CITY OF SAN FERNANDO – A pageant of beauty. So, the contest for Pampanga’s 3rd District congressional seat has come to be bruited about. For the best reasons – aesthetically, most obviously, with both lady candidates blessed with that face that launches a thousand swoons, that smile that makes the heart aflutter, that regal bearing that can stir any Wurtzbach-wannabe into a paroxysm of envy.
Enough hyperbole. Their pictures, randomly picked from the web – unphotoshopped, give the full measure of pulchritude mere words can only approximate.
A battle of brains, too. The more substantial of factors in consideration in just about every competition. The tale of the tape, education- and career-wise, thus:
Dr. Hazel Velasco Tumang, 39, otolaryngologist specializing in conditions affecting the ears, nose, and throat (ENT), as well as head and neck surgery. Degree in medicine, post-graduate residency training and internship at the Far Eastern University–Dr. Nicanor Reyes Medical Foundation, QC. Physician Licensure Examinations, Aug. 2012. Philippine Board of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery Diplomate Examination, June 2018.
Affiliations: Phil Medical Association, Pampanga Medical Society, Central Luzon ENT, Philippine Society of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery.
Medical practice: Marian ENT Clinic, Mexico; Green City Medical Center, City of San Fernando; Pampanga Metroeast Medical Center, Sta. Ana – all in the third district of Pampanga.
Alyssa Michaela “Mica” Mercado Gonzales, 30, incumbent provincial board member representing the 3rd District. Degree in business administration-major in management at the University of Asia and the Pacific, secondary education at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Nebraska, USA. Attended Ateneo Law School but shifted to managing the family business.
Work experience: Corporate treasurer and chief financial officer of her family’s AD Gonzales, Jr. Construction and Trading Co. Inc., a leading AAA-category company.
By, and of, the candidates’ credentials alone, political oddsmakers will be hard put to set the lines on the probability of the outcome of the 3rd District congressional contest.
What can ultimately tip the odds for either Tumang or Gonzales is patrilineage, both being their fathers’ daughters.
Proxy war
Mexico Mayor Teddy C. Tumang was yanked out of office by order of the Ombudsman in August 2023 over alleged anomalous purchases of road construction materials from a single supplier in 2009 and 2010, and faced indictment on 64 counts of graft and seven counts of malversation of public funds.
Tumang was subsequently subjected to House investigations and even spent time at the House custodial center for contempt.
House Senior Deputy Speaker Aurelio “Dong” Gonzales made it a point not to sit in any of those hearings, to be fair. However, the point was nonetheless well taken by folks back home – but for Gonzales’ being the second most powerful man in the House, why would an all-too ordinary graft case in a town merit a full-blown congressional investigation? Especially given that Tumang, in his 2022 campaign for his third and last term as mayor already served notice that he would run for the seat Gonzales would be vacating. A political threat there, taken most seriously, dealt with most decisively.
Even as Tumang ruminated on his fate, reverberated across the district a clamor for a congressional investigation of allegedly defective flood-mitigating projects reportedly contracted to the senior deputy speaker’s eponymous AD Gonzales Jr. Construction and Trading Co.
A complaint centered on short-of-specification sheet piles subsequently lodged with the Ombudsman against the family-owned company was as quickly dismissed for “lack of evidence.”
The dismissed evidence which, complainant Mexico ABC president Terence Napao pointed out, turned up when floodwaters wrought by the southwest monsoon and Typhoon Carina in late July and early August scoured the flood mitigation projects still bearing tarpaulins naming the contractor as “AD Gonzales Construction and Trading Co.”
By happenstance perhaps, a number of the complaints against Tumang were earlier dismissed.
It does not take a seasoned political spinmeister to weave the persecuted victim card around Tumang, and assign the role of villainous persecutor on SDS Gonzales.
How this shall impact on their daughter’s candidacies, only the election results can determine.
