Believing in impeachment, but distrusting its handlers - GOTCHA by Jarius Bondoc

Dong Puno lied! He’s been challenging anybody and everybody to prove if he ever lied about anything. Well, you catch a fish by its mouth. He said "there was no prayer, only cursing" in last Saturday’s rally at EDSA Shrine. Tens of thousands who were there know better. From 12:15-1:35 p.m., emcees announced the arriving parish delegations. Then followed 20 minutes of religious singing. Soon after Cardinal Jaime Sin arrived, the throng read and prayed to the Seven Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary. More religious songs followed. Only at 3:10 did Sin deliver a speech, then ex-President Cory Aquino. By 3:50, the rally was winding down with more singing. It ended at 4:05 with definitely no cursing.

Association with Joseph Estrada has rubbed off on Puno. Estrada lied too when he said rally participants were paid P300 each. It’s a sin to tell a lie. Lagot ka sa prayer group ko, kina Edward, Rosa, Rey, Veronica, Mar, Zeny, Albert, Dick, Joy, Marissa.

It’s Estrada’s minions who pay crowds to attend his rallies. In Cebu two weeks ago, a senator was given P2.5 million to assemble 5,000 cheerers for Estrada at P500 apiece. The senator snitched part of the budget by trucking only 3,000, and only for P200 each – P100 upon boarding, the balance payable at rally’s end. More than half the crowd scampered home from a heavy downpour midway into the rally, thus enabling the senator to pocket some more funds.

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Emoting the look of the underdog that tugs at Filipino hearts, Joseph Estrada cries for a chance to answer jueteng-bribery and tax-theft charges during impeachment hearings. "Let the constitutional process work," his aides plead. Yet more and more associations of workers and students, church and businessmen, farmers and academics are telling him to step down. "Resignation is constitutional too," Cardinal Sin reminds Estrada; "so is going on leave," Cory Aquino adds. It’s now just a matter of how he departs, for he has lost moral ascendancy to lead.

A survey of Employers Confederation members says it all: 44 percent for impeachment, 48 percent for resignation. A good number believe in the impeachment process, but many more want Estrada to just resign because they don’t trust their present leaders to make it work. Not when Estrada’s minions can manipulate Congress, not if he can dig into his presidential bag of tricks. An eerie feeling pervades that the impeachment process will easily be twisted, delayed and bought.

The fear is not unfounded. Televiewers witnessed last Monday how four Estrada hitmen tried to thwart in the 51-member House committee on justice – with only 37 present at that – a bipartisan impeachment motion of 99 congressmen. They also saw weeks earlier how the same hitmen had gagged Chavit Singson’s Juetengate testimony, and how fellow-lackeys in the Senate tried to tear apart the whistle-blower’s credibility in the guise of "examining a character witness."

Dilatory tactics are also in the works. Opposition congressmen and senators already have done everything to beat tight Constitution deadlines on affirming and trying the impeachment case. But Estrada’s hitmen are raring to take up supposedly more pressing tasks when Congress resumes sessions on Monday. For one, they plan to vote instead for a new Senate President and House Speaker because Franklin Drilon and Manuel Villar bolted from Estrada’s party last week.

Estrada toadies have each an assigned task. At the House, it’s to sneak out if a surprise impeachment complaint - rustled up Thursday against Vice President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo – is not taken up. After which, a designated spoiler will invoke lack of quorum to conduct official business like, say, naming the 11 congressmen-prosecutors of Estrada’s case. If they fail in that, they’ll try to get Estrada loyalists appointed as prosecutors themselves.

At the Senate, they’ll move to inhibit members who asked Estrada to resign or showed bias for Singson during Blue-Ribbon committee hearings on Juetengate. Too, they’ll drag debates on trial rules - such as what the base figure is for a two-thirds vote to convict, 24 prescribed seats or 22 actual occupants. There’s also a rule – belatedly inserted Tuesday – to try all pending impeachment cases at the same time, as if anticipating that the House will elevate that other complaint against Arroyo. The aim is to make the constitutional deadlines lapse with the closing of the 11th Congress for the May 2001 election.

The last time minority legislators attempted to impeach a President was in August 1985. The case: Ferdinand Marcos’ unexplained wealth amidst widespread poverty. Marcos henchmen in the Batasan committee on justice took all of one hour to study the complaint, declare it defective, then trash it. While it proved that Congress can tackle impeachment with dispatch, it also showed that it all depends on the strategy of the day.

