The Rational and the Disillusioned: Comparing Military ...

Dr Pak Nung WONG
The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Pursuing the Soldier-rebels:
Governing Military Rebellions in the Contemporary Congo,

Sierra Leone and the Philippines

Working Paper No.163

April 2010

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National Library of Australia.
ISSN: 1037-4612

ABSTRACT

Since independence, the postcolonial states of Congo, Sierra Leone and the Philippines have
been commonly troubled by military rebellions. Did the sub-Saharan African and Philippine
mutineers share the same cause of action? Did they deploy the same strategies when rebelling
against the states? Did the states manage to resolve the crises? How? These questions not
only interest military science scholars, but also students of postcolonial statecraft. To answer
them, this paper will examine the promise and pitfall of Bayart’s (1993[1989]) African
governmentality approach for analyzing state-military relations in the Philippine context. To
remedy the shortcoming of Bayart’s state-society relations which is conceived in
self-reproducing circulation, a more comprehensive framework will be able to explain social
changes. Thus, I will propose to conceive military rebellion as a political technology of
soldiers, who as individual persons, constantly grapple with the state’s sprawling subjecting
mechanisms, and challenge state power. Therefore, the state is forced to re-contain them.

Against the larger backdrop of the postcolonial state-building projects, I will then
compare and contrast the military rebellions in Congo, Sierra Leone and the Philippines.
Unlike the sub-Saharan African soldiers who rebelled for their own personal interests, the
Philippine state was able to subject the soldiers for state-building purposes. Even when the
soldiers were disillusioned under the Marcos regime (1972-1986) and resorted to rebellions,
the Philippine state was able to re-subject and instrumentalize them, and re-contain the
mutineers in the post-Marcos era (1986 – present), through three arts of governing: producing
martial law, brokering counterinsurgency, and re-containment and law-force indistinction.
These techniques constitute what I mean by ‘pursuing the soldier-rebels’.

Keywords: government of the military, postcolonial statecraft, military rebellions, the
Philippines, state-military relations, sub-Saharan Africa

INTRODUCTION

Shortly after the Cold War, in the 1990s, the postcolonial sovereign states of sub-Saharan
Africa and Southeast Asia were troubled by continued insurgency and military rebellion
(McCoy, 2003; Reno, 1998), which earned them the status as either weak or failed states. In
Sierra Leone and the Philippines, for example, scholars generally impute continued political
turbulences to the absence of a strong centralizing state since the colonial era (Abinales &
Amoroso, 2005; Migdal, 1988: 124-127; Reno, 2003). Nonetheless, as existing scholarships
have been mainly dedicated to intra-regional comparative country-based studies (e.g. Geddes,
1994; Kuhonta, Slater, & Vu, 2008), very little effort has been made to tease out the
differences between the states of the two regions. This knowledge gap may mislead us to an
over-simplistic conclusion and problematic policy implication; the states in sub-Saharan
Africa and Southeast Asia are commonly weak and therefore, they require the same
state-building measures. To fill this knowledge gap, the goal of this paper is to seek for a
diachronic approach to conduct a cross-regional country-based comparative analysis in order
to identify the changing workings of state-military relations. This analysis would shed light
on crafting and implementing suitable initiatives to effectively govern the military.

To achieve this goal, this paper has three objectives. First, I will critique the promise and
pitfall of Bayart’s (1993[1989]) governmentality theoretical scheme. Military rebellions in
Congo (formerly Zaire) and Sierra Leone will be used to illustrate Bayart’s theoretical
contribution. As Bayart’s scheme frames sub-Saharan African state-military relations in an
ostensibly deterministic perpetual self-reproducing loop, it is incapable of explaining changes.
Second, in light of Dean’s (1994) and Migdal’s (2001) governmentality-informed historical
sociology which conceives state-society relations in terms of uncertain contact zones between
the sprawling governmental technologies of the state and the endless self-reinventing
technologies of individuals, military rebellions in the Philippines will be used to illustrate a
more comprehensive theoretical scheme. This scheme goes beyond explaining social changes
as it also captures the neglected strengths of the Philippine sovereign state. In stark contrast to
the relatively static state-military relations that Bayart’s scheme subsumes in sub-Saharan
African politics, the Philippine state managed to pursue soldier-rebels with three governance
techniques when confronted by communist insurgency: (1) it made use of the communist
threat to produce the Martial Law regime and its top-notched soldier-agents, (2) it
instrumentalized soldiers as the local broker-agents of the counterinsurgency-pacification
programs, and (3) when the soldiers were disillusioned and turned themselves into mutineers,
the Philippine state was able to dissolve rebellions through law/force indistinction and
re-contained them into the state hierarchy of electoral offices as its ruling instruments.

In the following pages, I will first use military rebellions in Congo and Sierra Leone to
critique the contribution and weakness of Bayart’s sub-Saharan African governmentality; ‘the

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politics of the belly’. Without throwing the baby out with the water, I will then discuss how
Bayart’s promising scheme may be slightly modified in order to develop a better theoretical
framework which would be capable of explaining changes in state-military relations. Through
a case study of a major figure of the Philippine right-wing militarist movement, I will
elaborate on the meaning of ‘pursuing the soldier-rebels’, which may include three arts of
governing that the postcolonial Philippine state deployed to instrumentalize, pacify and
re-contain soldier-rebels to consolidate and defend its sovereignty in the frontiers.

THE POLITICS OF THE BELLY: GOVERNING MILITARY
REBELLIONS IN CONGO AND SIERRA LEONE

What is Sub-Saharan African Governmentality?
In a sub-Saharan town of Cameroon where Bayart (1993[1989]) conducted field research, the
informant Djoda woke up one day and found that he had to pay double the rent. Due to a lack
of money, he pretended to be the personal representative of the Cameroonian President and
visited a frontier tribe. The tribal chief received him with the highest hospitality, and gave
him a piece of land with a nice house. Encouraged, Djoda went to see the President in
Yaoundé, which is the capital city. Djoda informed him that he was the personal
representative of the tribal chief. Djoda then returned to the tribal chief with a story that his
family members were nominated as mayors and regional administrators of a leading political
party. Djoda then asked for a contribution of one million Cameroon francs. He received the
money, and moreover, the tribal chief even gave him gifts of a fast car and new wife before
he was eventually found to be a liar.

Bayart used this scenario to illustrate his reference to the African state: actors can
opportunistically take advantage of a shared, deep-seated repertoire of discourses and
practices from joining politics. In light of ‘governmentality’ (Foucault, 1991), Bayart
(1993[1989]) delineated that the African state entails a localized sets of practices that actors
utilize to satisfy everyday private desires. For example, the Cameroonian common saying, la
politique du ventre (the politics of the belly), carries the meaning of ‘the goat eats where it is
tethered’ which denotes that those in power all intend to eat up the state resources for their
own bellies. In Nigeria, the saying ‘sharing the national cake’ actually means going into
politics. Likewise, the Kenyan term kula refers to not just eating, but also forming a political
faction to eat up the government together. As a discourse, the African state mainly serves the
practical purpose of eating, neither for the service of the people nor the improvement of the
welfare of its population. As a practice, the state of Africa encompasses a widely-received
political repertoire whereby African individuals mainly engage with the government to
extract state resources for private gains through ‘everyday corruption’ (Blundo & Olivier de
Sardan, 2006).

