DE GUZMAN TO END 27 YEARS OF ABALOS RULE

DE GUZMAN TO END 27 YEARS OF ABALOS RULE

By JC NIGADO

 

Vice Mayor Danny De Guzman of Mandaluyong City

TODAY’S political contest in Mandaluyong City has reached certain mythical proportions that hark back to the Bible, the Greeks and other epics.  Except that in the present enactment, the conquering David also looms large as the gentle giant who’s poised to overcome the abusive, modern-day Goliath, who had become a citified monster in the eyes of many.

            It’s hard to get an interview with the lawyer Benhur Abalos, what with his web of cordon sanitaire that lines the offices and tables leading to his inner sanctum.  Besides, the mayor rarely grants an interview, if ever, I was told.

            Undaunted, I tried and tailed the opposition mayoral candidate Danny de Guzman, his running mate, Dr. Gerry Pe, and Abalos’s spokesperson and longtime “overall adviser,” Jimmy Isidro, a self-confessed pastor of the Full Gospel Church of Eddie Villanueva.

            I also did further research on the campaign, a number of voters and other residents, and Mandaluyong City in general.  What follows is a montage of days and nights of waiting and being where the action was most of the time.

            With every politician and their crowd scrambling in competition for any position, this election is touch-and-go right to the end.  But, tell me, how many candidates have been to the bowels of the city where people live in subhuman conditions?

            After 27 years, the right man of common touch has finally come to challenge the overstaying rulers of Mandaluyong.  To echo EDSA: “Tama na, sobra na, palitan na!” people chant.

            The man of the hour, 55-year-old (On June 27) Danny de Guzman, an erstwhile janitor, construction worker and hospital administrator married to Dr. Amalia de Guzman nee Esperanzate, is tasked to rev up the economy of the city and put an end to the thieving government of the calloused, corrupt and cheaters.  As they say in the Comelec, “Like father, like son.” And they believe their day of reckoning has come.

            Something indeed must be awfully wrong when even many of Abalos’s relatives are rooting, albeit quietly, for De Guzman.  The Del Rosarios, the Santoses, the Torreses and many others in this clannish city who requested not to be identified are counted as avid supporters of the widely considered champion of the poor and the abandoned.

            Danilo de Guzman first ran for councilor as an independent candidate in 1995, but he explained he was not made to serve his initial term due to the alleged intervention of the Abalos administration. That, he said, was his first taste of cruel defeat at the hands of the city’s ruling cheats.

            De Guzman ran again for the city council in 1998 and the succeeding elections, and served as number one councilor for three consecutive terms until 2007.  That same year he fought for vice mayor, and was blatantly cheated once more.  People say he won the ballots but lost in the counting, due to the fast manipulation of the city’s threatened and threatening powers-that-be. 

            At any rate, a sore loser was made to occupy the vice mayor’s seat; but the “fall guy” didn’t measure up to the expectations of his scheming sponsors. And the crooks’ cunning came home to roost.

            With the first automated elections in 2010, and the Comelec now sans the chair of the fallen and the lost Abalos, De Guzman, not unlike the Phoenix, rose again from the ashes and claimed the vice mayor’s seat hands down. But the stark reality of his situation finally hit home when, sometime in 2011, the city government -- or so he related -- withheld the budget for the vice-mayor’s office.

             One reason, rued De Guzman, was the widening observation that “the underdog from the slums” had become too popular with the masses. And the poster mayor couldn’t believe and didn’t like what he was hearing or seeing around him, even under his very nose at the city hall.

            No one but no one could be more popular than the “best friend ng bayan,” (Benhur’s tagline) he swore. 

            At once, Abalos decided to arrest the growing “De Guzman fever” so he reportedly cut the vice-mayor’s treasury lifeline. 

             So, where does De Guzman get the money that he seems fond of giving to his needing friends and constituents? People are asking. The oblique answer comes from various vested contributions and donations from discreet but identifiable sources.  

              For one, there’s the rumored – and later confirmed by Dr. Pe and others -- ancient Aquino, operating behind the scene. Another is De Guzman team’s campaign manager, former vice mayor and twice opponent of Benhur’s (1998 and 2001), Bibot Domingo. Still another is a reluctant business group that has been complaining about its “unprecedented neck-deep investments” in the long, if lucrative, Abalos regime.

            Apparently, even as early as then, some campaign funds were well under way on both sides of the election equation, as it were. With much money to burn, the mayor’s regular and weekly-gone-weeklong, as the election day approached, “vote-buying spree” in his office and elsewhere was actually in preparation for the coming big fight, which is now.  Of course, nobody expects De Guzman to match the kind of war chest that the billionaire Abalos and his cohorts have at their disposal in this protracted election campaign. 

