Lame excuses
An idealistic young navy officer writes a master's thesis on corruption in his service branch. When the government ignores it, he rounds up other young idealistic officers and their men and stages a 'protest'.
That is the July 27 coup attempt, as painted by its participants. Strangely, they seem to have left out the good parts - the ones about 296 heavily armed elite soldiers seizing a posh hotel in the heart of Manila's business district, wiring the area with explosives, posting snipers on the roofs and demanding that President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo resign at once. They have also kept quiet about what growing evidence indicates: that they were financed by disgraced ex-president Joseph Estrada and egged on by the notorious coup plotter, Senator Gregorio Honasan.
Before their so-called 'protest', the mutineers filmed themselves striking heroic poses - in a house owned by a former executive secretary of Estrada. They stayed and stashed their supplies in another house, owned by one of Estrada's mistresses. And two vans they used to ferry men and supplies had identification stickers on the windscreen made out to Estrada's wife.
In the mess left when the would-be rebels vacated the hotel, investigators recovered diskettes spelling out a plan to set up a junta headed by Senator Honasan, implementing a 'national recovery programme' that he had written.
Those accused or implicated in the plot have only been able to come up with lame excuses, along the line of 'the dog ate my homework'. They claim that the weapons, ammunition and supplies found in the houses were planted.
As for the incriminating vans? Well they just hijacked the first vehicles they happened to see. Yes, of the thousands and thousands of vans in Manila, the ones the soldiers stole happened to belong to Estrada's wife. One would think that when plotters get together, the least they could do would be to get their stories right and read from the same script.
The principal player has not been much help. Estrada has steadfastly denied knowing the plotters. But when a reporter pointed out that a copy of the rebel officer's thesis was found in the mistress' house, Estrada's response was to ask hopefully: 'Maybe he was studying there?'
