Pork and the 1986 Edsa People Power Revolution

Just my opinion

By Raïssa Robles

We Filipinos thought it was enough to topple a dictator. We thought we could rest easy after that.

We thought wrong.

Some of those who helped unseat the tyrant Ferdinand Marcos were tempted to do what he did – use political power to enrich themselves, live comfortably on the people’s money, get ahead of the rest and to hell with everybody else.

It was something that we Filipinos did not foresee – that good men could turn bad, sometimes very bad. And bad men could become much worse.

It was morphing time and I witnessed a lot of it as a young political reporter covering the Senate.

Among the things I witnessed began innocently enough and was packaged as something good. As something that would ease poverty and spread the dividends of democracy.

This was the congressional pork barrel.

It has taken me close to seven months to write this piece because the Senate holds a special place in my heart. It is where I witnessed the blooming of democracy. But it was also where I learned how Philippine politics really works. It is where I saw Filipino politicians up close and personal – how they can be noble and selfless one moment and downright mean, vindictive and greedy the next.

Senate was where I personally witnessed in 1987 the revival of the present pork barrel in our country’s history.

The recent, unprecedented outrage over the grand theft of this pork is another rare chance for Filipinos to reboot our democracy. Let’s not waste this chance this time, as we did after the Second World War, and after Edsa People Power 1 and 2.

I write this with the hope that the Senate will cleanse its ranks and finally consign the pork barrel – in whatever form or name – as a relic of our colonial past.

Congressional pork and its repeated theft by our lawmakers throughout our history – starting with the American colonial era – is at the centerpiece of our defective democracy.

It is a top-down kind of democracy where ordinary Filipinos have no say. Where the bosses are the lawmakers. And they expect us to thank them for spending our tax money.

The scandal over pork is the most damaging issue since 1987 to smear the credibility of Congress as an institution. With this issue unresolved, congressmen and senators have lost ALL MORAL ASCENDANCY to investigate corruption in government.

There are calls to abolish Congress. Personally, I’m not for that.

What I want is for the conspirators inside Congress to be hauled to court; resign their offices; have the equivalent amount of what they “lost” in the pork barrel scam frozen in their personal assets; and be detained in regular jail while facing court cases.

No mercy.

The crime they are being accused of is betrayal of the people.

Those senators who say it is not part of their job to see to it that their pork barrel is not stolen by bogus NGOs (Non-Government Organizations) have no business staying in office for ONE MORE DAY.

Consider this. In 2012, Congress enacted a new sin tax law which was intended, among others, to raise:

• P39.5 billion in additional revenues in 2013;
• P45.7 billion this year;
• P57.7 billion in 2015; and
• P64.4 billion in 2016.

In 2013, the pork barrel of all lawmakers totaled P11.6 billion. You could even say that nearly a third of the new tax take for 2013 would simply go to fund their pork.

Before I go into the sordid history of pork barrel in the Philippines, I want to explain why I found a particular statement made by Senator Jinggoy Estrada shocking. Apparently to excuse the fact that millions of pesos of his pork barrel ended up with fake NGOs linked to Janet Lim Napoles, Senator Jinggoy said:

“It’s not for the senators to determine whether an NGO is bogus or not. It’s within the powers, the functions of the Department of Agriculture to determine if an NGO is bogus or not. Alangan namang kami ang magsasabi na bogus yan. How would we know?”

Dear Senator Estrada,

Niloloko mo naman ang taongbayan na humalal sa yo. {You are fooling the Filipino people who elected you into office.)

Of course you would know because like every elected politician, pork barrel serves a dual purpose for you: It’s for self-service and public service. It’s to get you re-elected and to fulfill the promises you made to people who had elected you. It’s to make the lives of some Filipinos better.

The moment any senator with higher political ambition sits down in office, almost every move he makes is intended to get him re-elected six years hence. He commissions popularity polls (using our money, of course) to find out where he is weak and strong. And he pours his pork barrel into areas where he wants to be stronger and where he has unfulfilled election promises.

