Mixed Media : The Company She Keeps (Part One)

First posted 01:36am (Mla time) July 31, 2005
By Sylvia L. Mayuga INQ7.net

Many of us have been powerfully reminded these past few weeks: only the truth can set us free.

But where truth has become a prize football in a cynical power game, and memory in the working press can be short in the pile-up of scandals under constant deadline pressure, hunting down truth to its lair has become the turf of detectives, investigative journalists, historians and artists. It’s a matter of both time and passion for the larger picture discerned in the welter of disconnected factoids assaulting the media audience day after day.

Take the subject of jueteng. Free of deadline pressure, racial memory has already pointed out that it’s been with us since the postwar era. On the premise that it meets a public need, several readers have recommended that it be legalized once and for all. Several have observed, apparently from personal experience, that it’s perhaps the biggest money-spinner in the Pinoy underground economy – next to drugs, we might add. One reader went farther and noted its power to get one president impeached then pull the rug from under his successor.

Bishop Oscar Cruz and his witnesses’ claims linking Mike, Mikey and Iggy Arroyo to jueteng in early May prepared the ground for the opening of Gloria-gate by June. Whether they did so wittingly or unwittingly is the difference between political fate and opposition conspiracy awaiting discovery.

Before we get there, however, there’s a major point to be rescued from burial by information overload in the sheer speed of events. With the Estrada and Arroyo experiences now coming together in one picture, we see: jueteng spins the kind of money that, pre-Bishop Cruz, not only silences its strict moralist enemies in the Catholic Church but from the look of it also finances and “wins” elections.

Many things follow from that premise. First is the dualism of state policy on gambling – legal when sponsored by government in Pagcor, illegal when it’s not. From this dualism proceeds the economics of jueteng where money is made by authorities up and down the line precisely because it’s illegal.

This dualistic state policy creates a win-win situation for politicians in power at the price of a delicate balancing act – hiding enough of the truth to keep a veneer of moral governance while preserving the status quo. Enforcement authorities are kept loyal by allowing them their “little” rackets that, not so incidentally, also grease the larger wheels of state power with money for social services to keep the masses quiet.

This ruling schizophrenia is the root of what we call traditional politics and we experience as corruption, jueteng being only one of its pervasive manifestations in our national life. Truth, or its glimpses, has been the party pooper for the Arroyo administration, which was after all only perpetuating what had become established practice. One of the things that may have been forgotten, however, is that the oppositionist Senator Pimentel has been on an anti-jueteng crusade “in aid of legislation” since late 90s.

The emergence of the Garci Tapes while hearings on Bishop Cruz’s crusade against jueteng were pummeling the Arroyo government in the Senate has therefore seemed to many people as too much of a coincidence not to have been an oppositionist plot. But wait. With the Hyatt 10’s resignation from the Arroyo Cabinet, the account of exactly how and why those tapes emerged has begun to leak out.

I promised not to reveal my source since what was told to me could, and should, become part of an official investigation. Before that happens, however, we begin a peek at big pieces of the puzzle that is the Arroyo presidency. First, the “mother of all tapes” was produced not by an oppositionist plot but on orders from the Palace to spy on its dubious ally Virgilio Garcillano– whether from the Office of the President or the First Gentleman, my source did not say.

What this source did say is that the team on top of this operation was composed of First Gentleman Mike Arroyo, the ISAFP chief and the KAMPI stalwart and Antipolo representative Ronaldo ‘Ronnie’ Puno. (He is also the brother of Estrada’s former Executive Secretary and spokesperson, Ricardo ‘Dong’ Puno.)

You can well imagine my source’s shock at discovering that Ronnie Puno was behind not only the Garci tapes but also the sudden emergence of a female witness claiming to have been raped by Bishop Cruz as the Senate hearings on jueteng gained mileage. With that, public servant Puno’s record in both government and its informal power clique becomes worth a brief recital in, shall we say, a more honest portrait of the Arroyo presidency. What it’s doing to the nation I leave to your own conclusion.

Ronaldo V. Puno’s official Congress bio-data says he’s 57 years old and lists his “other profession” as “businessman.” Note that it lists only one bill under his name since the 13th Congress began, converting Antipolo’s Hinulugang Taktak from a national park into “a national park AND tourism center.”

