Watch for the return of Rafael “Ka Paeng” Mariano to a protest venue near you soon, as he reverts to his old, familiar role. The Commission on Appointments, once a mere rubber stamp for appointees of Malacañang Palace, has claimed yet another victim in the firebrand farmer-activist, whose exit represents the end of the always-shaky relationship between the Duterte administration and the homegrown Communists.
I had hoped that the CA would give Mariano a pass and confirm him as secretary of agrarian reform. I thought Congress would allow Mariano to stay in the Cabinet after it had defied predictions—and even common sense—by rejecting the respected and well-liked Judy Taguiwalo as secretary of social welfare and development.
But there is to be no tokenism in the Duterte Cabinet. Taguiwalo and Mariano, both nominees of the Left, have fallen, the victims of the newly-assertive commission and what some see as a rightist, anti-communist faction in the administration.
(A third leftist in high government office, former Gabriela Party-list Rep. Lisa Maza, remains head of the Presidential Anti-Poverty Commission. Maza is safe, for now, but only because she need not go before the CA for confirmation of her sub-Cabinet position.)
It is only fair, at this point, to conclude that President Rodrigo Duterte had become convinced that both Taguiwalo and Mariano should not be confirmed. And the rejection of the two leftists in the Cabinet had apparently nothing to do with their performance more than one year after being appointed—and everything to do with the breakdown of the once-warm relationship between Duterte and the Philippine Communist movement.
Mariano’s rejection, coming as it did on the heels of Taguiwalo’s, can be understood in the context of the existence of an ultra-rightist, militarist faction within the Duterte Cabinet, which has continually (if only quietly) protested the recruitment of leftists to high government office. The leaders of the defense establishment and the former high military and police officials in the administration can quite naturally be counted on to take a dim view of working with leftists, with whom they have had a long history of armed conflict.
Which is not to say, of course, that these former and current men in uniform who surround Duterte actively sought the ouster of Taguiwalo and Mariano. They knew, more than anyone, after all, that they were not dealing with a weak leader like Corazon Aquino, whom they could actively undermine with coup attempts after she began consorting with the Communists who helped install her in Malacanang in 1986.
They let Duterte himself come to that conclusion, after the New People’s Army kept up its depredations despite the President’s overtures of peace and reconciliation, like the Roxas night market bombing in Davao City, the ambushes on police and military units and the dozens of destructive attacks on private corporations that refused to pay their “revolutionary taxes.”
They watched as Duterte became frustrated in the lack of compromise shown by Communist leaders led by Jose Ma. Sison (with whom the President is still engaged in a name-calling contest) in the Norway-brokered peace talks, which led directly to the breakdown of the negotiations. They nodded in agreement as Duterte came to rely more and more on the military to put down the IS-inspired takeover of Marawi City.
There is no way Mariano (and Taguiwalo before him) could have done anything to stop these events from happening. And now they are no longer in the Cabinet, which is finally—and probably permanently—Red-free.
* * *
What I want to see in today’s resumption of the Senate hearings on the seizure of P6.4 billion worth of shabu through the Bureau of Customs is this: Who will backstop Senator Antonio Trillanes as he goes, hammer and tongs, like he promised, after both presidential son Davao City Vice Mayor Paolo Duterte and presidential son-in-law Manases Carpio?
My observations actually have nothing to do with whether or not Trillanes will succeed in linking both resource persons to the narcotics shipment, which I have already concluded exist only in the senator’s fevered mind. But they will have everything to do with counting noses, when the voting on the ethics complaint against Trillanes finally happens.
See, I have this theory that not even Trillanes’ colleagues in the opposition can be relied upon to back him up when the time comes to censure him for his consistent boorish and disruptive behavior in the Senate. This is why, in Trillanes’ current feud with Senator Gordon, not one of the Liberal Party members who usually stick together through thick or thin (thin, for the most part, since Noynoy Aquino left the building), you don’t hear any of them taking Trillanes’ side.
Of course, Trillanes is not even LP, but a nominal Nacionalista—a point he tried to make even to his interviewer from the BBC. But you’d have thought he would have been getting some love from the LPs, his fellow travelers on the now-deserted “daang matuwid.”
If none of the LPs take up Trillanes’ cause against the younger Duterte and Carpio, I will take that as a sign that (as I have long believed) the senator is now a pariah even to the Yellows. And that could only mean that Trillanes is finally—and most deservedly—on his own.