An ill-elected president & his ill-gotten wealth - HERE'S THE SCORE by Teodoro C. Benigno

The days of bluster and braggadocio are over, the days when President Joseph Estrada hove into view like a meteor from Mars and had virtually everybody in the palm of his hypnotic hand. The magic is gone, the baritone voice that boomed power, the nights from midnight to dawn when the canvases were those of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec painting the gay, gaudy and garish scenes of Montmartre in drunken revelry. Many of the president’s friends have left him or greatly distanced themselves. His top economic advisers have fled. Even his Chinese-Filipino cronies and ne’er-do-wells who call him bosing or some such endearments now seek the exits as witness the swift turnaround of George L. Go of Equitable PCIB.

The streets greatly took their toll in Erap, Resign! demonstrations which hit front pages and television newscasts all over the world. The ongoing impeachment trial of the president, which Mr. Estrada expects to acquit him, now has the makings of a heat-seeking missile poised to blast the president into the nether world of might-have-beens. His late-appointed presidential Merlins – Ernie Marceda, Danding Cojuangco and Ed Angara – are scratching the bottom of the witches’ cauldron. But it is highly doubtful they can save the president and so they can be expected to fly away on their brooms before the Malacañang walls cave in.

I do pity (or do I really?) Titoy Pardo, Brother Andrew Gonzalez and their like who have stuck their foolish heads into the sand. When they pull out, their heads will be gone, a monument to their colossal folly.

The adventurers are moving in, the self-appointed messiahs, shadow-worshippers of Der Fuehrer, Il Duce, the Shah-in-shah. They could be out to topple President Joseph Estrada before the military moves in strength, before the citizenry gathers for another EDSA, this time a score-settling EDSA which is sure and certain if the Senate should acquit the president. Those five bombs that exploded Saturday, December 30, were ill-omened. They were, I am almost sure by now, the work of para military gorillas led by fascist politicians and Marcos-era business moguls out to create havoc and chaos so they could snake-stride into Malacañang. Then they will remove Mr. Estrada from power or hold him captive as a dummy president.

Let me tell them they are insane and they will never succeed.

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This is the year 2001 and not 1972 when they could fool the people all of the time and make gunny-suckers out of the citizenry. The days of the Marcoses are gone, the Ceausescus, the Suhartos, the Duvaliers, the Milosevics. Once the military establishment turns its heels on the dictator or a highly unpopular and corrupt president, the dikes cave in and the people are ascendant. Our military has taken note of what is happening in the streets and the impeachment trial in the Senate. And five gets you one, it’s just a matter of time before our top Armed Forces generals withdraw their support of the president. They just need a cocked trigger. This could be acquittal in the impeachment. If not that, an impeachment trial so iniquitous, so crooked, so misshapen that even that trial has to be beheaded as you would a hissing, lunging cobra. Can you imagine a trial where the president can neither be convicted nor acquitted? That could happen. Already, the trial proceedings have taken a turn for the utterly odious and, yes, unspeakable. Thank the exemplary courage of a woman witness – and the sharp, incisive questioning of a woman senator Loren Legarda – for that. Clarissa Ocampo, senior vice president and trustee of the Equitable PCIB, revealed Tuesday there was a brazen attempt to transfer the P500 million (or is it P1.2 billion?) account of Jose Velarde (the president’s fictitious name) to presidential friend and businessman Jaime Dichaves. And in what venues were the transfer documents signed just last December 13?? Lo and behold! – In the offices of Estelito Mendoza, lead counsel of the president in the impeachment.

How did that happen? The rationale of Mr. Mendoza was even more absurd and preposterous. He just found George L. Go and Jaime Dichaves in his office and later on Clarissa Ocampo. Surprise, surprise, he didn’t even invite them, and he didn’t even know why they were there. If you can believe this, then you can believe Mother Teresa strangled babies in their cradle, Pope John Paul II takes shabu for breakfast when nobody is looking, and Hilario Davide has more mistresses and much more concealed loot than Joseph Ejercito Estrada.

