Luis V. Teodoro: The Regime of Mockery

By Luis V. Teodoro

Let’s not exaggerate. Retired Armed Forces Chief of Staff Hermogenes Esperon is not really as Senator Consuelo “Jamby” Madrigal described him.

Senator Madrigal compared Esperon to Adolf Hitler and to Josef Stalin when she learned that Esperon had been appointed Presidential Peace Adviser. Esperon did have command of the Armed Forces. But he commanded no force as powerful as the Wehrmacht as Hitler did, or an army as vast as the Red Army Stalin used to defend Soviet soil.

Neither did Esperon focus the energies of an entire nation into the conquest of vast territories and the annihilation of over six million men, women and children. And he certainly had not the vision, perverted as it may have been, of a thousand-year empire, or of a system in which all would be equal.

Hitler wrote a book, Stalin several. Esperon didn’t— and he doesn’t seem to have even “written the book,” figuratively speaking, on the Armed Forces’ Bantay Laya anti-insurgency strategy. Other men, from all appearances led by creatures who claim to be for others, seem to have done that. Or at least systematized and tweaked that part of a strategy that goes back to the days of the Huk rebellion by refocusing, and providing the justification for, the use of state violence on activists and unarmed militants.

What’s being laid at Esperon’s door is small potatoes, offenses trivial, puny, picayune and piddling when compared to the truly great crimes of our age. One is hawkishness, and of presiding over an Armed Forces accused of committing some of the worst human rights violations, including extra-judicial killings and forced disappearances, since the martial law period.

He’s also being accused of pivotal involvement in the electoral fraud of 2004, having been mentioned in the “Hello Garci” tapes by Virgilio Garcillano, that paragon of bureaucratic virtue, among the generals that assured Gloria Macapagal Arroyo a final tally of more than a million votes over the late Fernando Poe Jr.

Nearly a thousand men, women and children have been killed, and several hundreds abducted, over the past seven years. Those numbers don’t even come close to the millions slaughtered in Hitler’s death camps. But they do have a bearing on how successfully the peace adviser can do his job. As small time and paltry as his purported offense is compared to Hitler’s, if he’s being blamed for at least some of these deaths, negotiating in bad faith would be only the first complaint against the government; total insincerity would be the other.

But that’s to assume that both he and the appointing power are indeed after an honorable negotiated peace as the rest of the world understands it, not a peace premised on the annihilation of the other side– in this case the 40 year old Communist Party-led rebellion as well as the Muslim movement for autonomy.