An AFP in ferment - GOTCHA by Jarius Bondoc

Traditionalists in the military condemn it "a very serious breach of security." But young generals and colonels of PMA’s ’70s batches hail Col. Victor Corpus’s promotion to AFP intelligence chief as a "refreshingly bold move" by Gen. Angelo Reyes. The clash of views reflects the Armed Forces’ state of ferment. And in a service where attrition by age more than by war now dictates trends and changes, younger thinking is bound to prevail.

Reyes himself has just retired, though is about to be named defense chief. His departure, and that of others from PMA classes of ’66 to ’68 in the next few months, clears the ladder for younger star-rank officers to climb and test their new ideas right at the top. Corpus, too, is nearing retirement. But the new culture he brings to AFP strategic thinking can forever alter it.

Corpus is not your typical military man. Upon graduation from PMA in ‘67, he took command of a Constabulary detachment in Ilocos Sur. A profitable career lay ahead of him. All he had to do was play ball with traditional pols who ruled town – that is, protect jueteng, help cheat elections, perpetuate the local elite – and he’d surge fast to higher, more profitable commands. But that wasn’t his idea of service. Youth activism was in those days surging, too, questioning the poverty and social injustice from which a few rich families were becoming richer while the poor masa was becoming poorer. Critics were likening the structure to a "social volcano about to explode. "From his post, Corpus witnessed violent clashes of the Singsons and Crisologos for control of Ilocos, reaching feverish pitch in the elections of 1969. He refused to take sides, and instead took on both camps, for which they lashed at him in local radio. Then came that fateful night when one faction, infuriated by low votes in two barrios, swooped in and burned down hundreds of farmers’ nipa huts. Corpus took the victims to the Jesuits in Manila. The PC brass relieved him of his command and dispatched him to instructor duty back at the Academy. On Dec. 29, 1970, Lieutenant Corpus raided the PMA armory, and carted off dozens of high-powered rifles to the fledgling communist New People’s Army.

The Communist Party had been reborn only two years to that day. Its ideologically-mandated army was but a few months old. With Corpus’s defection, the ragtag NPA became a real army, with real weapons and a real trainer. Under his tutelage, it swelled in ranks from two dozen guerrillas to two hundred then to 2,000 and, at its peak, 12,000. The AFP threw its best men to track him down. Corpus, meanwhile, rose up the Party ranks to become member of the all-powerful Politburo. Those were years of martial rule, when Marcos dictatorship fed natural recruits to the revolution. Retired Col. Amado Espino (PMA ’70) one of Corpus’s rabid hunters and PMA students, encountered him in the jungles of Isabela. "I’m sure it was him," Espino swears, "he shot me in the leg." Espino still bears shrapnel from that skirmish, with a strangely fond memory that only soldiers will understand of engaging a mentor in real combat.

In the late ’70s, unacceptable communist tactics and doubts about a losing cause overtook Corpus. He came in from the cold. Some say it was a genuine capture. Others suspect he deliberately set himself up for the kill. If AFP officers will now brag that Corpus was a deep-penetration spy all along, a petition of former intelligence chiefs would belie it. Six retired generals and colonels complained to President Gloria M. Arroyo last week that Corpus should not be chief of the Intelligence Service-AFP. Had Reyes followed military tradition of CBI (complete background investigation), they insist, Corpus should not even have been reintegrated into the service.

But that’s old hat. Upon capturing Corpus, Marcos’s generals threw him into six years of solitary confinement. Former PMA students visited him on the sly, at first to view an oddity, eventually to admit that here was a victim as much as anybody else of the moribund system. They wooed him back to the fold. When Corpus did agree to rejoin the AFP, it was with a vengeance. As an Army light colonel, no longer a Constabulary peon, he lectured generals to start changing their ways or else perish. If the Army was for the people, there would be no need for a New People’s Army.

"His past is past, it’s history," Reyes says of the "refreshingly bold move" last Jan. 23, three days after the ascendance of a new President on the heels of People Power II, to appoint Corpus as ISAFP chief. Perhaps, Reyes understated his own act. Corpus is part of AFP history. His training, his initial posting, his decision to buck the evil system as a young officer – all are part of AFP’s own transformation. So are Corpus’s unjust relief, his eventual defection, his work with the underground, his skirmishes with former students, his capture and eventual reenlistment.

Two years after he rejoined the service, Corpus was assigned to evaluate intercepted communist guerrilla documents. But he soon grew tired of such intelligence analysis. He drafted a plan to beat the communist insurgency for good. But it wasn’t through military tactics, it was through genuine social, political and economic change. Soldiers just happen to be the front-line troops in entering NPA-held barrios. They would gather the rural folk and explain to them that poverty, not the Army, was their enemy. More important, they were there to fight poverty together, assuming of course that a new civilian political leadership in government would deliver the wherewithals for combat. At the same time, the Cold War was thawing, the Iron Curtain was crumbling, Marcos was no longer in power, the US was deciding to leave its military bases in Clark and Subic. Corpus wrote a book on his new strategy to win the war against communism not by armed combat but through delivery of basic government services. His ideas soon caught fire and became national policy.

Traditional thinking holds that communism is a foreign ideology that subverts the Filipino way of life. Corpus’s life experience is that the ideology, like any other, has its good and bad points. It’s not foreign, nor is it indigenous. It calls for justice yet can be unjust, it calls for economic boom yet can lead to bust, depending on who’s on top. Most of all, it has been superseded by a new world thinking that democracy and people empowerment – not central planning – are the best social ingredients for change. Fortunately for Corpus, young generals and colonels of PMA’s ’70s batches think the same way and abhor the traditionalist blinders.

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