By Atty. Howie Calleja
When all you know about the background of a candidate is that … (1) She born in a farm in the Philippines; (2) Her father is Chinese; (3) She was home schooled by Teacher Rubilyn; and (4) She grew up in the same farm — to which all information is devoid of any backstory; and then she wins as mayor … I think there is something fundamentally wrong on how we choose our candidates.
During the martial law period (a.k.a. the Marcos election era) the act of suffrage was all but done even before campaigns started except for a few shining opposition pickets of resistance to which about 90% of local and legislative winners come from the ruling dynasties and/or the ruling party of Marcos’ KBL; and our electoral process just became a rubber stamp of a candidate’s assumption into office. A shining light came after the EDSA People Power when a resurgence of great political debates and statesmanship was seen and experienced. Credentials and Competencies won over Peso, Personality and Patronage.
This was however short lived when family dynasties once again used Guns, Goons and Gold to take over the power vacuum left by the Marcoses most especially in the provinces and rural areas. As such, the political dynasties of deeply entrenched families took a stronghold in our Philippines political system. So how can an Alice Guo come into power? How can a complete stranger be elected into office vis-à-vis a dynastic local political system? The simplest answer would be the gullibility of our voters brought about the perceived “corruption” of a locality’s ruling political dynasty. To use “hope” and “change” as a means to galvanize support which blinds a voter from the pitfalls of not vetting a candidate before electing them into office.
Desperation canopies a voter to go beyond the RHETORICS and FAÇADE … seeing only the “scripted” persona they want to reveal. I will not go one by one with all the illogical statements and inconsistencies Mayor Guo has given. She has already said what she has to say and has dug her own big hole to bury herself with. So let us leave her own testimony to reflect her own duplicitous persona. But one thing is clear, you cannot come out of nowhere and just win a mayoral position. We all know how this happened and sadly it is not her direct fault but blame goes to the corrupt social realities in Bamban’s that has forces the electorate to be fooled by this charlatan.
We cannot prove that vote buying occurred in Bamban but using a person’s emotional weakness as leverage to push one’s hidden agenda (e.g. the building of a SCAM HUB in the guise of POGO or even the propagation of the political agenda of a foreign nation) is equally evil. It is one thing to sell your votes to your movie idol or favorite comedy or action star (at least they are true blooded Filipino) but it is one thing to sell your votes to an alien or an impostor masquerading oneself to be one of us.
This is another form of voters’ manipulation. A kind of manipulation which is scary because now we see a voter waive seeing the “deep community roots” of a candidate vis-à-vis psycho-social pre-conditioning. In a small and tightly-knitted community like Bamban voting for a stranger seems unlikely but it happened because someone who used “hope” and “PR” to fool voters was successful. Empowerment is the only way — the only route, come the next election cycle.