‘Where Is Gringo?’ Filipinos Ask : Once Hero, Now Hunted: Honasan Haunts a Nation

More than a decade ago, a young, idealistic Philippine army lieutenant named Gregorio Honasan was deeply concerned about the credibility of the armed forces as they battled thousands of armed Muslim secessionists on the southern island of Mindanao.

Honasan wanted to prove that body counts of enemy dead were accurate and not government propaganda, so he ordered his men to cut off the ears of each enemy soldier they killed and deliver them to their commander on a string.

“Then we told them, ‘Just divide by two,’ ” Honasan said with a smile.

Today, Honasan’s enemy is President Corazon Aquino, and that anecdote, related to The Times by now-Col. Honasan when he was still a national hero a year ago, reveals the ruthlessness as well as the depth of commitment of a man who is now the object of one of the biggest manhunts in Philippine history.

Honasan, known to almost every Filipino as Gringo, a nickname often given to men named Gregorio, has gone from hero to haunter in a year’s time.

At age 38, Honasan was the chief planner and executor of the February, 1986, rebellion that drove then-President Ferdinand E. Marcos into exile and brought Aquino to power. The nation instantly worshiped the ruggedly handsome combat veteran, who appeared on the cover of national magazines with an Uzi submachine gun over his shoulder and a confident smile on his face. Teen-age boys pursued him for autographs, and girls taped his photograph to the walls of their rooms.

Four days ago, Honasan tried it again. He and a band of rebellious troops, most of them the same military ideologues who took part in the uprising against Marcos, seized the same Defense Ministry building in the same military camp and issued the same appeal to fellow officers and men to join them in the interest of the nation’s future.

Disappeared Into Jungle

This time, Honasan failed. As loyalist Aquino forces led by Honasan’s former ally, armed forces Chief of Staff Fidel V. Ramos, were crushing his rebellion last Friday, Honasan fled Manila in a helicopter and disappeared into the labyrinth of mountains and jungles somewhere north of the capital.

The fact that Honasan is still alive and free has left the nation ill at ease, almost certain that the fierce young soldier--who is best known to Filipinos for parachuting into Muslim war zones with a pet cobra he called “Tiffany” draped around his neck--will try again.

Aquino has directed the military to issue shoot-on-sight orders for Honasan and his fellow rebel commanders, among them Lt. Col. Tito Legaspi. Presidential aides have declared publicly that they want Honasan dead. And for a nation that thrives on war-movie heroes who inspire awe and terror, the question on most lips this week is: “Where is Gringo?”

Sensing the danger that Honasan could become an even more charismatic folk hero, a rebel with a cause in a culture that admires defiance, Aquino and Ramos both have launched a drive to discredit him and his men.

“Why is Gringo so glorified up to now?” Ramos, 60, growled to reporters Saturday as he toured the damaged camp that the rebels had used as their base. “He’s a traitor. He is a big liar. He lied to his officers, he lied to his men and he lied to his country. He abandoned his men. He misled them, telling them they were going on a training mission. And he lied to the people, telling them he was for the people and then killing so many innocent civilians.”

Aquino has gone even further. In a speech to senior military commanders Sunday, she branded Honasan and his men as “cowardly” murderers and defined the drama now being played out in the wake of the coup as a personal conflict between herself, as the force of good, and Honasan and his men as the “forces of dictatorship and darkness.”

Personalizing even more the psychological battle with her now-invisible opponent, Aquino declared, “The aim of the rebels was clearly to kill the president and her family.”

Although the killing of loyalist soldiers by Honasan’s rebels alienated many key military officers and men who might have been tempted to join Honasan last week, it is not clear that the government’s campaign to discredit Honasan is working on a civilian population that loves melodrama.

At least two major daily newspapers have responded positively to the anti-Honasan drive. The pro-Aquino Philippine Inquirer ran a front-page headline Sunday declaring “Gringo a Coward,” and the respected Manila Chronicle published a story Monday that quoted Sen. Rene Saguisag, a former presidential adviser, as saying: “The Gringo of today is not the Gringo of the other day. Gringo doesn’t smell like roses anymore.”

The Chronicle story concluded: “In a manner of speaking, Col. Gregorio (Gringo) Honasan is dead, the myth and mystique of a professional soldier that he wove around his person shattered by the coup he led last Friday.”

Yet far more newspapers were filled with romanticized accounts of Honasan’s “daring escape” from the “clutches” of Ramos’ loyalist troops. According to most accounts, Honasan and Legaspi fled by helicopter at the height of the government’s combined air strike and artillery barrage on the rebel stronghold.

And, from bank clerks and stockbrokers to taxi drivers and street vendors, dozens of civilians have told The Times that they see the entire war of words as an internal military conflict, a battle between an idealistic, colorful and now-hunted renegade officer and a tough, cigar-chomping, by-the-book chief of staff.

Cinematic Character Role

At worst, most of the media has portrayed Honasan as a hero-turned-villain poised to fight to the death, a character role that would draw sellout crowds in Manila’s cinema halls.

