MANILA, Philippines – Former senator Panfilo “Ping” Lacson on Wednesday, October 2, filed his certificate of candidacy (COC) to seek a fresh term in the Senate in the 2025 midterm elections.
Lacson went to the Commission on Elections (Comelec) satellite office at the Manila Hotel on Wednesday with former senate president Vicente “Tito” Sotto III, who filed his own COC for senator. Lacson and Sotto ran in tandem in 2022 as president and vice president, respectively, but they lost to President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and Vice President Sara Duterte.
Lacson and Sotto are part of the “Alyansa Para sa Bagong Pilipinas” (Alliance for a New Philippines) administration slate endorsed by Marcos.
Lacson said he was “enjoying retirement” but was convinced by Sotto to run again. The former senator said he wants to restore “proper decorum” in the Senate.
“We are not in a position to judge the present crop of senators, they are mature individuals…. What I’m saying is that what I witnessed under Sotto was aligned with propriety,” Lacson said in a mix of English and Filipino, in the context of a recent near-brawl between senators Alan Peter Cayetano and Migz Zubiri.
Sotto was Senate president from 2018 to 2022.
Lacson could have run for a second Senate term in 2022, but he opted to run for president instead. He served in the upper chamber from 2016 to 2022. Before that, he was a senator from 2001 to 2013, maximizing the allowed two consecutive terms of six years each for senators.
As a senator, Lacson gained a reputation as a crusader against corruption, particularly the misuse of pork barrel funds — which he did not avail of prior to the Supreme Court decision that the funds are unconstitutional — and any form of discretionary funds that he continued to scrutinize in the national budget proposals.
“I need not reinvent myself. I pledge to continue not availing of the pork barrel allocations in any shape or form. I will continue to be a vanguard of the national budget to the best of my ability,” Lacson said on Wednesday.
But he is also infamous for his role in the Ferdinand E. Marcos dictatorship, when he was part of the notorious Metrocom Intelligence and Security Group (MISG). Lacson claimed during the 2022 campaign that he never committed torture during that time.
Court records would show, however, that he was a respondent in a long-running case of the alleged torture of political prisoner Rogelio Aberca way back in 1988. This case dragged on for decades, with a fire in the city hall destroying records midway. In 2012, the Supreme Court cleared Lacson and his co-accused not because the Court found them innocent of torturing Aberca, but because the decades-long process violated their rights to due process and rights to counsel.
Lacson also evaded justice at one point, though he described himself as a “figutive of injustice” at the time. In the last few months of the Gloria Arroyo administration in 2010, Lacson, an incumbent senator, fled the country before a Manila court ordered his arrest for the murder of publicist Salvador Dacer and driver Emmanuel Corbito. Lacson believed that the double murder case was revived because ofhis exposés on corruption cases against the Arroyo administration.
The Court of Appeals later junked the double murder charges against him, citing the lack of credibility of Cezar Mancao II. Lacson returned to the country in 2011. – Rappler.com