Divide one into two

"What of the Marcoses?"

Or into three, in the case of the decades-long odyssey of the Marcos family through the country’s history.

In the aftermath of the autist PNoy’s presidency—the prospect of which terrified his own father Ninoy—the stained legacy of the Cojuangco-Aquino families is being held up to critical reevaluation, especially among a millennial generation that wasn’t even born during EDSA 1, but who’ve been continuously bombarded by yellow propaganda since their school years, churned out by leftist academics with longer and more bitter memories.

Inevitably, the reevaluation has also spurred revisionist views of the Marcos presidency itself. Revisionists are pointing out the economic growth and dismantling of political dynasties during the early years of martial law, the construction of iconic projects like the Heart Center and the Cultural Center by Mrs. Marcos—before the momentum was upset by oil price shocks and a slowing economy abroad, as well as an uprising within the business community that predictably was able to enlist U.S. support.

As for human rights abuses during martial law, people often forget that only one person was officially executed under martial law—the drug lord Lim Seng, a short, stocky Chinese gentleman who liked to bang his head against the cell wall as his morning exercise inside the Crame stockade we shared. The crackdown was precipitated as much by the bombing of Plaza Miranda by communist provocateurs as it was by the inevitable response of State forces, and there’s more than enough blame to go around for those years when democratic space was suspended.

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The second act in the Marcos saga, post-EDSA, was dominated by the largely successful efforts of the Cory presidency to dismantle pretty much everything that was Marcos—although, strangely enough, she never did get around to actually bringing to justice the mastermind behind her husband’s death. Perhaps the consequences of justice being done in his case might have been uncomfortable even for her.

This period is when intensive effrts began to recover billions of pesos of what’s claimed to be the ill-gotten wealth of the Marcoses. As during martial law, the record is decidedly mixed, with human rights claimants seeming to make headway in their legal battles in Hawaii but, most recently, the Marcos family winning a decisive victory in the Supreme Court. Some people blame this victory on the phenomenal legal skills of family lawyer Estelito Mendoza, forgetting that our government—any government—could always outspend a private party like the Marcoses if it truly wanted to win in court.

After Cory, the Marcos family was able to come back home, and might even have reclaimed the presidency—just six years after going into exile—if they had not split the Marcos vote between two putative standard-bearers. Today the political mantle has fallen on the shoulders of the 2nd and even 3rd generation, with a grandson as new Ilocos Norte governor, daughter Imee as a new senator, and namesake Bongbong Marcos fighting to reclaim his vice-presidential bid and keep the path open for a shot at the presidency. It’s the rise of this new generation that will define the third act in the family’s saga.

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I ran into the frustrated VP at a casual event last week and took hold of a short pamphlet published last May on “The election protest of Bongbong Marcos.” The protest that he filed against Leni Robredo right after the 2016 elections is not something I’ve been following, so I found the pamphlet interesting enough to pass along to you.

In his filing at the Supreme Court constituted as an electoral tribunal, Marcos alleges three complaints against Robredo. The second and third ones have to do with alleged massive irregularities in various provinces in Mindanao and elsewhere. There’s a lot of detail there, but frankly it’s not very different from the kind of scandals that have regularly marred our elections as far back as I can remember.

It’s the first complaint that draws attention, especially in today’s regime of automated elections. It seeks to declare the May 2016 certificates of canvass (COCs) as “unauthentic” and, on that basis, nullify the proclamation of Robredo. The evidence may seem circumstantial, but taken together, it presents a compelling story and raises some pretty hard questions:

The law requires all election results to be sent directly to seven public servers, located at the canvassing centers for city/municipal, provincial, and national results; the majority and minority parties; the KBP and a citizen’s watchdog. But instead of doing this, Smartmatic installed a secret server through which the votes first had to pass. If this is true, what was that secret server doing to the votes passing through it?

On election evening, while the votes were already being counted, Marlon Garcia, a foreign employee of Smartmatic, broke into the system and changed one letter in the name of a senatorial candidate, Roy Seneres, who had died three months earlier. If true, why on earth did this happen? What else could Marlon have changed in the computer code? Marlon has long since skipped the country, together with then-Comelec chairman Andy Bautista after he’d proclaimed the illegal action as “just a cosmetic change.”

Around the same time the system was compromised, about 7:30 p.m., news reports were proclaiming that Marcos was leading with over a million votes out of 79% of total votes already counted. But the rest of that night, the Marcos lead slowly melted away at a regular rate of 40 votes against him, one for him, almost like clockwork. Could this have been the joint product of that secret server together with Marlon’s meddling?

Some people spitefully say that the Marcoses had it coming, being no paragons of electoral probity themselves. Apart from the obvious fact that Marcos Jr is not Marcos Sr, what should be remembered is that the real victims of such fraud are not the candidate himself, but the million-odd citizens who voted for him but may have been silenced. It’s these voters whom the electoral tribunal should keep in mind—not what kind of family Bongbong comes from—as they continue deliberations that, frankly, should already have been concluded by now.

Readers can write me at [email protected].