The "Mexicanization" of the Philippine Military
How a political assassination has brought out into the open a troubling possibility
My columns Six years past, six years more? and Bloody quicksand both serve as a prelude to this week’s column. The first pointed to political murder as part of the legacy of the previous administration, bringing the violence of the periphery to the center; and the second argued that the national leadership is increasingly spooked by this state of affairs, including the increasing prevalence of military or ex-military actors in what’s going on. This week, how it can all come together in a confluence of factors that echoes the Mexican experience.
This week’s The Long View
THE LONG VIEW
Soldiers no better than cops
By: Manuel L. Quezon III - @inquirerdotnet
Philippine Daily Inquirer / 04:30 AM April 12, 2023
The assassination of Negros Oriental Gov. Roel Degamo put the armed forces on the dock. The Armed Forces of the Philippines took pains to point out that the three ex-soldiers implicated had been dishonorably discharged. But the point stuck and a few days later the military said it now considered dishonorably discharged soldiers as threat concerns. AFP spokesperson Col. Medel Aguilar said Army chief Lt. Gen. Romeo Brawner Jr. ordered counterintelligence to be strengthened and discharged soldiers monitored, as well as the review of the Philippine Army Transition Assistance Program. The justice secretary for his part said a database of ex-Philippine National Police and AFP personnel was needed and would be built. The new defense chief announced that both the AFP and PNP would crack down on “private armed groups.”
The military traditionally has a low opinion of the police, a view not helped by cops being considered a far more pliable tool of political leadership. This was perhaps best seen during the investigations into Mamasapano; but in recent years, there have been incidents pointing to outright hostility, such as a shooting in 2020 between the PNP and AFP in which the ex-police chief of Jolo ended up gunned down in Maguindanao, and another in which an Army veteran was gunned down by cops during quarantine. A recent case in which an Army general was implicated in the murder of a “model-turned-businesswoman” turned the tables in what may come to be seen as a sign of where things have been headed for some time.
After two decades of military adventurism (from Honasan in 1987 to Trillanes in 2007), a social contract of sorts emerged between civilian and military leaders: The armed forces as a whole would enjoy generous pensions and its top brass would all take their turn, however briefly, at senior positions. At the same time, the military retreated from politics and became more professional. This “openness to embrace reform and substantive professionalism,” as noted by Aries Arugay in a 2021 commentary, had tangible public relations benefits: A 2019 Social Weather Stations survey “revealed that the AFP enjoyed its highest trust ratings since public opinion polling began … ” in which “[a]n astounding 79 percent of Filipinos trust the military.” But Arugay’s point was what was happening to the armed forces at the behest of President Rodrigo Duterte: the increasing reliance on the military to do duties best left to the police. Ananda Devi Domingo-Almase cleverly termed Duterte’s approach to both the police and the military as “Militarizing the police, constabularizing the military.”
Duterte did three things that would have a lasting effect on this delicate balancing act between satisfying parochial interests by means of pensions and promotions and fostering institutional professionalism. The former president tried to address policy and bureaucratic challenges by staffing civilian offices with retired officers; he tried to repair the damage he had dealt to counterinsurgency efforts when he welcomed aboveground radicals into the government, by filling positions vacated by the radicals, again with retired officers; and in the siege of Marawi City, he gave free rein to the military as it got mired in an urban siege, including turning a blind eye to allegations of looting by the military. He doubled military salaries, which in turn ballooned the funding needs of pensions, raised the military retirement age, and signed a law instituting a fixed term for the AFP chief of staff, both of which landed a fiscal and management problem on the lap of his successor (near the end, he issued a token appeal for reform, with no sign of his using his political capital to help bail his successor out: Recently, Sen. Christopher “Bong” Go vowed to run interference in efforts to trim pensions).
In light of the recklessness of the past six years, Mexico provides a cautionary tale on unintended consequences. For 17 years, Mexican presidents have increasingly turned to the military in its drug war. Bringing in the military to undertake police missions imposes tasks on the armed forces for which they aren’t trained. At the same time, it exposes the military to the same temptations to which the police have succumbed: on one hand, to supplant the drug cartels, and on the other, for individual soldiers or groups of soldiers, to be enticed into going rogue and turning into mercenaries. Here is where official policy can bleed into the murky world of crime.Back in 2021, in what can be considered the end-of-term report card of the Duterte era, the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime’s Global Organized Crime Index assigned the Philippines a criminality score of 6.84, making 13th of 193 countries, sixth of 46 Asian countries, and second of 11 South-Eastern Asian countries, with mafia-style groups (“activity from these mafia-style groups is likely only to increase in the coming years”) and state-embedded actors scoring the highest, respectively (both at 8).
Now consider three things. First, as an act of political restitution to an offended military, Duterte declared open season on communists, however loosely defined, removing the already few restraints on soldiers always chomping at the bit to liquidate the enemy. Second, his overall “war on drugs,” in which he took upon himself the moral responsibility for liquidations so long as they were undertaken according to the parameters and with the methods he defined, provided cover for the settling of scores and the conquest of turf, for all sorts of actors. And third, the riches plundered from Marawi gave significant but untraceable economic power to soldiers, quite possibly up and down the line, opening up the possibility of their having means and motive to edge out politicians and others who formerly had a stranglehold on political and economic power in their areas.
Whether an active duty general having to be arrested on charges of liquidating a civilian, or former soldiers, dishonorably discharged or not, turning into hitmen, the armed forces which formerly sneered at the police for being not just crooked, but incompetent, now have to look at itself in the mirror to ask if its reflection isn’t looking more and more cop-like. This is what has spooked the entire political class, from the President to his cousin the Speaker, and now our top brass.
