By Raïssa Robles
This interview with Customs Deputy Commissioner Danilo Lim and the accompanying sidebar on smuggling were recently published in Asian Dragon magazine. I am posting these with the magazine’s permission.
Danilo Lim - ex-rebel general now Customs Deputy Commissioner for operations - PHOTO by Raissa Robles
If the former jailed rebel general Danilo Lim continues to look grim these days, he has good reason to be.
Lim, 56, has been handed the chance to “put my money where my mouth is.” He was offered the post of deputy commissioner for intelligence operations of the Bureau of Customs, which was the farthest thing he had in mind.
You see, Lim said, he preferred a government position that would directly impact the lives of the poverty-stricken masses, such as the The Local Water Utilities Administration (LWUA), the National Irrigation Administration (NIA) or the National Electrification Administration (NEA).
But never the Bureau of Customs that has a system so thickly encrusted with corruption. It would not be a badge of honor but of shame to work there because “if you do some hanky-panky and even if you don’t, you are stained by the stigma,” he said.
The administration of President Benigno Aquino III, however, refused to give up on Lim whom the Liberal Party had fielded unsuccessfully for senator last year.
Starting May this year, three personalities close to Aquino lobbied with him to take the No. 2 post at Customs.
Lim said,
Secretary Mar Roxas and I talked. He told me he wanted me to join this bureau and that he was making a memo to the president recommending I join this bureau. I told him I’m not crazy about this because I prefer other agencies more direct with the masses.
In early August, Executive Secretary Paquito Ochoa followed up the offer. Lim replied,:
Is another agency possible?
Then Finance Secretary Cesar Purisima, whose office oversees customs, phoned him.
Lim explained why he was very wary about accepting a post that others were lusting for:
I have been consistent in my stance against corruption. I have been detained for more than seven years all in all. I won’t allow seven years of sacrifice to go down the drain because I’m assigned in this bureau.
in the end, though, Lim caved in –
I told myself, I didn’t ask for this job. I didn’t apply for this. Now that I’m here, I’ll make the best out of this. Put my money where my mouth is and show some results.
When President Aquino personally phoned Lim before his oath-taking, they talked for nearly an hour. Aquino asked him to help raise revenues, address corruption and smuggling.
He told me, of course anything illegal you have to act on. Don’t entertain people who use my name or drop names of relatives, or close friends. Don’t believe them or entertain them.
Ex-rebel general Danilo Lim was tapped to become the new deputy commissioner for customs by President Benigno Aquino III - official PHOTO from Malacanang Palace
Just 12 days into the job, Lim has criss-crossed the archipelago to personally lead the seizure of misdeclared goods such as rice, vehicles and onions.
If Lim keeps this up, he would be directly helping the country’s poorest sector – the farmers.
The farmers consider onions as the test case for the Bureau of Customs. Last year, according to Ernesto Ordoñez, a former trade and agricultural underseretary who now heads the NGO Agriwatch, KASAMNE Onion Growers chair Leandro Tañedo told then Customs Commissioner Joselito Alvarez that they were hurting due to onion smuggling. Their break-even farm gate price was P20 per kilo but they had to sell at P16 per kilo to compete with onions smuggled from China.
Ordoñez said they had earlier given the bureau a list of 63 shipments of onions that came in without import permits. The officials before Biazon and Lim did nothing about it.
What Lim now calls this “cat and mouse work” has been a drastic change from the four years of detention he had to endure until May 31 last year:
I couldn’t do much (then) because I was not allowed to do so many things” including use a mobile phone and computer.
For eight months he was placed in solitary confinement in Tanay, Rizal. The detention area was spacious but the walls were high and he could talk to no one.
Maybe they wanted to break me.
I raised chickens and read some books, mostly biographies.
It was actually Lim’s second taste of detention. The first was after the 1989 bloody coup attempt where he was among the junior officers who led a week-long siege of Makati business district. Had Lim’s side won, Aquino would never have been president and Rozzano “Ruffy” Biazon would not be Lim’s boss today. Biazon’s father was a general on the opposite side defending the military headquarters from Lim’s fellow renegades.
After three years in the brig, he obtained amnesty and was allowed to go back to soldiering. He was after all a prominent member of Philippine Military Academy Class of 1978 (which had adopted President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo as an honorary classmate). He had topped the PMA entrance exam.
He also studied twice in the United States – at the United States Military Academy at West Point after also topping its entrance exam and at the Infantry School in Fort Benning, Georgia, which he finished at the top of his batch.
