A Symposium at Estioko Hall, Christ the King Seminary in Quezon City
Among the ancient Greeks, a convivial meeting for intellectual discussion, music and drinking was termed a “symposium.” Some hundred gardeners or more gathered together last Saturday June 29th, for a symposium on the last Philippine elections from a Catholic perspective on invitation by organizers from the Lay Society of Saint Arnold Janssen or LSSAJ, the Philippine Association of Ex-Seminarians or PAX, and the ex-SVD seminarians or XVD’s.
A “thousand and one” points were discussed and debated arising from the stimulating inputs given by Edicio de la Torre, Ed Panlilio, Bal Falcone, Charles Avila and Jerome Marquez, after the introductory remarks by organizers Ricky Ribo, Manny Mendoza and Tyrone Cimafranca.
De la Torre is currently Senior Consultant to the Secretary of Agriculture. He used to be the head of the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority or TESDA. He is well-known as a (former) Catholic priest and religious who founded the Christians for National Liberation, and ended up a political prisoner for many long years.
Panlilio, a Catholic priest of good standing, was Social Action Director in his diocese when the people of his province of Pampanga cried out to the world that they had had enough of gambling lords to govern them. They looked around and practically forced “Among” Ed to run for Governor. He won by a landslide and became one of the prospective presidential candidates for the 2010 election. That year, however, turned out to be for PNoy. Last elections the same people who originally drafted Father Panlilio for Governor told him they had decided “to return to the fleshpots of Egypt” – to the universe of Bong Pineda. What could Ed do? Well, more of the same: praying and “staying in the desert,” ministering to the poor, the deprived and the oppressed. For such as Among Ed, que sera, sera!
Falcone, an ex-seminarian who became a businessman and academician with degrees in Economics and Development Studies ran for the Senate in this election on a shoe-string budget. President of the COMELEC-registered Democratic Party of the Philippines, Bal who was at first relatively unknown was credited with more than half a million votes, roaming the archipelago explaining his party’s Philippine understanding of Christian social teaching, underscoring economic development and not just economic growth. Many claim that the votes for Bal were much more than what was allowed by the infamous 60-30-10 notoriously programmed senatorial results.
Avila, the fourth discussant, is the Gardener, “yours truly.” I was billed as former Mayor of my town, former Administrator of the Philippine Coconut Authority and probably the oldest peasant organizer in the country today; also, as author of many books, and staff writer of the monthly magazine, IMPACT, and now, too, leader of the Confederation of National Coconut Farmers’ Organizations of the Philippines. In the last election I was drafted as a nominee for COCOFED Party list, which was so arbitrarily disqualified at the last minute – some say for several billion reasons from the Right and from the Left of the powers-that-be.
COCOFED had never been disqualified before and had matter-of-factly won the party list electoral contests many times – due to its huge organizational membership. This time its membership grew three-fold as it had become the new confederated unity of the three biggest national coconut farmers’ organizations.
Because of their common legislative agenda to recover the 73-billion-peso coco levy fund now in the hands of the national government following the farmers’ victory at the Supreme Court that declared the fund dually owned by government as trustee owner and all the coconut farmers as beneficial owners, COCOFED was expected to make it to the top of the electoral heap on sheer membership numbers and organizational cohesion around a concrete program.
The program of COCOFED was to create by law a Coconut Industry Trust Fund that would be administered by a Philippine Coconut Farmers’ Foundation wherein government and farmers would share voting rights as trustee and beneficial owners respectively.
But COCOFED remained disqualified on “grounds” that it had only three nominees instead of five. How and, more importantly, when the Supreme Court will resolve this case is any one’s guess – but surely not in three minutes or three months; in three years or more? Were there others who had only three nominees but were not disqualified? Yes, of course, a few, and to name one: ACTS-CIS – the party list of police and intelligence officers and rank-and-file.
Father Jerome Marquez, SVD, is currently vice-provincial superior of the Divine Word Missionaries, Central Philippine province, and at the same time parish priest of the Sacred Heart Parish in Kamuning, Quezon City. He is a practicing Canon Law-yer, and is also active in missionary outreach to indigenous peoples all over this country. As lawyer, Father Jerome is famous for his rather lucid and cogent disquisitions especially regarding Vatican II’s notion of the priesthood of the laity.
Point One – The Laity’s Responsibility for Politics of Christian Inspiration
“The Sacred Power in the church is vested in the entire people of God through the all-pervading presence of the Spirit. It is present and operative in the ordained and non –ordained who unfailingly adhere to the faith, penetrate it more deeply through right judgment, and apply it in daily life” (Vatican II, cf. LG12).
The characteristic of the lay state is that of “being a life led in the midst of the world and of secular affairs,… called by God to make of their apostolate, through the vigour of their Christian spirit, a leaven in the world” ( Vat.II, AA 2).
The two key areas where the laity are to make their most distinctive contribution are: first, evangelization through example and word, and, second, the renewal of the temporal order, which means influencing and bringing political and economic structures in society to a more human and Christian direction based on justice and the dignity of the human person.