Focus on Mexico
In tackling the so-called “war on drugs” (see The blueprint for the ‘War on Drugs’ and Lies, damned lies, and drug statistics, both from 2016) Mexico sooner or later comes up, not least because of reports of cartel activities in our part of the world (see Mexico’s feared drug cartels are infiltrating the region). And if Mexico and the war on drugs comes up, then author Ioan Grillo comes up. In Did Grillo grill the President? he described his experience:
By all accounts, Grillo handled his hour-plus-long meeting with the President quite diplomatically. As he put it, the President is a”very interesting character.” He added that “I asked him about the colorful language, the times when he used curse words about journalists or about politicians and he was open to talking about this,” although “I was cautious because I had seen videos where he’d been asked difficult questions. He wasn’t as aggressive. He was very open, very calm. He gave a very thorough interview.”
A continuing mystery to me, is why his interview with President Duterte had no tangible result. I’ve asked him about it, and suffice it to say that he has his reasons for choosing not to publish anything up to this time. Duterte said he’s a fan of Grillo’s work —but his takeaway has obviously been very far from what Grillo either expected or intended his work to inspire.
We are familiar with the phenomenon of crime corrupting the police. In a recent article, Grillo wrote,
The career path between gangsters and police officers became like a revolving door. Many of the most infamous traffickers, including Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, started in the police before they went into the mob to make their fortune moving product. In other cases, criminals joining the police to get weapons and a badge. Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as El Mencho, did prison time for heroin before he got a job as an officer in Jalisco.
But what about the military, which is often viewed as more disciplined and more dedicated than cops? The first thing to realize is that resorting to a military solution can have unintended consequences. Grillo summarized it this way:
In 2006, Mexican President Felipe Calderon officially launched a war on drug cartels and implemented a decapitation strategy: a plan to capture or kill drug lords, proverbially cutting off the heads of the cartels (CFR 2021). While the Mexican military arrested and killed 25 of the top 37 kingpins, the strategy seemed to have done more harm than good because it created smaller and more violent organisations…
The problem becomes, what happens when your instrument of last resort, the military, discovers it can do a better job at crime than then criminals against whom the military was unleashed? Grillo’s work points to a concrete example:
Formed in 1998 by 14 former Mexican soldiers, the Zetas have grown to command more than 10,000 gunmen from the Rio Grande, on the border with Texas, to deep into Central America. Their rapid expansion has displaced Mexico’s older cartels in many areas, giving them a dominant position in the multi-billion-dollar cross-border drug trade, as well as extortion, kidnapping and other criminal businesses.
But it is bloodshed that has made the Zetas notorious. And feared.
Zetas killers have been arrested for some of the worst atrocities in Mexico’s drug war, including the murders of hundreds of people whose bodies have been found in mass graves with alarming frequency…
As Grillo discussed in an interview, the cartels embarked on a steep learning curve enabling them to increasingly successfuly confront the military:
Grillo emphasizes that the Culiacan episode was the result of a trend over many years in which the cartels have developed deadly “insurgent tactics.” He notes that “the use of burning vehicles to block roads was taken from militant protesters; cartels use it to stop the movement of troops and put pressure on the government.” Perhaps most alarming, Grillo contends, the cartels “have armed up with stolen military weapons.” What occurred in Culiacan, he adds, “wasn’t gangster action; it was a mass insurrection.”
An earlier piece of his, provides a good summary of his thinking:
Latin America, it should be said, is still less authoritarian than parts of Asia and Africa. Chile and Argentina, home to some of the most notorious dictators of the last century, have allowed power to pass successfully back and forth between elected presidents from the left and right. Costa Rica is hailed as a vanguard of democratic environmentalism. These countries have kept crime lower without resorting to authoritarianism, using a mix of more professional (if still far from perfect) policing and relatively effective social programs. Ecuador has seen lower crime rates after reducing poverty.
But despite improvements by some governments, Latin America remains the most unequal region in the world, with 10 percent of the population holding roughly 71 percent of the wealth. Sprawling slums without paved roads and running water provide a steady stream of recruits into the crime armies. There are no simple solutions to these problems. But one thing that could be done is to recognize that elections and freer markets will not, on their own, improve people’s lives—governments are going to have to do more. First, they can build police forces that will genuinely defend people from predatory criminals while not being used as a tool of repression. And next, they can channel government resources into poor communities that need them most, rather than their own pockets. Democracy means a lot more to people if it translates into tangible benefits—it is then, and only then, that people become willing to risk their lives defending it. Politicians who talk about democratic values but don’t offer concrete answers to what matters most leave a vacuum for authoritarian leaders who do.
Addtional readings
See my recent newsletter, Political Murder: Migrating from the margins to the center
A useful snapshot of where things were, before Duterte, can be viewed through Philippine Governance: Merging Politics and Crime, by Peter Kreuzer in 2009:
The major part of this report is dedicated to the description and analysis of two major aspects of Philippine politics which illustrate the appropriateness of the comparison to the traditional Mafia: the private use of violence for particularistic ends of personal domination and the systematic involvement of Philippine politicians and administrators in illicit business ventures – mostly in the form of rent-seeking, analyzed by using the example of the illegal game of chance Jueteng. In addition a short analysis of the policy of peace pacts, with which contending politicians try to minimize the violent fall-out of political competition, is given, because as this very policy paradoxically underscores the right to self-help in the political sphere.
Human Rights in the Eyes of the Filipino Soldier by Leslie Advicunla-Lopez.
The Philippines: Civil Society-Military-Police Capacity Building
General Policies on Discpline, Law and Order of the Armed Forces of the Philippines.
Ananda Devi Domingo-Almase cleverly termed Duterte’s approach to both the police and the military as “Militarizing the police, constabularizing the military.”
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