The events unfurling in the country today give us a feeling of déjà vu. Almost 40 years ago to this day, people were marching in the streets, chanting slogans like what we hear today – albeit with an almost similar objective – bringing placards and huge, larger-than-life caricatures of the main characters of this real-life drama.
Although occurring under different circumstances, what then pose some striking similarities. Can the country afford to stage another so-called People Power the third time around?
Let us re-trace what happened in 1986, immediately after the creation of the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG) – which fulfilled its mandate of bringing the tenets of an essentially “good government” to the people. The article, which this columnist wrote as it first came out on May 14, 1986 in Woman Today, highlighted the efforts of then PCGG Commissioner Mary Concepcion Bautista as the office dismantled a 20-year-old bureaucracy. You be the judge whether, indeed, there is a semblance in the way our government has been running its affairs after the strongman President Ferdinand E. Marcos Sr.’s rule and today, under the administration of the strongman’s son, President Bongbong Marcos (PBBM). My article goes:
Lone woman Commissioner on Good Government Mary Concepcion Bautista feels like playing the devil’s advocate now that she has been appointed to the delicate, but herculean task of going after the illegally acquired wealth of the Marcoses and Romualdezes, their relatives, cronies, business agents, nominees, and front establishments.
“Our job is more complicated than what most people perceive it to be. The issue of the Marcoses’ so-called hidden wealth has just been too much – it will take some time to unravel it all. The list grows bigger and bigger each day we’re in office,” expounds lawyer Bautista when we managed to squeeze ourselves into her very hectic schedule at the office of the Presidential Commission on Good Government at the Development Academy of the Philippines building in Pasig.
Her presence in the otherwise male-dominated Commission provides a semblance of good-natured camaraderie when discussions become heated. In an office where one’s principal job is to snoop for the known and the unknown, the pressure can sometimes be mind-boggling, not to mention the fact that the Commission’s coverage spans a total of 20 years and business holdings of the Marcoses in the Philippines and abroad.
Headed by Minister Jovito Salonga, the other members of the Commission also include law practitioners Ramon Diaz, Raul Daza, and Pedro Yap, who was only recently appointed justice of the Supreme Court. In the Commission’s Pasig office, Bautista calls the shots behind a large glass-topped executive desk inside an air-conditioned, thickly carpeted office-cum-conference room which can be described as “opulent” if we go by the present administration’s indiscriminate description of existing government offices.
Behind the lady Commissioner’s soft-spoken ways and motherly nature is an iron will which she wields to an advantage when she tackles voluminous documents to be used as evidence against the erring parties.
Created under not so propitious circumstances, the Commission was one of the first to be conceived by the Aquino government in its long-range effort to restore the good image of the Philippine bureaucracy. It has, time and again, been branded as “presumptuous” because will it not be considered the ultimate, the Utopia if there will ever be such a thing as a “good government”?
Opines Bautista about the undue criticisms hurled at them and at the Aquino government in general. “We’re trying to find out what was wrong with the past government. We’d like to restore whatever confidence and trust the people had in the government which was undermined by the abuses committed by our officials. But all of these entail time and we have just started. We cannot undo the wrong that was carefully maneuvered for 20 years in just a matter of days or even months. It must be remembered that the circumstances surrounding the new government’s rise to power have been short of phenomenal. People had to be appointed fast – there was really so little time for deliberations.”
In the Commission for example, according to Bautista, there are only about 15 regular employees, while the rest whom one sees poring over piles and piles of paper and who occasionally consult the five members of the Commission, are volunteers.
While the Commission has sequestered most, if not all, of Marcos’ alleged properties, Bautista adamantly refused to quote exact figures of how much the Marcos empire is really worth or the exact percentage of properties that have been sequestered.
“No illegal properties or even foreign assets have yet been recovered,” explains Bautista. “Sequestration is not equivalent to recovery. We’re still sorting out the facts that we have gathered and we have more information coming, and until the public hearings will be held, the Commission is adapting a wait-and-see attitude. I myself would not want to be accused of being prejudiced.”
What makes the job of the Commission more difficult, mentions Bautista, is the intricate web that intertwines Marcos’ dealings with some favored friends or cronies. The (Roberto S.) Benedicto conglomerate, for example, is a major headache, claims Bautista.
“The friendship between Benedicto and Marcos is deeply rooted. Their relationship is such that you can’t even say Benedicto’s companies are solely his own,” explains Bautista who is a staunch advocate of human rights, as well as an active participant of the parliament of the streets as member of GABRIELA (she was its first vice-chairman), LABAN, BANDILA, and as vice-president of the National Union of Christian Democrats.
If there is anything people can do to avoid being exploited and victimized the way we were, Bautista urges people to be vigilant “and not to allow themselves to be hoodwinked again.”
It would be too presumptuous, indeed, to achieve a really perfect government, but as Bautista envisions with the changing of the guard, “We should maintain a system of checks and balances, prosecute graft and corruption, and condemn cronyism. ‘Palakasan” was the rule of the Marcos administration and people allowed it to go on. The leadership was corrupt and immoral, and that had a lot to do with it.”
Almost four decades hence, will we experience another changing of the guard? Will we have a “que sera sera, what will be, will be” yearender? Or, will the Filipino people greet the new year with a bang and a renewed sense of hope? The most that we can do at this point is to wait and see and do our share of protecting our rights as bonafide citizens of this beautiful country. | NWI