Let me give a concrete example of the power of the pork barrel to get senators re-elected.

In 1992, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo ran and won for the first time a seat in the Senate. She landed somewhere in the middle of the winners’ list because she was able to tap her parents’ political network. But in 1995 when she ran again, she topped the Senate polls.

How did she do that?

Simple. Through the pork barrel largesse assigned to her by Senator Edgardo Angara who was the Senate President from 1993 to 1995.

“Minanok si Gloria ni Angara, (Angara started grooming her)” my source who was then chief-of-staff of a former Senate President told me. The COS explained that Angara was preparing to run for president in 1998 and he saw Arroyo as a potential vice-presidential running mate.

And so Angara helped to build Mrs Arroyo up through pork.

Because of pork, Mrs Arroyo was able to fund various infrastructure projects in far-flung areas across the country. Each of these projects was always accompanied with giant billboards emblazoned with her face and her name. This political propaganda paid off in 1995 when she ran for re-election and topped the Senate race.

In other words, pork is a potent political tool for an ambitious politician.

Sadly for Angara, Mrs Arroyo decided she could bite the hand that fed her. Her husband Jose Miguel decided she could well run for president herself.

What I’m trying to point out through this anecdote is that senators are very, very careful where they allocate their pork barrel. In exchange for giving away their pork, they expect gratitude, electoral votes, the sort of relationships that in the criminal world would empower a Mafia don.

Politicians make sure they take a lot of smiling pictures with the recipients of their pork.

And so I find it quite incredible, insultingly so,  for senators to claim to the public that they were repeatedly fooled; that they he gave away millions of their pork barrel and no actual projects came out of it. Instead, private individuals pocketed the pork. And this went on for years. And the lawmakers allegedly did not know diddly-squat that they were being scammed.

Do you mean to tell me that Senators Jinggoy Estrada, Juan Ponce Enrile, Bong Revilla, Bongbong Marcos and Gregorio Honasan never asked for pictures of their pork projects? The senators never invited the beneficiaries over to their Senate offices or visited them in the provinces?

They never ever secured the beneficiaries’ undying, personal gratitude?

Just as senators try to attend every wake, every wedding and baptism they are invited to sponsor, they also try to ensure that people who partake of their pork know that they are the benefactors.

The senators and congressmen whose pork barrel ended up with fake NGOs would have us believe that they never asked to meet in person the recipients of their pork. They never had any photos snapped with them, which they could then use as part of their political propaganda for re-election.

So in this context, let’s examine once more the excuses that senators have made regarding their stolen pork.

Senator Jinggoy Estrada said:

“It’s not for the senators to determine whether an NGO is bogus or not. It’s within the powers, the functions of the Department of Agriculture to determine if an NGO is bogus or not. Alangan namang kami ang magsasabi na bogus yan. How would we know?”

As I said, of course YOU would know, Senator Estrada. It only takes one call from you to make executive officials and local government executives scramble to do your bidding.

Senator Gregorio Honasan said in reply to the Commission on Audit’s demand for senators to return the stolen pork:

“Ano ang isosoli namin, hindi nga dumadaan ang pera sa amin? (What are we going to return, when the money never passes through us.)Sabi ko nga (As I said) we are not the custodians of public funds. What is there to return?”

When Honasan said that, I remembered what Senator John Osmeña told me about pork back in 1987 when this was first re-introduced in Philippine politics.

It was Senator John Osmeña who gave me my crash course on pork. A veteran of the last pre-Martial Law Senate, Osmeña explained to me that senators needed pork for re-election and kickbacks. He told me how, before Martial Law, lawmakers used pork to fund the construction of a road and the contractor would “kick back” a portion of the total project amount to the lawmaker by scrimping on material or declaring “ghost workers.” Or sometimes, a contractor in connivance with a lawmaker could even get away with a “ghost project”.

Osmeña said this was precisely why pre-Martial Law congressional veterans like then Senate President Jovito Salonga, Senators Ernesto Maceda and Neptali Gonzales (who was a congressman before Martial Law) had placed safeguards.