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Bayart’s theoretical scheme may well be applied to explain coups and their plotters in
other sub-Saharan states, such as Congo and Sierra Leone. It is commonly believed that
personal networks are essential in order for the soldiers to predate for lucrative private gains.
Reminiscent of ‘the politics of the belly’, these selfish mutineers manage to establish,
maintain and rely on complexes of predatory patron–client networks which leech on the weak
state and impede formal institutional rule. In this regard, Reno (1998) defined them as
‘warlords’;

‘rulers and their associates resemble a mafia rather than a government if one thinks of
the latter as necessarily serving some collective interest, however faint and by whatever
means, to be distinguished from the mafia. This absence of collective, versus private,
interest is a major distinguishing feature of warlord politics.’ (Reno, 1998: 3)

As a manifestation of the ‘politics of the belly’, African warlord politics refers to a complex
form of predatory patron–client factionalist repertoire in the post-colonial sub-Saharan Africa.
In exchange for international political legitimacy, foreign financial aid and military support in
the pursuit of their own political supremacy, warlords grant privileged concessions to
neo-colonial foreign powers to tap state resources in the post-colonial era (Reno, 1998: 21).
Rewards in monetary terms and armaments would be used to wage wars against interior and
regional political rivals. Since contending warlords know well how to manipulate the
cleavages between the foreign powers, cross-border insurgency and counterinsurgency
become beneficial events for all parties to make considerable economic returns, and the
necessary avenue to negotiate for political legitimacy. Paradoxically, state failures and
weaknesses contribute to the maintenance of the states in sub-Saharan Africa. Case studies
from the Congo and Sierra Leone will illustrate this self-reproducing loop.

The Politics of the Belly of a Congolese Coup Plotter: Joseph Mobutu
In line with Bayart’s ‘the politics of the belly’ which suggests that unrestrained self-interests
govern military rebellions, Decalo (1976) also instructively stated that African coups are
driven by self-interest motives. Take President Joseph Mobutu (1965–1997) of Congo as an
example. From 1965 to 1970, Mobutu consolidated his political supremacy by establishing
personal rule in the military. Originally assigned as a military colonel by Prime Minister
Patrice Lumumba, Mobutu covertly colluded with foreign powers (i.e. Belgium and United
States) in the early 1960s to initiate a coup against Lumumba and seize state power.
Afterwards, by using the military as a vehicle for a coup against the established constitutional
and organizational framework of the Congolese state founded by the murdered Lumumba,
Mobutu initiated another coup in March 1966 and created his unitary state by removing the
powers of the legislature and dismissing the Prime Minister. He then centralized regional

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administration in his own hands by appointing dependants to be the provincial governors and
reducing the powers of provincial assemblies. In 1967, a referendum was engineered and this
Mobutu country was named ‘Zaire’. While regional rebellions were brutally put down and
rebels were driven out of Zaire’s national borders, Mobutu was noted for his intuitive grasp of
Machiavellian statecraft as ‘he [Mobutu] is in many ways the African Prince – a ruler who
must ultimately rely on his cunning and scheming to remain in command’ (Jackson &
Rosberg, 1982a: 171, emphasis original). Personal rule fashioned Mobutu as the ‘Messiah’
and the ‘Grand Patron’ of Zaire, who represented the ‘authentic Zairian personality’ (Jackson
& Rosberg, 1982a: 172-173).

There are good reasons why Mobutu is entitled to be called Machiavelli’s African Prince.
During the Cold War, in 1986, Mobutu gave up a staunch anti-Communist stance in exchange
for US$448 million of foreign aid from the Western bloc. Mobutu actively supported the
Angolan insurgents Uniõ Nacional para a Independencia Total do Angola (UNITA) in
fighting Zaire’s neighbor, the Angolan Communist regime, by permitting ‘a Zairian air base
at Kamina to resupply UNITA’ and giving other military assistance (Reno, 1998: 151). This
move granted Mobutu extra American diplomatic support in obtaining loans from
international creditors. For instance, creditors such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF)
disbursed US$1.3 billion from 1983 to 1988 and devised annual stabilization programs for
Zaire from 1976 to 1990. Mobutu even managed to establish ties with World Bank officials.
By hiring a World Bank official as his personal assistant, Mobutu had access to ‘confidential
information about granting aid to Zaire’ (Reno, 1998: 152). The Cold War scenes show how
Mobutu manipulated foreign powers and international organizations rather than merely acting
as a client of the foreign superpowers.

In order to turn the rich mineral resources in Zaire into his political resources, Mobutu
initiated the Inga-Shaba project. The project contracted out US$1.5 billion to foreign firms
for a hydro-electrical dam in the Inga area and in exchange, Mobutu received their support in
the pacifying of armed revolts by an American-backed Franco-Belgian military expedition in
the copper-rich Shaba province, which supplied half of Zaire’s mineral exports in the late
1970s. This move granted these foreign firms with further opportunities to tap into the rich
mineral resources in the Shaba region. By forging patron–client relations with foreign powers,
Mobutu served as the key broker for their companies to tap into state resources. However, as
a result of heavy reliance on foreign help, Zaire experienced a drastic decline in agricultural
exports in its foreign trade from twenty-eight percent of its total earnings in 1965 to only six
percent in 1990. In response to the shrinkage of Zaire’s production capacity and the
continuous decline of government revenue, Mobutu abandoned state health care, education
facilities and public works:

‘Mobutu’s decision to allocate 2.1 percent of state spending to health and education in

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1990, compared with 17.5 percent in 1972, reflected a rational choice from the
perspective of a weak-state ruler. The dramatic decline of formal-sector agricultural
production for export also followed Mobutu’s disinterest in cultivating support among
small agricultural producers and entrepreneurs in exchange for revenue and legitimacy.’
(Reno, 1998: 153)

Hence, in contrast to the drastic reduction in state welfare delivery, Mobutu’s privatization of
total government expenditures climbed from twenty-eight percent in 1972 to ninety-five
percent in 1992. Privatization of government expenditure does not necessarily mean that
Mobutu lined his own pockets. Public expenditure was used to maintain a vast constellation
of patron–client networks of Mobutu dependants. They are now found in every nook and
cranny of the Congolese state, replacing Mobutu’s outwitted political rivals. As shown,
Mobutu astutely used civil strife as an instrument to eliminate opponents and negotiate
financial and military support from foreign superpowers. To conclude Mobutu’s
Machiavellian career, Jackson and Rosberg (1982a: 180) stated that Mobutu is a ‘political
man who does not pursue his own interests to the exclusion of the interests of others, but
accommodates other political men and not only tolerates but also uses politician politics for
his own purposes’. These ‘political men’ are not just his dependants inside Zaire, but also
foreign elements.

As illustrated, sub-Saharan African governmentality entails the principle of rationality
on the part of the military elite, which narrowly defines their interests in private terms.
Politics would not be meaningful if they do not serve self-interest. As a research strategy, ‘the
politics of the belly’ tends to ground on the political economy of war and peace, from which
the state elite generates profits. Their acumen in accommodating diverse interests and
manipulating contending forces is the key strategy for survival. ‘The politics of the belly’
serves as a plausible analytical strategy by positing the intricate interconnectedness between
the military elite and foreign powers. However, it says very little about how the foot-soldiers
and ruled majority reacted, rendering the African people a silent and passive population.

In light of this critique, Mobutu once gave an instructive remark:

‘[E]verything is for sale, everything is bought in our country. And in this traffic, holding
any slice of public power constitutes a veritable exchange instrument, convertible into
illicit acquisition of money of other goods.’ (Quoted in Evans, 1989: 570)

This intriguing statement reminds us that this kind of selfish rationality is actually shared by
the rulers and the ruled. Although it might be unevenly shared, the ruled should not be
conceived of as being entirely outside the realm of sub-Saharan African governmentality. For
instance, it is reported that Zaire’s Air Force (FAZA) declared bankruptcy due to looting by

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its own personnel (Bayart, 1993[1989]: 235-236). FAZA pilots and crew members first used
FAZA aircrafts as their own transport company by competing with Air Zaire (the national
civilian airline). To do so, FAZA undercut official national rates by half. With the money that
they received from the illicit business, they bought produce from the interior Congo basin and
sold them in the capital, Kinshasa, at a price that was three times higher. With this lucrative
business, the pilots and the crew members found themselves a new gold mine. However,
because the ground-based staff did not receive a slice of the cake, the aircrafts were badly
maintained, and deterioration caused numerous flight accidents and deaths. In actuality, one
is not entitled to be a warlord without both the presence of loyal followers and
up-and-coming predatory challengers who wage wars against a warlord. Competing cliques
of predatory networks constitute the essence of warlord politics, rendering formal state rules
and regulations redundant. With regard to the collapse of state imperatives in sub-Saharan
Africa, it is therefore unsurprising for a Congolese archbishop to make the following
observation:

‘Why in our courts do people only obtain their rights by paying the judge liberally? Why
do the prisoners’ lives forgotten in prisons? They do not have anyone who can pay the
judge who has their dossiers at hand. Why in our office of administration like public
services, are people required to return day after day to obtain their due? If they do not
pay the clerk, they will not be served. Whoever obtains a scrap of authority, or some
means of pressure, profits from them to pressure and exploit people.’ (Quoted in
Callaghy, 1984: 420)

Echoing Bayart (1993[1989]), those who do not possess military power for a slice of cake in
the government still share the same mentality of ‘eating’ the government – a dominant
African power/knowledge system that treats the African state opportunistically as a flexible
profit-seeking instrument mainly for personal gain. Personal interests are said to be prevalent
in sub-Saharan Africa, encompassing both the mutineer-warlords, soldier-rebels and even the
seemingly vulnerable ruled civilians.

