Cory's coup - Corazon Aquino, Philippines

National Review, Dec 31, 1989 by W. Scott Thompson

Cory's Coup

MANILA--The obvious point about the Philippine coup in its critical first half-day was the feeble military response by the armed forces to the insurgents of the Reform the Armed Forces Movement. From the vantage-point of my ninth-floor downtown office, and then from a tour around the inner perimeter of the city to various rebel attack points, it was clear that the army was not keen to respond.

Early that afternoon a Filipina political scientist, an American foundation official, and I were betting on the outcome. When we heard on the radio that at the Channel 4 TV station, which the rebels controlled, the government troops had defected rather than attack, it seemed all over. Mrs. Aquino by her weakness, her failure to deal with any of the crises afflicting the country, had invited this coup, we all felt.

It was at that moment that the roar of Phantom F-4s came out of the north (manifestly from Clark Air Force Base, home of the 13th Air Force) and swooped across the city's skies. Coming on the tail, as it were, of the rebels' Tora Toras of World War II vintage, the effect was indeed sensational. It was also clear to us that, no matter what else happened, the rebels had lost. American power is taken seriously in the Philippines, and this was our first overt intervention since MacArthur's return.

True, Colonel Gregorio "Gringo" Honasan's forces fought longer and harder than anybody expected; this was the hardest-fought coup anywhere in memory. The rebels expected to win, after all, and considered that the American intervention cheated them of their victory, as they were quick to state to any interviewer. It put them in an odd position, given their accusation (the justification for Colonel Honasan's first coup attempt, in August 1987) that Mrs. Aquino's government was coddling Communists and that they themselves were the champions of the Free World.

The irony is that the only winners in this coup are the New People's Army (NPA) Communist cadre in the mountains. It is fair to say that, prior to the coup, the army was seriously and systematically rooting out the NPA; it was the latest Communist domino to begin falling. I had, just before the coup, visited Negros, a Visayan island south of Manila that is the heart of the sugar industry. The Communist insurgency, which it is estimated controls about a fifth of the country's villages, is nowhere any stronger than in this feudal area of haciendas and poorly paid sugar cutters. Interviews with numerous defecting NPA guerrillas there, however, convinced me that the NPA had lost its mass base--that it was no longer swimming in a sea of support and had reached the point of having to maraud for food. Though it is too soon to know what actual damage the coup has inflicted on the counter-insurgency effort, one assumes the guerrillas in the mountains were the only people apart from his own men to celebrate Colonel Honasan's move.

Why did he mount the coup at this time? Only a week before, he had given an interview to a local newspaper saying that he would strike again as soon as he had a "clear signal" from the populace. The fact is that President Aquino's popularity is at an all-time low; in Manila there is garbage on every street, power brown-outs for up to six hours a day, and a transportation crisis forcing workers to spend several hours commuting each way. While the 1986 revolution against Ferdinand Marcos was fought in her name, this time none of the local actors appealing for support--including Jaime Cardinal Sin, the first to go on the air-mentioned Cory. It was loyalty to the constitution that was invoked.

The exception was what turned out to be, in the view of many columnists, the most powerful actor of them all--the United States of America. And the reason it used her name is that the embassy had little understanding of how far her support had fallen. It is all too easy for Western embassies in Third World countries to get caught up in the social whirl of an administration, nowhere more than in Manila's elegant world of the ruling ilustrados, the old sugar-based oligarchs who came back in droves when Gringo and his colleagues drove Marcos out of power. Before the current coup attempt a senior embassy official, after confirming that the embassy had just spent millions upgrading its security, told me that things had never been better.

The military knew they had a problem in their ranks, which is why they allowed Gringo--who was cashiered after the 1987 coup attempt but remained very popular--to roam rather freely around Manila rather than take the unpopular step of arresting him. The military were preoccupied, in any case, by the NPA insurgency. And they underestimated the extent to which Gringo was organizing. In 1987, the Manila commander pointed out, Gringo and his men "had the facility of actually commanding military units." In 1989 he no longer commanded the elite rangers, and everything would have to be done on the sly. As it turned out, he still could get the loyalty of the country's best troops, even from outside the ranks.