Just when you’d thought you’d seen it all, “The Punisher” comes up with another one from way off left field. I know President Rodrigo Duterte cares little about what people (journalists, especially) think of his methods, but he certainly has my respect and undivided attention now.
This is a president who is going to try anything in order to get the job done. And he has balls the size of those new double-decker buses on Edsa.
If I sound like a Duterte fanboy, forgive me. But I am still in awe of Digong’s decision last Tuesday to “out” five police generals whom he believes are involved in the illegal drug trade.
I can’t think of any of the other candidates for president last May who would even seriously consider doing what Duterte did this week. Heck, I can’t even conceive of any previous—or future—president of this long-suffering republic trying it.
General Antonio Luna may have done it. But Luna never became president—his timid, backstabbing enemies made sure of that.
I have thought long and hard about what Digong did, groping for words to describe the act. Then a friend steeped in classical thought and literature found the metaphor I was searching for.
“If you know the legend of the Gordian Knot, you will realize how eerily it resembles the linkages between the generals and drug lords,” my friend wrote in a Facebook post. “The problem of illegal drugs is near impossible to untangle; Duterte, like Alexander the Great, just cut the proverbial knot in one speech.”
The mythical Gordian Knot, of course, was presented to anyone who wanted to rule the ancient satrapy (or province) of Phrygia. Every would-be ruler failed to untangle the knot, until the Macedonian Alexander arrived, looked at the puzzle and cut it with a stroke of his sword; problem solved.
Once again, Duterte has drawn flak from the human-rights crybabies for his precipitate action. And all five generals protested that the president had been fed false information that they were perfectly willing and able to refute in the proper court.
I sympathize with the generals and their families, actually. It is not easy to rebuild a reputation, built over many decades, that has been besmirched in one fell swoop—especially if the president himself is doing the besmirching.
But I am not going to accuse Duterte of wantonly and irresponsibly smearing a bunch of generals’ reputations if he is not standing on solid ground, evidence-wise. Remember, this is a president who is a lawyer and a former prosecutor—he would be the last person to make baseless allegations against career cops with generals’ stars on their shoulders.
I will also join the call for Duterte to back up his serious allegations in due time. And I know that if the President fails to substantiate his charges, there will be political hell to pay.
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But right now, I join the citizenry in unabashedly cheering Digong’s disclosures. I join them in heaving a collective sigh of relief that, at last, someone has decided to take on the drug syndicates that have penetrated 90 percent of all the nation’s barangays, like most official estimates say.
As for the generals, I can only commiserate with them up to a point. If Duterte really has the goods on them, they should have heeded his warning to retire early and fess up.
And yes, I understand that we have to stand our ground on the protection of human rights for all, because if we don’t, a point will be reached when there will be no one to defend us because everyone else’s human rights have already been violated. Honestly, I think that’s a truckload of manure.
Somebody has to do something about the problem of illegal drugs, a terrible scourge that was never acknowledged during the six years of Noynoy Aquino. As the pundit Bobi Tiglao wrote recently:
“Did Aquino coddle and protect drug lords? Most definitely yes, either out of his sheer incompetence or outright complicity.”
Tiglao explained: “I’ve reviewed all of Aquino’s six State of the Nation Addresses and it is shocking that in all of these, he
had not even mentioned that we have a serious illegal drug problem, as if he were deliberately concealing its existence.”
In all the years that I’ve watched Aquino’s presidency, I don’t remember him declaring war on illegal drugs syndicates, either. Like Tiglao, I am forced to concede that Aquino fought “corruption,” which was really synonymous with what his political enemies did, since he never pursued corruption charges against his own people.
This leads me to suspect that while Duterte is already engaged in catching the proverbial big fish by going after the generals, I think there are even larger marine life that he has to land. While accusing a bunch of generals of being in league with drug lords sounds good, I think there are even higher officials behind the proliferation of narcotics.
And I think Duterte has the cojones to go even higher than a brace of star-rank policemen. At this point, I’m not putting anything past him, really.