What does it take to overthrow a government? and who should be handed the power after it’s grabbed? the author dissects manila’s hopeless junta fetish and analyzes why the next one may need more guns and blood.

We were sitting in a hotel room in Makati. The four of us: me, a colleague from ABC news, a familiar academic with very left-wing politics, and someone we all presumed to be our military contact. We didn’t bother to ask. The less said, the better. It was incriminating enough that we looked like journalists conspiring with an odd alliance of an academic and a putschist in a clandestine five-star hotel meeting.

We were only interested in a scoop; a lead time on when and where the rebels would move next so we could move our antiquated news satellite in place before our more agile and well-oiled competition beat us to the broadcast. Our rebel contact wanted advice on how to spin it to the media.

We hesitated, but the theory-bound academic offered tactical advice: line up some criminals on the wall and shoot them. Score some points with the public. Satisfy the lust for a little blood. And show everyone who’s in charge.
Marcos did so in 1972. I was only six, and yet I found myself sitting in front of the TV, watching the drug lord Lim Seng being marched before a firing squad at sunrise. Marcos only needed one very public example. This academic was suggesting a bigger, bit more bloodier show.

It was December 2006. Nine months before the plotters had failed to turn the February EDSA celebrations into another EDSA-style regime change.
The ringleaders all ended up in the stockade, but they had enough loyal mistahs still out and in key places to keep trying.

The non-mils—the jargon for civilian or non-military conspirators—were to provide the trigger or backdrop for a coup, with a lightning rally in Ayala Avenue that succeeded in the element of surprise, but failed at drawing out a crowd large enough to convince the rebel commanders to move out of barracks.

It became obvious to the mils that you couldn’t count on civilians to lead a power grab. The next coup would have the generals—or colonels—keeping power for themselves.

The turnout at Ayala Avenue that December must have so embarrassed bishop Antonio Tobias that he angrily rebuked suggestions by reporters that he was part of the feeble attempt at instant people power. The bishop (a “suki” in ribbon-cutting ceremonies of Pagcor casinos) showed up for the rally, but stayed mostly indoors, inside the airconditioned Jollibee store at the corner of Ayala Avenue, while his acolytes from the Kilusan ng Makabansang
Ekonomista, were outside reassuring reporters and rally organizers that the bishop would be addressing the crowd. He didn’t.

A newspaper editor who had been a common face in many of these civil society exercises was also cooling off inside Jollibee. He was so frustrated at the dithering rally that he agitated for someone to clamber up the Ninoy statue and decapitate it. The newspaperman was obviously inspired by that TV moment in the liberation of Baghdad. (There were only a handful of Iraqis dancing around Saddam’s fallen statue, but because all news media were there, it was the image that propagated to the world the benign nature of the American invasion.) The newsman was so sure that the singular act of decapitating Ninoy’s statue would electrify even the white collar crowd of Ayala who chose to treat the rally as a traffic distraction that was only tolerable because it was small.

(I saw the faces of the poor and unwashed who were hauled in from the slums of Tondo that day. Some even brought their infants because there was simply nobody to leave them behind with. The rally was more an excursion into a world they had never seen or smelled before. It was a glimpse at life on the other side of the tracks. They would have been too intimidated to behave rudely.)

December 2006 was the coup that never was. It became obvious to the mils that you couldn’t count on civilians to lead a power grab. People Power would have been smoke and mirrors, anyway. The next coup would have the generals—or colonels—keeping power for themselves.

GAZEBO TALK
People power fatigue had set in much earlier. The coup plot in February of that same year in 2006 (that was to coincide with the People Power anniversary) failed in part because the non-mils could not draw out the same spontaneous crowd that came to EDSA in 1986 and again in 2001 when Erap stepped down.

The night before the march-off that would have seen rebel officers kapit bisig on EDSA with leading left-wing intellectuals, the armed forces chief of staff—General Generoso Senga—hosted a “gazebo talk” at his residence in Camp Aguinaldo. The commanders of the elite units (Marines, Police Special Action Force, Army Scout Rangers) led by Brig. General Danny Lim, had presented him with a fait accompli: they were withdrawing support from the Arroyo government.

A newspaper editor was so frustrated at the dithering rally that he agitated for someone to clamber up the Ninoy statue and decapitate it.

It was a repeat of EDSA Dos in 2001. The Chief of Staff then, General Angelo Reyes, faced a similar mutiny from commanders of the elite units. He could lead them or face early retirement. Reyes chose to betray his padrino, Erap, and move on to a long career in the Arroyo government that has seen him changing cabinet posts four times.

