i Report Issue No. 3 2005 - Philippine Center for Investigative ...

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THE TWO FACES OF GMA. Aides say that while the president has a reformist side, she has also accepted the realities of trapo politics, including paybacks and payoffs. JEKYLL-AND-HYDE CAMPAIGN YVONNE T. CHUA I N THE May 2004 elections, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo maintained a campaign organization so elaborate it even included a group dubbed “Special Ops,” an infamous abbreviation for “special operations” that many equate with “dirty tricks,” or cruder still, poll cheating. What the “Special Ops” group under then presidential liaison officer for political affairs Jose Ma. ‘Joey’ Rufino was tasked to do—or did exactly—was not known to the president’s official campaign advisers. Up to now, many of them are still clueless about that group’s tasks. Former presidential peace adviser Teresita ‘Ging’ Deles can only say that Rufino’s activities were never taken up in the meetings of the executive council Arroyo convened to take charge of plotting and directing her campaign. Deles was part of that council, also referred to as the advisory council. “We thought we were running the campaign,” says another council member, former social welfare secretary Corazon ‘Dinky’ Soliman. “We thought we were in the inner circle of the box.” But since the wiretapped conversations between Arroyo and Commission on Elections (Comelec) commissioner Virgilio Garcillano became public on June 6, and the subsequent sworn statement issued on August 1 by Garcillano nephew and Rufino subaltern Michaelangelo ‘Louie’ Zuce, Deles and Soliman now know better. Quips Soliman: “Inside the box was a smaller box.” Apparently working alongside Arroyo’s official campaign team was an informal network that included Garcillano, Comelec field personnel, the police and the military, freelance political operators, and perhaps a banana-chips processor and assorted businesspeople in Mindanao and elsewhere. Said to be on top of it all was First Gentleman Mike Arroyo, ably assisted by now Antipolo Rep. Ronaldo ‘Ronnie Puno, a veteran campaign strategist who was part of the Marcos, Ramos, and Estrada campaigns. These “backroom operators,” as one ex-Palace insider describes the motley team, made up several groups whose functions ranged from the seemingly mundane, such as quick-counting votes, to more questionable tasks that could have had electoral manipulation among them. These parallel operations seem to come as little surprise to those who have worked for the president, given what some describe as her “dualistic” nature. A former aide notes that during the canvassing, Arroyo was going around the Carmelite convents, including those in Bacolod and Iloilo, even as she was then placing “improper” calls to Garcillano. “It’s like Jekyll and Hyde,” says the ex-aide. At the height of the political crisis, even her Cabinet split into two groups: one concerned with the president’s “survival at all cost,” the other pushing for “reforms.” Soliman, a former Arroyo confidante, says of the president’s personality: “She was exposed and has accepted the practices of traditional politics such as paybacks, payups, operations of dirty tricks. At the same time she also believed in instituting reforms in the economic, social and governance spheres using principles of transparency, accountability, and service to the people. She believed that both worlds can exist in one person and the dissonance and disconnect will not clash in her and in her actions.” Soliman says that in a crisis, such as now, when the two parts of the president become dissonant, Arroyo is more comfortable with traditional politicians and reverts to the old world of wheeling-dealing and compromises that she knows so well. THE OFFICIAL COUNCIL When she was with her executive council during the campaign, it was the no-nonsense technocrat Gloria Arroyo that presided over the meetings. The council shared with the president the top rung of her official campaign organization. From January 2004 to the elections, the council met weekly to hear and analyze Palace pollster Pedro ‘Junie’ Laylo’s report on the province-by-province surveys he was running. It identified strategies for Arroyo in areas where her showing was weak, to turn “swing” votes among the undecided voters to her favor, and to maintain her showing in places where she was likely to win. Former President Fidel V. Ramos co-chaired the meetings with Arroyo. Aside from Ramos, council members included Deles and Soliman (both of whom represented civil society), campaign manager Gabriel Claudio, and campaign spokesman Michael Defensor. Also part of the council were the leaders of the political parties that made up the administration K-4 (Koalisyon ng Katapatan at Karanasan sa Kinabukasan) coalition: Speaker Jose de Venecia and then Defense Secretary Eduardo Ermita of the Lakas-CMD, Senate President Franklin Drilon and then Batanes Rep. Florencio Abad of the Liberal Party, Sen. Manuel Villar of the Nacionalista Party, and National Security Adviser Norberto Gonzales of the Partidong Demokratiko-Sosyalista ng Pilipinas. Businessman and Philippine National Oil Company president Paul Aquino occasionally sat in the council meetings in his capacity as K-4’s consultant. Then presidential adviser for media and ecclesiastical affairs Conrado ‘Dodie’ Limcaoco, who was in charge of the K-4 senatorial slate, was also in the meetings. Initially, the council met at the Palace. But when Cabinet meetings became irregular in the runup to the polls, the council would get together at the old Macapagal family residence in Forbes Park, Makati. Drilon also took over in the latter part of the campaign, says Deles. At the Cabinet, then Executive Secretary and now Foreign Secretary Alberto Romulo was in charge of how members were to 6 PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM I REPORT
