Gregorio Ballesteros Honasan II (born March 14, 1948), better known as Gringo Honasan, is a Filipino political figure. He played a key role in the 1986 EDSA Revolution that toppled the dictatorship of President Ferdinand Marcos. He led a series of coup attempts against the administration of Corazon Aquino. President Fidel Ramos granted him amnesty in 1992. He entered politics and became a senator from 1995 to 2004 and again since 2007.

Biography[link]

Early life and career[link]

Gregorio Honasan was born in Baguio City to Colonel Romeo Honasan and Alice Ballesteros, both from Sorsogon province.^[1] Honasan spent his elementary days at San Beda College from Kindergarten to Grade 6. After which, he went to Taiwan and studied at the Dominican School, Taipei, Taiwan. He then returned to the Philippines and finished his high school at Don Bosco Mandaluyong. He attained his Bachelor of Science degree at the Philippine Military Academy, where he received the title of "Class Baron", the academy's highest leadership award.^[1]

After graduating in 1971, he joined the Philippine Army and went into combat duty against separatist and communist insurgents in Luzon and Mindanao. He was wounded in action at battles in Lebak and Jolo.^[1] Making his way up through the armed forces, he became aide-de-camp to Secretary of National Defense Juan Ponce Enrile in 1974, and later became the department's Chief of Security.

Concurrent with his position as security chief, he was a board member of the Northern Mindanao Development Bank and president of the Beatriz Marketing Company.^[2]

EDSA Revolution[link]

In 1986, Honasan and a cabal of colonels, backed by Enrile, tried to use popular unrest to overthrow the dictatorship of President Ferdinand Marcos.^[3] When the plot was uncovered, the conspirators sought refuge in the military headquarters and called on civilians, the media, and the Catholic Church for protection. Hundreds of thousands of people served as human shields to protect Honasan and his men from Marcos' forces, sparking the 1986 People Power Revolution that led to Marcos' fall from power and the installation of Corazon Aquino as president.

Coup attempts[link]

Aquino awarded Honasan a Distinguished Conduct Star for the EDSA Revolution and the Presidential Government Medal in 1986. Under the new government, he was head of a special group in the defense ministry. Using his position, he was covertly involved in various coup attempts against Aquino.^[3] On August 28, 1987, fighting broke out in the streets and Honasan ordered his men to attack government installations, resulting in the deaths of dozens, including many civilians. The attack was put down by government forces, but Honasan was able to escape. He was later captured and imprisoned in a navy ship on Manila Bay. He later escaped once again by convincing his guards to join his cause.^[3]

Senator[link]

President Fidel V. Ramos, who was elected in 1992, granted amnesty to Honasan. Honasan utilized his rebel infamy to enter politics in 1995, becoming the first independent candidate in Philippine history to win a seat in the Senate. He was re-elected in 2001, and left the Senate when his second term expired in 2004. In the general election held in May 2007, he was again elected to the Senate. Running as an independent candidate, he polled some 11.6 million votes, finishing 10th out of 37 candidates for 12 Senate vacancies. He took up his post on June 30.

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official campaign site of Gregorio Honasan

