By Carlos H Conde
Asian Time Online
Feb 10, 2011
MANILA - It isn't entirely clear why a former budget officer of the Philippine military, George Rabusa, decided to speak out against corruption among his former colleagues in the service. It could have been out of love for country. Or it could have been Senator Jinggoy Estrada's promise of anything so that the senator could settle scores with individuals that wronged his father, the deposed former president Joseph Estrada.
It might even have been a decision to come clean after suffering a stroke that nearly cost him his life. Or was it something more personal, like being betrayed by the generals whom he had served and who refused to provide financial help at the time when he needed it most, as he hinted during a recent congressional hearing?
Whatever it was, his decision to testify on systemic corruption in the military has resulted in what many now say is a "catharsis" for the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), long vilified as one of the most corrupt institutions in the country.
Rabusas' testimony proved fatal in the case of Angelo Reyes, his former boss, a former chief of the military and subsequently secretary of different departments under former president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Reyes shot and killed himself on Tuesday in front of the grave of his parents in a cemetery in Manila; his mother's gravestone is now literally smeared with his blood.
Testifying in a senate hearing last month, Rabusa accused Reyes of pocketing 50 million pesos (US$1.15 million) as a "going-away present" when he retired as armed forces chief of staff in 2001. He also accused Reyes of receiving 10 million pesos each month. Aside from Reyes, Rabusa claimed two other chiefs of staff - Diomedio Villanueva and Roy Cimatu - had also received millions of pesos.
All of these monies, he said, came from a slush fund that he and his colleagues in J6, the military comptroller's office, secretly maintained. Rabusa said he and others had to make sure that this fund was replenished with at least 40 million pesos a month. He said that was done with cash from kickbacks from different contractors of the different departments in the armed forces, whose contracts the comptroller had discretionary power to approve.
The fund, Rabusa said, was at the disposal of the chief of staff. It became so big, Rabusa testified, that he had to install several vaults in his office at the military's general headquarters. When the vaults could no longer hold the sheer volume of banknotes, he claimed to convince his boss, Major General Carlos Garcia, to open separate bank accounts.
It was allegedly from this same slush fund that Garcia, his predecessor Lieutenant General Jacinto Ligot, and Rabusa himself had taken funds to maintain rich bank accounts in the Philippines and abroad, and to buy properties that they could never afford on their normal salaries. The lavish lifestyles of the generals, their wives, their mistresses and their children was allegedly financed by money from this pot.
The scandal first came to light when two of Garcia's children, Ian Carl and Juan Paolo, were arrested at the San Francisco airport in 2003 for trying to smuggle US$100,000 into the US. The two sons posted a $2 million bail, which raised even more questions back home: How could a general whose annual salary was only about $13,200 afford to pay such a huge bail? The answer - and the bombshell - came from their mother, Clarita, who told US authorities that the $100,000 was rightfully theirs and that they got it from kickbacks from military contractors back in the Philippines.
That compelled the Office of the Ombudsman, then headed by the famously honest Simeon Marcelo, to investigate the Garcias. His office's conclusion: all the money had been plundered. In 2004, General Garcia was subsequently charged with the crime, which is punishable by life imprisonment, but the next Ombudsman, Merceditas Gutierrez, a close ally of ex-president Arroyo, recently allowed Garcia to post bail and face a reduced charge of bribery in a plea bargain agreement. In return, Garcia promised to return a portion of the 300 million pesos he had allegedly amassed.
The plea-bargain raised the hackles of the public as well as senators, who immediately launched an investigation. It was in these hearings that Senator Jinggoy Estrada sprung Rabusa, catching Reyes, who had been called in as a "resource person", literally by surprise. It took Reyes some time to deny the allegation, instead launching into a rant asking Rabusa if he had ever been "greedy".
Estrada appeared to relish the moment: Reyes, after all, betrayed his father, whom Reyes had served as military chief of staff. Reyes defected to Arroyo's camp at the height of the "People Power 2" uprising in January 2001 that subsequently forced Joseph Estrada to flee Malacanang, the presidential palace. He was later sentenced and imprisoned on economic plunder charges.
Business as usual
To be sure, corruption in the military is nothing new. In fact, the slush fund had existed even before the time of Reyes, as Rabusa himself admitted. A questionable practice in the armed forces called "conversion" - funds or budgets allotted for a specific purpose being used on something else, thus making it vulnerable to manipulation and kickbacks - has for years practically been the norm.
The practice allows commanding officers to bypass the military's slow-moving bureaucracy and deal directly with the suppliers of urgently needed equipment and weaponry, according to a military official familiar with the practice. Military officials, in turn, often ask for the cash equivalent of the equipment and then allow the supplier to process the papers and deal with the bureaucracy. The supplier often pads the cost of the equipment and gets approval from the comptroller, who will only sign if a kickback is assured, according to the official.
