“DISPOSE for markets to sell at P70 per kilogram, or we’ll see you in court.”

Mobilizing several different agencies, the Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. administration has raided and found in several warehouses mainly in the National Capital Region and a few other provinces 401,000 50-kg bags of sugar. If half of these were raw sugar (P3,200 per bag) and half refined (P4,500), this hoarded sugar would be worth P821 million.

The figure would likely pass P1 billion when reports after “inspections” in other warehouses in the Visayas come in, government officials said.

The raids were undertaken, jointly and separately, by the Bureau of Customs, using its visitorial powers on warehouses keeping imported commodities, aided by the National Bureau of Investigation, the military’s intelligence service, and even the Presidential Security Group.

DID Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. risk his life to liberate the country from a dictatorship or did he mainly see it as an opportunity to succeed Ferdinand E. Marcos, well worth the risk of returning to Manila?

His candid conversation on Aug. 13, 1983 with his close friend, the late Steve Psinakis — the husband of Presentacion Lopez, the only daughter of the “Don” Eugenio Lopez Sr. — would seem to point to the latter motivation.

In Ninoy’s last interview with foreign correspondents inside the plane in the wee hours of Aug. 21, 1983, he portrays himself as the opposition leader who decided to return to the Philippines, as he put it, “to help the opposition rebuild its grassroots organization” for the 1984 Batasang Pambansa elections. Ninoy says: “I no longer crave for political office. I would like to reiterate: I am not out to overthrow Marcos.”

‘Sugar Order was not approved by Marcos’

EXECUTIVE Secretary Victor Rodriguez said yesterday that he had asked the board of the Sugar Regulatory Administration (SRA) to justify their plan to import 300,000 MT of sugar. “They couldn’t, and without the President’s approval went ahead to issue Sugar Order No. 4 that would have authorized accredited traders to import that huge amount of sugar,” Rodriguez said.

The executive secretary spoke with me yesterday over the phone after I texted him a set of questions, asking him to comment on reports that it was he who had prodded the SRA, mainly through the Agriculture department’s undersecretary Leocadio Sebastian, to issue the sugar order.

“Sebastian didn’t even inform the President or me that the Sugar Board will meet to approve that importation,” Rodriguez said. “We found out about it only when my staff reported that the SRA posted the order on its website.”

I ARGUED in last Monday's column that President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. must rescind posthaste the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) the unthinking Aquino 3rd government entered into in 2014 with the US. It…

UNTHINKABLE just a decade ago, more and more experts on geopolitics are now saying that the People’s Republic of China would likely invade and move to occupy its territory called Taiwan sooner rather than later, triggering a war between the Asian superpower and the US.

We ants have to play it safe and be doubly sure not to get involved in this battle of elephants that could crush us.

President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. should immediately revoke the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) that President Benigno Aquino 3rd entered into with the US in 2014, which automatically places us as allies of the US, with access to our military bases here, in a war with China. Marcos could do this tomorrow as EDCA is only an executive agreement. Unlike the old Military Bases Agreement, and evidence that that regime was the Americans’ lackey, we’re getting nothing from it anyway.

WHILE the late President Fidel V. Ramos wasn’t the highest ranking officer in the military establishment that supported Ferdinand E. Marcos’ martial law when it was imposed — Armed Forces Chief of Staff Gen. Romeo Espino who served until 1981 was — he was widely viewed as its strongest pillar.

This was not only because he was Marcos’ second cousin, who under Filipino culture would profess undying loyalty to the strongman. Ramos was head for 14 years until 1985 (when he was appointed acting AFP chief of staff), of the powerful and centralized Philippine Constabulary (PC).

It was the PC which had the main task of going after “subversives,” which included all civilians that were plotting against Marcos. The other three service commands were tasked mainly to go after the Moro insurgents. It was the PC’s dreaded Constabulary Security Units in each region which captured most of the Communist Party’s leaders, in my case, with members of the Manila-Rizal regional committee, the 5th CSU.