Troublemaker

It is not the rich, the comfortable and the powerful who should be most aggrieved by the troubles attributed to Gregorio ‘Gringo’ Honasan.

All the troubles associated with the flubbed coup attempts of the past two decades cost the economy billions in lost opportunities. Those lost opportunities translate into lost jobs, lost incomes, lost livelihood and more poverty.

The bloodiest of the military adventure, the 1989 coup attempt, nipped our economy as it was about to bloom. It happened during the time that Japanese capital was migrating to Southeast Asia. Investments originally headed for the Philippines moved on to Malaysia and Thailand instead, helping fuel the impressive growth of what were eventually called ‘tiger economies.’

A lot of the best hardware our military had at that time were destroyed in the pointless fighting between the contending armed units. The lest hardware could have been used instead to crush the flagging insurgencies and spare us the cost of having to deal with them to this day.

All the jobs lost because investments were scared away by the turbulence could have had multiplier effects on our economy, creating second and third tiers of jobs and billions of pesos in income. Perhaps the number of Filipinos going hungry, which the SWS regularly reports, would have been a lot less awesome.

In a word, the flubbed coup attempts brought misery, or prevented the emancipation from misery, of millions of Filipinos. They, the poor and powerless, should be most aggrieved by the all the bloody pranks Honasan is believed to have masterminded.

In a word, this man has, single-handedly, more than everybody else, had the most deleterious effect on the lives of our countrymen.

And for what did the nation have to pay so much in terms of lost livelihood and vanished opportunities?

For the vanity of men enamored with power that flows from the barrel of the gun? For some set of naïve and simplistic "solutions" to our problems, "solutions" that are as harebrained as they are seductive to a few young officers who did not know any better?

I have gone through, several times, Honasan’s little pamphlet grandly titled The National Recovery Program. I wanted to know if there was any hint of a revolutionary idea in it, smartly concealed between the lines, that might set a whole generation afire.

Each time I go through it, I felt disappointment. Page after page, the pamphlet makes statements that range from the trite to the obvious. To improve social services, for instance, it proposes sending medical missions to the far-flung communities. To improve our military institution it proposes "professionalization." To reduce graft and corruption, it proposes cleansing the public sector payroll of all ghost employees.

The only slightly novel idea here is to declare, as a matter of state policy, the use of both natural and artificial methods of contraception to contain population explosion. Given the CBCP’s constant interference in public policy, that is as in-your-face as any program could be. But then, the Philippine Population Commission and the Rafael Salas Foundation proposed that a quarter of a century ago.

So that, too, is not new.

How this trite little pamphlet become the mobilizing document for a revolution? Any fairly competent public relations hack could hammer out a document like this one any idle afternoon.

The last time I went through the NRP, the day after Honasan was captured, I realized that my sense of disappointment emanated not from the document itself but from the fact that such a shallow prescription could be accepted by some of our young officers as some sort of gospel justifying a putsch.

This is not a vision document. It is a document that tries to dress up naked ambition.

Sometime ago, Honasan asked former UP president Francisco Nemenzo to put together a group of academics to elaborate on an "alternative vision for the Philippines." The "alternative" program was unveiled at – where else? – the UP. But even in this persistent sanctuary of ideological dinosaurs, of the irreligious versions of the Taliban, the document hardly created a stir.

Only the eminent senior economist, and Nemenzo friend, Gonzalo Jurado bothered to write a critique of the "alternative" program. And what a devastating critique Jurado wrote. It was as sharp as any polemical document could possibly be, blasting the Nemenzo paper out of the water with the clarity of that child who said the emperor had no clothes.

In a paper rich with cruel irony, Jurado demonstrated that, setting aside the ornamental platitudes, all the policy recommendations put forward in this "alternative" program were exactly the policies maintained by the present political dispensation. In order to advance these policies, the logical course is to sustain the present dispensation.

Jurado, subsequently, became the subject of ad hominem attacks from those who would rather pretend to see that the emperor has clothes. Fortunately, Gon Jurado has the credibility, the prestige and the record of intellectual independence to ward off the yakking of the desperate.

At any rate, Honasan is now safely in jail – arguing with the authorities only on where he prefers to be jailed.

To be sure, that will not put an end to the trouble-making. It will only put a stop to the stupid rituals of blood compacts that intend merely to raise the romance quotient of pointless putsch-making – compacts that are Honasan’s fetish.

Those who shared the view that the emperor indeed had clothes have been arraigned for rebellion. The generation that indulged in pointless putsch-making, mainly as a cottage industry that benefited only the unscrupulous masterminds at the sacrifice of many bright young careers, is passing quickly.

The next generation of officers, better attuned to the realities of this century, understand that where forceful action is necessary it is to enforce the power of the state to realize correct policies that might seem counter-intuitive to naïve populists.