Defrauded

It is, of course, an old story, but that’s because it hasn’t been fully told. And it is, of course, a story fraught with personal motive and potential malice, as pure intentions seldom explain the complicated personal decision to blow the whistle. But last week’s disclosure by Senior Supt. Rafael Santiago and members of his old Special Action Forces team, that they carried out an illegal operation in early 2005 to replace original election returns with manufactured ones, has the potential to finally have the full story of the presidential election of 2004 told, once and for all.

After the “Hello Garci” tapes surfaced in 2005, evidence of massive and systematic election fraud to ensure Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s victory in 2004 could no longer be ignored. The crisis of legitimacy that surrounded Arroyo’s last five years in power, and especially the marked loss of support from the middle class that she began to suffer from that time, can be traced back to the now widely shared perception that, in 2004, she had stolen the vote. As her own spokespersons now say, an old story. But it is an old story that continues to engage the public’s attention, because the entire truth has not yet been shown.

The revelations by Santiago and his men have the power to change all that.

We should be clear about the scope of impact of their disclosure. Santiago’s team “merely” substituted fake ERs in ballot boxes at the center of Fernando Poe Jr.’s election protest against Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo—fabricated documents that ultimately ended up unused after the Supreme Court terminated Poe’s protest on account of his death.

Nothing much there? On the contrary.

In the first place, the substitution was a high crime in itself. It did not only seek to ensure the failure of the Poe protest through the use of fraudulent documents, it violated the fundamental premise of the democratic project itself: that the will of the people is paramount, that we the voters choose our leaders. Even if the crime did not meet its objective, it was still a crime. That elite police officers were used; that the operation was conducted (in a series of four raids) at the Batasan Complex itself, where the ballot boxes were being held in safekeeping; that according to Santiago the illegal orders were issued by the then-chief of the Philippine National Police himself, Hermogenes Ebdane; that a “high political authority” (to borrow the words of an outraged Jose de Venecia, the speaker of the House at the time of the operation) must have masterminded the entire operation—these details are enough to define the crime as treason.

It doesn’t hurt Santiago’s credibility that the details of his account are consistent with a breakthrough series of special reports which appeared in Newsbreak magazine in 2005, an exposé of the very same attempt to ensure the failure of the Poe election protest.

But secondly, and even more important, the substitution was part of a larger conspiracy to undermine the people’s will. Here’s the test: If the contested ERs were favorable to Arroyo, why was the operation necessary? If her margin of victory was in fact a million-plus votes, something we in the Inquirer took at face value in 2004, why did the operation target the replacement of ERs representing a million-plus votes from 6,000 voting precincts?

If a special operation were deemed necessary after the 2004 election to ensure the failure of the rival candidate’s election protest in 2005, then special operations before and during the 2004 elections to ensure Arroyo’s victory must have also been deemed necessary. The true import of Santiago’s disclosure, then, bears on the special operations described, in sometimes vivid detail, in the “Hello Garci” tapes.

Santiago, in other words, explains Virgilio Garcillano, the election operator caught talking on the Garci tapes.

We repeat: The Batasan raids make sense only if Arroyo was prepared to stake everything, even her historical reputation and eternal damnation, on a favorable outcome. But if she was thus prepared, she must have been ready to stake everything even before the first raid. Once the fateful decision to steal the vote was made, other dirty tricks became more necessary, and less difficult.