SENATOR GREGORIO HONASAN, NOW A RESPECTED POLITICIAN, WAS a key figure in the Philippines’ democratic transition, pivotal in the overthrow of President Ferdinand Marcos and after that in numerous attempts to overturn the civilian government and bring in military rule. Honasan offers an insight as to why the Philippines is so badly placed with China in its campaign for sovereignty in the South China Sea, and why so many attempts to install Western democracy in the developing world have failed.
In the 1980s, only in his thirties and the youngest colonel in the Philippine military, Honasan had been a pinup figure, slim, athletic, sexy, and driven, wearing his military fatigues like a fashion model and at ease with weapons. Legends grew around him, particularly one about parachuting from aircraft with a three-foot pet python wrapped around his waist. Not true, he says; it was in his pocket.
Marcos’s rule began to falter in 1983 when the opposition leader Ninoy Aquino was shot dead on the steps of his plane at the Manila airport, now named after him. Between then and 1986, Honasan created the Reform the Armed Forces Movement with a group of young officers who became known glamorously as the RAM boys. “We realized that to change things we would have to step out of barracks,” Honasan told me, “to attack the very center of power—not to harm the occupants, because Marcos was still our commander-in-chief, but to capture him alive and present him to the people for judgment through due process and the rule of law, something that the nation was deprived off for almost two decades.”
In February 1986 Marcos called a snap election, the fading dictator against Corazon Aquino, the widow of the assassinated democracy hero. The result was close and disputed and it was into this acrimonious vacuum that Honasan chose to launch his military operation against Marcos with a plan to seize the presidential Malacañang Palace and key radio and television stations, military bases, and airports. The plan leaked, causing them to abort, but already prodemocracy protestors were taking to the streets, accusing Marcos of rigging the election to stay in power. They gathered along the wide Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, which ran through Metro Manila, in what became known as the EDSA revolution. From all walks of life and supported by the powerful Catholic Church, people stretched through city streets as far as the eye could see. It was into this massive gathering that Honasan, a handful of rebel officers, and Marcos’s defense minister walked amid scenes of flowers in gun barrels, soldiers embracing nuns, and military men linking arms with activists, similar to what we would see twenty-five years later in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.
“When we made that crossing of a sea of a million people, my greatest fear was that the people would not understand what we were trying to do,” said Honasan.
In a whirlwind of shifting loyalties, Marcos’s power was being shredded minute by minute by defecting figures from politics, business and the armed forces. When he finally pleaded for support from the United States, he was told instead that it was time to go. One of the more dramatic moments came when a fleet of military helicopters flew low over Manila toward the main army base, creating uncertainty as to whether the pilots were defecting or about to attack. The lead pilot, Red Kapunan, a friend of Honasan’s, later explained how he honed his helicopter formation skills on the movie set of Apocalypse Now, which had been filmed in the Philippines. Kapunan and his colleagues flew helicopters in the famous scene showing an attack on a Vietnamese village with Richard Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries blaring out from Kapunan’s cockpit.
On the morning of February 25, with the streets filled with protestors and troops on the same side, Marcos and Aquino were both sworn in as president in rival ceremonies. Marcos’s was thinly attended at Malacañang Palace, and Aquino’s took place at the exclusive Club Filipino, a lavish hideaway for the wealthy elite. But before the day was out, Marcos had gone. At 10:00 p.m. a US military helicopter took the presidential entourage to Clark air base, where they were given two US military passenger jets needed for their cronies, booty, and families to fly to Hawaii. Marcos was so sick and exhausted that he traveled lying down on a stretcher. The protesters breached the presidential palace to discover his wife Imelda’s three thousand pairs of shoes, which became the symbol of the couple’s misrule.
Although a national hero, Honasan was far from happy. He had planned to create a military-led government that would clean out the system and oversee new elections after about a year. Instead, the cry to recognize Cory Aquino’s swearing-in and for her to continue as president became too strong to resist. He was furious that her ceremony had been held at the Club Filipino instead of somewhere more accessible to ordinary families.
“Cory had not been visible in EDSA,” he said. “If she had been there with us, it might have been different, but she did not represent the change we needed. The others decided to subordinate themselves to Cory and, for us, that was a problem. We thought that the national mood, the degree of impatience, the demand for real change would continue. Instead, everyone just went home.”
“But you didn’t give your new president very long, did you?” I asked. “What did she do that was so wrong?”
“We expected improvements in the system.”
“Sure, but that doesn’t happen in months.”
“She set free a lot of political detainees, and many of those people went back to their armed insurgencies. She did it with the stroke of her pen, not realizing the cost to our soldiers’ lives. Thousands of us had died. It was like the Arab Spring. You get rid of the dictator. The pendulum swings from one end to the other, and you create more problems than solutions.”
