Broken

One picture that is emerging in the congressional investigations related to the drug trade and extrajudicial killings is how broken our political and electoral systems are.

Campaigning for elective office has become so unreasonably expensive that candidates find themselves compromising their integrity just to raise enough funds.

“Don’t ask, don’t tell” has become the SOP for political parties and individual candidates alike when accepting contributions to their war chests. And even when the campaign donor is a notorious drug dealer, jueteng lord or smuggler, the money is accepted, because candidates and parties are certain that dirty money cannot be traced anyway.

In fact election campaigns have become among the most useful tools for laundering dirty money. Several gambling barons have used their illegal earnings to reinvent themselves as politicians.

As we have learned from recent congressional investigations, drug money is now being used to finance election campaigns.

Confessed drug distributor Kerwin Espinosa (not “drug lord” – there is a difference, he insists) testified that with the millions he earned from his lucrative shabu business, he financed the successful mayoral bid of his father Rolando Sr. in Leyte’s Albuera town. Kerwin also claimed he contributed millions in drug money to the campaigns of Sen. Leila de Lima and the wife of Superintendent Marvin Marcos. The wife (estranged from him, Marcos claimed) ran unsuccessfully for vice mayor.

Marcos, as we know, led the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group team that tried to serve a search warrant in the dead of night at the sub-provincial jail in Baybay, Leyte, in the process killing Mayor Espinosa in his jail cell and another inmate.

Kerwin has claimed that his father was silenced by Marcos amid President Duterte’s relentless war on drugs.

Narco politics is here.

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There are glaring inconsistencies in the details of the witnesses’ testimonies, but it looks like the worst is yet to come for De Lima.

It’s painful to watch a competent and accomplished lawyer and woman turn into an object of public ridicule. De Lima is impressively articulate; she clearly has brains and is charming. She is infinitely more deserving of her Senate seat than certain nitwits in that chamber, or the clowns who were grandstanding at the House of Representatives yesterday, endlessly repeating the same questions and playing cute about typhoon signals. One senator was linked to drug trafficking and should have been tossed behind bars many years ago.

It really should be nobody’s business if De Lima is a cougar who seems to like playing dominatrix. Men aren’t the only ones who have a right to indulge physical needs and sexual proclivities. But it becomes public business when her personal life influences her service to the public.

What did De Lima in, or what might do her in, if accusations against her stand in court – apart from “women’s frailties” and crossing President Duterte? From what we can glean, the need to raise funds for her election campaign.

Despite De Lima’s blanket denial of wrongdoing, her photo with Kerwin Espinosa in Baguio City tends to bolster his claim that he contributed to her campaign kitty. Assuming that she accepted money, we’ll probably never know if she was aware that she had received drug money.

De Lima won’t be unique in this. Even Du30, who seems to be succeeding in “killing her softly,” reportedly has among his campaign donors in Cebu City a certain Peter Lim and his brother. Peter Lim happens to be among the top five in the “order of battle” of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA).

Aware of the order of battle but apparently unaware of Peter Lim’s political affiliations, Dirty Rody initially warned that the man wanted by PDEA would be killed as soon as he set foot at the NAIA.

Peter Lim of Cebu then sought a meeting with Du30 to deny the charges. And surprise, Lim was granted a special audience, even if what he got was another presidential warning. Campaign support counts a lot in this administration.

With Peter Lim coming out in public, PDEA officials have confirmed that he’s the same guy in their order of battle. The other day Kerwin Espinosa also confirmed that the same Peter Lim was the guy who put him on the path to the big leagues in Cebu’s thriving shabu trade.

How tough will Dirty Rody be on this accused drug lord? Espinosa’s father was jailed and killed under questionable circumstances on accusations of being a mere drug coddler. Kerwin, who became emotional while talking about his father, insisted that the slain mayor was not directly involved in drug deals. Yet the mayor obviously knew of his son’s activities or they wouldn’t have talked about going legit through politics.

But first they needed to get a foot in the door. And for that they needed funds to buy political support.

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How can you expect politicians to be clean when they need to spend millions to win an office with a term of three years and modest compensation?

Drug dealer Kerwin Espinosa netted in a month what his father could have earned legitimately as mayor in a year including 13th month pay and Christmas bonus.

Even barangay officials need to spend for their election campaign, which must be partly why a number of them succumbed to the siren song of the drug trade. Du30’s bloody war on drugs has claimed a high number of barangay captains, council members and tanod or guards. Most of them were found dead ostensibly with a few sachets of shabu near their corpses along with the ubiquitous cardboard sign declaring their guilt.

Those who invest money beyond their means in seeking public office also tend to be willing to kill to eliminate the competition. A winner also typically wants a return on investment.

I have asked several candidates how much they needed to run for the Senate. The typical answer in the past two elections was an average of P150 million. For the presidency, estimates ranged from a whopping P2 billion to P4 billion.

That’s a lot of money. For national office, the amount may be raised legitimately from supporters, if transparency can be injected into the fund-raising process and contribution caps enforced. But there has never been political will, whether in the executive or legislative branches, to do this.

Our weak regulation of campaign finance is one of the biggest roots of corruption. Now it’s emerging as one of the drivers of the illegal drug trade.

The system is broken. Without structural reforms, Oplan Tokhang won’t be enough to fix it.