No Signs That He Will Fight Back : Enrile Feels Only Relief at Firing, Supporters Say

Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile had just been fired from one of the most powerful posts in the nation after more than two decades of public life, during which, last February, he risked his life to lead a military revolt that helped topple a dictator and bring to power the president who fired him.

Yet there was no mistake about it: Johnny (Rambo) Enrile, as he is known to his people, was smiling, beaming ear-to-ear and waving a final salute to reporters chasing after his bulletproof van as it sped away from President Corazon Aquino’s presidential palace.

Half an hour later, when Enrile walked in the front door of his posh suburban home Sunday night, “he looked as if a fishbone had been removed from his throat,” his wife, Cristina, later explained.

At 62 and out of work for the first time since childhood, Enrile, who was born dirt-poor and out of wedlock and who fought his way into Philippine history, is simply relieved, his family and friends now say.

“As far as he’s concerned, he’s out of government service,” his daughter, Katrina, told reporters waiting outside their home in hopes of getting a comment from the former minister.

“He’s taking it very well. We’ve all waited for this day for so long,” she said.

So, apparently, had thousands of supporters of Aquino, against whom the national press had continually reported that Enrile was plotting a coup.

When Aquino announced Enrile’s forced resignation at an outdoor religious rally Sunday afternoon, thousands of her devotees cheered wildly. A celebrating motorcade wound through Manila on Sunday night, horns blaring and lights flashing.

And in interviews, top Aquino aides were virtually gloating over a victory they said exorcised an ominous threat to the government that Enrile himself was instrumental in bringing to power.

Yet, as Enrile’s wife and daughter indicated, there were no signs Sunday that Enrile or his loyal, 700-man security group--the men believed to be the masterminds of a coup plot--would try to fight Aquino’s decision to fire the controversial minister.

On the contrary, a dozen key leaders of the security group emerged from a private meeting with Enrile at his home late Sunday afternoon looking angry and dejected. Dressed in combat fatigues, some of them armed, they looked ready for war.

‘The Game Is Over’

Later, however, one of them commented, “Well, the game is over.”

The group’s leaders then met privately with Enrile’s replacement, retired Gen. Rafael Ileto.

“I preached to them about unity,” Ileto said, and the group’s leader, Col. Gregorio Honasan, told reporters, “We agreed.”

It was a quiet climax to a drama that has been unfolding here since last summer, when Enrile took center stage in criticizing the policies of a government he perceived as adrift and susceptible to exploitation by the nation’s armed Communist insurgents.

Enrile hit the luncheon club circuit hard, railing against the “Communist threat.”

The Communists, he warned, were taking over every institution, from labor unions to Aquino’s Cabinet. He spoke to service clubs and dentists and lectured insurance salesmen. He even beseeched left-leaning leaders of the Roman Catholic Church to abandon contacts with the Communists in the countryside and help the armed forces instead.

Security Group Drops Hints

As Enrile’s campaign intensified and spread to other regions of the country, the sometimes-articulate combat veterans in his security group--the core group that actually staged the February coup against former President Ferdinand E. Marcos--began dropping hints to reporters that if Aquino did not get tougher on the Communists, they would again take matters into their own hands.

The threats, underscored by Enrile’s personal history of political ambition and a well-orchestrated anti-Enrile publicity campaign by key Aquino aides, soon turned the tide of popular opinion against the defense minister.

One by one, several of Aquino’s ministers, some who had been jailed as political dissidents by Enrile when he served as Marcos’ defense minister and martial-law administrator, began calling on Enrile to resign.

The psychological war escalated as Enrile began lining up military backing against the possibility that Aquino’s advisers would succeed in persuading the often-stubborn president to fire him. And he became brasher in his criticisms and bolder in describing his claimed support.

‘We Are One’ With Military

“This is not Enrile talking,” Enrile bellowed during a tirade against the president in Cebu. “This is your military organization talking. . . . We are one.”

Asked during an appearance before a Manila dentists group if he were daring Aquino to fire him to give his men justification for a coup, Enrile replied: “I did not dare anybody. I said, I am expendable. Anybody can sack me. That is not daring.”

During his most recent public addresses last month, Enrile began hinting that he would “have to consult the military organization” before ever considering a resignation.

But, behind the tough veneer, Enrile privately was telling his friends and family that he just wanted out.

Even in public, Enrile repeated that if Aquino fired him or asked him to resign he would “happily” return to private life, play golf, be a lawyer again and spend time with his family for the first time since Marcos, then an ambitious lawyer running for the Senate, came to him in 1964 and asked for his active support.

Everyone Stops Talking

Finally, after an ill-advised appearance at a Manila rally, billed as an anti-Communist demonstration that later turned into a Marcos loyalist conclave, Enrile stopped talking--and so did the security group he often calls “my boys.”

Although they were publicly silent, plotting continued, and Gen. Fidel V. Ramos, armed forces chief of staff, twice met with Enrile and his men to avert planned military moves to isolate Aquino from her ministers. On both occasions, sources close to Ramos said, Enrile sided with Ramos and Aquino and took the lead in persuading his men to wait for a more opportune moment.

Aquino, too, met with Enrile at the height of one of the crises last month, leading to an apparent hardening of her stand against the insurgents. But in that meeting, too, it was Ramos who did most of the talking.

Little Choice in the End

And, in the end on Sunday, it was Ramos who made a series of swift moves that unified the majority of the military behind himself and the president and left Enrile with little choice but to comply with Aquino’s request for his resignation.

Enrile was not commenting Sunday night. His family and friends said he is not likely to speak or appear in public for several days. “I like staying at home,” Enrile told an Australian women’s group last month. “I stay at home most of the time.”

Clearly, there was more to it this time. Enrile, an avid chess player who once told reporters “that is the only game I really know how to play,” apparently had found himself in checkmate.

“You know, though,” Enrile told the Australian group that day, “I have never regretted anything in my life. I never regretted anything that I did; that I do, or that I will do in my life.”