Senatorial history of Gregorio Honasan II v t e <14th Senators of the 15th Congress of the Philippines (2010-2013) 16th> Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile (2010–present) # Senior Senators (2007–2013) Junior Senators (2010–2016) Edgardo Angara Joker Arroyo Alan Peter Cayetano Francis Escudero Gregorio Honasan Panfilo Lacson Loren Legarda Francis Pangilinan Aquilino Pimentel III (2011–present)## Antonio Trillanes IV Manny Villar Juan Miguel Zubiri (2007–11)## Vacant (since 2010)### Pia Cayetano Miriam Defensor Santiago Franklin Drilon Jinggoy Estrada Teofisto Guingona III Lito Lapid Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. Sergio Osmeña III Juan Ponce Enrile Ralph Recto Bong Revilla Tito Sotto Term ends June 30, 2013 Term ends June 30, 2016 # — Ponce Enrile was also the Senate president of the 14th Congress. ## —Zubiri resigned from office on August 3, 2011, replaced by Pimentel afterwards. ### — Vacant due to election of Benigno Aquino III to the presidency. v t e <13th Senators of the 14th Congress of the Philippines (2007-2010) 15th> Senate Presidents Juan Ponce Enrile (2008-2010) · Manny Villar (2006-2008) # Senior Senators (2004-2010) Junior Senators (2007-2010) Rodolfo Biazon Lito Lapid Jinggoy Estrada Pia Cayetano Miriam Defensor Santiago Richard Gordon Jamby Madrigal Aquilino Pimentel, Jr. Juan Ponce Enrile Bong Revilla Mar Roxas Vacant ## Edgardo Angara Benigno Aquino III Joker Arroyo Alan Peter Cayetano Francis Escudero Gregorio Honasan Loren Legarda Francis Pangilinan Antonio Trillanes IV Manny Villar Juan Miguel Zubiri Panfilo Lacson Term ended June 30, 2010 Term ends June 30, 2013 # — Villar was also the previous Senate president of the 13th Congress. ## — Vacant due to election of Alfredo Lim as the mayor of Manila. v t e <11th Senators of the 12th Congress of the Philippines (2001-2004) 13th> Senate Presidents Franklin Drilon (2001-2004) # Senior Senators (1998-2004) Junior Senators (2001-2007) Teresa Aquino-Oreta Robert Barbers Renato Cayetano ## Teofisto Guingona, Jr. ‡ Gregorio Honasan ‡ Robert Jaworski Loren Legarda Blas Ople ‡‡ John Henry Osmeña Aquilino Pimentel, Jr. Ramon Revilla, Sr. Tito Sotto Edgardo Angara Joker Arroyo Franklin Drilon Luisa Estrada Noli de Castro ‡‡‡ Juan Flavier Panfilo Lacson Sergio Osmeña III Francis Pangilinan Juan Ponce Enrile Ralph Recto Manny Villar Term ended June 30, 2004 Term ended June 30, 2007 # — Drilon's Senate presidency continued until 2006 during the 13th Congress. ## — Position vacated when Cayetano died in 2003. ‡ — The appointment of Gloria Arroyo to Guingona to vice presidency made his position to the Senate vacant from January 20, 2001. On May 14, 2001, Honasan was elected to fill in Guingona's unfinished term until 2004. ‡‡ — Ople was appointed Foreign Affairs secretary in 2002. ‡‡‡ — In 2004, de Castro vacated his position when he was elected to the vice presidency.

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Three Gringos in Central America and Venezuela, 1896 book by Richard Harding Davis (poster by Edward Penfield)

Gringo (Spanish: [ˈgɾiŋgo], Portuguese: [ˈgɾĩgu]) is a slang Spanish and Portuguese word used in Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking countries in Latin America, to denote foreigners, often from the United States. The term can be applied to someone who is actually a foreigner, or it can denote a strong association or assimilation into foreign (particularly US) society and culture. While in Spanish it simply identifies a foreigner, without any negative connotation,^[1] in English the word is often considered offensive or disparaging.^[2]

The word was used in Spain - although the word is nowadays rarely heard there - long before it crossed the Atlantic to denote foreign, non-native speakers of Spanish.^[3]

Etymology[link]

The word gringo, was first recorded in the Diccionario castellano con las voces de Ciencias y Artes y sus correspondientes en las 3 lenguas francesa, latina e italiana (Castilian Dictionary including the Words of the Sciences and the Arts, and their Correspondents in 3 Languages: the French, the Latin, and the Italian, 1786), by Terreros y Pando, wherein it is defined as:

Gringos llaman en Málaga a los extranjeros que tienen cierta especie de acento, que los priva de una locución fácil y natural Castellana; y en Madrid dan el mismo nombre con particularidad a los irlandeses.

Gringos is what, in Malaga, they call foreigners who have a certain type of accent that prevents them from speaking Castilian easily and naturally; and in Madrid they give the same name, in particular, to the Irish.^[4]

The etymologic consensus is that gringo is a variant of griego ‘Greek’ speech (cf. Greek to me); yet the contrary also is proposed, that griego > gringo is phonetically unlikely, because the derivation requires two steps: (i) griego > grigo, and (ii) grigo > gringo, and, instead, might derive from Caló, the language of the Romani people of Spain, as a variant of (pere)gringo ‘peregrine’, ‘wayfarer’, and ‘stranger’.^{[5][6][7][8][9]}

The gringo entry in the Nuevo diccionario francés-español (New French–Spanish Dictionary, 1817), by Antonio de Capmany, records: ^[10]

. . . hablar en griego, en guirigay, en gringo.^[11]

. . . to speak in Greek, in gibberish, in gringo.

