The Senate is reopening an inquiry into charges of massive electoral fraud in 2004 and 2007 in the hopes of putting closure to the “Hello Garci” scandal that has hounded former President and now Pampanga Rep. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
Sen. Teofisto Guingona III on Monday said the blue ribbon committee would begin its inquiry into the charges of vote rigging and other election fraud once a resolution seeking the inquiry is referred to it.
The resolution has been filed by Sen. Panfilo Lacson directing the blue ribbon committee to inquire into the charges of “widespread, systematic, organized and massive poll fraud and election sabotage” in 2004 and 2007.
Guingona voiced hope that former election supervisor Lintang Bedol and ex-Gov. Zaldy Ampatuan of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, possible key witnesses in the fraud, would help the Senate put closure to the scandal.
The “Hello Garci” scandal, which erupted in 2005, was sparked by the circulation of wiretapped conversations that had then President Arroyo talking to an election commissioner about a one million vote lead over closest rival Fernando Poe Jr. The other voice on the tape with Arroyo was believed to be the election commissioner Virgilio Garcillano.
No. 1 electral reform
Arroyo, who won by more than one million votes over the action movie icon, admitted it was her voice on the line but denied she was involved in cheating. She survived a Cabinet crisis and went on to complete her term in June 2010.
Guingona said a reopening of the charges “should lead to No. 1, electoral reforms, but most definitely, it will write finis to this continuing saga that we all know: That FPJ was and is the real president.”
Lacson, who claims to have been a victim of vote-shaving and padding (dagdag-bawas) in Maguindanao in 2007, said the charges pointed to Arroyo and ex-elections chair Benjamin Abalos as the brains of the fraud.
“Election fraud and electoral sabotage of this magnitude and scale cannot be committed without public officers committing malfeasance, misfeasance and nonfeasance in their offices,” he said in the resolution.
Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile and other senators had expressed reservations about a fresh congressional inquiry into the scandal, asserting that the Department of Justice should handle this.
Past is catching up with Arroyo
“There will be an investigation. Where that leads to, we don’t know,” Sen. Sergio Osmeña III said in an interview. “We will invite Bedol. And by extension… we will invite Garcillano.”
Reminded that Garcillano had balked at testifying on the fraud, he said: “We’ll see.” Osmeña observed that the emergence of Bedol and Ampatuan was a sign that the past was catching up with Arroyo, now a lawmaker in her home province Pampanga.
“In a system of laws, the law has to be respected and implemented. You can’t say you’ll get away with it,” he said. “Until now, some Nazis are being captured [for World War II crimes].”
‘I want the truth to be retold’
Sen. Loren Legarda, Poe’s defeated running mate in the 2004 presidential vote who won a fresh term as a senator in 2007, sounded ambivalent about an inquiry into the scandal.
“I have let go… I have moved on,” she told reporters. “But now that it’s being talked about, of course I want the truth to be retold.”
“I want the world to know the truth, the truth that killed FPJ and broke his heart, and the truth that killed my ambitions, and 2010 buried it. The truth has been staring us in the face since 2007,” she added. (Legarda ran for the vice presidency again in 2010 and lost.)
Sen. Joker Arroyo was not so keen on a fresh Senate inquiry into the scandal.
“Anything that we do in the Senate amounts to nothing because it could not be the basis for any complaint. The ones who can charge for electioneering are either the Ombudsman, the Department of Justice or the Comelec. Why not bring it there directly?” he told reporters.