“If you don’t learn how to weep, you’re not a good Christian,” Pope Francis said during his visit here last month, suggesting that tears are often the only correct response to suffering.
Interior and Local Government Secretary Manuel Roxas II seemed to learn this lesson when he tearfully admitted to the men and women of the Philippine National Police Special Action Force (SAF) that he had mischaracterized the deadly Jan. 25 clash in Mamasapano, Maguindanao, that claimed 44 of their colleagues as a “mis-encounter.”
“I was one of those who called it that, when I still did not know the totality of what happened,” Roxas told the comrades of the Fallen 44.
A board of inquiry, he told the demoralized members of the SAF who felt—understandably so—that their government had failed them.
The common perception is that Roxas, along with PNP officer-in-charge Leonardo Espina had been kept in the dark about a top-secret operation to neutralize the international terrorist, Zulkifli bin Hir, alias Marwan, which resulted in the deaths of the 44 SAF commandos. Operation Wolverine, sources say, had been given the green light by President Benigno Aquino III, who coordinated with his suspended national police chief, Alan Purisima, who secretly ran the show despite his suspension as a result of allegations of corruption.
There are two distinct possibilities as far as the involvement of Roxas, the presumptive presidential candidate for the President’s Liberal Party.
The first is that he really didn’t know what was going on, and that he was as surprised as anybody else when he learned that the 44 police commandos had been slaughtered.
The other possibility is that Roxas was in on the operation from Day 1, and is now encouraging the perception that he was kept in the dark as a way of maintaining deniability, insulating himself from the political damage—and preserving what little chance he has left to be the country’s next President.
Neither of these possibilities is particularly palatable, but in either case, the secretary’s tears seem hardly sufficient.
If Roxas, as the Cabinet secretary in charge of the PNP, had truly been bypassed and kept in the dark about a crucial police operation, the proper response should have been indignation and anger that the chain of command in his own jurisdiction had been corrupted.
In 2001, when Roxas felt that President Joseph Estrada was no longer fit to lead the country, he resigned as Trade secretary. He could have done the same thing this week and redeemed his tarnished image—if not his presidential ambitions.
But those ambitions seem to have stripped Roxas of any semblance of principled, clear thinking or decisive action. Could these ambitions also be powerful enough for him to participate in a cover-up to keep the truth about the Mamasapano massacre from the Filipino people?