What is madness?
To have erroneous perceptions and to reason correctly from them.
—VOLTAIRE
The next morning, crawling east over the fecal suds of the San Juan River, my taxi driver leaned over his furry steering wheel and pointed through the purple smog to three army helicopters hovering a couple of miles away. On his radio I could hear the ominous throb of the Hueys as an out-of-breath reporter shouted Tagalog commentary above a shrieking crowd. “Is Erap being arrested now?” I asked, craning forward to the scratchy radio. My driver listened another moment and then burst into laughter, saying, “No yet, people chasing reporters because on TV they say protesters smell bad. So they yelling at him, ‘Mabuhay ang mababantot.’ Means, ‘Long live the stinky,’ ha ha ha!”
If the protesters came from around here then the reporters had their stories right, I thought. We were now rocking through a warren of narrow streets and dank alleys reeking with sulfurous sewage and sunbaked garbage. From the edges of ditches naked children waved at me and called their ubiquitous tourist greeting, “Hey Joe!” then went back to playing with splintered wood blocks in the brown runoff. This was San Juan, the municipality Erap had served as mayor from the time he’d retired as an actor in the late ’60s until he’d been elected to the Senate in 1987. Judging by the barrio’s poverty, Erap’s tenure hadn’t done his constituents much good. Nevertheless, the clotheslines across the alleys were hung with posters showing their beefy hero haloed in front of the seal of the Philippines, one hand on a text called Agrikultura as if swearing his solidarity with poor peasants. Other, more mundane posters fluttered in support of several candidates in the pro-Erap senatorial coalition, including former Bureau of Immigration chief Miriam Defensor-Santiago, Ping Lacson, and Lacson’s colleague from the Philippine Military Academy, Gregorio “Gringo” Honasan, a general who had led many of the nine coups against Cory Aquino. It stretched the bounds of sanity, but there were also posters for the megawealthy fugitive Mark Jimenez, now running for the House of Representatives. Smiling brightly, he offered voters a thumbs-up.
Ten minutes later we were close enough to Erap’s North Greenhills subdivision to have overtaken crowds of threadbare people in flip-flops heading up the street towards the rally. My driver honked his way through them, crossed a wide avenue called Ortigas, and turned into the huge Greenhills Shopping Center—a middle-class landscape that was startling after the medieval blocks behind us. We hauled up at the mall entrance, my driver saying it was too dangerous to bring his cab any closer to the thousands of people gathered across the parking lot. The crowd stretched for about half a mile between some condo towers on the right and a mall blockhouse on the left, with the greatest concentration at a gate in a high concrete wall to the subdivision. Rabble-rousers stood atop jeepneys that had been stalled and engulfed by the masa, leading a rhythmic cheer: “Ay-y-y-rap! Ay-y-y-rap! Ay-y-y-rap!”
“Where does Erap live?” I asked.
“Go straight through crowd, Buchanan Street Gate.” My driver pointed to the space in the wall. Then—” he angled his hand to the right “—end of Polk Street, number one. But you cannot go in now unless by them,” he cracked, pointing to the helicopters hovering overhead. As I got out he added, “Wait—I give you protection.” He leaned over to his glove compartment, took out a pint water bottle and a cloth hankie. “If throw gas, you make wet and hold over you face. Good luck, my friend!”
I wandered through the stunning heat towards the colorful crowd, which seemed, at least coming up to the back of them, more festive than fearsome. Not being a “foreign correspondent” craving a news hit off an angry mob, I was relieved at the street-party atmosphere. The feeling lasted only a minute. Hundreds of shouting people were soon pressing at my back from the barrio and I could feel the humidity rising and the oxygen diminishing. Worse, the pavement was coated with slimy plastic bags and other assorted squishy garbage. If there was a charge, from one direction or the other, the last thing I wanted was to slip underfoot.
I squeezed through the hot bodies and climbed atop the hood of a jeepney. Looking over the sea of black hair I saw the tightest knot of the demonstrators faced off against a phalanx of a hundred riot police on the other side of the latticed Buchanan Gate. “Are the police taking him out through there?” I asked a bare-chested kid beside me who was waving his tattered T-shirt over his head.
“We no let!” he shouted. “No can take him by! Because we protect! Ay-rap! Ay-rap! Ay-rap!”
How bizarre, I thought: on the other side of that gate Erap lived in another world from these people. I could see a tropically lush street with smooth pavement, intact curbs, and a newly painted white centerline—all rarities in Manila. The spanking road was lined on both sides by monster mansions—a mix of Spanish haciendas, Egyptian mausoleums, Greek temples, and English manor houses, each surrounded by palms, hedges, and yards elaborately decorated with fountains and statues. Jerome had told me that North Greenhills was almost exclusively populated by Manila’s rich Chinese merchants, while the richer “Spanish”-Filipinos, who controlled the financial center, lived in a gated community called Forbes Park, down in Makati. For 19 months, San Juan’s North Greenhills had usurped Makati’s Forbes Park as the social center of the capital, and, according to Jerome, that was another reason the elite had been so irked by the election of Erap.
To the right of the gate and looming over it was a meeting hall called Club Filipino, a large colonial building with a red tile roof and two floors of wraparound balconies. On the lower balcony I noticed some media folks doing stand-ups and filming the crowd. It looked like a safer vantage point than down here, so I jumped from the jeepney, pried my way back out of the crowd and walked the long way around to the condos on Eisenhower Avenue and back along the inside margin of the demonstration to the steps of the building. Upstairs, from behind the shoulders of a cameraman, I looked down upon a scene of pure hysteria at the gate—the first time I’d ever seen hate in Filipino faces. Hundreds had their fists up at the cops; the men roared catcalls and the women wailed piercing screams about Jesus loving Erap and Cardinal Sin being in league with Satan. The young cops behind their Plexiglas shields looked terrified as they jabbed red batons at the protesters rhythmically rocking the gate. One rowdy got it in the eye and stumbled back screaming, blood running through his fingers. Things looked as if they were about to boil over. I asked the cameraman if he thought the cops would open fire if the mob broke through. “They are ordered not to shoot,” he said. “But it just take a scared one, eh? Then lose control of situation. So let us pray.”
I was happy to do my praying up here, but several officials and security guards from the club soon came out on the veranda and announced that the media would have to vacate the premises to avoid giving cause for an attack up the steps. Apparently the crowd had been threatening this sanctuary all morning because of the press’s announced disdain for the supposedly unwashed and smelly multitude. Sure enough, as soon as we stepped onto the slimy pavement a couple of dancing teens jocularly emptied water bottles over the head of one ingenue female reporter and then upended her colleague’s Betacam. At that I decided to separate myself from the perceived bad guys. “I’m a friend of Lacson! From Canada! Covering his campaign! I want to know the real story!” I said, pen on my pad. That did the trick. “Canada, Canada!” they shouted, introducing me around, pouring their hearts out about the injustices to Erap, the corruption of Ramos, the evil of Cardinal Sin, the strings attached to Gloria’s head, and the handle in her back. Most of the half-dressed men around me said they had been keeping a vigil on this scorching street for days. I asked a kid where he’d slept, but never got an answer, because just then word circulated that the new chief of the PNP, General Leandro Mendoza, was on his way to serve the warrant.
