The Guingona factor

Sen. Gregorio (Gringo) Honasan says he is not in hiding, he is just inaccessible. Inaccessible? Every Tom, Dick and Harry in media has access to him, slurping interviews he gives right and left with the munificence of a department store Sta. Claus handing out gifts to the kids. Gringo, if anything, thrives on publicity. He loves it. And he has it galore when in hiding, when playig cops and robbers with the government. Media indulges him because that’s what media does best – touch base with rogues, renegades, rapscallions, rebels, demagogues, messiahs who seek to tear our society apart with high-sounding rhetoric.

Gringo says he will yield when patas na ang labanan.

That’s malarkie. There’s never any level playing field in any court of law. There are always the accusers and the accused. You win or you lose. What makes it tenable in civilized or democratic society is the presumption of innocence until all the evidence is scraped out, lawyers of both sides have their say and their day, and finally the judge pronounces sentence. Even this sentence is subject to appeal, particularly in the Philippines where often appelate courts take years to finally bang the hammer of justice.

So what is Gringo complaining about?

This fugitive from justice has no reason to complain at all. Our society has pampered him, coddled and eventually amnestied him, ultimately elected him senator of the realm. In other countries, considering the abundance of evidence that indeed he and his right-wing military cohorts had committed the crime of rebellion several times, Gringo would have been executed. If he is still around, it’s because the "mistah cult" has prevailed in our military culture, and Filipinos as a general rule tend to "forgive and forget".

Not in other countries. In South Korea, two former presidents Choon Doo Huan and Roh Tae Woo meekly submitted to the government. They were then charged, convicted and imprisoned for long stretches because they malversed funds in the hundreds of millions of dollars. All throughout the trial, they were manacled, jeered at, humiliated and rightly so because they were crooks and criminals of the first cut. When they were convicted, the nation cheered.

It’s time to cut and cut clean, Gringo. Those were the words of Senator Paul Laxalt when on instructions of US President Ronald Reagan, he told the dictator Ferdinand Marcos to abandon ship on that fatal day – Feb. 25, 1986. Put this in your mind, Mr. Senator. You are not a national idol. You are far from being a national hero the way Ninoy Aquino was and remains. If perchance you run for president in the year 2004 – if elections there should be – you have about as much chance to win as a popsicle in purgatory, a dewdrop in hell, a virgin blonde in the land of the ravenous Mohawks.

So cut your losses, Gringo, while and if you still can.

It would have been all right if you were the original boy on the burning deck – brave in heart, clean of soul, heroic in mould. But you are not. You sought many times to bring down Malacañang and President Corazon Aquino. Yours was a gospel of military and civilian reform underneath which was the gun, the knife, the bomb and all the deadly protofascist paraphernalia to kill a young and still aspiring democracy. Granted, that democracy may not be working well anymore and has, in all truth, dismally failed till now to extricate the Filipino from his quagmire.

That does not give you the rationale to defy authority, defy the law, defy all the noble codes you lived by in the Philippine Military Academy and stick a butcher’s knife into the nation’s throat. You and your bully boys killed a number of innocent Filipinos when you launched your series of coups. You still have to atone for that, pay for that. Get real, Gringo. Yours is not the Knighthood of the Round Table. And neither you nor your apostles – naval Lt. Antonio Trillanes and Army Capt. Milo Maestrecampo among them, are replicas of Sir Galahad and Sir Lancelot.

I saw Trillanes and Maestrecampo testify before the Feliciano Commission Wednesday. If they are the best you have, I worry for our country. Sonny Trillanes lied outrageously when he said the "Oakwood Mutiny" was a "spontaneous display of our grievances". Spontaneous? Hello again. The eye could see everything. Oakwood was well-planned in advance, the stationing of the rebel officers, hiring out rooms in Oakwood, the abundance of state-of-the-art weapons, the storage of provisions, well-coordinated rebel movements during the night, the planting of bombs, disquettes discovered unravelling Oplan Andres to take over power.

And where did all the money to finance the Oakwood operetta come from?

So far, it has turned out to be opera bouffe, that Makati Mutiny. The people did not rise to join the rebels. There was sympathy for their grievances but none for their cause. And for Gringo Honasan to repeatedly claim he had nothing to do with it is like the inimitable Groucho Marx disowning his brothers. This will pass, Gringo, as everything on this planet passes. Soon even the media will lost interest in you as other events, other earth-shaking matters splash on the national stage and regurgitate the venom of the times.

So come clean, Mr. Senator. Give yourself up.

* * *

Do you ever wonder, spare as it may be, why Vice President Teofisto Guingona gets more serious publicity than all other presidential candidates or aspirants, barring of course President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo? Some of her supporters say she is neither candidate nor aspirant and will stick to her pledge not to run in 2004. That I don’t buy. GMA will run. Unless of course, the NO-EL (No Elections) scenario materializes.

Tito Guingona is never discarded by media and some sectors of public opinion because like that spot in the horizon looming forth, he is getting bigger and bigger. And he is getting bigger because there is a sort of political vacuum that was not there before. There is a nationalism vacuum. By that I mean there is nobody, no group, no meaningful organization that hoists the flag of Filipino nationalism with any kind of towering flare. Guingona, almost all alone, has embodied that role.

He could hardly be heard just three years ago. People Power elbowed him aside. The voices, the faces that mattered in hauling the crowds in were those of Jaime Cardinal Sin, Corazon Aquino, and the Left, largely Bayan. And then, of course there was civil society and its moderate groups. It was only when the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) was approved by the Senate that a blip appeared, then several blips, then ripples, then bigger ripples, than a wave of two.

There was one man among a few others who saw the VFA for what it was – a Trojan Horse of ominous proportions. Tito Guingona sounded the alarm but hardly anybody then was listening to him. The VFA innocently enough was initially understood as a bigger vehicle for joint military exercises. Why not? The cream of US combat soldiers would come and train our ragtag-and-bobtail army in the art of modern warfare. To boot, the US would modernize our fighting capabilities with night- vision googles, smart bombs, satellite espionage, attack helicopters, the works.

Guingona smelled something else. He saw the return of America to the Philippines, at the very least their special troops. After September 11, 2001, the day Twin Towers and the Pentagon crumbled after a murderous terrorist attack, that view was reinforced with the US declaring total war on international terror. After that came the war on Afghanistan. After that came the US choice of the Philippines as the "second front" in the war against terror. After that Oplan Balikatan. After that the US war on Iraq and its aftermath. After that, the carousing, carolling White House welcome of President GMA. After that, the fire-engine American focus on the Korean Peninsula where North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il is reportedly on the way to building a formidable nuclear arsenal.

And so? And so the Philippines now looms as a major staging area for the projection of American troops and equipment in East and Southeast Asia. US military forces are ready to vacate the Korean peninsula and move down to safer countries like the Philippines and Australia. And so in this war against terror, the Philippines can slide into the maelstrom because the US has designated the CPP-NPA as a "foreign terrorist organization" and possibly in the future the MILF.

Tito Guingona has felt and perceived all these in advance and worries greatly that the Philippines may or can be sucked into America’s military programs or adventures in East and Southeast Asia. Only a political force that is truly nationalist, that seeks the integration of a divided archipelago into a strong and independent nation can draw the line that separates sovereignty and puppetry. So do not be surprised if in the near future, Tito Guingona bolts the presidency of Lakas-CMD to run for president in 2004.

(Erratum: The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor occurred Dec. 7, 1941 and not Dec. 9, 1939 as wrongfully stated by our previous column on Folly.)