No politics in admonition to Tupas, says Sen. Santiago

Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago and Rep. Niel Tupas Jr. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

ILOILO CITY, Philippines – Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago said Wednesday that local politics in Iloilo had nothing to do when she dressed down Iloilo Representative Niel Tupas Jr., the lead prosecutor in the impeachment trial of Chief Justice Renato Corona, at Tuesday’s hearing at the Senate.

“I don’t meddle in local politics,” Santiago said, sounding amused, in a telephone interview with radio station Bombo Radyo Iloilo.

Attending the impeachment trial for the first time on Tuesday, Santiago, a former regional trial court judge who was elected to the International Criminal Court in 2011, admonished Tupas for not knowing exactly how many witnesses and pieces of documentary evidence the prosecution was planning to present.

Santiago said in the radio interview that the prosecution should always come prepared so as not to “waste the time of the senators and the public.”

The senator, who hails from Iloilo, said she only wanted a speedy trial and was not motivated by political biases.

“It has nothing to do with the political rivalry between my cousin [Iloilo Governor Arthur Defensor] and his family and the Tupas family,” Santiago said in the radio interview.

Defensor, a stalwart of the Lakas-Kampi, defeated former Mayor Raul Tupas of Barotac Viejo, the younger brother of the congressman, in the 2010 gubernatorial race.

Defensor’s son and namesake, Iloilo Representative Arthur Defensor Jr., also defeated Rene Villa, a close ally of the Tupas family and President Benigno Aquino III in the Liberal Party, for the congressional seat of Iloilo’s third district.

Villa was appointed last year as the chairman of the Local Water Utilities Administration.

Santiago said she would rather want national officials from Iloilo to unite and help find funds for projects and programs for Iloilo and Western Visayas.

The senator authored a resolution last year against a controversial gun ban in the province’s fifth congressional district, the bailiwick of the Tupas clan.

The selective gun ban was imposed on eight of the 11 towns of the district. Representative Tupas’ hometown Barotac Viejo, was among the three towns excluded from the gun ban.

Defensor had said that politics could have been behind the selective gun ban.

Representative Tupas had supported the gun ban but denied that he had asked the Philippine National Police to impose it.

The gun ban was later lifted after it drew strong opposition from Defensor and other members of the provincial peace and order council, municipal mayors and barangay (village) captains.