Belmonte, party back Sotto for VP

MANILA, Philippines — Quezon City Mayor Joy Belmonte and her local Serbisyo sa Bayan Party (SBP) have formally endorsed the vice presidential bid of Senate President Vicente Sotto III, father of her running mate and reelectionist Quezon City Vice Mayor Gian Sotto.

The mayor said she met with SBP members the other night, hours after she announced her personal decision to endorse Sotto.

“It was a unanimous decision to support Senate President Sotto’s vice presidential bid. We are happy that our party supports the father of our vice mayor,” Belmonte said.

In an earlier interview, she pointed out that it was her personal choice to support the Senate President’s bid for the second highest post in the land and expressed hope that her party mates would follow suit.

Asked if she will endorse a presidential candidate, Belmonte said she would like to listen first to the candidates before making a personal choice and possibly endorse it to the rest of her party.

“I would like to say that I’m very open minded. I would like to choose a candidate that is for me the best for the country and the best for the city, and who has the welfare of citizens at heart,” she told ANC.

The mayor said yesterday that the SBP is still in the process of selecting its presidential candidate.

The elder Sotto, chairman of the Nationalist People’s Coalition, is a former vice mayor of Quezon City. He is running alongside Sen. Panfilo Lacson of Partido Reporma.

Quezon City has one of the largest voting populations in the country, with an estimated 1.33 million registered voters in 2019.

Meanwhile, Lacson vowed to prioritize freedom of the press and transparency in government should he win the presidential race next year.

He stressed that the government needs to be transparent as it does not have any reason to hide if it is not involved in wrongdoing.

“Freedom of the press is not just important to democracy, it is democracy itself. Why should we (government) hide anything? I’m all for press freedom,” Lacson said at the first media forum of Lacson and Sotto.

Sotto, author of the measure to extend beyond print publications the protection from being compelled to identify the source of a news or investigative report, vowed to uphold freedom of information.

“We will pursue freedom of information,” he stressed.

Both Lacson and Sotto also promised to withdraw their respective death penalty bills, even if these are meant for high-profile drug traffickers and those involved in heinous crimes.

Ping: No to death penalty

Lacson said he is a “convert” and recognizes the possibility of sending a man, wrongfully accused and convicted, to the death chamber.

He noted during an online interview via Zoom yesterday that “The Life of David Gale” – a true story of an activist shown over Netflix – changed his view on the death penalty.

Lacson, who authored the reimposition of the death penalty for plunder and heinous crimes, among others, said his point of view has changed and that “it is more weighty to be able to save the life of the wrongly convicted.”

He cited Sotto’s suggestion to just lock high-profile drug traffickers in an isolated jail similar to Alcatraz, where convicts would “suffer for life and do nothing but repent, especially if sentenced for life (and) spend life in prison until death.”

“It is better to imprison for life the guilty person than for an innocent man to be wrongfully executed,” Lacson added.

Like Lacson, Sotto said he recognized the position of groups against the death penalty, which has been the subject of debate for 20 years running.

“I initially filed death penalty only for heinous crimes and drug traffickers but it’s still difficult to have the measure passed. So I saw a good proposal of establishing a national penitentiary for high-level drug traffickers and heinous criminals,” Sotto said in the same online interview.

If they win, he said they would move the New Bilibid Prison in Muntinlupa City to regional sites in Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao.

Sotto added that the high-level drug traffickers and heinous criminals would be isolated in facilities similar to that of Alcatraz – a now shuttered maximum security prison located on an island off San Francisco in California.

The present location of the NBP could then be transformed into a university belt, he added. – Cecille Suerte Felipe