Sic transit gloria mundi
At the Libingan on All Saints Day, a widow and her daughter prayed before the plain white cross that marked the grave of a young officer, who more than four decades ago was killed in action in Jolo, at the height of the Mindanao war over the dictator Marcos’s inconsistent strategies for peace. There are few officers like him, the widow’s best friend, a general’s wife, once told her. Surely without malice, she added: it might as well be that your husband died early; who knows what he might have become, had he lived some years more?
You can’t put a good man down — that is what this young officer proved to his death. For his various assignments, he earned Military Merit Medals and several campaign/unit medals and ribbons. His decorations speeded his promotions until he was named the youngest Battalion Commander in the Philippine Army then, with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. But he was killed in action soon after. His Wounded Soldier medal and Distinguished Service Star were posthumous awards pinned on his young widow by Marcos.
Ironically, the Wounded Soldier, Distinguished Service Star and Purple Heart medals claimed by Marcos from the Bataan campaign in the Japanese-American War in the Philippines were declared as “never existed” by the US Pentagon in 1982-83 (archives@nytimes.com). Was not Marcos officially denied recognition as a veteran and war hero by the US government itself? (Ibid.).
Glorified even in death, the only self-installed dictator (so far) in Philippine democracy, Ferdinand Marcos has the only grave at the Libingan marked with an eternal flame. President Rodrigo Duterte, a professed Marcos fan, allowed and effectively ordered Marcos’s burial at the Libingan in December 2016, on the basis of Marcos being a former president and commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of the Philippines.
And the pain of the widow is that the glory for false claimants to heroism is perpetuated in aeternam at the Libingan, while the valor of soldiers who died for the country has been comparatively trivialized and virtually dismissed — sic transit gloria mundi — by the utter insensitivity of misplaced reverence for, and the glorification of the undeserving others. It is like blasphemously calling the just and fair God stupid.
Adjacent to the Marcos burial site at the 103-hectare Libingan is still another special area, the for-generals-only hill, near the also-special site for other deceased government luminaries and National Artists. But why is it that in the 253-hectare Arlington National Cemetery in the US, there is no segregation of generals from officers and soldiers, among the 400,000 or so military and some government officials buried there? Generals in the Armed Forces of the Philippines are gods, “Ad vitam aeternam,” forever.
Marcos, supreme god as martial law commander-in-chief of the AFP, increased the number of generals from the less than ten before his term to allegedly more than a hundred (according to now-retired ex-generals of Marcos era). The radical change, which was supposed to support the order of battle for the insurgency campaign, has been institutionalized — presidents/commanders-in-chief after Marcos could not reverse this, for obvious political reasons.
Thus has the military been reoriented towards ultimate loyalty to the person of the commander-in-chief, from whom all good things flow for them, it seems. The ambiguous motivations of the military leaders of the 1986 EDSA People Power Revolution that ousted Marcos, as historical hindsight now painfully shows, did not change the ascendancy structure and culture of patronage that ironically, Marcos installed. When Duterte became president, “(he) secured the loyalty of the police and the military after doubling their salaries,” 1986 Constitutional Convention Chair Christian Monsod said (ABS-CBN News, July 5, 2018).
Within his first year in office, Duterte appointed to the Cabinet and other agencies, including government-owned corporations, 59 retired military generals, police directors, admirals and colonels, many of whom are either from Mindanao, or were assigned to Davao City where Duterte served as mayor for 22 years (http://tucp.org.ph/2017/06). Retired Brig. Gen. Dionisio Tan-Gatue, a former police director in the Davao region said, “Like any political party with spoils to allocate, of course, positions are given (as reward)…(but) it is unfair to lump retired military officers with the unqualified” (Ibid.).
Magdalo Rep. Gary Alejano agrees. “But some positions also require a degree of expertise, which unfortunately some appointees do not have,” Alejano said, citing former Army Maj. Jason Aquino, who was named chief of the National Food Authority, and ex-Marine Capt. Nicanor Faeldon, head of the Bureau of Customs — BoC (Ibid.). Alejano, Aquino and Faeldon were among the young officers who called for the ouster of then President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in July 2003. Some of them were pardoned by Arroyo upon admission of guilt. The rest were granted amnesty by her successor, President Benigno Aquino III. The 2016 presidential election would split the group: Faeldon and Aquino joined Mr. Duterte’s camp, while the rest of the Magdalo led by Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV (and Alejano) became Mr. Duterte’s critics (Ibid.). On Aug. 31, 2018, Duterte issued Proclamation No. 572 stating that the amnesty extended to Trillanes was void from the start because he did not comply with the “minimum requirements to qualify under the amnesty proclamation” (GMA News, Sept. 4, 2018).
In August 2017, Faeldon resigned after he was linked to the entry of P6.4 billion in shabu that was later seized in a warehouse in Valenzuela City. He was replaced by Retired Police Director General Isidro Lapeña, then chief of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) and star witness in that shabu smuggling. Faeldon was subsequently appointed to the Office of Civil Defense late last year and was later named Bureau of Corrections chief to replace former Philippine National Police head Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa when the latter filed for candidacy in the 2019 elections (philstar.com, Oct. 28, 2018).
Last month, an estimated P11 billion worth of methamphetamine hydrochloride (shabu) in magnetic lifters in 40-foot container vans entered the country past Customs inspectors and Lapeña. Some people in the BoC are in cahoots with the drug syndicate, new PDEA director general (retired Police Chief Superintendent) Aaron Aquino said (msn.com, Aug. 11, 2018).
Two separate multibillion-peso drug smuggling cases involving the BoC, implicating two retired high-ranking police/military, and Pres. Duterte says, “they are not guilty…they were just outplayed [by the drug syndicates]” (philstar.com, Oct 28, 2018).
The widow at the Libingan ponders upon her husband’s grave. His first Military Merit Medal (Triple M) was pinned on him when his shoulder insignias were only those of a second lieutenant, entry level after graduation from the Philippine Military Academy (PMA). Leading a small platoon of soldiers one evening, he intercepted a shipment of illegal firearms being spirited out of the Manila port. He was in the newspaper front pages then, with headlines lauding him, the brave young officer who thwarted and exposed a syndicated smuggling operation that cast doubts on the integrity of the Bureau of Customs. But the young hero was soon after reassigned to a small Army detachment in Nueva Ecija — to dampen his healthy curiosity and righteous action against what was amiss, perhaps.
“Sic transit Gloria mundi” — all must remember.
Amelia H. C. Ylagan is a Doctor of Business Administration from the University of the Philippines.
ahcylagan@yahoo.com