(Editor’s Note: In the following excerpts from the book “Global Filipino: The Authorized Biography of Jose de Venecia Jr., the Visionary Five-Time Speaker of the House of Representatives of the Philippines,” De Venecia links members of the First Family to his removal from the post of Speaker.

The book was written by American journalist Brett M. Decker, a former editor and editorial page writer for the Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong who has served on the editorial board of the Washington Times.)

IT WAS A YEAR, NOT JUST A season, of deception. The political execution of Jose de Venecia by the conspiracy led by the President, her husband, and two sons was painful and merciless.

To the trained mind, the signs of danger did not materialize by chance.

The first of these signs was the President’s failure to act on de Venecia’s letter informing Mrs. Arroyo of an assassination plot against him and his son, purportedly hatched by three former police generals now working in her administration. In rapid succession three other signs appeared, each new one worse than the last. A complaint to impeach the President, filed by a certain Rafael Pulido, a lawyer, was lodged in the House of Representatives for the anomalous NBN deal her government had entered into with ZTE. The complaint aroused deep suspicion from the moment it was filed. It contained more malicious and unfounded accusations against de Venecia and his son than it did against the President.

De Venecia balked at referring the complaint to the House Committee on Justice. He described the complaint as a sham that was tainted with bribery.
....

The conspirators were putting up Nograles to replace him. And the conspiracy’s central command headquarters was not Davao City, Nograles’ bailiwick. It was somewhere deep in Central Luzon, in the ancestral province of the President, and the ringleaders were the two presidential sons and brother-in-law, all incumbent members of the House of Representatives. In the aftermath of the broadband business conflict between the President’s husband and the Speaker’s son, the President was now unleashing her family on the Speaker to finish him off in retribution.

With the passage of time, one is still struck by the brazenness of the plotters in organizing and seizing the initiative. The clandestine meetings (their favorite rendezvous was Mikey’s Bar and Grill in Manila’s famous reclamation area, fittingly on Diosdado Macapagal Avenue) all happened presumably after the Christmas holidays of 2007. In that case, the conspiracy was already in place by the time de Venecia got wind of it, and all the basic ingredients were thrown in—the prodigious resources, the influential actors, and the plan of action.

Now, this Sunday evening, after de Venecia returned from church, the strategy group gathered around the dinner table. Support for the Speaker remained solid from his senior leaders, but for the bulk of the majority coalition, a threshold was about to be crossed. Someone observed that many of those who signed for Speaker de Venecia also signed for his rival. And they were gathered at the moment that same night somewhere in a tony Quezon City village, in a meeting organized by the President’s husband and their two sons. No head count could reliably predict where the Speaker stood at this point. With large contingents of his coalition sequestered in clandestine meetings, he could not whip up support.

The small group at the Speaker’s residence explored several scenarios. In the end de Venecia decided he would make a tough stand in the caucus the next day. He would lose, but he would fight it out. Everyone left around 10 o’clock. The house on Tamarind Avenue fell silent. Outside, the night was cold and the street empty. It was the eve of a “night of a hundred knives.”

Malacañang had instigated the conspiracy to remove him from the House leadership, and the certainty of the Palace prevailing over him never seemed in doubt. The plot depended on presidential power, largesse, pork barrel, and other inducements that comprise the heavy firepower in Malacañang’s nuclear arsenal. That morning, de Venecia woke up no longer harboring any shred of illusions about the fate that awaited him.

....

De Venecia recalled the moment that sealed his political partnership with President Arroyo. It began with a request by Mrs. Arroyo, then one of the country’s twenty-four senators, that took a mighty effort for him to grant. On Christmas night in 1997, she visited de Venecia at his residence in Dasmariñas Village to solicit a political favor. “Please consider me as your vice-presidential running mate,” Mrs. Arroyo asked him...

At 12:43 a.m. of Tuesday, February 5, 2008, the political giant fell. And he fell hard.

This political crisis did remake de Venecia, the dreamer, significantly. It made him realize more profoundly that to advance the common good one must go through an indelible phase of pain and self-sacrifice.