Within months Honasan was plotting to overthrow the new and inexperienced Aquino. He trained a special force of thirty men to carry out yet another assault on Malacañang Palace with its new president inside. They moved on August 28, 1987, when I was having a drink not far away with a colleague at the laid-back bohemian Cafe Adriatico in Remedios Circle.
We rushed toward the Palace, following an armored car that stopped sharply when a mortar or rocket-propelled grenade exploded just yards in front of it. As the smoke cleared, the body of a young man who had been selling cigarettes lay skewed on the street, lit by our headlights, almost cut in half, his stomach ripped open. The armored car was from the mainstream military. Honasan’s men had killed the cigarette vendor. The two sides exchanged small arms fire while we watched. Soon reinforcements came, and Honasan’s operation was at risk.
By then he had shot his way into the palace and reached the corridor outside Cory Aquino’s bedroom. With the palace surrounded by her troops, he realized that trying to abduct her now would raise the stakes to an unacceptable level.
“I was looking at the bedroom of Cory,” he said. “We were willing to die, but we were not willing to do what was necessary. Killing fellow soldiers. If I had pushed on with the assault we would have had to fight our way out and she might have died.”
“And you didn’t want to kill her?”
“Good God, no. I wasn’t willing to harm her. If we had, we could not have weathered opinion from the international community. That was when we withdrew to Camp Aguinaldo.”
“When you knew you had lost?”
“Not lost, but the momentum had gone. The longer it takes to finish a coup, the more the advantage shifts to the other side.”
There were contradictions and conflicting small details, but it was thirty years ago, and Honasan’s central story added up. He was a young soldier who had tasted power, and was unprepared for what followed.
“What did you hope to achieve?” I said. “Did you want to become president?”
“No. No. It wasn’t that at all.”
“What, then? Was it that you didn’t understand the democratic space that was suddenly being allowed?”
“Yes. It takes patience to rebuild a nation after a dictatorship. And there’s been proof of that all over the world. I was just a soldier. I had no experience.”
Honasan fled underground, was captured, lost his middle ring finger by ripping it on razor wire as he tried to escape, and was imprisoned on an old ship in Manila Bay while all the time stirring up more unrest within the military. He spearheaded a third coup in 1989 when the military took control of Manila’s international airport, several air bases, and luxury apartment buildings in the Makati financial district. The threat was so serious that the United States deployed its fighter jets over Manila with instructions to confront rebel aircraft if necessary. Again, among the main casualties were cigarette sellers caught in the cross fire on street corners.
“The innocent people who died,” I asked. “Do you have any regrets?”
A defensive aura unfolded across his face. “I’m willing to stand in front of a firing squad as long as they hold responsible the ones that caused the loss of life—” He reeled off numbers of civilians and troops killed by insurgents.
“No,” I interrupted. “Let’s separate things. Do you have any regrets for the people who died during the coup attempts that you were behind?”
“Let’s go by the numbers: 150 in ’87. About three hundred in ’89.”
“And regrets?”
“No regrets, but always a lesson.”
He stiffened, hands open, pressing on the table, his severed finger stark against the polished wood, which was when I spotted a small, worn tattoo on his right hand just below his thumb. It turned out to be the faded logo of an organization that symbolized much about the Philippine character and explained why Marcos at his peak and President Rodrigo Duterte now have so much popular appeal.
The marking represents a promilitary, right-wing organization, the Guardian Brotherhood, set up in 1976 at the height of the Muslim and communist insurgencies. Its founders were a unit of noncommissioned officers who wanted to make sure they were watching each other’s backs. Honasan joined at the time, and since then its membership has grown into the millions and is now more grassroots-focused, working in villages and slums to ensure basic services. Honasan was its national chairman, and its other more famous member was President Duterte, who wears a similar tattoo in the same place on his right hand.
“The Guardians helped me so much when I was on the run. They hid me. They gave me shelter. Without them I wouldn’t have stayed free as long as I had. It could be a political force, but it hasn’t yet been exploited to its full potential.”
Honasan’s life as a fugitive ended in 1992 when Aquino’s successor, Fidel Ramos, granted an amnesty in exchange for a pledge to stop inciting military rebellion. Aquino suffered at least seven coup attempts against her; Ramos had none. Three years later, still a popular figure, Honasan ran for the Senate and is now a firm supporter of the president, his fellow Guardian Brotherhood member. “He has a clear sense of direction,” said Honasan. “This is what was missing before. Every time an issue comes up, you have a surplus of experts talking their heads off. They ask everybody except those who are dying and being killed and the civilians whose property and lives are being destroyed. You can’t have a wimp for a leader. You need someone who is feared more than loved and respected.”
