There is no Tagalog word to match it. Perhaps a phrase: kapal ng apog.
What actually happened on July 27 now appears to be the execution of the coup plan in its most minimal scale. This was less than Plan B. It is more like Plan Z.
A truly arrogant mind crafted what we now know as Oplan Andres.
At its maximum form, the plan imagined simultaneous rebel actions that would take three airports, grab armor and air support, occupy the General Headquarters and seize Malacanang Palace. The President would be led into an ambush. Broadcast facilities would be taken and used.
The young officers who took Oakwood may look like mama’s boys, with a fetish for the best gear there is and a penchant for striking poses for photographers to delight on. But the evidence is now suggesting they planned on murder and double-cross.
Oplan Andres is sufficiently arrogant to detail a comprehensive plan for this "revolutionary" movement to undertake after it has taken power.
A junta composed of military officers and their politician friends will rule as a dictatorship. They will sequester public and private facilities, annex corporations they consider important and begin a purge.
Among the first victims of that purge will be some of the very suckers who financed the conspiracy. They will be propped up in apparent positions of power to draw political support for the new regime – and then they will be killed off the moment they outlive their usefulness.
Some of the casual estimates of the financial outlay for this outrageous political project run in the vicinity of P300 million. That is not a measly sum. That is certainly a sum that the firebrand captains complaining of low pay could not raise from among themselves – even at gunpoint.
According to the grapevine, over P100 million was supposedly handed over to the usual rent-a-mob specialists to produce a million people in the streets to support the power grab. Greed and plain unscrupulousness saved the day for democracy. As the money filtered down, it very likely evaporated. The result was a pathetic crowd of sympathizers turning up in the early morning of July 27 and quickly dispersing in the face of superior force.
The rent-a-mob specialists, supposedly including one faction of the fractious political Left, must be laughing their way to the bank while the hot-blooded captains weep their way to the dungeons – and eventually to the dustbins of history.
Maybe a lifestyle check should be made on them, too.
Seriously, though, it was military intelligence that saved the day. The plot uncovered, the captains of Oakwood were forced to advance their schedule by a week. That threw off the massive machinery for a power grab.
Other conspiratorial military units, such as the one assigned to storm the armory at Sangley Point, flubbed their missions. The crowds, a supporting cast of a million, were not ready and properly warmed up. The "political component" lost its nerve as the authorities imposed a tight deadline and prepared to shoot.
At the onset, we made the mistake of considering the young Oakwood officers naïve. We were wrong. They were worse than that. They were brutally simplistic. As simplistic as the typical Khmer Rouge cadre, during the height of Pol Pot’s reign, believing he was cleansing his society and building a new future by filling up the killing fields with dead bodies.
The fact that the Magdalo poster boys actually moved to take power leaves all of us with the chilling visions of what hell might have been let loose had they managed to take power against the odds. We would be, today, busy burying the dead or getting ourselves buried by whoever bothered to do so with a minimum of ceremoniousness.
There are many, many questions that need to be answered in the aftermath of this hasty and badly executed coup attempt.
The most urgent should be: Who the hell had the money and enough stupidity to gamble this large sum on a lousy plan probably put together by people with long records at bungling coups?
The drug lords may be suspected here. They make money without much sweat, and money in truly humungous quantities that P300 million is pocket money for a night at the casinos. Why not gamble on a coup against a government that is gaining remarkable ground against the drug syndicates?
Successful police raids against shabu laboratories the past few weeks resulted in the capture and destruction of billions of pesos worth of abused substances. What is a paltry P300 million to gamble on a wrecking crew that will probably produce nothing but prolonged chaos for the country? Chaos is good for the illegal drugs trade.
But the evidence being turned up is more disturbing. The sniffing dogs seem to heading in the general direction of the Veterans Memorial Medical Center.
Consider these: Eki Cardena’s house, Laarni Enriquez’s townhouse, captured delivery receipts leading investigators to a house allegedly used as office by one of Joseph Estrada’s sons, and now three vans used by mutineers on their way to grab the Sangley armory traced to the Estrada home on Polk Street, complete with North Greenhills stickers and receipts with the name of Senator Loi Ejercito.
Rufus Rodriguez, lawyer for Loi Ejercito, Panfilo Lacson and now Laarni Enriquez says that government agents are planting evidence to link the deposed president to the flubbed coup attempt. If he is right, our law enforcement agencies are well on the way to a Guiness record of sorts for fabricating evidence in such stupendously large quantity and with such imaginativeness.
We better wait for the sniffing dogs to do their job.
In the meantime, the scale of Oplan Andres should be enough to entertain us for a few days. It is an arrogantly conceived plan that imagines a conspiracy of millions playing out their respective roles with clockwork precision.
But alas, it is a plan that makes too many precarious assumptions – the most important being that the authorities would do nothing while the conspirators go about executing their conspiracy.
It is plan that grossly underestimates the capacity of even a reckless democracy like ours to protect itself and survive an armed threat. It is therefore a plan that almost predictably succumbs to its own audacity.