The Politics of the Belly of the Sierra Leonean Soldier-rebels
After the Cold War ended in the early 1990s and international aid decreased significantly, it
was still possible to find an extreme manifestation of this form of popular opportunism in
another sub-Saharan African state – Sierra Leone. In the 1990s, patrimonial states such as
Sierra Leone faced economic and political crises. Economically, Sierra Leone experienced an
apparent exhaustion of its most precious mineral for the world market – diamonds, due to the
world recession of prices for raw materials. Through the De Beers-related diamond-trading
network which connects Sierra Leonean tributors to South African buyers, diamonds

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constitute a large portion of the Sierra Leonean national income (Richards, 1996). After the
Cold War ended, international aid from the Western bloc significantly shrank in the early
1990s as it was seen that there was no further need to maintain the Soviet-West fault-line, and
consequently, a large number of African state rulers faced fiscal crises in maintaining their
political legitimacy. Instead of facilitating the formation of solid state institutions, Sierra
Leone’s rich mineral resources for international trade were used to perpetuate personal rule
and patrimonial plunder. After the 1990s, the Sierra Leonean government started to find itself
caught by continuous insurgency within its territory as a result of a severe fiscal crisis and
intense resource competition.

In attempts to rescue the faltering economy by negotiating for international aid, Sierra
Leone state rulers sided with the United States of America and served as a military base for
the Americans. The political alliance automatically earned Sierra Leone the ire of an
American enemy in Arab Africa, a Libyan Islamic strongman, Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi.
In retaliation, Colonel Gaddafi supported a military rebel group along the Sierra
Leone-Liberia border named the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), which invaded the
diamond-rich Gola Forest. The Republic of Sierra Leone Military Force (RSLMF) originally
served as the government troops of the one-party Sierra Leone state, headed by the Sierra
Leone People’s Party (SLPP). RSLMF troops quickly found themselves caught in bitter
guerrilla warfare in the insurgent-infested Gola Forest. As a result of the continued fiscal
inability on the part of the state to maintain the daily operation of the counterinsurgency
programs in the early 1990s, these RSLMF troops dispersed when they found new fortunes in
the Gola Forest. With guns and ammunitions that were received from the state, these
military-turn-rebel groups started to operate as diamond dealers, using mixed tactics of
forging patron–client bonds with villagers, and coercion and terrorism. There were reports of
looting, human rights violations, mutilation and torture by these armed groups to coerce local
villagers to work for their diamond mines. These opportunists are known as ‘sobels’
(soldier-rebels, or ‘soldier by day, rebel by night’) (Richards, 1996: 7). Utilizing the
underground smuggling networks of the South Africa-based diamond trade, these scattered
‘sobel’ groups managed to make lucrative profits out of the unexploited mineral resources
within the impenetrable Gola Forest.

Within this context, schools shut down and the formal education system deteriorated
rapidly due to continual state failures. Many young Sierra Leoneans roamed around with
nothing to do. Targeted as a source of manpower for mining and guerrilla warfare, the youth
were recruited by various factions of ‘sobel’, either voluntarily or involuntarily. Caught in
this perpetual civil war, some of the youth organized themselves into
defensive-turn-predatory guerrilla groups to establish, protect and expand their own
territories of diamond mining, as a counter-strategy against the oppressive ‘sobel’ militia.

This largely explains why most insurgent-infested areas in Sierra Leone are alluvial

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diamond areas, where young and small-scale distributors and non-industrial methods of
mining are found. With the initial incomes generated from the first diamond harvests, these
young guerrillas bought an abundant supply of Kalashnikov (AK-47) assault rifles smuggled
from neighboring Liberia and Guinea, and turned themselves into the next generation of
‘sobel’ militias, which seemed to repeat the pattern of their oppressors. Richards coined the
widespread ‘sobel’ phenomenon into the phrase ‘fighting for the rain forest’, which refers to a
specific Sierra Leonean political repertoire – numerous young warlords who have ruled the
fragmented country through perpetual war since the 1990s:

‘[t]he problem is that the cat is out of the bag. Any opportunist with a few boxes of guns,
fighting in forested country, willing to make a virtue of isolation and poor
communications, can hold a weak state like Sierra Leone to ransom.’ (Richards, 1996:
154)

In sum, from Congo’s Joseph Mobutu to the ‘sobel’ diamond-warlords in Sierra Leone,
the state in Africa is seen to be caught by these predators who wage perpetual wars, centering
more on private interests than establishing institutional rule for public good. As various
strands of military rebellions have commonly shown, the actions of mutineers are seen to be
resiliently rational and selfish on these terms. To borrow Weber’s widely cited formulation of
‘patrimonialism’ – ‘that is, of one master’s domination over other masters who are not subject
to his patriarchal power implies an affiliation of authority relations which differ only in
degree and content, not in structure’ (Weber, 1978: 1013, italics added), ‘the politics of the
belly’ proves to be the resilient ‘structure’ of the African state. It has continuously reproduced
itself from the Cold War to the post-Cold War period. As Bayart’s sub-Saharan African
governmentality scheme is not sufficient enough to explain social changes resultant of
postcolonial state-building in contemporary Southeast Asia, a more comprehensive
theoretical framework of state-military relations should therefore be put into place.

PURSUING THE SOLDIER-REBELS: TOWARDS A MORE
COMPREHENSIVE FRAMEWORK FOR EXPLAINING CHANGING
STATE-MILITARY RELATIONS

Given the presence of various morbid symptoms of the Southeast Asian states, it may be
convenient to simply extend Bayart’s ‘politics of the belly’ argument into the Southeast Asian
context. However, his governmentality-informed theoretical formulation of the state is worth
a second look for a more comprehensive analysis of state-military relations which may
explain the changes. In this regard, Dean (1999) instructively elaborated governmentality in
terms of uncertain contact zones where the subjecting effects of the national state meet the

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technologies of continuous self-reinvention of individual-subjects (Foucault, 1988: 19). Such
spatial and symbolic theorization of the state-in-society as an undetermined, imagined and
territorializing community constituted by the discursive construction and social practices of
the inhabitants is parallel with Migdal’s definition of the state:

‘a field of power marked by the use and threat of violence and shaped by (1) the image
of a coherent, controlling organization in a territory, which is a representation of the
people bounded by that territory, and (2) the actual practices of its multiple parts.’
(Migdal, 2001: 15-16, italics original)

Echoing Bayart who conceived the African state in terms of discourse and practice, Migdal
(2001: 18-19) clarified that practices or tactics of governmentality, often go against and batter
the image of a coherent controlling state, and therefore, allows for room to reconstitute the
state and society. Whereas Bayart conceived that the discourse and practice of the ‘politics of
the belly’ is un-problematically reproduced by the actors, thus implying a static vision of
state-society relations, Migdal privileged practice over discourse, thus promising a diachronic
comparative analytic approach which is capable of explaining social changes.