There is no Catholic vote. A vote in this direction by Catholics and non-Catholics alike is the Catholic vote. It is the vote of Catholic inspiration.
Lay people are not to be mere spectators to priests and religious who are supposedly taking the initiative and doing the real Catholic work; rather, lay people are to be conscious of being at the front lines of the Church’s effort to sanctify the world. In politics and economic development, it is the laity first and foremost, the clergy only by exception.
In this new paradigm made by Vatican II, what happens inside church walls is really not the be-all and end-all of Christian life. The Mass is the source and summit of a faith life, surely, but such a life is one that is mostly lived elsewhere. Simply put: lay people must keep growing in consciousness that it is they who are sent to take the Gospel to the great wide mission field outside church walls – to the sphere of economics and politics, of reform, revolution and development.
Point Two – “Distinguir pour unir” to stop all muddled thinking now; grasp the duality of Philippine politics. So, first: “distinguish in order to unite.”
Government, politics, elections in the Philippines are of two kinds – national and local. These two must be distinguished clearly. There is the national government (the state), and there are local governments.
Long before there was a Philippine government (national) as an institution, the Catholic Church was already here institutionally organized. And before the Catholic Church, there was Islam and the institution of the Sultanates and their systems of Madrasha. And ante-dating all of them were a bunch of “local governments” that did all right getting their communities to produce wealth for themselves and enough surpluses to trade heavily with neighbouring kingdoms and empires for ten centuries straight – yes, a thousand years.
Please do Rizal and yourself a favor by reading not just the Noli and the Fili and his articles in the Soli (daridad) but also his book of annotations to Morga’s pre-colonial history of this country.
The old adage seems true: “You can truly own only what you have made.” Note, then, that never have Filipinos completely made a national government, ever; so, they’ve never got to own one. “Government” was always imposed on us, and that is why our ownership of any national government has always been most dubious and at best confusing – though it can be argued that we have already made a lot of progress. After all, the hidden foreign powers cannot do without our local oligarchy, if that is any consolation; it certainly is a fact.
The years 1896-98 were an exception. We successfully waged a revolution against Spain and made our own government, not primarily by elections but by the power that grew out of the barrel of the gun – out of the guns and with the bolos of a new people who had achieved a new awareness of being one whole, a people conscious of being a nation that could and must now run rough shod over the centuries-old invading colonial power.
Spain’s Catholic rule itself in this country was cannon-born; Magellan fired his cannons for demonstration purposes and 800 “natives” wanted to be baptized. For hundreds of years thereafter it was the combination of sword-and-cross tactics, not elections, which gave Filipinos a national government. This is why they made it a habit to revolt every other year. They did not own the governments imposed on them.
The Spaniards, however, knew that the revolts were local. There was, as yet, no national consciousness. So, they allowed the locals to have their own local governments. Local elections were quite an affair already during the Spanish times.
After allowing at first the datus of the barangays to become the cabezas de barangay, the Spanish invaders also encouraged them to privatize the communal lands (what belonged to all rather than to one) and thus effectively divide the locals into the collaborating rulers and the majority ruled, economically and politically speaking. Then by 1789, the cabezas de barangay were placed under the authority of the alcalde mayor. Next to cockfighting, elections became an archipelago-wide sport. Inevitably, however, a national consciousness was born and by 1896-98 a national revolution could not be stopped.
With the defeat of Spanish colonialism, a new imperial power salivated after the fledgling Philippine republic. Taking it over was seen as a necessary step to market-penetrating the vast expanse of China.
So, after killing off one-sixth of our population that had already primed itself to resist all invaders, the Americans demolished the government we had made and then – believe it or not – succeeded in making us love them, following 40 years of “Americanized education.” It does not sound true but it is: the Filipina maiden was drugged by so-called education to find her rapist irresistible. And the rapist did not want to be responsible for the illegitimate children; so, they tried to make the Filipina “gradually independent.” They asked the locals to learn again to have elections – but, please, no radicals and genuine nationalists. Only decent collaborators allowed.
Then came a few long years when another foreign power, the Japanese, pushed America aside, to take over the rape of the Philippines. This was the only time we had the temerity to call a Philippine government (Laurel’s) a “puppet government.” It felt that way to many, not because of collaborators Jose Laurel, Sr. Benigno Aquino, Sr. and Manuel Roxas, Sr. but simply because the Japanese had not stayed long enough to display their people skills like the Americans did, after the latter’s genocidal tactics of their first few years. People found Japanese cruelty quite a contrast to the behaviour of American “benevolent assimilators.”
In any case, the Americans came back soon enough (“I shall return”) and have never left since then. They perfected the art of hiding openly (e.g. not invasion forces, mind you, but merely “visiting forces;” just like before, not dominance but “parity amendment” – we like it – today we’d even pay them billions to count our votes for us and thus determine which collaborators would be allowed to participate in the installation of their Philippine government) and making elections either express or suppress our people’s democratic aspirations, depending on where the imperial interests blow.
