2008: Almost A Guachinango Year

In the original, the term guachinango (gua-chi-nang-go) referred to a kind of Mexican-Indian who came to the country in the service of Spain; in the Visayan, it became a funny word meaning something like a bluffing boastful clown of a liar. The year just past, sometimes also known as the Rat, could qualify as such a year.

Which is not to diminish the memory of hundreds who drowned when the Princess of the Stars sank off Romblon in June, or of the 10 bank employees of RCBC who were executed gangland style in the branch in Cabuyao last May. But the poor captain of the ship who steered the Princess into the eye of a storm, or the robbers who had dressed up in police special ops uniforms to carry out their grisly crime, were they not a product of the guachinango imagination?

Full of bluster, flustering fools too were a majority of those paraded before the hallowed halls of Congress to testify on this or that scam, and where the whistleblowers in fact carried the burden of proof, indeed whether or not in aid of legislation, hehehoha, thanks for the sound bite and all that, the next election year is after all just months away.

But wait, was it sheer coincidence that Jun Lozada’s almost-kidnapping and breakdown as he was about to spill the beans on the broadband deal with ZTE happened within days of the ouster of the long serving Speaker Jose de Venecia, whose son and namesake had first blown the lid off the certified scandal – complete with pictures of the First Couple playing golf in Shenzhen with the Chinese firm’s officials and the local elections chief since resigned – after he was told to “back off”?

The not-so-merry-go-round in Congress and the Senate occasioned the use of such words and phrases as “bubukol” and “moderate their greed” that would have ethnolinguists in academe scrambling to decipher subtext and other hidden meanings

A flurry of guachinango razzle-dazzle too were the rice lines and the panic regarding the supply and purchase of the staple, that saw corresponding raids of grains warehouses, possible charges of economic sabotage against hoarders, rice coupons for the poor and rolling stores with the smiling face of the President, even as the price of rice just about doubled to nearly P40 a kilo for the prime good stuff, let the masses eat lugao.

And mainly because everyone’s concern was the economy, stupid, or the stupid economy, the nearly guachinango year also had fuel prices moving like a roller coaster, soaring past P60 a liter in the third quarter and leading to mass transit systems bursting at the seams if not in urgent need of maintenance, then falling in a downward spiral toward yearend to around P30 a liter as private cars again filled the roads and the effects of a global recession loomed beyond the horizon in 2009.

What to make also of the protracted showdown between GSIS’s Winston Garcia and the Lopez-controlled Meralco on the issue of bringing down power rates, and whose fallout was the issue of corruption in the Court of Appeals among other alleged hoodlums in robes? The guachinango spirit, of course.

It was also the year when news made it to the news, as broadcast correspondent Ces Drilon and her crew were kidnapped in Sulu, and the Philippines came up empty yet again for the third straight Olympics, and where the melamine scare from China products took its toll as survey firms sent out questionnaires on the incidence of hunger.

It was the year of the aborted Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain, which triggered fighting and ransacking of villages across Central Mindanao and the subsequent manhunt for Umbra or is it Ombra Kato and company, and the Supreme Court ruling rendering the Bangsamoro Juridical Entity a non-entity.

It was the year Jocjoc Bolante came home or was extradited after months in a federal holding center, thereafter to run guachinango rings around the fertilizer fund inquiry, clutching his chest on the way to St. Luke’s.

It was the year when labor leader and congressman Crispin Beltran fell to his death while fixing the roof of his house on the outskirts of town, and jukebox queen Didith Reyes was found sprawled and lifeless on the floor of a small house in Laguna, already a ghost of her former self long before she gave up the ghost.

It was the year of the Pacman from Gensan who became the best Filipino boxer bar none, even the great Flash Elorde whose exploits we heard about only through our fathers and kuyas, maybe during a time when the word guachinango was not yet in vogue.

Can we help it if 2008 was such a year, reeling as most of us are with guachinango goodness and badness, not yet through reading the varied yearenders from the different departments that run like a diary, the diaries of diarrhea, thank the lucky stars that there are only 12 months and so many days and nights of guachinango watchfulness.

In the original, some kind of buffoon with a funny accent. And on whom the year 2008 almost, but not quite, rests its weary case, having made up in swagger what it lacked in talent and substance.