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| ON THE OTHER HAND |
| Who is Most Likely to Mount a Coup? By Antonio C. Abaya September 10, 2001 Now that the Senate is in recess and there is a dearth of wild stories and juicy allegations to spice up media, can we expect rumors of coups to reach feverish proportions? Already there are claims that PNP generals, angry over allegations that they are all drug traffickers, are plotting to mount a coup. So, too, kuno are some AFP generals, unhappy about accusations that they have an unholy relationship with, of all people, the Abu Sayyaf. There is even talk of a civilian-military junta to replace the GMA government. To make sense of all these rumors of coup, one must ask who has both the strongest motivation and the actual capability to mount that coup. It can be said from the start that anger over rumored involvement in criminal and/or treasonous acts does not constitute sufficient motivation to mount a coup. Especially in the Philippine context. In the only two serious coup attempts in modern Philippine history, both led by Gringo Honasan in 1987 and 1989, the twin motivation was survival and power grab for the sake of power, not anger over allegations of involvement in criminal and/or treasonous acts. The 1987 coup was triggered by the fear of then Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile that he was about to be arrested and possibly killed by his archrival in the Marcos imperial court, Gen. Fabian Ver. Enrile and his prot�g� Honasan and their RAMboys mutinied against Marcos out of a basic instinct for survival, and they manged to save their skins only after the Catholic Church, led by Cardinal Sin, and the middle class supported their mutiny. The 1989 coup was a naked grab for power by the same mutinous group, this time openly supported by some businessmen and some politicians. It should be kept in mind that the Enrile-Honasan mutineers had originally scheduled their mutiny for November 1985. But they had the bad judgment of blabber-mouthing about it to their CIA friends, who promptly warned Marcos and Ver. Forced to postpone their action to February 1986, the Enrile-Honasan mutineers were additionally upstaged by the sudden popularity and unexpected rise to power of the disembodied saint Cory Aquino. The 1989 putsch was an attempt by the Enrile-Honasan mutineers to grab the state power that they felt was rightfully theirs, since they had plotted to grab it from Marcos as early as November 1985. If that original plot had pushed through, Enrile, as head of junta, would have been hailed as the savior of the country and would have been elected president, hands down, six months later. A third factor in the 1987-89 coup attempts is the fact that the sitting president was a woman and as such was considered a pushover by the macho men who plotted her overthrow. ***** In 2001, the public figure who is fighting for survival � as Enrile was in 1987 � is none other than Panfilo Lacson, who is in very real danger of landing in jail for a variety of alleged crimes, from perjury and wire-tapping to drug trafficking, kidnapping for ransom, multiple murders and unexplained wealth. Like Enrile in 1989, Lacson feels he is heir to the throne, having been designated successor to Erap in 2004 by the Ejercito family, the Chinese Mafia and Mark Jimenez, the most important courtiers in the Erap imperial court. It will be recalled that in June 2000, according to Lacson himself, Mark Jimenez gave P100 million, Lucio Tan P50 million, and the Filipino Chinese Chamber of Commerce P40 million to the PNP Foundation, Lacson�s thinly disguised presidential campaign kitty for 2004. At about the same time, his biopic, �The Ping Lacson Story� hit the movie circuit, produced by Millenium Productions, which is owned by Jinggoy Estrada. And when the road to Malacanang was unexpectedly blocked by the Juetengate scandal, Lacson went to Washington DC in December 2000, supposedly to get an award from an industrial security group but actually to solicit American approval for his play for power � how else except by coup? � as an alternative to both Erap (�lapdog of Beijing�) and the constitutional successor Arroyo (�communist�), according to one of the Americans whom he presented his case to in DC. Again, like Enrile in 1987 and 1989, Lacson in 2001 is being stymied by a sitting president who is a woman. It is enough to give macho men a castration complex. As for capability, Lacson still has 500 former PAOCTF henchmen, loyal to him, who have been AWOL from the PNP since the overthrow of Erap in January 2001 and who have not returned to the police armory the heavy weapons that had been issued to them. No other potential coup plotter on the scene has that kind of muscle. In fact, I suspect Lacson was going to use the PAOCTF coup option on January 19, 2001 to save himself and his beleaguered patron (who kept asking for �five more days�, remember?) but became the victim of a mini-coup himself when he returned to Crame, where he was stripped of his command, allegedly at gunpoint. But that�s another story. This article appeared in the September 24, 2001 issue of the Philippine Weekly Graphic magazine. |