The irony of conversion
By Noralyn Mustafa
Inquirer News Service

DURING one TV newscast, as we listened transfixed to the reports about the mind-boggling list of Maj. Gen. Carlos Garcia's worldly goods, came the story of a father in the throes of unbearable grief. His two sons aged 3 and 5 had died after he fed them with food that he had scavenged from the garbage.

From the few words he could mumble through his anguish, it was obvious that he saw the tragedy only as an accident. After all, scavenged food-collected from garbage pails-was what he had been feeding them for sometime. It was all he could bring them at day's end because he was jobless.

This is the true state of the nation.

The presidential candidate -- who bullied a high school dropout into debating with her, a doctor of economics, to escape facing Raul Roco and Bro. Eddie Villanueva, packaged herself as our "last and best hope" (lifted from, of all things, a sci-fi space adventure television series) while she constantly flaunted her "learning curve" (gained from over three years of accidental presidency) against Fernando Poe Jr.'s "inexperience." She is, as usual, again in a state of denial about her newly won distinction as the "weakest leader in the Asia Pacific," and about her country's being ranked as the 11th most corrupt among 146 states.

During her first term, she blamed former President Joseph Estrada for everything bad that attended her governance, except the Jose Pidal account. Now she has summoned even the ghost of Ferdinand Marcos to take the blame for the country's present claim to infamy.

"What, me worry?" seems to be her credo now (it used to be "do your best, let God do the rest," remember?) as she breezily refuses to be distracted from her functions-reading speeches, issuing threats to whoever opposes her "reforms," viewing corpses of slain kidnap gang leaders, inspecting raided shabu laboratories, practicing dance steps for her alma mater's alumnae homecoming, doing aerobics, and through all these, making sure that there is not a single nick in her manicure.

She even goes out of her way to perform roles that can be delegated to others, like when she had to go scuba-diving to promote tourism in her favorite province, even risking the life of a Palace photographer who had to stay underwater as she leisurely meandered into a school of danggit. She really should have just left TV's resident mermaids, Ruffa Mae Quinto a.k.a. Dolphina and Claudine Barretto a.k.a. Marina, to do the job. Both are lovely and curvaceous enough not to be mistaken for mutant turtles.

But back to General Garcia, the icon of our present discontent and things to come, and Marcos, the ghost of sorrows past and of our present haunting.

Garcia, of course, belongs to the famous Philippine Military Academy Class of 1971, the same class that produced Gringo Honasan and Sen. Ping Lacson. Theirs was a unique batch that earned its place in our sordid history as the first PMA graduates of the martial law era; and wore out their first pair of combat boots in the battlefields of Mindanao and Sulu fighting the Moro National Liberation Front, where they confronted the realities of soldiery both at its best and at its most brutal.

But aside from that, they quickly learned they were the heirs-apparent to the thrones of kings who with their guns held the power over the life and death-and worldly goods-of a terrorized countryside. All they had to do was ask, or even just drop a hint, and anything would be given to them.

Cash and gold freely flowed into the hands of their senior officers. Political kingpins, many of them appointed by Marcos to replace duly elected officials whose faces he did not like, gifted them with cases of wine, the most delectable catch from the seas and the best harvest from the fields, and even parcels of land in exchange for being able to keep their power.

Businessmen who wanted to cement their hold on monopolies and to be spared from paying taxes and the right wages were an inexhaustible source of bounty for the military.

And what was not given, they looted. Or took for their own at the point of their guns. They looked at wealth as their birthright.

It was a good life, and many officers, even down to the rank of colonel, became millionaires while the powerless populace were disenfranchised and impoverished; some driven to starvation.

But added to all this, the military also fed upon itself, with millions budgeted daily for war materiel and supplies. The golden goose was "conversion."

The Magdalo officers somehow had a different definition of the term which now seems to befuddle lawmakers in the ongoing congressional investigation on military corruption.

Simply stated, conversion means converting supplies into cash. This practice is facilitated by suppliers who would issue a receipt for X number or volume of items, 20 to 30 percent of which would be actually delivered; but the cash allotted for the rest (undelivered) would remain in "safe hands" to be rechanneled into the pockets of corrupt officials.

Maybe, conversion will be better understood if a video clip of the Lamitan siege is shown: where the valiant Capt. Ruben Guinolbay, in stunned grief over the death of five of his men in that encounter, rather incoherently recounts that the soldiers based in the town had to share their ammunition with his newly arrived bullet-less unit. In the background lay a fallen soldier whose worn-out boots drove some viewers to tears.

Now that is a definition that even you and I can comprehend.

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