Samira’s wager

Samira Gutoc makes for an interesting study to illustrate how someone can lose herself in seeking an elective post such as a seat in the Senate. The Muslim activist and women’s rights advocate has come a long way since May 2017 when she quit the Bangsamoro Transition Commission to which President Duterte had appointed her, quit frustrated with the crisis in her native Marawi and appalled at his quip that he’d take responsibility for soldiers who committed rape while fighting the IS-linked Maute group in the lakeside city during the five-month siege.

She hammered at the slow pace of Marawi’s rehabilitation, saying in April 2019 that it broke her heart to hear the President gruffly say that he wouldn’t fund the project “two years after he made the order to rain bombs and pulverize my beloved city without even consulting the people who live in it.” There was no reason to doubt her anguish. She was on the ground in perilous times, becoming part of the Ranao Rescue Team and seeing firsthand what she called “a humanitarian nightmare.” And in July 2021, as the President prepared to deliver his final State of the Nation Address, she stood with other Marawi civic leaders in denouncing the government’s rehabilitation effort as “a failure.”

Now, as a senatorial candidate of Aksyon Demokratiko, Gutoc has doused her fire as well as her language vis-à-vis the President, saying after his withdrawal of his own senatorial candidacy last week that he “still has things to do, like the Marawi rehab,” and thanking him for moving to “focus” on unfinished business. She went on to declare that she was one with him—“Kaisa sa iyo”—in completing what needed completion.

Politicians change stripes in the course of embracing politics as the art of the possible. The observer wearied by continuing proof of that truism may find occasion to muse on the case of, for example, a representative of a formerly unheard-of party list group and once upon a time a member of the House’s “Spice Boys” that were a thorn in the side of then President Joseph Estrada. He, too, has come a long way since that time, the tag Spice Boys amplifying on his and the other members’ youth and—being young—on their idealism. (But, as the song goes, it ain’t necessarily so: Another member, who clung to the speakership in contravention of a “gentlemen’s agreement” and had to be pried off it, as it were, and who is now a dynast and yet to satisfactorily explain the ways by which taxpayer money was spent for the Philippines’ hosting of the 2019 Southeast Asian Games, was one of the Boys.) A little past 50, the party list representative now gunning for a mayor’s seat has run the gamut, from offering money in his capacity as then President Gloria Arroyo’s chief of staff to the kidnapped IT expert Jun “Moderate their greed” Lozada, to voting along with 69 other House members to kill the ABS-CBN franchise, to hitching his wagon to the perceived star of the late dictator’s son and namesake.

Of course, comparisons are odious. There are politicians and politicians, and Gutoc with her personal and professional credentials should not qualify to be among their ranks. But in an interview with ANC’s Karen Davila in October, she surprised many who voted for her when she ran with the opposition’s Otso Diretso senatorial slate that was routed in 2019. As it is turning out, her declaration in the interview that Mr. Duterte’s war on drugs was successful “in some way” signaled a change in her stance — although she denied that such a change was occurring.

The incoherence with which Gutoc, a former journalist, discussed “Oplan Tokhang” in the interview was startling: Her attempt to address the antidrug campaign but not to appear critical of it, or of the man whose centerpiece program it is, amounted to addled discourse. She used the strange term “remember-able” in speaking of the campaign, apparently unable to describe it correctly as “murderous,” or at least “controversial.” She eventually tried to gather the shards of her thoughts and insisted that her opposition to the war on drugs remained, that she felt for the women widowed by the killings. But she was greatly damaged by her remarks that left viewers incredulous, disappointed, aghast.

It’s clear that Gutoc now takes her cue from her party, which lately announced itself as “centrist and objective” (a no-stance stance that is in itself a dangerous stance), and its standard-bearer, who has changed stripes to boost a faltering run. There’s time for her to view her bold wager in what Janet Malcolm called the “skeptical light of morning,” but the outcome seems fairly obvious even now.

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