In the run-up to the 2022 national and local elections, OpinYon Laguna sent out an invitation to all candidates for mayor, vice mayor and councilor in Laguna’s first district for a series of one-on-one interviews.
These interviews aimed to seek out from these candidates not only what their platform of government and future projects are but also their personal backgrounds – where they came from, their educational background, how they entered the world of local politics and so forth.
Alas, only a handful of candidates heeded our invitation – and almost all of them were from the so-called “ruling” political team that was later roundly defeated in the polls.
What a pity, since many of the candidates during the 2022 elections were “first-timers” and as such, we were eager to learn from them what they could contribute to the local governance.
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Fast forward three years, and the Philippines is now riveted by the melodramatic story of a mayor whose origins have become suspect.
Following the recent raid of a POGO complex in Bamban, Tarlac, suspicions began to fall on Mayor Alice Guo, who, according to Senator Risa Hontiveros, was a “virtual unknown” in the town’s political scene until she was suddenly propped up by the outgoing mayor as his successor in the 2022 elections.
Inconsistencies in her background which surfaced during the questioning of Mayor Guo at the Senate, as well as the “unbelievable” facts of her life (come on, how can someone who claims her family has substantial business in the Philippines be “home-schooled” and had had her birth registered only at age 17?), had raised fears of the possibility – that Communist China may have already started the invasion of the Philippines by installing “proxies” not only in our economic but also our political scene.
Sounds straight out of a novel, right?
In fact, there was this novel I read (The Charm School, by Nelson DeMille) about a bold plan by the Soviet Union to infiltrate the United States using Russian spies who were so “indoctrinated” and trained into the American lifestyle that it would be almost impossible to tell them apart from natural-born Americans.
As one of the protagonists, an American military official living in Russia, notes, “So they look like a duck, waddle like a duck, quack like a duck and even lay eggs like a duck – but they ain’t ducks. They’re foxes in the chicken coop.”
Scary, isn’t it?
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These concerns, in my opinion, necessitate more than ever conducting background checks for all our local elected officials – heck, even those officials who are prominent and well-known in their communities.
Alam naman natin ang katawa-tawa (at medyo nakakagalit rin) na kabalintunaan ng buhay Pilipino: kailangan ng sandamakmak na clearance at permit ang isang ordinaryong empleyado para lang makapasok sa trabaho, pero napaka-kaunti ng requirements para sa mga elected official: natural-born Filipino, marunong bumasa at sumulat, pasok sa minimum na edad, at kailangang residente ng bayan o lungsod kung saan siya tatakbo sa loob ng ilang taon.
The fact that Alice Guo, a virtual unknown in Bamban, was even able to skirt such rules just show how principles (and the law) can be bent at the right price here in the Philippines.
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