Based on an interview with Marlene Garcia-Esperat by Luz Rimban

THE GOVERNMENT spends so much money to pursue cases against corrupt officals. For sure, there is no lack of witnesses willing to testify about corruption. Some of them have been put under the Witness Protection Program. But all these efforts just go to wastebecause the cases do not budge. And a witness supposedly under protection becomes a virtual prisoner for nothing.

I spent almost two years under the Program. Before I was put under protection, I was already a state witness and principal complainant in several cases filed against officials and employees of the Department of Agriculture (DA) in Regional Field Unit 12 in Cotabato City. But then some people burned down that regional office, resulting in the destruction of evidence for the graft cases I'd filed against top DA officials there. I also heard there was a plan to have me killed. So I chose to be turned over to the custody of the office of the secretary of agriculture in Manila. This is also a form of witness protection, although not like the one most people know. The DA dormitory became my safehouse and I was forbidden from going home to Mindanao. I did not see my family for this whole period.

A year after the burning of the DA Cotabato office, two eyewitnesses surfaced, both of them DA insiders. They were also put under the Witness Protection Program, but since they could identify who started the fire, they needed more security They became "live-in" witnesses and kept in a safehouse south of Manila.

They couldn't leave the safehouse at will. Their every movement was guarded, any transgression recorded. Communication with friends and relatives was cut off. They had to abide by the rules otherwise they would lose the P5,000-monthly allowance each of them was receiving.

I was treated more leniently But I still couldn't just go anywhere and I had to be at the dorm at designated hours. I did manage to help the other witnesses who would give me half their monthly allowance to send to their families or to buy things their children needed. I soon became caught up in the difficulties they had to go through with their families, even as I was having hard times of my own.

Although I did not get any allowance like the live-in witnesses, I was still working. By then, I had been designated action officer, investigating graft cases at the request of the DA resident ombudsman. But my salary was much less than what I was getting in my former post, where I had been chief of the Regional Chemical Analysis Laboratory of the DAs RFU 12.

Worse, the people whom I had accused of graft and corruption were still in office and were controlling finances at the DA. They found a way to hit back at me. Since they filed my income tax returns, they made it appear that I had no children and therefore not entitled to tax exemptions.As a result, I found myself with tax liabilities of P29,000.

Then I was told that my 21-year-old daughter tried to commit suicide because of financial problems in school that I failed to address. I had to live with the guilt, but I believed what 1 was doing was for a noble cause.

IT HELPED that I was kept busy As action officer, I also became the complainant in cases filed against corrupt DA personnel. So aside from my own cases, I became involved in others. I helped prosecute the regional directors in Baguio and Iloilo. They were later suspended. But a high-ranking official at the department with whom they were close pulled strings to protect them. Their cases were archived and never went to court. The directors were even reinstated in no time.

Meanwhile, my own cases were going nowhere. One of those that I filed against my superiors at the RFU 12 in Cotabato City was an administrative case for graft. This involved multimillion-peso ghost deliveries and the conversion into cash of our supplies. Because of these anomalies, I discovered that the funds for employees' social security premiums had disappeared. For a year and a half, our office was not remitting payments to the Government Service Insurance System (GSIS). Therefore, loan privileges for employees were suspended. In mid-1998, I exposed the anomaly in the local media. The RFU 12 officials responded by remitting the premiums. Three days afterward, the DA building in Cotabato was razed. Investigators were later able to prove that it was arson intended to cover up the fact that the GSIS payments were taken from other DA funds, which was illegal.

The administrative case reached the Sandiganbayan but things were not going right. An arraignment was scheduled originally in Manila. Then, the respondents petitioned that it be moved to Cebu, then back again to Quezon City After that, their lawyers filed a motion to quash.

Next thing I heard, the case had been dismissed. How could that happen, I asked? I kept calling the Sandiganbayan, inquiring when the next hearing would be held. During my first few calls, their reply was always that it was "up for resolution."

Then came the confuniation that the case had indeed been dismissed. I, the principal complainant and state witness, was not even told! Isn't this a travesty of justice? I was so incensed I filed a case against the prosecutor, an Officer of the Ombudsman assigned to the Sandiganbayan. After all, during the course of this case, I'd found out that the prosecutor, who was on my side at first, very aggressive and seemingly prepared to put the accused behind bars, was seen drinking with lawyers of the accused.

