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| ON THE OTHER HAND |
| Heeeeeere�s Garci! By Antonio C. Abaya Written Nov. 29, 2005 For the Standard Today, December 01 issue You cannot blame people for being skeptical and cynical, and for coming to the conclusion that all this has been scripted in advance, like those supposedly casual and spontaneous conversations on American television talk shows Based on recent news stories that have appeared in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, including deliberately choreographed leaks to media, the Garci saga has taken the following turns: Nov. 15 � Chief Gloria apologist Michael Defensor says the �Hello Garci� tape is now a closed book and �all venues (to it) have been exhausted�.If some groups want an academic review and understanding of the issue, then they should do this outside the realm of propaganda and publicity.� Nov. 16 � The heads of five House committees that conducted a joint investigation into the �Hello Garci� tapes concluded, in a 58-page report, that Malacanang attempted to rig the May 2004 elections. �Malacanang was clearly at an utter loss to explain the tapes and, on two occasions, tried to cover-up.� Nov. 23 � After disappearing for five months, following the �Hello, Garci� tapes and the political turmoil that it spawned, former Comelec commissioner Virgilio Garcillano, is suddenly back in the news. His wife Grace and two congressmen, separately, told the Inquirer that Garci was back. He supposedly took a kumpit from Kota Kinabalu in Sabah (Malaysia) to Puerto Princesa, then flew in a private plane to Cagayan de Oro (where he has a house), from where he traveled on land to Marawi City and thence to Bukidnon (where he has farms). This is said to have transpired two weeks ago, according to one source, or three weeks ago, according to another. But at about this same time, Mrs. Garcillano, in a video-taped interview with Ricky Carandang on ANC Channel 27, revealed, almost as an afterthought, that Garci never left the country at all. It was TV journalist Carandang who first broke the news that the Singapore foreign ministry, in response to an official inquiry from our Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA), wrote back that someone named Virgilio Garcillano did land in Singapore on July 14 aboard a private Learjet with registration no. RP-C 1426, and left on board a commercial airliner bound for London and parts unknown the following day. That Learjet has since been found to be operated by Subic Air, a company owned by Jose �Pepito� Alvarez, a known ally of President Arroyo. Nov. 25 � In apparent preparation for Garci�s long postponed (because he was nowhere to be found) appearance before the House committees investigating the Garci tape, administration congressmen removed four of five chairmen of the committees which had come up with a draft report that the Arroyo administration had attempted to cover up revelations connected with the Garci tapes. Nov. 26 � To facilitate Garci�s appearance before the House committees, opposition congressmen have withdrawn the P1 million bounty on Garcillano. Garci�s lawyer has petitioned the Supreme Court to nullify the pending warrant of arrest issued by the House, and to stop the House committees from playing the controversial tapes on the grounds that they had been illegally obtained and thus inadmissible as evidence. Nov. 27 � An unidentified PR man, who has been involved in political campaigns since 1990, predicts that Garci�s forthcoming revelations will include admissions that he (Garci) had been called by and had met with, between March and May, two senatorial candidates running in the 2004 elections, to plan �special operations,� a polite term for electoral fraud. Said the Inquirer: �The source said the meeting was brokered by a civil society personality who also set the cost of the �special operations� at P35 million for the first candidate, and P55 million for the second candidate.� Garci supposedly will reveal the names of the two senatorial candidates � who won � and the alleged civil society broker. In an interview with the Inquirer in June, before he disappeared, Garcillano admitted talking to then senatorial candidates Jamby Madrigal and Mar Roxas � who both won � and VP candidate Loren Legarda and Rep. Francis Escudeo (on behalf of his father Salavador, a senatorial candidate) � both of whom lost. Garci also admitted talking to re-electionist President Arroyo, but denied that he conspired with her to cheat for her. For his part, former senator Kit Tatad claims that Garci returned to the country via a South Phoenix flight (from where, to where?) on Nov. 18, met with First Gentleman Mike Arroyo in Zamboanga Sibugay that afternoon, as well as with ARMM Governor Zaldy Ampatuan and Comelec officials from North Cotabato, South Cotabato, Lanao del Sur and Lanao del Norte. The Inquirer says their calls to Arroyo�s lawyer were not answered. (Most certainly not by coincidence, the above four provinces � plus Sulu, Tawi-Tawi and Basilan � were mentioned several times in the taped conversations between someone who sounded like President Arroyo and someone who sounded like Garcillano. (These provinces are also located in the four regions where analyst Roberto Verzola, in a June 2004 article in the Inquirer, found the biggest discrepancies between the incomplete but extrapolated Namfrel figures [based on electoral returns] and the official Comelec figures [based on certificates of canvass]: Western Mindanao, 396.85%; Muslim Mindanao, 310.07%; Northern Mindanao, 128.33%; and Central Mindanao, 62.79%.) See my article �Cheating in 2004� (June 08, 2005) and other related articles going back to June 2004. Nov. 28 � Garci repeats what his wife Grace said in that ANC interview with Ricky Carandang (above) several days earlier, namely, that he never left the country at all. Nov. 29 � In his first interview with print media, Garci repeated his claim that he never left the Philippines, and dismissed the report of the Singapore foreign ministry that he arrived in Singapore on July 14 and left the next day on board a British Airways plane for an undisclosed location. Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez is quoted as saying: �That is something that has to be explained because there is a certification from Singapore that he was there and then he immediately left Singapore on board a British Airways flight. That evidence is really hard to disprove.� But that does not seem to faze President Arroyo�s perennially upbeat political adviser Gabriel Claudio who said Garci was �the best person to pass judgment on the authenticity of the Hello Garci tapes.� Is DOJ Secretary Gonzalez out of the loop? Or are we going to see a good cop-bad cop scenario in the coming weeks? Nov. 30 � Secretary Gonzalez revealed the findings of his department�s investigation of Garci�s departure and theorized that Garci was on board that Learjet but was disguised as the plane�s flight engineer. But this investigation was obviously done without a thorough check with the Singapore authorities and leaves unexplained why the Learjet flew back to Manila with one less person � the flight engineer, at that - on board, Garci having taken that BA flight to a third country, without the usually eagle-eyed Singapore authorities noting the discrepancy. In my article �Garci�s Vanishing Act� (Aug. 21, 2005), I theorized that Garci did leave for Singapore as a passenger on board that Learjet, but that the plane may have had two sets of passenger manifests. One had four persons on board, to satisfy Singapore authorities; the other had only three passengers, without Garci, to mislead Philippine investigators and media. Garci also had his passport stamped �departed� by the Philippine Bureau of Immigration, again to satisfy Singapore authorities, but the act of stamping that passport may have been done in private, say, in the office of an immigration official, so that Garci�s departure does not appear in the bureau�s departure records. Again, to mislead Philippine investigators and media. Garci�s new claim, that he never left the Philippines, can be easily verified from the Singapore authorities. At Bangkok�s and Hong Kong�s international airports � and, I�m certain, also at Singapore�s Changi and Selatar airports � all incoming international visitors are photographed while they stand at the immigration counters having their documents checked and stamped. So chances are very high that the Singapore authorities have at least one photograph of Virgilio Garcillano as he had his documents checked by Singapore Immigration. As the DFA had a dubious track record in dealing with earlier communications from the Singapore government � the DFA purposely delayed releasing them to the public � the House or the Senate should make an official request with the Singapore government for a copy of that photograph of �Virgilio Garcillano� taken on July 14. If that person was really the Garci that we know, then Garci is caught in a Big Lie and nothing he says from now on will be or should be believed by anyone. But if that person turns out to be someone else, then that someone else is caught in a Bigger Lie that involves many others, in and out of government and including Garci himself, some of whom have not yet been identified. Oh, what a tangled web we weave�..***** Reactions to [email protected] or fax 824-7642. Other articles in www.tapatt.org OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO Reactions to �Heeeeere�s Garci� It�s wilder than the movies, Mission Impossible, 1 and 2...My opinion is it�s just another chapter in Philippine circus of politics. Who has ever lost in elections here? It�s always the winner and the cheated. Watch the Congress tear Garci apart publicly, poor guy. He can reveal so much the others are peeing in there pants. Lets enjoy the ride to oblivion. Who suffers? Our country that we love so much. Merry Christmas, Mr. Abaya. More power! Julie Hernandez, [email protected] December 02, 2005 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww This is to formally inform all and sundry that the Thai Government vehemently objects to the location of The SEAGAMES Scoring Tabulation Center: Cagayan de Oro City. Rafael Santos II, [email protected] December 03, 2005 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Hi Tony: That's another interesting article on Garci, thanks. I hope you received a recent e-mail I sent notifying my friends and relatives about an extended trip my wife are taking to Manila for the entire month of December and return on the 5th of January. I have asked everyone to hold off sending any more messages as my computer will be too inundated. After the 5th of this month, I can be reached in Pasig, at Baryo Capitolyo where we will be staying with relatives.. Fred