I nearly fell off my chair the other day when I came across the headline news story about P79 million in cash and checks being discovered by our troops near a machine gun nest in embattled Marawi City.
That is a heck of a lot of money. The news photo showed stacks of neatly wrapped bundles of bills. So it’s not loose change either that might have been accumulated by a lot of Maute fighters from their day jobs, when they’re not otherwise beheading people or desecrating Catholic churches.
That kind of money is wholesale. And in this country, and almost anywhere else in the world for that matter, there’s only one industry capable of generating such wholesale cash: the drug industry.
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It is all exactly as President Duterte warned us from the start.
The snotty snobs laughed at him when he said that drug networks in Mindanao were also funding terrorist networks. From the safety of their middle-class communities, far away from the poverty and desperation that drive so many of our countrymen to drug use, they mocked him for what they said was an old man’s sad fixation.
But now the chickens have come home to roost. Seventy-nine million pesos is enough money to do the following:
• Plant improvised explosive devices (IEDs) on crowded streets as you drive by in your air-conditioned car;
•Take children and teachers hostage in the exclusive school where your kids go; or
• Detonate a suicide bomber in the fancy restaurant where you may be meeting for business or celebrating a family occasion.
• In the unlikely event that the airport baggage checker used to work for, say, Resorts World, smuggle a go-to-paradise device into the plane you boarded for your usual family vacation in Hong Kong.
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These scenarios are just as implausible as the hoard of cash that our troops stumbled upon, or the underground warren of tunnels that the terrorists dug over the years (with who knows how much help from the local civilians) and now frustrate Duterte’s hopes for a quick victory so he can also lift martial law earlier.
Implausible, yes. But now those other facts are staring us in our pampered little faces. And yet the politicians and the ideologues persist with their business as usual.
Their silence about all that terrorist cash is deafening.
The leftists who were screaming about potential military abuses under martial law may now have been dumbstruck by the absence to date of any actual abuses.
A bunch of legislators and lawyers decided to challenge martial law before the Supreme Court. Perhaps they can suggest a better way for us to address the warning sounded by our Muslim-majority Asean neighbors at a security conference in Singapore: that Mindanao, the current target for caliphate-building, is now the “weak link” in the region’s war on terror.
And the opposition senators, even after seeing a video of the Marawi attacks being planned, continue to belittle the situation. Instead they prefer to throw tantrums about being falsely linked to Marawi by Justice Secretary Aguirre, who for his part should do a better job of checking his facts and holding his tongue.
Opposition ringleader Senator Trillanes, together with underling Congressman Alejano, has even gone to The Hague to file a suit against Duterte. Against such chicanery, even the likes of their fellow veteran, Senator Lacson, can only rail in vain.
All of this would be laughable were it not for the dozens of military and civilian lives lost in Marawi, with more undoubtedly to follow. As ever, it will be the innocents who pay the price for the incompetents.
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Switching topics now: Lest I be accused of bait-and-switch with my catchy column title today, let me say right off that I loved Gal Gadot in “Wonder Woman.”
I was a fan of the amply-endowed Lynda Carter in the old TV series. And with Zach Snyder producing and a woman director at the helm of the film version, its success was virtually guaranteed.
But Ms. Gadot was a revelation. A drop-dead gorgeous model (for perfume) who’s also happily married with two daughters, she brought to her character a mixture of old-fashioned bravado and latter-day introspection that was utterly appealing.
In a press interview from LA, the Israeli actress also said all the right things: that boys should have strong female figures to look up to. That her own role model was feminist writer Maya Angelou. That all people have the same dreams and aspirations. That she would love for her character in the next film to stop World War 3 because that would be “very relevant.”
Nonetheless, many of my “progressive” friends were unmoved. An iconic Filipina writer, leftist and feminist, whom I highly esteem, said she still couldn’t bring herself to watch the movie, (impliedly) for one reason alone: because Gadot was Israeli, and thus (like every other Israeli) had spent time in compulsory military service.
Ideology trumps facts. Unfortunately, these are the kind of blinders that we still have to deal with in people who have spent a lifetime in that particular struggle, and from whom today the government’s peace panel has to sit across at the negotiating table.
Whether through protracted hostilities in Marawi or protracted peacemaking in Oslo, peace is never easily won. It’s something worth remembering as the President continues to make his hard choices in the months ahead.
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