You shall know the truth. And the truth shall make you mad.” That one-liner by scientist Aldous Huxley sums up the reaction of most people to the Inquirer’s selection of seven whistleblowers as “Filipinos of the Year”. Three days after the honor, they’ve linked former Sen. Ramon Revilla Sr. to the metastasizing pork barrel scam.
The Inquirer accolade “honored Filipinos who’ve made the biggest positive impact on the life of the nation in the year just past.” Take a bow Benhur Luy, Mary Ariene Baltazar, Merlina Suñas, Gertrudes Luy, Marina Sula and Simonette Briones. All were portrayed, on the front page, in Witness Protection Program bullet-proof vests.
Luy is a 32-year-old, long-haired former medical technologist who meticulously documented the pork barrel scams at the vortex of Congress most damaging scandal since it opened in 1907. To date, six senators, 24 congressmen and assorted officials face charges of swapping pork barrels for cuts ranging 19 up to 60 percent of allocation.
Revilla Sr, who was born in 1927, ignored the accusation. In contrast, Luy again proved surgically precise. “Between 2003 and 2004, the elder Revilla funneled P35 million of his Priority Development Assistance Fund to these LGUS: Clarin, Misamis Oriental (P10 million); San Quintin, Pangasinan (P5 million); Porac, Pampanga (P5 million); Siniloan, Laguna
(P5 million); San Juan, Leyte (P5 million); and Dawis, Bohol (P5 million).
“The company used in implementing these projects was Jo Chris Trading. And we delivered Foliar Fertilizer,” Luy said Jo Chris is Napoles’ main trading firm named after her daughter. Luy added: He, Napoles and her husband, Jaime, used to call on the elder Revilla in his Senate office.
In his privilege speech, Revilla Jr. said his signatures on NBI were forged. Luy said all letter-requests from the senator were original and the signatures there were “all his.” Like father, like son?
All these focus attention on the hard slog, by whistle-blowers of assorted repute, form mayhem to this year’s broader recognition. Are we finally heeding what the 9th International
Anti-Corruption meeting in South Africa urged: “Governments must create an environment that encourages, instead of penalizes, citizens who denounce venality.”
Remember banker Clarissa Ocampo? She told the Impeachment Court that Joseph Estrada signed the notorious Jose Velarde account which she refused to certify. Threats cascaded in.
Auditor Heidi Mendoza resigned from a cushy Asian Development Bank job to appear before Congress. There, she confirmed her documentation of P510-million theft by the AFP
Comptroller’s Office. And Gen. Carlos Garcia ended in the clink. A partisan Commission on Appointments refuses to confirm, up to now, the appointment of Mendoza as Commission on Audit commissioner.
Former Manila Chronicle Primitivo Mijares was one of dictator Ferdinand Marcos’ chief propagandists. He wrote the book “Conjugal Dictatorship” of Ferdinand and Imelda and testified before the US Congress. Mijares disappeared in 1977 enroute to the Philippines. His 15-year-old son was later found murdered.
“The nail that sticks out gets hammered down,” the Filipino axiom warns. Ensign Philip Pestaño, bucked in 1997, the misuse of Navy boats to haul illegal lumber and drugs. He was shot in his cabin. Ombudsman Conchita Carpio Morales reinstituted murder charges and dismissed 10 officers.
Marian School of Quezon City academic supervisor Antonio Calipjo Go exposed flawed textbooks. False charges were filed against him and some columnists smeared him.
After Land Bank’s Acsa Ramirez blew the whistle on tax scams, NBI agents shoved her into a police lineup — which President Gloria Arroyo used for a photo op.
We have no monopoly on this vice. In Russia, Judge Vicktor Danilkin handed down a six-year sentence on already imprisoned oligarch Mikhail Khordovorksy in a verdict he had not written.
It was shoved down his throat by President Vladimir Putin’s aides.
Filipinos recall “Deep Throat”. In 1972, this whistle-blower slipped to Washington Post data on White House involvement in the Watergate scandal. The uproar led to jail terms for five White House officials.
“I resign as President of the United States.” Richard Nixon wrote in a one-sentence letter. Vanity Fair magazine, 31 years later, reported “Deep Throat” was former Federal Bureau of Investigation associate director Mark Felt.
The Post’s executive editor during Watergate, Benjamin Bradlee, confirmed the report.
In August 2013, the Inquirer revealed that the “Deep Throat” behind this newspaper’s 1996 award-winning exposé on the graft-ridden pork barrel, then called the Countrywide Development Fund was the late Marikina Rep. Romeo Candazo.
On a paper napkin, Candazo illustrated to three Inquirer editors exactly how much, in the form of “standard” amounts, members of Congress and other officials got from projects funded with the pork barrel. Kickbacks were “SOP” (standard operating procedure) among legislators.
They ranged from 19 to 52 percent of the cost of each project which varied from dredging, rip rapping, asphalting, concreting to construction of school buildings. Other sources of kickbacks that Candazo identified were public funds intended for medicine and textbooks . “He was the original whistle-blower of the pork scam.”
“We say in this nation that we are looking for people with honesty, integrity, drive and dedication”, an anonymous whistle-blower blogged. “And then when we find such people, we take them out and whip them.” Inaction by those involved is buttressed here by a culture of impunity. Jerusalem also crucified its Whistle-blower.
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