Vidal, [email protected] Plantation, Florida, December 03, 2005 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww As we near the end of the GarSEAGAMES, let us all give thanks for the impressive medal haul of the Philippine teams. It seems that GMA has been saved once again by the diversion of public attention. For a few days respite, her palace Merlin has spread his hypnotism to even mesmerize the entire South East Asia. I am not belittling our athletes, but when in our history have we won so many golds? Is it because the Philippine Diaspora has produced so many hybrid athletic Pinoys? Wait till Merlin is grilled in Congress by one of the ten outstanding young men whom GMA awarded personally. Will Congress be hypnotized? Stay tuned! Rafael Santos II, [email protected] Roxas City, December 03, 2005 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Tell the truth and run. --Yugoslavian Proverb There are only two ways of telling the complete truth - anonymously and posthumously. --Thomas Sowell NOTE: Garci should never appear in both houses of Congress. No need! Congress will only waste our tax payers money. We know most of them are stupid. Roger L. Madrigal, [email protected] December 03, 2005 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww. I've been reading the blow by blow account of the Garci circus act in the House of Representatives. Seems to me the so-called Garci hearings on the alleged Gloria Macapagal election rigging last year are a total, utter, stupid dud! Garcillano is turning the whole country into a low-class circus ring. I really see no point in going on with the Garci hearings. The man is a friggin immoral lawyer who will just parry questions. The more I read of the blow by blow account, the more skeptical I become about the what the legislature is trying to achieve. No truth is going to come out of those hearings except that Garci is convincing everybody else that he�s an inveterate liar. Thanks to Gloria's allies in the House, Garci will walk out of the House at the end of the day, feeling supremely victorious for having outsmarted the entire legislature. He might as well stick his tongue out at them and say "Beeeeh"! (I sincerely hope his fake teeth fall in the process, at least that would be funny.) The best and only thing to do is to bound and gag Virgilio O. Garcillano and fly him him to Scotland Yard for lie detector tests and be done with all these Congress hooplas. If the tests show that he�s not lied then good on Gloria Macapagal but if the tests show that her phone pal Garci lied, the people of the Republic of the Philippines should be allowed to hang both Gloria (the liar, the cheat, the thief) and her friggin phone pal Garci from a lamppost, tarred and feathered! The one and only question should be: Did Garci rig election results in favor of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo? And do you really think he will admit that he did? Is anyone naive enough to think he will tell the truth? The answer is a big NO! So, what's the use? All these posturings, the questionings and all the blahs and blahs and more blahs are just a waste of people�s rations. Just get it done and over with... hang the goddamn useless crook (by the ears) from the highest lamppost! Anna de Bruz, [email protected] Belgium, December 09, 2005 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Dear Tony, Great article. I am attaching my latest analysis of Election Fraud. I also analyzed the VP elections counts. Apparently Garci forgot to cheat for Noli de Castro perhaps because Gloria wanted to look more popular than her running mate. But this makes the dagdag bawas in her favor more dramatic. The NAMFREL and COC Percentages for Loren and Noli are very close. Whereas for GMA and FPJ there is a dramatic reversal. Mano Alcuaz , [email protected] December 03, 2005 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww WAS THERE MASSIVE FRAUD IN THE 2004 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS? Manuel A. Alcuaz, Jr. I have analyzed the 2004 Election Results for the Presidential Elections at the provincial level and I can state that based on a comparison of the Congressional Canvass of Provincial COC�s and NAMFREL�s final report at the provincial level there was indeed massive fraud (Dagdag-Bawas) in most provinces in Muslim Mindanao. Unfortunately, this study was only made recently due to statements of then CBCP head Archbishop Capalla and Mr. Jose Concepcion that there was no massive fraud. I decided to investigate the possibility of massive fraud when the Hello Garci tapes became public. It is interesting that all I had to do was listen to GMA�s conversation with Garci and invariably the province they talked about had COC results in favor of GMA when the final NAMFREL provincial count indicated that FPJ would win with a significant margin. There was only one exception North Cotabato. In the Hello Garci tape Garclliano said he could not help GMA because of a certain �Atty. Sibol�. Roberto Versola and I agree that the NAMFREL count is a good benchmark for detecting massive fraud because in all other provinces the discrepancy between the provincial COC and the final NAMFREL count was less that 10%. In many cases less than 1%. Dagdag-Bawas becomes more obvious if one compares the difference in vote percentages for GMA and FPJ between the NAMFREL count and the increment between the COC and the