FOLLOWING THE extension of his term as Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) chief of staff until May 9, Gen. Hermogenes Esperon Jr. predicted that his last three months “could be bloody” because the New People’s Army (NPA) can be expected to fight back as the military makes a final push to crush the communist insurgency by 2010. In defending her decision to extend Esperon’s term, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo said his leadership was needed to sustain the momentum of the government’s campaign to end the 39-year-old insurgency.

In his self-promoting defense of the extension, Esperon said it was in line with the Jan. 7 AFP command decision with the President, in which the AFP command agreed to pursue this “course of action for the whole year.” This decision implies that Esperon represents continuity of this policy, which is claimed to have significantly reduced the armed threat of the NPA during his incumbency. The argument seems to be that he is the logical person to carry out the military objective of turning the NPA into an “inconsequential organization” by the end of President Arroyo’s term. He has described himself as “someone who fights the NPA all the way,” implying that any other chief of staff would not be as zealous as he is in eradicating the NPA.

This argument is a variant of the theme of his indispensability in completing the obsession of the President to wipe out the insurgency mainly by force rather than a blend of mailed fist and social reform.

Esperon has thus set the bloody tone for ending the insurgency. He appears to have ruled out a less bloody conclusion of the counterinsurgency campaign. He has expected and has called for blood, and that is what we are likely to get in the last three months of his extended term.

Esperon said as his mandatory retirement on Feb. 9 neared that the NPA had been reduced to 5,700 fighters, their lowest strength in more than 20 years. He added that there should be no let-up on the military pressure on the NPA. According to the AFP, the military, with the deployment of six new battalions to the campaign, should be able to dismantle 17 of the 87 so-called “guerrilla fronts” in the first quarter of this year.

Esperon referred only to the combat front with armed guerrillas, a sector where he expects an increase in armed encounters with rebels desperately fighting for survival and pushed to the wall by a military poised to deliver the death blow to the movement. Given that this has been decided as the standing policy at the January command conference, doubts arise over whether Esperon is indispensable in pushing this policy to its logical end or whether he has become redundant as executor of this policy. What is certain is that the extension of his term has blocked the entry into the top echelons of the chain of command of senior generals who have a fresh and less bloody approach to the mission of ending the insurgency by 2010.

Esperon has skirted reference to another bloody sector of the “all-out war” on insurgency: the front involving the extrajudicial killings of close to 800 unarmed political activists associated with the legal and aboveground members of the communist movement, who have been executed by death squads since 2001. Reports of human rights groups, the United Nations rapporteur on human rights and the government’s own Melo Commission have implicated death squads linked to military units involved in active military action in communist-infiltrated zones. The President, the AFP command and Esperon have not told the public whether they expect more bloodletting in this sector involving noncombatants.

There are suggestions that Esperon’s term was extended to serve the political interests of the administration, involving regime survival and continuity, rather than ending the communist insurgency.

Prior to the extension, reports circulated in the military camps of unrest and “destabilization threats” over whether the military would accept the extension of Esperon’s term. Esperon himself encouraged rumors that plotters in the military were continuing to recruit members to join new coup plots in the aftermath of the aborted coup attempt of former Navy Lt. (now Senator) Antonio Trillanes IV and Brig. Gen. Danilo Lim at the Peninsula Manila Hotel last November. When asked by reporters if the destabilization threat was serious, Esperon said, “It’s a concern to me. I cannot simply let it go and gain strength. Right from the start we want to nip things in the bud. We are discovering caches of some plans to transport firearms … some recruitment is ongoing, including inside the chain (of command).”

These reports played into the argument that Esperon, because of his known loyalty to the President, was indispensable to the survival of the Arroyo regime, which still faces threats of military mutinies despite the decisive crushing of the Peninsula Manila standoff. Now the regime has found another reason to justify the extension, and the reason is an old one.

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