IN the 1992 presidential campaign I was for Mitra. The Mitra campaign had so much money I carried an empty cardboard box to pretend I carried some too. Someone said that money has no smell. That guy knew nothing about money. Money smells of victory in the morning. Cory Aquino wasn’t smelling much of it. We had lured her finance people into our camp. We had a stranglehold on her candidate’s financing. One day I handed her a speech draft.
She said, “Don’t go. I have a question. Are you for Ramon V. Mitra?”
“Yes,” I said with a hint of superiority.
“Well, he will lose,” she said. “You know this election decides if the Marcoses return to power by the way they lost it—elections.”
“I know,” I said, “but they won’t win. Monching will win.”
“No, Teddy Boy, he will lose,” she said, cool as mint.
My small anger management issue kicked in.
“He will win,” I insisted—my voice trying to crack her calm. “And, and,” I sputtered, “I’d rather lose with the man who was jailed with my father—and your husband”—attempt at sarcasm there—“than win with the man who jailed them.”
She smiled. I closed the door behind me.
I met a New York Times correspondent who wanted to cover the campaign. “You came to the right place,” I said, “we’re gonna win.”
I took him to a Mitra rally and never saw him again. Later, he called me from the airport, saying he was going home, and that my candidate would lose and Miriam Defensor-Santiago would win.
I thought I should interview Miriam.
To catch her up, my first question was, “You said you will line up customs people and shoot them.”
“Oh, Teddy Boy,” she said sweetly, “what lousy law school did you go to? A president cannot do that. He swears to uphold the law.” My wife took over the interview and they got on famously after that.
Election day came. The votes came in. Mitra sank lower and lower in the count. But in ABS-CBN’s quick count—a super exit poll, not extrapolating from samplings but communicating the count as it was being made—Miriam got vote after vote after vote, Aparri to Jolo. Then, for a reason Commission on Elections never explained, the ABS-CBN quick count was blacked out. Suitcases stuffed with papers poured into Greenhills. Two weeks later the quick count was allowed to resume to show Miriam losing. After the winner was proclaimed, the young were inconsolable. So Miriam made many appearances in schools. This one was in Santo Tomas.
We walked with her down the corridor leading to the auditorium. We heard clapping from the classrooms. At first a smattering of applause, but quickly more and more of it. Soon the corridor was reverberating with claps and cheers. It reached a crescendo when the doors to the auditorium opened and a blast of cheers and applause hit us in the face. Cries of a hurricane force, conveying grief with the result, disgust with democracy, and total contempt for the voting process washed over us like bile.
Miriam walked to the podium. The air was electric with energy. She turned to the audience and bowed. Pandemonium broke lose. She did not say a word. They had said it all for her. That evening, in the long corridor past the morgue and in that hall, democracy died the death it deserved. Women in the media gloated: Well, better that “that” woman was cheated than she became president.
Not so long ago, in another election, the champions of people power sat in the gallery of Congress smug as bugs, as though they knew the result before it was proclaimed even though the fight was close. Although I, too, voted for their candidate, I kept insisting that we go behind the cover page of the certificates of canvass (COCs) to double-check the totals. The session was recessed with exasperation. I was called to the Speaker’s room. A chief of the Senate phoned a champion of democracy in the gallery and within earshot of me said, “Your boy just won’t listen to reason.”
A staff of the Speaker slipped me a manual of procedure open to a page with a stenciled paragraph precisely allowing a look behind the cover page of COCs. The phone was handed to me and a voice said, “Do you want another actor to become president?”
“No,” I said, “I just want the winner, regardless of what he did for a living, to be the president.” I got in my car and left Congress. I hadn’t reached Commonwealth Avenue when my phone rang and a voice pleaded that I return. I did. And I expressed my vote in a way far too clever to be honest. I explained my vote as follows, “I see no obstacle to the proclamation of…” and left for good with a bad conscience.
That evening, the Philippines lost the distinction it won at Edsa and sank to become what it is today, the lowest form of democracy in history. That day, we committed the original sin that has ever since tarnished our elections, not only with cheating—now electronic in its celerity—but with choices inferior to Miriam in quality. With the burial of Miriam, we interred our last best hope of democracy; and above both, their remains we erected a plinth to shaft the mournful air and commemorate its repeated mockery. Good luck.
2 comments
The people is democracy not the president. When you vote and your vote counts, that is democracy. When human right is upheld, that is democracy. When there is free speech, that is democracy. Miriam in no way represented democracy. When FVR cheated, it was a betrayal of democracy; but democracy didn’t end because the democratic law was followed after the election. Democracy is failing NOW because the current president does not care about the law, especially – especially – fundamental and all-important ones like the right to life and the right to justice and all the appurtenances of justice, including the much-maligned DUE PROCESS. Democracy is dead because people chose something else last election, and they continue to choose something else.
I forgot to add that there is also now a failure of checks and balances. So far only the media and a handful of people are faithful to democracy and upholding its values. Congress and the elite are failing the Philippines, choosing to collaborate or be silent.