NAMFREL count. (COC-NAMFREL) The following table summarizes these statistically impossible discrepancy that can only be produced by massive Dagdag-Bawas. In order to corroborate the existence of Dagdag-Bawas I also did an analysis on the Vice Presidential results in the same provinces. It is interesting that the COC and NAMFREL percentages for Noli and Loren where fairly close in Basilan, Sulu, Maguindanao, and Agusan del Norte. Surprisingly there was a pro Loren deviation in Sultan Kudarat. And deviations for Noli in Lanao del Sur, Tawi tawi, and Lanao del Norte. By failing to do Dagdag-Bawas for De Castro, the cheating for GMA becomes more obvious. The following comparison of NAMFREL provincial % shows that where FPJ leads Loren leads, where GMA leads Noli leads. These results confirm the fact that there was massive and obviouc Dagdag-Bawas for GMA not for de Castro. What happened? Was Garci really pressed for time to give GMA her 1M total victory? Did GMA intentionally make sure that her margin of victory was higher that De Castro? HOW DAGDAG-BAWAS WAS COMPUTED For every province I used the COC based totals of Congress provided by the staff of a Senator who loves our country and NAMFREL�s summary of ER�s by province and city in their Terminal Report. I subtracted NAMFREL�s final count from the Congressional Canvass for each province. This I call COC increment. I then computed the % of total votes for GMA and FPJ. You will note that the reversal in percentages is most glaring when you compare the NAMFREL % with the increment %. That is the smoke that signals the fraud that was committed. I computed the total increment in votes between COC and NAMFREL canvass and multiplied it by the NAMFREL percentage of vote to compute the NAMFREL trend for GMA and FPJ. I then subtracted the NAMFREL trend from the COC increment to get the dagdag for GMA and the bawas for FPJ to get the total dagdag-bawas in the province. BASILAN Basilan had a computed 103,360 dagdag-bawas as a percentage of total votes 75.8% was the highest. Gary: Hello, ma�am. Good evening. GMA: Hello, dun sa Lanao del Sur at Basilan, di raw nagmamatch ang SOV sa COC. Gary: Ang sinasabi nya, nawawala na naman ho? GMA: Hindi na nag-match. Gary: Hindi na nag-mamatch?May posibilidad na hindi magmatch kung hindi nila sinunod yung individual SOV ng mga munisipyo. Pero aywan ko lang ho kung sa atin pabor o hindi. Dun naman sa Basilan at Lanao Sur, ito ho yung ginawa nilang magpataas sa inyo, maayos naman ang paggawa eh. GMA: So nag-mamatch? Gary: Oho, sa Basilan, alam nyo naman ang mga military dun eh, hindi masyadong marunong kasi silang gumawa eh. FPJ had 73% of the votes and GMA had 20% in the NAMFREL tally. The incremental votes in the COC�s was 88% for GMA and 6% for FPJ. GMA % POE % Total Voters Total % COC: 79,702 58% 48,685 36% 136,297 100% NAMFREL: 12,162 20% 43,821 73% 59,647 44% COC Increment: 67,540 88% 4,864 6% 76,650 56% NAMFREL Trend: 15,629 56,312 76,650 56% Dagdag Bawas: 51,911 (51,448) Dagdag bawas = 103,359 My analysis indicates a probable �Dagdagr-Bawas� of 598,560 votes as shown below. Dagdag-Bawas % Total Voters Basilan 103,360 75.8 136,297 Sultan Kudarat 153,761 64.9 236,768 Lanao del Sur 134,505 57.9 232,010 Sulu 60,615 41.33 146,652 Tawi-tawi 31,389 35.86 87,520 Maguindanao 53,798 19.4 277,318 Lanao del Norte 38,843 12.35 314,577 Agusan del Norte 22,289 9.17 242,944 Total 598,560 In contrast the possible Dagdag-Bawas for VP candidates is summarized below: Dagdag-Bawas % Total Voters Basilan 2,000 1.6 126,130 Sultan Kudarat (37,675) 16.9 222,809 Lanao del Sur 39,971 22.6 176,222 Sulu 4,374 3.8 113,948 Tawi-tawi 7,621 11 69,970 Maguindanao 11,241 4 279,160 65,207 for de Castro (37,675) for Loren This deviation except for Sultan Kudarat, Lanao del Sur, and Tawi tawi indicate that the Dagdag-Bawas team was not manipulating the Vice Presidential results. WHAT MY ANALYSIS CAN DETECT? My analysis can only detect wholesale fraud. If the fraud was committed at the precinct level and the NAMFREL got a copy of the fraudulent ER, there would be no discrepancy between NAMFREL and the municipal COC. If the ER�s that GMA asks Garci about had arrived there is also a possibility that the NAMFREL count would incorporate the fraudulent ER. This could have happened in the following provinces, where GMA�s ratio of votes was unbelievably high. Pampanga is most obvious. Residents of Pampanga are surprised that GMA won in their province. Notice the provincial COC based % of votes for Pampanga and neighboring provinces. GMA FPJ Pampanga 80.4% 10.6% Bataan 22.4% 58% Bulacan 22.6% 48.1% La Union 18.7% 55.6% Nueva Ecija 20.5% 60.9% Pangasinan 41.3% 45.2% Tarlac 45.2% 35.8% People�s preferences will normally not change drastically as you cross provincial boundaries. However, the officials tallying the votes can be very different. The identification of cheating in these provinces and elsewhere has to be done at a more detailed level than my provincial level analysis. WHAT SHOULD BE DONE? The solution to cheating is not a change in form of government (it won�t work) or an emphasis in education (the kids and cadets are corrupted later in life) it is in punishment of the guilty. If we are to have honest elections and national consensus cheating and corruption must be punished. Start at the top. It would be nice if GMA would resign. But that is a tough job. Let us first get Joe Concepcion to resign