Gringo, griego: aplícase a lo que se dice o escribe sin entenderse.^[12]

Gringo, Greek : applies to what is said or written without understanding it.

Moreover, besides “Hablar en gringo”, Spanish also contains the analogous phrase “hablar en chino (To speak in Chinese)”, when referring to someone whose language is difficult understand, thereby re-enforcing the notion that alluding to the languages of other nations is a cliché. Furthermore, in the 1840s, Johann Jakob von Tschudi said that gringo was common Peruvian Spanish usage in Lima:

Gringo is a nickname applied to Europeans. It is probably derived from griego (Greek). The Germans say of anything incomprehensible, “That sounds like Spanish”, — and, in like manner, the Spaniards say of anything they do not understand, “That is Greek”. ^[13]

In English[link]

"Gringo" has been in use in the English language since the 19th century.^[14] According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded use of the term in an English source is in John W. Audubon's Western Journal of 1849;^[14] Audubon recalls that he and his associates were derided and called "Gringoes" while passing through the town of Cerro Gordo, Veracruz.^[15]

Folk etymologies[link]

One common folk etymology purports that gringo comes from a tune Green Grow the Lilacs sung around campfires by invading Anglo-Americans, not only English but Irish and German. When the Mexican-American War began in 1846, from a few to several hundred recently immigrated Irish, German, Matorian and other Catholic Americans who were sent by the U.S. government to fight against Mexico came to question why they were fighting against a Catholic country for a Protestant one, combined with resentment over their treatment by their Anglo-Protestant officers, and deserted to join forces with Mexico. Led by Captain Jon Riley of County Galway, they called themselves St. Patrick's Battalion (in Spanish, Batallón de San Patricio).^[16] Green was the color of the Irish, who also first used the Gaelic slogan Erin go Bragh (Ireland forever), but more importantly the soldiers frequently sang "Green Grow the Rushes, Oh!," an old folk song (and most likely not the song based on the similarly-titled Robert Burns poem, "Green Grow the Rashes"),^[17] or an earlier Scottish tune Green Grows the Laurel, which they called Green Grow the Lilacs,^[18] which traces back to a song composed in the early 16th century by English king Henry VIII called Green Grows the Holly.^[19]

Rafael Abal considers the origin of gringo as "green horn", an apprentice jeweller in Europe. In the United States, men from the west coast are called "westman", while people from the east coast are called "green horns". Spanish speakers called them "gringo".

All these folk etymologies place the origin of the word gringo in the 19th century. This is a problem because the word has been documented from the 18th century, including the 1786 Diccionario castellano con las voces de Ciencias y Artes y sus correspondientes en las 3 lenguas francesa, latina e italiana by Esteban de Terreros y Pando, and South American literature. In Esteban Echeverría's El matadero (1840), and in José Hernández's Martín Fierro (1872, 1879), the word gringo refers to persons from England.

Brazil and Portugal[link]

In Brazilian and Portuguese popular culture, someone unintelligible is traditionally said to speak Greek.^[20]

Absorption from Spanish is also reflected in that the word usage is not naturally widespread and only generally in regions exposed to tourism like Rio de Janeiro. There, the word means basically any foreigner, North American, European or even Latin American. Generally it applies more to any English-speaking person, not necessarily based on race or skin color but on attitude and clothing. The more popularly-used terms for fair-skinned and blond people would be "alemão" (i.e., German), "russo" (Russian) or "galego" (Galician).

The opposite of alemão/russo/galego among white people in Brazil is branco moreno, or white people of dark hair or darker complexions. Moreno is actually the opposite of the most formal term for people of fair complexion (including most East Asians and many Levantine Arabs, among others Middle Easterners and other ethnicities of light skin), pálido (IPA: [ˈpalidu], Portuguese: pale).

Moreno white people includes most Brazilians of pure or mostly European, Rromani, or Levantine descent. It also includes mixed-race people perceived as phenotypically closer to Caucasians than to Pardos—caboclos (Pardos, or Brown people. The majority of Brazilians are of some Amerindian descent, and some may have more Amerindian features than many people labeled as mestizo in nearby nations—since it actually describes strictly non-white people (and not those somewhere in-between). This broader definition of white people also includes light-skinned mulattoes of loosely coiled or straight hair and generally European features. Moreno can describe people of all races and ethnicities in Brazil, but most often refers to White Brazilians and Pardos. It is not politically correct to refer to an Afro-Brazilian by this term (because some may interpreted blackness being a minor deniable element of the person's characteristics—the stigma of being Black or partly Black in Brazil caused the phenomena of racially promoting: educated or affluent Afro-Brazilian historically "elevated" as Pardos, or very colloquially, morenos, and Pardos being seen as white people.