That galvanized the mob. With ululations that made my ears ring they attacked the steel gate, gaining leverage by leaping up and pulling at its top and leaning down and pushing at its bottom, twisting it on its hinges while the cops beat at their hands and heads. I flinched at three sudden explosions and watched black canisters come sailing slow motion over the fence and land in the crowd, fizzing in circles and blowing holes in the press of people. I poured my water over the hankie, but barely caught the chloro-burn vapor because a few brave kids, bandannas around their faces, threw the canisters back over the fence, to loud cheers. Pulling and pushing to the commands of a couple of ringleaders the masa finally snapped one of the hinges and twisted the gate open a few feet on its heavy chain lock. With waves and screams of victory the crowd began pouring through the space into the exclusive condominium.
The cops, most of them probably from neighborhoods not far in poverty from where these folks were from, held their fire and randomly beat at human targets as they raced through their ranks. I hung back until I saw some journalists squeeze through the gate in pursuit of the story. As I took off after them I questioned what the hell I was doing. This had nothing to do with Steve. And yet I kept going.
Just as my driver had said, Estrada’s mansion was off to the right of Buchanan, at the end of a leafy cul-de-sac on Polk Street. The strategic intersection of Polk and Buchanan was blocked by hundreds of police and soldiers carrying mini-machine guns, rifles, tear-gas bazookas, and drawn pistols—a murderous match for the perhaps 300 scraggly rioters who’d gotten through and were now faced off against their line. On the flat roofs of the gargantuan mansions I could see the running silhouettes of snipers. Above us the choppers seemed to grow larger, lowering their olive-drab bodies as if they were going to land on our heads. The thunder of their straining engines was deafening—which was the intended effect, I supposed.
I looked back at the Buchanan Gate. The cops had reformed a tight line and with swinging batons, shots in the air, and tear gas they beat the crowd back, plugging the dike. There must have been some military strategists in the masa’s ranks, however, for suddenly, looking actually more frightening than the military blockade, thousands of reinforcements of the poor came running at us from the north—a flanking stampede that would have caused me to open fire right into their midriffs.
“Where are they coming from?” I asked a cameraman who was on his cell phone.
“Broke through Madison Gate, farther north!”
The two mobs merged and began celebrating, socializing, and exchanging intelligence. Then everyone began pointing to the Polk Street cul-de-sac, where soldiers were scaling Estrada’s brown steel gate. The gate opened and word circulated that Mendoza was entering the premises. Wild kids in the front row began taking blind flying leaps at the shields, grabbing at the lashing truncheons and creating opportunities for breaching the line. Dozens squeezed through and ran in their flip-flops to save Estrada. Those too timid to risk gun butts turned on the press, furious that they had obstinately portrayed Estrada as a gross criminal and Gloria Arroyo as a virginal saint. I took shelter amidst a gaggle of journalists, as the masa began showering us with clods of turf, poured water over our heads, and upended some more cameras. Some of the rioting women kept their Filipino sense of humor, however. Into the mikes they sang bawdy songs about Arroyo’s close relations with one of her allegedly corrupt ministers, Justice Secretary Nani Perez, then washed their underarms and asses for the cameras to show they weren’t dirty.
All this time a senior officer on a bullhorn, surrounded by soldiers with raised pistols, had been lecturing the mob in Tagalog. Whatever he was now saying sparked half a dozen male demonstrators, masked like bandits with red bandannas, to come forward. They turned their backs on the cops and held their hands up to the protesters. The decibel level went down a 10th. The officer with the bullhorn slipped in front of his men and he and the mob marshals seemed to hold a powwow, while everyone else leapt and danced and otherwise went berserk behind them. I supposed the officer was negotiating for Erap’s passage but after five minutes of fruitless argument he shook his head and walked back behind his ranks.
I knew what was coming next. There was a massive brown house to my right, and I boosted myself onto its outer wall and crawled through the bushes planted there. I was surprised to discover, crouched on the other side and peering through the bushes, the entire Chinese family from the house—middle-aged father, mother, and several teenage sons and daughters, plus hand-wringing maids in white uniform. “Okay?” I asked the old man of the house. “I’m a journalist from Canada.” “Yes, yes, okay,” he told me. “Keep head down.”
Then came the explosions of tear-gas canisters, and the cops charged, swinging their long red sticks in front of their shields, beating the backs of the slower demonstrators as they fled and the heads of the obstinate ones who tried to fight them. A few women who’d been pushed off to the side wept hysterically on the ground, arms raised to Jesus; others crawled over lawns with bleeding heads and noses. One shirtless fellow in green shorts who’d gone down wasn’t moving at all; I watched him trampled by peasants’ thongs and soldiers’ boots until a cop threw him over his shoulder and carried him off down Buchanan. Meanwhile, up the block to my right, a white bus came out of Estrada’s gate. One of the weeping woman stood up and tried to get her claws under the face shield of a soldier; another grabbed a running garden hose from a rich man’s lawn and, surrounded by cameramen, comically soaked the cops. I thought Estrada was inside the bus and leaned over the hedge to have a look at him, but the teenage boy beside me, listening to Tagalog commentary on a boom box, told me that the bus was carrying Estrada’s son, Jose “Jinggoy” Estrada, the current mayor of San Juan, arrested for graft as well. Led by a phalanx of riot cops dispersing the regrouped rioters, the bus pushed past the corner and began inching north up Polk Street.
Five minutes later came Estrada’s black Ford van. A human bulldozer of anti-riot policemen were in the vanguard, flanked sides and back by hundreds of soldiers with rifles and machine guns. They plowed through the wall of masa with a flying wedge of shields and flailing sticks, leaving the demonstrators sloughed off upon the streets and lawns as they passed. When the hubbub had crawled past I jumped down from the wall and joined the mob as it impotently followed the trailing convoy of army trucks loaded with soldiers. Wailing and weeping as if on the road to Calvary behind Christ, the masa moved north up Polk and west on Madison (all of the Greenhills streets were named after American presidents) back out to Ortigas, and then north to Santolan Road, where the parade snaked at five miles an hour along the outside walls of the subdivision until, an hour or so later, it came to a whitewashed side entrance to Camp Crame, several blocks west of Edsa Avenue. The steel gates were thrown open and Erap’s van turned inside, followed by the convoy of military trucks.
The president was in custody.