Traveling through the web, you next discover Ronaldo V. Puno’s name in a list of congressmen with the most number of absences, despite his membership in nine powerful House committees as an adjunct of the ruling majority - appropriations, dangerous drugs, foreign affairs, good government, housing and urban development, legislative franchises, local government, rules, and Southern Tagalog development.

What is one supposed to think when those first dots are connected to the earlier set of dots in Ronnie Puno’s scandalous career as local governments secretary under Estrada – and how smoothly it segued into his present career in the de Venecia Congress and now the Arroyo crisis?

There’s much more on that, the tapes and other dots of the puzzle to connect as we continue down this road next Sunday.

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Mixed Media : The Company She Keeps (Part Two)

First posted 06:22am (Mla time) Aug 07, 2005
By Sylvia L. Mayuga INQ7.net

There remains a wide public impression that it was the opposition that wiretapped the President into ‘Gloria-gate.’ “No,” says my source emphatically, “they got careless after winning in 2004. The tapes were lying around for Samuel Ong.”

Many gaps remain in this former NBI deputy director’s tale on “the mother of all tapes” from the time he surfaced and today’s legislative inquiries. Here we focus on my source’s “they” – the President’s covert operations team for elections 2004 and beyond. Discovery that it had ordered the wiretapping in the first place was a major whiplash to resignation from the Cabinet, says my source.

Revelations unfolding in a series of Malacañang crisis meetings had beamed an increasingly harsh spotlight on the inner workings of the Arroyo presidency. To begin with, contrary to Press Secretary Ignacio Bunye’s script when he waved that famous CD in media faces on June 6, its source was not quite anonymous. It was the product of hasty splicing ordered by the Palace itself when alarms rang that the originals had fallen into opposition hands. Bunye was the fall guy – whether wittingly or unwittingly remains to be seen in a move to preempt what became the opposition’s Paguia tapes, says my source.

To most of the Cabinet, presidential stonewalling on ‘Hello, Garci’ was the last straw in deepening internal conflict pointing to a discomfiting truth: led by the economics team, they were making a trapo presidency look good.

Signs had been multiplying – reversal of Gloria Arroyo’s noble gesture not to run in the 2004 election; dangerous foreign policy in Balikatan; reversal of sustainable development policy in the Mining Act; use of government resources in the 2004 election campaign. My source confirmed the tons of rice distributed to Metro Manila’s urban poor through Mayor Lito Atienza, one of whose ward leaders (a Sr. Zeny in Sr. Cristine Tan’s Leveriza community) handed it out only upon proof that the recipient voted Lakas.

Then there were the First Gentleman’s “subalterns.” Last May 2, one of the future Hyatt 10 had already called for a special group meeting with Gloria Arroyo on reports of graft piling up against these Palace-appointed officials in the money-spinning PCSO, PAGCOR and NAIA. “Puputok ito (This will explode). The First Gentleman has to go. I don’t want to see you ousted like Erap,” an honest official had presciently warned the President.

Mrs. Arroyo would not listen. “They blame him wherever he is anyway,” she reasoned. The warning came alive soon enough, as jueteng pay-offs exploded in the faces of Jose Miguel, Miguel, Jr. and Ignacio Arroyo. This brought the next revelation: the central role in the Arroyo presidency of the Kampi top gun and Macapagal kabalen Ronnie Puno.

The public record of his graft cases as a public servant has lengthened by the decade.

This reputation has hounded Ronnie Puno through the years. Here’s an e-mailed comment on Part One of this column from an old schoolmate who has watched the brothers Dong and Ronnie for decades. “Of the two, Ronnie was known to be ‘street-smarter’… a member of the ‘dirty tricks’ department during the last days of Marcos, and later on the head of the same department during the time of Estrada… [He] has always been pro-Marcos and FM loyalists.”

A first taste of that reputation still lingers in my source’s mouth. “Doon sa propaganda na may ni-rape si Bishop Cruz namin na realize and tactics niya, (In the propaganda that Bishop Cruz had raped someone was when we realized his tactics.),” says this source. “Hinarap ang biktima kay bishop. Ni hindi siya kilala nung babae.” (“The supposed victim was brought to the bishop. The woman didn’t even know him.”)