Today’s strategy is to confuse. Estrada’s aides expect the Opposition to raise the question: If he wants his day in court, why then are his boys twisting and delaying impeachment proceedings? But answering it is of no concern to Estrada. More important to him is for the case to not be heard at all. A presentation of the 10 crimes for which he’s charged will only highlight the issue of moral (un)fitness – and incite bigger protest rallies that could pressure Congress to speed up the case. The game plan is thus to deflect attention away from the case onto sideshows.

It doesn’t matter if the sideshows look all too contrived; the point is to present them. Cabinet men are busy ensuring attendance of a million prayer-ralliers in today’s National Thanksgiving. They take pains to disclaim that it’s a political show of support for Estrada, yet they intend to dwarf Sin and Aquino’s EDSA rally last weekend. This, to reduce the impeachment charges and resignation calls to a battle not of principles but of popularity.

Equally distracting are Estrada’s Senate loyalists John Osmeña and Tessie Oreta. They’re raising hell over Jun Magsaysay’s reply to a reporter’s query about a Palace plot to buy off senators for P100 million apiece. Ethics committee sanctions are in order, they scream, as if it’s a capital offense compared to their accepting P1 million each in mah-jongg balato from Estrada, through Singson, last April.

But the sideshows failed to prime up the main actor. Estrada phoned five AM-radio stations last Thursday to kick off his popularity game with the poor. Answering selected items in the impeachment complaint for the first time, he called Singson a jueteng lord. He said his gambling buddy accused him of jueteng payola to prevent him from legalizing the numbers racket and giving social security benefits to hundreds of poor bet collectors. He swore he never accepted a P200-million jueteng payoff. As for the P130 million in tobacco tax that he and bagman Atong Ang allegedly pocketed from a separate P200-million release, he said Singson once tried to bribe him with it. He then jumbled the jueteng and tax issues, saying Singson apparently gave the P130 or P200 million to his unsuspecting personal lawyer Edward Serapio, whom he had tasked to keep tabs of his donations for poor but deserving Muslim scholars.

Estrada tried to look like Robin Hood – but a hood just the same. Opposition lawyers view his exhuberant talkativeness as an extrajudicial confession that he received hundreds of millions in dirty pesos, whether in jueteng protection money or tobacco farmers’ tax shares. They sigh in relief that the accused himself simplified their job of proving guilt.

Why, Estrada even said the P200 miIlion is intact in his bank, and that he’ll show it in Senate hearings to prove innocence. In law, however, admission of crime is enough, regardless of outcome. A man can’t demand clemency on the grounds of being a poor orphan after confessing to killing his parents. The only job left for Estrada’s defense counsel, former Supreme Court chief justice Andres Narvasa, is to cop a plea.

Perhaps it’s not really the look of the underdog that actor-turned-President Estrada is emoting, but the leer of the underworld.

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INTERACTION. E.C. Ibazeta, pworld.net: It’s evident he’s digging into his presidential arsenal (Gotcha, 8 Nov. 2000), ranging from disinformation to telephone brigades, similar to the Marcos regime.

aramco.com: The Opposition must consult all legal experts to counter LAMP’s delaying tactics in the impeachment process.

Joey Legarda, Makati: No way must we let Erap get away by negotiating a graceful exit (Gotcha, 6 Nov. 2000). We failed to punish Marcos because we let him escape.

Ramon Blanch, apwtrade.com: Keep updating us about those backroom deals. Vigilance is the price to pay to sustain democracy we earned at EDSA. GMA must not start her tenure with a deal but with the full extent of the law.

Ricardo Galanao, deloitte.com: Erap says he merely rented the Boracay Mansion from Sel Yulo (Gotcha, 1 Nov. 2000). How could Yulo afford to build it when the reason for his Cabinet departure was his failure to pay credit-card bills?

Thank you, Bernie Cruz Mendoza, Ting Caacbay, Manolo Montes, Aida Aguas, Arch. Ed Amorozo, Grace Sison, Ben Bie, Jim Cata, Cesar de los Reyes, Santi Oliva Santander, Narciso Ner, Rudy Reglos, Mar Ramos, Joey Catama, Fr. Rene Cuadras, Albert M. Garcia, L.C. Baula, Victor Gil Saldajeno, Archie Tacla, Gary Mariano, Joey Labrador, Danile Manalo, Amapola Luna, Pancho Umali, Gras Reyes, James Litton, Vicar Rosales, Julieta Sasuman, Greg Campomanes, Pablo Binas, Oscar Labrador, Nida Jose, Jay Entruda, Manny Leno, Renato de Leon, Jacob Solano, Luciano de Guzman, Rita Gonzalez, Frank Hernandez, G.M. de Vera Jr.

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