Why the 18 ex‑soldiers’ accusations are so credible

Last of three parts

IT is scandalous that mainstream media and 12 pro Marcos senators have so casually dismissed a 31 page, notarized the joint affidavit by 18 to 19 former Marines and security men, when it contains the most damaging accusations against this administration, the biggest case of corruption in our history. It is stunning that Liberal Party senators, the Pinks and the Reds — once virulent critics of the Marcos kleptocracy — have closed their eyes to the accusation, in total servility to President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

Marcos’ minions in the Senate illegally usurped that chamber’s leadership for the two main purposes of suppressing the ex soldiers’ explosive testimony to bury the accusations against him and his family, as well as his allies and later, and to railroad Vice President Sara Duterte’s impeachment.

There has never been such many accusers in our political history: the handful of witnesses in the Priority Development Assistance Fund and Janet Napoles cases is tiny compared with the number of named, uniformed men signing a single 31 page sworn affidavit. When 18 Marines and security operatives step forward together, under oath, to admit participation in suitcase deliveries and to name their superiors, the burden of proof shifts; we are no longer dealing with an isolated tattler but with something closer to a battalion’s mutiny against a corrupt chain of command.

All this makes the sneering putdowns of Sen. Raffy Tulfo — who reduces them to mere “cargadores,” as if they were brainless porters rather than ex Marines sworn to follow orders — not just unfair but obscene: It spits on their risk and operational experience while ass-kissing the very officials they say commanded the deliveries. But then it is totally beyond college-dropout Tulfo to think that ordinary people would have a sense of justice as to rebel against the corrupt and powerful.

The accusations

There are 10 major reasons why the accusations are credible.

First, these men do not talk like rumormongers. They talk like operational staff. They describe tasks they say they personally performed as drivers, escorts and security in a logistics operation. They state where the money was counted — a specific house in Valle Verde 6 — and where it was brought: particular houses in Forbes Park, identified addresses in Greenhills and Bonifacio Global City, even locations inside the House of Representatives. They present themselves as the “taga buhat” of maletas, not as distant commentators. Importantly, they enumerate specific vehicles and plate numbers: a Toyota Sequoia bearing plate NNV 2869, armored Grandias with exact plates, a Lexus with plate NFX 8886 — the kind of detail normally known only to those who actually operate the vehicles, not to political rumor mills. Under the rules on evidence, this is direct, experiential testimony, not hearsay; operational details like plates, addresses and routines are hard to fake convincingly en masse and can be independently checked.

Second, the affidavit is filled with factual and logistical detail of the kind fabricators usually avoid. The affiants give granular denominations and packaging of cash: how many millions, by their estimate, fit into large, medium, or small suitcases; how much is typically stuffed into paper bags (P5 to P10 million); how “expandable” envelopes are used for around P2 million; and how they resorted to cartons and storage boxes when the suitcases ran out. They list precise venues: multiple identified houses in Forbes Park along McKinley, Narra and Tamarind roads; Manila Polo Club town house units 8 and 9; a house on Aguado Street directly across Malacañang; Horizon Homes basement level 3; and named hotels such as Midas, Holiday Inn, Citadines, Raffles and Diamond. Fabricated stories tend to be vague or generic for a reason: specificity invites verification. This affidavit is the opposite — it provides a prosecutable quantity of concrete data points that invite cross checking with Land Transportation Office records, subdivision guards, hotel logs, CCTV footage and building access systems. Their lawyer Levito Baligod and crusader Mike Defensor, who has been helping him, could not have known all these data points to ask the soldiers to report.

Coherence

Third, the narrative has internal coherence. It behaves like a real operation, not a random collage of dramatic scenes. According to the affiants, the cash flows follow a consistent structure: “bagsakan” and accounting at Valle Verde 6, (Elizaldy “Zaldy” Co’s residence) consolidation and storage at Horizon Homes, then repeated outward deliveries to a stable set of nodes — politicians, Commission on Elections (Comelec), troll farm operators and others. They speak of making these runs three or four times a week, over several years, to the same addresses.

Their account of International Criminal Court (ICC) related activities is similarly structured: dollar conversions on Valero Street months before ICC personnel arrive; airport pick ups in specified vehicles; accommodation at known Makati hotels like Citadines; and interviews or meetings at places such as Midas Hotel and Bahay Kalinga. Internal coherence over more than 30 pages, with routes, staging points and frequencies that make sense, is a plus factor for credibility; concocted political scripts rarely bother with this level of logistical realism.

Fourth, these ex soldiers do not stand alone. Their testimony explicitly corroborates earlier whistle blowers. They declare that Msgt. Orly Guteza’s Senate Blue Ribbon testimony is true and insist that they themselves accompanied him on deliveries of suitcase cash. They point to photos showing Guteza with maletas as consistent with their own operational role. They also confirm essential parts of Zaldy Co’s social media disclosures about delivering money to high officials, asserting that what he described matches what they personally saw.

Crucially, Co has not publicly denied that he employed these former soldiers and security men, nor has he refuted the core claim that graft money was transported in the very maletas and suitcases they now describe — a silence that sits uneasily with any attempt to paint them as total fabricators. When whistleblowers from different vantage points — a principal, a staff officer, operational escorts — converge on the same modus operandi and list of recipients, they strengthen each other’s credibility, especially when the later group exposes itself to retaliation by publicly aligning with the first.