But that was not all. During the time that the administrative case was being scheduled for arraignment, the same people were also facing a criminal case for arson, which was filed against them by the Anti-Arson Task Force of the Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG).

The accused filed information at the Regional Trial Court in Cotabato City Government prosecutors recommended no bail. The accused filed a motion to quash and a motion for reconsideration; both were denied by the court. But what was curi­ous was that the court never issued a warrant for their arrest.

Some time later, it looked to me that the prosecutors were losing interest in the case. When we confronted them about this, they said, "How can you expect us to be interested in this case when the DA is not even doing anything to support it?"

Sadly, they were right. The Department of Agriculture was really the aggrieved party here: The DA building burned down, DA property was lost and DA operations were affected. The Anti-Arson Task Force said there was prima facie evidence of arson. Yet, the DA did not lift a finger to see that justice was served.

Instead, corrupt DA officials were helping protect their own. Once, during the arson investigation, a high-ranking official even refused to let me join the DILG Anti-Arson Task Force on one of their missions, saying I had no business being there.

The DILG operatives were supposed to retrieve the two eyewitnesses to the fire — by then they had given up, broken free of the Witness Protection Program, and gone home — and bring them back to Manila. So they proceeded on their own. The mission failed because the witnesses refused to go with the DILG people. They wanted me to be among those who would fetch them.

When the DILG operatives returned, they made a formal request that I accompany them on their next mission. The same DA official ignored the request and referred it to the legal department. The legal department tossed it back to the official. It was like they were playing basketball with the case.

So I decided to go with the DILG operatives even without permission. After a week, we returned to Manila with the witnesses in tow. The entire process cost the government P371,000!

ACTUALLY, it was not even the DA but the DILG Anti­Arson Task Force that had recommended the filing of arson charges against the top DA regional official and 13 personnel, as well as two from the Bureau of Fire Protection. The DA official had friends in very high places and had filed a motion for reconsideration to have his name stricken off the charge sheet. He wanted three low-ranking DA personnel to take the heat.

But the DILG operatives did not want to settle for just small fry after all their trouble. They wanted the big fish, so the DILG filed its own motion to retain all the accused. The justice department opted to pursue prosecution. Unfortunately when

Alfredo Lim took over as DILG secretary, one of his first acts was to abolish the Anti-Arson Task Force. For what reason, I don't know. The Task Force was the complainant in the cases. Who was going to pursue it if the group had been disbanded?

This is why I spent two years away from my family, sacrificed our finances? This was why the two eyewitnesses spent eight months of their lives in a safehouse? Truth to tell, when the two of them quit the Program, they were left to fend for themselves.

I myself am no longer under the Witness Protection Program. I am putting my life on the line for this arson case and for graft suits against DA officials. Coming out in the open has made me a target of assassinations. Goons have tried to kill me thrice.

The most recent was January, just before a hearing on another case involving the same RFU 12 personnel. The case involved the rigging of bids for postharvest facilities. I had to be there as complainant and action officer of the DA Ombudsman. A hearing was set for January 24. But I was told by police contacts of an intelligence report that someone was trying to kill me so we had to postpone the hearing.

Less than a week later, some suspicious-looking men were casing my house in Sultan Kudarat. They did not know I was in Davao at that time. For a week, they put my house under surveillance. I was told later that while they were on one of these casing missions, they chanced upon a former gang member who had duped them in the past of their earnings from their criminal activities. These people are Mindanao's guns-for-hire — kidnappers, car thieves and murderers.

When they saw this former gang member, they gave chase. There was a running gunbattle at the public market. When the shooting stopped, one of two men who were casing my house was killed. The other was arrested. When the police searched his belongings they found a picture of me, with my name and address and an X mark at the bottom of my picture. The suspect confessed that I was a target of liquidation. When the hearing finally pushed through on February 15, 1 told the court of the attempt on my life.

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 assassin's bullets.

But is this how we reward and protect whistleblowers? 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.

In fact, the DA official who blocked my efforts to pursue the arson case was reappointed by the Arroyo government. His is a a very powerful post. But finally, I am hearing good news — I've been told that he has just been removed.