At the barricade of the Ombudsman

Telltale Signs
by Rodel Rodis

In a scene in the Broadway musical, Les Miserables, student rebels set up barricades in Paris in 1832 and call on the people to support the revolution: “Will you join in our crusade? Who will be strong and stand with me? Beyond the barricade, is there a world you long to see? Then join in the fight that will give you the right to be free…Will you give all you can give, so that our banner may advance? Some will fall and some will live, will you stand up and take your chance?”

The song revived memories of the heady times I spent in Manila during what was called the First Quarter Storm (FQS) which Nelson Navarro described as “that cathartic student revolt in the first months of 1970 that shook the nation with its La Gran Pasion, its intense and encompassing life-changing experience.”

Among my closest friends attending those FQS rallies and People’s Marches were Gary Olivar, Jerry Barican and Raquel Edralin who would marry fellow activist, Bobby Tiglao. Some other friends gave all that they could give and fell, like Gene Gray and Caloy Del Rosario, but many others lived.

When martial law was declared in 1972, Gary, Jerry, Raquel and Bobby were among the thousands who were arrested and incarcerated in Bicutan, the Marcos prison for political prisoners. By then, I was teaching Philippine History at San Francisco State University.

After their release from Bicutan, Gary, Jerry and Bobby obtained scholarships to study at Harvard University. I don’t quite know what they teach there but sometime after they returned to the Philippines, these three Harvard graduates ended up working as spokesmen for various Philippine presidents.

Jerry Barican, once the chair of the UP Student Council, served as Spokesman for Pres. Joseph Estrada in the last year of his presidency. When Estrada was deposed and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (GMA) assumed the presidency, Bobby Tiglao was handpicked by GMA to serve as her Spokesman and Press Secretary. In the last two years of her presidency, GMA appointed Gary Olivar as her Deputy Spokesman.

During our 20th anniversary reunion at Freedom Park in front of Malacanang on January 30, 1990, Jerry Barican explained his political transformation by paraphrasing Winston Churchill: “If you’re not a radical by the age of 18, you have no heart. If you’re still a radical by the age of 30, you have no head.”
Whatever the reason or reasons, I now find myself on the other side of the barricade from these two erstwhile comrades on the issue of the impeachment and removal from office of Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez.

In his March 19, 2011 column, Bypass, which regularly appears in The Manila Standard, Gary Olivar reduced all the charges leveled against Gutierrez as mere petty complaints about “her delay or inaction on cases pending before her.” Gary believes that “the real agenda of the impeachers is to try and drag the former First Couple back into these proceedings.”

In his March 23, 2011 Outlook column in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Bobby Tiglao defended Gutierrez by claiming that her “impeachers couldn’t uncover anything even remotely similar to these crimes against her, so all of the articles of impeachment against her could invoke only “betrayal of public trust.”

Agreeing with Gary, Bobby similarly charged that “it is the forces against former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo which have degraded democracy’s weapon of impeachment. The blood lust against her has been seething; there is after all, for most insecure regimes, a need to demonize the past regime as a distraction from its inadequacies.”

Of course, this is what Jerry Barican was spinning all along about why Bobby’s boss prosecuted his boss for plunder.

But defending Gutierrez on the grounds that she has never been charged with a
crime is to miss the point. As another FQS veteran, Randy David, explained in his Public Lives March 9, 2011 Philippine Daily Inquirer column: “The person being subjected to impeachment may not necessarily have committed a crime or an offense punishable under our criminal laws. The object of the whole process is to remove the person from the position he or she is occupying…the most common cause for impeachment is “betrayal of public trust.” This is not a crime in our penal books; it is rather a political offense.”

The Office of the Ombudsman was envisioned in the 1987 Constitution to be the protector of the people against the sins of commission and omission of government officials and employees and as the chief government official to spearhead the fight not only against graft and corruption but against anything “illegal, unjust, improper or inefficient.”

The Ombudsman Law (RA 6770) empowers the Ombudsman with disciplinary authority over all elective and appointive officials in the government, its subdivisions and instrumentalities. As there are 1.3 million government officials in this category, the law specifies that the Ombudsman “shall give priority to complaints filed against high government officials and/or those occupying supervisory positions, complaints involving grave offenses as well as complaints involving large sums of money.

According to the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ), “only 19 generals of the Armed Forces have actually been prosecuted for alleged corruption in the 22-year history of the Office of the Ombudsman. Of the 19, one and only one, Maj. Gen. Carlos F. Garcia, was convicted, after pleading guilty to a lesser offense of bribery, and after securing a plea-bargain agreement to evade prosecution for plunder.”

In light of the recent congressional disclosures about the billions of pesos that have been looted from the military’s treasury by various generals, the failure to prosecute them is clearly a “betrayal of public trust”.

Gary and Bobby may also find it difficult to refute another fact exposed by the PCIJ: “of the 223 cases filed under Gutierrez’s watch, almost all – 221 – were against one official: the mayor of Nakar, Quezon… The 221 cases of “usurpation” against then Nakar Mayor Leovegildo R. Ruzol and municipal administrator Guillermo Sabiduria were all filed on March 31, 2006. The Sandiganbayan’s Third Division dismissed all the cases on June 7, 2006.”

Ombudsman Gutierrez claims that her office lacks funds to do her job. Again, the facts exposed by the PCIJ belie this excuse. “The Ombudsman’s budget has tripled from P392.08 million in 2003 to P1.33 billion in 2009 during the administration of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, the wife of Gutierrez’s law school batch mate, then First Gentleman Jose Miguel Arroyo. In five years under Gutierrez, the Office’s budget grew by an annual average of 21.35 percent, or twice more than the usually allowed increase in the budgets of most other government agencies.”
Then there is also the fact that Gutierrez has never once filed her Statement of Assets, Liabilities and Networth (SALN) as required by law when her office is entrusted with enforcing compliance with the SALN law and using it as a means of rooting out corruption.

Do we know how many mansions, luxury cars and bank accounts Gutierrez has? Without her SALN, we will never know, at least until her Senate trial.
Do you hear the people sing? Singing the songs of angry men?

It is the music of a people who will not be slaves again
When the beating of your heart, echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start when tomorrow comes

(Rodel50@aol.com)