from NAMFREL and apologize for the cover up he did. Garcilliano should be tracked down. And provincial election officials in provinces with massive Dagdag-Bawas should be prosecuted. The COMELEC should be overhauled. wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww The following article was recently emailed to us, but it originally appeared in Newsbreak Magazine , December 05, 2005 issue. Madame Operator? By Miriam Grace A. Go Newsbreak Assistant Managing Editor President Arroyo probably wasn't lying when she responded to allegations that election officials received bribe money in her presence at her family's La Vista house in January 2004: "Ang masasabi ko lang, walang nagbibigay ng suhol sa harap ko (Nobody gives a bribe in front of me)." When administration operator Michaelangelo "Louie" Zuce testified in the Senate in August this year about the bribing incident that he claims to have witnessed, a former campaign adviser who remains close to the President told NEWSBREAK, "Hindi naman kasi sa La Vista (It wasn't done in La Vista)," referring to a posh village in Quezon City, where the family residence of the President is located. The former adviser says he's familiar with the circumstances surrounding at least two of the meetings that Zuce was talking about, between some regional directors of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) and Pampanga provincial board member Lilia "Baby" Pineda, before the presidential election last year. Pineda, a close friend and town mate of President Arroyo in Lubao, is the wife of known jueteng lord Rodolfo "Bong" Pineda. As far as he knew, whenever the directors gathered in Metro Manila in the months leading to the presidential elections, they only "dropped by" the Arroyos' La Vista house "to pay a courtesy call [on the President]." After that, the groups would proceed to the Pinedas' house in Greenhills Subdivision in San Juan, "where the payoffs were made." This other version of the story, however, doesn't debunk the issue brought forth by Zuce's testimony-that Comelec officials received what was presumably jueteng money, together with instructions to help the President win in the upcoming polls. And it further raises two crucial questions related to Gloriagate which an impeachment trial or an independent fact-finding body-had they been allowed-could have answered: How many groups and operators worked to ensure the President's victory through legitimate and foul means? And where did they get their orders? The "Hello, Garci" tape revealed a President that was hands-on in the campaign. In the infamous recorded conversations, she made references to vote padding, the non-matching of votes in election documents, and a seemingly pre-determined winning margin of one million votes. We tried to find out if this was an isolated case; that perhaps during the campaign, somebody else-not the President-was directing all the "special operations" that led to her victory. But our interviews with political operators and review of events and documents show very compartmentalized operations by the "unofficial" campaign groups under her. These compartmentalized operations were run by people close to the President, but they did not sit down to "coordinate" with each other as in a committee. Among them, there was no single "bastonero"; no one played the role of an orchestra conductor. Yet, the operations were systematic, complementary, and intricate. It appears that the political lieutenants on top of these parallel operations were getting orders directly from no less than Ms. Arroyo. New Findings Since the year is ending with no clear answers in sight regarding "Gloriagate," NEWSBREAK revisited the 2004 Arroyo campaign. We established the following: There were at least four groups that operated independently of each other. Only the President knew of the businesses of all four. The President worked with unaccountable persons in three of the parallel groups. Ms. Arroyo appears to be the first post-Marcos presidential candidate to have combined and maximized electoral dirty tricks from over half a century, foremost of which were the utilization of the armed forces for partisan activities, and tampering with election results. The alleged large-scale cheating was easily carried out because the election manipulators who honed their skills since the time of President Ferdinand Marcos, and who worked in the campaign of Fidel Ramos, also played crucial roles in the Arroyo campaign. Claudio's Official Group Earlier accounts and evidence made it appear that President Arroyo's campaign was run only by two groups: the official campaign team under the President's liaison to Congress (now also presidential political affairs adviser) Gabriel Claudio; and the shadow-and shadowy-campaign team led by political strategist (now Antipolo congressman) Ronaldo Puno at the behest of presidential spouse Jose Miguel "Mike" Arroyo. The organization under Claudio included all the political parties in the ruling coalition, the parallel groups that were reaching out to different sectors for the President alone, and the group that took care of the senatorial campaign. This team had then-Defense Secretary (now executive secretary) Eduardo Ermita as chief executive officer. It had an executive committee that served as the policymaking body of the campaign. It was composed of representatives from the member-political parties and from sectoral