The tale of the Spanish inquiry: Dead or disappeared?

The dawn attack staged yesterday by a sabotage team of the New People’s Army against the 600-megawatt NAPOCOR power plant in Calaca, Batangas, was bravely repulsed by the Air Force detachment guarding the facility and government troops rushed to reinforce it.

The story was all over the cable news networks yesterday afternoon, too, reminding the world that the Philippines continues to seethe with rebellion and terrorism.

Three NPA "guerrillas" and four soldiers died in the hour-long gun-battle, as well as in the ambush of the responding Air Force personnel by the communist rebels. Sanamagan, if the raiders had succeeded, we might have been plunged into darkness.

Such an assault is a "heads up" signal that we will simply have to intensify the present limp-wristed military crackdown on the NPA, and not neglect their arrogant hit-and-run intifada and their insolent pronouncements, particularly those of the posturing but media-idolized Ka Roger (alias Gregorio) Rosal who continues to hog more publicity mileage than many of this election year’s aspirants.

Military intelligence has long asserted that Ka Roger maintains media-people on his payola that his glorification is constantly assured. While we usually regard the term "military intelligence" as an oxymoron, sometimes it looks that way.

Roger-Baby, indeed, seems to be trying to build himself up (sorry, Joma, out in Utrecht) into the new "Ho Chi Minh" plus "Mao Zedong" of the Communist "liberation" offensive.

Indeed, the NPA’s run their blackmail collection activities more efficiently than the Bureau of Internal Revenue, and are hyping the image of their ferocity up so they can reap the election-time bonanza of fleecing fearful candidates of amounts ranging from P1.5 million to much bigger "fees" based on the post for which they’re aspiring.

If they’re reported demanding the above bottom-line figure from candidates for mayor, vice mayor, governor, vice governor, etc., can you imagine what they’re strong-arming more important candidates to cough up?

What about presidential candidates? If any pay up – and many believe some will – the NPA will have become a multibillion-peso corporation (indeed, it probably already is), as greedy and capitalistically avaricious as any affiliated with the Makati Business Club.

Behind the pro-poor mantle of the "revolution", no doubt great fortunes are being made. Is it true that the NPA are "supporting" FPJ? If he has the guts to do so, he must renounce this support. Anyway, he’s already got radical leftwing Puwersa ng Masa.

But let’s not forget the echo of the ideological fury of the insurgent movement. The Communists’ aim, whether in the parliamentary struggle, the streets, or in the field, is to topple the government. Screw the delusion that they’re attacking the GMA Administration because of La Gloria’s so-called friendship with Dubya Bush and her ties with the United States. Their goal has, as it always been, the seizure of power. And, as this writer and others warned many months ago, they’re growing stronger, while our response to them is growing weaker.

Wake up.

* * *

That kissing scene on television between President Macapagal-Arroyo and a suddenly over-affectionate ex-Senator Miriam Defensor Santiago who just somersaulted into her camp was so yucky it surely made a few people want to puke.

The Biblically-inclined might wish to dredge up that other scene in the Garden of Gethsemane in which Judas Iscariot kissed Jesus, and was gently admonished: "Betrayest thou the Son of Man with a kiss?" But neither GMA nor Miriam, surely, is Judas, and certainly neither is Jesus Christ. And to think that not very long ago, Miriam had outraged Malacañang and many sober citizens by referring to an FPJ-GMA fight as between Panday and Pandak. Today, her venomous tongue may be directed against her former friend, Ronnie (and naturally Loren L.), but who knows about tomorrow? All those kissy spectacles in the Pinoy context are forever suspect, as are those warm abrazos in which people embrace and feel each other’s backs, in order to determine where to sink the knife.

Was it not Miriam who, as soon as she jumped over the fence, started questioning Fernando Poe Jr.’s (alias Ronald Allan Poe’s) citizenship? She went on TV with an open law book – after all, she had been the author of law books, a judge, a law professor, and, significantly, a former Commissioner of Immigration.

Miriam admitted on TV that while she had sat with GMA in the Senate, she had not during those years discovered GMA’s sterling and endearing qualities. Yo, ho, ho, and a bottle of rum!

In the meantime, La Presidenta shamelessly goes on welcoming former foes, rivals, critics, and all sorts of riff-raff into her fold, while proclaiming the glorious strengths and intentions of K-4. The late Senate President Amang Rodriguez, it’s true, once said that "politics is addition". In the present context, politics has become "addiction".

Oh, well. GMA is a chip off the old block. Her papa, the late President Diosdado Macapagal, used to seduce or drag senators, congressmen, governors, and other political leaders from the rival Nacionalista Party. When they joined Cong Dadong and his Liberal Party, he enthusiastically hailed them as "patriots".

Turncoatism, thus, became synonymous with patriotism. Truly the balimbing is our national fruit. However, this isn’t news. As I’ve remarked, the only consistent party is the Birthday Party.

And, besides, in the Chinese calendar, it will soon be the Year of the Monkey.

* * *

It has the very pungent smell of a demolition job. What does? The highly-publicized questioning of the Filipino citizenship of FPJ. It’s a sign, on the other hand, that it’s FPJ the Palace most fears.

Admittedly, it is a civic duty to insure that those who post for the Presidency must be natural-born citizens, pursuant to Section 2 of Article VII of the Constitution.

The formal petition to disqualify FPJ, filed with the Commission on Elections by lawyer Victorino X. Fornier, however, does not only impugn Ronnie Poe’s citizenship but alleges that he is an illegitimate child of his father out of a void (allegedly "bigamous") marriage to American Bessie Kelly due to the former’s then existing marriage to one Paula Gomez.