Local wielders of sovereign power (e.g. frontier strongmen and tribal chieftains) have
been regarded as either impeding state-building or being insulated from state encroachment
(Hansen, 2005; Hansen & Stepputat, 2006). Instead of merely seeing the state and the local
powers as two incompatible entities, I want to add that the state has been able to reach and
instrumentalize local powers for state-building. Although various supranational systems (e.g.
the United Nations) provide juridical frameworks which uphold state sovereignty and limit
national identity (Jackson & Rosberg, 1982b), one cannot dismiss that the national power
elite strives to develop state capacity from within, and without being solely dependent on
external entities (Reinhard, 1996; Waldner, 1999). Moreover, apart from the aforementioned
Congolese and Sierra Leonean cases, there is considerable evidence which suggests that the
international juridical frameworks were compromised in historical conjunctures (Callahan,
2003; McCoy, 2006, 2009).

In the search for a postcolonial cross-regional comparative scheme of state-military
relations, existing accounts of Mexican and Philippine state formation in the Chicano and
Mindanao frontiers by Acuña (1974) and Abinales (2000) are instructive because they
illuminate the centrality of the frontier strongman’s Janus-faced practice for colonial and
postcolonial state-building; otherwise known as brokerage. As the making of state
sovereignty must hinge on the successful instillation of insider knowledge that exclusively
links the state and its subjects mostly in the intimate cultural forms of identities and practices
(Bartelson, 1995: 188-189; Migdal, 2004), the frontier strongman’s realization and grasp of
tacit local knowledge and Janus-faced brokerage practice as the hidden rule of the game are

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both critical to position himself along a volatile interface between a centralizing state and
diverse frontier powers.

Thousands of miles away from the sub-Saharan Africa, the postcolonial Philippines in
the archipelagic Southeast Asia have also been troubled by military rebellions. In particular,
the late Lieutenant Colonel Rodolfo E. Aguinaldo (1946-2001) of the Reformed Armed
Forces Movement (RAM) whose career as a martial law soldier and leader of a right-wing
militarist organization reveals a resilient paradox in post-colonial Philippine state formation;
that is, the existence of military counterinsurgents as the state’s power-brokers is
instrumentalized for the consolidation of Philippine postcolonial state-building in its frontiers.
How did the Philippine state subject the military? How did the cause of action of Philippine
soldiers differ from their sub-Saharan counterparts? How did the Philippine state dissolve
Aguinaldo’s military rebellions? How was this soldier-rebel re-contained by the state? To
answer these questions, a more comprehensive theoretical framework which is capable of
explaining changes must be explicated.

In contrast to the sub-Saharan African ethos of ‘the politics of the belly’, the
historical-ethnography of Aguinaldo will be used to substantiate what I mean by a more
comprehensive framework of state-military relations, dubbed ‘pursuing the soldier-rebels’. In
a nutshell, ‘pursuing the soldier-rebels’ entails the following expositions:

I. It is an ethnographic-historical comparative approach to posit the subjecting
postcolonial state and the soldier-rebels as reflexive persons at two ends of the
state-military relations analytical dualism. In light of governmentality (Foucault,
1988), it conceives military rebellion in terms of uncertain contact zones where the
subjecting mechanism of the state and the reflective selves of soldiers meet.

II. While it informs the fieldwork practice of how state-military relations may be
documented by conducting research in the national capital and the pacifying frontiers,
it holds that the soldiers are Janus-faced power-brokers who juggle across the
conflicting interests of the centralizing state and diverse frontier powers. These
contradictions may often expose them to predicaments and disillusions, which tempt
them to resort to rebellion.

III. On the one hand, the agency of a soldier-rebel may well be molded by the
meritocratic subjecting mechanisms of the state. On the other hand, upon dispatching
to the field, they may also be disturbed, confused and even awakened by the
discrepancies between the clashing realities that are concomitantly perpetuated by the
hegemonic state and retold/deflected by the frontier powers.

IV. By diachronically pursuing the soldier-rebels along their criss-crossing life histories
that bisect a range of communities and actors in the trans-local/national space,
‘pursuing the soldier-rebels’ may include three arts of governing that the postcolonial

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Philippine state used to govern the military: (1) the production of martial law, (2)
brokering counterinsurgency, (3) law/force indistinction and re-containment through
electoral democracy.

These will be elaborated in the next section.

GOVERNING PHILIPPINE MILITARY REBELLIONS: THE RISE AND
DEATH OF LIEUTENANT COLONEL RODOLFO E. AGUINALDO,
1970-2001

Producing the Martial Law: The Making of an Anti-communist Legend
Aguinaldo was not just a product of the Philippine state, but also a creation of the Cold War
circumstances in the Asia-Pacific region where transnational forces of communism and
anti-communism collided. Approximately two months before President Ferdinand Marcos
formally declared martial law in September 1972, a Philippine-registered vessel named
Karagatan (meaning ‘ocean’ in the Tagalog-Filipino language) carrying unlicensed foreign
armaments was intercepted by the Philippine armed forces outside the sea-waters of Palanan,
a remote coastal municipality of the Isabela province, eastern Cagayan Valley. Crewmen of
Chinese nationality were allegedly identified onboard. The arms were reportedly to have
originated from the People’s Republic of China for supporting the New People’s Army (NPA),
the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). In the midst of public
controversies, President Marcos insisted that the nation was threatened by a foreign power.
This justified the imposition of the Martial Law, granting the military with discretionary
powers to detain and interrogate individuals who were suspected to be associated with the
global communist movement as the enemy of the Philippine state.1 The alleged existence of
the communist threat was a pre-requisite of the declaration of the martial law, thus lending it
legitimacy as a national security measure of the Philippine state.

In the late 1960s, the communist ideologues of the Huk rebellion (1940s to 1960s) had
decided to go beyond the ‘Huklandia’ of the central Luzon plain to reach the southern and
northern Philippine frontiers due to a few strategic considerations (Kerkvliet, 1986,
1990[1977]; Pomeroy, 1994[1963]).2 During the Cold War, aside from using military combat
to counter communism, soft-power programs such as civilian counterinsurgency were also
introduced into various Southeast Asia states (Bowie, 1997; Landsdale, 1972). In the
Philippine Cagayan Valley, there were two legitimate forms of civilian counterinsurgency that
the local powers could perform: the Civilian Home Defence Forces (CHDF) which was
active from the 1970s to 1986, and the Civilian Armed Forces Geographical Units (CAFGU)
which was active in the post-1986 era. Despite their differences, the organizational gist is the
same: to delegate extra commands of firearms and financial resources to the local

11

power-holders in order to mobilize the civilian population against the communist insurgency.
The civilian counterinsurgency also gave rise to vigilante groups and their acts of

exercising extrajudicial violence (Amnesty International, 1988; Hedman, 2000). A leading
example would be the Reformed the Armed Forces Movement (RAM), a right-wing militarist
organization whose core members were mostly top-gun graduates of the Philippine Military
Academy (PMA), mainly recruited by the architect of the Martial Law regime, the
Cagayan-born Atty. Juan Ponce Enrile, Secretary of National Defense (1972-1986).
Graduating with a top-notch ranking of number two out of a 102-strong PMA class in 1972
(Academy Scribe, 2008 [1984]: 96), the young Ilocano man, Rodolfo Espejo Aguinaldo, was
handpicked by the Ministry of National Defense to join the secretive Constabulary Security
Unit (CSU) as an intelligence officer for countering communism. After almost a decade of
marking a distinguished record in capturing key figures of the Philippine communist
movement, including Jose Maria Sison and Saturnino Ocampo, Aguinaldo was promoted to
the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and assigned a special mission to pacify prolonged insurgency
in Enrile’s birthplace, the Cagayan Valley. Stationed in the regional seat, Tuguegarao,
Aguinaldo served as the chief of the Philippine Constabulary (PC).

