i Report Issue No. 3 2005 - Philippine Center for Investigative ...
i Report Issue No. 3 2005 - Philippine Center for Investigative ...
i Report Issue No. 3 2005 - Philippine Center for Investigative ...
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THE TWO FACES OF GMA.<br />
Aides say that while the<br />
president has a re<strong>for</strong>mist<br />
side, she has also accepted<br />
the realities of trapo politics,<br />
including paybacks and payoffs.<br />
JEKYLL-AND-HYDE<br />
CAMPAIGN<br />
YVONNE T. CHUA<br />
I<br />
N THE<br />
May 2004 elections,<br />
President Gloria Macapagal<br />
Arroyo maintained a<br />
campaign organization so<br />
elaborate it even included<br />
a group dubbed “Special<br />
Ops,” an infamous abbreviation<br />
<strong>for</strong> “special operations” that<br />
many equate with “dirty tricks,” or<br />
cruder still, poll cheating.<br />
What the “Special Ops” group<br />
under then presidential liaison<br />
officer <strong>for</strong> political affairs Jose<br />
Ma. ‘Joey’ Rufino was tasked<br />
to do—or did exactly—was not<br />
known to the president’s official<br />
campaign advisers. Up to now,<br />
many of them are still clueless<br />
about that group’s tasks.<br />
Former presidential peace<br />
adviser Teresita ‘Ging’ Deles<br />
can only say that Rufino’s activities<br />
were never taken up in<br />
the meetings of the executive<br />
council Arroyo convened to take<br />
charge of plotting and directing<br />
her campaign. Deles was part of<br />
that council, also referred to as<br />
the advisory council.<br />
“We thought we were running<br />
the campaign,” says another<br />
council member, <strong>for</strong>mer social<br />
welfare secretary Corazon ‘Dinky’<br />
Soliman. “We thought we were in<br />
the inner circle of the box.”<br />
But since the wiretapped<br />
conversations between Arroyo<br />
and Commission on Elections<br />
(Comelec) commissioner Virgilio<br />
Garcillano became public on June<br />
6, and the subsequent sworn<br />
statement issued on August 1 by<br />
Garcillano nephew and Rufino<br />
subaltern Michaelangelo ‘Louie’<br />
Zuce, Deles and Soliman now<br />
know better. Quips Soliman: “Inside<br />
the box was a smaller box.”<br />
Apparently working alongside<br />
Arroyo’s official campaign<br />
team was an in<strong>for</strong>mal network<br />
that included Garcillano, Comelec<br />
field personnel, the police<br />
and the military, freelance political<br />
operators, and perhaps<br />
a banana-chips processor and<br />
assorted businesspeople in<br />
Mindanao and elsewhere. Said<br />
to be on top of it all was First<br />
Gentleman Mike Arroyo, ably<br />
assisted by now Antipolo Rep.<br />
Ronaldo ‘Ronnie Puno, a veteran<br />
campaign strategist who was<br />
part of the Marcos, Ramos, and<br />
Estrada campaigns.<br />
These “backroom operators,”<br />
as one ex-Palace insider describes<br />
the motley team, made up<br />
several groups whose functions<br />
ranged from the seemingly mundane,<br />
such as quick-counting<br />
votes, to more questionable tasks<br />
that could have had electoral<br />
manipulation among them.<br />
These parallel operations<br />
seem to come as little surprise<br />
to those who have worked <strong>for</strong><br />
the president, given what some<br />
describe as her “dualistic” nature.<br />
A <strong>for</strong>mer aide notes that<br />
during the canvassing, Arroyo<br />
was going around the Carmelite<br />
convents, including those in Bacolod<br />
and Iloilo, even as she was<br />
then placing “improper” calls to<br />
Garcillano. “It’s like Jekyll and<br />
Hyde,” says the ex-aide.<br />
At the height of the political<br />
crisis, even her Cabinet split into<br />
two groups: one concerned with<br />
the president’s “survival at all cost,”<br />
the other pushing <strong>for</strong> “re<strong>for</strong>ms.”<br />
Soliman, a <strong>for</strong>mer Arroyo<br />
confidante, says of the president’s<br />
personality: “She was exposed<br />
and has accepted the practices of<br />
traditional politics such as paybacks,<br />
payups, operations of dirty<br />
tricks. At the same time she also<br />
believed in instituting re<strong>for</strong>ms in<br />
the economic, social and governance<br />
spheres using principles of<br />
transparency, accountability, and<br />
service to the people. She believed<br />
that both worlds can exist<br />
in one person and the dissonance<br />
and disconnect will not clash in<br />
her and in her actions.”<br />
Soliman says that in a crisis,<br />
such as now, when the two parts<br />
of the president become dissonant,<br />
Arroyo is more com<strong>for</strong>table<br />
with traditional politicians<br />
and reverts to the old world of<br />
wheeling-dealing and compromises<br />
that she knows so well.<br />
THE OFFICIAL COUNCIL<br />
When she was with her executive<br />
council during the campaign, it<br />
was the no-nonsense technocrat<br />
Gloria Arroyo that presided over<br />
the meetings. The council shared<br />
with the president the top rung<br />
of her official campaign organization.<br />
From January 2004 to the<br />
elections, the council met weekly<br />
to hear and analyze Palace pollster<br />
Pedro ‘Junie’ Laylo’s report<br />
on the province-by-province<br />
surveys he was running. It identified<br />
strategies <strong>for</strong> Arroyo in areas<br />
where her showing was weak, to<br />
turn “swing” votes among the undecided<br />
voters to her favor, and<br />
to maintain her showing in places<br />
where she was likely to win.<br />
Former President Fidel V. Ramos<br />
co-chaired the meetings with<br />
Arroyo. Aside from Ramos, council<br />
members included Deles and Soliman<br />
(both of whom represented<br />
civil society), campaign manager<br />
Gabriel Claudio, and campaign<br />
spokesman Michael Defensor. Also<br />
part of the council were the leaders<br />
of the political parties that made up<br />
the administration K-4 (Koalisyon<br />
ng Katapatan at Karanasan sa<br />
Kinabukasan) coalition: Speaker<br />
Jose de Venecia and then Defense<br />
Secretary Eduardo Ermita of the<br />
Lakas-CMD, Senate President Franklin<br />
Drilon and then Batanes Rep.<br />
Florencio Abad of the Liberal Party,<br />
Sen. Manuel Villar of the Nacionalista<br />
Party, and National Security<br />
Adviser <strong>No</strong>rberto Gonzales of the<br />
Partidong Demokratiko-Sosyalista<br />
ng Pilipinas.<br />
Businessman and <strong>Philippine</strong><br />
National Oil Company president<br />
Paul Aquino occasionally sat in<br />
the council meetings in his capacity<br />
as K-4’s consultant. Then<br />
presidential adviser <strong>for</strong> media<br />
and ecclesiastical affairs Conrado<br />
‘Dodie’ Limcaoco, who was in<br />
charge of the K-4 senatorial slate,<br />
was also in the meetings.<br />
Initially, the council met at the<br />
Palace. But when Cabinet meetings<br />
became irregular in the runup to<br />
the polls, the council would get<br />
together at the old Macapagal family<br />
residence in Forbes Park, Makati.<br />
Drilon also took over in the latter<br />
part of the campaign, says Deles.<br />
At the Cabinet, then Executive<br />
Secretary and now Foreign<br />
Secretary Alberto Romulo was in<br />
charge of how members were to<br />
6 PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM I REPORT