One safeguard was that pork would no longer be handed to lawmakers in cash, which was the practice before Martial Law. The senators would merely identify the projects and/or end-beneficiaries of their pork. The pork would then be coursed through an agency of the Executive branch of government for implementation.

I had asked various senators then why they needed pork. I could not find it as one of the powers explicitly granted to Congress in the 1987 Constitution, I told them.

I was told it was “inherent” in the lawmaking power of Congress and its “power over the purse”.

The Senators frankly said that even if they didn’t want to use pork, there were so many poor people trooping daily to their offices asking for “pamburol, panglibing, medicine, money for surgery or hospitalization. On top of that, local government executives to whom they owed their victory were also asking them for farm-to-market roads, or a public market or a basketball court or to sponsor a fiesta. They could not just turn them away. The people might get angry if they said “no.”

The senators said they weren’t asking for much – just a very modest amount – just several millions of pesos – to meet the needs of their “constituents”.

I don’t remember what that modest amount was. Former finance official Milwida Guevarra said it was P14 million per senator. All I remember was that there was public uproar at that time over the re-introduction of pork.

But the senators argued with sweet tongues.

How could you not trust these men and women who had put their lives on the line fighting the Marcos dictatorship and wanting to do good for their country?

Still, I was bothered. As a newbie reporter covering the post-Martial Law Senate in 1987, I knew nothing about pork.

It was only three years later in 1990 that I learned more about pork – how it rotted our entire political system even before the Republic was formed in 1946.

The American colonizers introduced the pork barrel system to keep the local political elite happy and subservient. In 1907, the Americans held the first election of an 80-member Philippine Assembly, to represent the 34 Philippine provinces then. I learned all these when I was researching for my book on the biography of President Elpidio Quirino, commissioned by the Filipinas Foundation which ran the Ayala Museum. The museum had been the recipient of Quirino’s presidential papers and wanted a book written based on the papers and Quirino’s unpublished autobiography. I accepted on the condition that the book would not be censored by the Quirino family.

In the 1900s, pork barrel was the way to bring development to the country’s provinces since provincial governors had limited powers to raise funding for infrastructure.

Members of the Philippine Assembly became the leaders of patronage through their pork.

When the Americans “gave” the Philippines independence  in 1946, the Philippine politicians adopted the political system they were familiar with.

During the presidency of Quirino, even Senator Lorenzo Tañada asked and obtained pork. Writing in Free Press magazine, the late Teodoro Locsin Sr. recounted how Tañada once managed to extract P30,000 worth of pork from President Quirino – a hefty sum at that time – in order to build the breakwater in his hometown of Gumaca, Quezon. In return, there was a tacit understanding that Tañada would back Quirino in his fight against then Senate President Jose Avelino – who has gone down in history as the politician who said, “What are we in power for?”.

To read more about Avelino’s famous creed, pls click on this link.

There was never any mention of pork in the 1935 Philippine Constitution nor in the 1987 Constitution.

It is notable that the late Senator Arturo Tolentino made no mention of pork in his ground-breaking book, “Republic in Action” which teachers used to teach pre-Martial Law students how their government worked.

Pork has always been our democracy’s dirty open secret. It’s there. Everyone talks about it. But there are no rules to rein in the greed of any politician who decides to divert pork into his own pocket.

Which is what has been happening for over a century of Philippine politics.

No lawmaker has ever gone to jail for stealing pork.

And yet it is one of the country’s persistent and serious problems.

As I said earlier, pork institutionalizes a top-down kind of development. Senators and congressmen decide where tax money should go. And people have to grovel to get a piece of it.

Pork has frittered away tax money on waiting sheds, basketball courts and shoddy roads – money that could have built more expensive infrastructures  like power plants and dams, if only these had been pooled together. And if only development, and not political patronage, was the top priority.

I don’t think pork has been abolished. It has just morphed into a different form but it’s still pork.

The least we should do as a nation is to start jailing those who steal pork. No matter how old, no matter the gender.

And start demanding a say in how it’s used.