Rep. Magtanggol Gunigundo said that the retired military officers who served at the Bureau of Customs were “illegal and inutile,” and their departure was “good riddance” (“5 ex-generals axed at BOC,” Front Page, 1/12/16).
Allow me to provide a different view. These officers reported to me while they worked at Customs.
Corruption and inefficiency are so deeply entrenched in Customs that reforming it requires drastic new approaches and fresh blood. But Customs’ bad reputation makes it extremely difficult to lure the capable and honest people needed to change it. The country was lucky that in 2013, through the initiative of the Department of Finance, a team of dedicated reformers, a number of them retired military officers, answered the call to serve, under unimaginably difficult circumstances. This team was largely in place, and had already started delivering results by the time I became Customs commissioner in December 2013.
Before the team joined Customs the annual Customs collections from 2011 to 2013 increased by 3-8 percent. In 2014 collections increased by 21 percent; this speaks for itself. I simply cannot understand how anyone can call this a “deterioration of revenues” as the article says. Smuggling—both outright and technical—were reduced substantially. Of course, the record isn’t perfect. Neither corruption nor smuggling was eradicated, and not all Customs employees—including the reform team and myself—met public expectations at all times. Nonetheless, real progress was made, and the direction of change was positive. Only one year after excoriating Customs in his 2013 State of the Nation Address, President Aquino himself acknowledged these changes in his 2014 Sona, as did a wide range of stakeholder groups.
The officials mentioned in the article were “frontliners” in the reform team, and the achievements of 2014 would have been impossible without them. But that is not what’s going through my mind as I write this. I remember a late night text from one of them, telling me about armed men who “visited” his wife after his team conducted raids on warehouses of smuggled goods. I remember a colleague who visited one of them in his office in one of the provincial ports on a Saturday, only to find him doing his laundry by hand in the office, “dahil mahal ang pamasahe pa-Maynila, paminsan-minsan lang ako lumuluwas” (because the fare is so expensive I seldom go home to Manila). I remember a counterpart from another government agency telling me, “Iyang ’tangnang tao niyo diyan, ang tigas ng ulo, pero malinis ang ’tangna” (The son of a b—- of a man you have there is hard-headed, but clean son of a b—-). I remember their faces when we met about the cases they were threatened with for doing their jobs properly and following my orders. I remember their matter-of-fact expressions after facing yet another hearing in Congress where power-tripping legislators would treat them as verbal punching bags: “Ayun, nasabon kami” (There, we got grilled).
Many Filipinos believe that because Customs is corrupt, everyone from Customs is corrupt. It’s hard to blame them; Customs is corrupt, but not everyone in Customs is corrupt. And if good people don’t join a corrupt institution to try to change it, nothing will change. How can we expect good people to even try if we don’t recognize, support and protect the people who do?
The people named in the article—Ernesto Benitez, Esteban Castro, Bonifacio de Castro, Elmir dela Cruz, Jerry Loresco, Arnulfo Marcos, Mario Mendoza and Rolando Ricafrente—were neither illegal nor inutile. They served the bureau and the Filipino people, with courage and dedication. They deserve respect and gratitude, not the rudeness and paglalaglag that they’ve received. It was my privilege to have served our country alongside them.
—JOHN P. SEVILLA, 646 Lee Street, Mandaluyong, sevilla.customs@gmail.com