President Duterte and his cabal of mouthpieces must really think so lowly of the Filipinos’ capacity to digest information that they get from their officials. Either that or they are really paranoid and scared. Or they are just reading too many Tom Clancy books. Or they are conditioning the people’s minds for some sinister plot of their own.
Take your guess.
Consider these: Less than three months into Duterte’s presidency, Communications Secretary Martin Andanar — repeated by Duterte himself, then Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre III and other administration officials – claimed that some Filipino-Americans in New York were hatching a plan to oust Duterte by January 2017.
They even had a time frame for the supposed ouster plot. Andanar cited an unnamed Cabinet secretary who had just visited New York and heard about an alleged secret meeting where the plot was hatched.
Two months later, Duterte repeated the allegation, this time adding that a certain “affluent businesswoman,” apparently referring to multi-millionaire Loida Nicolas Lewis, was funding the alleged destabilization plot. In March, the President again said she had a taped conversation between Lewis and an alleged co-conspirator of a plot to destabilize his administration.
Lewis denied all allegations and demanded that they produce any evidence of such plots. Duterte and his spokespersons ignored her.
A few days later, Foreign Secretary Alan Cayetano, along with Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque, alleged that drug lords are using drug money to discredit Duterte’s drug war and to destabilize the government. And yet, they showed no proof of such a plot.
Just a few weeks ago, the President repeated a long time claim that the Central Intelligence Agency is out to assassinate him. He has been saying that from Day One, and yet has not presented any evidence of such a plot.
On Sept. 11, during his nationally televised one-on-one interview with Presidential Legal Adviser Salvador Panelo, Duterte said he got information from a reliable foreign source that the Communist Party of the Philippines, the Liberal Party and some members of the Magdalo group (party List of Sen. Antonio Trillanes and Rep. Gary Alejano) were hatching a plot he termed “Red October” to oust him in October.
Again, he had a time frame for the alleged plot. By the way, the CIA plot to assassinate him was supposed to be carried out last Sept. 21, the anniversary of President Marcos’ declaration of martial law. Of course, we all know that it didn’t happen. Except for the President’s army of trolls and blind supporters, nobody believed it anyway.
A week later, the AFP Chief of Staff Gen. Carlito Galvez and his deputy for Operations Brig. Gen. Antonio Parlade confirmed Duterte’s allegation and said there was indeed a lot to oust the President hatched by the communists, the Liberals and some soldiers belonging to the Magdalo group.
“There will still be a plan this coming October. They call it Red October. That is the month of international celebrations for communism, Marxism and IP (indigenous peoples),” Parlade said. He insisted that the previously reported Sept. 21 plan to oust Duterte was real, if not a prelude or at least aimed at destabilizing his administration.
Parlade said military intelligence were in possession of documents seized from communists showing such a plot exists, but wouldn’t make public the supposed documents. Note that during his interview with Panelo, the President said the information came from a foreign source. The military, on the other hand, said the information came from communist documents.
Even the name given to the supposed plot was obviously a product of someone who has been reading Tom Clancy novels, particularly the book that was made into a movie titled “The Hunt for Red October” and starring Sean Connery and Alec Baldwin. The book was not really about some fancy destabilization plot, but about a Soviet submarine captain who wanted to defect to the US, taking with him a ballistic missile submarine named the Red October. But who cares? It is a sinister sounding name that was fit for an October ouster plot, the military people or whoever cooked up the idea must have thought.
Red October? For real?
Retired Admiral Ramon Farolan doesn’t think so. In his Philippine Daily Inquirer column, the former Navy chief asked: “If there is such a plot as Red October, why announce it in advance? Why not first arrest the people who are the supposed leaders and then declare that the plot has been nipped in the bud, so to speak, and present the suspects and the evidence?”
Farolan also noted that amid the Red October scare, the military is not on heightened alert, which he said is the usual procedure in the face of such a serious threat. He also wondered why if there was such a threat, some of the most important members of the Cabinet are in London with their assistants in a trip billed as a trade mission. Amid all these threats?
So why announced an ouster plot that would scare away investors and possibly worsen a runaway inflation and a slowing economy? Many opposition leaders and critics believe it’s another distraction to keep the people’s attention away from these very problems that confront the millions of people trying to make ends meet amid rapidly rising prices and fast dwindling value of the peso.
The continued claims of ouster and assassination plots would have been laughable but for the fact that Marcos used similar alleged destabilization plans from both leftists and rightists as an excuse to first suspend the writ of habeas corpus and later declare martial law that put the country under darkness for 14 years.
The only difference is that Marcos never claimed that the leftists and the rightists conspired with each other and the political opposition (coincidentally also comprised of leaders of the Liberal Party at that time) in efforts to oust him. Marcos obviously understood the fact that the communists and military leaders would never join together for the simple reason that they adhere to completely opposing ideology. As Rudyard Kipling said: “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”
All this drama about destabilization plots, about daring the military to tell him they didn’t like him and he would step down, about assassination plots, about wanting to resign, and similar pronouncements are simply meant to stir sympathy from his loyal supporters and keep his political base intact.
If anything would happen in October, Heaven forbid, it would come from the Duterte camp and would most likely be a repeat of what transpired after reported destabilization plots 46 years ago. God bless our Motherland.
(valabelgas@aol.com)