"From Dimasalang to Balsac: When Secrecy and History Becomes an Excuse"
A public controversy can begin with a laugh and end with a constitutional question. A name may sound improbable, a receipt may appear suspicious, and a coincidence may seem so extravagant that it belongs in satire. But when such a name appears in documents used to liquidate public funds, the issue is no longer merely amusing. It becomes a matter of accountability.
That is why the exchange in the Senate impeachment court between Robin Padilla, prosecution counsel Mae Divinagracia, and Bam Aquino deserves more than the amusement it naturally produced.
Padilla invoked history. He reminded the prosecution that Filipino heroes used aliases: Dimasalang, Siling Labuyo, Tikbalang, and the many noms de guerre by which revolutionaries concealed themselves from the colonial police. He later invoked the alias “Marcial Bonifacio,” used by Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. when he returned to the Philippines in 1983. Padilla’s argument was essentially that aliases have a legitimate place in dangerous and confidential work, and that even the armed insurgency of the present era furnishes examples of people operating under assumed names. (Inquirer.net)
Bam Aquino did not dispute the history. He merely restored the missing context.
Ninoy Aquino did use Marcial Bonifacio, he said, but Ninoy had no confidential funds, and his alias did not appear among the acknowledgment receipts now before the impeachment court. (GMA Network)
It was a humorous intervention, but beneath the humor lay a serious distinction that the Senate would do well to preserve. An alias adopted by a revolutionary to escape an occupying authority is one thing. An alias supposedly attached to the receipt of taxpayers’ money is another. Jose Rizal was not submitting Dimasalang to the Commission on Audit. Andres Bonifacio did not ask the Treasury to liquidate a government cash advance payable to Maypagasa. Ninoy Aquino used Marcial Bonifacio because he was attempting to return to a country ruled by a government that had imprisoned him, sentenced him to death, and driven him into exile. These historical circumstances cannot simply be transplanted into the accounting system of a constitutional republic.
Indeed, there is an additional oddity. The prosecution clarified after Padilla’s questioning that it had not asserted that the questionable names in the receipts were aliases, and that the defense itself had not established such a proposition either. (Inquirer.net) The result is a risk of constructing an elaborate historical defense of an explanation that has yet to be proved.
And this controversy did not begin yesterday.
The woman who could not be found
Mary Grace Piattos entered the national imagination in 2024, when her name appeared on acknowledgment receipts connected with confidential expenditures of the Office of the Vice President. The name immediately acquired an almost folkloric quality because it appeared to combine the name of a well-known restaurant with that of a familiar snack. But Congress did not merely laugh. It asked whether the person existed.
The Philippine Statistics Authority subsequently certified that its Civil Registry System contained no birth, marriage, or death record under the name Mary Grace Piattos. The PSA prudently added that a more extensive search could be conducted if additional identifying information—parents’ names, dates, or places of vital events—were supplied. That qualification is important. A negative database search is evidence deserving inquiry; it is not, standing alone, metaphysical proof that no human being could ever have borne the name. (GMA Network)
But what began as one bizarre name did not remain one bizarre name.
When the impeachment trial reached the confidential-fund records this August, Mary Grace Piattos returned, this time before the Senate itself. Former COA auditor Roderick Wamil identified her receipt as among the 845 acknowledgment receipts he examined in relation to the OVP’s ₱125-million confidential fund for the closing days of 2022. (Philippine News Agency)
Then came the procession. The selected receipts presented in court included Mary Grace Piattos for ₱70,000, Renan Piattos for ₱110,000, Mico Harina for ₱295,000, Patty Ting for ₱150,000, Andy Lim for ₱50,000, and Sisfrunio Balsac for ₱70,000, among others. (DZRH News) The names by themselves prove neither fraud nor guilt. There are Filipinos with unusual names, unfortunate names, amusing names, and names whose parents displayed an imagination that no civil registrar could restrain. The law cannot convict a person because a surname happens to resemble lunch.
But government accounting does not operate on the presumption that the more ridiculous a coincidence becomes, the less necessary it is to explain.