In the early 1980s, Aguinaldo commanded the provincial police force with irregular
financial support from a deteriorating Martial Law regime. Realizing that the military was
increasingly factionalized by competing political groups, Aguinaldo and his PMA classmates
formed the RAM under the aegis of Enrile. Identifying communism as the enemy of the
Philippine state, RAM forcibly upheld the doctrine that the military should remain internally
intact and refrain from any external political influence. When taking necessary security
measures, the military as the determined vanguard of the state should be emancipated from
any forms of political and social control in order to defend the collective welfare of the
Filipinos. While the singular end justifies all possible means, state intactness is prioritized
over core social values, moral and civic virtues in exceptional situations of civil war, foreign
invasion and states of emergency. The theory and practice were nonetheless interrogated and
modified by Aguinaldo when he was assigned to the field, Cagayan Valley.

Approximately in the year of 1979, Aguinaldo was dispatched to Cagayan as a covert
intelligence officer to infiltrate the insurgent-infested settlements along the foothills of the
Sierra Madre Mountains. He was provided with substantial assistance by the residents in the
Municipality of Gattaran. It was there that he later married an Ilocana named Lerma
Dumaguit of Barangay Calaogan Dackel, where Aguinaldo established a counterinsurgency
base: Camp David Corpuz, named after his close field guide, an Aeta/Negrito tribesman who
died in an encounter with the NPA guerrillas. Prior to joining Aguinaldo’s mission, Corpuz
was among the peasant-insurgents who were captured by Aguinaldo and surrendered. Instead
of merely deploying coercive measures, Aguinaldo had a discussion with them about their
common concern: impoverishment. By immediately meeting their tangible needs, he was able

12

to convince some of them to lay down their guns and join his ‘Task Force Kappia (meaning
peace in the Ilocano language)’ to counter communist insurgency.3

In the early and mid-1970s, Manila-dispatched counterinsurgency troops in Gattaran
mainly relied on ruthless suppression and terrorism against the revolting peasantry. Therefore,
the counterinsurgency program was not well-received locally. In the late 1970s, Aguinaldo
was once assigned by the Ministry of National Defense to take up special training in a
US-sponsored military base in Taiwan, where he specialized in Maoist guerrilla warfare to
prepare for the special mission.4 When he was assigned to Cagayan, he modified the costly
US-originated combat-oriented model into localized tactics due to a reduced budget and
usually late and irregular financial delivery. These tactics were then recognized and
incorporated into the recent PMA curriculum of ‘Internal Security Operation (ISO)’.5
Nowadays, ISO puts more emphasis on localization practices in two respects. First, officers
should consider local knowledge in terms of culture, institutions, networks and contexts as
useful resources for restoring law and order (c.f. Scott, 1998). Secondly, counterinsurgency
would not be successful without the willing cooperation of the frontier societies. Operators
are expected to be the broker-agent in collaborating with local government units, private
sectors, business and civic associations to formulate and implement community-based
initiatives, e.g. public exhibitions, crime prevention talks, rural development programs and
free medical missions (Aguirre & Villareal, 1990[1987]).

Instead of merely antagonizing the local inhabitants through coercive measures,
Aguinaldo immersed into the local communities. He gained social acceptance from a range of
local powers and made use of Janus-faced brokerage politics to co-opt the peasant-insurgents
into his privately-funded army of vigilantes. They would patrol public order and fight against
the Maoist guerrillas. Since some members of the vigilantes were the marginalized
Aeta/Negrito tribesmen in the Philippine state-building project, this private army was then
legendarily named in their honor as the ‘Black Army’. Aguinaldo successfully turned himself
from a high-profile PMA graduate and military officer into a local tribal chieftain by
performing as a Cagayano strongman. This allowed the frontier populations to identify with
him. Often casually dressed in short pants and slippers, he was popularly addressed as ‘Agi
nac Cagayan (Agi of Cagayan)’. This was a Robin Hood persona, someone that the poor
peasants could turn to seek tangible help. However, confronted by the fiscal constraints
resultant of a deteriorating Marcos administration in the early 1980s, Aguinaldo needed to
look for additional financial sources to maintain the counterinsurgency program. It
conveniently explains why Aguinaldo forged a tactical alliance with the illegal business
networks in the Cagayan Valley (c.f. Coronel, 1993), especially the jueteng, who were the
gambling lords of the Philippine illegal lottery.

Brokering Counterinsurgency: Fighting Insurgency through Jueteng

13

According to a former senior staff of the CSU, Aguinaldo’s determination and leadership
capability were exceptional.6 He could accomplish tasks in unfavorable environments with
limited resources because of his creativity and boldness to pursue unconventional measures.
Aguinaldo’s involvement in the jueteng helps to illustrate this point. Jueteng was originally
imported into Luzon from China’s Fujian province by Chinese migrant-traders. In the
Hokkien language, the word jueteng means flower den, a mobile stall put up by the Chinese
peddlers to sell flowers and confectionaries in the streets. These dens usually became popular
gathering places of street-corner fortune-telling and petty gambling. As lotteries are easily
comprehended and participated by different walks of life, jueteng quickly became a popular
gambling game among the Filipino masses.

In the Cagayan Valley, jueteng operations were already active in the 1960s through an
ethnic Chinese merchant named Ang Chung. As one of Ang Chung’s businesses was
grain-trading, his local and trans-Luzon connections enabled him to network effectively with
the peasants, politicians, businessmen, police, military and insurgents. After Ang Chung’s
death in the 1970s, his son-in-law Ben De Guzman took over his businesses, including the
jueteng. De Guzman then inherited his father-in-law’s name: ‘Ang Chung’, signifying the
continuity of jueteng operations in the region. Given Ben ‘Ang Chung’ De Guzman’s
hands-on access and knowledge of the Cagayano political economy, it was therefore not
surprising for Aguinaldo to establish a tactical alliance with him. Aguinaldo needed a
ready-made organizational infrastructure to finance and conduct the counterinsurgency
program.7 Ang Chung needed Aguinaldo to protect and further his legal and illicit businesses.
The two therefore found each other useful in achieving their very different goals.

Since the jueteng consists of a pyramidal complex network which connects a range of
localized actors that cut across different social class and status groups as well as geographical
territories, it conveniently served as a web of surveillance, intelligence, wealth redistribution
and coercion. Aguinaldo would recycle such for counterinsurgency purposes. In Cagayan, for
instance, from the 1960s and onward, jueteng operations were organized through a
patron-client network of the following roles: banca, cabo, kubrador and acha-dor. Ang
Chung was the banca; the major operator who was assisted by a number of cabo. As jueteng
was based in Tuguegarao, the cabo did the legwork in traveling to other municipalities to
monitor the operation and collect bets through the local contact persons, known as kubrador.
A kubrador should be able to protect the operation in the assigned jurisdiction. As a result, it
was not surprising to find a kubrador occupying public office, such as in the police station
and municipal hall. Under a kubrador, a group of acha-dor was assigned into smaller
bailiwicks for daily operation. Village officials, vigilante groups and random members of the
police outposts were reported to perform the duty of the acha-dor. Bet collections were
conducted in a bottom-up fashion from the rural villages up to Ang Chung’s grain-storehouse

14

(bodega) in Tuguegarao. An incentive-based counter-checking system among the acha-dor,
kubrador and cabo ensured that the original sum of bet money would reach the banca intact.
After the winning numbers were released from Tuguegarao, money would be siphoned down
from the banca through the cabo, kubrador and acha-dor. These individuals were allowed to
take away a certain agreed percentage of commission from the money before passing it down
to the next contact(s). In case of monetary dispute, for example, an acha-dor could bypass the
kubrador and appeal to the cabo or banca directly, who would mediate. Despite that there
were occasional internal squabbles, all these individuals knew discreetly well that the
winning numbers were maneuvered by the banca and confidantes after calculating which
numbers would bring the cabo, kubrador and acha-dor the most considerable monetary
returns.8