            But the groundswell of support for the charismatic challenger is overwhelming, and it comes largely from the so-called “silent majority.” With few posters – and fewer “car barkers” on the road – De Guzman and his team’s primary mode of campaigning is a throw back to the good old days of “word of mouth,” mostly in hushed talk or silent speak.

              The entire city, however, blares with the incumbents’ unremitting noise and is covered with gobs of posters and tarpaulins by the reigning Tarpaulin Team of Abalos.

            Such is the lopsided campaign scenario and the unleveled playing field in this river city of 27 barangays that many people have called De Guzman “the Silent Giant.”  And he hardly sleeps on the campaign trail – whether on the house-to-house sorties or the more grueling late-night caucuses and meetings anywhere in the city of floods, fools and frauds.

              In the ongoing hectic campaign, it’s public knowledge that the re-electionist mayor is sometimes accompanied by his father, the former Comelec chair currently on bail, especially in the more intimate house-to-house courting for votes. At other times, they say, the older Abalos even organizes his own separate “feeding programs” to help enhance his son’s last-term candidacy and his granddaughter’s (Benhur’s daughter Charisse) first-term run for the city council.

            On the other hand, De Guzman’s oldest son Dan Carl, daughter Danica Mae and youngest son Dan Mark oftentimes go with their father to support him in the campaign, preferably during daytime. Another family member, his eldest sister, Susana de Guzman Constante, who served as barangay Burol (the De Guzmans’ place) chair for 18 years, also walks the campaign path with her brother.

            For years a brief steady rain brings a downpour of floods in many places, particularly the mired Maysilo Circle and the city hall. Isidro, as Abalos’s mouthpiece, argues that such reality cannot be avoided because the low area of the Maysilo Circle vicinity and its environs serve as a “catch basin” of the city.

            Then why are the Abalos administration and the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) still digging the place deep and wide, even at this late stage of the game, and during election season?

            Elsewhere, mountains of garbage litter the city with very offensive and rotten smell.  But more rotten and offensive is the stench of corruption and deceit prevailing at the mayor’s office, and spreading to the city hall and the whole city. Yes, Jimmy, prostitution, in all its guises, proliferates here.

            Old folks say Mandaluyong was damned when the ZTE wheeler-dealer assumed power in 1986.  It was further doomed, they continue, when the wheeling-and-dealing son also rose only to make things worse. Let justice be served to the unsolved crimes of murdered men in Mandaluyong, they protest!

            A man of many misses in Mandaluyong (pun not intended) is indeed a big mistake.  And see what the city of dead waters has gotten. But to enumerate what Abalos and his gang have amassed while in office for 27 years only begs the obvious.

            Nowadays talks are abroad that the outgoing mayor is sick. That’s why, a female relative of the Abalos says, he can’t always go to some of his campaign outings and keep the scheduled political meetings, especially at night. 

            It’s the same “hereditary illness,” the elderly female relative confides, that some members of the Abalos family have been afflicted with. The same source also mentions about Benhur’s older and younger siblings who succumbed to a similar malady years ago.

            Still, it’s disconcerting to see and hear someone else talk onstage, in lieu of the “effacing” mayor and his team. Why can’t the candidates themselves speak in public and answer straight all those questions being thrown their way by the opposition?

             Can’t Abalos attorney himself – and defend his person fairly and squarely, and in the flesh – against the charges of De Guzman and company?

              At the administration’s caucus on April 7, 2013 along Pantaleon Street in Barangay Barangka Ibaba and another meeting on April 28, 2013 in Tanglaw Street near Barangka Drive, at least two nondescript proxies maundered about their prepared speech furiously in behalf of Benhur Abalos.  With matching audiovisuals, they raved mad, ranting about certain stock issues undoubtedly to ridicule and demolish the unseen opponents of their evasive boss and employer.      

            As always, both camps accuse each other of lying through their teeth. But an Abalos emcee named Lexter Calabia goes overboard with his risqué story about Dr. Gerry Pe and his purported “ECG medical mission.” But the joke falls flat on his face, with only his lustful thoughts and lewd behavior showing.

            Also lewd and in bad taste are Jimmy Isidro’s heated arguments that go around in circles, mainly to mock and mislead. A putative pastor, Isidro talks wildly with gay abandon, not unlike an angry and arrogant evangelist on the prowl. But instead of spreading the so-called good word, the pied preacher is propagating ill will and foul language full of fire and brimstone.

