MANILA, Philippines — President Rodrigo Duterte, once again, has urged the Congress to enact a law that would revive the mandatory Reserve Officers' Training Corps or he would issue an executive order that would make it so.
A bill reinstituting the mandatory ROTC for Grades 11 and 12 students in public and private schools nationwide is pending before the House of Representatives.
Duterte said he wanted to require mandatory ROTC for senior high school students to "instill patriotism" and "love of country among our youth."
What Duterte didn't mention in his call to make ROTC mandatory is why the program was made optional in 2001.
On Jan. 23, 2002, Republic Act 9163 or the National Service Training Program Act of 2001 was signed into, allowing college students to choose between ROTC, Literacy Training Service and Civil Welfare Training Service as part of their required National Service Training Program.
Twitter user Emmanuel Cocina pointed out that corruption was rampant when ROTC was compulsory.
"Back when it was mandatory, students paid their officers so that they won't undergo the program but still get a passing grade," Cocina said.
Back when it was mandatory, students paid their officers so that they won’t undergo the program but still get a passing grade.
— Emmanuel Concina (@emmancon) November 24, 2018
A UST student, Mark Chua, exposed this practice in The Varsitarian in Feb 2001.
Death of UST cadet Mark Chua
Concina recalled that a University of Santo Tomas student and cadet exposed this practice. His body was later found floating in the Pasig River.
Mark Chua, along with fellow cadet Romulo Yumul, disclosed the corruption in the university's ROTC program in The Varsitarian's Feb. 21, 2001 issue.
According to a March 18, 2018 report from The Varsitarian, the story titled "Struggle Against the System" revealed the formal complaint of Chua and Yumul against Maj. Demy Tejares, the commandant of the UST ROTC unit, and other Department of Military Science and Tactics officials.
Chua went missing after the story was published and his father Welson received a call claiming that the UST student was kidnapped.
On March 18, 2001, Chua's body was found floating in the Pasig River. His body was wrapped in a carpet, his face covered with masking tape and his hands were tied.
In 2004, a Manila court found ROTC cadet Arnufo Aparri Jr. guilty of killing Chua. He was sentenced to death and was ordered to pay the family a 50,000-peso indemnity. However, Aparri's sentenced was downgraded to life imprisonment without parole when the death penalty was abolished in 2006.
Another accused, Eduardo Tabrilla, pleaded guilty to homicide in 2006 while the other two involved — Paul Tan and Michael Manangbao — are still at large, according to The Varsitarian.
Road to ROTC reform
Chua's death led to a series of protests by student activist groups, who planned barricades and launched a signature drive to abolish the ROTC program.
Sen. Ramon Magsaysay Jr., who had committed to working for the abolition of mandatory ROTC, said in 2001 that while the program made sense in the Philippines before World War II, the situation had changed since then.
He said that with the absence of external threats to national defense and security, a focus on military training was no longer necessary.
He also pointed out that the Armed Forces of the Philippines only recruited around 10 percent of the 400,000 cadets who graduated from the program yearly, indicating, he said, that most students were not interested in a career in the military.
"I believe students should instead have the option to take up community service or related subjects that will enhance their performance of civic duties," he said then.
He also urged the Defense department to stop all irregularities and malpractice in the ROTC program, noting that students had been able to bypass the requirement of attending training through deals with officers.
Angelo Reyes, Defense secretary at the time, had acknowledged the need for an update to the ROTC law but said the Armed Forces of the Philippines still needs to have a reserve force.
"I am entertaining the idea of taking in only 25,000 cadets every year whom we can give proper training, allowance and other benefits. With this, we'll have a smaller but higher quality reserve force," he said then.
Sen. Renato Cayetano, who was the bill's principal sponsor at the Senate, said when it was passed into law, said that it was important for the Filipino youth to "be motivated, trained, organized and mobilized in military training, literacy and civic welfare."
"Finally, college students are now given a choice on how to participate in nation-building through civic consciousness aside from the ROTC which was imposed 76 years ago," he said at the time.
The law made the NSTP mandatory for all college students while the mandatory ROTC program it replaced only covered males.