Guns of July-August/Why pick on Trillo?

As we had anticipated, the presidential campaign for the 2004 election is turning out to be wild and woolly. Guns are spitting deadly political fire at OK Corral and pretty soon, bodies will be all over slumped literally and figuratively. Already, the Sandiganbayan emptied its bomb bay on Eduardo (Danding) Cojuangco. In ruling that the coco levy funds were public, the Sandiganbayan smashed the redoubtable SMB chairman with a left hook to the jaw. And he is reeling against the ropes. Those funds are said to amount today to 100 million smackeroos. In any language including the Swahili, that’s a whale of a lot of money. And so you can understand why Danding Cojuangco is raging like a pit bull, awaiting the Supreme Court’s final decision on the issue, and readying his own roundhouse punch.

The fight ahead is knock down and drag out. When the fortunes of the rich and the mighty are at stake, the entire country shakes and staggers.

Obviously, there could be a changing of the guard at San Miguel. This is no longer a fight of middleweights and light heavies, but of rampaging bull elephants and anybody who stands in the way will be crushed. It will certainly impact on the ruling Lakas-CMD whose titular head is President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. And today, with Danding Cojuangco wobbly at the knees, this lady carries a lot of weight with a big club to match. Wonder who she’ll hit next?

Now everybody is asking: Whose hidden hand was behind the Sandiganbayan decision?

Good question. Only weeks or months ago, the perception was that GMA and Danding Cojuangco were – as always–at daggers removed. They were friends and collaborators. They were never really political enemies, it was said, and Danding continued to be an extremely generous contributor to GMA’s coffers. He preferred it that way. In the shadows, he loomed over everybody. He was the kapitan, the king-maker, the facilitator, the boss whose snap of the fingers rang sharply in Malacañang. He should have stayed there. There was a working balance of power between the little lady and the big man. GMA had concentrated political power. Danding had corporate power with his NPC allied with Lakas.

So what happened?

GMA upset this balance of power when last Dec. 30, 2002 she announced in no uncertain terms she was through with politics. She would not run for the presidency in 2004. In a Christian country, this was word of honor, palabra de honor, constant like the Holy Grail. This was embedded in our Roman Catholic culture like St. Paul’s sword in its scabbard. But something else happened. Before and specially in the wake of America’s war on Iraq, the Philippines and GMA figured prominently in the geopolitical chessboard of the Pentagon and the White House. America’s war against international terror became fixated on Asia, chose the Philippines as "the second front", zeroed on GMA as the spear-carrier.

This was too much for a diminutive colleen bounced by Dadong Macapagal on his laps when they were in Malacañang.

For this meant GMA would have go back on her word, and run like the dickens for the presidency in 2004 with no less than George W. Bush playing the godfather role. And so the dam broke. But even before the dam broke, Danding Cojuangco, Raul Roco, Panfilo Lacson, others were already positioned for 2004. The case of Danding was cause cèlébre, better still casus belli. He was a 12-round holdover from the Marcos dictatorship, bossman to Joseph Estrada, the corporate world’s Godzilla. He was the second most powerful figure in the Philippines. Danding Cojuangco, fortunately or unfortunately, took GMA at her word when she renounced the presidency in 2004.

The chances are GMA will run. The chances it would seem – are Mr. Cojuangco will fight back with all the weapons at his command. Each of them knows where the bodies are buried, where the transoms are located, where crates of stolen gold have been hidden. If Danding Cojuangco withdraws from 2004, the fires will surge but will not consume. A bargain could be concluded. If he does not, and GMA runs, the ensuring conflagration will devastate and devour. This is what worries me. The military establishment will think the republic is coming apart.

And maybe it is. And when the military thinks that way, its more adventurous components will stage a golpe, a seizure of power.

It is time for civil society, the middle class, to come awake. For it alone embodies the republican convictions and beliefs that can heal a sick society, a rotting society, a society whose political leaders largely have lost every excuse to belong to the human race. But that I suppose, is the nature of the historic beast.

When it has lost its way, when lucre and power have devoured its conscience, the guns of July and August take over.

This writer could probably seek consolation in the perception of some that what is happening is the inevitable clash between the Marcos past and the future at the end of the tunnel. Somehow I cannot see that future – yet. If by future is means a new set of leaders emerging from the 2004 presidential elections. What leaders? I don’t see anyway. What I see are the whitened sepulchers of heroes who died too soon, Ninoy Aquino, Pepe Diokno, Evelio Javier, to mention just three whose lives and names are still contemporary. Together, they could have stopped the social avalanche, illuminated the landscape with their vision, summoned the race to feats of bravery.

Today? Our future is depicted as a change of system from presidential to parliamentary. This is fool’s dice. And the people who would rule us in a parliamentary system are the same people who have robbed us blind in a presidential system. They have stripped the nation to a fig leaf, while extolling the virtues of democracy. A plague on them. In writing the post-scriptum to this column, we do hope the PCGG gets to higher ground, gets more leverage and necessarily beheads more crooks. Haydee Yorac, get thee out of bed soon. You’re the only man in the cabinet. Fight, my old friend.

One day, I will surely write a column-profile on Haydee who I met many, many years ago when she was a UP activist-professor and I am a constant journalist-critic of the Marcos dictatorship. We milled often with the studentry, and joined many of their street demonstrations. We met at my residence every so often plotting against the dictatorship, together with some foreign diplomats who shared our abomination of the powers that be. Soon we organized a group that met at least once a week. When EDSA erupted, we figured we had won. Hooray! We didn’t realize that was just the beginning. And here we are still at the verbal barricades.

* * *

We have no intention of blasting it out with SBMA and its pasha in residence Tong Payumo who replaced the one untouchable and irreplaceable Dick Gordon about five years ago. But we certainly have a row to hoe with Mr. Payumo whose gorillas and assigns have shut down electrical power source to Tony Trillo and his Crown Peak Hotels. The long and short of it is that Tony Trillo has been paying his electric bill since Crown Peak started operations in Subic since 2001. "Our enclosed power payment receipts will attest to that!" says Mr. Trillo. And they have been sandbagged?

Tony Trillo claims that Crown Peak had 350 long-staying tenants "prior to the SBMA anomaly, many of them foreigners with families along with many other Filipino locator investors who are now leaving in dribbles, largely inconvenienced by the power shutdown and appalled by what is happening around them." Trillo continues: "Surely it is all so difficult to understand why SBMA is doing its utmost to injure and destroy a Pioneer Investor’s business who has been around since the establishment of the Subic Freeport in 1992 and who generously paid out Hotel and Restaurant facilities to the APFC gathering here at Crown Peak Gardens in 1996. one who has invested his heart and soul plus all his resources despite many economic reverses during this period."

Why is all this happening to you? I asked Tony Trillo.

His answer was simple and to the point. He maintains his friendship with Richard Gordon, now secretary of tourism. I don’t see anything wrong with maintaining his friendship so long as Tony Trillo remains a citizen and businessman in good standing in Subic. And all the proof available to me shows incontrovertibly he has. So what’s the beef? I would therefore counsel my friend SBMA chairman Tony Payumo to forget his bitter feud with Dick Gordon. Tony Trillo points out that the Legend Hotel, Subic International Hotel and Subic Yacht Club "struggle with their late-arrear payments but have never had their power source cut."