            So where’s Benhur Abalos? Many people wonder. It’s quite different at wakes, burials, weddings, birthdays or what-have-you when the missing mayor would easily send flowers, cash or cakes to make up for his glaring absence.

            In an election contest, and a heavy fight at that, dummies are unacceptable as substitutes for evading candidates.  With their naked fury and violent passions unfurled at peak performance, one marvels at how much is the equivalent of such untamed dummies on the loose, for inflicting another strain of “pollution virus” on their listeners with their loud, uncivil tongues.

            Besides, a mayor’s cozy spokesperson that feigns ignorance about the annual budget of the office of the mayor has no business or excuse for being.  And then, on afterthought, he proceeds to mention the vice-mayor’s annual budget instead, even without being asked.

            Should people vote for Isidro, whoever this guy is?  Or does an impostor inhabit the mayor’s office instead of, or posing as, the real McCoy, if only to justify his unwarranted presence?

            In flesh and blood and spirit, what’s really ailing the mayor now that he’s turning 53 (on July 19)? Has it anything to do with the unreported “bloody” Polymedic incident in August 2012?  Or are someone’s sins visiting their host to haunt him of sly and unsolved deeds and misdeeds?  The people of Mandaluyong are asking, and it seems no answers are forthcoming.

            Be that as it may, in a sin city laden with billions of debts, in crisis or any other circumstance, the big losers are really the people who always pay for their leaders’ debts, even when they have already packed it all in, so to say. 

            Incidentally, an unabashed Isidro adamantly denies that Abalos – or Gonzales, for that matter – had incurred a billion debts at anytime in their respective mayoralty.  This completely contradicts a provision in the city’s current (2013) budget resolution where an item about “amortization and interest on loans” to the amount of more than 220 million pesos is clearly indicated.  Surely someone’s “standby loan” does not have to amortize anything any old time, does it, Brother Jim?

            So, how does one explain such huge annual percentage payments as reflected in the city’s yearly budget list?  And how much bounty have Abalos and Gonzales gotten after leaving the burden to the people and the city? 

            When elected, De Guzman’s vision is one of renewal; and his mission is rehabilitation and regeneration of the damaged and dirty city.  With the help of the people and the Divine, the man promises to spend his life in public service, hopefully in its true sense.

            Towards this end, De Guzman, his running mate for vice mayor, Dr. Gerry Pe, and the candidate councilors in Team Maiba Naman have devised a city-wide “master plan” to finally control and stop the floods that previous false policies brought about.  To be sure, there are at least four engineers of varied degrees in De Guzman’s team of candidates to spearhead and oversee the groundbreaking project.

            Also included in the plan are sanitation and the proper disposal of garbage and other wastes, including sewage.  The Abalos administration’s much-touted performance stinks – in words and in actions – and the stench of rotting garbage and other wastes permeates many parts of the city, especially where there are markets. Kalentong, Gabby’s, Barangka, Pinatubo, Sierra Madre, San Joaquin, San Jose, Martinez, Aglipay, Hulo, Pag-asa, Daang Bakal, Nueve de Febrero ad infinitum.

            In a nutshell, De Guzman’s party’s platform is summarized in the acronym HELPS, to solve the old nagging problems of the “Tiger City” of flesh, filth and foul, courtesy of 27 years of Abalos abuse and neglect.  To wit:

            H is to provide adequate Health facilities, products and services available and affordable to all Mandalenos;

            E is for good and accessible Education to all and Environmental protection; 

            L is for enough Livelihood and economic growth for the people and the city;

            P is for Peace and order so people can live in a free and safe community;

            S stands for Social justice and Security for everyone anywhere in the city.

            The group’s standard-bearer states: “Team Maiba Naman shall adhere to the principles of truth, honesty, integrity, transparency and accountability in all its official acts and transactions – answerable to God, to the people and to themselves.” 

            This certainly is a tall order that reeks of platitudes and motherhood statements, but De Guzman and his working team have spoken.  They promise to devote themselves to a productive public life, as good and professional politicians undoubtedly should.

            Now it’s the people’s chance and turn to vote, and perchance change their lives and improve their means of living.

            As the aspiring leader has pledged everyone in his campaign pitch, De Guzman wants to be the best mayor of Mandaluyong City and not of the whole country.  And he doesn’t need any awards or plaques of recognition to prove it or show to the world. 

            De Guzman said he only needs three years in office to keep his word.  If he doesn’t deliver, then people would know what to do with him the next time around in 2016.