Arroyo: Believe Duterte on ‘Red October’ ouster plot

House Speaker Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. INQUIRER PHOTO / GRIG C. MONTEGRANDE

House Speaker Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo on Wednesday said the public should believe President Rodrigo Duterte on the so-called “Red October” destabilization plot because he was “working from good information.”

“Again, going from my experience as president, the President really has access to information that not all of us have access to,” Arroyo told reporters in an interview.

“If the President believes that there is a threat, he is working from good information. So, we should believe whatever (he’s saying),” she added.

The past leadership of Arroyo, who was president from January 2001 to June 2010, faced various threats which included widespread protests and several mutinies.

In an earlier televised tête-à-tête with Presidential Legal Counsel Salvador Panelo Duterte said he had a copy of the “conversation provided by a foreign country sympathetic to us” between political opponents, the communists, and the Magdalo conspiring to oust him.

READ: Duterte: Reds, Magdalo, political rivals plotting to oust me

But both the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP), the Liberal Party (LP) and the Magdalo group of opposition Senator Antonio Trillanes IV have denied the allegation.

READ: NDFP on ‘Red October’: Duterte, military ‘scaring themselves to death’ | No ouster move, say Trillanes, ‘plotters’

“There is no conspiracy between the CPP-NPA-NDFP and LP for the purposes claimed by Duterte and the military. Duterte and the military are scaring themselves to death,” Fidel Agcaoili, chairperson of the NDFP peace panel, said. /cbb