Special Operations Command

Fidel Agcaoili
Chairperson, NDFP Monitoring Committee

National Security Adviser Hermogenes Esperon, Jr., is once again lying through his teeth as he desperately tries to evade accountability for more than a thousand cases of extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances under the Gloria Arroyo regime.

He is doubly desperate to evade culpability, as he now also finds himself in danger of sinking along with his current master Rodrigo Duterte’s wobbly ship.

As Philippine Army deputy chief of staff for operations, Special Operations Command chief, Philippine Army commanding general and later AFP chief of staff–positions he occupied from 2003 to 2008–Esperon, in tandem with Norberto Gonzales, cannot deny responsibility for serving as the main architect of the Arroyo regime’s brutal fascist attacks during this period against activists, mass leaders and suspected revolutionaries, including priests, trade unionists and poor peasants, journalists, and academicians.

Among the most notorious cases of human rights violations perpetrated by the Esperon-led military under Gloria Arroyo’s helm were the enforced disappearances of activist Jonas Burgos, UP students Karen Empeno and Sherlyn Cadapan and 10 NDFP consultants and staff (for which cases have been filed with the UN Human Rights Committee). From 2001 to the end of Gloria Arroyo’s term in 2010, there were more than 1,300 cases of political killings and enforced disappearances, including the assassination of NDFP consultant Sotero Llamas.

In 2006, Special Rapporteur Phillip Alston saw through Esperon’s lies as the latter attempted to blame the killings on the Left. Alston dismissed the so-called documentary proof presented by Esperon, saying they bore “all the hallmarks of a fabrication and cannot be taken as evidence of anything other than disinformation”.

Now that this bloody record is being raised anew by a public outraged at the rise in power of his former commander in chief Arroyo, Esperon is attempting to deflect the unwanted attention by again blaming the Left.

He misleads the public by mixing up two incidents that occurred almost 20 years apart–the alleged mass killings in Inopacan, Leyte in the 1980s (where the “evidence” consists of the incredible testimonies of military assets and an assortment of skeletal remains dug up from public cemeteries) and the widespread state-sponsored extrajudicial killings from 2003 to 2007 that Alston was investigating, and for which Esperon was as culpable as his boss Arroyo.
Esperon is so desperate that he could only recycle the same ill-conceived lies of long ago that, unfortunately for him, no intelligent mind would buy.

Sooner than later, he will be held to account both for his damning history as Arroyo’s henchman, as well as for crafting the Duterte regime’s national security strategy that has mandated, among others, the scuttling of the peace negotiations in favor of all-out war, the vilification of the people’s liberation movement as terrorist, the killing of hundreds of unarmed activists in the countryside, the manufacture of bogus criminal cases against revolutionaries and leaders of the progressive mass movement and the enactment of increasingly repressive laws to stifle dissent.###