In subsequent proceedings, still more curious names appeared in selected 2023 receipts: Miggy Mango, Jay Kamote, Matthew Keso, Ralph Josh Bacon, and others whose collective effect caused the evidentiary record to resemble, at moments, less the supporting documents of an intelligence operation than the inventory of a grocery basket. (Philippine News Agency)
This is where ridicule becomes dangerous, because ridicule can distract from the larger issue. The republic is not prosecuting a menu. It is examining money.
Confidential is not synonymous with unknowable
There is a legitimate case for confidential funds. Every serious government recognizes that intelligence work cannot be conducted entirely in public. Informants may have to be protected. Operations may fail if their objects, participants, or methods are disclosed prematurely. A state that cannot keep a secret will soon discover that its adversaries can.
But this principle produces the opposite conclusion from the one sometimes drawn from it.
Precisely because confidential expenditure is hidden from ordinary public inspection, the internal mechanisms of accountability must be stronger, not weaker. The taxpayer may properly be denied the identity of an intelligence source. It does not follow that the state itself may be unable to establish that the source exists.
Wamil put the distinction with admirable simplicity during his testimony. What is confidential, he said, is the purpose or operation; that does not automatically render the identity of an ordinary supplier confidential. The OVP, he testified, was still expected to produce the appropriate supporting documentation for purchases. (Philippine News Agency)
That distinction is the heart of the controversy.
A secure government audit system can know what the public must not know. It can assign codes, restrict access, seal records, and protect sources while retaining a verifiable chain between the pseudonym and the real individual. Otherwise, “confidential” ceases to describe information protected from public disclosure and begins instead to describe information incapable of verification.
An alias may protect an informant, but the government must still be capable of proving, to the officials legally authorized to know, that there was an informant to protect.
That is why the argument cannot end with the discovery that aliases have been used by heroes, rebels, spies, journalists, actors, and revolutionaries. Of course they have. The question is not whether aliases exist. The question is whether an alias written on a government acknowledgment receipt corresponds to a real person, whether that person actually received the stated amount, whether the expenditure served an authorized confidential purpose, and whether an auditable record exists somewhere within the state establishing those facts.
These are accounting questions before they are historical questions.
The danger of making heroes into bookkeepers
Padilla’s historical excursion also illustrates a recurring Philippine weakness: public officials sometimes invoke national heroes where ordinary administrative competence would suffice.
Rizal and Bonifacio belong to the history of a people deprived of their own sovereign state. Their secrecy was directed against a colonial state they sought to overthrow. The officials now before the impeachment court operate inside the Philippine state, exercise powers created by its Constitution, and spend revenues collected under its laws.
The difference is not semantic. It is the difference between conspiracy against colonial authority and fiduciary responsibility under republican authority.
The Katipunan kept secrets from the Guardia Civil because discovery could mean imprisonment or execution. A constitutional office keeps certain intelligence information from public circulation because disclosure could compromise legitimate operations. But that office remains accountable to the republic whose money it spends.
The romance of revolutionary secrecy therefore requires caution. Taken too far, it converts a principle of resistance into a theory of public administration.
Almost anything could be justified by that method. Revolutionaries met secretly; therefore government meetings need no minutes. Revolutionaries concealed their finances; therefore government expenditures need no audit. Revolutionaries used assumed identities; therefore names on official liquidation papers need never be traceable. The absurdity becomes apparent as soon as the analogy is completed.
The heroes of the Revolution used secrecy because they had no republic of their own.
The officials of the present republic have no such excuse.
The receipts themselves must answer
There are other facts that make the demand for explanation more serious. Wamil testified that the liquidation of the initial ₱125 million was marked by deficiencies in supporting documents. He also described as “unusual” a pattern in which 111 transactions totaling about ₱17 million were recorded in a single day, with the amounts appearing in round figures. (GMA Network) COA has separately affirmed a notice of disallowance covering roughly ₱73.28 million in 2022 confidential expenditures, although questions of ultimate liability and the legal effect of the audit findings remain matters subject to the proper processes. (GMA Network)
None of these facts authorizes anyone to skip the trial and pronounce a verdict from a newspaper column. The Vice President is entitled to a defense. Her lawyers are entitled to challenge the prosecution’s interpretation of the documents, the auditors’ conclusions, the provenance of the receipts, and the inferences being drawn from unusual names. Impeachment, however political in character, must not become conviction by meme.
