This is what appears to have happened this week in Guimbal, Iloilo, in that province’s first district. The district is controlled by the Garin family, overseen by local political underboss Sen. Franklin Drilon and counting as one of its members a most trusted Aquino consigliere, former Health secretary Janette Garin, who implemented the billion-peso Dengvaxia vaccine scandal.
Playing the heavy in last week’s drama is the local congressman, Oscar “Richard” Garin, the husband of Janette Garin, currently known as the “most well-suited” of the former lieutenants of Aquino because of the sheer number of lawsuits filed against her by the alleged victims of the Dengvaxia mess, a hurriedly put-together program to vaccinate up to a million public school pupils in the last months of Aquino’s term using an untested drug. In the role of backup bad guy was Richard’s father, also named Oscar, the mayor of Guimbal.
Garin pere et fils appeared one fine day at the Guimbal police station and demanded an audience with a local cop, PO3 Federico Macaya, over a recent incident. When Macaya was presented to the two officials, he was allegedly repeatedly punched, threatened with a gun, disarmed and even spat on by the mayor and his congressman son.
I doubt very much if the two Garins are related to the young bully of Ateneo de Manila junior high school, who was dismissed last week for using his martial arts superiority to force his classmates to submit to his will. But that young man appeared to have channeled the spirits of the two Garins, his spiritual kin, before he embarked on his reign of terror at his school.
Now, lowly police officers like Macaya, placed in such a situation, would normally just prefer to keep silent because the balance of power was so heavily tilted in his assailants’ favor. In fact, quiet submission must have been what the Garins were expecting from Macaya and any other witness to the bullying incident — except that they figured wrong.
Macaya filed a complaint against the two political big shots on the basis of a police report drawn up on what happened. His station commander was fired for failing to keep things under control and the police regional director, an upstanding officer by the name of John Bulalacao, demanded that the two be charged and held accountable criminally, brushing aside a half-hearted, non-specific apology proffered by the younger Garin.
The political fallout from the incident could also be significant, if still unquantified, at the moment. There is a local election scheduled this coming May and the people of Iloilo’s first district will get to decide if the Garins (including Janette, who reportedly intends to reassume her House seat that was kept warm by her husband Richard) should be made to pay for what they did to a low-ranking, practically powerless — compared to them, anyway — law enforcer.
In the calculus of local politics, it’s perfectly possible that the Garins, including various other politicians of the same surname who currently hold elected seats in the provincial board and other positions in their tightly controlled district, can still win in the next polls. It’s just going to cost them a little more, especially Jannette Garin, who must already be spending a lot more money than she did in her three previous terms as congressman because of the Dengvaxia scandal and who intends to replace her now-disgraced husband.
(But then, Janette is no political spring chicken who just lucked into joining an established warlord clan by marriage. No, she is from Leyte province across the water from Iloilo, where she belongs to the powerful Veloso-Petilla clan of political stalwarts and survivors, who have a reputation of durability at least as longstanding as that of the Garins’.)
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That said, it really makes no sense for the Garins to keep acting like they own Guimbal and the rest of their district, at a time when they should be lying low and preparing for the political winds in Manila to change in their favor once again. But people are creatures of habit, after all, and when you’re bitch-slapping a “disrespectful” local policeman who doesn’t even know who he’s dealing with, it can seem like the most normal thing in the world to do — especially if you’ve been doing it for so long.
Ultimately, the fate of the Garins will not be decided by any number of outraged pundits in the faraway nation’s capital. No, that is only something that the people of the first district of Iloilo, who keep electing the Garins to office, can do.
That is what democracy is, and until a better system is put in place, it will have to be the one that prevails. Does it surprise anyone, for instance, that the House of Representatives, in proposing wide-ranging changes to the 1987 Constitution, will still not impose a ban on political dynasties or touch the gamed provisions on term limits for elected officials?
The rest of the country can only hope that the voters of Guimbal and its environs ultimately take the courageous step that PO3 Macaya made when he filed his complaint against the Garin father and son tandem. Because unless the voters decide that they’ve had enough of the abuse and bullying of their political overlords, nothing will really change.
https://www.manilatimes.net/more-bullying/488803/
https://www.manilatimes.net/more-bullying/488803/
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