Gossamer

I’m relying more on the grapevine than on the progress of the official investigation to get a sense of the dimensions and drivers of the coup attempt aborted last February 24.

The official investigation is trapped in the legalese paradigm. It seeks documentary evidence, affidavits, expert testimonies and confessions. That is like trying to build a statue with ash.

All conspiracies tend to be nebulous. This last one is even worse than that: it so bravely crossed over into the ridiculous.

All conspiracies tend to revolve around firm compacts, a well-understood protocol and a clear line of command. This last one is more of the wink-and-nod variety, of a lot of fence-sitters waiting for things to unfold and a band of risk-takers betting that if A is done, B will surely follow.

It is a gossamer conspiracy.

Only the most foolish conspirators will get nailed: those who kept minutes of their conspiratorial meetings; those who were possessed by so much hubris they invited journalists to witness their involvement; those infatuated with blood rituals and trinkets such as those dog tags issued junior officers after they had signed their names with their own blood.

There is a practical dictum in political analysis that says: In order to understand why things happen, follow the money.

I tried to follow that dictum in the effort to understand the dynamics of Filipino elections. For close to two decades now, I have tried to document campaign financing. This involves estimating the magnitude of campaign costs and tracing where the money comes from.

It is an exasperating project. The report of campaign expenditure candidates submit to the Comelec after each election is fiction. Proof of that: the only presidential candidate cited for overspending in recent memory was Jovito Salonga in 1992 – the candidate who obviously spent the least but probably reported everything.

While the phenomenon cannot be documented, and the "study" consequently useless for academic purposes, the insights derived from interviews and close observation of campaigns are precious. Those insights about the innards of our electoral politics convince me that this system is unsustainable.

In the case of this last coup effort, the political grapevine quotes a truly staggering financial figure.

The more I try to understand how this money was raised and where it went, the more I am convinced that the real drivers of this conspiracy were the best swindlers there are. It was the lure of easy money (so easy it makes bank robbery look obsolete) not ideology nor idealism not some wild lust for power that animated the key network behind the coup effort.

The coup effort, therefore, could never have been anywhere near success. It was simply the tool of a grand swindle.

Since the economy emerged largely unscathed in the wake of this funny coup conspiracy, the real losers were the suckers who fell for this ploy: desperate political players with large caches of ill-gotten wealth, cash-laden wheeler-dealers who were easy to convince to buy "insurance" in case the power grab did succeed, businessmen dependent on political leverage and criminal syndicates who will throw money at anything with the slightest chance of a political return on financial investment.

Losers, too, were the idealistic but naïve officers who thought they would be part of something glorious and the marginal political personalities who were so easy to convince to do funny things on the promise of a seat in the junta.

The key network behind this coup effort were like the weavers and tailors in The Emperor’s New Clothes. They worked smartly on the insecurities, the vulnerabilities, the vanity and the fantasies of their victims. Like the emperor in that story, they walked naked, fearful to admit their stupidity.

Let’s call the people in that central network the Weavers.

They are good at what they do. They have done it before.

This time, they took the opportunity of a slew of political scandals to seduce those who fantasized about making their own "Edsa", those desperate to break out of the far margins of our political stage and become main players, those saddled with one problem or another and who think that political power might solve those problems.

Although they despised the communists, it was necessary for the Weavers to link up the cadres as well. The communists have two assets essential to make visions of yet another "people power" rising look imminent: they have organized forces that could occupy the streets and they have a large war chest derived from systematic extortion that allows them to participate at their own expense, without siphoning from the Weavers’ loot.

It is not the leakages from the pork barrel of leftist congressmen that is of any real importance. The CPP-NPA makes billions annually from "revolutionary taxation" by threatening to blow up or burn down equipment in the countryside or mowing down criminal syndicates engaged in logging, gambling and drugs. They use the money to finance the logistical requirements of staging large demonstrations almost daily and, of course, to cover the overhead costs of maintaining the armed insurgency.

There must seem to be an alliance between the Weavers and the Left if the prospect of a coup is to be saleable to political speculators.

True to their basic criminal motive, the Weavers vanished with the cash when the moment of rising came, leaving all the suckers in a lurch.

There is nothing visionary, patriotic or revolutionary about this whole enterprise. No wonder this last coup effort looked, well, so gossamer.

The wonder of it all, after the Weavers have pulled their scam and taken off with the money, is that some of the suckers are still at it, animated principally by their own political delusions.