Philippine Military ‘Reformists’: Specialists in Torture

Manila’s “Christmas coup” showed that the Philippines has not yet moved beyond the Marcos era--indeed, evidence indicates the coup was an attempt to restore the Marcos regime without Ferndinand E. Marcos.

The late president built his political machine by transferring vast amounts of money from established businessmen to a claque of kin and courtiers called the “crony capitalists.” Marcos reinforced his financial clout with personal control of the military, making the armed forces a mailed fist of one-man rule.

President Corazon Aquino failed to purge the politicized military officers or pursue the assets of key Marcos cronies. Not surprisingly, these Marcos survivors are the ones who conspired, for a third time, to overthrow her government.

According to Aquino, the coup’s political leaders were Sen. Juan Ponce Enrile, Marcos’ defense minister from 1971 to 1986, and Eduardo Cojuangco Jr., the former dictator’s wealthiest crony, who slipped into Manila from his Los Angeles exile just days before the coup. Under Marcos, the two had prospered as partners in the regime’s lucrative coconut monopoly. Significantly, the rebel officers proclaimed their membership in the Reform Armed Forces Movement (RAM), a group that Enrile organized to overthrow Marcos after the two broke in 1985.

Over the long term, a politicized, faction-ridden military may prove the most lasting legacy of the Marcos era. Under martial-law rule, an officer corps once proud of its professionalism split into factions headed by Enrile and two rival Marcos cousins--Gen. Fabian Ver, head of the Palace Guard, and Gen. Fidel Ramos, chief of the Philippine Constabulary. Once a likely successor, Enrile was forced out of the ruling circle in 1981 when Marcos made his wife, Imelda, his heir and designated Ver her protector.

Convinced that Ver was planning his assassination, Enrile organized a 300-man security squad in the Defense Department under Lt. Col. Gregorio (Gringo) Honasan, a charismatic former class captain at the Philippine Military Academy. Moving from defense to offense in 1985, Enrile used Honasan to launch RAM as a group of reformist officers protesting Ver’s corruption of the military. By year’s end, RAM’s public protests concealed a clandestine coup group led by Honasan and 15 officers, most of them former classmates at the military academy.

Although the press portrayed them as genuine reformers, the officers were creatures of the Marcos dictatorship. Rather than an efficient, Argentine-like slaughter of the opposition, Marcos directed an almost theatrical terror that intimidated though displays of torture-murder that Filipinos call “salvaging.” Graduating from the academy in 1971 only months before Marcos declared martial law, many future RAM leaders specialized in repression. Instead of learning respect for civil authority through normal garrison duty, these young lieutenants were trained in the surveillance, arrest and torture of civilians.

The record of human-rights violations in the Marcos era reveals that almost all future RAM leaders engaged in regular torture. They used psychopathic techniques, presaging their later attempts at political terror. Reading the testimony of their victims, they played games of domination and empowerment, often involving sexual torture of male or female.

* In 1977 the International Commission of Jurists reported that Lt. Vic Batac, RAM’s future tactician, had participated in the torture of a young woman, Maria Elena Ang, through “electric shock, water cure, sleep deprivation, sexual indignities, pistol whipping and threats to relatives.”

* In 1981 the Philippine human-rights group Task Force Detainees reported that another officer in the same unit, future RAM leader Lt. Rodolfo Aguinaldo, was a “persistent and systematic torturer.”

In 1986, an Australian newspaper alleged that RAM leader Honasan “had played a role in the brutal slaying of a dissident, Dr. Johnny Escandor, whose body was found dumped outside military headquarters in Manila, the brain removed from his skull and underpants stuffed in the cavity.”

In 1983, in a letter to his family just before his death, Ruperto Kangleon, a Catholic priest, recalled his torture by a constabulary unit commanded by Lt. Hernani Figueroa, later RAM’s spokesman. After the priest proved evasive in his answers, Figueroa, with the calm of a master inquisitor, ordered him taken away to be stripped naked, beaten and sexually humiliated.

RAM’s political strategist, Capt. Rex Robles, translated the group’s experience of torture into an ideology of violence and incorporated it in plans for holding power after a coup. “You must show people that you want to be their leader,” he explained between coups in a July, 1986, interview. “Now if you want to make a naked grab for power, recognize it for what it is and live up to it. Kill people. Discourage any opposition . . . . You have to be prepared to shed a lot of blood.”

RAM members, so enamored of violence, overestimated its political utility--a miscalculation that would ultimately cripple their three coup attempts.

Meeting with Enrile in January, 1986, RAM leaders formulated a plan for a coup against Marcos flawed by its extraordinary overconfidence. At midnight, Feb. 22, a 20-man commando team would somehow slip through the cordon of 3,000 palace guards and take Marcos hostage. Within hours, a mass mutiny of 2,500 troops would reinforce the commandos, using Marcos to force the surrender of loyalist forces.

Egos swollen, RAM members failed to see their plan was doomed by an obvious tactical contradiction: The commando raid required absolute secrecy, while the mass mutiny involved widespread knowledge of the plan. As details inevitably leaked to his security men, Marcos reinforced the palace with two Marine battalions on the eve of the coup. Instead of seizing power in a surgical strike, RAM rebels were saved from certain slaughter by Manila’s masses, who blocked Marcos’s tanks and installed Aquino in the palace.

In their first coup against Aquino in August, 1987, extreme audacity produced another RAM debacle. Without adequate planning, Honasan attacked Manila with 2,000 rebel troops, a hodgepodge of squads and companies drawn from disparate units. Despite superior numbers, RAM rebels were no match for the disciplined Malacanang presidential guard. After loyalist Marines attacked the last rebel redoubt, RAM’s coup collapsed, 18 hours after it began.

Last December, however, RAM came close to seizing power for the first time. Honasan captured three key pieces on Manila’s chessboard--air control, a major military base and, most important, the Marines. Instead of fighting the Marines again, RAM infiltrated their ranks, changing them from palace guard into main rebel force. In the coup’s first hours, the Marines captured Manila’s main air base, enabling rebels to bomb palace grounds. With control of ground and air, Honasan may well have seized power had not two U.S. Air Force jets reclaimed the skies for Aquino.

Transformed by their experience of torture and terror under Marcos, RAM colonels have refused to accept restoration of civilian rule. As long as they are free, the chance of another, and possibly successful, coup remains. With each attempt, RAM’s capacities have improved markedly. Their 1987 coup collapsed in a day, but their latest held much of Manila for a week.

What kind of a government would a RAM junta bring? They may call themselves reformists, but RAM leaders have never developed a coherent political program. At the height of their anti-Marcos agitation in 1985, they called vaguely for a return to “military professionalism”--a theme since dropped. Through interviews and actions, the rebels have indicated that they would impose an initial terror to subjugate the population. Beyond that, their reform agenda appears to have only two planks--eradication of all “leftists” and installation of Enrile in Malacanang Palace.

For a glimpse of such a program, we have to look beyond the RAM colonels to their patron, Enrile, and his ally, Cojuangco. As Marcos’ defense minister for 16 years, Enrile participated in the terror that produced martial law and served as its de facto administrator for a decade. While Enrile maneuvered for political power, Cojuangco amassed a vast conglomerate--coconuts, banking and beer--that brought him close to being the country’s first monopoly capitalist.

Principals in the lastest coup represent the worst wing of the Marcos martial-law coalition. Just as Imelda embodied the regime’s extravagance, Enrile personified political repression while Cojuangco meant business monopoly. None was identified with such progressive Marcos programs as land reform or rural development. If they do gain power, a RAM junta would restore repression, terror and monopolistic control.