As defined by the Commission on Elections, negative campaigning seeks to promote the defeat of a candidate.
One can campaign against a candidate and tell others not to vote for him or her. But there are boundaries that should not be crossed.
What one does or says must not amount to a criminal offense such as libel or printed defamation, cyberlibel, fake news, slander (oral defamation), unjust vexation (unjustly annoying an innocent person), coercion (preventing or compelling someone from doing something), threats of harm, or sedition (uprising or rebellion).
Clearly, filing a criminal complaint or petition for disqualification against a rival candidate is not among these offenses that a negative campaign should not cross. But certainly, it is negative campaigning.
It has been done before, in 2012 when businessman and 2013 gubernatorial candidate Larry S. Que, through the lawyers of fellow gubernatorial bet Araceli Bernardino-Wong, filed a petitioned for disqualification case against then Governor Joseph C. Cua before the Commission on Elections.
The Que petition claimed that based on Cua’s birth certificate and naturalization records, he was Chinese and therefore disqualified from running for the elective position.
Although the COMELEC eventually dismissed the petition just a month before the 2013 elections by ruling that Cua presented abundant evidence to prove that he was Filipino, the damage had been done and Cua lost his bid for a third consecutive term.
It is likely for this reason that the political opponents of the two Cua brothers filed separate disqualification petitions, but through the same law office, before COMELEC.
Would it work this time?
Probably not. The original petition was earthshaking for the electorate at the time, but the passage of more than a decade has greatly diminished the shock value of such an accusation.
Frequent social media users may recall that sometime last year, wild stories about the alleged Chinese “invasion:” of Catanduanes proliferated on Facebook.
Many people living outside this island were apparently convinced into believing the lie that the island was a “Chinese enclave within a ‘Chinese-dominated’ Philippines,” which was reportedly propagated by a group identified with a retired military general.
Even former Senator and Gigmoto native Francisco S. Tatad was prompted to debunk the baseless allegations in his column in the Manila Times, asserting that “(A)lthough Gov. Joseph “Boboy” Cua and his brother Vice Gov. Peter Cua are definitely of Chinese descent, they are genuine Filipinos, seriously committed to the progress of the province.”
Which brings to mind the motivations of the two gentlemen who caused the petitions to be filed before C0MELEC.
Joseph Cua had just won back his Capitol seat in 2016 when Atty. Sinforoso A. Sarmiento Jr. filed his bid for mayor of Virac against Engr. Samuel V. Laynes and lost in a three-cornered fight.
Cua was still the provincial chief executive when Sarmiento finally defeated Laynes in a rematch in 2019 before losing again in 2022 just as Cua launched into his third term.
Incidentally, it was in 2021 when now gubernatorial candidate Patrick Alain T. Azanza became one of the three applicants for the presidency of the Catanduanes State University.
At the time, insiders claimed then that the support of Gov. Cua was crucial to Azanza’s selection as president as his rival was then widely believed to have majority of the votes of the Board of Regents.
From 2019 onwards, none of these two personalities – the lawyer and the Juris Doctor graduate – ever questioned the citizenship of Joseph C. Cua or that of then San Andres Mayor-turned-Vice Governor Peter Cua.
Of course, they probably knew or were aware of the disqualification petition filed against the governor in 2012 or its favorable result along with its unfortunate effect on his reelection campaign.
It is just convenient now, for both running against the brothers in different elective positions, that the ghost of Cua’s alleged Chinese citizenship is being resurrected on basically the same grounds.
There is no other reason for the filing of the twin petitions as the two petitioners could have filed cases questioning the entire Cua family’s citizenship as early as 2019 or 2021 for that matter.
It’s just politics, plain and simple.