The terrifying Juan Ponce Enrile
belly. His assailants were boys from wealthy families and got off unpunished. Enrile was expelled. The experience taught him a hard lesson. For this reason he took up law. “Only the rich, the powerful,
peace and security,” he says in his recently published memoir. Our sympathy for him should end here. Enrile’s lifelong lust for wealth and power has been brutal, merciless and rapacious.
It is well known that the “ambush” of Enrile’s car was faked to justify Martial Law in 1972. It is now also known that the bombings that crippled Manila, which President Marcos blamed on subversives and terrorists, were in fact the work of clandestine paramilitary units known to Enrile. As minister of national defense, Enrile shut down newspapers, jailed hundreds of journalists, opposition leaders, clergy and students. He then went on public record to defend dictatorship. Democracy, he said, was not suitable for the Philippines.
After loyally serving Marcos, Enrile, ever the opportunist, switched to the opposition in February 1986 and sealed the dictator’s downfall in the EDSA revolution. He joined President Corazon Aquino’s cabinet but was a constant thorn in her side. Just nine months into her tenure, Enrile did everything he could to destabilize the fragile democracy he helped to restore. He publicly attacked Aquino until
the WashingtonPost reported at the end of 1986, Enrile became Aquino’s chief political rival and drew on strong support from his Cagayan home province, and the Nacionalista Party, which was being quietly revived by other former Marcos ministers.
As one of Marcos’ closest cronies, Enrile became a very rich man. He held near monopolies on coconut, timber and logging, the country’s key and most lucrative industries, aside from sugar. His control of forestlands through various companies and intensive logging operations contributed to the serious deforestation of northern Luzon. In his book WaltzingWithaDictator (1987), the American journalist Raymond Bonner recounted how Marcos created a coconut monopoly by imposing a forced tax on coconut farmers. To hold and administer the considerable coconut levy funds assets — the levy raised P9.8 billion, money that remained unaccounted for — Marcos and his cronies established the United Coconut Planters Bank (UCPB), which bought companies, oil mills, company shares, including Juan Ponce Enrile San Miguel Corp. stock, using money from the levy funds. Enrile was chair of both the UCPB and the Philippine Coconut Authority, the agency assigned to collect and manage the coco levy. By 1979, it was found that Enrile and his wife owned luxurious real estate worth millions of dollars in some of the most expensive areas on the US west coast. By 1986, the US Justice Department had launched investigations on whether Enrile had diverted US aid money to his own personal use.
More recently, in 2013, Enrile, with several other senators and his chief of staff, Jessica Lucila “Gigi” Reyes, a woman alleged to be his longtime lover, was implicated in a P10 billion pork barrel corruption scam. Accused of pocketing P172 million in kickback commissions when he allegedly