Issue Analysis No. 10
September 12, 2005

PEOPLE POWER and the MILITARY

Now an administration voice in the Senate, having bolted the opposition a month or so ago, former Marcos Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile last week said over national television that former President Corazon Aquino should disabuse herself of the thought that she can help oust Gloria Macapagal Arroyo from the Presidency.

It’s the military that put Aquino in power in 1986, said Enrile, and the military too that put Arroyo in Malacanang in 2001. Ergo, it’s the military, not Aquino, not civil society, and not the citizenry, that will resolve the present crisis, and it just so happens that the military and police—at least the generals closest to her heart and purse strings—are supporting Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

This is the myth Enrile and such like-minded bureaucrats like Angelo Reyes would like to foster. But it is exactly that, a myth.

Both Enrile’s premise and his conclusion are wrong. Enrile was with then Constabulary Chief Fidel Ramos when some two million Filipinos braved Marcos’ guns at EDSA during the February 22-25 People Power revolt to save his and Ramos’ hides..

The facts of the matter are simple enough even for simpletons to remember. Enrile and Ramos were involved in a coup plot against Marcos, and out of their and their bully boys’ ineptness were discovered by Marcos and his cousin, General Fabian Ver. Afraid of being arrested, both, with their retinue of bodyguards headed by one Gregorio Honasan, withdrew to Camps Aguinaldo and Crame.

Called out by Jaime Cardinal Sin, millions of Filipinos rushed to EDSA to surround the camps into which the former Marcos henchmen had crawled like cornered rats, thus protecting them from the tender mercies of their former boss and patron.

The factions of the military loyal to Ramos and Enrile did not protect the citizens; the citizens protected them, Enrile, and Ramos. Then Armed Forces Chief of Staff Fabian Ver could have easily bombed Camps Crame and Aguinaldo into oblivion, and Ramos, Enrile and Honasan with them. What prevented Marcos from ordering such a strike was the presence of those millions of Filipinos on EDSA.

In destroying Ramos and Enrile and their motley military company, he would have also killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of civilians in the process. Internationally that would have been a public relations disaster, and Marcos, who never lost his fear of world opinion, especially the displeasure of his US patrons, knew it.

In 1986 Enrile himself knew a good thing when he saw it. Given Corazon Aquino’s massive support among the population, he and Ramos acknowledged her as the legally elected president of the Philippines. Neither he nor Ramos nor their military cohorts “made” Aquino President—the people did.

Though he did not enrich them as much as Marcos did, Joseph Estrada too enjoyed the support of most of the generals of the military and the police—until these worthies saw the people massed at EDSA, and forthwith withdrew their support from
Estrada. In fact that was their condition for supporting EDSA II in 2001: that there be at least a million people demanding the ouster of Estrada.

There is no revising history. Enrile and those who now imagine that something else other than the people’s rising against Marcos and Estrada in 1986 and 2001 put Aquino and Arroyo in Malacanang will have the hard facts to contend with. And the hard facts in 1986 as well as in 2001 are too clear for even those who want to muddy it to obscure.
The people in their millions wanted two presidents out of Malacanang in 1986 and 2001. In 1986 they supported the military mutineers led by Enrile and Ramos; in 2001 the military shifted its allegiance from Estrada the minute they saw the millions massed at EDSA.
In 1986 the Enrile-Ramos military clique embraced Aquino because she had massive citizen support; in 2001, Angelo Reyes and company changed allegiances the minute they saw the millions massed at EDSA.

The Philippine military—and one may throw the police in with it—is the most unreliable of allies. One can only rely on the principled. But as the entire country has seen in recent years, that is a trait from which the military leadership has been exempt since the Armed Forces were established by the United States at the turn of the century to hunt down the remnants of the Katipunan.

What this means is that Enrile’s current patron Gloria Macapagal Arroyo may have the declared support of the military and the police now, but that support is hollow because premised on her remaining firmly in control, and capable of providing them the worldly goods they covet.

Military and police support can—is in fact certain to-- melt away once a million Filipinos mass at EDSA or elsewhere in the country, quite simply because, even more than among the putrid traditional politicians in Congress and in the provincial capitols and municipal halls all over the country Mrs. Arroyo counts among her allies, opportunism is the one trait these institutions share by tradition, training, habit, and ideology.

The leaders of these institutions have in fact raised lack of principle and looking out for themselves to the level of a fine art. One has only to recall the 1986 image of a sweating General Prospero Olivas, then chief of the brutal Metropolitan Command of the thankfully defunct Philippine Constabulary, referring to Corazon Aquino as “my President” once he realized that the Marcos he had served so well for 14 years was losing his grip on power. Or, for that matter, that of Angelo Reyes in 2001 saluting Estrada one day and then declaring his withdrawal of support the next.

The instinct for nothing else than survival and self-aggrandizement is in fact what unites the generals of the military and police with the alleged, current president of the Republic. That makes for the worst possible alliance of all, in which one can easily abandon the other for no other reason than convenience and gain. If Enrile and company think that military support is that crucial to Arroyo’s survival, they need to study recent history—but they need to study it without those revisions that they may find comforting though false.

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