GREGORIO 'GRINGO' HONASAN Photo by Lilen Uy

IF HE were an ordinary ex-military man, Gregorio "Gringo" Honasan would be taking it easy, preparing for what aging soldiers are supposed to do next: fade away. After all, he is just three years short of officially turning senior citizen, his hair is a salt-and-pepper gray, and the trim physique women used to swoon over is now just a memory.

But the once-dashing army colonel isn't about to vanish from public view. By his own admission, he has been busy, silently carrying out an unspecified role in the political opposition. In fact, it is quite difficult getting hold of him these days. PCIJ had to wait more than a month to wangle an interview with Honasan, and when the day finally came, we waited a little bit more for our turn at a ground-floor table of a Quezon City restaurant, while upstairs, he received what seemed to be a steady stream of military-looking visitors.

Honasan is spending his pre-retirement years chairing the Philippine Guardians Brotherhood Inc., an organization composed of military and civilian members. In the 2004 elections, Guardians formed the human cordon that protected presidential candidate Fernando Poe Jr. during campaign sorties. They continue to serve as security detail for his widow Susan Roces whenever she appears in rallies and other protest actions.

Guardians tried penetrating Congress as a party-list group in the 2004 elections, but failed. Still, leading such a group gives Honasan tremendous clout over members and officers of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and also affords him leverage within the opposition. But it also makes him a usual suspect as far as government is concerned, the perennial plotter of coups and destabilization efforts.

Being a coup plotter is a label that also won't go away. Honasan first earned it exactly two decades ago in February 1986, when he and other mid-level military officers were leaders of the Reform the Armed Forces Movement or RAM. Most of them belonged to the elite Philippine Military Academy's Class of 1971, whose charismatic class captain was no other than Honasan himself.

When Ferdinand Marcos imposed martial law in 1972, members of PMA Class '71 were among the AFP's youngest lieutenants. They were trained in a military pampered by the dictator, who gave them free rein-including employing the most brutal methods of torture-to fight Muslim rebels and to break the communist insurgency. The author Alfred McCoy described PMA Class '71 as "instruments of state terror" in his book Closer Than Brothers. Yet by 1986, Honasan and company were calling Marcos a despot and plotting to remove him from power.

"The original plan was to mount a military operation against the very seat of political power, Malacañang," recalls Honasan, who was then chief security of one of the plan's masterminds, Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile. The RAM wanted "to break away and withdraw our support to the administration of President Marcos whom we felt then did not have the mandate and the trust of the Filipino people anymore."

But coup plans never stay secret for long in the Philippines. The plot was discovered as early as January 1986 when one of their recruits, Presidential Security Guard (PSG) Maj Edgardo Doromal, blabbed about it to his commander, Col. Irwin Ver, son of then AFP Chief of Staff Gen. Fabian Ver. And so the coup that was planned to take place at two in the morning of February 23, 1986 became common knowledge days before, at least in the upper political and military circles, giving Marcos and Ver time to beef up the palace defenses.

	GREGORIO 'GRINGO' HONASAN Photo by Lilen Uy

HONASAN WAS supposed to be ground commander of the assault on Malacañang. Had things turned out as planned, he would have led a band of 30 rebel soldiers whose task was to arrest or kill the Marcos family. But it would have been a suicide mission; the thousand-strong military force Ver had brought in from neighboring provinces would have pulverized them on sight. Honasan could have died then, but a snitch of a soldier forced RAM to shift to a hastily thought-up Plan B.

The rest of the story is chronicled in the images of the time. The plotters regrouped at the Ministry of National Defense offices in Camp Aguinaldo, challenging Marcos to step down. In response, Marcos demanded their surrender and in a nationwide broadcast presented the RAM members in the PSG who were arrested for complicity in the coup. To break the standoff, the late Jaime Cardinal Sin and Butz Aquino, the brother of the slain Ninoy, summoned the multitudes to gather outside the gates of Camp Aguinaldo to protect "the rebels."

"People power was a miracle, a pleasant surprise," says Honasan. But at first, they were unsure about the public's reaction toward them. In one memorable photograph, a scowling Honasan clutched a firearm as he escorted Enrile across Edsa. He remembers the gun — a paratroop model of the M-14 762 semi-automatic rifle — as though it were still by his side. He apparently would have used it if provoked. "That was the longest crossing I had ever encountered in my life," he says, "(going) from the gate of Camp Aguinaldo to the gate of Camp Crame where we practically waded through a sea of people. I did not know if they would criticize us or even hold us accountable for the sins of the military then that was seen to be lapdogs of President Marcos."

Funny for this to have come from Honasan himself — holding the military accountable for its sins is something Filipinos did fail to do at Edsa. In four short days, Filipinos forgot that the AFP was the machinery that kept the dictator in power for most of his 20-year rule. The RAM boys were hailed as heroes, their human-rights violations forgotten, their word given much weight by politicians. And while the AFP did try to reinvent itself as the New AFP, it soon reverted to its old ways.

Yet even after RAM mounted more coups and caused more deaths in the 1980s, the worst punishment they got were push-ups or banishment to a floating prison in the middle of Manila Bay from which Honasan, who was captured after an extensive manhunt, escaped easily. Years later, many of the RAM boys were reinstated, some even rewarded with "stars on their shoulders," which Honasan also dreamed of having, except that he found another calling as senator of the Republic.

Honasan does admit that the coup attempts he took part in (just three and not nine, he quickly clarifies) caused hundreds of civilian deaths. But he thinks civilian leaders must be punished for their misdeeds if members of the military are to account for theirs. "We accept," he says. "Talagang unfortunate. We regret it. But who holds the wonderful Department of Environment and Natural Resources responsible for the 8,000 people dying in two hours in the Ormoc flash flood? Pinakalbo 'yung bundok eh (They stripped the mountain of trees). We'll never see any indictment even in media. So where is the uniform standard?"