Amnesia prescription
How does one bag a slot in local history, even if tawdry? Former Election Commissioner Virgilio Garcillano prescribes a hefty dose of amnesia.
Garcillano clamped hands-on oversight of fraud-ridden elections in two crucial areas: the 2004 presidential elections in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao and the 2007 senatorial shutout of Maguindanao. Both set new records of sleaze.
Juan Miguel Zubiri conceded there was ballot rigging by an unprecedented surrender of his Senate seat. New witnesses prodded the Department of Justice and Commission of Elections to revisit these festering issues.
Former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, whose term straddled those two elections, battles a rare spine infection. Everyone hopes she will recover soon. Knock on wood.
Still, this lady knew “talent” wherever she stumbled upon it, from the Comelec to the Supreme Court. Her midnight “Hello, Garci” call to “confirm” her one-million vote lead in Mindanao demonstrated that skill.
In an interview in Bukidnon, Garcillano couldn’t resist tooting his horn. “We’re talking about elections—which I am known for,” he bragged.
Given his “expertise,” would he testify before Comelec and DOJ probers? He begged off.
“Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in memory than the wish to forget it.” So, Garci prescribed instead a double dose of amnesia. “It’s time to forget the issue of 2004 election fraud,” he said. “Let’s move on.”
Forget Edsa II, then President Arroyo urged at the 2008 People Power rites. Amnesia “would heal wounds,” inflicted by People Power which ousted her scandal-tainted predecessor.
Chatter about a possible Esda 3 rattled GMA then. That had been stoked by back-to-back scandals, from the ZTE broadband scam to the looting of Pagcor coffers. But was the lady being original?
Hit the rewind button to President Joseph Estrada’s Latin-American state visit. Erap and party touched down in Santiago, Chile, in September 1999. Half a world away, Filipinos marked the 13th anniversary of People Power 1. Chile was grappling at the time with remnants of caudillo dictatorship. The Chilean press played up reports on People Power rites.
“Why do we commemorate dark spots in our history?” an irritated Erap griped. “Dapat, ang mga pangit at nakalipas (ugly parts of our past), like martial law, ought to be forgotten.” Why dawdle over the unpleasant? “We should move on.”
Erap would indeed move on. An aborted impeachment and People Power 2 swept him away. He became the first Philippine president to be convicted for plunder. A protracted luxury house arrest followed. Was his pardon, given by Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, destiny?
“It would be destiny if I am elected as Manila mayor,” Estrada declared on a TV talk show. “I started as a mayor, I may end up as a mayor. That’s destiny.”
But isn’t this the same shabby tune local communists sang when asked about over 1,400 slaughtered in paranoid pogroms in the late 1980s to the early 1990s. A “cannibal revolution” devoured its own children, noted the Inquirer in a Jan. 2, 2004 editorial. Innocent comrades were killed without even a pretense of trials. Their remains moulder in unmarked graves, reminiscent of Stalin’s massacre of Polish officers in Katyn Forest or Cambodia’s killing fields. Some executioners today are aging, button-down bourgeois executives in air-conditioned Metro Manila offices.
Why recall those purges? groused the Communist Party of the Philippines in an Inquirer opinion page article on Feb. 1, 2004. The party condemned the abuses, wrote Anne Buenaventura of the party’s information bureau. “It rectified this mistake.”
“They didn’t bother to notify us,” answered relatives in an Inquirer open letter. Instead the party shredded the names of the victims and the location of their graves. “We should not stop remembering and reminding.”
“Forgetting is never an option,” Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate Elie Weisel wrote in “Hope, Despair and Memory.” “An immoral society betrays because it betrays the basis for humanity—which is memory. ‘’
“A moral society is committed to memory,” Weisel continued. “Never be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
Today, former First Gentleman Mike Arroyo has absolutely no memory of ever owning a fleet of helicopters. Sorsogon Rep. Salvador Escudero authored House Resolution 1135 to bury the remains of Ferdinand Marcos in Libingan ng mga Bayani. He can’t recall any abuse by the dictatorship.
In his novel “1984,” George Orwell depicted a country where citizens thrust into a “memory hole” anything that crossed the whim of rulers. As memory holes shredded remembrance, wrong became right. Lies replaced truth. And freedom turned into slavery.
Like malign genies, blotted-out memories don’t stay bottled up. They deform daily life.
The Philippines seems caught in a long nightmare between remembering and forgetting, Alfred McCoy told the Ateneo-Wisconsion Universities conference on “Memory, Truth-Telling and the Pursuit of Justice.” Amnesia turns “cronies into statesmen, torturers into legislators and killers into generals”—and the likes of Virgilio Garcillano and Co.
Sue Garci for perjury, passport tampering and tax evasion, the Inquirer suggests. “The prospect of rotting inside a jail might make him reconsider his omerta-like obstinacy.”
Fine. But first make sure he doesn’t vanish, as Dinagat Island Rep. Ruben Ecleo did.
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