The elections after the 1946 “grant of independence” met with an accident, as far as the hidden imperial powers were concerned. The Filipino people overwhelmingly voted for the candidates of the nationalist Democratic Alliance to Congress which would be enough to prevent a two-thirds vote for a so-called “parity amendment” to the Philippine constitution, so badly needed by the Americans for imperial business-as-usual. An immediate solution was found: disqualify and evict the nationalist representatives from the Congress – end of nationalist story (supposedly), onward the neo-colonial game.
If 1896-98 was the first exception, 1986 was the next. Following another national farcical election, the people of Metro Manila waged a successful people’s urban insurrection (people-powered). The hidden imperial and oligarchic powers went to work fast to ensure no genuine social revolution would ensue but, rather, a grand restoration of liberal (i.e. oligarchic) democracy. And so it happened.
Everything was fine till one President played with independence. She went out on a limb for imperial competitor China and was almost in a position to pull it off for her secretly chosen successor but another accident happened. A popular former President died and her funeral was such as to ensure the popularity of any of her offspring, should any one of them decide to go for the presidency. One did, and the rest is history, recent history.
Amidst his popularity was an uncritical acceptance of a new imperial instrument of elections to ensure what kind of national government was desirable. The instrument was really simple: the non-recountable automated election system. Cheating had suddenly become as easy as children’s computer games. People could at best suspect that cheating, even massive cheating, had occurred but they could never be sure. No one would have the wherewithal and the time to “prove” it.
Point Three – the almighty proclaimer of victors.
The Commission on Elections – they spell it COMELEC. Stare at it long enough and you see the same letters for MOC ELEC, or mock-elect. This is one of its hidden functions.
Sixto Brilliantes is one of the oldest lawyers who specialized in election law down the decades. He was, too, all these many years veritable servant-in-law of Eduardo Danding Cojuangco. So, he has two owners: the administration that appointed him and the outside sponsor that guaranteed his loyalty – to what?
Do not now be tempted to crack a sick joke by saying “loyalty to the law” because as a superb election lawyer of many long years’ practice his business was anything but that – his business was to get his clients proclaimed victors, if and when he could.
Now that he is COMELEC Chairman, it must be said that he is one who understands the whole process. He understands that the process is not about campaigning (although this has its importance), nor even about the election proper and the subsequent votes counting; no, the main thing in the process is about having victors proclaimed. And he alone has the power to proclaim.
If he says, “you are disqualified” – for whatever reasons or no reasons at all, with or without the agreement or disagreement of the collegial body as required by law – he knows it does not really matter; he can be taken to court – so what? These processes take years to resolve; so, effectively speaking he always wins, he has his say.
If he says the following are winning the senatorial race, have won, and he proclaims them so despite a very insignificant percentage of the total votes being accounted for, what can you do? Go to court? See you in a few years.
Sixto understands his power to proclaim, and over the media, too. He proclaims, you dispute; you lose. Of course, if you are right, you can win the argument later on when the whole thing has become moot and academic. So, when you finally win, he will die laughing.
Party list representatives are part of the national system like the senators. Trust Sixto to cast all carefulness aside. The rule is what he wants; is he arbitrary, is he abusive? Aesop wrote about you before and called your tale “Sour Grapes.” Sixto can trust the media to call you that. Oh, Sixto is that smart: an old election warrior and a bold election warrior. Who says there are no old, bold election warriors? He is one. (He is not a bomber. There are some old bombers. There are some bold bombers. But there are no old bold bombers.)
When he disqualified Cocofed Party list, he had no resolution signed by the Comelec en banc. He just went on the air, a few days before the election. The matter was never discussed, never taken up by the Comelec en banc. The disqualification paper was dated almost two weeks after the election. All he wanted was to tell voters, “disqualified…don’t waste your votes on this one.” Much later, minutes before deadline, he would tell the public, “we will allow the counting of the votes of the disqualified but we will not proclaim them.” Four days later the results were accidentally deleted by Smartmatic. Oh, sorry, we apologize, truly.
The coconut farmers of the Philippines are numerous indeed. They form one of the biggest single subsectors in the country. They moved on their own, without outside sponsor, to have their own voice in Congress and pursue the recovery of the coco levy funds. Of course they will never stop asking: what happened, why were they disqualified, what happened to their votes? On the first night they had already reached more than three hundred fifty thousand votes and then the counting was stopped and next day in many places they were reduced to zero against the testimony of hundreds of thousands, and ultimately of more than a million – but what could they do before such as Sixto, servant-in-law of the farmers’ foe and appointee of a government whose cabinet members are racing against each other to be the ones to use these farmers’ trust funds?
If your interests were not pro people would you not rejoice to have appointed Sixto? He is such a perfect instrument. If he did not exist you would have had to invent him. But there he is – powerful, dictatorial, arbitrary, and exasperatingly loyal. Who will deliver the coconut farmers of such as Sixto Bee? FINIS.