allies, and chaired by former President Ramos, who is president emeritus of Arroyo's adoptive party, Lakas-Christian Muslim Democrats. The Claudio group was the public face of the Arroyo campaign. It was assumed to be doing all the legitimate campaign work. This was put in question, however, when Mindanao-based businessman Rodolfo Galang later surfaced. He executed an affidavit about his alleged connivance with presidential adviser and senatorial campaign manager Conrado Limcaoco to bribe local officials in the South to shift their loyalties from candidate Fernando Poe Jr. to President Arroyo by giving them fertilizer funds from the agriculture department. Limcaoco denied knowing Galang, but the unaccounted fertilizer funds are now the subject of a Senate investigation. Some operators involved in the alleged fabrication of pre-accomplished election forms in the Visayas, as well as post-election vote-padding in Mindanao such as whistle blower Zuce, claim to have been hired or contacted by then presidential political affairs adviser Joey Rufino. As Lakas executive director, Rufino was technically within the structure headed by Claudio. Claudio, in an interview for this article, denied knowledge of Rufino "ever employing operators to conduct dirty tricks...nor do I consider this plausible." Rufino, he said, was too busy settling disputes between allies who wanted to run in the same localities; he was in charge of determining the official candidates in the local elections. (Rufino made a similar denial in a statement before he became sick.) "Within the campaign organization, I remember having constantly reminded ourselves and our staff and our field men to desist from illegal electoral interventions because we were ahead in all the surveys...and way ahead in superiority of our vote-delivery machinery.... We would not have wanted to deprive ourselves the satisfaction and pride of a clean, honest, and convincing victory," Claudio said. During the campaign, Claudio told NEWSBREAK that he was not reporting to or coordinating with the First Gentleman. He also denied knowledge of a second campaign group led by Mr. Arroyo and Puno. Mike Arroyo and Puno Puno's group, the one directly working with the President's husband, was believed to be the "dirty tricks" department, an allegation that both of them have repeatedly denied. Sources say it was particularly responsible for operations to rig the results of pre-election surveys to effect a favorable trend for Mrs. Arroyo. At the height of the campaign, some opposition members raised doubts about the integrity of Trends, the research arm of major polling firms Social Weather Stations and Pulse Asia, saying that some of its employees had been secretly working for Puno and were thus manipulating the data in President Arroyo's favor. But this allegation was debunked by Trends, whose CEO Mercy Abad explained to NEWSBREAK at the time the various security measures employed by the company at every phase of the surveys. (Abad is at present a member of NEWSBREAK's advisory board.) After the elections, however, operators working for Puno bragged about their attempts at influencing the survey interviewers in certain provinces. They said they gave the field interviewers "allowances" higher than what they were getting from Trends, and sometimes gave them "comfortable lodging in hotels." One of the sources said they didn't ask the interviewees to change the answers of the respondents. They only directed them to "friendly" barangays and asked them to ask the questions in a way that would lead respondents to favor the President. The operators refused to say if these attempts were successful. Puno's group was also widely believed to be responsible for pre-fabricating election documents-from precinct-level election returns up to city- and provincial-level certificates of canvass-and having them filled with pre-determined numbers of votes. This was most evident in the so-called CBIP (Cebu, Bohol, Iloilo, Pampanga) area, where surveys showed the President to be leading and where the local government officials were her allies, and therefore would not invite suspicion if her margin would be maximized. One of those who worked on this project said they spread out the pre-determined votes in more than 30,000 precincts in 11 provinces. The source said that in this operation, they secured the cooperation of the teachers and election inspectors by allotting P10,000 per precinct. The Puno group included his younger brother Robie, the First Gentleman's younger brother (now Negros Occidental congressman) Ignacio Arroyo Jr., and close allies who joined Lakas only when President Arroyo assumed its leadership, but whose loyalties were with the First Gentleman. These allies served as "brokers" who dealt with the freelance operators who carried out their strategies in the field. Yet, other political operators for the President said Puno's group was "overrated." It clashed in the field with the two other groups that will be named later. Puno's group was believed to be capable of carrying out special operations because the First Gentleman had the power of the purse. Mr. Arroyo's involvement in the special operations (which he had repeatedly denied), however, was not as extensive as originally believed. Neither was he the sole campaign fund-raiser. Little Big Brother It appears now that there is a third and equally powerful group: the one