Back in my hotel that night I saw that the TV cameras had been allowed to follow Estrada into the booking room of the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force—Lacson’s former lair—a grand irony that the commentators made much hay out of. They filmed the old actor standing miserably in profile before the police camera, then turning face front, then turning the other way in profile—like a common thief. They showed him being fingerprinted, and, finally, led into a small cell with a thin prison cot. Erap looked around and gave a little laugh as if to say, “Ah shit.” He threw his trademark windbreaker on the cot, opened his suitcase, took off his socks, laid them in the suitcase, then stretched out in his bare feet with his hands behind his head. Like a gorilla in the zoo he remained on display to the nation for over an hour, the footage endlessly repeated all night long.
“That’s going to drive the masa wild,” I told Jerome over the phone early the next morning.
“Yes, take away his dignity, humiliate him, that is the plan,” he said, adding that the plan was backfiring. All the people who’d been demonstrating at North Greenhills had moved down the road to the EDSA Shrine after I’d left. They’d spent the night there and were now being joined by thousands more from San Juan, Tondo, and other poor neighborhoods.
I asked what Lacson had been up to yesterday afternoon. Jerome said the general had been meeting with his advisers and giving interviews on “the developments.” There was a pregnant pause, after which I said, “Because I kept my cell phone on last night. I suppose he didn’t have time for the meeting on my man.”
Jerome laughed and said he didn’t think so, it looked like this was turning into another People Power event. People Power Three, he called it. EDSA Tres.
“So when can I meet with him again?” I asked.
Jerome said he and the general were just leaving to catch a flight south; “the situation” had forced Ping to “rearrange” his schedule. He was needed immediately at a location Jerome couldn’t reveal.
“So I guess I’ll just wait,” I said.
“Yes, wait. Meantime, go to EDSA—you will see what is going on. The general, everybody is telling people to go to EDSA.”
I felt like saying, “Jerome, I don’t give a shit about EDSA” but instead promised I would hang tight.
When I got off the phone I began to slip into a blue funk. This was all on the other side of the world from my Steve-mission. To solace myself I went down to the hotel’s Internet café and sent Leslie and Anne complaining updates. Back upstairs I chewed Nicorettes and watched television. Oddly, there was no coverage of what was taking place at EDSA on mainstream TV stations like ABS-CBN—just wall-to-wall coverage of a supine Estrada staring at his bare feet over his big belly, some breaking news about where he was to be taken for a medical exam, and some reassuring statements by Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo that the country had turned a corner in its history. I found a grainy and amateurishly produced station called Net 25, which showed 100,000 people at the shrine, assembled before a 50-foot banner hanging beneath the Virgin that said “POOR IS POWER.” I turned back to the mainstream channels and caught a brief clip of a circumscribed view of the EDSA demonstrators, followed by a spokesman from the Catholic Bishops’ Conference, who decried the “desecration” of the shrine by “paid hooligans bused in from Tondo.” Cardinal Sin, the spokesman said, had urged the authorities to “take appropriate action in the face of any discovered vandalism upon our holy shrine, which is the private property of the Catholic Church.” He read a statement from Cardinal Sin: “They have profaned a house of prayer … offending our Catholic sensibilities…. We are grieving for the EDSA Shrine.” I watched for another half hour, but that was the end of the EDSA coverage on the main channels. I switched back to Net 25 and noticed, in the lower right-hand corner, the logo of Iglesia ni Cristo, an evangelical sect with millions of followers that had backed Estrada against the Catholic Church. (I later found out that INC, as it was called, owned the station.) Coverage of what was going on at EDSA was constant on the INC channel. In her senator’s office, incumbent candidate Miriam Defensor-Santiago was being interviewed. “Sooner or later, military support will come,” she said. “Especially from those holding lower positions. This is just a numbers game. The Supreme Court ruling on Arroyo’s legitimacy will have to apply. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.” She called for Filipinos to rally at EDSA, predicting that a million people would be assembled there by the next day, given that the numbers were doubling as she spoke. “The rally will grow and grow until Mrs. Arroyo steps down and the president resumes office. They may try, but they ignore EDSA Tres at their peril.”
Lacson was next. “The Arroyo administration has done nothing to uplift the lives of the masses,” he told reporters as he hurried through a crowd. “We are calling on all our countrymen to go to EDSA to condemn this administration which is preoccupied with politicking, demolishing the reputations of the opposition, and making their candidates win the election.”
I shut the TV off and sat there marveling at Steve’s luck. Time and again over the past nine years the cards had fallen his way. First the judge had given him his passport back, then another judge hadn’t issued a warrant. Then, when I’d found him, the DOJ took six months to issue its extradition request to Macau. Then the hunt for him had all but fizzled out. Then he’d turned up again. And now this. I’d come all this way with a fair shot at getting him this time, and had landed in the middle of a revolution. EDSA fucking Tres.
With each day over the next week I would come to feel that EDSA embodied, not the hope of the Philippines, but a fundamental anarchy that made it a cozy home for sociopaths like the Paper Fan. The word itself was actually an acronym for Epifanio de los Santos Avenue—Avenue of the Epiphany of the Saints. In mundane lowercase, Edsa was just a traffic-choked, black-fuming ring road that began at Manila Bay, half a mile south of the Jumbo. It snaked east through the shacks and shops of Pasay City and turned northeast as it entered the financial district of Makati. It then headed due north past Cardinal Sin’s villa and the mental hospital in Mandaluyong, passed into the Greenhills section of San Juan and through Quezon City’s West Triangle, where it swung back west to Manila Bay. At its most cosmopolitan point, between the Wack Wack Golf Course and Robinson’s Galleria in Mandaluyong, Edsa rose up as a cloverleaf overpass, crossing high above Ortigas Avenue about half a mile south of Erap’s house. It was here, on ground level, that you ran into the capitalized EDSA, a fiberglass-roofed church topped by the giant gold Virgin with her hands extended. In uppercase, then, EDSA designated the shrine, the square before it, and the revolutions-by-means-of-holy-street-party that had taken place there. Indeed, after the overthrow of Marcos, the building, the plaza, and its spirit had been declared hallowed by the Vatican. EDSA, a Filipino Trinity, had become, as Cardinal Sin said, “a Holy place.”
But I just couldn’t accept this sanctifying with a straight face. If EDSA I and II were holy People Power events, then what gave the Church the right to condemn the poor for “defiling” the shrine with their own EDSA? Then again, wasn’t the masa version of EDSA equally paradoxical? The poor meant to take back what they perceived had been stolen from them in the last two EDSAs, but their savior was a megalarcenist. Didn’t the repeated “people power” orgasms of EDSA signify, not power, but helplessness?
To be sure, when I got down there that afternoon, there was a feel about EDSA that reflected power—though I wasn’t sure whether it radiated from the towering Virgin, weirdly draped with half-naked humans like a hellish statue in a Hieronymus Bosch painting, or from the police and military bases I passed walking in from the north.