There were rumors that a rehabilitated Lim might even be on track to be a military chief. However, on February 23, 2006, Scout Ranger chief Lim and marine Colonel Ariel Querubin tried to persuade the Armed Forces Chief-of-Staff General Generoso Senga to go along with their plan to publicly withdraw military support from then President Gloria Macapagal-Arryo.
Both officers were arrested and detained. The following year, though, while appearing in a court hearing, Lim simply walked out of the court room with other detained officers to hole up at the Peninsula Manila hotel in Makati City and again called for Arroyo’s ouster.
The siege was called off when the expected “people power” failed to materialize. Lim obtained amnesty from President Aquino in October 2010.
In July this year before a University of the Philippines forum, he tried to explain his personal reasons for rebelling against the system, instead of embracing it and making money out of it.
He said:
But no matter how hard I tried to do the right thing, I was constantly hounded by corruption so pervasive.
I realized if I did nothing, if I stand idly by while I watched my people being robbed….I would myself be complicit of these immoral acts.
He said he wanted to be “part of the solution” and not just a soldier trained to obey without question.
He also theorized that-
Eventually we would realize that cleansing in the military would really amount to nothing without accompanying alterations in the bigger picture – the bureaucracy, government and whole society – if we agree the military is a small picture that reflects the bigger picture.
He had then concluded that –
If the universe is corrupt then the subset (like the military) would also be corrupt.
It was for these very reasons that he decided to accept the post at customs.
Like the new Customs Commissioner Biazon, Lim said he believes in putting up functioning systems.
One of his self-imposed first tasks is –
To identify the weakest links, the loopholes…(because) a weak point in the chain renders the whole chain weak.
He intends to start by examining the acccreditation of existing companies or entities dealing with customs. That means tediously weeding out fly-by-night companies and fictitious companies.
He has also relocated his office to a room across that of Biazon for easier coordination.
We’ve heard a lot of horror stories about the practices here. What Senator (Panfilo) Lacson said really had basis.
Lacson had warned that every Friday afternoon, customs officials had the habit of disappearing in order to collect their cut in bribes.
Lim has tried to look on the bright side:
There are (customs) people who do good. I guess it’s just a matter of giving the right motivation and policies. That’s the challenge.
He has yet to be offered a bribe –
I think they know me better to make an offer.
Aside from catching smugglers and helping raise revenues, Lim faces yet another unfamiliar challenge – beating the daily traffic to and from office.
Below is an overview of the gigantic task facing the officials of the Bureau of Customs:
A mammoth job
When Rozzano “Ruffy Biazon and his deputy for operations Danilo Lim took over last month, the bureau had on file 20 known really big time smugglers.
Smuggling is so rampant and yet no updated study of its extent has been done in recent years.
Recent estimates are shocking.
Ernesto Ordoñez, a former trade and agricultural undersecretary who now heads the NGO Agriwatch, once told Customs Commissioner Rozzano Biazon’s predecessor that the government could be losing around 120 billion pesos a year in uncollected revenues due to “outright smuggling” and “technical smuggling”. The latter includes undervaluation and misclassification of imported goods.
Ordoñez arrived at this sum in this manner.
Agriwatch noted that the International Monetary Fund recorded Philippine import figures from 2002 to 2007 at US$47.5 billion.
The Philippine National Statistics Office placed imports at US$46.5 billion, or close to the IMF estimate.
But actual records at the Bureau of Customs placed imports for the same period at only US$32.5 billion.
Agriwatch and other agricultural leaders had asked Joselito Alvarez when he newly assumed the post of Customs Commissioner last year:
“Could the difference of about $15 billion (P653 billion) represent the value of smuggled goods coming into the country every year?,” Agriwatch asked.
A totally different source paints the same grim picture.
In August this year, the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks leaked a cable purportedly written by US Ambassador to Manila Francis Ricciardone. Marked “sensitive” and dated May 2, 2005, it was entitled “Embracing the dragon: the Philippines deepens economic engagement with China.”
Ricciardone noted the yawning gap between trade figures coming from Beijing with those of Manila.
For instance, China’s General Administration of Customs placed 2004 bilateral trade with the Philippines at US$13.3 billion. But the Philippine NSO said the same was only US$5.185 billion that year.
Ricciardone wrote:
This discrepancy between the data collected by the Chinese and Philippine governments suggests that a great deal of the trade between these two countries is happening under the radar.
The Philippine press has recently carried stories about local producers of shoes, textiles, and appliances that have been negatively affected by the large-scale smuggling of Chinese goods. – Raissa Robles
Both Biazon and his deputy Lim recently noted that goods mostly being smuggled were vehicles, oil products, food products like onions, used garments, electronics, guns and illegal drugs – not necessarily in that order.
