An end-of-term court in Spanish Manila

MANILA, Philippines - We wouldn’t be so neurotic about June 2010, if we had a Residencia court in place. If we did, we would all be certain that, as day follows night, Gloria Arroyo’s term of office would end abruptly on June 10, 2010 and it would be time for her to face the music. Everything would be revealed and all wrongs would be righted to our satisfaction in a court presided over by her successor.

Far out unbelievable?

It once was inevitable reality in Manila. What’s a Residencia anyway? Not to be confused with posh condos that go by the same name in Greenbelt, Makati, it was a court that held sessions at the end of the term of office of each governor-general during the Spanish regime. If we were not so misbegotten, it would have been part of the legal system we inherited from our colonizers.

The Residencia was a feature of the Audiencia, which was a supreme court created by the Spanish king for some of the distant colonies like the Islas Filipinas. A court session was held at the seat of government at Intramuros at the end of the term of office of a departing governor during which he had to give an accounting of his performance during his term of office, answer all charges and complaints brought by any of the King’s subjects and submit to the judgment of a panel of judges headed by his successor. Then and there penalties for any transgressions would be imposed like: confiscation, restitution or jail terms.

You might call it a civilian version of the dreaded religious Spanish Inquisition, for it was just as harsh, detailed and unbending and was regularly enforced during the early part of the Spanish regime in colonial Manila. It was intended to foil or at least curb the cupidity and amorality which had set in among the Crown’s administrators. Land and office holders had begun to scandalize Madrid by oppressing the natives excessively and piling up untold riches.

Cervantes attests to this phenomenon of the Spanish dream. In Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, an unlettered, dirty, flea-bitten, impecunious peasant, devoutly wished that Don Quixote would reward him with an appointment as governor, mayor or constable in some benighted, recently discovered island possession of the Spanish empire, where he would hold land and people in thrall, fleecing them as he did his sheep.

Philip II, whom Horacio de la Costa calls, “the painfully conscientious king,” in the same year he sent a doomed armada to the English coast, took pains to work out a policy which created a Royal Audiencia for Valladolid (the bureaucratic repository), Granada (the city in Southern Spain that was still a half-Moorish colony) and the fabled pearl of the Orient, Manila. Little wonder he included Manila because the Governor-General in Filipinas “exercised by delegation the King’s patronal privileges” and behaved like a king. “He had the right to approve ecclesiastical appointments, below the rank of bishop… the exclusive and undisputed right to appoint subordinate civil officials, such as provincial governors (alcaldes mayores and corregidores), to regulate and ratify the annual elections of mayors and corporations of chartered cities and of native magistrates of provincial towns. The post of commanding officer of the Acapulco galleon, a fantastically lucrative one, was in his gift.

“These large powers were enhanced by the immense distance and the slowness of communications between Manila and Madrid. It took a year for a letter, report or complaint to reach the king and one to three years for a reply, admonition or directive to be returned. Meantime, a governor could do pretty much as he pleased. All he needed to worry about was the Residencia, a court of inquiry into his conduct in office which his successor was usually empowered to hold; for at this court anyone in the colony who felt he had a grievance could file a charge, and an unsympathetic successor could make the charge stick. (From de la Costa’s Readings in Philippine History.)

(Wow. Isn’t that exactly what we’ll need in 2010?)

Many governors-general came to grief at this Residencia which was the best part of the Audiencia. I shall cite only two of the many who were convicted.

Sebastian Hurtado de Corcuera (governor-general from 1636 to 1644) was a heroic administrator. He had succeeded in pacifying the Moros in Mindanao both by armed attacks on their stone forts and by a treaty of capitulation. He captured and destroyed their strongholds in Maguindanao and Sulu. He overran the country around Lake Lanao and brought the Maranaos into subjection, established a fort at Iligan and subdued the Moro princes who signed a peace pact that lasted 10 years (1645-1655).

Yet Corcuera had a “particularly severe” Residencia. He was sentenced to a prison term at Fort Santiago and a “colossal fine.”

Another, more typical, example is that of Gov. Alfonso Cruzat (1690-1701) who had more than 24 charges brought against him at the end of his term. The 23rd charge was that “he caused the native laborers drafted to fell timber for the galleon to work 24 or 30 days more than the law specified, without any pay or provisions.” He was acquitted for lack of proof of that particular accusation. 

But he was found guilty of the 24th charge: “Although the estimated cost of construction for the government house was 30,000 pesos, only 6,000 pesos were disbursed, the remainder representing what the natives contributed of their sweat and blood.” At that time one peso was the yearly salary of native galleon builders in Cavite and you could buy a house for twenty pesos.

The grand palacio, both the governor’s residence and the seat of government, included the hall of the Audiencia where Cruzat was tried. It was “handsomely hung with damask, it had a great canopy and under it a long bench covered with silk and a great table covered with crimson velvet.” The description fits our Supreme Court’s kitschy appearance during Chief Justice Hilario Davide’s tenure, its hilarious red and gold flamboyance (one of the reasons for his attempted impeachment) now happily dismantled.

Next question. Then why is it that, after 333 years of Spanish rule and draconian influence, we Filipinos don’t have anything like the Residencia?

The fault, dear fellow-Pinoys, lies in that we chose to copy the many vices of our colonizers but none of their few virtues. We gladly took up their self-indulgence, but very little of their discipline. We inherited the Siesta, the Fiesta, the Compadre (kumpare) and Spangalog (almost half of the nouns in our national language are Spanish words) but not the rational, sensible institutions like the Residencia.

Truth is, even Spain appears to have given it up after a long while. When the well-meaning conquistadores and the saintly friars had departed, we were left to the whimsy of the fortune-hunters, the penniless younger sons, fugitives from justice and Moorish and Jewish converts who migrated from the Peninsula and became our rulers. 

Maybe it’s not too late. The United Opposition, the former senior government officers, the Bagong Katipunan, Gabriela, the whistle-blowers, the students and alumni associations, even the Catholic bishops and the Christian churches could or might come together and revive an end-of-term court like the old Spanish Residencia.