led by President Arroyo's younger and favorite brother, Diosdado "Buboy" Macapagal Jr. This group, according to a businessman-operator who dealt with a member of the group, raised about 35 percent of the campaign fund-the contributions from "legitimate businessmen." The rest of the campaign kitty was raised by Mike Arroyo's group from "other" businesses, the businessman-operator said. Buboy Macapagal's group was reportedly so suspicious of the other groups working for the President that it ordered the wiretapping not only of Garcillano but of Puno as well. "They thought Garci was also working for the opposition. Puno, they suspected he was diverting [campaign] money to his own campaign [for congressman] in Antipolo," he added. A friend of Buboy Macapagal is businessman Ruben Cesar C. Reyes, who has close links with the Intelligence Service of the Armed Forces of the Philippines. Reyes is also close both to Garcillano and Comelec chair Benjamin Abalos. A fourth group was revealed when NEWSBREAK was working on the story about the break-in at the room holding the ballot boxes at the Batasang Pambansa building months after President Arroyo's proclamation (NEWSBREAK, Sept. 12, 2005). We reported that the operation in Mindanao during the canvassing period, which was led by Garcillano, was done in haste and that operators only tampered with the figures in the certificates of canvass. The figures, therefore, could not be supported by the data in the election returns and statements of votes. Since Fernando Poe Jr. had filed a protest, there loomed the possibility that the mismatch in the figures would be discovered. Thus, there was an operation to sneak into the ballot boxes in Batasan the election documents with "corrected" and consistent figures. Antidote Group The ones behind the operation belonged to the "Antidote Group," the most covert bloc in the Arroyo campaign. Very few administration people have heard about the group, and still fewer were familiar with its composition and activities. From what we gathered, its main task, as its name implies, was to "cure" election results in President Arroyo's favor. Its name first cropped up in one of the documents submitted by Zuce to the Senate. In a letter to the President on Nov. 11, 2003, Garcillano-who was not yet commissioner at that time-reminded the President that a vacancy would soon occur in the Comelec and that she should keep him in mind. The letter was endorsed by Rufino, who in his marginal note to the President on the same document, told her: "He [Garcillano] will be a great asset to you. He has a proven track record and can deliver! Part...the Antidote group." A NEWSBREAK source who participated in the post-proclamation Batasan operation said the group's boss was "Mr. Antidote," a code that President Arroyo herself gave the man. The source refused to reveal the identity of Mr. Antidote but said the latter worked confidentially for Presidents Corazon Aquino and Fidel Ramos before working for President Arroyo. (The source was vague on the nature of Mr. Antidote's work for the two former presidents.) Another source familiar with the Antidote Group said the head of the group is an "operative" specializing in "intelligence work." We got the supposed name of Mr. Antidote from a civilian operator. We checked out this name with a veteran intelligence operator who was part of Antidote, but the latter refused to talk about him except to say that Mr. Antidote is known to most only by an alias. For lack of independent confirmation by another source, we are withholding the name of Mr. Antidote. What we know so far about the Antidote Group are bits and pieces of information that we have managed to get from people who have worked with its members or who are part of it but would not admit that on record. The Cops: Mendoza and Ebdane The accounts of three sources indicate that the Antidote Group includes veterans from the Comelec as well as retired and active-duty police and military officers. "They like to call themselves patriots, because they have in the past worked for both the administration and the opposition...they ensure balance of power in elections," says one who has sat down with some of them. Some of the members of Antidote are also part of the "official" campaign groups of the President and enjoy direct links either to her or to Mr. Mike Arroyo. Known to have at least sat in the meetings of the Antidote Group were Transportation Secretary Leandro Mendoza and Public Works Secretary Hermogenes Ebdane Jr. Both police generals were the first two chiefs of the Philippine National Police under the Arroyo regime. One of the sources said a "Batangas Group" was represented in the Antidote Group, and that group included then Defense Secretary Eduardo Ermita (now executive secretary). Another source said that "even if it's a military [dominated] group, it was not reporting to Ermita." The source also said Ebdane was "not part of the strategizing. He was just an implementor." Ebdane is closely associated with the First Gentleman. In an earlier interview with NEWSBREAK editors, Ermita downplayed his role in the campaign and pointed to Claudio as the one on top of it. He didn't respond to questions for this article. Our text messages and voice calls to the mobile phones of Ebdane and his aide de camp went unanswered. His office said he was out of town and had no definite date of return. It was the Antidote