But neither can accountability become acquittal by euphemism.
Calling Mary Grace Piattos an “alias” does not answer who used the alias. Calling Patty Ting an “alias” does not establish the real person behind Patty Ting. Calling Sisfrunio Balsac an “alias”—however valiantly one may attempt to pronounce the name with a straight face—does not demonstrate that ₱70,000 reached a legitimate recipient for a legitimate confidential purpose.
The alias theory, if the defense eventually adopts it, creates a new question rather than answering the old one: alias of whom?
And somewhere in a functioning government there must be an answer.
The answer need not be announced from the Senate gallery. It need not be televised. It need not be printed tomorrow morning beside the name of an intelligence operation. There are legitimate secrets that a mature republic should be mature enough to keep.
But secrecy from the public and secrecy from accountability are not the same thing.
The fillers in a trial that is supposed to be swift
Meanwhile, supporters of Padilla’s position appear to be treating the issue as little more than filler in a trial that is supposed to be swift and speedy. Some seem to have been carried away by the phrase “confidential alias,” as though the mere invocation of secrecy were enough to settle the matter.
One apologist even responded by citing history:“Be careful about calling people stupid, because even lawyers can be stupid, especially when it comes to history. We are all ignorant about different things...Always remember the lessons of the Katipunan so that you will not be deceived by people who are small-minded, as you see them…”
The translation is clear enough, but so is the irony. The statement warns against intellectual arrogance while using history as a rhetorical shield rather than engaging the central accounting question. It invokes the Katipunan, but does not explain how revolutionary aliases establish the identity of people who received public money. It cautions others against being “small-minded,” yet treats a demand for documentary verification as though it were an insult to history.
A trial intended to be swift and speedy should not be burdened by arguments irrelevant to the actual issue. The question is not whether lawyers can be foolish, whether critics can be arrogant, or whether the Katipunan taught Filipinos to distrust people of poor character. The question is whether the receipts identify real recipients, whether the money was actually disbursed to them, and whether the expenditures were lawful and properly documented.
Historical references may illuminate a legal argument. They cannot substitute for one.
The Senate should be especially wary of allowing such diversions to consume time. A proceeding that is supposed to determine constitutional accountability cannot afford to become a contest of patriotic quotations, personal insults, and improvised lessons in revolutionary history. If the defense has evidence that the names were aliases, it should present the evidence. If it has a secure record identifying the persons behind those aliases, it should explain how that record satisfies the requirements of confidential auditing. If it does not, then the invocation of history remains precisely what it appears to be: a distraction.
What Bam Aquino actually exposed
This is why Bam Aquino’s remark worked. Its effectiveness did not lie merely in political wit or family history. It exposed the category error in Padilla’s comparison.
Yes, Ninoy Aquino used an alias. But Marcial Bonifacio was not offered as a receipt for public money.
No auditor had to ask whether the government gave Marcial Bonifacio ₱70,000, ₱150,000, or ₱295,000. No liquidation report depended upon proving that Marcial Bonifacio bought information for the Office of the Vice President. No constitutional officer asked the republic to accept his assumed identity as documentary support for an expenditure.
Ninoy was hiding himself from the state. The persons behind these receipts, if aliases they truly are, were receiving money from the state. That distinction is everything.
The Senate should therefore resist both temptations now competing for attention. It should not convict because the names are funny. And it should not cease asking questions because someone has remembered that Bonifacio, Rizal, the Katipunan, Ninoy Aquino, and the NPA also used aliases.
The republic can tolerate an alias. What it cannot safely tolerate is an expenditure without an accountable human being behind it.
Mary Grace Piattos may someday be identified. Patty Ting may prove to be somebody. Sisfrunio Balsac may yet emerge from the documentary shadows with an identity, an explanation, and a perfectly legitimate story. If so, the evidence should establish it, and fairness should acknowledge it.
But until the receipts can be connected to real persons and lawful purposes through a credible and protected audit trail, invoking the heroes of the Revolution does not elevate these documents.
