Has GMA lost control? - HERE'S THE SCORE by Teodoro C. Benigno

Has she lost control? All eyes are on President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo as she rattles up and down country like a roulette ball, God’s little girl seeking to stay an avalanche of events and whip the whey out of that horrible, terrible, execrable Abu Sayyaf. She has not succeeded so far and many doubt she will ever. Maybe it’s not really her fault. The Philippines is in a seismic fit like Indonesia, like Algeria is, like Cambodia was, social turmoil to the extreme.

Violence is the spearhead of the march of events and when you add colossal graft and corruption, and an economy going downhill, what do you have?

A nation at the edge of the cliff and screaming for help. So we need a superman at Malacañang.

In our first three columns after returning from a month’s vacation, we sought to depict the crisis at length. We largely blamed our tribal and backward religious culture, Filipinos imprisoned by their past, unable to catch up with a world fast whirling into globalization, unable to feed an exploding population that had crammed into the cities, unable to educate a citizenry that chose a hambola of an ex-movie actor to rescue it from distress. And idolized him. We don’t do things right. We make a mess out of them.

The thing is, we can no longer muddle through as we have through the decades. Two events hit us like a lead pipe on our sacroiliac. We realized that if we didn’t shape up, our Republic could go boom very soon and end up like Tahiti or Sierra Leone. The first was the May 1 revolt of the masses laying siege on Malacañang. In effect, it was like the storming of the Bastille, except that it didn’t succeed. The second was the Abu Sayyaf back into prominence as the world’s most notorious kidnap-for-ransom gang.

As the masses continue to seethe in grinding poverty (what’s next, a siege on the luxury, gated subdivisions of the rich in Makati and Ayala?), just a handful of bandits led by a ruthless killer Abu Sabaya by name could hold the nation hostage from their forest eyrie in Muslim Mindanao. They can only be wiped out if the Armed Forces wipe the hostages out, including an American missionary couple. Something like My Lai during the Vietnam war. To kill a few Vietcong, murder all the village people in a rain of fire.

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The Americans lost the war in Vietnam.

But we are digressing. As all these events unfold, we tend to forget the main event, and accessory events to the main event. This is former president Joseph Estrada and the urgent historic necessity to nail him in a court trial as guilty of plunder and perfidy, next to Ferdinand Marcos the most shameless presidency in our history. The Sandiganbayan, I am sorry to say, has been dragging the case, allowing the lawyers of Estrada to get away with a great bluster of legal words and delaying tactics.

And —- wonder of wonders! —- the Sandiganbayan has even granted a five-day furlough to Jingoy Estrada to "clear his desk" in San Juan as half-brother JV Ejercito readies to fully take over the mayoralty. Your honors in the Sandiganbayan, if this is the way our law works, you should have allowed Jingoy to take a month’s rest at the Riviera, with a side trip to the gaming tables of Macao. And now lawyer Rene Saguisag insists on house arrest for Erap Estrada, citing the case of Jose P. Laurel who was accorded a 30-day house arrest while facing treason charges for heading the Philippine government during the Japanese Occupation.

This Saguisag never fails to amaze me. The comparison is revolting. Laurel was a great Filipino, a towering nationalist who deeply loved his country, a fighter for noble causes, an honest man who never stole a centavo, worthy of occupancy in the Philipines Hall of Political Fame. He was eventually acquitted. Estrada? C’mon, Rene, your client should be in jail, just like Romeo Jalosjos, and I do not know of anything Mr. Estrada has done to ennoble the Filipino dream. On the contrary, if he had remained in power and was not ousted by People Power II, he would have destroyed the Philippines in a jiffy. He had stopped the clock, stilled the switches. Only the taps worked to disgorge billions in alleged plunder.

So all this talk about house arrest makes me puke.

There should be no further delay to the trial, to his arrangement, to the decision his crimes are not bailable. And all this talk that he could get deathly sick in Sta. Rosa, Laguna (even here, Estrada enjoys all the amenities) is a lot of bull manure. Napoleon Bonaparte was locked up in far-flung Elba, there eventually to die of loneliness and syphilis, we are told. Two South Korean presidents, Chun Doo-huan and Roe Tae Woo, were manacled, got into grim prison uniform, marched into jail where ordinary felons swelter in subhuman conditions, convicted, and slammed into oblivion.