____________________________
GAMAYNON 'GM' says
Nothing to follow for searching for a heroes???
is it being Filipino we are very Enthusiastic to start but we don’t have patient to for the good fruit!!!
edwin w says
smuggling happen because we allows it
smuggling happen because we are not very productive..our production cost are higher than other countries..our agricultural products are higher than other countries..the irony of all is that almost all Asian countries that are agricultural producer learn their technology in our country
to solve the unemployement problem , smuggling ,migration and increase our agricultural potential and export , our government must address the needs of the agricultural sector
farmers don’t have access to credits , not enough farm to market road , not enough post harvest facility and other infra
our fellow citizen must be vigilant by buying only Philippine made product, deny the market for the smugglers,reward the honest government official with higher salary and incentives
with the big disparity in import data and taxes losses from smuggling, gov’t will have enough fund to see all of this done .
with a strong agricultural backbone , our economy will be better , and industry will thrive
export will grow
all our skilled worker now working abroad can now come back to our mother land and further contribute to our growth
deny the market for the smuggle goods and we will become prosperous
buy our own product
Leila says
I salute General Lim, he should be the Bureau of Customs Commissioner
joan says
Good job, Raissa!
raissa says
Thanks for reading.
Blanche says
Just getting to know Ninoy “the hero” Aquino.
Blanche says
TIME TO REVISIT TAG ON NINOY AQUINO AS NATIONAL HERO.
by Ed Malay
Except for what I have written about Ninoy Aquino, I no longer want to add anything as I am one person who respects the soul of a person especially one who is long dead. But if there is something that I may say with regards to what the late Ninoy Aquino represents it is the word ambition written all over him.
Prior to martial law, then Pres. Ferdinand Marcos launched what was then an ambitious plan to occupy Sabah which historically and ancestrally is part of the Philippines. Hundreds of Filipinos were recruited and trained. Many were already sent to Sabah as an advance force. While the plan may be unorthodox and which may constitute an act of war, the objective was noble for it was to regain a territory which in the first place belongs to the Philippines.
The operation was to have been finalized when then Sen. Ninoy Aquino rose on the floor of the Senate and exposed the plan that was then labeled as Operation Jabidah. The plan came to public view when several men who were training escaped from the training facility and were shot while escaping and Ninoy Aquino used this as basis for his privilege speech. Again, this plot to regain Sabah may have been wrong but these men knew beforehand what they were getting into and knew the risks and took it. This is no different from similar training camps regardless of the kind of ideology under which such facilities are under.
What happened following Aquino’s expose’ was that the Filipino soldiers who were already in Sabah numbering more than 1,000 were all rounded up by the Malaysian authorities and executed one by one. Some 1,000 Filipino soldiers lost their lives for a noble cause just because an irresponsible and ambitious politician exposed the plot without due regard to the lives of the Filipino soldiers.
And if one were to do a research on the legislative record of this so-called national hero there is nothing in the archives that would even suggest that Ninoy came close to helping our countrymen except deliver brilliant privilege speeches that demonized then President Ferdinand Marcos while at the same time promoting himself as the messiah that this country needed. Remember too that it was during his time as Governor of Tarlac when the New People’s Army grew to such prominence that it became a serious threat to national security. We’re not saying that Ninoy had a hand in this. We’re just saying the coincidence is striking.
Then came the historic and dreaded Plaza Miranda bombing during the political meeting of the Liberal Party. The party bigwigs were all there and were almost wiped out when two grenades were lobbed at the stage where the top LP leaders were seated. Senators Jovy Salonga, Gerry Roxas, Rep. Ramon Bagatsing. All the important and top leaders of the LP were there EXCEPT ONE – SEN. NINOY AQUINO. For some reason, Ninoy Aquino was not there, the ONLY ONE among the LP hierarchy who was not there when Plaza Miranda turned into a carnage.
Pres. Ferdinand Marcos became the most convenient alibi and suspect. For good reason. The LP representing the mainstream Opposition at the time was becoming a thorn on the side of Marcos and eliminating the LP ranks would have been enough justification. But this was later ruled out when subsequent investigations and even a more recent court ruling said that the communist rebels were behind the mass assassination attempt on the LP leaders at Plaza Miranda.
And the same question raised in 1972 remains. WHERE WAS SEN. NINOY AQUINO AT THE TIME. WHY WAS HE NOT AT PLAZA MIRANDA. WHY WAS IT THAT OF ALL THE MEMBERS OF THE LIBERAL PARTY, SEN. AQUINO WHO WAS SUPPOSED TO BE AN LP PRESIDENTIAL TIMBER WAS NOT THERE AT PLAZA MIRANDA.
