Nightmare called Bedol

Like a nightmare skulking deep in the subconscious, lying quiet in the day but ready to manifest itself at any inopportune moment of sleep, Lintang Bedol has resurfaced in the news, with a hearing on his case held last Thursday. If the name now rings a faint bell, that’s because Bedol has largely blurred into the obscurity of prison since 2011, charged with a crime that goes back to the midterm elections in 2007 when he allegedly manipulated the senatorial elections in Maguindanao to favor the ruling party of then President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

Massive cheating was alleged in the 2007 polls, but none more blatant, it seemed, than in Maguindanao, where Bedol, the province’s election supervisor, declared that Arroyo’s senatorial slate had won 12-0. Not only that: The 19 other senatorial candidates got zero votes, among them seven candidates of the opposition. But for election observers interested in independently verifying the numbers, Bedol presented an outrageous hurdle: He claimed that the municipal certificates of canvass were gone—stolen from the Commission on Elections office at the provincial capitol in Shariff Aguak.

The controversial Maguindanao results would deliver the 12th Senate seat at the time to administration candidate Miguel Zubiri, at the expense of the opposition’s Aquilino Pimentel III. Zubiri would later resign from his post, “without admitting any fault,” after a bombshell from Zaldy Ampatuan, former governor of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao. Ampatuan claimed in 2011—in apparent retaliation against Arroyo for having him and members of his family detained in connection with the 2009 Maguindanao massacre—that during the 2007 polls, Arroyo and her husband ordered his father, Andal Ampatuan Sr., to rig the results. The specific order was supposedly to ensure that three opposition senators—Benigno Aquino III, Panfilo Lacson and Alan Peter Cayetano—got zero votes, and their numbers transferred to Zubiri.

The “dagdag-bawas” operation needed an operative at the local Comelec, of course, and that job went to Bedol. But the irregularities so stank that the Comelec had no recourse but to launch an inquiry into the allegations and Bedol’s role in it. When a warrant for his arrest was issued in 2007, the slippery Bedol went into hiding for four years, surrendering only in July 2011. On the dock, he confirmed the essential details of Zaldy Ampatuan’s accusations against Arroyo. He also revealed the existence of a “syndicate” in the Comelec engaged in the sale of certificates of canvass and other vital documents to parties intent on thwarting any investigation of padded or manipulated election results. That would explain the alleged theft of the 2007 documents from the Comelec’s Shariff Aguak office, the convenient disappearance of which sealed the victory of Zubiri and the Arroyo slate.

Bedol’s brazen trickery at the Comelec could only be possible with backstopping by powerful and influential forces—in this case, the Ampatuans, long the overlords of Maguindanao, and Arroyo. Bedol and Arroyo actually go a long way further than the 2007 polls. In the infamous “Hello, Garci” phone conversation between Arroyo and then Comelec Commissioner Virgilio Garcillano, Bedol had the distinction of being mentioned—as the point man in the South tasked to make the necessary moves (“gagawa ng paraan”) to ensure that she would win the 2004 presidential election against her opponent, Fernando Poe Jr., by a persuasive one million votes.

It was a most delicate operation, and its implementation was entrusted to a handful of operatives. But Bedol was a dependable henchman—or, as Garcillano memorably put it, “Hindi naman ho masyadong problema sa Maguindanao (Maguindanao isn’t much of a problem)”—and he delivered accordingly. The Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism would later report: “Muslim Mindanao votes were indeed crucial to Arroyo’s winning margin as the region accounted for close to 300,000 of the lead. In fact, 17 percent of Arroyo’s total votes obtained in Mindanao came from ARMM. In seven towns ruled by the pro-Arroyo Ampatuan clan, Arroyo won over Poe by an incredible vote ratio of 82,411 to 142 (or 99.83 percent to 0.17 percent). In two towns, Arroyo garnered all the votes, with Poe getting zero.”

Bedol is in jail, but his and Garci’s crimes, and those of their overseers, have gone unpunished—like a nightmare yet to be exorcised by the light of day. Which means that the syndicate whose existence he confirmed is still spooking the Comelec.