There are echoes here of Donald Trump’s campaign, of the resurgent right in Europe, Britain’s split from the European Union, Narendra Modi’s massive mandate in India, and Recep Erdoğan’s iron-fist rule in Turkey, the loathing of experts and the embrace of what has become known as “populism.”
“A populist leader claims to represent the people and seeks to weaken or destroy institutions such as legislatures, judiciaries, and the press,” argue Jeff D. Colgan and Robert O. Keohane in their 2017 Foreign Affairs article “The Liberal Order Is Rigged.”42 “Populism is defined not by a particular view of economic distribution but by a faith in strong leaders and a dislike of limits on sovereignty and of powerful institutions. Such institutions are, of course, key features of the liberal order.”
The weaker the democratic institutions, therefore, the more challenging populism is proving to be and therefore the more vulnerable the Philippines is when it comes to China.
FOR MANY IN the senior ranks of the Philippine military Duterte and Honasan are role model heroes. “We are still not entirely democratic,” Deputy Chief of Staff Major General Guillermo A. Molina Jr. told me in an interview at the main military base, Camp Aguinaldo. “The appeal of a strongman is still here. That type of leader is what we’re looking for. We are not Thailand, but our military provides a sense of stability and predictability, and given our discipline and organization, we give the impression to our people that we are the defender of the homeland. When everything else is in a state of flux, the military stands in the center.”
Seen from Beijing, the Philippines under Duterte would be vulnerable for turning. First China had taught the Philippines a lesson with the attacks on its fishermen and economic boycott, then it befriended it. The voters’ decision to put in office an authoritarian strongman played right into Beijing’s hands. In one of those strange quirks of history, the ballot box was producing exactly the type of government that suited the interests of an antidemocratic government.
Like the armed forces in several Southeast Asian countries, the Philippine military has historically been deployed against internal insurgencies and not external threats. Duterte has now formalized this by ordering the military to protect the nation’s infrastructure against “enemies of the state,” which are mainly Islamic and communist fighters. The communist New People’s Army ran a militia of about three thousand, and it had once been a Cold War, grassroots insurgency, part of the feared domino impact of Marxism sweeping the world, sharing values with Peru’s Shining Path, Fidel Castro’s Cuba, and doctrines encircling the globe from Moscow. That beacon dimmed long ago. As with the Islamic insurgency, cease-fires came and went, but the communist insurgency has kept going, and routinely carries out attacks on the police, military, and government officials.
Duterte has courted Chinese investment in the hope that high-speed railways and sweeping highways would give the southern Philippines the employment and facelift needed to deter rebellion. The military’s job was to make sure none of the flagship projects, ports, airports, telecommunications, fiber optic cabling, and the rest got sabotaged as they were being built.
“We have to be the vanguard of the economy,” explained General Molina. “To make this country strong, it has to have peace. Under the previous administration, our critical infrastructure would get blown up, and the army would be sent in afterward. Now, protection of these projects is part of our mandate.”
Molina cut a neat figure in a dark blue uniform with a short-sleeved tunic bedecked with medals. He had spent much of his early career fighting the Moro guerrillas in Mindanao. On the table in Camp Aguinaldo he had laid out maps and books to explain the threats to the Philippines. Molina argued that the mission to protect infrastructure was achievable, whereas if deployed against the China threat, the Philippines was bound to lose. “The current maritime situation does not warrant the deployment of the military. The Philippine Coast Guard is responsible for this,” he said with a hint in his expression that he understood the irony. While the military was dealing with homegrown threats, the civilian Coast Guard was tasked with warding off a nuclear naval power against which the United States was deploying its aircraft carriers.
Honasan’s Senate committee was looking into all the Philippines’ multilateral and bilateral arrangements to determine which ones worked and which did not. “You must clearly define your national interest,” he said. “Right now, we know we cannot afford to take sides against China. That is a truth we have to live with.”
At the same time, however, can the Philippines afford to distance itself so much from the United States, which has both interfered and watched its back since 1899? After Duterte’s declaration in Beijing, US officials stress that the US-Philippines relationship was unchanged and nothing had moved on the ground. But the Philippines is clear that as the South China Sea dispute becomes more polarized, it cannot be seen to be getting too close to America, partly because of China’s reaction and partly because of Cold War memories that it needs to retain its own dignity of independence.
“We have been conditioned to think that we are the little brown brother of America,” Duterte’s first foreign secretary, Perfecto Yasay, told me in Manila. “This has not been good for us. We continue to remain subservient and dependent on the US.”
