Marlene Garcia-Esperat, a journalist/anti-graft
crusader, was killed in Sultan Kudarat last week. Marlene was a good
friend of PCIJ's and a source for some of our corruption stories. This
report pays tribute to her.
It was hard to take Marlene Garcia-Esperat seriously. Each time she
came to our office to report yet another corrupt government deal,
she wore mini skirts, stiletto heels and tight dresses with low necklines
that revealed more than concealed. Every visit from her was a sartorial
shock. You could say she was a colorful person, as each time she came,
her hair was dyed a different shade (her preferred hues were light
brown and red) and her eye shadow was inspired by the rainbow. Once,
she even came in fishnet stockings.
We liked to call her “Erin Brockovich” after the tireless,
gusty and sexy movie (and real-life) heroine who made a giant utility
company in the US pay for its misdeeds. Although Marlene did not quite
look like Julia Roberts, she had the attitude and the fearless, in-your-face
style of the filmic heroine. Once, she appeared on our doorstep wearing
glitter in her eyes. “I want to look pretty when the assassins
come to get me,” she said.
On Maundy Thursday, the assassins did come. Marlene was killed in
cold blood, in front of her children, with a single bullet fired by
a gunman who casually walked into the living room of her home in Tacurong,
Sultan Kudarat.
For years, Marlene Garcia-Esperat was the resident whistleblower
at the Department of Agriculture, which she said was one of the most
corrupt agencies in government. The DA has one of the largest budgets
but Marlene said that its decentralized operations make it hard to
detect graft.
Marlene was determined and tireless. She was driven by righteous
rage — she had seen how money that should otherwise be used to
better the lot of farmers was instead being siphoned off to enrich
bureaucrats and politicians. She dug up evidence to show that the
government was pouring in millions for a nonexistent irrigation project
in Cotabato. She also found documents proving that a bureau under
the DA rigged the bidding process to buy overpriced speedboats.
In the last 10 years, Marlene had filed dozens of cases ranging from
the smuggling of agricultural products to the overpricing of farm
inputs and the diversion to private pockets or political uses of funds
intended for farmers.
Last year, she filed a case against DA officials led by Secretary
Arthur Yap and former Undersecretary Jocelyn Bolante, a close confidante
of First Gentleman Mike Arroyo, alleging that the DA had bought overpriced
fertilizer and that these funds were used in the 2004 presidential
campaign. She has also accused Surigao del Sur Rep. Prospero Pichay
of complicity in chicken smuggling.
Marlene knew she was stepping on the toes of powerful people, but
she often told us she had the support of well-meaning and honest employees
who wanted to clean up the department. She also knew that being a
whistleblower in this country was a thankless and dangerous job and
was well aware that killers were hot on her trail.
“Is this how we reward and protect whistleblowers?” Marlene
asked in 2001, in one of our meetings. “It would be some consolation
if the cases were moving and the accused jailed. But most of the time,
that’s wishful thinking. I know of corrupt regional directors
who have been reappointed by the new administration, some with long
lists of graft cases against them. There seems to be no effort to
scrutinize the performance of these officials and to purge the bureaucracy
of bad eggs.”
Marlene was an unlikely candidate to lead a one-woman crusade to
clean up the DA. After all, she was a chemist, and when she wasn’t
talking about the goings-on at the DA, she would lecture about the
health benefits of various herbs or marvel at the new technology in
forensic medicine.
She was really a scientist, and so she attacked corruption scientifically,
by meticulously collecting documents and identifying people who provided
first-hand information about the hypothesis she wanted to prove. She
had a list of sources and could recite them from memory if she wanted
to. Like Erin Brockovich, she also memorized phone numbers of possible
sources and gave them to reporters to follow up.
Marlene’s crusade began in the early 1990s when she headed the
Chemical Analysis Laboratory of DA’s Region 12, then located
in Maguindanao. She had been lamenting the sorry state of the regional
laboratory and its lack of facilities. But it was not until she attended
a national conference and met other DA chemists that she found that
her lab was entitled to more money than it had been given.
So she hounded RFU (Regional Field Unit) 12 for funds to buy the
equipment she needed and to construct a new building for the laboratory.
While following up on her request, she accidentally saw the regional
unit’s 1991-1992 financial report, which said that there was
an annual allocation for her laboratory of P400,000. “But I was
receiving only P175,000,” she said. “That’s when I
became suspicious.”
Marlene reported the incident to then DA Secretary Salvador Escudero,
who ordered a probe. In the course of the investigation, a fire hit
the DA office in Cotabato City. Because the incident took place just
a few days before the 1992 presidential elections, the fire was dismissed
as just another election-related event.
But one year after the fire, two witnesses, both employees of RFU
12, swore in written affidavits that RFU Finance Officer Osmeña
Montaner and his friends burned down the DA office to destroy evidence
of their wrongdoing.
The incident prompted DA officials to place Marlene under the witness
protection program. Although the other witnesses were kept under lock
and key, Marlene was allowed to work, and absorbed as action officer
of the DA’s resident Ombudsman in Quezon City. The case wrenched
her away from her family for about two years, but it brought her face
to face with many other incidents of corruption at the DA.
At the time of her death, Marlene was a frequent visitor at the Office
of the Ombudsman, where she hounded employees and told them they were
dragging their feet in investigating the cases she had filed.
She was also investigating the complicity of top DA officials in
chicken smuggling. She sued DA Undersecretary Cesar Drilon and others
for allowing the entry of chicken leg quarters by a company that did
not have the proper documents to import chicken. That firm, CSP International
Commodities Inc, is partly owned by Pichay, who was included in the
charge sheet.
A few days before her death, Marlene had gotten in touch with Mindanao
journalist Carol Arguillas to provide her information about “the
sale of audit certificates” in Cotabato, but the meeting never
took place. It was typical of Marlene to poke her nose wherever she
suspected wrongdoing was taking place.
Marlene left the DA last year and made a living by selling Tupperware
and running a small sari-sari store in Tacurong. Relatives helped
out as did others who believed in her work. She also wrote a weekly
column for a local newspaper entitled “Madam Witness,” after
an article about her published in PCIJ’s i-magazine. Before that,
she also had a program on local radio and was even accredited by the
Kapisanan ng mga Brodkaster ng Pilipinas. But she was an accidental
journalist: She was killed mainly because she was a whistleblower
and anti-graft crusader.
Her family says that Marlene angered many people doing what she did.
Her friends and family have repeatedly cautioned her and asked her
to slow down. But she said once, “I am not exactly new to this.
Lumaki ako sa bala (I grew up on bullets.) My father was a farmer
who became the first chief of police of our town. After that he was
a municipal councilor. There were threats on his life. He survived
two assassination plots, but two of my uncles were not as lucky. They
were felled by assassins’ bullets.”
Like her uncles and so many others before her, Marlene was gunned
down because she lived in a violent place where all it takes is a
bullet to silence those who seek justice and to end even the most
tireless crusade.
-This article is from www.pcij.org.
