Mutineers’ Political Chief Still Defiant Even as Coup Unravels

The scene at the posh suburban home of a rich, anti-government businessman Wednesday night was an inside glimpse of a coup gone bad.

Renegade Brig. Gen. Edgardo Abenina, self-styled political leader of the sixth unsuccessful coup attempt against Philippine President Corazon Aquino, was snacking on pickled eggs and Blue Nun wine and sending perhaps his final taunt to his former classmate--the man who was hunting him.

“Surrender?” Abenina laughed into the phone when he got through to the office of Maj. Gen. Ramon Montano. “You tell Montano he can surrender to me.”

Montano is the chief of the Philippine Constabulary, the man who commanded the government effort to mop up the coup that turned into a siege of Manila’s financial district by right-wing military rebels.

Defiant, but deceiving. Negotiations were already under way for the surrender of nearly 400 crack troops who had laid siege to Makati. Today, the rebel troops returned to their barracks, leaving only the top leaders and the supporters of the mutiny at large.

As the coup neared its end Wednesday night, the rebel leaders put on their best face for a reporter taken to interview the renegade general in his hide-out.

Abenina, unaware of how soon the end would come, conceded that his operation had “stalled.” He had lost all contact with his fellow coup plotters and, more important, with the field commander of the rebel troops who were occupying Makati’s high-rise office towers and luxury condominiums and hotels.

Lt. Col. Rafael Galvez, the highly decorated rebel commander in Makati, was negotiating on his own after having unilaterally reversed a decision by his senior rebel officers to hold Americans who were trapped inside the district.

But even at that late hour, Abenina used the interview for what promises to be the next phase of the rebels’ campaign to bring down Aquino’s government--a propaganda battle--a contest so important that Aquino used her emergency powers Wednesday to ban broadcasts of rebel “propaganda, comments, interviews and other similar materials.”

The rebels’ strategy, their logistical support and the key personalities behind their coup attempt also were evident during the visit to Abenina’s hide-out.

Even after the end of the Makati siege, Abenina said, the group plans to continue the campaign to destabilize the government. He contended that “some small (rebel) units” already have entered Manila to “blow up some government facilities.”

“But the government’s real weakness now is we have people in their offices,” Abenina asserted, refusing to identify the rebel infiltrators. “They were involved in the action, but they were never identified. Now, these are the people who will weaken them.”

Abenina also said that the rebel general holding strategic Mactan air base in the central province of Cebu would continue to hold out even after the Makati surrender. But the rebel general is expected to follow the lead of the Manila rebels and give up.

Brig. Gen. Jose Commendador, the air base commander, had a spotless record before joining the coup effort. So did most of the junior officers who took over the Makati financial district in Manila. At 32, army Maj. Abraham Puruggunan, who secured the rebel base in Makati’s luxury Inter-Continental Hotel, is the youngest soldier ever to achieve his rank.

Abenina named only three of the underground officers who were the key planners of the rebellion--himself, renegade army Lt. Col. Gregorio (Gringo) Honasan and Brig. Gen. Jose Zumel, a mutinous officer who was loyal to the late President Ferdinand E. Marcos.

Honasan, Abenina said, was in charge of logistics and field operations during the initial coup attempt on Nov. 30 and the subsequent siege. Zumel, he said, organized rebel support units in rural areas of Luzon Island north of Manila. And Abenina said his own responsibility was political organization and, of course, propaganda.

Honasan has figured prominently in every Philippine coup, including the one that brought Aquino to power.