Camp Aguinaldo was the name of the military base, just across Edsa Avenue from Camp Crame. It was the headquarters of the AFP—the Armed Forces of the Philippines—with a sign out front that read: “Freedom. Your right. Our responsibility.” Aguinaldo had a lot of tanks, armored personnel carriers, and cannon on hand, and during the last two EDSAs the satraps in Aguinaldo had tipped the scales by ordering their hardware to support “people power.” In this EDSA, it was fairly well accepted that the AFP would stay loyal to the barons in the government who richly rewarded their fidelity. Or would some contingents march out and join a revolt? “Especially from those holding lower positions,” Defensor-Santiago had said, referring to the young officer corps, and Jerome had told me this morning that she would know. Her staunchly pro-Erap brother, General Benjamin Defensor, was the chief of the air force.
The square in front of the Virgin could hold perhaps 50,000, but the real power of EDSA drew its strength from the thousands and thousands on the overpasses above and the thousands and thousands that packed Edsa Avenue north and south, and Ortigas east and west. Masses of poor people, several stadiums’ worth, were waving flags, singing, weeping, dangling dangerously off the cloverleaf circles 60 feet overhead, throwing confetti, and draping spray-painted sheets that said “Free Erap Arrest Ramos—Amari thief U Owe Us 1 billion,” “In Jesus Our Love, In Erap Our Hearts,” and “He Suffers for Your Sin, Cardinal.”
In the shaded heat beneath the overpass entrepreneurial folks had established a circuslike village with eggs stalls, meat stalls, fruit stalls, and water stalls—supplying the multitude. I’d heard on the mainstream TV channels just before I’d left my room that the crowd had fallen off and only 10,000 were gathered here—a figure grossly, and (it was later admitted) purposely underestimated by the pro-Arroyo, anti-Erap media. Indeed, the mainstream media were nowhere to be seen at this massive demonstration, lending some weight to the contention of the participants that the controlling powers of the Philippines were trying to kill the rally with silence or, in their scant commentary referring to EDSA Tres as “pathetic,” contempt. Net 25, on the other hand, had assigned all its reporters and cameramen to the square, giving it 24-hour coverage. Doing stand-ups they claimed there were close to half a million people here, and that miles-long lines of others were converging from all over Metro Manila, as if following ant trails. It did not seem possible that these masses had been “bused in from Tondo” by pro-Erap candidates. No, they had walked here on their own, with their heads wrapped in T-shirts they’d hastily grabbed off a hammock, sandal-footed and wearing ragged cutoffs, all they had in the world in their pockets. Unlike the first EDSA, which had been stimulated by mainstream TV stations and newspapers, and the second EDSA, which had been drawn by a million text messages mailed by Cardinal Sin, this EDSA, EDSA III, was word-of-mouth generated. The masa truly believed that if Erap came back he would wave his movie hand and miraculously fix their lives. They believed it so much that they sang “Erap’s Truth Is Marching Home,” to the tune of “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
At the moment they were leaderless, but I could see the first signs of organization. Towering floodlights and a powerful sound system had been installed on a bandstand beneath the Virgin. After “Erap’s Truth Is Marching Home,” a rock group began playing Filipino pop tunes and the square turned into a disco. Then, around 2 P.M., an Iglesia ni Cristo bishop named Roger Alliento began addressing the crowd in firebrand Tagalog slogans—all that could be reasonably communicated across the vast distances. Each slogan was followed by riotous cheers. “They have stolen the power of the poor!” “They are the thieves and plunderers!” “Seventy million poor Filipinos!! We want our country back! We want Erap back! Instead of Erap in jail, put in Ramos!!” That blew the roof off, it being the absolute conviction of the masa that the exposed deeds of Ramos had gone unpunished, while Erap had paid the full humiliating price. An emcee then came to the mike and led the masa in a mocking Tagalog song about Arroyo doing the wash of her justice secretary, Nani Perez. It was a pun on the urban myth of Gloria’s relationship with Perez: Gloria was laundering Perez’s money at the same time as she enjoyed his love. It was a tune everybody seemed to know by heart.
I had a handle on what was being sung and bellowed because a young fellow beside me had volunteered to translate. He was a born commentator, with an accent that was definitely not Tagalog. I would have mistaken him for a Spanish reporter except his skin was richly brown, there was an Incan hook to his nose, and he was dressed poorly in runners, baggy black track pants, and a red T-shirt, without the de rigueur safari vest of Continental journalists. My translator’s name was Jose Luis, and he did indeed have Incan blood. He told me he was Peruvian, that he’d come to the Philippines five years ago, when he was 23, on a merchant ship, and had married a Filipina. He now lived in the Visayan Islands, but traveled frequently to Manila “for my affairs here,” and had taken the ferry to Manila last week to participate in the North Greenhills demonstrations.
Jose seemed as informed about “the developments” as anybody I’d met. When I told him I was here interviewing Lacson he gave me a five-minute exegesis on the politics of law enforcement in the Philippines that reflected everything Jerome Tang had said. Lacson, Jose said, was utterly incorruptible and had refused to be appointed number two man under General Leandro Mendoza because of Mendoza’s questionable affiliations and his ties to Cardinal Sin, whom Jose despised. He drew a map to show me Sin’s vacation hacienda—on the highway opposite the main airport on Panay Island, near the town of New Washington. He urged me to go down there and see it for myself—it would explain why Sin disdained the poor whose welfare and salvation he supposedly looked out for.
He said the new government was feckless and utterly corrupt, and kidnappings had taken a big jump since Lacson’s resignation. Why should anybody be surprised with that convicted kidnapper Berroya now the intelligence chief? he wondered. With Lacson gone, he went on, “the syndicates” were flourishing again in Tondo, Chinatown, and the Muslim quarter of Quiapo. Without fear of arrest you could once again buy a passport, a birth certificate, a kilo of shabu, and guns of any kind and caliber—if you knew whom to approach. Girls, they were everywhere, he said, but the best ones could be found in the nightclubs in Chinatown run by the syndicates, who paid off the PNP and Gloria’s new officials.
When I asked where he got his inside information, he merely shrugged and said he followed politics closely.
“Are you NPA?” I asked him.
“No Communist,” he said. “I am against the oligarchs, I am a social democrat.”
I asked what he did for a living, to which he replied, “Whatever is possible.” Then he added smiling: “If you are a serious journalist, perhaps you should have a guide.”
War correspondents have a term for their guides. They call them “fixers.” Fixers, usually intelligent men with checkered backgrounds, have a ground-level knowledge of everything that goes on in a cratered landscape. Where bullets fly and society has run amok (a good Malay/Filipino word), they can keep a journalist from getting shot or kidnapped as they arrange interviews with warlords or rebel chiefs you could never safely reach without an intermediary. Every seasoned correspondent knows that when he lands in the middle of a war, he is nowhere until he finds a good fixer. Thus, following the law of supply and demand, fixers sprout up at airports and around the breeze-ways of InterContinental Hotels wherever chaos draws the world’s press. Quite simply, they are the Tenzing Norgays to the Edmund Hillarys of the cable news channels, the uncredited senior researchers of much of what you see on the tube about Chechnya and Afghanistan, Somalia and the West Bank.