Senga’s sentiments were clear to the plotters. “He wouldn’t call the meeting in the first place if he wasn’t open to it,” says a source. The plotters headed back to their quarters confident that Senga was with them. So confident that they even pre-taped the statement that they would be releasing to the public, the night before. The videotape that leaked a year later to ABS-CBN had General Lim reading the declaration of withdrawal of support alone. But a source present at the taping says there were four other officers, all colonels. “They were talking about who would be allowed to go up the stage in EDSA,” the source says. “Si Drilon, hindi puede . . . si Randy [David, UP professor] okay ‘yan,” he quotes them saying, revealing a clearly left-wing bias. The plotters were not about to turn over government back to the same old politicians. Adds the source: “I asked who’d be leading the council, and they said, ‘ayun.’ They were pointing to Lim.”

“They thought it was a done deal . . . nagpa-tape na nga ng script. How confident can you get?”

But they miscalculated the chiefs of the army, navy, and air force who were invited later to the gazebo. They were old school officers who were more likely to stick to the chain of command or fence-sit. “The chiefs wanted to first observe the crowd and then talk again,” says another source close to the plotters. They might have gone along with Senga as Chief of Staff, but the army chief then, General Hermogenes Esperon, tipped the balance when he supposedly warned Senga after the gazebo meeting, “I will resist you.”

The day of the supposed coup, when Senga called again for Danny Lim, it was to detain him in his office and prevent him from joining the “march off” from Camp Aguinaldo to the EDSA Shrine. UP Prof. Randy David had to march alone at the head of a few hundred demonstrators. He didn’t make it to the shrine, but instead landed in Camp Crame for his mugshot after the police arrested him.

The resulting marines standoff in Fort Bonifacio was the panic button. With Danny Lim in custody, Marine Colonel Ariel went for “Plan B.” Q, as some call him, agitated for people power, recalling to mind how it saved Enrile and F.V.R. in 1986. Cory Aquino tried to come, but when the police turned her back somewhere in Pasong Tamo extension, she didn’t try again. The few sympathizers who made it to the gates of Fort Bonifacio were too few to matter.

One source recalled how months before General Renato Miranda, the marines commandant, showed him a paper that Miranda circulated at a G.H.Q. command conference with the title, “The Fulcrum.” It wasn’t clear if it carried Miranda’s authorship but, in it, he laid out a bold role for the A.F.P.. At a time when the country’s stability hung in the balance, the A.F.P. could swing it either way. The way that Miranda chose was for the military to step in and take charge. But from sources interviewed for this story, it would appear that Miranda’s fulcrum was unhinged that February 2006. He failed to move out his men and take Malacañang as planned. One source says Miranda put the decision to a vote by his commanders. The naysayers won. He and Querubin, one of the ringleaders, now face court martial for mutiny.

THE REBEL AND THE PRAETORIAN GUARD
Generals Esperon and Danny Lim are the two protagonists in this struggle for the hearts and minds of the Philippine military. They both come from P.M.A.—Lim being four years junior to Esperon, a member of Class 1974. Both are remembered for their intelligence. Esperon was a scholar of the Philippine Science High School before joining the academy; Lim went on to West Point from P.M.A. Lim excelled in all his studies, except for P.E. He broke Fidel Ramos’ record in the General Staff College when he topped every single subject. Like all young first lieutenants, they served in Mindanao. But after three years, Esperon was plucked from the frontlines by Fabian Ver and detailed with the Presidential Security Command. Esperon, a Ver boy, would stay in the P.S.C. until 1986, when Marcos was overthrown and the praetorian powers of the P.S.C. were cut down to size.

Ver’s P.S.C. was resented by officers who saw it as an armed forces within the A.F.P.. After 1986, Esperon had to work his way back into the mainstream of A.F.P. life. His career was just coasting along when his classmate, Sonny Razon, a former aide of Fidel Ramos, brought him back to the whittled down Presidential Security Group. After F.V.R., Esperon earned his combat stripes for the big Army offensive on the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the Lanao area during the time of Erap.

For most of his career, Lim was with the Scout Rangers, the storied elite unit first created to fight the Huks in the 50s. In 1983, the cerebral warrior returned to the academy as an aide to General Antonio Zumel, the P.M.A. superintendent who, after 1986, became the fugitive Marcos loyalist general. The December 1989 coup, a largely loyalist plot, was a classic golpe de gulat that saw little need for mass actions but proved most fatal to the Cory government. Lim, a major then, belonged to a shadowy group called the Young Officers Union that marched into Makati and boobytrapped the Hotel Intercon. The YOU proved more radical than Gringo Honasan’s RAM. Their ideological guru was Nilo Tayag, the former communist activist who, after spending time in Marcos’ jail, turned radical right. Filipinism echoed the interwar nationalism in Europe that blamed foreigners—in our case the local Chinese—for despoiling everything that was good and pristine about the Filipino. Tayag’s Filipinist ideology found a patron in Marcos. In Filipinism, Marcos found intellectual cover for his New Society.

