Fat Philippines' Police Generals

By MORTZ C. ORTIGOZA

It was pathetic to see the sight of four Police District Directors who were all star ranked in Metro Manila sacked by Secretary  Mar Roxas of the Department of Interior & Local Government and Police Director Alan Purisima.

Just like their chief at the Philippine National Police, they look like a toad with their beer belly.

What happens to the 35-inch waistline limits’ PNP Physical Fitness Program vigorously implemented during the time of then national police chief Panfilo Lacson ?

I am green with envy every time I see physically trimmed police officials like Lacson, Police Regional Office Director Chief Supt. Roman Felix, and Pangasinan Police Provincial Office Director S/Supt. Rey Biay. These officers and gentlemen probably maintain a strict physical or diet regimen.
Look at General Felix,with all those well toned body like PC General Job Mayo I met in Mindanao, you would mistake him to be in his mid-40s.

Iyan ang dapat hindi lang sa mga generals kundi sa mga colonels, Lt. Colonels, and majors whose "handsome dividends" in their post as chief of police could really make them stout.

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Talking about good physique and athleticism one can cite former Urdaneta City's Chief of Police Supt. Pat Pinol, a British trained Royal Marine Commando and former trainor of the elite Special Action Force. Sannamagan, he can still jog 21 kilometers with regularity in my Province Cotabato. I could cite also former president Fidel V. Ramos (USMA 1950) who challenges any captain or major for 100 push up or abdomen flexing contest.

He once challenged me, although I was only a lowly tanod (watch man) of our barangay then, for 100 pushed up and abs flexing on the river cruise at the pristine Dawel River of Dagupan City.

I stopped at 95 in both the two contests in deference to the man who fought along side with my father against Mao-Tse Tung’s Chinese and North Korean Communist troops in the Korean War in the 1950s.

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But a good example of athleticism, I told police colonels and majors who treated me with booze, was Army Four Stars General David Petraeus (USMA 1974).When the jogging buff Petraeus, whose body looks like a 35 years old man according to Bob Woodward’s book Obama’s War, was the commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and Commander, U.S. Forces Afghanistan (USFOR-A), every colonels who wants to confer with him could find themselves running and discussing with him in a 5 miles (8 kilometers) speed jog that the general has been doing regularly. Petraeus, however, was, disgraced as  CIA Director because of a tryst with a pretty West Point alumna who was a writing her dissertation for her Harvard studies about him.

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As what Chris McDougal of The Daily Beast (successor of Newsweek Magazine) described the run-till-you-drop exercise regimens of Petraues in 2010:” At 57, the newly minted leader of the U.S. efforts in Afghanistan still likes to start his day at sun-up with a five-mile run, blazing out each of those miles in under six minutes. Then it’s straight to the weight room, where he ignores all those cushy-seated machines and heads for his torture device of choice: a single iron bar, lag-bolted eight feet overhead. A Petraeus pull-up is nothing as simple as hoisting your own body weight up and down a few dozen times. Instead, he slowly jack-knifes from the hips until his shoelaces are level with his face. After 20 of those babies, he drops to the floor for crisp 100 or so pushups. And to recover from these self-imposed beatings, the general treats himself to a total of one meal per day and four hours of sleep. This was from a guy who a year ago was being treated for prostate cancer and survived getting shot in the chest when a soldier tripped during a live-fire drill”.

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Last week I rubbed elbows with San Carlos City's Chief of Police Supt. (Lt. Col) Charles Umayam (PNPA 2000) and Binmaley new Police Chief Supt. Marlon Castillo (PNPA 1998). I enjoyed talking with these two down-to-earth officers who have good future that await them. I regaled the duo at Charles' (my political science student at Lyceum Northwestern) office in San Carlos City's Police Station about how the Reagan Administration sustained the Contra rebels versus the Sandinista in Nicaragua by funneling to them the proceeds of tens of millions of dollars from the sale of U.S spare parts sold by U.S Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North and the Israeli Mossad (Spies) for the Iranian U.S made F-14s, F-15s as its fought Iraq in the 1980s.

Castillo, I learned, was assigned as chief of police of the five towns in Ilocos Sur before he was whisked, through the intercession of then acting Pangasinan Police Provincial Director S/Supt. Sterling Blanco, at the Pangasinan’s PPO as legal officer since he is a law graduate like Umayam. Barely warming his seat at his new post at the Police Civil Relation Office at the PPO he was reassigned again at the biggest town in terms of voting population in the 2^nd Congressional District.

Umayam told me that he and Castillo vigorously worked hand in hand in apprehending and discouraging those enterprising folks who run a bukis or a jueteng (that piggy backs on the winning result of Meridian Jai-Alai) by crisscrossing the common boundary of San Carlos and Binmaley.

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Without defending himself against the barrages of expose’ unleashed by Senators Allan Peter Cayetano and Antonio Trillanes, Vice President Jejomar Binay chances to be president in 2016 would be as bleak as the color of the alkitran (asphalt or sealant) used by those in the Ghetto or squatter area to seal their rusty rooftop.

The significant 15% plunged of Binay in the latest polls at Pulse Asia only shows that he is destined to follow the fate of moneyed former Senator Manny Villar when he became a target of the big guns of his presidential rivals’ demolition team.

If U.S Presidents are “singed but not burn” as motto of the Annual Gridiron Dinner held by the U.S Media (Do we have that Philippine version?) for a U.S President, Binay and Villar have been burned mercilessly by their detractors with corruption issues.

The aggravating circumstance that would make Cayetano particularly liable was he roasted, the already razed Jojo as his skins could attest, in his take-no-prisoner’s Senate Investigation.

Politically double "murder" with ignominy pag nagkata-on ang kaso ng eloquent Senator Alan Peter Cayetano.

(You can read my selected columns at http://mortzortigoza.blogspot.com and articles at Pangasinan News Aro. You can send comments too attotomortz@yahoo.com).