Why Villar was turned away

Published by the Visayan Daily Star Publications, Inc.

NINFA R. LEONARDIA Editor-in-Chief & President

CARLA P. GOMEZ Editor GUILLERMO TEJIDA III Desk Editor NANETTE L. GUADALQUIVER Busines Editor CEDELF P. TUPAS Sports Editor RENE GENOVE Bureau Chief, Dumaguete MAJA P. DELY Advertising Coordinator

CARLOS ANTONIO L. LEONARDIA Administrative Officer

The report yesterday that Senate President Manny Villar and his wife, Las Piñas Congressman Cynthis Villar, were prohibited from entering the resthouse in Tanay, Rizal where former President Joseph Estrada is being detained, seems to prove what many Filipinos have suspected: That the alleged intelligence information fed to the imaginative security adviser of the President about plots to assassinate the ousted leader, was only an excuse to keep people, especially political leaders, away from him.

It is all over the media, the way the increased security personnel guarding Erap Estrada have turned away no less than the President of the Senate, the person third in line to the Presidency, from the gates of Estrada's house. Previously, people came and went, and visitors had no problem getting cleared to see Estrada. Suddenly, with the onset of the election season, and with the constant alignments and re-alignments of candidates, the former president is no longer accessible.

It's all for his protection, they say, but, naturally, neither Estrada, nor his family, and even his friends and followers believe that. One may commend the guards for driving away disreputable-looking, unrecognizable characters, but the President of the Senate? And a member of Congress? Both are so media-friendly that hardly a day passes by without one or both of them having a photograph in the papers or footages on TV.

But perhaps it was precisely because it was Villar, the Senate president, who was believed being courted by the Administration group to join their ticket, that the guards knew he had to be stooped. Who knows what mischief he and Estrada would have cooked up? Villar, who was highly instrumental in the ouster of Estrada - why had it become imperative that they should not meet?

Well, the ways of politics are really strange and incomprehensible to ordinary people, so let us just put this down as something we will understand only when things come to a full circle.*