The one time I met Lim was in 1992, at the homecoming for Marcos’ body in Ilocos Norte. He was one of thousands of loyalists who came to pay his last respects. He had been pardoned for the coup, but it was still not clear whether he’d be returning to the military (F.V.R. would make that decision later as president). Like most officers out of a uniform, Lim looked nondescript. He spoke gently, but you could sense the intensity of his convictions. His more high profile peers in YOU had since mellowed or pursued quiet civilian lives. Not Danny. As if to win his loyalty, President Arroyo gave Lim the star rank way before it was time for anyone in his P.M.A. batch to become a general. He was also given command of his beloved Scout Rangers. It was a miscalculated risk by Arroyo’s advisers who thought it was better to have someone of Lim’s influence on their side.

Esperon was the opposite personality. “When I see him on TV sounding so serious, I say he’s just acting,” says a P.M.A. classmate. “That’s not Jun. He is actually a funny person; very witty.” As cadets, they were investigated by the academy for attending a leftist teach-in at U.P. Baguio. “Jun is not politically-naïve,” says the classmate, suggesting Esperon is not averse to taking risk. “He believes he can handle G.M.A.; he thinks he can still control the situation.” This classmate once told Esperon, “Mistah, tayo na, take over na lang tayo.” Esperon’s answer was, “Mistah, baka hindi pa natin kaya.”

Danny Lim, too, felt the time was not right when officers who eventually took part in the Oakwood mutiny of July 2003 came to him to enlist his support. (Magdalo was a misnomer. The mutineers originally called themselves B.K. for Bagong Katipuneros, but a former colleague in ABS-CBN News Channel saw the countersign displayed by the mutineers and dubbed them Magdalo, a Katipunan faction by Emilio Aguinaldo; the 16-ray sun was in fact the flag of the Magdiwang, Magdalo’s rival.) It was the timing that Lim questioned. When the country once again seemed on the brink because of the “Hello Garci” scandal, Lim would attempt a “soft coup” of his own that February 2006.

BLOODLESS
Twice, as a cub reporter for The Manila Chronicle, I was woken up by 3 A.M. phone calls (this was before pagers and cell phones) by our overnight newsdesk informing me that rebel tanks were on the move again.
In December 1989, I remember getting caught in traffic at 3 A.M. by rebel tanks rolling out of Fort Bonifacio, which is not far from where I live. At that moment, I felt the futility of reporting for work since the rebels seemed almost in control, and press freedom would have surely ended up as collateral damage in a successful coup.

This was before coups were made banal by perennials rumors and denials of fresh destabilization attempts—and before the modus “withdrawal of support” made it purely a battle of wills and nerves, and less an actual gun-battle.
Coups were right-wing plots back then, partly against the liberals in the Cory government. These same liberals—even leftists—now conspire with the same officers who used to hunt them down (during Marcos) against an Arroyo government that has made enemies in all shades of the political spectrum.

Ronald Llamas, one of these leftists and a former mentor in our student movement days, sees reformists in the Philippine military where left-wingers like him used to see fascists. It’s not really a stretch. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez is a fine example. The former paratroop commander led a failed coup in 1992, but succeeded in getting democratically elected twice. Chavez is not of the same breed as the generals who took over much of Latin America in the seventies on the prodding of the C.I.A. Venezuela’s president is reviled by the U.S. and by that country’s upper-classes for his populist and pro-poor stand.

Danny Lim is conceivably of the same cut. He doesn’t possess the on-camera charisma of an Antonio Trillanes, but he isn’t as cocky or self-possessed either. I asked a leader of a civil society group what made Lim credible to them. He enumerated the reasons: he’s level-headed, a family man, has a clean record, plus his politics have since drifted left of center. But he draws the line at the communists. Lim disapproved it when one of the Oakwood mutineers who went into hiding made contact with the N.P.A. for a possible joint exercise against the Arroyo government. “Lim believes only the military can reform society,” says a friend. “Who else can fight the warlords and landlords.”

EDSA Dos of February 2001, when Erap was overthrown, is the closest to a successful coup this country has seen. “Withdrawal of Support” made it possible for the military to tip the balance and force out a president without a single life lost. It was, as one officer calls it, “a walk in the park.” Literally because it was over the moment the generals escorted Erap through the Palace garden and on board the Pasig river ferry. Even then, some mavericks in the A.F.P. flirted with the thought of taking over government for a change, instead of turning it over to a different faction of the same old politicians.

