‘GMA dams’ about to break?

The “Pajero bishops” issue is fading. The bishops returned their pick-ups to the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office, whose sloppy information releases hurt the bishops, their flock and even the PCSO itself.

With the exposé badly diminishing all it touched, would the next step be to simply forget a bribery scandal involving a sitting president and compliant bishops whose actions in fact defrauded poor beneficiaries of the nation’s charity agency?

Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago so forcefully defended the bishops that many felt “the lady doth protest too much” as she tried too hard to curry favor with the bishops.

For his part, Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile declared that there was no constitutional violation and that the bishops were innocent of any crime.

Other senators tried to prevail on the bishops to keep the vehicles. But although the bishops and the PCSO have now withdrawn from the fray, this case may be far from closed.

Other cases involving the Catholic Church and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo may still emerge. Since the Marcos years, the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp. has been very generous to the Church, its cardinals, bishops, priests, charities and other causes.

Given the tendencies of the GMA cabal, that generosity could have been catalogued into dossiers to lay the basis for which priests and bishops could be pressured into being improperly close to the administration.

GMA’s reign spared no one from bribes, intimidation, kidnapping and maybe worse. As such, someone from Pagcor could one day discover such files, which may include priests being caught on tape as regular visitors to casinos.

For those who think that’s too remote a possibility, consider how Zaldy Ampatuan is now singing like a canary against his father and brothers regarding the Maguindanao massacre and the 2007 elections, and how Lintang Bedol has emerged to corroborate the election stories of Zaldy. Another index would be the number of plunder cases being lodged against the representative from the second district of Pampanga.

Note also that the blood money stories involving the PCSO funds could now lead to OWWA (Overseas Workers Welfare Administration) funds also being investigated. Taken together, these telltale signs suggest that the dams are about to break—and that the information overflowing from that breach may be impossible to contain.
—JOSE OSIAS,
jzosias@gmail.com