Poll cheat report slams Arroyo, foes for cospiracy
Poll cheat report slams Arroyo, foes for cospiracy
John O'Callaghan, Reuters/Manila
The Philippine government tried to cover up election cheating allegations last year but was battling a conspiracy to oust President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, a draft report by a congressional committee showed.
The document, reported in the Philippine Daily Inquirer newspaper on Wednesday, is being discussed by five panels from the lower house of Congress looking into opposition claims that Arroyo conspired with an election official to seal her victory.
The "Hello Garci" tapes were a series of audio recordings allegedly featuring Arroyo talking by telephone with former election commissioner Virgilio Garcillano about rigging the presidential election on May 10, 2004.
The tapes mysteriously surfaced in June, sparking months of crisis for the president, including desertions from her Cabinet and a failed impeachment in September.
Arroyo's foes in Congress and in regular street protests are pressing demands she step down, but the turmoil has largely subsided without the middle-class anger that toppled dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986 and Joseph Estrada as president in 2001.
Arroyo, whose new term is due to run until 2010, apologized on television in June for talking to an election official but did not say it was Garcillano and insisted she did nothing wrong.
The author of the draft report, Congressman Gilbert Remulla, said the five committees hoped to reach conclusions by next week.
"Everything will be there, from the cover-up to the conspiracy by the opposition," said Remulla, a member of the ruling coalition who nonetheless voted in favor of ousting Arroyo during the failed impeachment.
"We're not taking any sides. I know that we cannot make everybody happy with the report," he told Reuters.
President Arroyo's spokesman, Ignacio Bunye, called the allegations of a cover-up "grossly unfair".
"But we have to point out that some committee members themselves were on fishing and witch-hunting expeditions and were using the probe as a political platform," he said in a statement.
The source of the tapes has yet to be established and many questions remain, including how the president's phone conversations were tapped and for whom.
The recordings, whether real or altered, "just materialized out of thin air and fell fortuitously on the laps of the persons who brought them to public attention", the draft report said.
Other recordings released by the government, purportedly showing Estrada conspiring with unknown people to assassinate Arroyo, were "suspiciously short and clearly spurious, not to say unquestionably fabricated", it said.
Arroyo's administration gave "no sincere co-operation" to the congressional inquiry and "contributed nothing toward arriving at the truth" about the tapes, said the report.
Arroyo's officials have said they consider the matter to be closed and the focus is now back on the economy, with a broader sales tax that will help the government cut its chronic budget deficits and the costs of borrowing money.
But Roilo Golez, a congressman and former national security adviser who left Arroyo's party, said on television: "It will never be closed until Commissioner Garcillano has appeared".
Garcillano's whereabouts are not known after he slipped out of the Philippines in July. Media have reported sightings in Singapore, Britain and South America but the chat at diplomatic events and in coffee shops is that he could be dead.