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Philippines
Friday, March 29, 2024

Never forget

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Six years ago this week, the new president faced his first real test of leadership. And the abject failure of Noynoy Aquino to deal with and contain the damage of what became known as the Rizal Park hostage crisis foreshadowed, in my opinion, all that he was going to do wrong until the end of his term.

I had never thought highly of Aquino, almost from the moment he launched his candidacy a year earlier, when the concrete used to seal the tomb of his mother Cory had not yet dried. Noynoy was the candidate of convenience for the anti-Arroyo forces, who viewed Cory’s death as a godsend because it suddenly made her non-entity of a son a viable choice.

(One day, someone will write the definitive book on how some Philippine political groups seem to require a prominent corpse in order to motivate their sympathizers. It doesn’t matter if the dead person in question was assassinated at the airport, succumbed to colon cancer or was fished out of a crashed plane; they always need to parade a cadaver to inspire their death-obsessed followers.)

Ninoy and Cory’s son was still mostly a cipher in August 2010, an awkward, goofy-looking, balding old bachelor whose first moves were to fire all Arroyo appointees and ban the use of sirens by unauthorized vehicles. Like many in the media at the time, including those who had bitterly campaigned against Aquino in the presidential elections just a few months earlier, I had decided to give the new Malacañang occupant his traditional hundred-day honeymoon.

I tried to look for the good things that Aquino was doing and refused to criticize him simply because he was not my choice for president. Then the hostage crisis at the park happened and changed all of that.

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To this day, there are some Aquino sympathizers who will insist that the former president did nothing wrong at the Luneta. Aquino, they say, could not possibly be held responsible for the crazed action by a dismissed Manila policeman of holding hostage a busload of two dozen or so Chinese tourists and the eventual killing of eight persons, including the hostage-taker.

I disagreed then and I disagree now. If Aquino had been more pro-active in resolving the hostage crisis (which took place just a short jeepney ride from the presidential palace) and more transparent and just in holding officials of his administration who dropped the ball in the aftermath accountable, he would have shown himself as a capable and fair leader very early on and set the tone for the next six years.

Instead, Aquino displayed, in just one incident, just how unprepared, unfeeling and incompetent he was for the job he had sought, traits that would weigh down his administration to the very end. The Rizal Park crisis marked the beginning of the end of Aquino’s plans to become “the greatest Philippine president of all time,” as some of his fans still call him, though very few knew it at the time.

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It happened like this: Aquino disappeared throughout the crisis and could not even be reached by the authorities from Hong Kong who wanted to be updated about the matter. He would only resurface several hours after the bloody resolution at the scene, flashing the incomprehensible grin that would earn him the favored moniker that the Chinese gave, “The Smiling Dog.”

Then Aquino ordered, after much pressure from Hong Kong and Beijing, the obligatory investigation of what went down, promising to punish those who did wrong or who didn’t do anything when they should have. When the investigation report was submitted to him by Interior Secretary Jesse Robredo and Justice Secretary Leila de Lima (yes, her), Aquino ignored it because of how the document blamed his friends—notably Undersecretary Rico Puno and Manila Mayor Alfredo Lim— for the debacle.

Despite the repeated demands of the Chinese, Aquino would not punish any of his officials. He would even say “sorry” to the families of the victims.

The template was set. Whatever subsequent crisis took place during Aquino’s term—whether it was the arrival of super typhoon “Yolanda” or the massacre of 44 members of an elite police commando force by Muslim rebels—the president’s response would hardly vary.

He would disappear, never take responsibility or hold any of his officials responsible, never show any empathy and never apologize for anything. As it was in the Luneta, so it was in Tacloban, so it would be all the way to Mamasapano, Maguindanao.

In between, Aquino wasted his political capital in the pursuit of a policy of vendetta, twiddled his thumbs as he watched the deterioration of agriculture, infrastructure and transportation and gloried in the unfelt gains of GDP growth and other macroeconomic mumbo-jumbo. In the end, he could not even make his chosen candidate for president win, despite his claims that the vast majority of Filipinos just waiting for him to endorse someone.

Aquino and his followers, apropos of something else entirely, ask us to “Never forget.” Of course, we shouldn’t; as far as Aquino is concerned, may I also suggest the hanging of the appropriate figurative sign around his neck: “Huwag tularan.”

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