Bongbong to fellow bets: No more smear tactics

MANILA, Philippines - Sen. Ferdinand Marcos Jr. yesterday appealed to his fellow candidates in next year’s elections to stop engaging in smear tactics and start waging a campaign based on issues.

Marcos said he and his presidential candidate for the 2016 presidential elections, Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago, have been the subject of smear campaigns done through text messages, the details of which he did not disclose.

He urged the people behind the spread of black propaganda to fight fairly and engage in a debate on issues that matter to the Filipino people. 

“We owe it to the electorate to elevate the level of discussion, especially of the pressing issues facing the country today such as our problems on drugs, rising prices and criminality and how we plan to address them,” Marcos said.

“Any candidate who resorts to insidious smear campaigns against his opponents is doing a disservice to the people who need solutions to their problems. While mudslinging could be entertaining to some, it will not help us at all,” he added.

Despite the attacks, Marcos vowed he would not resort to black propaganda and stick to a fair, issue-based campaign. “I will fight fairly,” he said.

Former Albay congressman Edcel Lagman said Marcos is trying to make Filipinos forget alleged atrocities and corruption during the martial law regime of his father.

Lagman, a human rights lawyer during the reign of the late strongman Ferdinand Marcos, said he found “intolerable and insulting” the senator’s “prescription of a national amnesia over the Marcos’ sins of the past.”

He described Bongbong Marcos, who is running for vice president in the 2016 elections, as “a living beneficiary of the ill-gotten hoard amassed by his father.”

“The atrocities and venalities during the dark years of martial rule are too real and oppressive to be consigned to the past as they continue to hound the present,” Lagman said.

“Sweeping under the rug the victims of martial law is like wrapping history in a blanket of oblivion,” he said.

Lagman is a brother of the late labor activist Felimon “Ka Popoy” Lagman, who was assassinated in 2001; and lawyer Hermon Lagman, who disappeared during the martial law regime.

On the other hand, the camps of Sens. Grace Poe and Francis Escudero denounced a similar smear campaign being lodged against them, also through text message.

Valenzuela Rep. Rex Gatchalian, spokesman for the Poe-Escudero tandem, revealed there were text messages circulating about the two candidates supposedly not in favor of promoting the growth of the BPO call center industry in the country because it leads the youth to social ills or vices.