The seven-page petition adds that Gomez also filed a complaint for bigamy and concubinage against FPJ’s father.

It’s interesting to know that the complainant, Atty. Victorino X. Fornier, is a younger brother of lawyer Andresito Fornier who also in 1998 filed a petition to disqualify presidential candidate Fred Lim.

The former Manila Mayor, NBI Director and Police General Lim (later on Secretary of Interior and Local Government) was alleged to be Chinese, not a natural-born Filipino – Salamabit. The complaint, which was enthusiastically entertained by the Comelec, was given extensive publicity – and was not decided until the last hour of the last day, practically on the eve of the elections. The Comelec ruled that Lim was, indeed, a true-blue Filipino. But he and his campaign had been mortally wounded by the complaint and the "cloud" over his disqualification.

Will the Comelec, once more, dilly-dally over the accusation against FPJ?

By the way, the Fornier brothers are law practitioners under the firm Fornier and Fornier with offices on the 12th floor of the Antonino Building in Ermita, Manila. They are sons of the late Antique Rep. Jose Fornier who was the Consul General in Hong Kong. When the Department of Foreign Affairs recalled him from Hong Kong, the late President Macapagal appointed Fornier as a Commissioner of the Public Service Commission. Fornier subsequently won a congressional seat in the 1967 elections. (He was a younger brother, too, of Tobias Fornier who was Chairman of the powerful House Committee on Appointments.)

* * *

It might be well to recall, at this juncture, how the attempt of GMA’s father, the late President Macapagal, to suppress a movie in September 1965 backfired disastrously, and, instead, garnered widespread sympathy for his presidential challenger, ex-Senate President Ferdinand E. Marcos. (Perhaps that blunder helped propel Marcos to power, elbowing out Cong Dadong, and condemned this nation to 20 years of Marcos kleptocracy and martial law despotism).

I refer to the DM government’s effort to ban the Sampaguita Productions’ film, Iginuhit ng Tadhana (Marked by Fate), glorifying the wartime exploits of Marcos. Never mind, of course, that most of Macoy’s medals and decorations turned out to be ersatz or fake, but this emerged many years later.

The case went all the way up to the Supreme Court, with the High Tribunal finally allowing the film’s exhibition – overturning the Court of Appeals ruling in favor of Macapagal’s Board of Censors.

In his memoirs, Cong Dadong confessed that the attempt to defer the showing of the movie until after the elections had adversely affected his Administration’s chances of victory in the 1965 polls.

* * *

We’re so obsessed with electoral gossip and politics that our media has been missing a story that is being widely followed all over Spain – and drawing interest even in other countries.

I was surprised when a very prominent Spanish journalist (and a friend), Joaquin Luna, one of the editors of the prestigious and influential La Vanguardia of Barcelona, arrived here four days ago and contacted me for help in tracing the spoor of a case which was reaping headlines in Spain, particularly in his native city of Barcelona. This was because the dead man, Joan (John) Cogul, had been a former Director General of Catalonia’s tourism board and had been summoned back to Barcelona by a Spanish court to return to Barcelona to surrender his passport and face charges that the gentleman, reportedly deceased now, had in the 1990s ran the Catalan Tourism Consortium, paid generous amounts of money to companies controlled by his own wife and daughter.

If found "guilty", the suspect faced at least 12 years in jail. Just before he was scheduled to fly home to Barcelona, the man died. First, it was claimed he had succumbed to a heart attack. Later, it was clarified that he had committed suicide.

In Barcelona, particularly, Joaquin told us, there was "some" suspicion that the fellow was really dead, since his widow had just presented the court an urn containing his cremated ashes. In any event, La Vanguardia had sent Luna all the way to Manila (almost immediately after his return from an assignment in London) to verify the story.

The other day, through our intercession, our police opened their records and one officer showed him a photograph of the dead man indicating he had shot himself in the mouth.

I knew the topnotch investigating editor from his earlier reportorial stint in Manila (out of Tokyo). In fact, he was the one who introduced this writer when I delivered my speech in the "Casa Asia" forum in Barcelona several weeks ago. Now he’s hot on the trail of what happened to Cogul, who had headed the management company running the Country Club in posh Punta Fuego, in Nasugbu, Batangas.

Yesterday, our friend and erstwhile coffee crony, Jose "Pepe" Rodriguez (who’s being awarded, by the way, the distinguished "Order of Sikatuna" by the President) contacted us from Madrid, where he’s now an executive of his old outfit, EFE, the influential Spanish news agency. Don Pepe was astonished that nothing was being said about the Cogul case in our Philippine press, since the story was all over the Spanish newspapers and media.

Yesterday, the Financial Times (of London), which is published in 22 cities around the world simultaneously, came out with its own four-column story on the back page, one of its most prominent slots, "Vanishing Act Adds Mystery to Tale of Spanish Practices."

There was a photograph of the deceased Cogul in full color, plus a photograph of a traffic and umbrella clogged Metro Manila scene over a caption, "Lost in the crowd: Manila, in the Philippines, where the fugitive was reported to have died."

The FT Weekend story by correspondent Leslie Crawford started out with the query: "Is Joan Cogul really dead?" The subtitle said: "Doubts abound about the reported demise of fraud case fugitive due for trial in Spain."

In one paragraph, the report stated that "Francisco Gonzalez, the investigating magistrated smelled a rat. He requested the repatriation of Mr. Cogul’s body for identification. The Spanish embassy in Manila retorted that this was impossible, as the body had been cremated. The embassy said that, contrary to lawyers’ reports, Mr. Cogul had not died of heart attack. Hospital records allegedly showed he had shot himself in the head."

Dead or alive? The question festers. Abangan.