Group that got former elections official Roque Bello, the "master operator" reputedly to be "better than Garcillano" (NEWSBREAK, Sept. 12, 2005), to lead the Batasan operation. Pineda's Money Bello's post-election Batasan operation was funded by Bong Pineda, according to a police official. In our previous report, we referred to a police general who facilitated the Batasan break-in and who was named to a Cabinet position after the operation. We were referring to Ebdane. It seems that Pineda had a direct line to some members of the Antidote Group. In fact, it was he who introduced Garcillano to Ebdane, according to the same police source. Thus, during the campaign, Garcillano received "royal treatment" from the PNP in his visits to certain areas. It's no surprise then that Ebdane was tagged as the one who hid Garcillano at the height of the "Hello, Garci" scandal and who facilitated the commissioner's "escape" to Singapore. In securing Garcillano when the latter was still in the Philippines, Ebdane tapped the services of a police general who happens to be a business partner of Garcillano and who incidentally is close to Pineda as well. Straddling Between Groups The four groups in the Arroyo campaign apparently had compartmentalized operations, with a number of members-especially those in the official campaign team-apparently finding out about the other groups only after the "Hello, Garci" tape was exposed and NEWSBREAK reported about the Batasan operation. At the most, a few members shuttled between two groups, but never between all four. With no single political lieutenant of the President emerging to be on top of the four groups, Mrs. Arroyo is left as the only person common to all of them. Circumstances point to her as the person to whom the leaders of these groups reported and got orders from. Former Education Secretary Florencio Abad, who represented the Liberal Party in the Arroyo campaign's executive committee, said that during the latter part of the campaign, the President stopped presiding over the committee's meetings. She appeared to be "growing impatient" with the meetings where the status of the campaign in the provinces was being discussed, and showed that she was "giving more importance to being hands-on" in running her campaign. Although Claudio said the President's role was "largely the product that had to be marketed and sold," Abad said "she knew the campaign terrain quite well, down to the details." He said there were instances when she directed where the campaign convoy should go; she knew the municipal leaders by name and the situation in their specific areas. Abad agreed that this tendency toward a hands-on style of management, the "Hello, Garci" conversation, and the fact that no single person seemed to be present in all the other campaign groups that had been revealed, "make it appear that she was indeed the one running the show." Same Old Boys Interestingly, those who were involved in Ramos's campaign in 1992-both in the legitimate and special operations (but mostly the latter)-played key roles in Arroyo's campaign. Ramos himself was with the executive committee of Arroyo's campaign, along with those who started Lakas with him: Speaker Jose de Venecia Jr. and Ermita. Claudio was with the Ramos campaign, and so were Rufino and Puno. In fact, the earlier assumption that there was only one dirty tricks department for Arroyo's campaign came from the fact that operators who had supported Puno and Claudio in the past had worked together at the Comelec and the Ministry of Local Government during Marcos's time. It turned out that in 2004 these Marcos-trained operators were dealing with different groups or bosses in the Arroyo camp, bringing along their respective networks of teachers, election workers, and political operators in the field that they had utilized in past elections. "There were simply too many groups that worked for her...but in the end, it was the Antidote that delivered the most important results," says a member of the group who did not reveal much except to confirm or deny information that we verified with him related to the group's activities. "There are stories that would be left untold, because in the first place, without the Garci tape, we would not even be talking about this." -with reports from Glenda M. Gloria and Mia Gonzalez OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO |
| Province Basilan Sultan Kudarat Lanao del Sur Sulu Tawi Tawi Maguindanao Lanao del Norte Aguasan del Norte |
| GMA 20% 20% 36% 32% 20% 59% 26% 55% |
| FPJ 73% 49% 47% 61% 75% 30% 40% 28% |
| FPJ 6% -6% 5% 21% -89% 17% 82% 12% |
| GMA 88% 77% 89% 76% 185% 83% 215% 59% |
| NAMFREL |
| COC-NAMFREL |
| Province Basilan Sultan Kudarat Lanao del Sur Sulu Tawi Tawi Maguindanao Lanao del Norte Aguasan del Norte |
| NDC 21.4% 44.3% 28.6% 36.1% 28.4 59.3% 47.6% 71.8% |
| Loren 78% 53.5% 70% 63% 70% 39.4% 50.7% 27.1% |
| Loren 76.5% 69.8% 44.2% 66.9% 4% 36.3% 35.8% 24.1% |
| NDC 22.8% 29.1% 49.7% 41.4% 97.3% 63.3% 63.5% 74.7% |
| NAMFREL |
| COC-NAMFREL |
| Province Basilan Sultan Kudarat Lanao del Sur Sulu Tawi Tawi Maguindanao Lanao del Norte Aguasan del Norte |
| GMA 20% 20% 36% 32% 20% 59% 26% 55% |
| FPJ 73% 49% 47% 61% 75% 30% 40% 28% |
| Loren 78% 53.3% 70% 63% 70% 39.4% 50.7% 27.1% |
| NDC 21.4% 44.3% 28.6% 36.1% 28.4% 59.3% 47.6% 71.8% |
| NAMFREL |
| COC-NAMFREL |
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