Guanzon’s gambit

In the game of chess, gambit means “an opening in which a player makes a sacrifice, typically of a pawn, for some compensating advantage.” In the game of life, it is “a device, or opening remark, typically one entailing a degree of risk, that is calculated to gain an advantage.”

Many of us must have done a gambit or other in our lives, like resigning before being fired or sacrificing something and taking all the weight of it in the hope that a greater win would come out of it in the end. It may not appear to be the best legal and sensible move, it may even look like an irascible act, suicidal so to speak, but unknown to most, the gambit may have been, for the protagonist, a calculated move that has been weighed against all odds. Don’t we sometimes hear ourselves saying, “Wise move!”?

Commission on Elections (Comelec) Commissioner Rowena Guanzon who was also head of the Comelec’s First Division played her own a few days before her retirement on Feb. 2. It was not an opening gambit but one at the end of her term. But it opened something she needed the voting public to know. And that is, that her vote as a member of the Comelec’s three-member First Division that she headed would not be counted after she has retired. And why not? Because, as Guanzon alleged, the ponencia (who was supposed to write the division’s decision on whether or not presidential candidate Ferdinand Marcos Jr. was to be disqualified) has delayed submitting the results of their deliberation as if waiting for Guanzon to first retire. This means Guanzon’s decision would count for nothing.

The first question that comes to mind is: what was the use of all those deliberations on the cases against Marcos Jr. (cancellation of his certificate of candidacy and his disqualification—two different things—filed by several groups of petitioners) if one or some commissioners’ decision would not be counted? Note that the Comelec’s Second Division had already come up with a decision which was to throw out the petition for the cancellation of candidacy (the only one of its kind) of Marcos Jr. but for which the petitioners have filed for a motion for reconsideration. Note, too, that two other Comelec commissioners are also retiring.

Guanzon’s case is different because she is retiring before her division’s decision on several disqualification petitions has been submitted and laid bare. Guanzon’s gambit was therefore to jump the gun, so to speak, and reveal her own separate decision ahead of her division’s decision, threats of disbarment and losing her retirement benefits be damned.

Guanzon’s reveal: she voted to disqualify Marcos Jr. on grounds of moral turpitude. “He is a convict,” she says again and again.

Guanzon has since been loudly proclaiming the reasons for her decision and revealing her suspicions on the delay, the reason for the ponente to wait for Guanzon to pack up and vanish.

Well, Guanzon has packed up and left the Comelec as of yesterday but she has not vanished from the scene. There will be more of her on billboards, she intimated during her open-air announcement in front of the Manila Cathedral and elsewhere. If Guanzon sounds extremely incensed and suspicious of Commissioner Aimee Ferolino, the ponente, it is because the latter has had enough time to do the writing, Guanzon said. Indeed, why the delay?

Ferolino has denied Guanzon’s accusations and cited reasons of her own, even saying that Guanzon had pressured her to decide the way Guanzon did.

At first, I thought Guanzon was going a bit uber (berserk may be an understatement), so unlike one of the judges that she was at the 2000 Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery held in Tokyo that I covered. There she was, I remember, cool in her toga, in the midst of the weeping and fainting of the aging sex crimes victims from Asian countries during World War II. Among them were survivors of the so-called “Rape of Nanking” and the Philippines’ “comfort women.”

I did listen to Guanzon’s interview on Iloilo’s Radyo Bombo where she spoke in Ilonggo. Despite the Ilonggo lilt in her speaking, she could not hide her dismay. She took offense at George Briones, lawyer for Marcos Jr.’s Partido Federal ng Pilipinas, for calling her “incorrigible narcissist.” “Matal-as ka gid,” she warned. The former mayor of Cadiz City (who did Silliman, UP, and Harvard) is on the warpath.

Send feedback to ceresp@gmail.com