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In Italy, during Operations Mano Pulite (Clean Hands), nobody was spared. Virtually all the eminentos of Italian politics and big business were detained on high suspicion of corruption without as yet formal charges. There they were, grilled ruthlessly and almost endlessly for days on end, former prime ministers Aldo Moro and Julio Andrlotti among them. Some who couldn’t take it committed suicide. But that is justice. It spares nobody high and low, and this is what it should be in the Philippines.

This is what GMA lacks. Our system of justice lacks.

She has often treated Erap Estrada with all the care in the world, visiting him twice in detention, sending signals that he was a duke or a baron or even a Canterbury prince fallen on hard times, to be treated like exiled but still respectable royalty. Hell, the former president should have been dismissed and avoided like an ordinary jailbird. And he was there because he was accused of having committed high crime, betrayed the Seal of the republic, torn his constitutional obligation to shreds. And, if convicted, sent to his death in less than five minutes as lethal injection claimed its ghastly toll in a man who enjoyed life to its sybaritic fullness.

GMA’s spokesman Rigoberto Tiglao, once a columnist of some credibility, now held Malacañang’s megaphone, saying things he would never have said before. Estrada was suffering from some afflictions, he richly deserved residence at the Veterans Memorial Hospital, and if transferred back to Sta. Rosa could suddenly expire. An epileptic fit? A heart attack? Cerebral thrombosis? Aneurism? Poor Tiglao. Overnight from a straight-talking columnist to pugilistic flapjack, tossing in the air like pancake on the fry.

And what about the brutal murder of publicist Bubby Dacer and his driver? What about the December 30 bombings? What about the rebellion charges against those who instigated the May 1 assault on Malacañang? What about the Kuratong Baleleng massacre, charges against Panfilo Lacson and a brace of top police officers recently revived but seemingly stuffed again in limbo? What about Mark Jimenez, a fugitive from US justice, who should have been repatriated to the US a long time ago but for his being the buddy-buddy of Estrada? And they say, a partner in crime.

And now — God forbid! — Mark Jimenez is a congressman?

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I tell you, this nation has lost its sanity. It is GMA’s duty to restore it. But there she is, traipsing all over the country. She seems to fear Panfilo Lacson and Gregorio Honasan, not to mention Juan Ponce Enrile. Lacson and Honasan were fingered by the CPP-NPA as possibly the next targets of "blood debt" extermination, the way they did in Rudy Aguinaldo. Amnesty International’s archives often mention Lacson and Honasan as high priests of the "cult of violence" in the Philippines, army officers who have reportedly killed recklessly and wantonly. Ground human rights to clods of clay.

And now, both are elected senators of the realm. Begorra!

GMA wants to walk a portentous path to presidential goodness. She doesn’t want to be a great president, just a good president. Her model is Margaret Thatcher. Really? Maggie was the Iron Lady, whose flag was always up even when it was bullet-riddled by her critics, and nobody ever came up to her courage, nobody ever came up to her decisiveness. Lady Thatcher —- who I interviewed on Firing Line, an interview that earned me the highly prestigious gold medal in the New York International TV festivals in 1997 —- didn’t hesitate at all firing even her closest friends and collaborators in the cabinet when she felt they could no longer deliver. She was a "great butcher", as all great presidents and prime ministers are.

Ate Glo is Ate Glo. She wants to be all things to all men, and so this mad scramble for media exposure in the slums, in Muslim Mindanao, grieving mother to troopers who died fighting Abu Sayyaf, her war on poverty, her war on crime with the setting up a of superbody headed by Executive Secretary Bert Romulo, her war on ignorance and neglect of the poor. Of all shadows, the most sinister shadow is that of the killer-criminal and he must be brought to book. Else, there is no political stability. This is her top priority.

If, indeed, Margaret Thatcher is her model.