PRESIDENT Duterte’s presidency has been an amazing
one, which has changed the course of Philippine history. His breakthroughs
though can still be reversed if incoming President Ferdinand (“Bongbong”)
Marcos slows down his predecessor’s momentum, or even just moderates
it.
Already, I’ve heard of some calling the new
president, “A kinder, gentler Duterte.” If BBM indeed becomes that, he
would be upending Duterte’s huge achievements in building what political
scientists call a “strong republic.” This is a nation-state independent of
political and economic elites and with an efficient, law-based and robust
institutions. Without a strong republic, there can never be peace and
prosperity in a nation: That is the incontestable lesson of global history. One
cannot claim that with regard to democracy: Many nations, especially in Asia –
China being emblematic of this – have become developed without this
cumbersome system.
(photo credit to owner) |
First
First, Duterte has all but routed the communist insurgency.
He is the first president to undertake an all-out drive to end this scourge
after 40 years, since Marcos in the early 1970s.
Except for Duterte, all the five presidents
immediately preceding him shirked in fighting the communists either because
they were plain naïve (as Corazon “Cory” Aquino was) or were political
opportunists that they couldn’t risk losing the support of the Left and its
many allies.
Cory even strengthened the communists, releasing,
as soon as she grabbed power, its top leader and tactician par excellence, Jose
Ma. Sison, whom Marcos captured and arrested in 1977. Cory even romanticized
the communists as freedom fighters and undertook “peace talks” with them, which
was nothing but the vast “democratic space” they used to expand their ranks.
Cory got the Constitutional Commission she commanded to create the so-called
party-list system, which the communists expertly maneuvered both to become
major participants in Congress and to raise funds for their New People’s Army.
Never before has there been a multi-agency
“National Task Force to End Local Communist Conflict” that has fought the
communists in all fields – from propaganda to economic development of
communities organizing the insurgents’ victims to the battlefield.
I respect very much BBM’s designated national
security adviser Clarita Carlos, and I was witness to how the Left academics
tried to isolate her at UP for not toeing the communist line. But I am worried,
she’s diluting her mandated focus on “national security” to include food,
health and other “securities.” Former President Fidel Ramos’ national security
adviser Jose Almonte in fact did that – and even included “Ramos’”
security, i.e., remaining in power after six years. He had so many things
on his plate, except the most important The communist insurgency surged during
his time; China occupied and built its first structures on Mischief Reef in
11994.
Carlos should forget an academic discourse on
“national security” but stick to its strict usage: the State’s security, its
survival from its principal enemy – the communist insurgency, the last
remaining Red rebellion in Asia and Africa.
Second
Second, Duterte has launched an all-out
attack not just against the Left but also the Right. Duterte has put in the
nation’s agenda and in people’s consciousness the need for the country to fight
the Right, i.e., the oligarchs who have used the state to advance their own
selfish interests. The Lopez clan, the maker of presidents that has been since
independence emblematic of the Philippine oligarchy, has been overpowered, now
sinking in billions of pesos in unpaid debt. Ask any politician, media man or
observer of Philippine society, this was outrightly inconceivable before
Duterte.
However, it is still a much-unfinished project to
vanquish the oligarchs: after all, they have been, precisely, oligarchs because
their tentacles reach far and wide.
Duterte’s biggest sin of omission is this. He is
aware of one of the most powerful oligarchic conglomerates in the
country, the Indonesian-owned First Pacific group. Yet he seems to have shirked
away—for reasons I do not understand — from even naming it. In his State
of the Nation address in 2021, he only vaguely referred to it as “a cartel of
Malaysia and Indonesia, and they form part of that mother corporation. It’s
being controlled up by the [inaudible].” The Indonesiano-owned
conglomerate has grown vastly richer, and more powerful during his term,
siphoning of billions of dollars from its monopoly Meralco and the
largest telecom firm PLDT-Smart.
Third
Third,
Duterte has tamed an irresponsible and mercenary media, from the once-mammoth
ABS- CBN to the Philippine Daily Inquirer owned
by, compared to the Lopezes, a small-time oligarch, to the one run by and
funded by Americans, rappler.com. Again, such an attack on these propaganda
machines was inconceivable before Duterte. Duterte wasn’t cowed by the US
media, which had swallowed hook, line and sinker the lies of the
Philippines’ journalistic version of Anna Sorokin, Maria Ressa, who
made the totally, absolutely absurd claim she was being threatened with rape
20 times a day by Duterte’s supporters. Stupid American media wept for
her.
Duterte has looked away from the media empire of
the Indonesian-owned First Pacific group, which is a violation of
the constitutional ban on alien involvement in media. I cannot understand
why the Duterte administration filed charges against Rappler for having foreign
equity, when the Indonesian First Pacific’s media empire is a hundred-fold
bigger.
It has
become the country’s biggest multimedia outfit owning the Philippine Star, Channel 5, interaksyon.com and dozens
of radio stations around the country. Already there are talks for Channel 5 to
air the content – including its news programs – of ABS-CBN. That would mean a
total resurrection of this oligarch media.
