A CIVIL-SOCIETY group that campaigned against the Arroyo administration is also behind efforts to oust President Benigno Aquino III, a former military rebel said Tuesday.
Retired Marine Col. Ariel Querubin said it was the Solidarity for Sovereignty group led by Linda Montayre that had invited retired Marine Col. Generoso Mariano to a forum where he was tricked into issuing a statement urging people to “replace the government.”
Video clips of the statement were later posted on the Internet and sent to media organizations.
“The group is identified as disgruntled, and now they’re at it again this early,” Querubin said.
“They were anti-GMA [Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo] and now they [want to oust] P-Noy [President Aquino].”
During the Arroyo presidency, Montayre served as the convenor of the Solidarity for Sovereignty, a civil society group that, according to military intelligence reports, had links with disgruntled members of the Armed Forces and even the Moro National Liberation Front.
The group questioned the legitimacy of Mrs. Arroyo’s presidency because of the allegations of election fraud in 2004.
On Monday, Querubin visited Mariano at the Marine Headquarters in Fort Bonifacio, where he is confined to quarters pending an investigation.
He said Mariano was outraged on learning that the current administration was linking him to Arroyo.
“I’m alone in this,” he said in a text message sent through Querubin. “God bless us as a people and as a nation.”
The Justice Department on Tuesday said Mariano might be charged with inciting sedition.
“Colonel Mariano’s speech constitutes an overt act, which definitely tends to create sedition,” said Justice Secretary Leila de Lima, who sent an opinion to the Judge Advocate General’s Office of the Armed Forces.
“It is a contemptuous condemnation and wholesale attack on the present government, calling as it does for its replacement... impliedly through illegal means and therefore patently seditious,” she said.
Last week, before he was confined to quarters, Mariano told the Manila Standard he had been speaking generally and had never referred to the Aquino administration in his speech. With Rey E. Requejo
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