Unfortunately, in the craziness of the criminal underworld, there are almost no fixers. Gangsters are sometimes warlords, but only in rare cases do they have a story they want to tell reporters who need some hot footage in a hurry. The lifespan of a professional fixer in the underworld would be very short indeed if word got around that he was leading snoopy foreigners into nightclub caves, making introductions where none were wanted. A fixer in the crime world is almost an oxymoron, since he’s probably not in the business of fixing anything but your own kidnapping or murder.
It was a measure of how desperate I was feeling that I asked Jose if he could meet me near the American embassy on Roxas Boulevard at three the next day. I might want to hire him on a story I was on that could do some good for his cause, I said.
As I e-mailed Leslie and Anne that night, I just couldn’t get rid of the gnawing feeling that I was wasting my time and money on Lacson. I was locked into the ex-chief, and he was where? And doing what? I was in the Philippines to the tune of over a thousand dollars in airfare and $150 a day in expenses and if Lacson didn’t come across for me soon, I would have to expand this operation.
Over a lonely late supper of Bacolod chicken near my hotel I plotted a three-step Plan B. The first step would be Jose—he would supply me with the inside story of the Manila underworld. The next step would be the Philppine Center for Investigative Journalism—I would swear its executive director Sheila Coronel to secrecy, share some of what I had found out, and get the name of an NBI cop she absolutely, 100 percent trusted. The third step would be another trip to the NBI—this time up front and on the record. I would come bearing the classified gifts that Jose delivered to me, and then say, “Oh, by the way, here’s something you can help me on.” Then, when I brought out the Interpol posters—What?
I knew I was hoping for some metaphysical event. Yes, I recognize him. He is in our next office here. Ask Agent Joe Co to come in here, please. We will see if he has these tattoos. And suddenly, there would be Steve, presented to me for packing home. Like the split second after a lottery win, my life would be transformed.
I knew that the chances of winning a lottery were 14 million to one, so the next morning I took another shot at getting in touch with the general via Jerome. The Jolibee owner told me he and Ping were back in town but that Lacson would be very busy throughout the day. “There will be developments today. I will call you. Meetings are taking place. Very secret. We cannot talk about it on the phone.” Three hours later I turned on the TV and saw live coverage of Lacson walking out of Camp Crame with Jerome, having just had lunch with Estrada. Very fucking secret, I thought. I waited till the TV screen showed Ping getting in a car and then phoned him on his secure cell phone, whose number I’d just pried out of Jerome. If Ping wasn’t helping me get Steve, I figured, then the least he could have done was to help me to get a scoop on his pare. No journalist had yet interviewed Erap after his arrest.
“Why didn’t Jerome tell me?” I said, sounding irate and silly, even to myself. “I would have liked to interview Erap.”
“I am afraid that would have been impossible—no press allowed,” Ping replied.
I dropped it. “How are you doing?” I asked.
“As you know, the situation grows complicated. I am quite busy now. Can we speak later?”
“Just tell me—any developments on my project?”
I heard some voices in the car, then Lacson said, “Nothing, except it is still in my thoughts, Terry. Excuse me.” The phone was muffled for a minute, then Jerome came on.
“Teddy?”
“Yes.”
“You must be patient. We are negotiating with the army and PNP to keep EDSA from dispersal. To preserve the masa democratic rights. You know how many there now?”
“Half a million?”
“More, maybe three-quarter. You hear what the cardinal say about them? They desecrate shrine, so police should chase them. So government getting worried. They know when will be a million what will be the result already.”
“What’s that, a coup?”
“Shh, shhh!!” he hissed. “I call you later. Keep cell phone open.”
As soon as we greeted one another on the trash-strewn lawn of the Roxas esplanade Jose said to me: “Here is my wife name and telephone number. I trust you. If I die, tell her I was brave.”
“Die when—today?” I asked, feeling my abdominals tighten.
“No today,” Jose reassured me. He looked at a pump boat picking up three young prostitutes to take them out to a freighter in Manila Bay; then at the dozens of naked kids swimming in the putrid water; then at the children in Jockey shorts sprawled against the seawall, sniffing water bottles with an orange pasty substance at the bottom. “No more millions to live like this,” he stated. “I willing to die to change. To die at EDSA Tres! We want to bring down government of oligarchs, we want—”
“Do me a favor,” I said, glancing towards the uniformed figures guarding the embassy lawn, “keep your political beliefs to yourself today. At least don’t let yourself be overheard. I don’t want to die.”
“No problem,” he smiled. “I know, Mr. Gould, we are on the same side.”
I punched his arm. “Call me Joe.”
We sat down on the seawall and I explained what I needed accomplished today. I wanted to find out how to buy a new, fully-lived-in life—including a birth certificate and a passport. I wanted to see how you went about selling and distributing large shipments of shabu to the streets, and the mechanics of buying quantities of illegal weapons. Then I wanted to go where the really big bosses went to relax with their Chinese girls. I faced Jose squarely. “You know I’m good friends with Ping Lacson.”
“That is why you are my friend,” he offered.
“Okay, hombre, Ping knows what I’m doing today. He’s on my side—and he’ll be on your side if this works out.”
I let the implied threat and the reward sink in, although both just seemed to raise a broader smile on Jose’s mahogany face. I made the decision to trust him, and then made the decision to be specific. I told him that if by the evening he had earned my trust, I would give him $1,000 if he could lead me to a gangster.
Jose was right off the mark at that, heading to the other side of the line of seaside palms to wave down one of the hundred jeepneys crawling at 10 miles an hour north down Roxas. I eyed the sardined humans in the jeepneys and told him we were taking a cab. As usual it took some time getting across Roxas to flag one going the right way. The mile-long line of traffic lights that didn’t work was something I never got used to on this perpetually clogged thoroughfare. In Cambodia they didn’t have any lights, so that gave them some kind of excuse for their new traffic anarchy, but the Philippines had no excuse. All the accoutrements of a modern civilization were in place but nothing worked here. They’d let their infrastructure go to shit—were actually going in the opposite direction of Cambodia. So much for People Power.