Knowing well the ways that the jueteng operated and connected all walks of life in
Cagayan, Aguinaldo joined and utilized the jueteng for his own purposes. By using the
considerable monthly protection fee given by Ang Chung, Aguinaldo financed his
counterinsurgency programs. Keeping a low-profile and simple life-style, Aguinaldo allowed
the ordinary and poor masses to visit his office to ask for services and assistance. He
identified himself with the poor people by openly criticizing the landlords and businessmen
as well as politicians for exploitation and corruption. Notes of pesos were immediately
fetched from the desk drawers and passed to those in need, quickly giving him a popular
image of being the ‘Robin Hood’ of Cagayan. This Robin Hood persona would not be
complete without projecting violence and displaying coercive capabilities. For instance, when
Aguinaldo ran for provincial governor of the Cagayan province against the long-reigning
political giants, Teresita Dupaya and Tito Dupaya in the 1987-88 election, he campaigned in
an armored carrier followed by a convoy of A-150 tanks and military trucks, and expressed a
wish to help the poor with ruthless determination in front of massive crowds who were
chanting his nickname ‘Agi! Agi!’:

‘Throughout my adult life, I have always been fighting a bloody and senseless war.
Filipinos killing brother Filipinos. What for? ... The time has come to bring peace to our
poor and weary people.’ (quoted in McCoy, 1999: 305)

Knowing that the Commission of Elections of the Philippines (COMELEC) had asked the
Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) to remove him for alleged electoral fraud and
terrorism from the 11 May 1987 election, Aguinaldo indiscreetly warned the COMELEC in
front of journalists and correspondents:

‘They [COMELEC] just start trying to disarm my men and I hit their houses and I wipe
them out. At a given signal, we chop off the heads of anybody who is foolish. We will

15

send them straight to hell, from the grandfather to the grandson. If I am cheated of
victory and the people say nothing, then I leave the country. But if the people want a
bloody revolution, who am I to refuse them?’9

Aguinaldo’s creation of this Robin Hood persona should be distinguished from the
‘noble robber’ whom Hobsbawm (1985: 49-56) qualified to be a ‘social bandit’. Whereas a
social bandit insists that as an outlaw, ‘morally positive actions such as robbing the rich and
not killing too much’ are protests against oppression and injustice, as a Manila-dispatched
counterinsurgency agent, Aguinaldo astutely utilized the Robin Hood heroism in order to
pacify the aggrieving peasantry. He did so by making himself the live embodiment of hope to
the poor. As Aguinaldo’s Robin Hood image would not be possibly maintained without
substantial financing to support his charitable and violent acts in being the ‘strongman’
(Tagalog: kapagyarihan; Ibanag: mangiyegu) of the Cagayano masses, the jueteng provided
him with the patron-client machinery and substantial finances to engage with the political
economy of the frontier society. To counter communist insurgency, the jueteng served as both
a surprisingly creative wealth-redistribution and ideological system, offering monetary
assistance to the deprived and sustaining the poor people’s hope that they may become rich
one day. Towards the end of the Martial Law regime, the operation of the jueteng was solidly
forged by Ang Chung, Aguinaldo and a lawyer-cum-businessman named Atty. Victor ‘Bing’
Padilla, under a company named the Blue Pearl Corporation. Following the downfall of the
Martial Law regime and exile of President Ferdinand Marcos to Hawai’i, United States, in
1986, the regional jueteng operations were challenged by an emerging Chinese-Ibanag
strongman in Tuguegarao, Delfin T. Ting.

Re-enacting State Sovereignty: Law/Force Indistinction and Re-containment through
Electoral Democracy

A state is defined as a community which claims the legitimate monopolization of physical
violence (Weber, 1948: 78). Although the state is governed by a legal framework, the rule of
law may not be ensured without using force. In situations such as rebellion and secessionism,
the merging of force and law is said to be critical (Giddens, 1987). The use of force and
non-force (e.g. legal and normative measures) constitute a complementary art of governing to
dissolve internal threats and re-contain the challengers. Aguinaldo’s 1990 secessionist
rebellion and his subsequent re-access into the Philippine electoral democracy would
illustrate this art.

After the Martial Law regime was overthrown by the People Power Revolution in 1986,
in stark contrast to Marcos’s dictatorial rule, the newly installed President Corazon Aquino
stood for nation-wide democratization. This turned the Philippines into an electoral

16

democracy. Nation-wide local elections were scheduled in 1987 and 1988 to elect local
government officials and members of the national assembly. Being the head of a trans-Luzon
business conglomerate of grain-trading, agricultural and farm produce, transportation,
hardware, garment and textile, catering and hotel companies which connected the Cagayan
Valley and Manila, Delfin Ting ran as an independent candidate for the Tuguegarao
mayorship in 1988. This was after several years of harassment inflicted by political rivals
who were supported by competing business groups of both legal and illicit nature. Delfin
presented himself as a self-made liberal-capitalist of humble background and an alternative to
candidates of traditional landed elite backgrounds. According to the Tuguegarao and Manila
legal elite, Delfin promised to eradicate the jueteng, an ill of society and obstacle for
economic progress and productivity. As no candidate in the election had ever stated such an
unambiguous statement against the jueteng, he managed to gain support from local
professional bodies, especially the Tuguegarao Rotary Club where there were well-connected
legal practitioners. Recalled by Professor Father Ranhilio Aquino of the Philippine Judicial
Academy (Manila Supreme Court) and Cagayan provincial secretary Atty. Ven Del Rosario
Jr., a few Manila legal elite saw Delfin as a possible instrument to institute law and order in a
frontier where insurgents, militias, outlaws, vigilantes and the local warlords were regarded
as the obstacles of state rule.10 The newly installed Aquino regime, moreover, saw Delfin
Ting as a possible entry-point to gain access into Cagayan, the traditional stronghold of Juan
Ponce Enrile and Ferdinand Marcos. Identifying his ethnic background with Corazon
Aquino’s Chinese ancestry, Delfin campaigned as a ‘Chinese’ alternative, promising to bring
Tuguegarao change and progress.

Using his extensive connections in Manila, Delfin Ting successfully received a recount
in favor of his candidacy at a small margin. The opposition then filed a lawsuit against Ting’s
eligibility as a Filipino government official by denouncing him as a Chinese national. This
immediately constituted a Schmittian exception; a situation of legal indeterminacy
(Scheuerman, 1999; Schmitt, 2005[1922]: 5), which the Philippine state found points of
intervention into the frontier society and imposed its sovereign verdicts. The Manila Supreme
Court required Delfin Ting to testify his genealogy as a ‘natural born Filipino citizen’. By
mobilizing associates from the Cagayan and Isabela provinces, Delfin Ting re-constructed his
genealogy and proved himself the legitimate child of a Chinese national and an indigenous
Ibanag woman in legal court.11 Testified to be a locally raised Chinese-Ibanag mixed-blood,
the Supreme Court ruled that Delfin Ting was a ‘natural born Filipino citizen’. He quickly
assumed the mayoral office in 1988.

On the first day of public office, Delfin Ting immediately raided Ang Chung’s
grain-warehouse (bodega) to request him to stop the jueteng operations. Agamben refers an
exception to an indeterminate situation where state delegates have to exert their sovereign
authority to make a finalizing act. He defined sovereignty in terms of law/force indistinction:

17

‘the sovereign is the point of indistinction between violence and law, the threshold on which
violence passes over into law and law passes over into violence’ (Agamben, 1998: 32).
Mayor Delfin Ting’s campaign against the jueteng is the art of merging law and force, in
which the Cagayano notion of Ibanag parenthood informs patrimonial logics and coercive
practices (Gatan, 1981: 29-30). Nowadays, a Cagayano mayor is expected to be ‘a father of
the town’ who can use physical measures to protect the constituents as his ‘children’. As the
Cagayan Valley is inhabited by the Ibanag people, political leaders at village and
municipal/city levels are known to punish petty criminals by the practice of slapping.
Considerable physical force is used against serious crimes.