Ms. Ocampo is the same witness who cooked the president’s goose when last December 22, she revealed without flinching she was just a foot away in Malacañang when Joseph Ejercito Estrada (the name she repeatedly mentioned) signed the name Jose Velarde to deposit documents then in the amount of P500 million. If you needed the garrot to finish off the president, that was it. He was guilty as hell, guilty as those convicted in the Nuremberg trial were guilty. The only way he can retaliate is to appear in Senate court, and tell Clarissa Ocampo to her face she is a goddam liar.

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But he won’t do that because his lawyers won’t allow him. And he won’t do that because nobody will believe him. And he won’t do that because he is a crippled Brahma bull tottering on four legs and a single swordstroke by the prosecution will do him in. Joseph Ejercito Estrada is – in the last and final analysis – an ill-elected president. The hearings bear out the charge – also the crushing testimony of Jose "Chavit" Singson – that his prime purpose upon getting into Malacañang in July 1998 was to accumulate "ill-gotten wealth." Ill-gotten seems to reek around the president, now reduced, as Joker Arroyo says, to "cowering" in the dark.

I will agree with Sen. Rodolfo Biazon that all that sound and fury about "burden of proof" and "burden of evidence" is mere "legal gobbledegook." As far as the people watching the presidential impeachment on TV are concerned, nothing more is needed to prove the president is guilty – as charged. We can even temporarily forget Luis "Chavit" Singson. The shocker was that in the presence of Clarissa Ocampo, presidential lawyer Fernando Chua, Equitable PCIB top executive Manuel Curato and Malacañang chief of staff Aprodicio Laquian, Joseph Estrada unwittingly signed his death sentence by impersonating himself as Jose Velarde. And the objective was to conceal ill-gotten wealth, then in the amount of P500 million.

Where did he get all that money? And all the other monies – presumably again in the hundreds of millions – the prosecution claims to have been concealed by the president in other banks? He won that fortune in the lottery? He inherited it just recently from rich uncles and aunts who just died? This was the flow-over money in fund contributions during his 1998 presidential campaign? Then why didn’t the president come clean as the laws of the land require him? Why didn’t he say, as Sen. Miriam Defensor Santiago insinuates, that was campaign money? Why were his assets and liabilities for the year 1999 only P35 million?

Even Mandrake the Magician couldn’t pull off such a feat.

TV coverage of the presidential impeachment trial has turned out to be – to use our favorite phrase – an alligator’s tail. The more it moves, the more damaging evidence comes out, the more it becomes improbable (at least in theory) that the president can be acquitted. The defense has lost its best man, Estelito Mendoza, and we wonder if he can continue to function credibly. Mendoza has lost almost all credibility by saying – honest to God and cross my heart and hope to die – he was in complete ignorance of what happened when Jaime Dichaves, George L. Go and Clarissa Ocampo signed the transfer documents (Jose Velarde to Jaime Dichaves) in his office.

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And so we have an alligator’s tail whipping the defense and, of course, the president wickedly in the water and drawing a lot of blood.

The desperate minds that set off the five bombs in five different places last Saturday, killing 18 persons and injuring about a hundred, can resort to something more macabre. They can set off a bomb in the Senate during the impeachment processings or during the night when only the security guards are around. This way, they believe they can stop the impeachment trial. They will frighten the prosecution, the senators, of course, the defense and presiding justice Hilario Davide. And, verily, no witnesses will dare to come anymore for fear they can be blown to kingdom come. In the ensuing chaos and anarchy, they can play the hero by toppling the president.

I would thus urge Ernie Maceda to ultimately fulfill his role and tell the president to resign. Nobody beats Mr. Maceda when it comes to wetting his forefinger with his own saliva, of course, and thrusting it into the wind. This way he has survived all presidents because he was a genius at knowing when it was time to jump ship. He jumped when Imelda Marcos started muscling on his territory as executive secretary to Ferdinand Marcos. He fled the country and joined Ninoy Aquino in Boston. When Ninoy was assassinated August 21, 1883, Ernie dutifully carried the luggage of Cory Aquino – who hardly liked him then – and accompanied her and the children to Manila. When he was bumped off Cory’s cabinet, Ernie ran for senator and eventually joined the ranks of Lakas-NUCD and became president of the Senate under President Fidel Ramos. Nobody beats him when it comes to smelling out the fate of any presidency. It was Ernie who first primed Erap for the presidency.

So, Ernie, how long do you give Joseph Ejercito Estrada?