Republicanism on trial / Three events bestir nation: Lacson, SSS, Abu Sayyaf

(First of two parts)

The three EDSAs apart, three contemporary events grimly test the republican theory that we have here in the Philippines a representative democracy. Such advocates of American republicanism as Walter Lippman, Benjamin Franklin and James McGregor Burns emphasize that public issues and therefore public opinion like ocean winds should whip at the masts of political power. In turn, the elected leadership would illuminate the way guided only by their honor, courage and – of course – the light of the stars.

The first of the three events has to do with Sen. Panfilo Lacson. The two others were the reckless, abusive SSS demonstrations that drove out Vitaliano Nañagas Jr. as president and the renewed rampage of Abu Sayyaf.

As many of my readers may have noticed over the years, I have often written in what I felt was the alarming shadow of Senator Lacson. Not to mention that of Erap Estrada. Ever since he came close to Joseph Estrada, first as head of Task Force Habagat when Erap chaired the Presidential Anti-Crime Commission (established by President Fidel Ramos), then as Philippine National Police chief and head of PAOCTF (Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force), I had a strong feeling the Estrada-Lacson duo constituted the fuse that would ignite and sputter with the kind of haymaker that would blow up the government.

I was right. Estrada hoisted himself on his own petard and in less than three years got blown out of Malacañang. But what about Lacson? I had thought that he too would be swallowed by the quicksand of People Power II. I was wrong. Smarter than his boss Erap who was the cloak while he was the stealthy and shadowy dagger, Lacson, loaded with campaign funds, easily got himself elected as senator. There he ensconced himself as a neophyte lawmaker, supreme in his belief he had outwitted everybody. Now he was safe. And now, just maybe, he could gun for the presidency in the year 2004.

That was the game plan. It backfired. Now Lacson is in deep trouble.

Lesser mortals had earlier sniped at him including Mary "Rosebud" Ong and Angelo Manaway, alias Ador, not to mention former PNP intelligence chief Gen. Reynaldo Berroya and to a lesser extent PNP Big Boss Gen. Leandro Mendoza. Even Justice Secretary Hernando Perez hinted Lacson was a prime suspect in the double murder of publicist Bubby Dacer and his driver Emmanuel Corbito. And then, again and much earlier, the disappearance and presumed murder of Edgardo Bentain, who blew the whistle on Estrada gambling at a casino. And, of course, the rubout-massacre of eleven Kuratong Baleleng gang members. But Lacson was suave and smooth, an operator without peer, elusive, crafty as all-get-out, doors sliding and closing with sinuous silence whenever he was around. His image-makers built himself up to what he was not – a model police officer. Omigawd!

It had to take a journalist, Ramon Tulfo, to blow the whole thing wide open. Drugs mostly. And Col. Victor Corpuz, chief of military intelligence, to sum up the loot through the cooperation and connivance, I suppose, of the Pentagon, CIA, FBI, DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) and Special Operations. The Philippines was fast becoming the Colombia of Asia – narcotics transit to the US West Coast.

The latest figures about the loot reportedly amassed by Lacson in cahoots with Joseph Estrada (while still president) and deposited in foreign banks abroad are mind-boggling. Lacson’s reported bank accounts alone in the US total $211 million, almost all with Citibank New York. The joint accounts of Lacson and Estrada in Citibank Hongkong reportedly amount to $118,833,107.70. A joint account with Alice Lacson (Citibank New York) is listed at $212,500,436.79. Bejesus! Alice Lacson alone has $40,357.078.79 in Bank of America and Wells Fargo. Joseph Estrada’s bank account (Citibank, Hongkong) towers to $336,421,258.16.

The grand total is a whopping $728,500,293.53! By gahd, all of that is in US dollars (multiply each dollar by P54), amassed in so short a time. Tulfo reports that the loot "confirms rumors that Lacson was involved in big-time drug trafficking, kidnap for ransom and bank robbery." All this loot at a time 40 percent of our people are groveling in mass penury and poverty, when families in the slums only eat once a day, just rice porridge with salt. Honestly, even as I write, the hackles on my skin crawl and rise, and I am deeply sad, grieved and mortified.

