IN the 16 months that the late President Corazon C. Aquino ran the government as a dictator, after abolishing the 1973 Constitution and wrecked the entire Marcos bureaucracy, she arbitrarily freed the Communists from prison, including members of the Communist Party of the Philippines’s (CPP) Central Committee and their social-democrat allies, declared a total cease-fire and held peace talks with them.
Among them were Jose Maria C. Sison, CPP chairman, and Dante Buscayno, New People’s Army (NPA) commander, who were placed, respectively, in the custody of the late Joker P. Arroyo, President Aquino’s first executive secretary, and Doña Aurora Aquino, the then-president’s mother-in-law.
Sison subsequently escaped to Eastern Europe and then settled in Utrecht, Netherlands, on a passport issued by the Aquino administration, where he relentlessly directed the armed and political struggle against the Philippine government with other members of the CPP Central Committee, who later joined him there.
Sison and the key CPP members were convicted by the courts for waging an insurgency war for more than two decades. Their socialist democratic allies were, likewise, imprisoned for exploding bombs and burning shopping malls and hotels that killed innocent people, including American nationals.
Worse, the Aquino administration, after issuing Proclamation 2, which granted general amnesty to Communist rebels and their socialist democrat allies (Left of center), employed many of them in her administration, compromised national security and triggered a spate of rebellion in the police and military organizations. Hundreds of these Leftist allies later went back to the hills and elsewhere, and resumed fighting the government.
Some infiltrated not only the trade unions but also the schools, the churches, the media and other sectors of society.
When Ferdinand Marcos fell from power, the NPA, the guerrilla arm of the CPP, had 16,500 regulars. And none of them could operate at will in Metro Manila.
By 1988, it had an armed strength of 25,200, including 2,500 operating in Metro Manila. Worse, 20 percent of the country’s 42,000 barangays or villages were under CPP-NPA’s influence.
Ironically, this was the same year that President Aquino announced in her second State of the Nation Address that “the insurgency was broken.”
Between 1988 and early 1992, 78 policemen and military men were systematically assassinated by the NPAs in Metro Manila alone.
Only Juan Ponce Enrile Sr. and the reformist officers questioned President Aquino’s unilateral release from prison of the Communists and their allies at the height of the Edsa euphoria.
Enrile told President Aquino and her Executive Secretary Arroyo that releasing the Leftists from prison without first requiring them to renounce their own constitution, give up armed struggle and pledge allegiance to the flag would be a dangerous move.
Then Army colonel and now Sen. Gregorio B. Honasan, then head of the Reform the Armed Forces Movement, known today as Revolutionary Alliance of the Masses (RAM), said President Aquino merely ignored Enrile’s advice.
“Worse,” Honasan said, “Mrs. Aquino was supposed to provide the leadership and a clear direction to the armed services in fighting the Communists, but she chose, instead, to stay in the middle (centrist) and treated the insurgency problem as if it was the sole concern of the individual soldiers.”
Recalling that incident, Honasan said: “When President Aquino ordered the military to deliver a string of victories against the communists, I didn’t know whether I should laugh or curse her because she gave us the impression that she was not really serious at all.
“For how can we deliver a string of victories when she was sleeping with the Communists and, at the same time, treating the military as her enemies?” Honasan said.
The crime situation
Because of irresolute prevention and a tenuous criminal justice system, drug trafficking, drug abuse, kidnapping and rape reached an alarming situation and had drawn so much fear and apprehension during the Aquino administration.
Records at the Supreme Court and the Department of Justice revealed that by October 10, 1998, five years after the reimposition of the death penalty, various trial courts have meted out a total of 748 death penalties, including 422 for rapists.
Of the 422 rapists, 153 (mostly drug addicts) picked their own daughters.
In 1972, when Marcos declared martial law, and up to the time he was deposed in 1986, there were only 20,000 or more users of different kinds of prohibited and regulated drugs.
In President Aquino’s time, specifically in early 1987—when methamphetamine hydrochloride, or shabu, known also as the poor man’s Cocaine or Ice in the United States, was introduced in the Philippines by foreign gangsters, mostly Chinese—the number of drug users reached 480,000 and many policemen, according to the late Sen. Ernesto Herrera, were getting involved in drug-related activities.
In 1972 Marcos enacted Republic Act 6425, or the Dangerous Drugs Act, subsequently resulting to the discovery by the military of a heroin laboratory and the arrest of Lim Seng, a drug trafficker and manufacturer, who was executed in public by firing squad.
Since 1972, the law went through four amendments (in 1972, 1980, 1982 and in 1993) to eradicate the scourge of shabu and other dangerous substances introduced into the market by traffickers and manufacturers.
Although the amended law was envisioned to be an effective tool against drug traffickers, manufacturers and users, the government lost its focus to stifle the problem by putting more premium on the quantity of drugs seized rather than on the criminal act and intent of the drug traffickers, or both.
What really compounded the situation was the abolition of the death penalty, which started in the Aquino administration and then implemented by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo on the misplaced reaction and outcry of some condescending politicians, churchmen and cause-oriented groups.
Retrospectively, this is what President Duterte faces today and, so far, he has taken the right direction and needs the full support of the citizenry.
To reach the writer, e-mail cecilio.arillo@gmail.com.