‘Hello, Garci’ crash landing into the miasma of the Senate’s jueteng investigation gave Cabinet members the leverage to extract a promise from the President to speak up on the tapes to a nation in uproar by Independence Day. To collective disappointment, all she came up with was feeble lip service to “’cut corruption by 50%.’ Eto na (Here it comes.) – survival at all costs,” says my source. Another moral wrestling match to the finish had begun.

In the weekly Cabinet meeting the next day came a strong recommendation that the President now “get rid of the First Gentleman’s subalterns” in government’s money-spinning agencies. The stubbornness that is the vice of Gloria Arroyo’s virtue kicked in on this – until four days later when she suddenly informed the Cabinet of the First Gentleman’s planned departure on his birthday, June 28.

“ Masyadong matagal ‘yan. (That’s too long.),” Vice President Noli de Castro had objected. By now the Cabinet, too, was vibrating to the Garci ringtones, over two-dozen versions at that point, in a deepening crisis of credibility. The matter of the “FG’s” subalterns brought only the next revelation however.

“These are the people I need to survive. They know what I need to survive,” Mrs. Arroyo had said. She had dropped all veneer of consensus by then, says my source, steering Cabinet meetings to “what needed to be done to convince the community – rolling stores, food for work…“ Sabi ko sa sarili ko (I told myself,) ‘Hello, why don’t you speak up and meet the real issue head on?’”

The next major Cabinet meeting on June 25 was when Gloria Arroyo echoed the last Marcos years in her articulation of government’s present propaganda line: “There’s destabilization going on. The opposition is doing this.” Members of the future Hyatt 10 were dumbstruck at how this missed the point completely. Says my source from the other side of the philosophical, to say nothing of spiritual, divide, “Destabilization did not ring true. This was a moral issue. We were losing moral force.”

That meeting struggled with new recommendations and repetitions of old ones to prove presidential sincerity: the First Gentleman’s departure, getting rid of his subalterns, purging the Comelec, a decisive shift on the coco levy on the side of the farmers. Too late – that meeting, too, was when the Cabinet heard for the first time that, in tandem with the First Gentleman, “her grand commander in all this was really Ronnie Puno, in my source’s words

Vice President de Castro took the words out of the Cabinet’s collective gaping mouth, “Ngayon ko lang nalaman ‘yan. (This is the first I’ve heard of this.)” How long this had been going on – unknown to a Cabinet absorbing multiple blows from their respective constituencies in growing scandal – completed the shock. Soon Interior Secretary Angelo Reyes and defense chief Efren Abu, in the dark with the rest, would not quite know what to tell the media circling the ISAFP for ‘Hello, Garci’s’ real source.

My source pauses on this blow-by-blow account to reflect on four years of close observation of how Mrs. Arroyo’s PhD in economics comes with an inversely proportional low “EQ” – emotional quotient, the ability to catch and act on messages conveyed by emotion. Dug in with the legalists in keeping mum on the tapes, she had now reached a decision whose fatal impact on her Cabinet’s remaining faith she failed to pick up in that June 25 meeting.

“ Sige, sige. (Okay, Okay.) Put the two teams together,” she finally said, for the first time acknowledging a parallel power structure in the Palace – overt in the Cabinet, covert with the First Gentleman and his buddy Ronnie. They were not willing to work with him, says my source. When Gloria Arroyo apologized to the nation for a “lapse in judgment” two days later, a moment of truth for her and her Cabinet was already poised for climax.

“By July 5, in full Cabinet meeting, nagsisi siyang nagsalita siya . (She was sorry she broke her silence.) The framework of governance had become national security. This was the tipping point,” says my source. “No more govern, just survive.”

It was clearly time to leave government, an old adage ringing in the ear, “What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world…” echoed, perhaps, by another, “You can fool all the people some of the time, some of the people all the time, but not all the people all the time.”

(We waited till the last hour for Mr. Puno’s comment on his role in this crisis, but were met by silence from his office in Congress and his assistant’s cell phone.)

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