Fourth
Fourth, Duterte, however, has stopped dead in its
tracks the campaign of First Pacific (with two other oligarchs) to force China
to allow it to extract gas in the Reed Bank. While it was a laudable plan to
replace the Malampaya gas field that will be running out in 2024, the Aquino
regime adopted the US-backed strategy of demonizing China as a bully in the
South China Sea and filing an arbitration suit to pressure China to back down.
That the arbitration ruling was an “overwhelming
victory” for the Philippines is the biggest deception of our time,
demonstrating the tremendous capacity of oligarch- and US-controlled media to
brainwash people. (I have written over two dozen columns to show this, with not
a single point I’ve made contested by anyone. A “shortcut” to see that the
arbitration was a hoax: Even if it ordered –[and it didn’t — China to vacate
the Spratlys, there is still Vietnam which also claims the entire area.)
Duterte intuitively saw through this colossal pile
of BS. If it had been Mar Roxas who won in the 2016 elections, he would have
continued his predecessor’s anti-China tack. That would have severely weakened
our economy so much (like it or not, China now is the biggest economic engine
in our part of the world), there would have been widespread poverty by now – at
the time of the pandemic.
Fifth
Fifth, and related to the fourth, Duterte has ended
the Philippines’ vassalage to its former colonial master, the US. Just as in
ancient times, when vassals of an empire would troop to the emperor to express
its vassalage, all Philippine presidents went to Washington, D.C. to meet with
the US president. Benigno Aquino 3rd went to the US to meet President Obama
barely three months after he assumed the presidency and would go to the US six
more times. In 2011 he met with Obama to beg him to militarily intervene in the
Scarborough stand-off with China.
He was told instead to agree to the Enhanced
Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), which will allow the US to use our own
camps as their military bases, when they need it.
Cheaper for the Americans of course. From a
high-maintenance mistress (permanent US bases) Aquino had turned
the country into a when-needed prostitute (Philippine bases to be used when
needed).
In his 2021 SONA, Duterte repeated his past
declarations that he will never visit the US. The Philippines has achieved
independence under Duterte. He has yet to end the EDCA though, which was merely
an executive agreement.
Sixth
Another of
Duterte’s big breakthroughs of course was his war against illegal drugs, which
stopped the country from becoming during the Aquino 3rd regime Southeast Asia’s
first narco state. To stop his campaign, the Yellows had savaged Duterte during
his entire term claiming this had resulted, as Vice President Leni Robredo,
Rappler, the Inquirer and the Star kept on lying, in massive extrajudicial
killings. Together with US media, they touted that over “27,000” Filipinos were
victims of Duterte’s war against illegal drugs. No one dares quote that
fabricated figure now.
The Ateneo (with funds from Columbia University’s
School of Journalism, where one Sheila Coronel was the dean of) two years ago,
and more recently the UP’s moribund Third World Studies Center, counted the
victims of Duterte’s war against illegal drugs. Both could report only around
3,900 deaths, even less than the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency’s figure of
6,248 persons who died during anti-drug operations since these were started up
to end-April 2022.
How many were killed in a similar campaign in
Mexico during the presidency of Felipe Calderon from 2006 to 2012? /Sixty
thousand, with 27,000 “missing.”
Those who have been shrieking to high heavens that
the innocent, or even unarmed, drug dealers were summarily executed seem to
assume that Duterte and the police simply have this perverted, satanic pleasure
in killing the innocent. It is indeed naïve to think that police didn’t kill
unarmed drug suspects.
But then for three decades or so, the police have
been frustrated by the spectacle of drug dealers being arrested and then
released the next day, on bail, with these criminals even grinning at them, and
telling them:
“I’ll be going after you and your family.” This was
the experience of the police in the municipality where I live.
It’s an unfair world indeed: The choice is between
one criminal’s life, or even just freedom, to the many lives in a community.
Duterte was bold enough to make the choice, and he even says he is willing to
go to hell for that.
Seventh
Duterte’s government has demonstrated that with
political will and with competent implementers the Philippines can build
infrastructure rivaling those of the developed countries in the region. An
expressway from Alabang to Quezon City to Manila leading to the North
Expressway? A light rail transit from Quezon City up to Antipolo? In a few
years, an underground subway? C’mon, these were inconceivable just six years
ago.
Eighth
And
eighth, Duterte has very successfully managed the
Covid-19 pandemic in a country of 104 million people living in 17 regions in
100 main islands.
In
Worldometers’ statistics on 30 countries with at least 50 million
population, the Philippines ranks way below – slot 128, No. 1 being the
worst — in terms of deaths per 1 million population with
538, compared, for instance, to the US and Brazil, with 3,109 and
3,111, respectively. In terms of Covid-19 cases, we are ranked 150th, with 32,919 cases per 1 million population,
compared to US (58th) with 265,522 cases per 1
million.
Indeed, there has never been, and I think there
will never be a Duterte as Philippine president again.
Quoted
fully from Mr. Rigoberto Tiglao’s column
RigobertoTiglao.com
June
29, 2022
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