CRIME DOES NOT PAY—GEN JOVITO PALPARAN

Maj Gen Jovito Palparan, who is from Cagayan de Oro City is an example of the time-honored truism, ‘Crime Does Not Pay’. It was also a warning against submitting to the darker side of life that would inevitably gloat at your downfall. Only then you will realize that indeed, ‘Crime Does Not pay.’

I featured Gen Palparan in my FB Post today, as a reminder, life is the most unpredictable journey on earth in the sense that in any challenges or trials you encountered, you should never be complacent because even the greatest favorite can lose to the hopeless opponent; and that the situation where you are now could change within seconds.

Gen Palparan had his glory days during the time of former Pres. Gloria Arroyo as he is perceived to be one of her icons in the insurgency matters. Fear was a lot of Palparan’s weaponry in the past when he was at his prime that he even earned the moniker ‘The Butcher’ by friend and foe. Gen Palparan was intoxicated on his laurels over his victory while he was the Commander of the Army’s 7th Infantry Division in Central Luzon that his discipline failed seriously. As it has always been said: when you play around a lot, that’s where you get hurt and it was the keystone moment of his career.

What blew the lid off is when Gen Palparan had been tagged in the abduction and disappearance of UP students Karen Empeño and Sherlyn Cadapan in 2006. Palparan was able to escape prosecution from many of his Human Rights violation and he thought the UP student kidnapping was one of those cases that would just die a natural death. But the relentlessness of the parents of the kidnapped victims to pursue the case is something to behold reinforcing an accepted truth that ‘No one can ever win every time, and nobody gets defeated all the time.’

So the life with a colorful career as a bemedalled Major General and a former Batangas Congressman was anticlimactic, an execution rather than an explosion. After all the buildup, the ending of the story was an anticlimactic letdown. People are only interested in winners. Look at the sad dejected head. Nobody wants to mob a beaten General. Gen Palparan was sentenced to life imprisonment and is now languishing in jail at the Bilibid National Penitentiary.