“Withdrawal of Support” would be attempted again and again by plotters who wanted to live down the trauma of December 1989. More than a hundred soldiers died in that fighting. One of those who almost didn’t make it at that time was Marines Colonel Ariel Querubin. He and Danny Lim were a tag team in many of these military “adventures.” Querubin, nicknamed “bulldog” for his thick neck and wide jowl, was given up for dead at a hospital after he “dueled” a MG-520 attack helicopter, armed only with a Garand rifle. Years later, after the marines standoff in Fort Bonifacio, my colleague from ABC-5, Ed Lingao, visited him while he was on house arrest. He showed the scars on his head, his shoulders, and thighs. Ed asked him why anyone would engage a chopper in a gunfight. Querubin’s brief answer: “Asar talo.” Simply, he was piqued. After initial successes, the tide was turning against the coup that December of 1989. Their rebellion had failed.

“We’ve been trying to avoid a shooting war between soldiers because it’s harder to consolidate after,” says a source. When Danny Lim was attempting another soft coup in February 2006, they were hoping for the same bloodless regime change that would have put him in command of a council of civilians handpicked by them. But, after two failures in 2006, the plotters abandoned hopes of massive demonstrations against Mrs. Arroyo.

“The February 2006 coup was well anticipated; it was leaked, almost everyone expected something to happen,” says Llamas. It was an open secret. The coffee shops buzzed with talks of unauthorized military movements. Even Time correspondent Nelly Sindayen was later investigated for knowing too much. Says Llamas: “But the Manila Pen incident was a complete surprise.” The plotters had decided to move without fully informing their civilian sympathizers. Llamas only learned about it, and only in sketchy details, the night before. A source privy to the military preparations says the plan called for the Marines to move to Camp Aguinaldo and limit the ability of General Esperon to reinforce Malacañang.

I previewed some of the news videos from that coverage. There were men in plainclothes putting on camouflage fatigues and taking out automatic rifles from their backpacks who joined Lim and Trillanes during their march to Manila Pen. It is presumed they were soldiers who managed to slip out of their units without detection and then returned quietly—without getting arrested—when it failed.

Danny Lim and Trillanes were supposed to hold out at the Pen for two days until the big rally planned by bishops that Saturday gave the soft coup a semblance of a critical mass. “It looked like they were waiting for something to happen,” recalls Lingao. There were rumors that Arroyo’s former economic planning secretary Romulo Neri would show up and drop a bomb on the   bribery. Another rumor said a Supreme Court justice had agreed to head a caretaker government. One source says that in the absence of Neri, Jun Lozada offered to speak about the Z.T.E. scandal. The idea was thumbed down because Lozada was a “nobody,” at least back then.

“We don’t hate the rich,” says Lim’s friend. “But we need to dismantle all land-based wealth. It’s what allows politicians and congressmen to control votes. And we can’t allow that.”

Whatever it was, it didn’t happen. Ed Lingao recalls Danny Lim saying shortly before the government assault, “Mahirap sa iba hindi sumusunod sa usapan.” By that Lim meant fellow conspirators in the military. It was the shortest siege. The government didn’t even negotiate. The A.P.C.’s rolled in to the hotel lobby, and Trillanes and Lim threw in the “wet towel” (which they used to fight off the tear gas).

ENDGAME
Manila Pen in 2007 was one of the three times mutineers openly moved against the Arroyo government. The two others were the 2003 Oakwood Mutiny and the February 2006 Marines standoff. None of them were bloody. There were other plots that never saw the light of day. Cory Aquino saw nine attempts; all of them involved some shooting.

Our source says those who still believe in a soft (and bloodless) coup are now in the minority. “It’s only a question of timing and technical preparation,” he says. That timing has nothing to do with the 2010 elections. The prospect that Arroyo will be stepping down anyway does not mitigate another coup because, as her critics see it, she’s likely to stay on beyond her term. Besides, the plotters are motivated beyond their deep dislike for Gloria. “We don’t hate the rich,” says Lim’s friend. “But we need to dismantle all land-based wealth. It’s what allows politicians and congressmen to control votes. And we can’t allow that.” By their analysis, corruption and poverty in the Philippines have their roots in the unbroken hold of politicians on land and the constituencies that come with the land. To them, the Philippines is no more than a collection of fiefdoms; the government is weak because real, long-term power remains with the political barons who rule the provinces.

Still, the short-term remains to be Gloria Arroyo. Akbayan’s Llamas is not alone in thinking there’s no way she will yield power when her time’s up. “You can imagine all the people who will want to put her in jail; or harm her,” Llamas says. Staying on beyond 2010 could become a matter of survival; even physical survival for her and her family. That’s why Llamas does not rule out a Palace coup. On hindsight, the most successful coup this country has seen was in 1972. A president facing the end of term declares martial rule. It was a palace coup, by the definition of some political scientists, since Marcos had overthrown the constitutional order of things to stay in power. The republic was in grave danger, Marcos had argued. Arroyo may face greater compulsion in wanting to save her own skin.