By SIMON SANTIAGO
Political Director, Merardo Arce Command
NPA Southern Mindanao
The arm of revolutionary justice that has compelled the implementation of capital punishment against Patrick Wineger is, in fact, light and considerate, contrary to the claims of the 6th Infantry Division-Armed Forces of the Philippines and its running dog Alliance for Nationalism and Democracy (ANAD) partylist that the 7 March action of the New People’s Army was “cold-blooded.”
The highest penalty of capital punishment is reserved for the most rabid, most fascist and incorrigible criminals and people’s enemy like Patrick Wineger who carried blood debts against the masses and the revolutionary forces — who actively, consistently participated, directly and indirectly, in the armed attacks and violence against the people.
It is not only inaccurate and misleading for the AFP and ANAD to project Wineger as a hapless victim of violence; it also perpetuates the mistaken notion that military assets and unrepentant counterrevolutionary criminals like Wineger would eternally enjoy the cover of human rights and international humanitarian law.
Unlike the reactionary US puppet regimes in the country which abducts, tortures, and kills without compunction innocent civilian of all ages and sexes, the revolutionary movement is genuinely humane and forgiving, and akin to giving the offenders chance to repent and serve the interest of the people.
Enough opportunities were given to Wineger to change his ways in the course of more than a decade of his active conscription of paramilitary Lumad fanatics, surveillance of peasant communities, psychological warfare operations, and human rights violations. Many warnings were relayed to him.
But because Wineger served the US-Aquino regime, and continued to be a part of the AFP’s intelligence and finance network, he masterminded the brutal and heartless killing of the beloved priest Fr. Fausto “Pops” Tentorio, who was long part of the military’s Order of Battle list.
In this last project of his, Wineger was truly impenitent, ever the most loyal servant of the AFP’s counterrevolutionary war machine. Thus, for masterminding the killing of Fr. Tentorio, Wineger was handed down the maximum penalty of capital punishment.
The masses, who grieved for Fr. Tentorio, are rejoicing because revolutionary justice has finally begun in the punishment of Wineger.
ANAD Partylist Jun Alcover’s recent pronouncements merely serve to confirm what the revolutionary movement has known all along: that Fr. Fausto Tentorio was a victim of a conspiracy of the 6th ID-AFP, 10th Special Forces, 57th Infantry Battalion, criminal Lumad fanatic baganis and financier and asset Patrick Wineger.
Nothing can be farther from the truth in Alcover’s description of Wineger’s killing as cold-blooded.
Cold-blooded, in the eyes of the masses, refers to the track record of Alcover’s buddy Jovito Palparan whose hands are bloodied with the hundreds of lives he snuffed out in the course of the implementation of Oplan Bantay Laya. Cold-blooded, in the eyes of the masses, was the murder of Fr. Tentorio by a mercenary AFP and the fascist state.