By Diego Morra
After being ousted as Senate President in just four weeks, Alan Peter Cayetano has to contend with the fact that in less than a month, he became a champion only to be abandoned by his supporters, a hero that became a villain in record time. In chasing his rainbow, Alan fell off the abyss of his own making.
Yet, Cayetano is just being true to himself, saving his own neck from arresting Manila police operatives in 1990 by dropping daddy’s name and being freed while other UP leaders were manhandled and slapped with criminal charges that were dropped. Tagged as “ligtas katawan” by militant activists even as he was supposed to serve the best interest of UP students since he was a university councilor at the time, Cayetano was the forgettable face of the youth demanding the dismantling of US military bases in that year.
Cayetano is too enamored with power and when he cut a deal with Marinduque Rep. Lord Allan Velasco to share the speakership with the obvious blessing of the now-detained ex-president Rodrigo Duterte, his friends thought that the pact would not be honored after 15 months. Nagdilang-anghel sila. The term-sharing scheme was torpedoed by Cayetano on the pretext that majority of the members of the House of Representatives wanted him to stay on as Speaker, prompting the conduct of a rump session in which lawmakers signed, sealed and delivered Velasco’s endorsement. To prevent his opponent from working and winning the support of the majority, Cayetano cut off power and internet service, which presumably forced lawmakers to dump him.
Why did Cayetano secure so much power under the Duterte dispensation? He donated P71.3 million for the Duterte presidential campaign in 2016, and impossible amount given his Statement of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth (SALN) for that year showed he only had a net worth of P55 million, which was more than double his net worth in 2015. The amount is the officially declared Cayetano contribution to the Duterte campaign. It has nothing with corporate donations or personal contributions from plutocrats and taipans that have become the milking cows of traditional politicians. Only the garrulous Sen. Rodante Marcoleta has been caught with contrived SALNs and Statement of Contributions and Expenses when he admitted not including P75-million in campaign donations as the donors did not want to be identified. Marcoleta has since been charged criminally. Cayetano may face the same fate.
Cayetano’s maneuver to win the Senate presidency by compelling the missing Sen. Ronald de la Rosa to materialize at the chamber and then pull the rug from under the feet of Sen. Loren Legarda is part of the culture of legislative betrayal. Once elected, Cayetano did what he must do: Get de la Rosa out after promising him protective custody. This was the context bogus “siege of the Senate” show fabricated by Cayetano, with axed Senate Sergeant at Arms Mao Aplasca as lead actor. The dramatis personae included the best supporting actress and Cayetano sister Sen. Pia, Legarda and the chorus of Duterte senators. However, Cayetano’s irrelevance was proven when Sen. Jinggoy Estrada was arrested at the Senate, with Interior Secretary Jonvic Remulla telling him that he failed to stop de la Rosa from escaping while under his “protective custody.”
Apart from his debacles at the Senate and the House of Representatives, Cayetano also performed poorly when he took charge of the Southeast Asian and its multi-billion budget that produced the world’s most expensive cauldron. As foreign secretary, Cayetano defended the murderous drug war before the United Nations and topnotch journalists Christiane Amanpour and Mehdi Hassan, telling them that the 30,000 fatalities were drug kingpins, addicts or pushers who “fought back” and were eliminated. Lying with a straight face has become a habit for him, from being an architect of the scrapping of the ABS-CBN franchise in collaboration with Marcoleta and Mike Defensor, the Three Clowns of Digong, to allowing Chinese research vessels to conduct studies in the Philippine Rise and letting them declare that the Philippines had no right to the vast submerged seamount.
Cayetano also clashed with the Arroyos at the Lower House in 2006 after he accused them of squirreling away huge sums in a German bank, which Mike Arroyo, then Reps. Mike Arroyo and his uncle Rep. Ignacio Arroyo flatly denied. The Arroyos then sought Cayetano’s ouster for fabricating evidence and improper conduct. The ethics panel found substantial evidence in the Arroyo complaint but Cayetano was not ousted. In 2013, Cayetano was also linked to the pork barrel scam by Janet Lim Napoles, who claimed that the former, through an intermediary, was demanding a huge cut that she could not afford. Cayetano’s name also appeared in the list of beneficiaries of the pork barrel scam culled by Sen. Ping Lacson and then Justice Secretary Leila de Lima.
Cayetano was also part of the group that plotted the black propaganda to derail the presidential campaign of then Vice President Jejomar Binay in 2016, lawyers alleged, along with a senator, a Metro Manila congressman, a bureaucrat who is now a Cabinet member and two owners of big mining firms with close ties to China. Dubbed Oplan Stop Nognog, Cayetano and Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV conducted 25 hearings of the Blue Ribbon Committee on the wealth and assets of Binay. The Binay camp claimed that the plot was meant to boost the chances of then Interior and Local Government Secretary Mar Roxas to win the presidency. In the end, the campaign boosted Duterte, Cayetano’s running mate, to win the presidency. Binay was eventually acquitted of all graft charges. #