T H E C A M P A I G N “CONSULTATIONS” WITH CASH Apparently more focused on their “tasks” were Garcillano and his cohorts. Indeed, Garcillano already seemed to know what he would be doing when he applied for the post of Comelec commissioner. In his Nov. 11, 2003 letter to the president, Garcillano reminded Arroyo that he was among those approached by her husband when she ran and topped the 1995 senatorial polls. He also underlined his role in monitoring and protecting the votes of the Lakas senatorial candidates in 2001. Garcillano was formerly the Region 10 (Northern Mindanao) Comelec director. Sen. Aquilino Pimentel called him a “dagdag bawas” (vote-padding and shaving) operator, but he was named elections commissioner anyway in February 2004. The burly Zuce says he was instrumental in bringing Garcillano to Rufino’s —and consequently the president’s––attention. In his sworn statement, Zuce says Garcillano, with Rufino’s blessings, in 2002 organized three “consultation meetings” with Mindanaobased Comelec officials in Lanao del Norte and General Santos City during which he solicited their support for the president’s candidacy and gave out cash ranging from P5,000 to P20,000. A year later, says Zuce, Mindanao regional directors and procampaign for the president. Cabinet members, for example, were told to make a pitch for Arroyo when they distributed Philhealth cards. “We asked if we could campaign and they said we could legally because we were political appointees,” says Soliman. On election day onward, Cabinet members fanned out to the provinces to gather the provincial certificates of canvass and the accompanying statements of votes. This time they took their cues from then presidential legal counsel and now Defense Secretary Avelino Cruz, who had set up a quick-count center at the basement of the Olympia Towers in Makati. Cruz also headed a legal panel assembled for the president’s election bid. Operating out of Olympia Towers as well, the panel included former local governments undersecretary and now Government Corporate Counsel Agnes Devanadera, ex-Comelec Commissioner Manuel Gorospe, and election-law experts Romulo Makalintal and Al Agra. A BIG WINNING MARGIN Like any candidate, Arroyo wanted to win. That much was clear to all the president’s men and women. Actually, says an ex-Cabinet member, “she was obsessed with the idea of winning. She (couldn’t) stand a loss….(She) felt she had to redeem her father (the late president Diosdado Macapagal) who lost in his reelection (bid).” That the president should win by at least a million votes, however, was never made known to most members of her Cabinet. Yet it apparently was common knowledge among the other groups working for her. A handler of a K-4 senatorial candidate says that two weeks before the May 10, 2004 elections, a campaign operative had said the president would win by 800,000 votes. “Plantsado na raw (It was already arranged),” the handler says. That statement would make sense to the handler only after the “Hello, Garci” tapes controversy broke out. More interestingly, however, is that other campaign insiders say First Gentleman Mike Arroyo, Kampi stalwart Ronaldo ‘Ronnie’ Puno, and a top government official met regularly at the Wack Wack Country Club before the campaign to discuss ways to ensure not only the president’s victory, but also a huge winning margin. As campaign manager, presidential political adviser Gabriel Claudio was the K-4’s public face in last year’s elections. But those with the administration party say it was Mike Arroyo who was the de facto campaign manager, and that he got a lot of help from Puno. At the peak of the political crisis, the president herself told some Cabinet members that she had called in the Antipolo congressman to help. But during the campaign, he had no official role in the Arroyo camp. “He was never mentioned, he was never seen,” says Deles. “I would even deny his involvement in the president’s campaign. Even the First Gentleman was not visible.” Some Palace insiders, however, say Puno was working quietly behind the scenes with the First Gentleman and had recommended “unorthodox” means to clinch Arroyo’s huge winning margin over her opponent, actor Fernando Poe Jr. A campaign strategist who was part of the K-4 coalition also recalls a K-4 lawyer assuring them that they were certain to get help. “The same operations as Sulo Hotel and Byron Hotel,” the strategist was told, apparently in reference to Puno’s operations at Sulo Hotel in Quezon