InsiderPH features the inspiring stories of Metrobank Foundation’s awardees as Outstanding Filipinos for 2025—teachers, soldiers and police officers who are making significant contributions to nation building.
The date marked the 123rd founding anniversary of the Philippine Army, an occasion observed in garrisons across the archipelago. But here, the moment carried a different meaning of “commitment to serve.”
For so many years, this clearing in the jungle had belonged not to the state but to absence – to the long silence and abandonment imposed by war.
Colonel Ricky L. Canatoy had been in command for just under a month. He assumed leadership of the 58th Infantry “Dimalulupig” Battalion on February 20, stepping into a role that was as much about historical baggage as it was about firepower.
Col. Canatoy wasn’t a stranger to this kind of fight. He had entered military service in 1995, and by the time he got to Misamis Oriental, he had spent nearly a quarter century learning how war often doubles back on itself – how victories rarely feel like victories, and how losses tend to echo across generations.
Holding hostile ground
The ground he was asked to hold was not neutral ground. This was the heartland of the Communist Party’s New People’s Army (NPA), the Sub-Regional Committee 1 of North Central Mindanao Regional Committee (NCMRC).
The rebels knew the ridgelines, the gullies, the invisible boundaries of ancestral land with an intimacy that only bloodlines and geography could explain. It was a place where the government could plant a flag one day and lose it the next.
Commanders often counted their time here in months. Col. Canatoy decided to count his in years. He extended his service beyond the usual tour of duty to see his mission through. As he explains, “No one rotated me out on the normal schedule, but I wanted to finish the job.”
He served for two years and seven months – an endurance record of sorts in recent 4th Infantry Division history – under a campaign he called Pagkabot Mis Or. On paper, it sounded like a standard military operation. In practice, it was a wager on the slow work of trust.
Apart from hunting down the enemy armed group and neutralizing them in the jungles, his soldiers entered villages not as transient forces but as neighbors-in-training. They learned the rhythms of barangay life, met with elders, brokered support from trade and technical agencies, and courted NGOs.
The talk was not only of ceasefires and patrols but of fishponds, bakeries, road grants. “It is not enough to fight and win battles,” he says. “You must stay.”
Lives restored, roads opened
The statistics were there for the military briefings: enemy numbers reduced from 163 to 40, firearms from 180 to 87, 3 major NPA units defeated. But the measures that mattered were harder to quantify.
In Sitio Kalhaan, Higaonon families came back after a decade and a half in exile. In Sitio Kamansi, residents from almost two years of absence due to conflict, also came back with new hope. A school opened, another reopened.
In Malitbog, a mining cooperative emerged and “Minahan ng Bayan” (People’s Mines): approved. There's a bakery now. A cell tower. Roads now passable, several were built.
On Highway 955, the Gingoog–Claveria road, tourists began to arrive, enough to make it the country’s second most frequently used route by tourists after Baguio.
“It seems small and hard to quantify,” he says. “But in a place like this, these mean everything, life-changing and cause very visible positive change.”
Purpose beyond duty
He had grown up with not much himself. His father, feeding five children, insisted on hard work and honor as part of the daily ration. That insistence stayed with him.
In Jolo and Basilan, he had lived on the pay of a young officer. Later, married with a child, he supported his wife’s small ventures from afar, a private hedge against the temptation to cut corners. “The success of our business allowed me to resist temptation,” he says. “I was able to serve without corruption.”
As a commander, he taught his men to think in the same terms: to dig canals, patch school walls, navigate the thickets of local governance, and sit through the bureaucratic tedium of grant applications.
“Provide them with a noble purpose,” he says. “That’s how you build character and provide genuine happiness. That’s how you have a lasting impact.”
Today, Col. Canatoy serves at the headquarters 4th Infantry Division as G7, in charge of Civil Military Operations, a post that allows him to continue the work to sustain the gains of Internal Security Operation against insurgents albeit in larger scale.
Shaping the narrative
His task now is to shape the national story for external security operations: to explain to a distracted public the stakes of the West Philippine Sea, where foreign or external adversary’s encroachment is already a form of pressure, and could yet lead to war.
The fight, he believes, must begin with clarity to foster patriotism and nationalism.
When asked about his tenure, he will point to the partnerships forged – with the police, with local governments, with civil agencies. He will talk about inter-agency coordination, about community presence.
What he rarely says is that he stayed longer than anyone thought he would, or that in certain military circles his time in Misamis Oriental is spoken of as a prototype for a new strain of counterinsurgency: one that fights, but then remains; one that builds as much as it dismantles; one that knows when to speak, and when to listen. —Metrobank Foundation
