Better to plunder than to mutiny?

Published in The Philippines Star, GOTCHA By Jarius Bondoc, Wednesday, April 16, 2008

That the two events happened only days apart highlighted the irony all the more. Nine Army junior officers last week opted to plead guilty of coup d’état in the July 2003 Oakwood Hotel takeover, and were promptly sentenced from 12 years to life imprisonment. In another court Maj. Gen. Carlos Garcia, the Army comptroller exposed in Dec. 2003 of plundering P302 million, was acquitted of perjury to conceal his assets.

Garcia, it should be recalled, was somehow one of the reasons the disgruntled captains and lieutenants had mutinied in 2003. Actually they didn’t name him then, perhaps due to naïveté about the inner workings of the military brass. But they fittingly griped that supplies, ammo, and even combat boots weren’t reaching the frontlines because of sleaze at general headquarters. Criminally they protested by booby-trapping a civilian enterprise in Makati’s central business district while demanding that Commander-in-Chief Gloria Macapagal Arroyo step down. But they captured the imagination of voters enough to send one of them to the Senate in the 2007 election. Garcia meanwhile became the poster boy of rot in the service. From there their stories took strange twists.

Garcia, for all his faults, has been enjoying a string of good fortune. Last week’s clearance by a division of the anti-graft Sandiganbayan, of hiding three cars from his 1998 Statement of Assets and Liabilities, was his second. Two years ago another division absolved him of the same offense in his 1999 SAL. Legal analysts say the acquittals likely will sway two other divisions hearing false entries in his SALs for 1997 and 2000. Earlier a court martial found Garcia guilty of faking his SALs for 2001-2002, and sent him to two years’ hard labor. Since the Constitution forbids cruel and unusual punishments, the verdict simply meant doing chores beneath a general — like, uh, sweeping his cell floor. He is in jail only because indicted for no-bail plunder, also at the Sandiganbayan. That and the civil forfeiture of his unexplained P302 million could be affected too by the two exonerations.

In contrast fate has been harsh on the Magdalo mutineers. The raps filed against them, mutiny before a military tribunal and coup d’état in a civilian court, are punishable with service discharge and long prison terms. They apologized to Arroyo in Sept. 2004, but got nowhere. (Nine months later their C-in-C would try the same tact in the Garci exposé and move on.) Jail conditions deservedly have been strict. Scores of foot soldiers that followed the Magdalo officers to Makati in 2003 have been demoted or dismissed. One of the ringleaders, Antonio Trillanes IV, was elected senator but is barred by the court from leaving jail or even talk to the press. The Army renegades eventually broke ranks with their Navy and Marine comrades led by Trillanes. The nine from the Army who last week changed their plea to guilty are believed to have struck a deal in exchange for swift pardon. The brass denied so, yet let the convicts hold a press conference. In their visitors’ hall they vowed contritely to beg Arroyo day and night for clemency — reiterating the message to other potential putschists of who’s the boss. Malacañang played coy about pardoning; a bishop in charge of Catholic prison missions opposed it. No such obstacles marked Arroyo’s reprieve for Joseph Estrada six weeks after sentencing for plunder.

If ever pardoned, the Magdalo men may not be readmitted to duty. At best they could become, like some released buddies, narcotics agents. The longer they stay in jail, the more their families will suffer lost incomes.

Garcia’s wife and three sons have fled to the US to elude prosecution. They are known to own a New York luxury condo and a house in another state. US authorities supposedly confiscated a second flat in the Big Apple, and RP counterparts should have frozen Garcia’s bank accounts. But real estate and deposits in the names of the immediate kin reportedly escaped seizure when prosecutors dropped them from the plunder charge sheet.

Garcia’s hand was caught in the cookie jar not by RP but US officials. The elder sons were to visit the third in Dec. 2003 when nabbed at the San Francisco airport with $100,000 in undeclared cash. Mrs. Garcia tried to retrieve the money by indiscreetly writing US Customs that it was their father’s take from approving military contracts. She even swore that she too had sneaked such amounts into America at least thrice before. Apprised by US agents, the Ombudsman in Sept. 2004 sought Garcia’s suspension. The Armed Forces brass circled wagons around him, relenting only after a public outcry.

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E-mail: jariusbondoc@workmail.com