However, in order to eradicate the jueteng, under the aegis of the legal courts, Ting
conflated indigenous parenting knowledge into practical frontier governance (Scott, 1998:
Chapter 9). He formulated the ‘iron hand’ policy in Tuguegarao, known as kamay na bakal in
the Tagalog-Filipino language, in which he was known to kick, box and slap the banca, cabo,
kubrador, and acha-dor. Due to the support of the Governor Lt. Col. Rodolfo Aguinaldo and
resistance from the jueteng network and some members of the Tuguegarao municipal police,
the anti-jueteng campaign was then escalated into more confrontational and terrorizing
measures, such as burning down motorcycles, filing lawsuits and armed commotion. Apart
from filing charges against the police chief and intimidating the jueteng operators, a major
commotion emerged in the Cagayan provincial government in late 1989. Accompanied by
some thirty-strong Tuguegarao municipal policemen, Mayor Delfin Ting gun-pointed at
Governor Aguinaldo and forced him to surrender. Following the down-fall of Marcos in 1986
and in parallel with a series of RAM-related mutinies in Manila from 1986-1990, this
Ting-Aguinaldo commotion then led to the Hotel Delfino Uprising, a state of exception on 4
March 1990. It was there that the Philippine state had to show its sovereign might to dissolve
Aguinaldo’s secessionist cause.

Secessionism entails a serious challenge against the state boundary by disregarding the
moral and political supremacy of the constitution. Secessionists are therefore identified and
excluded as an enemy of the state, who are legally subject to the state’s cultural and violent
censures (Sumner, 1997). Being a leading state agent who spent most of his adult-life fighting
the communist insurgency for the Philippine state, Wood’s (2003) seminal work is useful in
understanding why Aguinaldo had to declare the independence of Cagayan on 4 March 1990.
In contrast to the political economy argument (e.g. Popkin, 1979), Wood (2003) suggested
that rebel behaviors are not always driven by material interests, but moral and emotional
factors, especially the emotive satisfaction gained from rebelling against injustice.

From 1986 to 1989, while a new constitution was being drafted and debated, the
Enrile-associated RAM faction initiated a series of mutinies in Manila. They attempted to
overthrow the Aquino administration. As the Cagayan province was identified by the new
regime as the solid base of Enrile, RAM and the remnants of Marcos, Aguinaldo’s

18

governorship was suspended by President Aquino as a counterstrategy to undermine her
archrival’s stronghold. Continuously caught in the struggles between the Enrile faction and
Aquino administration, Aguinaldo decided to keep a distance from Enrile by refusing to be
his candidate for the governorship in the 1987 election. 12 With years of grass-root
counterinsurgency work in Cagayan, Aguinaldo was not only confident enough to run as an
independent candidate, he also formulated a populist view on the root-cause of the country’s
prolonged insurgency problem: impoverishment resultant of corruption and kleptocracy
perpetuated by a minority of forged landed-cum-capitalist locally hailed elite, especially of
Chinese ancestry. The Aquino-Cojuangco family of the Tarlac province neatly falls into this
elite category (Anderson, 1988). When Aguinaldo resumed the governorship of the Cagayan
province, he openly lambasted politicians, such as Tuguegarao mayor Delfin Ting, through
weekly radio programs for allegedly using public positions to protect and advance their own
sectoral interests. These acts reinforced the Robin Hood persona that he cultivated, rendering
him a folklore outlaw-hero of the Cagayano masses.

When Aquino delivered the suspension order to remove Aguinaldo from office after
dissolving a mutiny in Manila in December 1989, the frustrated Aguinaldo defied the order
and fielded hundreds of supporters into Tuguegarao with a stern warning to the Aquino
administration: ‘Kung may masaktan sa isa sa aking supporters, diyan lalabas ang mga
armado (If any of my supporters get hurt, we will have to use arms)’.13 Human barricades
were formed, preventing the central government and military officials from going into the
provincial government.14 After several failed talks, the AFP troops were dispatched into
Tuguegarao whilst President Aquino assigned Aguinaldo’s PMA classmate, General Oscar
Florendo, as the mediator to negotiate for Aguinaldo’s surrender. Florendo was
accommodated in Mayor’s Delfin Ting’s Hotel Delfino. Frustrated by Florendo’s insistence
for his unconditional surrender, Aguinaldo and his defected soldiers kept Florendo hostage
inside the hotel lobby. Mayor Delfin Ting and his fully armed security aides were also banned
from leaving the hotel. Ting then called and ordered his two sons in Manila (Rafael Ting and
Raul Ting) to immediately approach the AFP headquarters, indicating an emergency situation
in Tuguegarao and urging for armed assistance.

Upon receiving information that the AFP troops were quickly encroaching into
Tuguegarao, Aguinaldo went to the Provincial Capitol and turned the Philippine national flag
upside down, signifying that the state was at war with him. He gathered a crowd of one
thousand armed and civilian supporters in front of the hotel. Armed with an M-14 Armalite
rifle, Aguinaldo opened fire into the sky and formally declared independence of Cagayan
from the Republic of the Philippines on 4 March 1990. With about fifteen casualties in the
rebel group, AFP helicopters, tanks and infantries eventually pushed into Tuguegarao and
took control of the town. A gun-battle followed inside the hotel lobby between the rebels and
Ting’s security aides, rendering the death of Oscar Florendo. The rebel group splintered and

19

retreated into hiding. Outside the Hotel Delfino, about two hundred military fatigues and
firearms were left by the rebels. Suspecting that Florendo was killed by the rebels,15 AFP
Chief of Staff General Fidel Ramos ordered a ‘shoot-to-kill’ ultimatum, pursuing Aguinaldo
and rebels into the mountains.16 After a hundred days, however, Ramos admitted that the
AFP had lost track of Aguinaldo.17

On 12 June 1990, Aguinaldo eventually surrendered to the AFP at the Cagayan
Provincial Capitol in front of crowds of local supporters. Although the following Senate
hearings could not determine if Aguinaldo killed Florendo or not,18 the Hotel Delfino
Uprising declaration of the Cagayano nationalist cause rendered Aguinaldo as an
unforgettable enemy of the Philippine state. Despite facing major charges such as of rebellion
against the state, continued massive local supports enabled Aguinaldo to win again the
Cagayan governorship in the May 1992 election, which temporarily affirmed its sovereignty
in this once-uncertain frontier. Consistent with his counterinsurgency career, Aguinaldo went
on to implement peace-building initiatives through the provincial government. There, he
marked several distinguished records in fiscal management and social welfare delivery. For
instance, when he finished his three terms as the provincial governor, in 1998, the provincial
public coffer was left with an unprecedented surplus of eighty-seven millions pesos.19 These
track records partially brought him to the congressional seat in 1998, when he defeated the
indigenous Itawes strongman, Dr. Manuel Mamba of Tuao.

After re-containing Aguinaldo within the Philippine electoral democracy through the
1995 and 1998 elections in which he won as the provincial governor and congressman, his
electoral defeat to the tactical alliances between (1) the Mambas of Tuao and the Tings of
Tuguegarao; (2) the Mambas of Tuao and left-wing political party, Bayan Muna in 2001,
gave an opportunity for the communist insurgents to avenge against Aguinaldo’s life-long
counterinsurgency career by killing him in Tuguegarao on 12 June 2001.20 About six months
later, the Aguinaldo-associated Cagayano jueteng-lord Ben ‘Ang Chung’ De Guzman was
also murdered in Tuguegarao.21 Up to the present, the two cases remain unsolved. The
indeterminate conditions of these two legal cases have again left the Philippine state with
various options to consider in exercising its sovereignty over the frontiers. What are these
political options? There are no definite and fixed answers. The question will again, largely
depend on the extent that the frontier strongmen are willing to continue to collaborate with
the state for its state-building project. As well, it also depends on the extent that they are
willing to submit themselves to the constitution of the Philippine Republic and its national
defense.

CONCLUSION

Through a comparison of military rebellions in contemporary Congo, Sierra Leone and the

20

Philippines, this paper critiques the promise and pitfall of Bayart’s (1993[1989]) sub-Saharan
African governmentality theoretical scheme for a cross-regional comparative framework of
state-military relations. Despite that Bayart insightfully approached African state formation in
terms of the discourse and practice of ‘the politics of the belly’, he ostensibly reduced it into a
perpetual self-reproducing circulatory loop, which does not explain changes in state-military
relations. Because of this pitfall, the sub-Saharan African soldier-rebels are all regarded as
selfish predators. This presupposition is scientifically so interesting that it may provoke
further meaningful debates. However, it may also lead to flawed domestic and foreign policy
options with regard to state-building in the developing world.

