For the nth time, there is no coup

The newest racket in town isn’t, as Presidential Spokesman Bobbie Tiglao says, coup d’etat for sale by the millions of pesos to cronies and kin of Joseph Estrada. No, it’s "intel reports" on supposed coups that shady types concoct and send to jittery administration officials, who then jump from their seats to release money to the authors for "deeper analyzes."

One such report has found its way to Malacañang. It conjures the supposed recruitment of 200 young AFP and 500 PNP officers for a strike sometime between the anniversaries of EDSA-2 on January 20 and EDSA-1 on February 25.

The report is farthest from the truth. "Crazy people are trying to recruit," AFP intelligence chief Col. Victor Corpus laughs, "but actually getting anybody to join is another story." Gen. Edilberto Adan, AFP spokesman, further clarifies: "There will be attempts to recruit, but the officers they talk to invariably report them to (the brass)." Such a tip led Corpus last June to try to recover an explosives cache from the disbanded Swift Reaction Unit of the Navy Special Warfare Action Group that was once attached to the defunct Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force. Corpus’s operatives finally found 100.5 blocks of C-4 explosives in December in the locker of a former SRU non-com. The non-com pointed to Lt. Senior Grade Anthony Miraflor as having ordered him to store the stuff despite an order from the SWAG commander to return it. Investigators are trying to determine if the cache was linked to the murder of National Security Adviser Roilo Golez’s intelligence consultant, Baron Cervantes. They suspect that the explosives and the murder could be part of a plot to destabilize the Macapagal-Arroyo administration. But Defense Secretary Angelo Reyes is quick to clarify that a destabilization effort – like the Rizal Day bombing of Dec. 30, 2000 – is not a coup per se. Destabilization, Golez explains, is aimed at weakening the administration, while a coup requires mobilizing troops to grab power.

A founding officer of the Young Officers Union, which had staged the Dec. 1989 coup attempt against President Cory Aquino, dismisses all the present coup talks. Requesting anonymity, he said that morale is high in the Armed Forces, the antidote for a coup. "Things may not be perfect, we may have high officers who are not proven in combat at only in desk work, but that doesn’t mean we’re ripe for a coup," he says. "Besides, the anti-coup indoctrination in the AFP has taken root." In such indoctrination former coup leaders themselves explain to their peers and subordinates the futility of military action for political gain.

If a coup is next to impossible in the AFP, more so in the PNP, the YOU founder says. He quotes military academy batchmates who now serve in the PNP as saying they won’t think of staging a coup, assuming they’re that disgruntled, for fear of being crushed by the military within hours. One such classmate in the PNP confirms the assessment. "Even in the past, PC-INP officers only took the cue from the AFP," he says.

The concocted intelligence report states that PNP officers are restive because graduates of the Philippine Military Academy, who are a small minority, always get plum postings. Director Lucas Managuelod, a non-PMA grad who was himself disgruntled about postings during his younger years, is surprised with the information. "That may have been true before," he says, "but things have changed since then."

Managuelod not only holds two-star rank and heads the Directorate for Investigation. He also sits in the powerful Board of Promotions. Other members of the board, mostly PMAers, attest that Managuelod is so strict with their work that they usually end up deferring to his opinion about officers who are up for promotion. Managuelod is also chairman of PRIMO (Police ROTC Graduates for Integrity, Morality and Order), composed of officers who did not come from the PMA. PRIMO has a grievance committee that hears members’ complaints and, if found to have merit, sends these to the PNP brass.

Managuelod says morale is also high in the PNP officers’ corps. For the first time in four years, they now have a budget for capital outlay. This means the PNP can procure 35,000 new pistols and build a training school for police investigation. Other reforms are also being made, from sterner action against erring officers to as little as freeing policemen from driving garbage trucks inside Camp Crame.

Perhaps the biggest, if unintended, foil for a coup was yesterday’s promotion of 11,000 policemen. A thousand of them are for the equivalents of commissioned officers in the military. The promotions came with the standardization of police salaries regardless of posting.

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Kids do say the darndest things. Following were answers made by US 6th graders during a history test:

1. Ancient Egypt was inhabited by mummies and they all wrote in hydraulics. They lived in the Sarah Dessert. The climate of the Sarah is such that all the inhabitants have to live elsewhere.

2. Moses led the Hebrew slaves to the Red Sea where they made unleavened bread, which is bread made without any ingredients. Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the ten commandments. He died before he ever reached Canada.

3. Solomon had three hundred wives and seven hundred porcupines.

4. The Greeks were a highly sculptured people, and without them we wouldn’t have history. The Greeks also had myths. A myth is a female moth.

5. Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock. After his death, his career suffered a dramatic decline.

6. In the Olympic games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled biscuits, and threw the java.

7. Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul. The Ides of March murdered him because they thought he was going to be made king. Dying, he gasped out: "Tee hee, Brutus."

8. Joan of Arc was burnt to a steak and was canonized by Bernard Shaw.

9. Queen Elizabeth was the "Virgin Queen." As a queen she was a success. When she exposed herself before her troops they all shouted "hurrah."

10. It was an age of great inventions and discoveries. Gutenberg invented removable type and the Bible. Another important invention was the circulation of blood. Sir Walter Raleigh is a historical figure because he invented cigarettes and started smoking. Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100-foot clipper.

11. The greatest writer of the Renaissance was William Shakespeare. He was born in the year 1564, supposedly on his birthday. He never made much money and is famous only because of his plays. He wrote tragedies, comedies, and hysterectomies, all in Islamic pantameter. Romeo and Juliet are an example of a heroic couple. Romeo’s last wish was to be laid by Juliet.

12. Writing at the same time a Shakespeare was Miguel Cervantes. He wrote Donkey Hote. The next great author was John Milton. Milton wrote Paradise Lost. Then his wife died and he wrote Paradise Regained.

13. Delegates from the original 13 states formed the Contented Congress. Thomas Jefferson, a Virgin, and Benjamin Franklin were two singers of the Declaration of Independence. Franklin discovered electricity by rubbing two cats backward and declared, "A horse divided against itself cannot stand." Franklin died in 1790 and is still dead.

14. Abraham Lincoln became America’s greatest President. Lincoln’s mother died in infancy, and he was born in a log cabin which he built with his own hands. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves by signing the Emasculation Pro-clamation. On the night of April 14, 1865, Lincoln went to the theater and got shot in his seat by one of the actors in a moving picture show. They believe the assassinator was John Wilkes Booth, a supposingly insane actor. This ruined Booth’s career.

15. Johann Bach wrote a great many musical compositions and had a large number of children. In between he practiced on an old spinster which he kept up in his attic. Bach died from 1750 to the present. Bach was the most famous composer in the world and so was Handel. Handel was half German, half Italian, and half English. He was very large.

16. Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf. He was so deaf he wrote loud music. He took long walks in the forest even when everyone was calling for him. Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died for this.

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