Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana. Photo from Department of National Defense
While the defense establishment is taking the supposed “Red October” ouster plot against President Rodrigo Duterte seriously, Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana is confident that the plan supposedly directed by communist rebels will be unsuccessful.
“Like the other plots of the CPP-NPA (Communist Party of the Philippines-New People’s Army), this too will fail for lack of popular support,” he told reporters Tuesday.
The purported plot, which is an alleged coalition of communist rebels and members of political opposition, aims to remove the President from office by next month.
AFP deputy chief of staff for operations Maj. Gen. Isidro Purisima on Monday explained that the groups are also targeting to discredit the Philippine government by internationalizing various issues to destroy the country’s image abroad and to scare away potential investors.
The plan is said to culminate in October, which the military says coincides with the international celebrations for Marxism, indigenous peoples, and communism.
Lorenzana stressed that they would not need emergency powers to deal with the alleged plot to unseat the President.
“We are not yet facing an emergency situation. These are just irritants that somehow distracts us from properly governing,” he said.
The military continues to insist on the said ouster plot, even if the previously reported Sept. 21 ouster plan, which they also claimed, failed to materialize.
“What they planned to do is initiate mass action which they hope to snowball into a people power such as what they intended last Sept. 21 or the anniversary of Martial Law. The turn out was pitifully small,” Lorenzana said.
“Their plan was to get as may as civil organizations as possible to their mass actions led by their progressive fronts,” he added.
Lorenzana said that they exposed the plot to the public to preempt it.
“Exposure is the first step. Second is to monitor their activities and affiliates. Third is to pre-empt if there are indications that they will conduct destabilization or any violent mass movement,” he said.
But the defense chief said that the plan may not be executed next month, as what CPP founding chairman Jose Ma. Sison had hinted.
“If you are listening to Joma Sison, he came out recently to say that PRRD will not last until the middle of 2019. Maybe they have moved their goalpost, considering the lackluster performance of their so-called mass rallies last Martial Law anniversary,” Lorenzana said, adding that they are closely monitoring them and the other groups.
Reacting to Duterte’s statement that the decades-long communist insurgency would end by mid-2019, Sison said last week that it was more likely that the President would be ousted by that time. /je