Half an hour later, as we crossed Quezon Bridge into Quiapo, I saw a three-story-high poster of Ping Lacson, his bespectacled eyes squinting at the city like Doctor T. J. Eckleburg’s and his lips proclaiming, “End Kotung.”* A few blocks north, on the corner of Claro M. Recto Street, there was a big air-conditioned mall called Isetan Shopping Center. Jose told me to put my camera and pad away—this is where we got out. We walked west down Recto on the opposite side of the street from the mall, passing a number of fly-blown shops and restaurants until we entered a dirt-encrusted market arcade covered by a concrete ceiling held up by cracked pylons. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The booths had sandwich boards on the arcade walkway, openly advertising college degrees, birth certificates, professional certificates for doctors, pharmacists, and engineers. “Man name Mr. Recto,” Jose whispered. “Real name, no from street.” The whole block, he said, was protected by the 14K—Recto’s syndicate—which took care of the police, so there were no worries for Recto or anyone else here.
Jose stopped at one of the little shops and introduced me to a plump, round-faced, middle-aged Chinese with a soft, casual handshake, and a thin pink shirt opened four buttons down his hairless chest. The shirt was smudged with finger tracks of ink. Recto looked like a typesetter in a print shop, and there might have been a printing machine in the back since the office was stacked with bundles of posters for pro-Erap senatorial candidates. A fan turned slowly overhead, though I couldn’t imagine it offered the least bit of cooling to the cooking alcove. Jose talked to Recto in Tagalog, indicating me with his head. Recto nodded and on the back of a campaign poster he wrote out a list of information I needed to give him: photos, name, DOB, place of birth, father’s and mother’s names.
“This will be a new name, not my own,” I said to Jose.
“Yes, new name,” Recto said. He switched to Tagalog and Jose translated.
“For Philippine passport with a U.S. visa,” Jose said, “take three days and cost eighty thousand pesos. With no visa, only ten thousand pesos, next morning.”
“Official?” I asked Recto.
“Malacañang,” Recto nodded.
“You mean the official paperwork is from there? No trouble for me after?”
Recto spoke to Jose, who translated: “Yes, all official. No mistake.”
“What about a birth certificate?”
“Same, same,” Recto said. “Same for visa.” He switched to Tagalog and Jose smiled.
“He say for eighty thousand more, can get birth certificate register in hospital, then Manila records. So no problem for you if you in trouble and they check. You just have story. I born here, U.S. Army father, then move to United Stay when little boy.”
“Good plan,” I said, and shook Recto’s soft hand, adding I would be back with the money in cash tomorrow.
“The guy’s not even afraid I’m a journalist,” I told Jose as we crossed Recto Street to the mall. “None of them are—they fucking advertise.”
“Is new regime. I tell you, it better than old for syndicates.”
We walked back through the Isetan Shopping Center and down Quezon Street, then through the crowded Camedo Street Market until we came to a square in front of the white stone Quiapo Muslim Center. I hung back amidst the strolling crowds of women in black chadors as Jose went up to two dark-eyed and poorly dressed men on the corner and began negotiations for a .38 and a 9mm. Just like that.
Beside me old men sat on boxes, smoking cigarettes pinched between their fingers with their palms up. All their eyes were on the white man and his briefcase, staring at me without inhibition. I offered them a smile but got none in return. Jose held up his hand for his contacts to wait a moment. He came over to me. “The .38 is sixteen thousand pesos, the nine millimeter is fully automatic for twenty thousand, twenty-two with police permit.”
“I get a permit with it?” I laughed. “Ask them about assault rifles and submachine guns.”
“I no think you can get permit for tha-a-A-T,” Jose cracked and walked back to the pair. He came back a moment later. “AK-47 want U.S. dollars five hundred—much cheaper than in United Stay. Uzi sub is one thousand U.S. You want to leave now or just—”
I asked him to find out if I could get the AKs in bulk—about 10. “Say I’m having a lot of trouble with pirates and need protection for my crew.” He took another trip to the corner and came back with the news that 10 AKs would be $400 apiece, then said he was getting really nervous—if they found out I was a journalist they would kill us.
“Now you tell me,” I said. “Are they just local criminals or are they with one of the Muslim groups on Mindanao?”
“I think the groups, too,” he said. “Very dangerous men.”
“And shabu?”
“Yes, they sell shabu, gun, everything.”
I took out 2,000 pesos and told him to give it to them as a deposit, to say we’d be back tomorrow. “Then let’s get out of here,” I said.
While I waited for Jose, I speculated that Quiapo was probably where Steve had got his bona fides and outfitted himself for a new career when he returned here from points west. A new set of parents, citizenship, a new education, a line on shabu, and guns for a new crew. In the Philippines you could do it in a day.
The Ongpin Street Moongate to Chinatown was just a few blocks away, opposite the Santa Cruz Church. Just the other side of the red-and-green-tiled arch we were hit by a stink of hot car exhaust, boiling grease, and rotting fruit. I had a burst of longing for the minty air of my Mosquito Creek bridge. Manila was starting to get to me.
“What go on always upstair,” Jose said. He lifted his chin to the wooden second stories above the shops, where the gambling, drugs, and prostitution were, he said. Not that street level was quiet. A block from the moongate we walked right into an armed holdup: a frenzied fellow in jeans, runners, and guinea T-shirt ran out of a jewelry store clutching a paper bag in one hand and a special in the other. He raced to the corner and disappeared, followed a moment later by the shouting store owner. The pomelo fruit sellers hardly seemed to notice. “Maybe don’t want to see,” Jose shrugged.
We turned onto an old littered lane called Ling Street and Jose led me into a modern restaurant that smelled from cigarettes and cooking meat.
“You want supper?” I asked him.
“If you want, thank you, I am very hungry.” He leaned his head back without turning around. “Next door, you see sign?”
I looked up past his head at a large pink marquee sticking out from a second story into the street. The lettering was in Chinese and English: “Top Royal: KTV Music Lounge & Health Centre.”
“A karaoke lounge and a health center,” I said, thinking the Coin Cache guys had missed half the action.
“Health centre because Chinese women make you healthy,” Jose explained dryly. “Very expensive. Manila nice clean girl all night fifteen hundred pesos. Top Royal, Chinese girl same for one drink just sit with you. Every drink, another thousand. Then, in health room, massage ten thousand. Take to room, twenty thousand.”
“That’s four hundred bucks—for fucking?”
“You want special girl take home to hotel, maybe six hundred U.S. dollar.”
I asked him what the story was: did he bring Chinese guys here? “Only when my situation is critical,” he said.
“Do you know the big ones—the Triad guys?”
“No for friends, like Recto, just to see. I never go upstair here.” He waved at his shirt and pants. “No dressed right. Buy me suit I can go with you.” He laughed sheepishly at that. He really was a straight-ahead guy.
“Are they open now?”
“Close now but open nine. Ten, eleven o’clock we go in, you see.”
I glanced at my watch. It was just past six.
“You know there’s one guy I’m looking for,” I said. “Ping and me are looking for him.”
“Yes, you tell me,” he said, leaning forward eagerly.
I took out Steve’s photos. “These are old—at least ten years. He’s very short. About up to here on me. Have you ever seen him?”
