By: Jullie Y. Daza
DISCLOSURE. My daughter and Comelec Chairman Andres Bautista are friends; she knew him before I met him briefly for the first and only other time at a dinner in the house of his dear mother-in-law and my friend, Baby Cruz Vazquez.
Some months ago, when Mr. Bautista was in India to attend an election conference, my nephew, husband of our ambassador to India, Teresa Daza, offered to drive for him on a sightseeing trip to the Taj Mahal. By the time they got there, the “monument to love” was closed, so they went to a market. There they saw a bullwhip, which Mr. Bautista bought for 200 rupees after an opening price of 2,000. In fairness to Patricia (Tisha) Bautista, neither my daughter nor I nor my nephew knows her.
After all has been said and done, the Comelec Chairman has three options: “Resign. Go on leave. Fight.” Short words, each wrought with implications. At the end of a conversation with print journalists last Thursday, I asked him what is at the core of his need for discernment, and this was his reply: “Family or country?” His priority is to shield his four young sons from further harm and injury, while “ensuring the integrity of the elections” past and future.
A legal strategy is in order, but he will not be his own lawyer, for a lawyer who defends himself has a fool for a client. NBI, BIR are investigating the unexplained-wealth charges aired in media by Tisha, who’s also suing him for violations of the law against abuse of women and children. He has filed charges of robbery, extortion, coercion, and qualified theft against her. He could be impeached for filing a wrong SALN (in the amount of P176,300,000) last April which he said mentioned the names of his parents and one or the other sibling. Under the terms of agreement, Tisha would get P90M plus equal shares for the children; she now claims P620M. The PCGG ghost salaries issue “was cleared by NBI in 2014.”
“I may not have been a perfect husband,” he confessed, “but maybe I was kuripot.” After paying a credit card bill of R3.2M? To those of us kibitzers hungrily awaiting the next chapter of this domestic drama cum political thriller, and even as we guess how the man who presides over the conduct of every election is undergoing the longest night of his soul, we have to wonder if it has been any easier on Tisha, in a matriarchal society where wives who have done what she did automatically come under opprobrium.
