The turning tides of politics

This week is important for the turning tides of our politics. Senator Juan Ponce Enrile, the 92-year-old warrior whom the administration thought already has Alzheimer while on hospital arrest, will be the lead inquisitor at the opening of the Mamasapano probe.

Accused of alleged plunder (stealing public funds more than P50 million), the senior senator was placed under hospital arrest at the PNP General Hospital. But in a turn of events worthy of a telenovela, the Special Action Forces (SAF) survivors of the Mamapasapano clash were placed in the same hospital at Camp Crame, to heal and to recuperate.

If you were Juan Ponce Enrile – brilliant lawyer, shrewd strategist, and political survivor – whom this administration has dismissed as over the hill, what would you do? Would you just keep quiet when only a few rooms away stayed the survivors of the worst political scandal to hit the administration?

I am sure Manong Johnny did not keep quiet. He must have walked a bit here, for his exercise, and walked farther there, to explore the area, until one fine day, he reached the rooms and began asking the soldiers how they are. Remember, this was the former Defense Secretary of Ferdinand Marcos, and later the Defense Secretary of Cory Aquino (although later dismissed for allegation of leading a coup d’etat against her). His ties with the military run wide and deep – until now.

With one ear weak and one eye dimming, the patient lawyer must have sieved through the stories, saw a pattern of deception, something that ought to be pieced together later, when he was free.

And freed he was when the former Solicitor General, Estelito Mendoza, managed to have Enrile freed on bail. Upon his return to the Senate, Manong Johnny said, “I am no longer a politician.” And quietly returned to his work, shielded by this statement.

But like a spy master and a sharp prosecutor, he was slowly building a case, I am sure talking to people in the know, in the top rungs of the police brass, tapping his deep sources. For better beware when Juan Ponce Enrile is quiet, when he said he is no longer interested in politics. When he said that, a bulb lit up in my brain, a LED bulb nonetheless, a clear light cold with indignation.

He asked the Senate committee on public order chaired by Senator Grace Poe if it would be possible to reopen the Mamasapano probe. Why? Because he claimed that he has new information, revealing facts that might turn the tide of the investigation. The Senate rules certainly allow this, and Senator Alan Peter Cayetano, who chairs the Blue Ribbon Committee, concurred.

I am sure the screams of disbelief rang loud and clear in the halls of the Palace and its nest of snakes. How could they do this, when the Mamasapano incident cost the President a plunge in his ratings so steep people thought it would be difficult for him to recover? But the Senate did, and so next week, buy a bag of popcorn, a bottle of soda, and watch the Senate skewer the administration, on the alleged information that the higher-ups abandoned the SAF 44 to die in the darkness of noon, on that hot day in January of 2015.

The darkness of ignorance seems to cloud the minds of some fans of Mayor Rodrigo Duterte. Perhaps buoyed by the strong and fighting words of their idol, who has vowed to fumigate drug lords, criminals, and the corrupt like anopheles mosquitoes the moment he lands in Malacanang, they have trained their guns on  John Paolo de las Nieves. The chairman of the University of the Philippine Student Council, on his own cognizance, has filed a disqualification case against Mayor Duterte, deeming legally infirm his substitution for Martin Dino as presidential candidate of PDP-Laban.

De las Nieves and his family have been getting death threats allegedly from the followers of Duterte (alangan namang the followers of Miriam Defensor-Santiago, right?). They are training their anger at a young man who is the son of a carpenter and a market vendor, poor as they come, who has landed a scholarship at the State University and is just speaking his mind. Trained in the best scholastic traditions of UP, De las Nieves is just exercising his freedom of speech, which the Constitution guarantees and which Mayor Duterte — being a good prosecutor — knows by heart.

Miyako Izabel, in a shrewd post at her Facebook account, also asked where are the women, the public intellectuals, the bright academics, the renowned economists, in the inner circle of Duterte? For when you look at the photos of our sound bite-savvy mayor, he is surrounded by big, burly men, none of the people whom, Izabel thought, could give gravitas to his campaign. After all, she added, Duterte is no longer running for city mayor but for president of a country with such complex and intricate problems.

Complex and intricate is also the nature of the mess that is the MRT. My car is on number coding every Friday, and I took the MRT again today. There are three new urinals at the men’s toilet in the Cubao station, and all of them are not working. Either the materials bought were inferior, or there is no maintenance going on in this curse of the administration. Also today, as usual, the coaches are hot and the air cons are hardly working. Wait for summer to come, I thought, as I felt beads of sweat sliding down my back. The escalators are not working at the Taft station, and last Friday, there were no trains. The queue was from here to eternity.

Those of you who were lucky enough to travel in just the nearby Southeast Asian countries are filled with envy when you take their trains — cool, clean, on time. The mess that is the MRT has symbolized the Aquino administration in its end game: dirty coaches, clogged-up urinals, and escalators that do not bring you up, to where you can see the sky and its horizon of possibilities.

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