Jose studied the pictures, shuffling them like cards. There was no gleam of recognition in his eyes. “I am sorry,” he said, impressing me by his honesty. Maybe I was lonely, but I felt a surge of affection for him. “We find him here tonight, you pay me thousand?”
“Absolutely. It’ll give you a reason not to die at EDSA. Only—” I made a snap decision that it was too dangerous to suit Jose up and go into the Top Royal with him. I could just picture him walking from booth to booth trying to get his reward and getting me rubbed out, even if Steve had never been inside the place in his life. “I’ll give you another fifty for new clothes anyway.” This in addition to the $50 I told him I’d give him for the day. I had money to burn. “Meantime, you ask around about a short Chinese guy in the 14K. Let’s get together Sunday morning on Roxas, whatever happens.”
I cabbed back to Roxas with him and paid the driver to take him on to EDSA. Three hours later I was in the Top Royal, flying my baseball cap and dark glasses like an asshole sex tourist from Mobile. The joint was done up Vegas-modern—low light, lots of gold mirrors, a bar by the door, karaoke stage by the bar, and plush booths that took up most of the floor. The “health center” rooms were behind buttoned Naugahyde doors that faced the stage. I was the only white guy in there, the only male not in a jacket, but nobody seemed to pay me any mind as I sat in the company of one of the Group Responsibility Girls—a stylish gal in a burgundy leather cat suit who spoke no more than 10 words of English and flitted her hand around my crotch as she tried to get me to order another beer for 20 bucks. Every now and then a door opened and showed a fluorescent-lit health room. Bright promise and then darkness, like all my leads on Steve. Every day I was sinking deeper and deeper in mood. “Want real fucky-fucky?” the gal asked me. “Two girl suck you cock?”
“Not tonight,” I sighed. I was getting set for something crazy, but not that.
“I tell you truth, they are no good,” Jerome said, referring to the Center for Investigative Journalism. It was the next morning and I was sitting in his office across from his Jolibee restaurant in Quezon City. The office, a huge dingy loft, doubled as a storeroom, and the back of it was piled with a depressing collection of Disney characters, fat Buddhas, owl clocks, old tinsel Christmas trees, teddy bears, and porcelain eagles. Along with this dust-covered kitsch were police memorabilia in museum cases: a PNP patrol boat, a riot helmet, a sword, and an elaborate Sam Browne belt. These last belonged to Lacson’s Camp Crame office, hastily evacuated when Estrada was overthrown and given to Jerome to look after until the general’s return to power. One case, beside the riot helmet, had caught my eye when I walked in. It contained the most beautiful statue of Kwan Kung I had ever seen—polished bronze and three feet tall. Beside it was a picture taken the day the statue had been given to Lacson by the Chinese Filipino Business Club. Lacson was in full Third World police regalia—gold epaulets, big hat with gold olive leaves on the brim and gold martial shield on the crown. Jerome stood beside him, his arm around Lacson.
“They will tell you one side—side of Cory and Sin and Ramos,” Jerome went on about the PCIJ. “You cannot trust them. They find out you friends with Ping, they cause you trouble.”
The TV was on, tuned to Net 25. Jerome’s assistant, Carmela, translated a Tagalog stand-up as Jerome took a call on his cell phone. The police were moving Estrada to a veterans’ hospital in Quezon City. This was less for medical reasons, Carmela said, than to get Erap out of the orbit of the demonstrating hordes down at EDSA. “They afraid they attack Crame, to free Erap. What will they attack with, water bottles?”
Half an hour later word came over the TV that government forces were blocking access to EDSA; then that tanks from Camp Aguinaldo were outside the Net 25 station.
“It’s like martial law!” Carmela complained. “First a news blackout, then they are blocking access to the poor people, then they surround the TV station. Ramos is behind it. Ramos, Cory, and Sin.”
“I have been in this country for sixty years,” Jerome said, punching off his phone for the fourth time. “Lacson is only one takes no money. They know this, so they want bring him down, accusing him things he want stop. Setting right that which is wrong. Lacson no take bribes and no give bribes. This is what cause him trouble.”
“It’s all a plot,” Carmela said. “By the people who hate the Chinese. The Makati Business Club, they call us Chekwa, means like you say for black people. We just a million Chinese, so we are like the Jews here. The Makati Spanish hate the people that help us.”
“You see,” Jerome went on quietly, “since he take over chief of PNP, a lot of top police lose jobs. He transfer them, get rid of them, make lots of enemies. But rank and file, they loyal to him. Gloria know this, so she is an enemy, very afraid of him, try to bring him down. She know Lacson going to arrest the gambling king Bong Pineda—I tell you already, Gloria is godmother to his son. He run the jueteng in her province, Pampanga. Pineda ran away to California because Lacson was going to arrest him. Then, Ping out, so now Pineda back. Very bad man—not just jueteng. If Lacson come to power, no more kotung, no more kidnapping, try to arrest Gloria’s jueteng friend. So they don’t want him.”
“You’ve got a wild media here,” I said. “How come this stuff isn’t blown up in the press if it’s in Time magazine—”
“Because I tell you!” he replied, exasperated. “Don’t report on these stories because they get bribe by the politicians. Because Lacson no pay bribes, try to stop bribes, so the media is against him. Oh, oh—look!”
There was Cardinal Sin on the screen, again somberly declaring that the poor were “desecrating” the shrine, bringing shame and disgrace on EDSA.
“Any chance I can meet with Lacson on my project today?” I asked.
“Schedule very busy now. Tonight he go to EDSA, address poor.” Jerome leaned closer. “Be patient. Something happen, then he can help you again.”
“What do you mean ‘happen’?”
“Shhhh!”
The PCIJ was located in a modern, three-story office building on a tree-lined street in Quezon City, not far from Jerome’s restaurant. When I got there the office was crowded with people on the phones and working at computers. I’d heard the center was run mostly on grants from UNESCO and the Ford and Asia Foundations, and that, until quite recently, it had employed only one full-time journalist. That was amazing considering the fact that it was the PCIJ which, in the last decade, had exposed the Amari land deal scandal, justice for sale in the Supreme Court, corruption in every aspect of Philippine society from journalism to law enforcement, and, most recently, Estrada’s weird world up to but not including Singson’s charges—although their previous exposés had given Singson the momentum to come forward and offered his allegations the weight of logic in the public arena. Sheila Coronel, the co-founder and executive director, whom I had come to meet, had an international reputation for writing, editing, and assigning stories that would have won her and her organization a few Pulitzer Prizes if she had been doing the same work in the States.
I entered her private office and found a diminutive, soft-voiced woman with huge glasses and boy-cut hair who seemed so absolutely sure of herself that I could see right off the bat how she’d had the courage to take on every crook in the country—this despite the fact that many of those crooks were, as a matter of course, killing the journalists who exposed them. I began by reiterating the very general e-mail I’d written her by way of introduction: I was looking for a Triad guy from Canada, probably connected to the police. I laid out what I had found out in Quiapo and that I needed an NBI cop I could trust to share all this with—someone the Mounties could trust, as well.