There were of course assumptions and assertions that the late Sen. Ninoy Aquino was more than just a friend to the leftist movement. In fact there were even some accounts claiming that Ninoy Aquino was particularly known to New People’s Army chief Kumander Dante although this was never verified.
History has a way of rewriting itself.
raissa says
I’m curious to know more about this part –
What happened following Aquino’s expose’ was that the Filipino soldiers who were already in Sabah numbering more than 1,000 were all rounded up by the Malaysian authorities and executed one by one. Some 1,000 Filipino soldiers lost their lives for a noble cause just because an irresponsible and ambitious politician exposed the plot without due regard to the lives of the Filipino soldiers.
What is the source? I’d like to follow it up cause its the first time I’ve heard about it.
Pickers in Markham says
This is a classic tabloid piece and very poor journalistic story that you typically hear in the streets of Lahore worthy of Jesse Ventura’s conspiracy theory episode. Very opinionated with no trace of facts. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out a fiction-based story. Try these: “I no longer want to add anything as I am one person who respects the soul of a person especially one who is long dead. But…” “…objective was noble for it was to regain a territory which in the first place belongs to the Philippines”, “this plot to regain Sabah may have been wrong but these men knew beforehand what they were getting into and knew the risks and took it.” “Some 1,000 Filipino soldiers lost their lives for a noble cause just because an irresponsible and ambitious politician exposed the plot without due regard to the lives of the Filipino soldiers”.. just to name a few.
Pickers in Markham says
Here’s what one blogger thought about a certain Ed Malay
WHO IS ED MALAY?
Posted on April 27, 2010 by durianburgdavao
This is a comment sent to durianburgdavao by
[email protected]:
Ed Malay, in all his 64 years (it was his birthday yesterday, April 22, 1946) has failed to accept the reality that a good education is critical to achieving any professional career. He finished High School at the MA ROXAS HIGH SCHOOL in 1964 and puts in his bio-data Adamson University 1964. It goes to show that he is a mere college drop-out trying to eke out a living pretending to be a professional journalist without any skill other than licking some powerful asses.
He faked my Facebook Account 3 times and left his trail in the URL address of the fake Facebook Accounts using my name and profile pictures, obviously not familiar how the internet protocol works especially with .php formatted webpages where CSS Style Sheets and Master Pages are commonly used and inserted with .php codes which leaves behind the Master Page URLs.
He was even quoted as telling a potential client ” my webpage was hacked by a trojan virus ” In his world of pretentions, trojan viruses now can hack websites like his virus-ridden website http://www.philpolitics.com. I have warned you this is a virus infested website, browse at your own risk.
The pathetic Ed Malay even faked an autograph of Former President Fidel V. Ramos in one of his pictures in his Facebook Account where he forged a note on the picture purportedly written by FVR on the bond paper where he placed the picture and wrote in very small space, avoiding writing on the main picture, contrary to usual autographed pictures where the celebrities write all over the picture to make the authograph autehntic for the fan.
He even has an photo album in Facebook Titled ‘Spiritual Sojourn in HK’, a pathetic attempt to look holy but why not in Lourdes France, or Medjugorje, or the Holy Land? Why of all places seek spirituality in HongKong, a shopping haven?
Obviously, the guy is such a pathetic creature in his last hurrah. Umayos Ka Ed Malay !
rodjun says
what happened to those numerous container vans that mysteriously disappeared??
raissa says
I don’t know.
Ben Leano says
Cases are to be filed against some 14 people. http://www.manilastandardtoday.com/insideMetro.htm?f=2011/december/2/metro2.isx&d=2011/december/2
Randy Lopez says
I believe the general is fighting a good fight on this battle although he has a small force. I hope someday, somehow I could join and help him. hehehe
Johnny M says
Keeping my faith on this government, I wish this government will be successful at the end of its term and will be sustained by the next leaders. Let’s do our share everyday.
raissa says
Be vigilant.
Pickers in Markham says
That’s the downside of office term limit. The hardcore misfits will be waiting in the wings and resume their ‘career’ when the new administration comes in or during their lameduck phase. Perhaps we should look at changing the system. I reckon a lot will not mind living in Singapore if given a chance to. The number of filipinos living and aspiring to go to countries that have repressive regimes and inhospitable climate like the gulf region, africa, etc. are just amazing. Democracy is important but so is rule of law and the general welfare. Those who left the country obviously put that in the reverse order.