From Makati Pen to Bilibid Resort Complex

I had made a case that the PNP and the Military Authorities had preferred the exact strategic move when they dispatched a military armored vehicle crashing through the main entrance door of Manila Pen to immediately end the existing standoff. Letting the “situation” to persist until the following day, as what Senator Trillanes and Brig. Gen. Danilo Lim had actually anticipated to ensue would have allowed their civilian followers and supporters, which was schedule to congregate in Liwasang Bonifacio in a protest gathering prepared by the Communist movement and their Leftist allies to transfer to the Peninsula Hotel and the nearby Ninoy Aquino monument and put forward a possible people power scenario not seen since 1986, thus creating more problem for the Security Officers.

In the previous month, the Black and White Movement, an unyielding middle-class anti-GMA group, instigated an online petition requesting President Arroyo to give up her job. In fact, BnW drew more warm bodies from 50,000 online petitioners than Trillanes and Lim did from 11 million voters. Why? Is it partly because of protest fatigue? The Filipino voting public has grown significantly. The electorates now avoided boisterous political rallies to get acquainted with ambitious aspirants. Trillanes was the exception that substantiated the imperative. Nothing like his slick kuya Gringo, Trillanes in no way mastered the gift of public verbal communication; his spoken accounts, even during the confrontation, came out unexciting and without any passion.

The two were also active in the Fort Bonifacio standoff in February 2006, trying unsuccessfully, to put together a mini-Edsa people power civil disobedience. In a Trillanes avant-garde government, Nemenzo would be the principal ideologue. But throughout the inquest on the Pen Revolt, Nemenzo disavowed any participation in uprising articulating he was in the Pen simply to do academic study on armed rebels. In my article Fidel Castro Trillanes (June 11, 2007) I wrote: “For the next three years at least, Trillanes will be looking forward into a vague future, to escape which the only way out appears to be a audacious flight from jail, pursued by a popular revolt directed by him against a awfully detested lame-duck president, which might be successful this point in time.

Anyhow, he did get away from confinement for a short time last week, but his trendy uprising metamorphosed into a not so popular undertaking. There would be sufficient time for that in Bilibid Resort Complex but not in Makati Pen hotel.