E·N·Q·U·I·R·Y
DEMAREE J.B. RAVAL
DEMAREE J.B. RAVAL
Profiles in (Filipino) courage
Sunday, 01 25, 2004
The finest of plans, a wise man once observed, have always been spoiled by the littleness of them that should carry them out. Even pharaohs and emperors can’t do it all by themselves – they had to rely on subordinates. This is exactly what happened to the unmasking of Ricardo Manapat, who as of Thursday was director of the National Archives Office. He thought he had it all neatly figured out: “Discovering” all by himself, from the tangle of microfilm rolls in the archives, the existence of documents that would give lie to the claim that Fernando Poe Jr. is not a natural-born Filipino citizen.
Whether Manapat was motivated by what Sen. Aquilino Pimentel Jr. calls a desire to pay a debt to his benefactors – meaning the people at Malacañang – or whether he was carrying out a plot hatched by people who have helped install the President under illegitimate maneuvers, will perhaps never be known. What the public will remember is the wanton arrogance – hubris, as the classical Greeks would call it – he showed at the Comelec hearing last Monday, as he challenged FPJ’s attorneys to prove that the documents he “discovered” were a fabrication.
In his heady, power-intoxicated position as top dog in the National Archives, Manapat has forgotten that still, small insistent voice that comes to people in the middle of the dark night of their soul. That voice is called conscience.
This, it is perhaps no accident that my cell phone should ring in the middle of the night several days before the hearing at the Comelec with a cryptic text message: “Attorney, would you know photo shop?” I had no way of establishing the identity of the sender since the number did not match any and all the numbers stored in my cell phone. Thinking that it was only a misplaced call, I chose to ignore it and went back to sleep.
The following day – the hand of Providence must have been working here – I chanced to show the message to a friend of mine and he casually mentioned that the sender must have meant “Photoshop,” a graphics software that is acknowledged by experts in the computer industry as the best in its class. He promptly lapsed into computerese, explaining what Photoshop could do, most of which sounded gibberish to my ears until he started speaking in a heavily accented albeit understandable English: “…you can alter photographs and other scanned documents, retouch an image…introduce text and logos…swap details between documents…”
In my mind, a light bulb clicked on. Days before, while I was pursuing some inquiry at the National Archives, I could feel an almost palpable atmosphere of suppressed unease among the people who attended to my request. My business having been concluded, I, in an automatic, unself-conscious gesture peculiar to lawyers all over the world, fished out one of my business cards from my wallet and gave it to one of the employees while I was on my way out of the building. The card, I was to find out later, found its way into the hands of my nocturnal tipster.
Thus began my tedious, delicate and at times wary correspondence through cell phone with someone at the National Archives (who shall remain unnamed as of the moment but whom I shall call TexTip). After a series of text messages that went on far into the night for days. I become convinced that TexTip was in possession of enough damning information, but was reluctant to come out in the open for fear of reprisals or even grievous bodily harm while on the job. Textip assured me, however, that the employees who were unwittingly made participants to the fabrication – realizing that they had been duped by Manapat under false pretenses and fortified by an overwhelming show of moral support from fellow workers at the archives – were willing to testify, and tell the whole truth.
What followed next was a revelation that was read by the entire country on the papers…after they heard it on the radio…before they watched it on television. Among others, Vicleyn Tarin testified that she was asked to scan signatures which later appeared in a marriage contract presented by Manapat in the Comelec hearing as being executed in 1939 by Allan Fernando Poe and Paulita Gomez; Emman Llamera declared under oath that on orders of Manapat he made a high-resolution computer scan of a signature which later materialized over the name of the officiating priest who, it turns out now, never had authority to do so; Remmel Talabis told the members of the Senate inquiry that he was directed by Manapat also to encode, using a popular word-processing application, text into a marriage contract form. All three are unanimous in declaring that, at the instance their particular computer skills were required by Manapat, they had no idea as to where, or for what, their individual output would be used, and that it was only shortly after Manapat’s “discovery” of the film rolls at the archives that the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle began to fall into place.
It is sad to note that in many a great number of offices in the bureaucracy, the corporate culture has deteriorated into a matter of pakikisama where one is expected to close his eyes to evil, plug his ears on evil and keep his mouth tightly shut in the presence of evil. People who assiduously do their jobs are derided by their fellow workers as hopeless idealists who are trying to be magpakabayani, which is a self-destructive attitude since “the only good heroes are dead heroes.”
Indeed most of our Philippine heroes are tragic losers; they have died, however, with the courage of their convictions. But once in a glorious while, there arise among us men and women who have unhesitatingly lived through acts of courage. One need not go far back into history to recall that band of brave computer operators who walked out of the PICC in February 1986, and the thousands of citizens from the cozy enclaves of the elite down to the crowded makeshift hovels of the country’s riffraff who courageously faced the tanks at Edsa that same year.
Nowhere perhaps is this kind of courage more eloquently extolled than in the preface of a book written by John Kennedy: “ The courage of life is often a less dramatic spectacle than the courage of a final moment; but it is no less a magnificent mixture of triumph and tragedy. A man does what he must in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures” – and that is the basis of all human morality."
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