It merely reminds observers how far the country has traveled from Dimasalang to Piattos—and how dangerous it would be if, somewhere along the journey, the Philippine government began mistaking secrecy for accountability.
That is why the exchange in the Senate impeachment court between Robin Padilla, prosecution counsel Mae Divinagracia, and Bam Aquino deserves more than the amusement it naturally produced.
Padilla invoked history. He reminded the prosecution that Filipino heroes used aliases: Dimasalang, Siling Labuyo, Tikbalang, and the many noms de guerre by which revolutionaries concealed themselves from the colonial police. He later invoked the alias “Marcial Bonifacio,” used by Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. when he returned to the Philippines in 1983. Padilla’s argument was essentially that aliases have a legitimate place in dangerous and confidential work, and that even the armed insurgency of the present era furnishes examples of people operating under assumed names. (Inquirer.net)
Bam Aquino did not dispute the history. He merely restored the missing context.
Ninoy Aquino did use Marcial Bonifacio, he said, but Ninoy had no confidential funds, and his alias did not appear among the acknowledgment receipts now before the impeachment court. (GMA Network)
It was a humorous intervention, but beneath the humor lay a serious distinction that the Senate would do well to preserve. An alias adopted by a revolutionary to escape an occupying authority is one thing. An alias supposedly attached to the receipt of taxpayers’ money is another. Jose Rizal was not submitting Dimasalang to the Commission on Audit. Andres Bonifacio did not ask the Treasury to liquidate a government cash advance payable to Maypagasa. Ninoy Aquino used Marcial Bonifacio because he was attempting to return to a country ruled by a government that had imprisoned him, sentenced him to death, and driven him into exile. These historical circumstances cannot simply be transplanted into the accounting system of a constitutional republic.
Indeed, there is an additional oddity. The prosecution clarified after Padilla’s questioning that it had not asserted that the questionable names in the receipts were aliases, and that the defense itself had not established such a proposition either. (Inquirer.net) The result is a risk of constructing an elaborate historical defense of an explanation that has yet to be proved.
And this controversy did not begin yesterday.
The woman who could not be found
Mary Grace Piattos entered the national imagination in 2024, when her name appeared on acknowledgment receipts connected with confidential expenditures of the Office of the Vice President. The name immediately acquired an almost folkloric quality because it appeared to combine the name of a well-known restaurant with that of a familiar snack. But Congress did not merely laugh. It asked whether the person existed.
The Philippine Statistics Authority subsequently certified that its Civil Registry System contained no birth, marriage, or death record under the name Mary Grace Piattos. The PSA prudently added that a more extensive search could be conducted if additional identifying information—parents’ names, dates, or places of vital events—were supplied. That qualification is important. A negative database search is evidence deserving inquiry; it is not, standing alone, metaphysical proof that no human being could ever have borne the name. (GMA Network)
But what began as one bizarre name did not remain one bizarre name.
When the impeachment trial reached the confidential-fund records this August, Mary Grace Piattos returned, this time before the Senate itself. Former COA auditor Roderick Wamil identified her receipt as among the 845 acknowledgment receipts he examined in relation to the OVP’s ₱125-million confidential fund for the closing days of 2022. (Philippine News Agency)
Then came the procession. The selected receipts presented in court included Mary Grace Piattos for ₱70,000, Renan Piattos for ₱110,000, Mico Harina for ₱295,000, Patty Ting for ₱150,000, Andy Lim for ₱50,000, and Sisfrunio Balsac for ₱70,000, among others. (DZRH News) The names by themselves prove neither fraud nor guilt. There are Filipinos with unusual names, unfortunate names, amusing names, and names whose parents displayed an imagination that no civil registrar could restrain. The law cannot convict a person because a surname happens to resemble lunch.
But government accounting does not operate on the presumption that the more ridiculous a coincidence becomes, the less necessary it is to explain.
In subsequent proceedings, still more curious names appeared in selected 2023 receipts: Miggy Mango, Jay Kamote, Matthew Keso, Ralph Josh Bacon, and others whose collective effect caused the evidentiary record to resemble, at moments, less the supporting documents of an intelligence operation than the inventory of a grocery basket. (Philippine News Agency)
This is where ridicule becomes dangerous, because ridicule can distract from the larger issue. The republic is not prosecuting a menu. It is examining money.