City when he helped Ramos’s 1992 presidential campaign and at Byron Hotel in Mandaluyong when he backed Joseph Estrada’s presidential bid. The strategist says, “DILG (the Department of Interior and Local Governments that Puno headed under the Estrada presidency) people in the provinces were used as listening posts. They even knew who drug and jueteng money were funding.” Both Claudio and Puno were with the Ramos campaign. In a 2003 interview with PCIJ, Puno scoffed at allegations that he was the architect of Ramos’s supposed dirty-tricks department based at Sulo Hotel. He said he delivers because he has the science, citing his experience a campaign consultant for the U.S. lobbying firm Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly, which has strong links to the Republican Party. In 2002, Puno supposedly set up camp again at Byron Hotel to build a comprehensive elections database for Arroyo. A K-4 campaign strategist says Puno disbanded the group when President Arroyo announced on Rizal Day in 2002 she was not running. But he quickly got the group back together in April 2003, long before the president announced her candidacy. The strategy, this source says, was to use the database to pinpoint places where Arroyo was strong and employ “all means” to increase her votes. Malaya columnist and opposi- tion stalwart Lito Banayo, quoting Loren Legarda’s electoral recount consultants, says Byron Hotel was the “headquarters of choice in the 2004 electoral experience of a coven of pre-fabricators of election returns” used to ensure the president’s landslide victory in Pampanga, Cebu, Iloilo, and Bohol. One member of the K-4 campaign says Puno oversaw the Mindanao canvassing after being proclaimed Antipolo City’s congressman. This source asserts that “Ronnie Puno played a big role,” although he was “distracted because he was running at the same time.” vincial election supervisors met at the Grand Boulevard Hotel on Roxas Boulevard to discuss the president’s candidacy. Envelopes containing P17,000 each were distributed to the participants. On Jan. 10, 2004, Garcillano, through Rufino’s office, organized yet another meeting with 23 Mindanao election officials, again at the Grand Boulevard. This time, each Comelec official got P25,000, Zuce says. But Zuce’s most damning allegation so far is that President Arroyo hosted dinner for 27 Mindanao-based Comelec officials at her La Vista residence in Quezon City four months before the elections, and that envelopes containing P30,000 each were distributed by Lilia ‘Baby’ Pineda, wife of jueteng lord Rodolfo ‘Bong’ Pineda, to her guests in her presence. Zuce, who was invited to the dinner and got an envelope himself, says Garcillano and former Isabela Gov. Faustino Dy were also present. Zuce told the PCIJ as well as the Senate later that the president hosted another dinner that same month for about 20 Comelec officials from Luzon and the Visayas. Baby Pineda again distributed money to the officials before they left Arroyo’s home. Malacañang has issued no categorical denial about the dinners, although the president herself has said, “Ang masasabi ko walang nagbibigay ng suhol sa harap ko (All I can say is no one gives out bribes in front of me).” The now ailing Rufino’s own statement said, “I and my office have never been involved in influencing, much less bribing, Comelec officials to support Lakas-NUCD candidates including President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.” Comelec officials led by Region 4 Director Juanito ‘Johnny’ Icaro, who allegedly distributed the envelopes at La Vista, have PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM I REPORT 7
Page 1: i REPORT July-September 2005 P75 Ph
Page 4 and 5: SHEILA S. CORONEL NO TWO presidents
Page 6 and 7: Tobacco, the country’s biggest ci
Page 10 and 11: likewise rebutted Zuce’s charges.
Page 12: T H E C A M P A I G N Presidential
Page 15 and 16: C A M P A I G N F U N D S Buying vo
Page 17 and 18: C A M P A I G N F U N D S On March
Page 19 and 20: T H E V I C E P R E S I D E N T WHO
Page 22 and 23: HAPPY DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN? In 1998,
Page 24 and 25: legislators have given themselves p
Page 26 and 27: LIGHTS, CAMERA, IMPEACHMENT! ALECKS
Page 28 and 29: For Visayans, the center does not h
Page 30 and 31: The Moro people can be part of a pl
Page 32 and 33: TWO AT EDSA ‘When the wheels of h
Page 34 and 35: FOCUS ON FILIPINO YOUTH DEFYING THE
Page 36: T H E L O S T G E N E R A T I O N d
Page 39 and 40: T H E L O S T G E N E R A T I O N K
Page 41 and 42: T H E L O S T G E N E R A T I O N s
Page 43 and 44: T H E L O S T G E N E R A T I O N d
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Page 49 and 50: T H E L O S T G E N E R A T I O N W
Page 51 and 52: T H E L O S T G E N E R A T I O N m
Page 53 and 54: T H E L O S T G E N E R A T I O N a
Page 55 and 56: le Up le lim CHANGING FACE. Muslim
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FOCUS ON FILIPINO YOUTH ALECKS P. P
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T H E L O S T G E N E R A T I O N a
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GRASSROOTS GAME Jueteng has deep ro
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