Philippines Continues to Fight COVID-19 With Duterte’s Team of Retired Generals

Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte has called uniformed personnel “the backbone of my administration.” His COVID-19 task forces, stocked with former military men, have overseen a series of strict measures that have put soldiers in the streets and quarantine violators in jail cells.

Duterte’s approach has not made much progress in defeating the invisible enemy of the coronavirus. It has, however, generated harsh domestic and international criticism for rights abuses, misallocation of resources, and an absence of mass testing and effective contact tracing,

Duterte has stocked his cabinet with retired military and police officials since taking power in 2016, often leaning on his close relations with authorities to bolster his own grip on power. When he announced a lockdown of Manila in March, he was flanked not by doctors and health professionals but by uniformed generals.

The signal was clear: Duterte saw military and police officers as essential in keeping order. The result, however, has been closer to chaos.

Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana, a former army commander, chairs the National Action Plan (NAP), which is meant to “reinforce efforts” of the health department to combat the virus. He also chairs the National Task Force (NTF), which implements the recommendations of the Inter-Agency Task Force on Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF).

Both task forces are stocked with generals. Eduardo Ano, the interior secretary and former Armed Forces chief of staff, is vice chairman of both the IATF and NTF. The NTF’s “chief implementer,” Peace Adviser Carlito Galvez, and several other NTF members are former military or police generals themselves.

The task forces have been sharply criticized for prioritizing punitive measures, such as orders to arrest quarantine violators and a proposal to go house-to-house to round up positive patients into quarantine, while Filipinos complained of a lack of mass testing, functional contact tracing, and financial assistance.

Duterte’s group of generals showed a propensity for inefficient decision-making from the beginning. In April, they were criticized for a snafu in which the Department of Social Welfare and Development, headed by retired army general Rolando Bautista, initially said it would have to validate lists of aid recipients before distributing around $1.57 billion in cash aid. The decision was reversed when it became clear that process would harm vulnerable families in dire need of assistance.

“While nobody questions the generals’ personal integrity, their policies display lack of consensus-building skills and a narrow preference for ‘order’ over empathy toward the needs of the country’s 17.6 million poor families, including the 5.2 million families that live in the capital Manila,” journalist Inday Espina-Varona wrote for LICAS.NEWS.

But Duterte has continued to lean on the generals as the Philippines has overtaken Indonesia as the Southeast Asian country with the highest number of positive cases and the most deaths due to the coronavirus.

Despite the Philippines’ failures in curbing the spread of the virus, Duterte has made moves to seize power during the pandemic, passing a controversial anti-terror law and publicly stating his fondness for martial law and for the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

Temario Rivera, a former political science professor, said in a recent webinar Duterte’s recruitment of military officials to civilian posts has become “dangerous.”

Duterte, Rivera said, became president despite lacking a traditional base, unlike predecessors with deep links to dynastic political families. “So again, naturally Duterte had to rely [on] the military and the police in addressing the severe problem[s] that confronted him when he became President,” he said.

He’s continued to lean on them throughout the pandemic out of a belief that generals are less prone to corruption and are used to making orderly, efficient decisions. Experts interviewed in a July Rappler article said generals often listen to Health Secretary Francisco Duque and presidential spokesperson Harry Roque, but that decisions made in task force meetings can sometimes get abruptly changed afterward.

Duterte, wrote journalist Nikko Dizon, continues to rely on “a shock-and-awe strategy of managing a problem that, to him, could only be implemented by his police and military.”