Confidential is not synonymous with unknowable
There is a legitimate case for confidential funds. Every serious government recognizes that intelligence work cannot be conducted entirely in public. Informants may have to be protected. Operations may fail if their objects, participants, or methods are disclosed prematurely. A state that cannot keep a secret will soon discover that its adversaries can.
But this principle produces the opposite conclusion from the one sometimes drawn from it.
Precisely because confidential expenditure is hidden from ordinary public inspection, the internal mechanisms of accountability must be stronger, not weaker. The taxpayer may properly be denied the identity of an intelligence source. It does not follow that the state itself may be unable to establish that the source exists.
Wamil put the distinction with admirable simplicity during his testimony. What is confidential, he said, is the purpose or operation; that does not automatically render the identity of an ordinary supplier confidential. The OVP, he testified, was still expected to produce the appropriate supporting documentation for purchases. (Philippine News Agency)
That distinction is the heart of the controversy.
A secure government audit system can know what the public must not know. It can assign codes, restrict access, seal records, and protect sources while retaining a verifiable chain between the pseudonym and the real individual. Otherwise, “confidential” ceases to describe information protected from public disclosure and begins instead to describe information incapable of verification.
An alias may protect an informant, but the government must still be capable of proving, to the officials legally authorized to know, that there was an informant to protect.
That is why the argument cannot end with the discovery that aliases have been used by heroes, rebels, spies, journalists, actors, and revolutionaries. Of course they have. The question is not whether aliases exist. The question is whether an alias written on a government acknowledgment receipt corresponds to a real person, whether that person actually received the stated amount, whether the expenditure served an authorized confidential purpose, and whether an auditable record exists somewhere within the state establishing those facts.
These are accounting questions before they are historical questions.
The danger of making heroes into bookkeepers
Padilla’s historical excursion also illustrates a recurring Philippine weakness: public officials sometimes invoke national heroes where ordinary administrative competence would suffice.
Rizal and Bonifacio belong to the history of a people deprived of their own sovereign state. Their secrecy was directed against a colonial state they sought to overthrow. The officials now before the impeachment court operate inside the Philippine state, exercise powers created by its Constitution, and spend revenues collected under its laws.
The difference is not semantic. It is the difference between conspiracy against colonial authority and fiduciary responsibility under republican authority.
The Katipunan kept secrets from the Guardia Civil because discovery could mean imprisonment or execution. A constitutional office keeps certain intelligence information from public circulation because disclosure could compromise legitimate operations. But that office remains accountable to the republic whose money it spends.
The romance of revolutionary secrecy therefore requires caution. Taken too far, it converts a principle of resistance into a theory of public administration.
Almost anything could be justified by that method. Revolutionaries met secretly; therefore government meetings need no minutes. Revolutionaries concealed their finances; therefore government expenditures need no audit. Revolutionaries used assumed identities; therefore names on official liquidation papers need never be traceable. The absurdity becomes apparent as soon as the analogy is completed.
The heroes of the Revolution used secrecy because they had no republic of their own.
The officials of the present republic have no such excuse.
The receipts themselves must answer
There are other facts that make the demand for explanation more serious. Wamil testified that the liquidation of the initial ₱125 million was marked by deficiencies in supporting documents. He also described as “unusual” a pattern in which 111 transactions totaling about ₱17 million were recorded in a single day, with the amounts appearing in round figures. (GMA Network) COA has separately affirmed a notice of disallowance covering roughly ₱73.28 million in 2022 confidential expenditures, although questions of ultimate liability and the legal effect of the audit findings remain matters subject to the proper processes. (GMA Network)
None of these facts authorizes anyone to skip the trial and pronounce a verdict from a newspaper column. The Vice President is entitled to a defense. Her lawyers are entitled to challenge the prosecution’s interpretation of the documents, the auditors’ conclusions, the provenance of the receipts, and the inferences being drawn from unusual names. Impeachment, however political in character, must not become conviction by meme.