The most pejorative terms for white people in Brazil, both for locals and foreigners, even used by brancos morenos against fair-skinned White Brazilians, are branquelo (IPA: [bɾɐ̃ˈkɛlu], literally Portuguese: whitey, or also honky) and the even more disparaging leite azedo (IPA: [ˌlejtʃ(j) aˈzedu], Portuguese: rancid milk, in reference to the combination of an unusual light complexion, almost white as the milk, and the negative stereotype of the bad smell in Westerners — in most of Brazil, including White-majority states of Centro-Sul such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, the normative social habit is to take at least one bath per day year-round, and Westerners are said to generally be not used to this — still the term is so common that in some regions it does not carry more the same negative connotation it carried in the past, although without losing its disparaging meaning). Gringo, on the other hand, is almost absent of pejorative connotation outside politically nationalist circles.

In Portugal the word is seldom used and so is "Ianque" (Portuguese spelling of Yank). It is never used in a formal context. It specifically describes someone from the USA (as does "Ianque"), and is not related to any particular physical or racial features.^[21]

Other uses[link]

In Mexican cuisine, a gringa is a flour tortilla with al pastor meat with cheese, heated on the comal and then served with a salsa de chilli (chilli sauce). It is thought that the dish was born when an American citizen living in México City went to the same taco place and always ordered a pastor taco with cheese. The waiters started calling this dish "taco de la gringa."

In the 1950s, the blue fifty Mexican peso bill was called an ojo de gringa ("gringa's eye").^[22] In Brazilian and Portuguese popular culture, someone unintelligible is traditionally said to speak Italian.[20]

Meanings[link]

A woman reads the Gringo Gazette in Cabo San Lucas, Baja California Sur, Mexico

For most Latin Americans^{[citation needed]} the word has only very mild pejorative connotations, or none at all. Typically, the word is simply used to describe someone from the US. The other three options would be either "Estadounidense" (Unitedstatesan), which is unwieldy, "Americano," which many Latin Americans begrudge, since all inhabitants of the Americas are Americans, or Yanqui (Yankee). However, there is variation between individual Latin-American countries in how the word gringo is used:

• In Mexico, El Salvador, and Venezuela, Cuba, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, and the Dominican Republic, the term applies to U.S. citizens, and is widely accepted as a colloquial demonym. Depending on the context, it may or may not be pejorative.
• In Puerto Rico, the term refers to U.S. citizens from the U.S. mainland.
• In Cuba the term Yuma is also used with the same meaning.
• In Honduras, the term is used to refer to any English-speakers, but mainly people from the United States.
• In the Dominican Republic the term is also used to refer to non-free-range store-bought chicken (pollo gringo).
• In Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost state of Brazil, the term is applied to Italian settlers and their descendants).
• In some places^[which?] the term may be used to refer to any foreigner who does not speak Spanish (or, in Brazil, Portuguese) as a native language.
• In Ecuador the term can be used to refer to foreigners from any country (mainly US or European), especially light-skinned blond-haired people.^{[citation needed]}
• In Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, Argentina, and Peru the word refers to light-skinned, blonde haired people, whether local or foreign.^{[citation needed]} There may or may not be a pejorative connotation depending on the context of the sentence. For instance ¨La Gringa¨ is the nickname for Sofia Mulanovich a blonde Peruvian surfer.
• In Venezuela the term "Musiú" (Moo-see-oo') is applied to European foreigners, a corruption of the French "Monsieur."

See also[link]

Look up gringo or right in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Anglo
• Bolillo
• Bule
• Canuck
• Cracker
• Farang
• Gabacho
• Gaijin
• Goy
• Gringo Trail
• Güero (disambiguation) (Huero)
• Guiri
• Gweilo
• Honky
• List of terms for white people in non-Western cultures
• Moskal
• Old Gringo
• Pakeha
• Pindos
• Pocho
• Use of the word American
• Yankee
• Mat Salleh

References[link]