A DAY after Armed Forces Chief Carlito Galvez Jr. and Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana attended a Senate budget hearing, President Duterte, wearing fatigues, addressed a military unit where he gave the go signal for the military to go all out against New People’s Army rebels. The order was actually long in coming considering that the government’s talks with the rebels’ umbrella organization, the National Democratic Front (NDF), broke down months ago yet.
For those like me who had wanted the talks to resume and reach their desired conclusion, this is a worrisome development. After the president’s pep talk, for example, a military official said the rebels are doing the recruiting in schools. I just hope there won’t be a crackdown in the campuses nationwide.
But back to that Senate hearing. Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV naturally lost no time in questioning Galvez about his (the senator’s) recent predicament. Trillanes asked Galvez about the lost application for amnesty that the president used as reason to issue a proclamation that declared his (Trillanes’s) amnesty as “void ab initio.”
Galvez attested that Trillanes did file an application for amnesty and that the papers just got lost due to lapses in records keeping. That contradicted the president’s claim in his proclamation on the granting of amnesty to the senator. It also means the military is not about to join the game of politics played by its commander-in-chief at the higher levels of power.
But there was an interesting exchange between Trillanes and Galvez that bolsters this perception of mine about the military’s stance. When Trillanes asked Galvez about the surveillance conducted by military elements on his house, the latter responded that it was meant to ensure nothing untoward would happen to the senator.
I don’t think Galvez was either politicking or covering up for something sinister. Trillanes’s safety should be a concern for the Armed Forces because if something happens to him the political repercussion would be grave and it could potentially divide the military considering that Trillanes, being a former Navy official, may still have some factions sympathetic to him.
This is partly why Trillanes is a more difficult nut to crack for the Duterte administration than its other staunch critic, Sen. Leila de Lima. He is not only a senator, he is also a former military man. That means he couldn’t be touched except by using legal means.
But it is also difficult to build trumped-up charges against him because he is a straight arrow. So the best that the administration could do was do something questionable, like voiding the amnesty given to him and other rebel soldiers by former president Benigno Aquino.
And Trillanes has not been deterred by the Duterte administration’s move. Instead, it apparently has emboldened him, or should I say, angered him and strengthened his resolve. Now he knows that he has some support not only among his colleagues in the Senate but also in the military.
It would be good to find out what the Duterte camp’s next move would be.