While this shortcut is evidently vulnerable to corruption, it worked well as far as the field commanders were concerned. And it worked for the longest time because, apparently, none were as greedy as Ligot and Garcia. This eventually had an impact on soldiers in the field, including Antonio Trillanes IV, a former naval officer who led the so-called Oakwood mutiny in 2003 because he and others, according to them, could no longer stomach the military's corruption. In that incident, 321 soldiers seized and occupied with arms a high-end serviced apartment in the capital's financial district.
Trillanes emphasized that corruption often resulted in the deaths of soldiers battling communists, terrorists and other insurgents in remote areas while generals and their wives and mistresses were living it up in swanky homes in Manila and San Francisco. Trillanes spent several years in the brig for his audacious act but is widely viewed now as a whistle-blowing hero. Even while detained, he ran for and won a senate seat.
The Oakwood mutiny forced the Arroyo government to look into the complaints of Trillanes and his company. It formed the Feliciano Commission, which ended its investigation with the conclusion that the mutiny was nothing but an attempted coup d' tat but nevertheless recognized the group's complaints, including the "conversion" of funds, the misuse of the so-called "modernization fund," the questionable practice of transferring weapons to "unauthorized parties" (read: enemies of the state), among others.
It then put forth several recommendations, among them an overhaul of the military procurement system, and to "effectively address legitimate grievances ... against corrupt officers, officials, bureaucrats, and practices". The recommendation about the procurement system was heeded, to the military's credit: the comptrollership was dissolved and replaced by units that decentralized how supplies are procured. The other recommendations, however, have not been as successful in their implementation.
Political soldiers
"The politicization of the military amid the erosion of civilian political institutions that had oversight powers over the military, particularly during and since the imposition of martial law, is a cause of military adventurism. The AFP's role as a partner in national development efforts led them to assume roles that used to be played by civilian authorities.
This tended to increase their political leverage over other sectors of society, and contributed to their politicization as they interfaced directly with the people and the problems of the country. During the martial law period, there were no institutional checks on the military's power and influence as well as on the uses to which its power was used, other than the personal power of [former] President [Ferdinand] Marcos."
This paragraph is contained in the Feliciano Commission report. While it seems to refer only to the Marcos dictatorship, it could also speak of the Arroyo regime. For this is the context of the present scandal: All of it occurred during the time of Arroyo, who relied heavily on generals like Reyes to keep herself in power during a tumultuous nine year tenure marked by several attempts to unseat her. In fact, many of the corruption scandals that Arroyo, her family and her cronies faced invariably involved generals and sections of the military. Foremost of these was the allegation that military officials helped Arroyo to rig the 2004 elections in her favor.
Much like Marcos, Arroyo left the generals to their own devices. Many suspect that Garcia and the others involved in the slush fund scandal became even more audacious when they saw how Arroyo was beholden to Reyes and other generals. At one point during the recent senate hearing, Rabusa claimed that Garcia had given Diomedio Villanueva, Reyes's successor as military chief of staff, 160 million pesos as a "going-away present" when he retired - more than three times what Reyes allegedly received.
There is no debate that Marcos, who ruthlessly used the military to suppress his political enemies, thoroughly damaged the armed forces. It didn't help that after the first "People Power" uprising in 1986 soldiers did not return to the barracks and inserted themselves directly in the country's rambunctious politics.
Doubtless this politicization began with Marcos but it worsened under Arroyo, who relied on the military for her rise to power. Human-rights groups claimed this dynamic allowed the military to implement a bloody and unaccountable counter-insurgency program, known as Oplan Bantay Laya, that has been blamed for the extrajudicial killings, abductions and torture of hundreds of leftists, even those operating through legal political and civil society organizations. The left, of course, was the most vociferous of Arroyo's political enemies.
To please top-ranking military officers, Arroyo appointed six different chiefs of staff in nine years - the most by any Philippine president. As a result, whatever reforms that should have been implemented were ignored or disjointed because of the short tenures of successive chiefs of staff.
Glenda Gloria, editor of Newsbreak and an expert on the military, believes one of the most urgent actions for incumbent President Benigno Aquino "is to appoint a chief of staff who will stay long enough - three to four years - to institute reforms and who is strong enough to make bold decisions". Aquino is in the process of interviewing candidates and has said publicly that fighting corruption will be a top priority for the next military chief.
Arroyo also stands accused of compromising the institutions that are tasked with checking and prosecuting military abuses. Foremost of these is the Office of the Ombudsman, which is headed by Merceditas Gutierrez, a close ally of Arroyo and her husband. Apart from sitting on the numerous complaints filed against the former president and her cronies, Gutierrez presided over the plea-bargain agreement that favored Garcia, despite the overwhelming evidence that Gutierrez's predecessor, Simeon Marcelo, had accumulated against the general.
The plea bargain agreement was widely viewed as yet another breakdown of the country's dysfunctional justice system and set in motion the congressional hearings that led to the explosive events of this week, including the self-inflicted wounds at the grave of Purificacion T Reyes, whose memory has now been soiled by the blood of her own son.
Carlos H Conde is the freelance correspondent in Manila for The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune. He may be reached at chconde@gmail.com or at www.facebook.com/chconde.
Copyright 2011 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved
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