It’s still ‘Hello Garci’ October 16, 2006

“HELLO GARCI WILL NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN,” predicts Defense Secretary Avelino Cruz. That is so in the light of the Comelec resolution to limit the role of the military in elections. No more will soldiers take part in counting and canvassing votes, choosing precincts, transporting ballot boxes and carrying election materials and results. Henceforth, they will merely man checkpoints and enforce the gun ban. And only 10 percent of them will be involved where before the entire 125,000-strong Armed Forces of the Philippines was.

Comelec Chair Benjamin Abalos agrees enthusiastically: “Garci is gone, there will be no more Garci.” He adds jokingly, “There will only be ‘Hello Brawnie’,” in reference to Romeo Brawner, a newly appointed Comelec commissioner.

So all’s well that ends well?

Not really. All sucks that ends badly.

I grant that limiting the military’s role in elections can have tremendous salutary effects. Especially given that today’s AFP is controlled by the generals mentioned in the Hello Garci tapes as having cheated for Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, chief of them Hermogenes Esperon. They were all rewarded, and not punished, for that monstrous act of infamy. But limiting the AFP’s role in elections won’t exorcise Garci from the face of this earth, or even come close to it.

Lest we forget, there’s an exchange in the “Hello Garci” tape, where GMA worried about not getting enough votes in some parts of Muslim Mindanao and Garci responded by saying, as you know Ma’am the military isn’t really good at rigging things, “di gaano marunong gumawa,” but that generally speaking the effort to pad her votes was being executed well, “’yung hong pagpatataas sa inyo maayos ho naman.” That is a breathtakingly revealing statement in more ways than one. The least of what it reveals is that the soldiers are not the Einsteins of cheating in elections, people like Garci and his boss, GMA herself, are.

Lest we forget too, it was people like Brig. Gen. Francisco Gudani and Lt. Col. Alexander Balutan who tried earnestly and desperately to stop cheating in their areas of jurisdiction. For his pains, Gudani was told to go on a paid vacation, to relax on a beach or go mountain hiking, which would have been temptation enough for a lesser man, but which he himself took to be the punishment that it was. If I recall right, in the same “Hello Garci” tape, one senatorial candidate referred to him as “tarantado talaga.” This was after Garci told him there was little he could do for him as Gudani was bent on keeping the elections clean. There, too, you find something breathtakingly revealing: In this country, people who are determined to be honest are an affront to high office, they are tarantado talaga.

Both Gudani and Balutan went over and beyond the call of decency and went on to tell the Senate what they knew about the cheating in the last elections. For which pains they were court-martialed for defying GMA’s order forbidding any subordinate—as though Gudani and Balutan could ever be that by any moral standard—from testifying against her without her permission. What can I say? Tarantado talaga. I leave you to determine whom that judgment properly applies to.

Why on earth should limiting the military’s participation in elections stop another “Hello Garci” from happening? The “Hello Garci” tape wasn’t a conversation between military officials or between a candidate and a military official, it was a conversation between two civilians. It was a conversation between GMA and Virgilio Garcillano, between the incumbent-president-cum-presidential-candidate and a Comelec commissioner, at the height of the counting of votes—a conversation that by all the rules of God and man, democracy and decency, should never have taken place. It was as much an “impropriety” as the lawyer of the accused in a court case barging into the judge’s quarters and being assured by the judge in the most obsequious terms that her case is won. What has that got to do with the role of the military in elections?

At bottom, what is the “Hello Garci” tape all about? It is all about cheating. It is all about the highest official of the land conspiring with a Comelec commissioner to screw the voters, and not quite incidentally kidnapping a public school teacher to prevent her from squealing on the cheating. That can’t be prevented from happening again by limiting the participation of the military in elections. That can’t be prevented from happening again by putting the public school teachers solely in charge of elections, which will only succeed in overworking while underpaying them. That can’t even be prevented from happening again even by computerizing the elections, though that should have been done long ago. Except that Abalos, who now jokes about cheating, cheated the taxpayers by awarding the bid to an unqualified bidder.

That can be prevented, as all iniquity can be prevented, by righting wrongs, by punishing the guilty and rewarding the innocent, by showing the world that nobody gets away with murder. People get away with the murder of the soul, they will get away with the murder of the body. People get away with the murder of democracy, they will get away with the murder of people. The only way to stop “Hello Garci” from happening all over again is to jail Hello and Garci. You allow them to reap the fruits of their malefaction, you might as well have a law ordering all honest men in this country to carry a sign that says, “Tarantado talaga ako.” You allow Hello to continue being president of this country and Garci to seek a seat in Congress next year, you might as well prepare yourself for a ring tone that keeps repeating again and again and again like the Eveready battery:

“Hello Garci, Hello Garci, Hello Garci.”

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