Yasay, who had to step aside because of his dual Philippine-US citizenship, said that Washington had been putting pressure on the Philippines to take a more active role in policing the South China Sea by conducting joint patrols with the US Navy. “We don’t feel that would be in our national interest because of the realities on the ground here,” he explained. “The joint patrols are based on that old fear that China remains a threat, and we don’t like that because it’s provocative.”
“So, is America’s tone toward China a help or a hindrance?” I asked.
“It is a hindrance. America’s pursuit of its international policy tries to get us involved in whatever quarrel they have with China. It is not worth our while risking our economy because of sovereignty rights around a fishing reef. If the US feels that Chinese aggression needs to be addressed to protect the trade that goes through these waters, let them do that in their own international interests. That’s their concern. They must settle their differences with China by themselves, not with countries like the Philippines that have other national interests to pursue.”
The policy of détente with China was bearing fruit up in the fishing village of Masinloc. The men were fishing again, and the Masinloc Fishing Association was skeptically studying the offer from China as a guaranteed buyer for whatever fish the villagers caught. The association’s head was Leonard Cuaresma, a fifty-one-year-old, slight, bespectacled man who had been taken to China to see for himself the modern fishing industry. In his house on a busy side street, Cuaresma showed me the glossy brochures of the places he had visited, including a fisheries research vessel and a maritime scientific center. The living room was sparsely decorated, neat, certainly not rich or lavish, and on the wall hung plaques depicting Los Angeles, the Statue of Liberty, and other American landmarks. To supplement his income, he ran a brisk business renting out a pool table that stood on a patch of concrete below the window. Cuaresma said he rarely fished himself now because he had lost his boat in bad weather and couldn’t afford another one. There had never been enough money. His son had broken generations of tradition and abandoned the fishing trade to become a motorcycle mechanic. Cuaresma told his story while questioning whether he would be right to accept China’s offer. “They say they want to be a close friend to the Filipino, but what else do they want to take from us?” he asked. “Will they use this to build more fish farms that will wreck our environment?”
I pointed to the iconic American plaques on the wall. “Five or ten years from now, might you have plaques of Tiananmen Square or Mao Zedong up on your wall instead?” I asked.
Cuaresma smiled, reached down, and brought out a model he had been given in Beijing of the Forbidden City and the Gate of Heavenly Peace. “I have this,” he said. “But I haven’t shown it yet. I prefer the American ones.”
In 2004 the Philippines and Vietnam, now China’s main Southeast Asian antagonists over the South China Sea, worked with Beijing to put together a plan for joint maritime exploration of oil and gas. One of its architects, the former speaker of the Philippines House of Representatives, Jose de Venecia Jr., explained that it had been agreed on by all three governments but then blocked by the Philippine Congress. “That is the problem with our style of democracy,” Venecia told me. “There are too many vested interests fighting for a bigger bite of the pie.”
Venecia revived the plan for Duterte’s trip to Beijing because it had obvious advantages for China. Signing with the Philippines and Vietnam would bring on side its two most threatening antagonists. Once that had been done, a second-tier consortium could be formed with Brunei and Malaysia, the other claimants. China’s big energy company, China National Offshore Oil Corporation, would be given first refusal on the project. “The appointment of a Chinese operator and drilling company for the multinational consortium will also be logical,” Venecia told Duterte in a private letter. “In the event of oil/gas discovery the most proximate buyer will be Chinese refineries nearby and ensure maximum profitability to the consortium while encouraging China’s goodwill.”
The Asia-Pacific region has far less oil and gas than either Latin America or the Middle East, and there are wildly differing estimates about the South China Sea. Beijing veers to the high side, believing that there could be 125 billion barrels of oil and 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.43 The US Energy Information Administration estimates much less, about 11 billion barrels of oil, which is not a lot given that Saudi Arabia has 268 billion barrels and Iraq 140 billion.44 Nor are reserves of natural gas enormous, estimated at 190 trillion cubic feet, which would be enough to keep China supplied for only about thirty years, and it is far from certain how much could actually be recovered from the seabed. The number is dwarfed by Russia’s estimated 1,688 trillion cubic feet and little Qatar’s 890 trillion. On top of all that—and here’s the rub—there are few proven reserves in the key disputed areas of the Spratly and Paracel island groups, and only small amounts detected by Scarborough Shoal.
“In sum, the overall potential for the South China Sea is probably relatively limited,” writes Mikkal E. Herberg of the National Bureau of Asian Research. “However, Chinese sources make much higher estimates than the US Geological Survey which could suggest a correspondingly higher level of interest in establishing sovereignty and jurisdiction.”45
It is exactly on this point that China has made its presence known across the western side of the South China Sea with Vietnam, which has suffered none of the Philippines’ democratic growing pains. In its wars against world powers, Vietnam has shown that it is not a country to be messed with. That does not, however, mean it can take on Beijing over the South China Sea.