The Senate should bow its collective head in shame.

In the US, Rep. Gary Condit’s political life is in shambles and he may be ejected soon from the House by his peers. His only crime – if crime it indeed is -- is that he had an affair with Chandra Levy, a brunette who disappeared sometime ago without any trace. The police have so far established no link between Condit and Chandra’s disappearance but the clouds have mounted over his head – and he will have to go. Condit’s case is a trifle, a pinhead compared to the fireball of a scandal now exploding around Senator Lacson. The Senate, the entire Senate, has demeaned itself by threatening to explode "the guns of August" against the presidency of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo for no reason at all than that it suspects – without any proof so far – that First Gentleman Mike Arroyo is guilty of grand larceny in the telecommunications flap.

If as Mon Tulfo states in pardonable derision that the Senate has deteriorated to an Old Boys’ Club out to protect all its members from charges hurled by outsiders, then, by golly, this senate has no reason for being. If it disappears in a cloud of smoke, nobody would miss it. How about it, Loren? Joker? Frank? Lost your guts? The Senate I respected had Ninoy Aquino and Pepe Diokno as members, and I still stand in awe remembering the great legislators who once traveled the Senate’s corridors, boomed wisdom from its podiums, stalked its halls with the treat of a mountain bulldozer, men like Claro Recto, Jose P. Laurel, Lorenzo Sumulong, Lorenzo Tañada, Ambrosio Padilla.

The least the Senate can do today is to open up a full-dress investigation into the charges – and they are mighty serious – against Sen. Panfilo Lacson. If they fear him, then they have no business calling themselves lawmakers, the Chosen 24 of Philippine politics. They are fugitives from the Republic of Courage, an insult to the world of intelligence, and the ground they walk on hardly leaves any traces because all they are made of is sawdust and piffle.

Enough already. Let the investigation begin. And as for Erap Estrada, with this latest exposé about his huge dollar deposits abroad, let him not foul the air again with the lamentation that he is innocent, that he never stole a single centavo, that evil men have betrayed him, that his life has been a model of rectitude, that cross his heart and hope to die, he was a great president. Sir, will you just shut up for once? Even Ping Lacson betrays you. He considers Ferdinand Marcos, not you, as the greatest president of the Philippines that ever lived.

The choice says a lot about Lacson. In my book, Marcos was the biggest crook and criminal that ever inhabited Malacañang.

* * *

Now let’s go to the SSS brouhaha. That too was a scandal. If the SSS hordes thought they did the nation a favor by getting rid of Vitaliano Nañagas, all they really accomplished was bastardize People Power. Firstly and lastly, they and their mentors, or better still, agents-provocateurs proved they were bullies, no better than an anthropoid in full cry in the jungle. All they had against Nañagas was that they didn’t like his "management style." Hah! What crap! If you look intelligently and closely, the truth was that they were afraid of two things. Primo, a full-dress investigation into "scams" and irregularities committed by the past SSS administration (or administrations). Secundo, privatization of the SSS.

Both are overdue.

I do not know this man Horacio Templo, executive vice president of the SSS. But if Jarius Bondoc’s figures are right, that he receives a monthly SSS income of P314,416.00, while Nañagas gets only P123,265 then I say we the citizenry are being rooked. Jobbed. Rolled. Five senior vice presidents, sixteen vice presidents, four assistant vice presidents pull down monthly incomes of P206,235 and down to an average of about P130,000 to P120,000 each. Know what I receive monthly as my SSS retirement benefit after working 36 years at the Agence-France-Presse Manila bureau? P2,700. Yes, you read right, P2,700. Somehow, somewhere, some people up high in the SSS bent and disfigured the scales. And we who poured hard-earned money into the SSS over many decades as monthly deductions from our salaries now get peanuts, while SSS officialdom pull down millions. Oh, gahd! The unfairness of it all.

Somehow, President Arroyo was not firm enough. She should have stood by Nañagas, instead of capitulating to Templo and the SSS mobs. In the eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation, GMA blinked, evidence of lack of presidential character. She is lucky Pricewater’s Corazon de la Paz agreed to replace Nañagas. This woman doesn’t scare. (To be continued)