaign. However, on the plus side, we don’t even know who is running against her in the fourth district or if there’s anyone running against her at all! But what if the voters would retaliate against her husband, Celestino "Junnie" Martinez Jr.? That’s not a farfetched possibility.

At this point, no one can really tell who is leading in the gubernatorial race; it’s too close to call. Yes, Vice Gov. John-John Osmeña was weakened by the Perdido Lex scandal but this recent mea culpa of Rep. Martinez takes the cake simply because she herself was the one who admitted having public funds in her own bank account… a case that doesn’t have to be proven in a court of law anymore.

Sitting pretty and scandal-free is Gwen Garcia, the governor’s daughter. If any, her biggest drawback is that she’s the governor’s daughter and that’s it! Of course, both the Osmeña and Martinez camps are accusing the Garcias as the brains behind all this mudslinging. When the scandals hit the vice governor, pundits began saying that it would be a Garcia-Martinez toss-up. With Rep. Martinez’s stunning revelation, the same pundits are now predicting that this race will be an Osmeña-Garcia toss-up. So it’s now back to the vaunted Osmeña political name versus the Garcias. Who will prevail?

In a talk with an Osmeña insider, he expressed confidence simply because John-John has the support of his father, Sen. John "Sonny" Osmeña, (and uncle, former Cebu Gov. Lito Osmeña) whose allies are Mayor Eduardo Gullas (who is running again for Congress) of the first district, Rep. Simeon Kintanar of the second district, Rep. Antonio Yapha of the third district and Rep. Ace Durano of the fifth district. Cebu’s fourth district belongs to Martinez, while the sixth district is under Rep. Nerissa Soon-Ruiz, who is an Osmeña ally.

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For e-mail responses to this article, write to [email protected]. Bobit Avila’s columns can also be accessed through www.thefreeman.com. He also hosts a weekly talk show, "Straight from the Sky," shown every Monday, at 8 p.m., only in Metro Cebu on Channel 15 of SkyCable.