The PMA ‘hazing’ hogwash smells like a cover-up for continuing bestiality - BY THE WAY by Max V. Soliven

That "medico-legal" fairy tale being peddled by the top brass of the Philippine Military Academy smells. Surely, PMA Superintendent Maj. Gen. Manuel Carranza Jr. doesn’t expect the public to swallow the PMA alibi that Cadet Fourth Class Monico de Guzman died of water in his lungs which, in turn, triggered cardiac arrest.

If we resurrected the expression, "Tell it to the Marines!" it would be futile. For even the Marines, many of whose officers came from being brutalized themselves in their plebe days in the PMA, wouldn’t believe that horseshit.

To begin with, De Guzman was one of 165 new cadet-entrants admitted only last April 1, or eight days before he died. You don’t develop water in your lungs in just one week. If he had a lung condition, then, the unfortunate De Guzman shouldn’t have been admitted into the Academy. Then there’s the phoney baloney report by an unidentified medical officer on duty (as the newspaper story said) at the plebe barracks that a "cursory examination" of De Guzman’s body "showed no hematoma tell-tale signs of severe beating." That quotation is lifted directly from the statement issued by the PMA. Kindly give the public the name of this unnamed "medical officer", General Carranza, so we can identify the jerk! And please show us a plebe who is bruise-free after over a week in that school where upperclassmen traditionally count sadism as a virtue!

Next, Carranza alleges that hospital records revealed that De Guzman had water in his lungs which doctors in the Baguio General Hospital (BGH) – tried to pump out, but – Susmariosep, get this – the machine kuno along with a respirator, stopped functioning due to the power outage. Gee whiz. Now they’re trying to pass the blame over to the National Power Corporation’s "blackout" for poor De Guzman’s death! The final explanation is that, owing to this failure, the patient’s blood pressure plunged, and this precipitated cardiac arrest.

The crowning insult to the public’s intelligence is the claim of Carranza that he tried to persuade De Guzman’s parents to agree to an autopsy on the boy but had not yet received a "positive response." When a cadet dies under suspicious circumstances, you can bet your bottom peso his parents, unless they’re cowed, will be crying for an autopsy. If President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is serious about a full investigation, she must direct the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) to conduct a complete medico-legal autopsy of the young man’s body.

Even a layman like this writer knows that you don’t accumulate water in your lungs like you experience the hiccups. And if water, indeed, was in cadet De Guzman’s lungs, it wasn’t something to be pumped out, even with the aid of a respirator. A drastic surgical approach, my doctor friends tell me, would be to operate and put a catheter in to drain out any fluid (and this doesn’t require electric current to operate any pump). A less drastic approach would be to supply the patient with a diuretic. Sanamagan: The PMA explanation stinks like a sewer. It has all the acute symptoms of a cover-up.

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There’s another cadet also in distress, De Guzman’s classmate Mark Anthony Caraan, who’s reported fighting for his life due to "kidney problems secondary to dehydration."

It’s difficult to imagine how a young man’s kidney could be so severely afflicted, after just a week in the academy, that he had to be rushed to the Baguio General Hospital and now, they’re even talking of airlifting him to the Armed Forces of the Philippines Medical Center in V. Luna Hospital in Quezon City.

Once again, Caraan’s condition merits closer inspection. Is Caraan suffering from nephritis? Kidney infection? Or what? One way kidney function can be drastically impaired is by the subject being painfully beaten up – as in hazing. Repeated beating, hacking, and maceration of a person can result in an accumulation in his blood of "myoglobin." When this mass of myoglobin goes into the kidney, it can "choke" the kidney. This is not a joking matter. Doctors yesterday told me that patients have died of such a development.

What bothers me most of all is General Carranza’s bluster and his "don’t-care" attitude. He insists that training at the PMA is traditionally very rigid. (Rigid? Survivors of hazing, even those now holding the rank of general, have told me often in the past that the proper word should be "brutal".) Was Carranza quoted correctly when he declared the following: "This is the acid test if they can really endure life here. We are not forcing them to enroll here"?

The sneering implication in Carranza’s tone is that the two cadets were weaklings, and couldn’t "take it." What a disgusting attitude for someone who is expected, by virtue of his assignment, to be not only a soldier but an educator. Is the PMA, then, a survival course? Is "hazing" then essential to making "men" out of plebes, warriors out of puking adolescents? If that’s the PMA "tradition", then it’s no wonder so many of the academy’s products get involved in rackets like "conversion", ghost deliveries, procurement scandals, jueteng collection, drug syndicate protection, and logging control irregularities. For such a violent tradition churns out cruel rather than noble officers and gentlemen.

This writer has known war at its worst, endured privations and dangers you wouldn’t believe, been blown out of a helicopter by a Viet Cong rocket. But brutality was never a condicio sine qua non in preparing guys like me, or the gutsy soldiers I accompanied into battle, or covered. Ruthless hazing doesn’t produce men – it produces sadists. Bestiality inflicted on youths in their formative years results in converting them into beasts, not paladins or defenders of the people.

