Sex, mystery and drama at the Senate

It is said that the Filipino male is the most “chismoso” specie in the world. You cannot imagine how many people watched the unfolding drama at the Senate, the most-watched telenovela complete with action, tears and recriminations when former lovers Katrina Halili and Hayden Kho faced it off. You won’t believe how many well-known businessmen stopped working for a couple of hours just to watch the whole affair.

Ironically, the (video) show was dominated by actor-senators Bong Revilla and Jinggoy Estrada, and even “the waterman” who doused Kho with water had his one minute of fame. Even the Israeli Ambassador was astounded at the attention given to a secret recording of two people’s sexual encounters, with details of the whole sordid affair (gone sour) becoming media fodder. Ambassador Vapni said there are more “bombshells” here than in Israel (no pun intended).

Thursday’s hearing probably had the highest viewership rating of all the Senate investigations. The huge attention generated by the Katrina-Hayden scandal may be the reason why some jealous senators wanted to conduct the hearing behind closed doors — but Jinggoy Estrada and Bong Revilla prevailed, scoring a lot of publicity from that two-hour exposure. 

The problem of sex videos spreading all over the internet has really gone out of hand. Kho, Halili and his victims had no chance once the cat was out of the bag. Even if the NBI cracked down on locally-maintained websites, the “Hayden cam” videos have become best sellers with international porno sites charging fees for every download, making the scandal a money-making venture.

Some of my sources claim that in the last two weeks, over a million DVD copies were produced and vendors made a killing with pirated copies going for as high as P250. The scandal has dislocated lives, and is probably the reason why one of the poor victims (who I understand is now a doctor belonging to a decent family) has already left the country totally embarrassed. This high-tech pandemic has turned into a nightmare because the internet transcends borders, making it easy to globally transmit sex videos in just a matter of seconds. The fact that it involves well-known people heightened the drama even more.

Despite criticisms that the hearing became a circus sideshow catering to Filipinos’ voyeuristic tendencies (in the sense that everyone wanted “a peek” at the intimate details about Halili and Kho’s relationship), the saving grace was that it actually brought out the far more serious problem of drugs in the country.

I have to give credit to Jamby Madrigal for trying to give the hearing a semblance of sanity, maintaining order in the small jam-packed hall at the Senate. Though Jamby used words like “God” and “country,” she failed to persuade Kho to reveal the name of the influential drug supplier.

The Alabang Boys scandal is just the tip of the iceberg that underscores the problems hampering the fight against the drug menace. A drugs shipment worth P5 billion was apprehended in Subic last year, with authorities saying they were offered a P50-million bribe. The amount should have raised a lot of red flags that the smuggled cargo was not electronics equipment, yet for some inexplicable reason the mastermind still got away.

PDEA head Dionisio Santiago had admitted the drug menace is a national security threat more serious than the insurgency, with syndicates penetrating politics “from the municipal to the national level.” Reports from the UN and the US-INCSR say the Philippines has become a major player in the international drug trade, with shabu sales generating P300 to P400 billion a year. The country’s shorelines and porous borders also make it ideal for traffickers to transport drugs through the backdoor, with the ports of choice located in Mindanao, Cavite, Laguna and Aurora.

While shabu is the most “popular” among low and mid-end sectors, Ecstasy (the drug reportedly used by Kho and Halili) is said to be the drug of choice among high-end users (at P800 per tablet) especially in the showbiz world since it’s known as a sex stimulant that boosts energy and keeps users awake for hours. PDEA agents revealed that some celebrities and scions of prominent families are on their watch list for cocaine and Ecstasy abuse. More disturbing still are reports that more than 6.7 million Filipinos from ages 10-44 from a cross section of society are hooked on drugs. 

People who watched the Senate hearing say that in the first place, Hayden Kho was stupid in taking the videos and carelessly allowing them to be stolen. But the real culprit is the person who exposed its existence and posted it on the internet. He or she must be exposed. Obviously, the mystery in the sex video scandal is not “whodunit” but who spread it. But for the country, the bigger mystery that must be solved is the identity of this big-time, influential drug lord that Kho seems to be more scared of than anybody else. To make this whole drama-laden hearing relevant to the country, the Senate committee must expose who this powerful, influential drug lord is.

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I received a lot of e-mail from so many people who were appalled and turned off at the comments made by Congresswoman Nikki Teodoro that for her husband, Defense Secretary Gilbert “Gibo” Teodoro, it’s either the presidency or nothing. People told me her comments made her look overly ambitious, confirming rumors on why Danding Cojuangco was disappointed: It’s because his nephew’s wife was “uncontrollable.” I personally like both Gilbert and Nikki, and I certainly hope they recover from this negative perception.

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