“I know the head of the NBI, General Reynaldo Wycoco,” she said. “He can be trusted, he is one of the most decent police officers. Talk to him and maybe he will find someone to work with you.”
“That’s what I’m worried about,” I said.
“Well, it ought to be somebody that he trusts,” she said, without smiling. “There’s another guy, but he is tied in with Ping Lacson, and his son was said to be involved in a kidnapping gang.”
I almost didn’t want to hear the answer, but I asked the question anyway. “What do you think of Ping Lacson?”
“He’s frightening,” she replied, without hesitation. “He has a past as a torturer—he was a torturer during the Marcos years.”
“That’s proven?” I asked.
She went over to her bookshelf and took down a weighty volume. “It’s all in this book. It was recently published in the Philippines. Have you heard of it?”
“No, I haven’t,” I admitted, my heart sinking. It was called Closer Than Brothers: Manhood at the Philippine Military Academy, by Alfred W. McCoy, originally published in 1999 by Yale University Press. I’d done a search on Lacson but hadn’t turned up McCoy. He happened to be one of the journalists I respected most in the world, the author of the seminal 1972 work, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia—the volume that had blown the lid off the CIA’s involvement in the Golden Triangle drug trade and the Agency’s use of Air America during the Vietnam War.
“Lacson’s a member of the class with Gringo Honasan,” she said. “Gringo was behind the coups to overthrow Cory.”
“That part I know,” I said. “Ping came up through the ranks—but because of that he’s been tarred with the reputation of all the—”
“There’ve been several charges against Lacson,” she interrupted me. “It’s been documented by Amnesty International—it’s in Al McCoy’s book. There’s also been several cases of kidnappings, and those were clearly upon his orders, there are people now ready to testify he did those things—the Bubby Dacer killings.”
“I hear that Ramos was behind it,” I said. “They say he would do that to implicate Ping.”
She dismissed this as nonsense. “No no! It’s all Lacson’s people, it’s the task force people, how could Ramos be behind it? Lacson’s men have confessed that they did it because they were told that Dacer was a criminal. It’s that sort of people in the task force who feel that if you’re a criminal it’s okay to bump you off. He’s not a nice fellow. There are a lot of other stories that are coming up. Certainly there’s things emerging from the testimony of this woman Mary Ong. Then there is Estrada himself, he was involved in smuggling, illegal gambling, and they say drugs were number one, that Ping would be behind it too, because he and Estrada were really close. On the other hand, the thing is, Lacson has a lot of enemies, and the charges may be exaggerated, for example the ones from Berroya. However, it seems to be there’s enough reason to believe he’s involved in drugs.”
Sheila had to take a call and I looked in the index of Closer Than Brothers. In 400 pages there were only five citations for Lacson, but McCoy’s statements about Ping were unforgiving. The Metrocom Intelligence and Security Group (MISG), which Lacson had joined in 1971, was “a closed, tight-knit, psychotic club of martial law enforcers.” Lacson was the aide to the MISG’s commander, Colonel Rolando Abadilla. “At the MSIG, Rolando Abadilla and two close comrades, Roberto Ortega and Panfilo Lacson, tortured together for over a decade, forming a tightly bonded faction that would … rise together within the police after Marcos’s downfall.” Lacson and Abadilla were eventually sued in civil court by the Free Legal Assistance Group “for the brutal torture of nine victims.” Lacson testified that he had never taken part in acts of torture, maintaining that his accusers had mistaken him for another officer. In 1993, a Quezon City judge found Abadilla and Lacson liable for about $10,000 in damages. “But the defendants appealed, insuring delays that could continue for another decade or more….”
Freed from judicial review [McCoy went on] the torturers of the Marcos era have continued to rise within the police and intelligence bureaucracies, allowing martial law’s legacy of military abuse and corruption to persist, unaddressed and largely uncorrected…. After his inauguration in July 1998, President Joseph Estrada appointed PNP Chief Superintendent Panfilo Lacson to head the powerful Presidential Task Force on Organized Crime. Because Lacson was still facing charges for the 1995 mass murder of eleven members of the Kuratong Baleleng gang, the appointment sparked protest by human rights groups and the Catholic bishops. Nonetheless, with the president’s backing and unlimited operational funds, Lacson soon emerged as the country’s most powerful police officer. Within weeks, witnesses recanted and the murder case collapsed. Parallel promotion of two classmates … to key PNP regional commands made their PMA batch the most powerful cohort in the national police. Significantly, each was notorious for brutal killings that marked the different stages in Class ’71’s troubled career. Then in December, President Estrada, apparently unaware of the macabre irony, marked the fiftieth anniversary of the U.N. human rights declaration with a palace ceremony honoring his “trusted aide” Lacson, formerly leader of the notorious torture unit and currently facing mass murder charges, for his “exemplary service to our country.” A few weeks later, Lacson and two classmates … were promoted to two star generals in the police hierarchy.
I put the book down. Oh God, I thought. Am I using Heinrich Himmler to get Bugsy Siegel? When Coronel got off the phone, I said: “He has a dark, dark past. I didn’t know about the torture part.”
“Talk to Wycoco about it.”
“I will, but I must tell you, Sheila,” I went on sheepishly, “I’ve been talking to the opposition, and they’re claiming that there’s a secret triumvirate of Ramos, Aquino, and Cardinal Sin, that Sin has this mansion down on Panay Island, that you could take it as a given this faction would be plotting against all Estrada’s backers, making accusations—that they’re so entrenched and trying to preserve—”
“Sin is seventy years old,” she laughed, “he undergoes dialysis, he doesn’t have the capacity to plot, he’s very sick. Cory’s a grandmother, she’s not capable of plotting anything that could affect government. And Ramos is seventy-something years old too, none of the younger officers would follow him. Those three people have influence, but I can’t imagine they go around plotting—these two doddering old men and this grandmother, that’s the most fantastic allegations!”
I began packing up. I apologized for the silliness of the rumors. I confided that I’d spun off into all these “side issues” simply because I was dealing with people connected with law enforcement who were now outside government and, it seemed, fighting a life-or-death battle. My real goal in coming to her was to find one good cop. I would have to judge Wycoco on my own, of course, but at some point I’d have to make the decision whether I would hand over the whole file to him. “Because if it turns out I can’t trust him, I won’t last long here,” I said.
Sheila thought on that a moment, staring at her desk through her big round glasses. She looked up at me. In her eyes and brows was a statement: You want me to tell you the obvious, I’ll tell you. Then she said: “Wycoco, you can trust him up to a point—but who knows really?”
*In The Great Gatsby, T. J. Eckleburg’s eyes gaze from a billboard over a wasteland. Fitzgerald writes: “But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg…. Blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out … from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles.”