Carranza took over as PMA superintendent only three months ago. But already he’s asserting that two casualties out of 165 new cadets is still, in his quoted words, a low percentage. Did he really say that? Then woe to the PMA. For two casualties within less than two weeks of their entering the Academy is unacceptable. In combat, true enough, men can die by the dozen. But to die, even on a military campus, when you’re supposed to be going to school, not a firefight, is another matter altogether.

The PMA, admittedly, cannot be a school for sissies or the timid and cowardly. Yet, the thought necessarily intrudes: Will beating them to within an inch of their lives, forcing them to drink bottles of patis or other vicious stuff, making them prostrate themselves under the bootheel of their schoolmates or subjecting them to degradation and humiliation make them better?

Addressing the PMA only recently, President Arroyo stated that the PMA should be a "hazing-free zone." That’s an order, General C, from your Commander-in-Chief – not a plea or a request? A "low" percentage of casualties is not good enough!

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Labor Secretary Patricia Sto. Tomas is attempting "damage control" when she claims there is no truth to the published report that 11 Japanese firms are planning to pull out of the country. Ms. Sto. Tomas said yesterday she met with members of the Japanese Chambers of Commerce and had been assured they have no plans to pull out their investments.

Okay, we’ll allow her to get away with that statement, hold her to her vow that her Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) will assume jurisdiction over the Toyota "case." She can’t deny that the Toyota car assembly plant in Sta. Rosa, Laguna, has been strike-bound since March 28 after the management dismissed 227 workers for allegedly illegal and destructive acts. The DOLE surely knows the law. Strikes called without due strike notice and required negotiation are illegal. There’s no going around that. The law is the law – except that the DOLE, and our authorities have been timorous or super-slow about cracking down on troublemaking workers and unions even when it’s clear they’re violating the law of the land.

This anti-employer bias shows, constantly, even in arbitration or in the attitudes of the National Labor Relations Council. In a world where economies are sliding into recession, and even the US economy – once so buoyant – is in a state of shock, or Japan itself where business and banking are in the doldrums, our laborers and workers ought to be more practical. They cannot afford to launch aggressive action, particularly "illegal" strikes, when to do so would cause the companies that employ them to collapse, or pack up and leave the country. Yet union loud-mouths and truculent labor organizers whip up strikes willy-nilly, while the rank-and-file tend to follow them blindly.

Let’s face it. We’re not the most attractive labor market in the world. There are many countries in our immediate neighborhood who don’t have a "minimum wage law", and are not, on another plane, "temporary restraining order" (TRO) slaphappy. Moreover, a nation which has 45,000 pugnacious, heat-seeking lawyers, or where somebody cries out "human rights" violation at every excuse, is never considered a safe haven for a foreign investor’s money.

Sto. Tomas may try to put a beaming face on the harsh situation, but those eleven Japanese firms, though they may be polite to her when she confronts them, are indeed poised to flee. Being courteous and not being confrontational in expression is a sometimes frustrating Japanese trait. They call it tatemae language, as contrasted with honne or "straight talk" which is used only when Japanese intimates speak to each other. So, our Labor Secretary must not deceive herself about the situation.

As for Toyota, not only has that firm injected P8 billion in investments here, employing 1,400 workers, but it is the leading automobile and vehicle firm in the world. This was acknowledged only two weeks ago in a frontpage top story of the Asian Wall Street Journal.

If Toyota were to suddenly pull up stakes and abandon the Philippines, that would not merely be a major disaster locally, but would destroy our image as a place for investment all over the planet. There’s no fudging it. If Toyota leaves, everybody else will follow. And no foreign investment will come in after Toyota decides to decamp and go elsewhere in disappointment and disgust.

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President Arroyo, for her part, must beware. She’s being seen as too eager "to please everybody" and – perhaps unfairly – to be afraid of the generals, afraid of that bunch called the "civil society" (whatever that means), afraid of the Cardinal and the bishops, overwhelmed by ex-President Ramos, cozened by Cory’s "yellow" balik-people-power minions, scared of the Communists and the Radical Left (which includes the Red-lining labor unions and federations) – and afraid of losing the May 14 elections.

It’s time for her to show her mettle. To become truly President. To be fearless. To take risks. Give us a glimpse of the old fireworks, the old Macapagal git-up-and-go. That’s what the nation needs – a leader.

La Gloria cannot seek to be universally loved – no champion or leader, or fighting lady, ever is. She must decide to be respected – and, if occasion warrants it, to be feared. It’s no use having a pretty foot, Madam President, unless you put it down. Resolutely. Sometimes you’ll have to stamp it down on the necks of your friends, your subalterns –and your conceited "advisers."