But neither can accountability become acquittal by euphemism.
Calling Mary Grace Piattos an “alias” does not answer who used the alias. Calling Patty Ting an “alias” does not establish the real person behind Patty Ting. Calling Sisfrunio Balsac an “alias”—however valiantly one may attempt to pronounce the name with a straight face—does not demonstrate that ₱70,000 reached a legitimate recipient for a legitimate confidential purpose.
The alias theory, if the defense eventually adopts it, creates a new question rather than answering the old one: alias of whom?
And somewhere in a functioning government there must be an answer.
The answer need not be announced from the Senate gallery. It need not be televised. It need not be printed tomorrow morning beside the name of an intelligence operation. There are legitimate secrets that a mature republic should be mature enough to keep.
But secrecy from the public and secrecy from accountability are not the same thing.
The fillers in a trial that is supposed to be swift
Meanwhile, supporters of Padilla’s position appear to be treating the issue as little more than filler in a trial that is supposed to be swift and speedy. Some seem to have been carried away by the phrase “confidential alias,” as though the mere invocation of secrecy were enough to settle the matter.
One apologist even responded by citing history:“Be careful about calling people stupid, because even lawyers can be stupid, especially when it comes to history. We are all ignorant about different things...Always remember the lessons of the Katipunan so that you will not be deceived by people who are small-minded, as you see them…”
The translation is clear enough, but so is the irony. The statement warns against intellectual arrogance while using history as a rhetorical shield rather than engaging the central accounting question. It invokes the Katipunan, but does not explain how revolutionary aliases establish the identity of people who received public money. It cautions others against being “small-minded,” yet treats a demand for documentary verification as though it were an insult to history.
A trial intended to be swift and speedy should not be burdened by arguments irrelevant to the actual issue. The question is not whether lawyers can be foolish, whether critics can be arrogant, or whether the Katipunan taught Filipinos to distrust people of poor character. The question is whether the receipts identify real recipients, whether the money was actually disbursed to them, and whether the expenditures were lawful and properly documented.
Historical references may illuminate a legal argument. They cannot substitute for one.
The Senate should be especially wary of allowing such diversions to consume time. A proceeding that is supposed to determine constitutional accountability cannot afford to become a contest of patriotic quotations, personal insults, and improvised lessons in revolutionary history. If the defense has evidence that the names were aliases, it should present the evidence. If it has a secure record identifying the persons behind those aliases, it should explain how that record satisfies the requirements of confidential auditing. If it does not, then the invocation of history remains precisely what it appears to be: a distraction.
What Bam Aquino actually exposed
This is why Bam Aquino’s remark worked. Its effectiveness did not lie merely in political wit or family history. It exposed the category error in Padilla’s comparison.
Yes, Ninoy Aquino used an alias. But Marcial Bonifacio was not offered as a receipt for public money.
No auditor had to ask whether the government gave Marcial Bonifacio ₱70,000, ₱150,000, or ₱295,000. No liquidation report depended upon proving that Marcial Bonifacio bought information for the Office of the Vice President. No constitutional officer asked the republic to accept his assumed identity as documentary support for an expenditure.
Ninoy was hiding himself from the state. The persons behind these receipts, if aliases they truly are, were receiving money from the state. That distinction is everything.
The Senate should therefore resist both temptations now competing for attention. It should not convict because the names are funny. And it should not cease asking questions because someone has remembered that Bonifacio, Rizal, the Katipunan, Ninoy Aquino, and the NPA also used aliases.
The republic can tolerate an alias. What it cannot safely tolerate is an expenditure without an accountable human being behind it.
Mary Grace Piattos may someday be identified. Patty Ting may prove to be somebody. Sisfrunio Balsac may yet emerge from the documentary shadows with an identity, an explanation, and a perfectly legitimate story. If so, the evidence should establish it, and fairness should acknowledge it.
But until the receipts can be connected to real persons and lawful purposes through a credible and protected audit trail, invoking the heroes of the Revolution does not elevate these documents.
It merely reminds observers how far the country has traveled from Dimasalang to Piattos—and how dangerous it would be if, somewhere along the journey, the Philippine government began mistaking secrecy for accountability.