Risk

Fifth, there is the simple question of risk and reward. The accusers have identified themselves as individuals whose ranks and service histories are disclosed in the affidavit. They swore to a joint narrative before a notary, in a 31 page document, in which they accuse powerful politicians and senior officials of participating in a massive cash delivery scheme. They recount threats and attempted bribery meant to force them to sign counter affidavits disowning Guteza’s testimony, which they refused.Fourth, these ex soldiers do not stand alone. Their testimony explicitly corroborates earlier whistle blowers. They declare that Msgt. Orly Guteza’s Senate Blue Ribbon testimony is true and insist that they themselves accompanied him on deliveries of suitcase cash. They point to photos showing Guteza with maletas as consistent with their own operational role. They also confirm essential parts of Zaldy Co’s social media disclosures about delivering money to high officials, asserting that what he described matches what they personally saw.

Crucially, Co has not publicly denied that he employed these former soldiers and security men, nor has he refuted the core claim that graft money was transported in the very maletas and suitcases they now describe — a silence that sits uneasily with any attempt to paint them as total fabricators. When whistleblowers from different vantage points — a principal, a staff officer, operational escorts — converge on the same modus operandi and list of recipients, they strengthen each other’s credibility, especially when the later group exposes itself to retaliation by publicly aligning with the first.

Risk

Fifth, there is the simple question of risk and reward. The accusers have identified themselves as individuals whose ranks and service histories are disclosed in the affidavit. They swore to a joint narrative before a notary, in a 31 page document, in which they accuse powerful politicians and senior officials of participating in a massive cash delivery scheme. They recount threats and attempted bribery meant to force them to sign counter affidavits disowning Guteza’s testimony, which they refused.

Testifying against those who hold real power, naming them and describing specific maleta deliveries is not a risk free hobby. From a rational choice perspective, it is difficult to see how nearly 18 individuals would collectively invent such a story, expose themselves to criminal, civil and physical danger, and risk their own families, simply to participate in someone else’s political game.

Sixth, they neither present themselves as heroes nor sanitize their own roles. They admit that they were instruments of the operation, acting as escorts, drivers and money carriers over several years. They go further and implicate their own network: fellow members of the security forces, including active duty Philippine National Police officers that they name, whom they accuse of joining these deliveries and, in some cases, breaking maleta locks to steal bundles of cash and then replacing the locks to cover up the theft. Self incriminating testimony — especially when it also incriminates peers within the police and military — is atypical of purely self serving narratives. Courts treat such admissions, subject to cross examination, as a badge of credibility: people who are lying to protect themselves usually do not volunteer evidence of their own criminal participation.

Verifiable

Seventh, a large portion of their story is objectively verifiable. Many elements can be tested against independent records: vehicle plate numbers; property ownership and occupancy of the specific Forbes Park and Aguado addresses; condo ownership at Horizon Homes and Raffles; hotel bookings at Midas, Holiday Inn and Diamond; flights on AirTaxi.ph to Laoag within certain periods; and DHL shipments to named ICC personnel. A fabricated story usually avoids providing a prosecutable quantity of checkable details, precisely because any mismatch can destroy the narrative.

Here the state, if it wished, could test dozens of discrete claims against third party records. The more of these check out, the stronger the presumption of overall reliability; the burden shifts to doubters to explain why a lie would risk so many points of falsification.

Eighth, this is not a single voice claiming omniscience. It is a joint affidavit of ex-soldiers, each with overlapping but not identical duties: drivers, bodyguards, marine security and other roles. The document is structured so that they narrate the same overall pattern but have specific “Ako…” paragraphs — “Ako, Belnard Tube…,” “Ako, Bernard Gumban…” — for particular deliveries they personally handled.

The text reflects role specific knowledge: some focus on airport pick ups and hotel escort duties, others on specific provincial trips such as to Ilocos Norte and Laoag by land or air, while still others discuss deliveries to troll farm operations in Valero. When multiple witnesses with different roles converge on the same core pattern, and their details interlock without being copies of one another, that is exactly the profile of genuine multi witness evidence that courts and investigators look for, as opposed to scripted testimony where everyone repeats the same sparse storyline.

Consistent

Ninth, the alleged flow of money is consistent with what is known about contemporary Philippine political structures and incentives. The pattern of alleged recipients — key House leaders, Senate figures, Comelec, Department of Budget and Management, Department of Public Works and Highways, Bureau of Corrections, troll farm operators — matches how political power and budgetary bottlenecks are actually arranged in our system. The timing of the deliveries, post 2022, during the current administration’s control of the budget, aligns with the most rational moments for such pay offs: to secure approvals, buy protection and manage international legal exposure. This is not a story that ignores institutional realities or invents implausible conspiracies; the alleged flows track real power centers and calendar events where corruption pay offs are most plausible.

Finally, the form of the testimony matters. The affidavit is notarized, dated and explicitly states that it is 31 pages, including the jurat, satisfying the formal requirements of a sworn statement and exposing the affiants to liability for perjury. Its structure — Roman numeral headings, numbered paragraphs and carefully distinguished “I” versus “we” sections — suggests deliberate legal preparation, not a rushed manifesto for a press conference. The sworn affidavit prepared with counsel and notarized means a willingness to stand by the account under oath.

None of this means all the accusations are infallible, or that cross examination and counter evidence are unnecessary. Inevitably, a 31 page narrative stitched from the memories of 18 men will contain minor inconsistencies and honest errors in dates, amounts, or sequencing; to fixate on these while ignoring the overall pattern is to stare at the trees and refuse to see the forest. What it does mean is that, by any fair evidentiary standard, these 18 ex soldiers and their colleagues are at least prima facie credible witnesses — not mere rumormongers.

If one studies the affidavit in detail, the truth will be so obvious that the former Blue Ribbon Committee Chairman Panfilo Lacson was undertaking a scandalous burying of the ex-soldiers’ accusations. That’s why the 11 senators with high moral values chose to rebel against Marcos’ Senate bloc.

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Why the 18 ex‑soldiers’ accusations are so credible
Source: Breaking News PH