PEOPLE are not so much worried about the possibility of a violent coup as they are about being prevented from watching the much-awaited boxing rematch today between Filipino Manny Pacquiao and Mexican Erik Morales.
Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez said that after he warned of a possible destabilization move against the administration on Friday, people had been calling him to express alarm over how that would affect the television telecast of the most anticipated Pacquiao-Morales fight in Las Vegas.
He said people wished that the coup, if it had to happen, would not occur at such a critical time.
Speaking on his dwIZ radio program yesterday, Gonzalez said that he assured the callers that “both of us will watch Pacquiao this Sunday.”
Last Friday, Gonzalez said the critical period for a possible coup would be between midnight of Friday and today.
Asked if he was going to watch the fight in Las Vegas, Gonzalez said he would watch it here as he did not have the money to go to the United States.
The secretary said he was scheduled to attend a justice department seminar in Cagayan de Oro, but opted to send a representative so he would be free to watch the fight.
Yesterday, however, Gonzalez appeared to be taking back his warnings about a coup.
“The word I used was not coup, it was D-Day,” he said, and blamed the media for putting a “twist” to the story.
It was “not only unfair but unnecessarily places the people in the wrong mood at this time,” he said.
Gonzalez explained that while a coup was an “overt act,” destabilization could be “a long process” with anti-Arroyo forces resorting to “guerrilla war tactics.”
Still, he vouched for the veracity of the intelligence report he had received pointing to a planned move to destabilize the administration between Friday and today.
“Everything that I have read in that document had happened or is happening, but I repeat that there is no coup that is being talked about but the beginning of a plan to move against the government,” he said.
Gonzalez said he could not say whether the report was “a hundred percent accurate” but noted that “the details mentioned there have already happened, for example the [detained mutineers’] plan to escape, which happened.”
He said he had also received reports that the escape would be facilitated by a group “friendly” to the escaped soldiers and that too happened.
Gonzalez said he had his own “intelligence team” at the DOJ “aside from the information I get from normal intelligence channels.”
