Loren Legarda

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Loren Legarda (born January 28, 1960) is a Filipino broadcast journalist and politician. In the 2004 Philippines general election, she ran for the position of Vice-President as the running mate of Fernando Poe, Jr.

[edit] Political career

She ran for the Senate in 1998 under the Lakas-NUCD-UMDP Party. She was elected with more than 15 million votes, becoming the senator with the highest number of votes in that year's election. After the 2001 elections she was chosen to be the Senate's Majority Floor Leader.

Senator Legarda played a crucial role in the expeditious release of five military and police officers and personnel held captive by the CCP-NPA-NDF in April 1999. The captives included General Victor Obillo of the Philippine Army. In April 2001, Senator Legarda again championed human rights when she led the Humanitarian and Peace Mission for safe and successful return of Army Major Noel Buan to his family after almost two years of captivity by rebel groups. She was also instrumental in the release of fellow journalist Arlene dela Cruz from her abductors in Jolo, Sulu.

Throughout her six-year tenure in the Senate from 1998 to 2004, she authored legislation benefitting women and children, such as the Anti-Domestic Violence Act and the Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act. She is also the author of the Ecological Solid Waste Management Law and the Tropical Fabric Law, which is consistent with her advocacy for indigenous fabric.

She has put to school dozens of former child laborers through the Libro ni Loren Foundation, and conducts regular medical missions benefitting indigent breast cancer patients through the Bessie Legarda Memorial Foundation.

She is an environmentalist, and is a recipient of the United Nations Environment Program Award (UNEP), in Turin, Italy, in 2001 for her outstanding work through Luntiang Pilipinas (Green Philippines). With this program, she planted over two million trees all over the Philippine archipelago. She is also the recipient of the Global Leader for Tomorrow (GLT), from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in the year 2000.

[edit] 2004 elections

In 2003, she quit the administration party Lakas to join the opposition KNP coalition of Fernando Poe Jr.

In the 2004 election, she lost to fellow ABS-CBN anchorman and Senator Noli de Castro by a very slim margin of 800,000 votes, amid allegations of massive fraud by de Castro and the administration.

After her bid in the election, she filed an electoral protest before the Supreme Court sitting as the Presidential Electoral Tribunal. In a PowerPoint presentation on the alleged electoral fraud case filed by Legarda against Noli de Castro, who won the vice-presidency against her in Philippine general election, 2004, Legarda and her principal witness, Segundo Tabayoyong, showed the Kapihan sa Manila forum how the cheating was done. It was a simpler and new way of cheating, used for the first time in the elections of 2004. They alleged that instead of changing the ballots at the precincts -- as was done in the past, which is difficult and labor-intensive -- the cheating was done on the election return (ER), the summary of the votes in the precincts. They alleged that these spurious ERs were prepared in advance, by a special force of about 200 persons in two places in Metro Manila (one in a hotel near the Edsa highway) and then sent to the provinces. The Commission on Elections has admitted that it overprinted 32,000 sets of these ERs before the elections. It has not explained fully what happened to these excess ERs. Of the approximately 5,000 ERs analyzed, 3,000 were found to be spurious. The vertical tally bars ("taras") used to mark the votes on the ERs were written very neatly and not in the uneven manner when written in the precincts because of stress and haste. There are columns where there are totals of votes but no bars. There are totals that do not tally with the bars. Thumb marks used to close the columns -- so no new bars could be added afterwards-were small, purposely smudged to make identification impossible. Required signatures were missing. Some had only initials instead of signatures. The analysis also alleges that the team gave De Castro an average of a 70-vote margin over Legarda, and Ms Arroyo, a 100-vote margin over Poe. Therefore, the 32,000 sets of overprinted ERs could translate to a vote-margin rate of approximately 2.1 million votes in the Legarda-De Castro vice-presidential contest and around 3 million votes in the Poe-Arroyo presidential race.

[edit] Personal life

Born Lorna Regina Legarda in Metro Manila, she is the only daughter of Antonio Cabrera Legarda of Manila and San Pablo City, Laguna and of Bessie Gella Bautista of Metro Manila and Antique. She is the granddaughter of one of the pillars of Philippine journalism, Jose P. Bautista, editor-in-chief of the pre-Martial Law Manila Times.

She was a valedictorian from the Assumption Convent in grade school and cum laude graduate from the University of the Philippines. She was a popular commercial model as a teenager, appearing in various television and print ads.

She started her career in journalism as a reporter of RPN-9. While working as a broadcast journalist, she obtained a master’s degree in National Security Administration from the National Defense College of the Philippines, where she emerged as topnotcher (NDCP awarded her gold medals for Academic Excellence and Best Thesis) and where she was the youngest in the class. She is a Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force Reserve Corps.

She reached the peak of her television career while she was with ABS-CBN, when she used to anchor The World Tonight (ABS-CBN). She also hosted the highly acclaimed current affairs program The Inside Story, also from ABS-CBN. She received more than thirty major awards during her 20-year television career, including the Catholic Mass Media Hall of Fame, KBP Golden Dove Award, and the Gawad CCP, among many others.

While she was with the Senate, prior to her candidacy for the Vice-President position, she hosted Kabalikat, a docu-drama show and Tara Tena, a youth drama previously aired at ABS-CBN When She left The World Tonight (ABS-CBN).

She is highly regarded by the Muslim population in the Philippines and the Maranao Sultanate League bestowed on her the title of "Bai Alabi," or "Princess."

Ms. Legarda is currently a regular host of ABC-5 Real Stories and is a Sunday columnist of Panorama magazine.