December 7, 2007 

Members of the press being pushed back by Pen putschists

It was rated at 150-head banquet style, but more than 200 persons, excluding hotel staff, showed up at the Peninsula’s Conservatory Wednesday noon.

Not to worry, no fireman would dare cite the management for safety violations, when it was the media and their glaring cameras and the Cabinet-military-police bosses and their heat-packing bodyguards who were cocking a snook at safety regulations, live no less on national airwaves.

Even Metro Manila police chief Geary Barias, sporting a Santa Claus cap over his uniform, could not suppress his elation over his gentrified circumstances, blurting: “This is actually my first time to be here.”

It would normally cost P1,000 a head—equivalent to three days’ minimum wage—to hold a function in the Conservatory; this being a supplicant Malacanang treating a riled media, the tab had been taken care of by a certain chap named Juan de la Cruz.

Still, not everybody had the chance to wolf down the pumpkin creme soup with toasted cashew nuts, pan-fried mackerel steak on ratatouille vegetables with garlic rice and lemon butter sauce on the side, and, for finale, cassata napoletana with fruit coulis washed down by the customary coffee or tea.

For a number of police support staff and security waiting by the hallway, the noontime blessing proved to be, sorry boys, plastic-bagged Jollibee meals.

The last time that the Pen was swarmed by media heavies—the Tres Marias of ABS-CBN were in full force, three seats separating them from their daily breakfast, their female counterparts from rival GMA-7—was when a military-media mob broke through the glass doors of the coffee shop the other Thursday in a farcical attempt to launch a people-power revolt, 2007 version.

The painted-over scars of that aborted putsch have themselves become must-photo opportunities, especially the front door where an armored personnel carrier rammed through.

Save for a female duty manager, the entire management corps of the Pen was up in Tagaytay for a team-building seminar when all hell broke loose that event-rich day. Within one and a half hour, general manager David Batchelor was back in the lobby, still in his walking shorts and polo shirt, but no longer in control of his five-star hotel.

According to a foreign correspondent, he and most of the foreign media all voted to leave after the police gave the 3 p.m. deadline, even though the partisan local press chose to stay in the same room with the military mutineers and, in the words of Malaya columnist Ellen Tordesillas, “agreed to link arms just in case we would be forcibly removed.”

Judging from the bullet marks, the gunfire, though mercifully brief, had indeed been two-way. One of the spent shells, missed by the after-operations sweep, is now a prized, somewhat purloined possession of the Pen management, part of the growing lore now enriching the luxury hotel.

Despite the heroic repair works done, there were still visible gaps; the lobby-side glass panels on the left stairway column, shattered and taken down as a result of the shootings, remain to be replaced.

And, as management had feared, tears, holes, and stains on the twin Tai Ping carpets covering each wing of the expansive lobby have multiplied past the acceptable level.

One final tidbit: A bottle of champagne and a loaf of panettone had also gone missing from the pantry beside the mutineers’ room, a pre-Christmas celebration for putschists with patrician predilections.