Nail on the coffin

Senator Jose “Jinggoy” Estrada said quite a mouthful after Ruby Tuason came back to haunt. Or to accuse him and Juan Ponce Enrile of being party to Janet Napoles’ crime.

“I am quite sad that she came out into the open without any basis,” he told the Inquirer. “At our expense, just to save her own skin.” He felt betrayed, he said, because Tuason was an old family friend and was at one time a social secretary of his father. Erap says she wasn’t a social secretary, just one of the staff who did routine office work.

Jinggoy himself offered several reasons why he thought Tuason had done it. One was that she probably minded the fact that he couldn’t give her money after she asked for help last October when she fled to the United States. Two was that she was coerced into it by the authorities. Three was that the authorities had the goods on her, she had admitted brokering the Napoles transactions, which left her with no choice but to agree to point to others.

There and then, you see why we have such bad movies, quite apart from such bad politics. We have such bad actors and such bad scripts. I don’t know which is the more fantastical, the movie-in-the-mind, or in-the-Senate, Bong Revilla unveiled some weeks ago, the one whose only claim to believability was his casting one Mar Roxas in the role of Boy Pickup, or the one Jinggoy just did.

If Jinggoy shows anything with luminous clarity, it is only the kind of mentality or culture he and his father have unleashed on Philippine politics. That is the opposite of “Walang  personalan,  trabaho  lang” that Rudy Fernandez popularized in his movie as a hitman, which is “Hindi  ito  trabaho,  personal  lang.” Philippine politics has always been exceptionally personalistic but nowhere did it reach stratospheric heights than during Erap’s time, when friendships and enmities defined dynamics of rule.

Jinggoy’s lament partakes of that same mindset: He can’t recall any  atraso  or grievance he may have inflicted on a family friend to make her act like this. Other than perhaps the petty one of not being able to come to her aid in her time of need. Maybe that tack will sell to Pinoys who are themselves steeped and bonded in interpersonal relationships?

Maybe, except for one thing: If Tuason was so greedy she just pocketed the kickbacks herself, why would she be in such dire straits she would need to reach out to Jinggoy from the wilderness of America to borrow money? You’d think he’d think out the script better.

There’s more, far more. Like his and Bong’s own movies, his depiction of Tuason as not worthy of being listened to, or believed, because she is a self-confessed crook is  bumenta  na  iyan, a storyline that has worn itself out. Irony piles up upon irony. If that sounds familiar, it is because it is so: That was exactly what Estelito Mendoza, Erap’s chief counsel, said about Chavit Singson at the start of Erap’s impeachment trial: He was a self-confessed criminal, having admitted to all sorts of malfeasance presumably in partnership with his good friend Erap. The partnership was unproven, the self-incrimination was not. Why should we believe the word of a certified out-and-out thief?

Precisely because he was so, and being so knew whereof he spoke. He was Erap’s pal, the one person who introduced him to FPJ (or was it vice versa?), so he knew him by heart, warts and all along with his  pogi  points. They had been through thick and thin, until thick turned to thin, or until Singson thought Erap had turned against him and wanted him dead, so he could be expected to tell all,  if only out of revenge. He had gone for broke, he didn’t mind sharing a jail cell with Erap, he said, so he could be expected to tell the truth, he had nothing to lose but his life.

Of course why Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo thought to reward him for this afterward instead of just treating him like the crook he said he was, albeit with grudging nonprosecution as promised, only she can say. But that’s another story.

The same is true with Tuason. The fact that she is a self-confessed racketeer doesn’t weaken her case, it strengthens it. The thief may be the sibling of the liar, and vice versa, as Susan Roces pointed out after “Hello Garci,” but thieves have also been known to tell the truth at least about other thieves. Some thieves more than others.

We do not know what persuaded Tuason to finally break her silence. Maybe it was the weight of resentment, maybe it was the weight of conscience, maybe it was the weight of neither the one nor the other. Maybe it was just government badgering her with carrot and stick, the carrot of immunity by turning state’s witness, the stick of being extradited and facing an eternity of jail. Whatever it was, her testimony, like Singson’s, carries with it the ponderous weight of a direct, indeed participative, eyewitness. With the corroborating evidence supplied by Benhur Luy, which is remarkable as well for its plethora of detail, it has the solid ring of truth. Jinggoy would not be this rattled if it did not.

At that, who knows what Napoles herself might reveal once she gets to feel pressed on all sides, once she gets to feel hemmed in by Tuason and Luy’s testimonies? As interrogators know, it is the hardest thing to hold on to a lie, you will trip up at one point. And as scriptwriters know, a bad script is the hardest thing to sell, the audience will see through the inconsistencies after a while. I’m glad that after the sideshows Jinggoy and Bong mounted one after the other, which succeeded for a while in diverting the public’s gaze away from them, that public gaze is back on them. Well may they, and Enrile, quake at the sound they are hearing today.

That is the sound of the nail being hammered on the coffin—heard from the inside.