False hopes in our leaders

By Herbert Vego

“AAYAW-AYAW nga ako ngunit ‘yan ay di totoo,” says a line from a Tagalog song where the lady singer “resists” the suitor she loves; pakipot for short.

The song reminds us of how the then mayor of Davao City, Rodrigo Duterte, initially laughed off “public clamor” for him to run for president in 2016. Let us travel back in time.

“Change is coming,” his PR men hollered as he was launching his candidacy on the promise of waging a “war on drugs.” He would eradicate shabu and other illegal drugs in three to six months.

On that note, he beat the four other presidential candidates — Mar Roxas, Grace Poe, Jejomar Binay, and Miriam Defensor-Santiago.

I still wonder why Poe — elected senator in 2013 — had to run as an opposition presidential candidate in 2016 when she still had three years left to serve her first term in the Senate. How could she have raised billions of pesos needed to mount a nationwide campaign?

Until she ran and won as senator in 2013, she had held a humble job as a preschool teacher at the Montessori School of Cedar Lane in Fairfax, Virginia.

Was she “sponsored” to run for the highest office to spoil the chances of Roxas, who was then the choice of outgoing President Benigno Simeon “Noynoy” Aquino III?

To recall, Roxas had 9,978,175 votes while Poe had 9,100,991. Their combined 19,079,166 votes were 2,477,169 more than Duterte’s 16,601,997.

On the positive side, if he had lost to Roxas, Duterte could not have committed those “crimes against humanity” which are the grounds why he is now a “resident” at The Hague, Netherlands, awaiting trial at the International Criminal Court.

To this day, there are Duterte’s die-hard supporters who believe that “extrajudicial killings” by the police are the price the victims had to pay in pursuit of a drug-free society.

Despite the PHP 6.4 billion worth of shabu from China that passed through the green lane of the Bureau of Customs in May 2017 and many other big shipments attributed to the “Davao Group,” his supporters brush them off as “fake news.”

Methinks we would have been better off had Roxas won the presidency against Duterte in 2016. He could have pursued the Daang Matuwid (straight path) essence of the six-year Noynoy Aquino presidency, aimed at curbing graft and corruption in government.

As a senior citizen, I can recall earlier attempts by previous presidents to leave a legacy. I was three years old in 1953 when Ramon Magsaysay ran and won against reelectionist President Elpidio Quirino with this credo: “Those who have less in life should have more in law.”

Carlos P. Garcia defeated the rich Jose Yulo in the 1957 presidential election on the platform of economic protectionism known as “Filipino First.”

“Rising prices” was the issue that frustrated Garcia’s reelection bid against then-Vice President Diosdado Macapagal in 1961.

President Macapagal tried to win reelection in 1965 by portraying his challenger, Sen. Ferdinand Marcos, as a “land grabber” and “killer of Julio Nalundasan.”

Marcos ignored that accusation and exploited his own track record as a World War II “bemedaled hero” through his biography For Every Tear a Victory and the movie Iginuhit ng Tadhana, starring Luis Gonzales and Gloria Romero as Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos.

Marcos’ declaration of martial law in 1972, allegedly to quell the creeping communist rebellion, was widely perceived as a way out of his two-term limitation.

It was the assassination of opposition Sen. Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino in 1983, however, that sparked the public indignation that culminated in Marcos’ ouster during the “People Power Revolution” in 1986 and the ascent of his wife, Cory, to the presidency.

And now we have President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. trying hard to regain confidence in the Marcos brand in the remaining two years of his term. May he succeed.