To remedy this pitfall, the governmentality-informed theoretical work of Dean (1999) and
Migdal (2001) instructively highlighted two complementary points for studying state
formation from a spatial and symbolic perspective. First, state-military relations should be
conceived in terms of uncertain contact zones where the subjecting mechanisms of the
centralizing state and the self-inventing technologies of the soldiers meet. Second, these
uncertain contact zones would enable comparative analysts to explain changing state-military
relations in which the art of governing the military by the state must be identified and
explicated. Without rigidly typifying the soldier-rebels as selfish predators, the foregoing
pages have elaborated the expositions of a more comprehensive framework of state-military
relations to diachronically study how the state may re-contain mutineers and re-enact its
sovereignty, dubbed ‘pursuing the soldier-rebels’. Through an ethnographic-historical study
of a Philippine mutineer and frontier strongman, Lieutenant Colonel Rodolfo Aguinaldo of
the Cagayan Valley, ‘pursuing the soldier-rebels’ entails three specific arts of governing that
the state deployed to instrumentalize soldier-rebels for state-building. They are: (1) producing
martial law, (2) brokering counterinsurgency, and (3) law/force indistinction and
re-containment through electoral democracy.

21

1 Sources from The Manila Bulletin: ‘PC Patrol on Ship Rescued under Fire.’ 8 July 1972. ‘More Troops to
Isabela.’ 9 July 1972. ‘AFP Unleashes ‘Might’ against 1000 NPA Men.’ 10 July 1972. ‘PAF Jets Can’t Bomb
NPA.’ 11 July 1972. ‘Mitra Ridicules NPA “Ship” Story.’ 11 July 1972. ‘NPA Arms Cache Seized.’ 12 July 1972.
‘Mysterious Palanan.’ 12 July 1972. ‘Hidden War.’ 13 July 1972. ‘NPA Kills 4 Soldiers; Ship Had 2 Sino
Seamen.’ 13 July 1972. ‘6 Army Soldiers Slain in Isabela Ambuscade.’ 3 September 1972. ‘New Raps Poised on
“Karagatan”.’ 9 September 1972. ‘Troopers Raid Chinatown Area.’ 10 September 1972. ‘Intercept Rockets,
Arms.’ 14 September 1972. ‘Chinese Vessel Fired at off Isabela Waters, Crewman Hurt.’ 17 September 1972.
‘Ferdinand Marcos Tells of LP-NPA Huddle.’ 17 September 1972. ‘NPA Raids Army Post, Troopers Die.’ 21
September 1972. ‘PC Commander Ambushed – NPA.’ 22 September 1972.
2 Source: The, Armed Forces of the Philippines (2008). Special Briefing Paper on the History of Communist
Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Cagayan Valley (Region 2) from the 1960s to the Present. (Date of
Briefing: 14 July 2008; Date of Receipt of the Paper: 16 October 2008). Gamu, Isabela Province, the
Philippines: Fifth Infantry Division, Philippine Army.
3 Field notes and dataset, Gattaran, Cagayan Valley, 1-14 July 2007.
4 During the Martial Law, there was a diplomatic agreement between the Philippines, Republic of China
(Taiwan) and United States to counter communism in the Asia-Pacific region. China was suspected to support
the communist movements in Southeast Asian countries. As a result, Philippine military officers were sent to
military bases in Taiwan for special counterinsurgency training. Sources: (1) Interview, Retired General Pedro
Sistoza, residence, Manila, 15 December 2007. (2) Interview, Senator Greogorio B. Honasan II, office, Manila,
27 April 2009.
5 Field notes and dataset, Philippine Military Academy, Baguio city, 7 July 2008.
6 Interview with Retired General Pedro Sistoza, residence, Manila, 15 December 2007.
7 ‘Aguinaldo “Payroll” Includes Top Officials.’ The Manila Chronicle. 22 March 1990.
8 Author’s investigative research report on jueteng in Cagayan province, 1960s – Present (June - August, 2008).
Unpublished manuscript.
9 ‘Renegade Officer Seeks Philippine Governorship.’ The New York Times. 18 January 1988. ‘Tough-talking
Colonel Challenges Cagayan’s Political Giants.’ The Manila Chronicle. 18 January 1988.
10 Sources: (1) Interview with Delfin Ting, Tuguegarao city, 30 November 2003. (2) Interview with Atty. Ven
del Rosario, Jr., Secretary of Cagayan Provincial Board, Tuguegarao city, 24 February, 2004. (3) Interview with
Fr. Ranhilio Aquino, Parish Convent, Tuguegarao city, 20 March, 2004.
11 Civil Case No. 3813 (16 May 1991). Florentino M. Fermin, Petitioner, Versus Delfin T. Ting, Respondent.
Tuguegarao: Regional Trial Court of Cagayan, Second Judicial Court, Branch IV.
12 ‘Renegade Officer Seeks Philippine Governorship.’ The New York Times. 18 January 1988.

22

13 ‘Aguinaldo Hangs on, Has New Legal Tactic.’ The Manila Chronicles. 19 January 1990.
14 ‘Officials Fail Anew to Remove Aguinaldo.’ The Manila Chronicle. 20 January 1990.
15 Later investigations suggested that Florendo was not directly killed by Aguinaldo’s men, but accidentally shot
by a security aide of Ting. Sources: ‘Mayor’s Aide Eyed in Slay of Florendo.’ Philippine Daily Inquirer. 13
March 1990. ‘Mayor’s Bodyguard Killed Florendo – CIS.’ Philippine Daily Inquirer. 22 March 1990. ‘Mayor’s
Aide Most Likely Killer of Florendo, says CIS report.’ Globe. 1 April 1990. ‘Florendo: CIS Report Points to
Mayor’s Aide as Mostly Likely Killer.’ Globe. 1 April 1990.
16 ‘Troops Given Shoot-to-kill Order on Agi.’ Philippine Daily Inquirer. 15 March 1990
17 ‘Ramos: Gov’t Troops Having Difficult Time Finding Agi.’ Philippine Daily Inquirer. 15 March 1990.
18 Committee on National Defence and Security, Senate, Congress of the Philippines, Republic of the
Philippines (1990). Third Regular Session, 23 March 1990. Jarencio II-2, p.3.
19 Sources: (1) Interview, Professor Leticia Aquino, former budget officer of the Cagayan provincial
government, Dean of School of Law, office, Cagayan State University, Tuguegarao city, 13 July 2008. (2)
Interview, Edna Junio, Director of Department of Social Welfare, Cagayan provincial government, Tueguegarao
city, 7 April 2009. (3) Interview, Dr. Mildred Abella, provincial agriculturist, Cagayan provincial government,
Tuguegarao city, 7 April 2009. (4) Anonymous RAM member, policeman, Cagayan Valley, 7 April 2009. (5)
Interview, Emy Garan, former Cagayan provincial government administrator, residence, Tuguegarao city, 10
April 2009. (6) Interview, Sally Vitug, former assistant of the Provincial Planning and Development Office,
Cagayan provincial government, residence, Tuguegarao city, 10 April 2009. (7) Jeanna Garma, provincial
accountant, office, Cagayan provincial government, Tuguegarao city, 10 April 2009.
20 ‘Cagayan Solon Slain in Ambush.’ Philippine Star. 13 June 2001. ‘NPA: Aguinaldo Deserved to Die.’
Philippine Daily Inquirer. 14 June 2001. ‘The Peace Talks, Aguinaldo’s Killing.’ Philippine Daily Inquirer. 10
September 2001.
21 Source: ‘Suspected Drug Lord Shot Dead.’ Philippine Daily Inquirer. 16 January 2002.

23

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