Revisiting the 2010 polls

Bencyrus Ellorin

WHAT could have prompted the second district congressman of Cagayan de Oro to abandon a well-oiled national political party, and join a new and little known political party in 2011.

He was in the inner circle of President Erap Estrada. When an impeachment case was filed against the president in 2000, he served as Erap’s spokesperson.

When he returned to politics in 2007 and subsequently in 2010, Rep. Rufus Rodriguez ran under the Partido ng Masang Pilipino (PMP), Erap’s party. In 2007, he had an alliance with the PDP-Laban led by former mayor Ambing Magtajas. In 2010, he and Dongkoy Emano were partymates in Estrada’s PMP.

This fact may belie claims that the second district congressman supported all the way the mayoral bid of 1st District Rep. Klarex Uy in 2010. There were pronouncements though that he supported Klarex versus Dongkoy Emano.

Claims of Rodriguez’s duplicity were ripe way back in 2007 but these were largely ignored by the PDP-Laban leadership.

Rodriguez focused on his law practice after his stint as Homobono Adaza’s vice governor at the capitol in 1984 until the Edsa revolution. He was then the bright boy of the local Kilusang Bagong Lipunan (KBL), the political party of dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos. He then left the city and Misamis Oriental.

After about 10 years of hiatus from public service, President Estrada appointed him as commissioner of the Bureau of Immigration in 1998.

There were no known schism between the Cagayan de Oro congressman, the former president and the PMP, leaving questions why he joined the CDP, a new, small and not known political party, considering that he had an eye at the Senate in 2016.

But something must have happened in 2010 and 2011 that made the second district congressman take that political gambit.

I believe the rift that broke the political relationship that spanned more than a decade between the second district congressman and Estrada’s PMP was an episode in the final days of the 2010 elections.

In the last days of the 2010 campaign, Emano was expressing differences with the PMP and had flirted with presidential bet Manny Villar of the Nacionalista Party. As a Villar campaigner then, I was privy to some negotiations. Villar and Emano even had a closed door meeting at an uptown hotel days before the election.

In fact, on May 8, 2010, the Villar camp was closely monitoring whether Emano would break ties with Erap during the miting de avance at the Rodelsa Circle.

Early in the day, the former political kingpin expressed on radio his grievances over the appointment powers the second district congressman got from Erap for the PMP for poll watchers and management of the party’s ultima hora resources.

We later on learned that Erap digged deeper into his campaign chest to keep Emano with him.

Fast forward to the present: Dongkoy and Erap are friends. Rodriguez, who had set his eyes on the Senate, may have lost national political clout without a strong party to back him up. Many political observers thought the congressman flirted with the ruling Liberal Party by taking the cudgels for the proposed Bangsamoro Basic Law (BBL) as head of Congress’s BBL ad hoc committee, to gain entry into the administration party’ senatorial slate. It placed the second district congressman between the devil and the deep blue sea. The administration party was not keen on having him in.

In fact, after sponsoring the Malacanang-backed version of the BBL in the plenary of Congress, he was sued before the Ombudsman for his alleged participation in the Napoles scam.

Summed up, transactional politics may have affected the second district congressman’s Senate dream. Now, he is faced with the biggest electoral challenge in his political career. Unlike his three-peat in Congress against waning politicians and unknowns, he now pits himself against an aging but scheming former political kingpin and the politician who had unseated the kingpin’s heir in Misamis Oriental in 2004 and the kingpin himself in 2013.