Baloney, PNP chief says of coup rumors

"Baloney."

This was how Philippine National Police (PNP) chief Director General Leandro Mendoza dismissed reports of a coup attempt or a destabilization campaign against the Arroyo administration.

"Those reports are raw and unvalidated. There is no truth to them," Mendoza told reporters over the weekend.

The PNP chief assured the public that the PNP will not allow any group to topple the Arroyo administration, which marks its first year in office on Jan. 20.

"There is no way the PNP leadership will not know the pulse of its personnel... whether or not it would join any coup," he said. "We know and we can feel it from the ranks. So far, these reports are empty. These could be psychological warfare."

Mendoza further said misguided groups cannot even use as a "jumping board" the recent killing of discharged Army Lt. Baron Alexander Cervantes.

Cervantes, who claimed to be a spokesman for the military fraternity Young Officers Union (YOU), was killed on New Year’s Eve, a few days after he exposed a supposed coup plot against the government.

Cervantes had claimed that some 80 active and retired police and military officers had mapped out the supposedly coup try in a meeting at the Puerto Azul resort in Ternate, Cavite last month.

Mendoza said the police were not even sure if there was really a meeting at Puerto Azul and stressed the PNP is ready to thwart any armed attempt against the government.

Mendoza made the assurance as a group, calling itself the Partido ng Manggagawang Pilipino (PMP), claimed to have forged an alliance with a faction of the YOU allegedly led by Senior Superintendent Diosdado Valeroso.

The PNP Intelligence Group is supposedly verifying the strength of the group which styled itself as the "underground revolutionary party" of Filipino workers.

The group’s spokesman, who identified himself as Patricio Ramirez, urged workers in a statement to "establish a government of the poor."

"Enough of the elite-led EDSAs where opportunist generals and ambitious trapos (traditional politicians) rob the people of the fruits of their struggle," the statement read.

"Instead of revolts by the middle-class combined with coups by the generals, let us have an uprising of the masses in fusion with a mutiny of the soldiers... Let us establish a government of the poor," the statement added.