Clearly, though, there is much more at stake for the nation than a scriptwriter’s dream of a story line.

During a number of informal meetings with a reporter for The Times in the 18 months since he played a key role in helping former Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile overthrow Marcos, Honasan had indicated clearly that he and his followers would not hesitate to move against Aquino. It was only a question of timing, he indicated.

Honasan, who speaks in short, terse sentences that sound more like machine-gun bursts, has sharply criticized Aquino, accusing her of favoring the nation’s Communist insurgents over the armed forces that helped put her in power. He has said there is widespread official corruption in the new administration, which he has called potentially worse than the wholesale looting of the national treasury under Marcos. And he has criticized Ramos, calling him an indecisive political sycophant whose devotion to Aquino and her government resembles that of Marcos’ incompetent former chief of staff, Gen. Fabian C. Ver.

“We are sliding back down that slippery slope, at the bottom of which is the deep blue sea,” Honasan said nearly a year ago on a provincial tour with his former boss and now Senator Enrile, for whom Honasan served as security chief for many years until Aquino fired Enrile from her Cabinet last November amid rumors that Honasan’s men were plotting a coup.

12 Pesos a Day

Honasan and his followers have complained about low pay for Filipino soldiers, who receive 12 pesos (60 cents) a day risking their lives against Communist guerrillas to protect a government that they say distrusts them.

And he has spoken of the need for violence as a tool to purge a military establishment that he says was left slovenly and corrupt after Marcos used the armed forces virtually as his private army for nearly two decades.

“Cory calls the February revolt a revolution,” Honasan once said, using the president’s nickname. “It was only the opening round.”

For most of last year, Ramos agreed with much of Honasan’s assessment of the new administration. Unlike the idealistic colonel, though, Ramos, a West Point-trained career officer who fought his way up through the ranks, is committed to the supremacy of civilian authority over the military and the discipline of the military chain of command.

‘Rambos and Cowboys’

To Ramos, Honasan and his men are radicals--”Rambos and cowboys,” he called them Sunday--whose methods are tearing apart his 155,000-member military organization.

Ramos has toured military camps in every province of the country several times in the last year, in part to counter the rhetoric of Honasan and others in the reconstituted Reform the Armed Forces Movement. The once-covert group known as RAM was begun during the Marcos regime and has earned Honasan and his men the title “Ramboys.”

“The grievances are sound,” Ramos once told The Times. “It is the approach that matters. . . . We have a chain of command, and we are working very hard to have a constitutional democracy that will be the proper forum to redress these grievances. It requires patience.”

Ramos’ supporters in the military, among them most of the senior commanders and many junior officers as well, argue that Honasan’s approach is fundamentally so dangerous in a nation prone to anarchy that it could eventually destroy the armed forces as an institution of authority.

“All this talk of coups, coups and more coups--all this talk is very dangerous,” said Brig. Gen. Eugene Ocampo during an interview late last year. Ocampo is a pro-Ramos regional commander who holds three graduate degrees from Harvard University.

Not a Banana Republic

“We must unify,” Ocampo said, “join forces to rebuild and protect a functioning democracy, or else we’ll just become the laughing stock of the world--a little banana republic that overthrows its government every few weeks.”

Nonetheless, Honasan found wide support for his restlessness and impatience among the younger officers and enlisted men, who have become increasingly demoralized fighting for a financially bankrupt government that many fear has forgotten them.

A sign of that support came Monday with reports that the entire cadet corps at the Philippine Military Academy in the northern city of Baguio had gone on a hunger strike to protest the government’s policy toward the military rebels.

And Ramos’ strategy this week is to ensure that Honasan and his men remain isolated from such fertile bases of support. All 705 rebel followers who surrendered to Ramos after the attempted coup are being held in the cargo hold of a navy landing craft docked behind naval headquarters in Manila Bay, and government soldiers involved in the manhunt for Honasan are concerned with keeping the colonel away from all military bases in the northern part of Luzon Island.

In detailed, inside accounts of Honasan’s failed rebellion that have unfolded in Manila’s daily newspapers this week, there are even more justifications for the government’s concern.

Belinda Cunanan, a pro-Aquino columnist who lives with her husband, an army colonel, in the camp that Honasan occupied during his uprising, reported that the colonel took Camp Aguinaldo without firing a single shot.

Guards even saluted as he drove in with troop trucks and took over the Defense Ministry building. “That’s because I knew many of them. We were together in the field,” Cunanan quoted Honasan as saying during an interview with him before the government assaulted the camp.

And when Honasan left the camp under fire just before sunset, Ramos’ deputy chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Eduardo Ermita, who was there at the time, said that Honasan shook hands with many of the troops who stayed loyal to Aquino, and many of them wished him luck.

“Gringo is my friend, too,” said Ermita, who commanded an outnumbered force of 116 officers who prevented the rebels from seizing the armed forces general headquarters building in the heart of Camp Aguinaldo.

“But for me and many others of us in the officer corps, enough is enough. He just has this messianic syndrome that he, and he alone, can save his country. And that’s dangerous.”