No more Garci?

Lito Banayo:

No more Garci, declared Ben Abalos. Ha, ha, ha. Just because Esperon and Habacon and Kyamko and Lomibao and all their ilk have, through their SND, signed a memorandum of agreement with the Ombudsman’s favorite commissioners, Garci is gone. Dead for all Abalos cares. Funny.

Months back, three cabinet secretaries, went on a hegira to Cagayan de Oro because Garci assembled his Sumalipaos and Pobes and all of his Comelec menagerie in Mindanao and was threatening to call a press conference. First there was a line department secretary from Mindanao. Then there was a presidential adviser with cabinet rank from cabalen-land. Garci would not be dissuaded by such "mere mortals". He was asking Malacañang for something, but it had not delivered, wearing his patience thin. So in flew the boy wonder, the Doña’s Mr. Fix-it, the defender of everything amoral, yet Manong Gil could not be mollified. By noon, someone more powerful flew in by private jet at Lumbia airport, went straight to Garcillano, and after less than an hour, "straightened" things out. Garci was happy, and went back to his poultry and plants in Baungon. Who could be more powerful than the Little Mike? Someone bigger, obviously, went on a pilgrimage to Garci.

Weeks after, Garci celebrated his birthday, with lechon and liquor flooding his highland estate, attended by a cabinet member and two congressmen, a general here, a general there, two colonels, and of course, the ever-loyal, the ever-faithful Comelec provincial supervisors and regional directors whom Abalos has never suspended or disciplined in any manner whatsoever, Hello Garci notwithstanding. Why, Sumalipao, who vowed that he would shoot himself if there was proof he cheated in the 2004 polls was even promoted to regional director!

No more Garci? Tell that to the Marines.

Garci may be gone from the COMELEC, but his lieutentants and the dagdag bawas infrastructure are left intact.

More from Conrad de Quiros:

I grant that limiting the military’s role in elections can have tremendous salutary effects. Especially given that today’s AFP is controlled by the generals mentioned in the Hello Garci tapes as having cheated for Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, chief of them Hermogenes Esperon. They were all rewarded, and not punished, for that monstrous act of infamy. But limiting the AFP’s role in elections won’t exorcise Garci from the face of this earth, or even come close to it.

Lest we forget, there’s an exchange in the “Hello Garci” tape, where GMA worried about not getting enough votes in some parts of Muslim Mindanao and Garci responded by saying, as you know Ma’am the military isn’t really good at rigging things, “di gaano marunong gumawa,” but that generally speaking the effort to pad her votes was being executed well, “’yung hong pagpatataas sa inyo maayos ho naman.” That is a breathtakingly revealing statement in more ways than one. The least of what it reveals is that the soldiers are not the Einsteins of cheating in elections, people like Garci and his boss, GMA herself, are.

Lest we forget too, it was people like Brig. Gen. Francisco Gudani and Lt. Col. Alexander Balutan who tried earnestly and desperately to stop cheating in their areas of jurisdiction. For his pains, Gudani was told to go on a paid vacation, to relax on a beach or go mountain hiking, which would have been temptation enough for a lesser man, but which he himself took to be the punishment that it was. If I recall right, in the same “Hello Garci” tape, one senatorial candidate referred to him as “tarantado talaga.” This was after Garci told him there was little he could do for him as Gudani was bent on keeping the elections clean. There, too, you find something breathtakingly revealing: In this country, people who are determined to be honest are an affront to high office, they are tarantado talaga.

Both Gudani and Balutan went over and beyond the call of decency and went on to tell the Senate what they knew about the cheating in the last elections. For which pains they were court-martialed for defying GMA’s order forbidding any subordinate—as though Gudani and Balutan could ever be that by any moral standard—from testifying against her without her permission. What can I say? Tarantado talaga. I leave you to determine whom that judgment properly applies to.

Why on earth should limiting the military’s participation in elections stop another “Hello Garci” from happening? The “Hello Garci” tape wasn’t a conversation between military officials or between a candidate and a military official, it was a conversation between two civilians. It was a conversation between GMA and Virgilio Garcillano, between the incumbent-president-cum-presidential-candidate and a Comelec commissioner, at the height of the counting of votes—a conversation that by all the rules of God and man, democracy and decency, should never have taken place. It was as much an “impropriety” as the lawyer of the accused in a court case barging into the judge’s quarters and being assured by the judge in the most obsequious terms that her case is won. What has that got to do with the role of the military in elections?

At bottom, what is the “Hello Garci” tape all about? It is all about cheating. It is all about the highest official of the land conspiring with a Comelec commissioner to screw the voters, and not quite incidentally kidnapping a public school teacher to prevent her from squealing on the cheating. That can’t be prevented from happening again by limiting the participation of the military in elections. That can’t be prevented from happening again by putting the public school teachers solely in charge of elections, which will only succeed in overworking while underpaying them. That can’t even be prevented from happening again even by computerizing the elections, though that should have been done long ago. Except that Abalos, who now jokes about cheating, cheated the taxpayers by awarding the bid to an unqualified bidder.

Unless you remove the corrupting influence occupying malacanang and start a real house-cleaning inside the COMELEC, not much real improvements or credible reforms will take place.