This time, it was Interior and Local Government Secretary Mar Roxas, not Dinky Soliman, who turned on the waterworks. Speaking before the men and women of the Philippine National Police’s Special Action Force, Roxas could not hold back the tears when he admitted that his earlier assessment, that what happened last week in Mamasapano, Maguindanao was a “mis-encounter,” was erroneous.
“I was one of those who called it that, when I still did not know the totality of what happened,” a contrite Roxas said, as the comrades of the 44 slain PNP-SAF men listened in silence. “Obviously, it was not [a mis-encounter].”
I am glad that Roxas, unlike his boss, is capable of admitting a mistake. However, if the purported Liberal Party candidate to succeed President Noynoy Aquino thinks his admission and some well-timed tears are all that his job requires of him in these times, he is once again seriously mistaken.
If Roxas, who is nominally the head of the PNP as DILG secretary, was truly kept out of the loop during the Mamasapano operation, then the least he can do is to resign in protest and in outrage. If he takes to some public stage and lets loose with some Tagalog profanities, that will be a bonus.
Of course, there are those who believe that Roxas has always been in on the plan to extract Malaysian terrorist Marwan from the clutches of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front or their reversible-jacket buddies in the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters. Roxas, after all, was in Zamboanga City that fateful Sunday with Aquino, who was supposedly in town not to condole with the victims of a car bombing but to be close by when the PNP-SAF returned triumphantly with Marwan, like Barack Obama when the operation to kill Osama Bin Laden took place in Pakistan.
But Roxas certainly sounded like the most clueless of all Aquino’s men in the early days after the now-discredited “mis-encounter” —something that goes against the “segurista” character of the DILG secretary. If Roxas did not truly believe that the SAF force had been felled by friendly fire (the hallmark of all “mis-encounters”), his play-it-safe nature would not have allowed him to talk like it took the MILF/BIFF 12 hours of offensive operations and close-quarters, execution-style killing to realize that they were, in fact, attacking friendlies.
No, I’d like to think that Roxas was indeed as clueless as he was erroneous. Which makes his continued stay in the Aquino Cabinet truly a remarkable act of political desperation from a would-be President whose only perceived advantage is the anointing by his feckless and traitorous boss.
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There was a time, of course, when the name Roxas was synonymous with principle. But that was when another politician with the same surname, Mar’s father Gerry, was fighting the Marcos dictatorship.
Nowadays, the Roxas name (like so many other surnames that have been passed on by stalwart statesmen together with the high political offices they once held) has been seriously devalued. The current Roxas is nothing more than a super-flunky of the current Aquino, who strings Mar along with the mere promise that someday, if he slavishly does all the dirty work that is demanded of him, all this shall be his.
Roxas does have considerable influence, especially on the Department of Transportation and Communications, which he runs remotely though his own lackeys from the rank of undersecretary on down, even if Joseph Emilio Abaya is the nominal head of that strategically important Cabinet post. And he gets to act as a counter-weight to the shadowy “Samar” faction of Malacañang, which is headed by Aquino’s eminence grise, Executive Secretary Paquito Ochoa.
But in exchange for all that power, Roxas also gets to chauffeur senators to the palace, lift sacks of rice, garlic and onions, fall from motorcycles and, at present, act like he knows something even if he really knows squat. And, at the end of the day, he isn’t even really sure if he will be favored with Aquino’s endorsement, which may be given to someone with better chances of winning in 2016, in order to keep Aquino out of jail the moment he steps down.
Roxas now has an excellent opportunity to show that he is his own man and to redeem his father’s name from the shackles of servitude to the current President. If Roxas resigned from the Cabinet right now, I would even forgive him for using some of those choice, foul-mouthed epithets that he used to describe the Arroyo administration.
But I’m afraid Roxas will never be able to wean himself away from the teat of Aquino’s uncertain promise of anointment. And his servility to Aquino is only one more reason why, when the elections come along, I fear Roxas will never become President, regardless of whether he gets Noynoy’s endorsement or not.
Sayang. Roxas, like a basketball team full of superstars, seems to have everything that it takes to win on paper.
But what Mar doesn’t have is his own identity—that, and a set of principles. And it may be too late for him to do anything about these fatal wounds to his overweening ambition.
Stop crying, Mar. You have no one to blame but yourself.
