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WHAT a
crazy day. As the government was announcing the
third-quarter GDP figures, indicating still decent
growth despite the economy’s unhealthy reliance on
migrant-labor remittances, the country’s central
business district in Makati City was hounded by the
specter of past military adventurism.
Suddenly, people on both sides of the fence were gripped
with memories of the December 1989 takeover of the same
business district with the bloodiest coup attempt by the
Gregorio Honasan group; more recently, of course, there
was the Oakwood mutiny, directly related to this
Thursday’s events since the protagonists involved the
core accused at Oakwood.
As this
was being written, teargas was starting to engulf the
second floor of the Manila Peninsula, where the group of
Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV and Gen. Danny Lim were holed
up with their lawyers Argee Guevarra and Jose Virgilio
Bautista, former vice president Teofisto Guingona,
former University of the Philippines president Francisco
Nemenzo, and two Catholic bishops, Julio Labayen and
Antonio Tobias.
Early
on, the words and demeanor of the protagonists clearly
indicated they were ready to shed blood for their cause.
It’s a sincere—if misdirected, as critics say—advocacy,
but at the end of the day, no matter how genuine the
grievance, it is truly difficult to justify the methods
used. In the end, they fortunately yielded to
conscience, weighing more important the lives of the
civilians who had refused to leave their side—the ones
named above, and the at least four dozen mediamen who
would not leave the place of action.
A
stone’s throw away, earlier, someone from the stock
exchange at Makati harrumphed that these destabilizers
could never enter her building because they had been
quickly fortified by the military, and that if she had
her way, snipers would have done a neat job of finishing
off the troublemakers. Easy enough to sound like that,
as a troubled presidency consistently puts down one
challenge after another, the same way that Cory Aquino
bravely faced off seven coup attempts in six years.
The
unfortunate difference is that in the case of President
Arroyo, no matter how robust the economic data she
banners, no matter how resolute she may seem in the face
of physical threats and how politically savvy against
even the most grizzled tradpols, she is hobbled by the
ghost of shortcuts past.
She and
the people had hoped she could put to rest all doubts
about her presidency from the congenital flaws of Edsa
2, by winning an election fair and square in 2004. But
then came “Hello Garci,” and the shadow of scandals
unresolved. The fertilizer scam and Joc-joc Bolante, the
Venable contract, the NBN-ZTE deal—the list goes on.
Normally, in a climate described as a “vibrant
democracy”—the phrase used by Palace officials to drive
home the point there’s no need to stage such
protests—people should feel constantly assured the
avenues for seeking redress will always be there or
that, if one institution fails, one or several others
remain. Yet, in the seven years she has ruled, the
President has been accused of either directly
undermining or allowing the damage to such important
institutions as the Commission on Elections, the courts,
Congress, the anticorruption and transparency and
accountability mechanisms and, worst of all, the Armed
Forces of the Philippines. The courts would have gone
that way, too, had not an activist Supreme Court taken
by the horns the bull called political killings and
enforced disappearances.
The deep
damage to these institutions has unfortunately not been
repaired, so that these fissures have run alongside the
positive developments in economic life.
Reacting
to the standoff, the party-list Akbayan simply described
the situation as the “result of the refusal of the
government to address allegations of fraud and
corruption squarely.” Worse, it added, “the
administration has evaded and manipulated constitutional
processes to hold GMA accountable for allegations of
monumental fraud.” That—the eternal suspicion over one
of the most hardworking presidents in modern times—is
the tragedy that clouds this President, because of the
consistently successful means she and her supporters
have employed to simply sweep under the rug the serious
allegations of wrongdoing.
Had the
administration not been seen to be actively
short-circuiting the institutions and processes by which
people can seek redress in a democracy, the nation would
not have come to this sorry pass.
Even his
worst critics cannot deny that Senator Trillanes was
elected by a substantial number of people, despite his
peculiar circumstances as a detainee for the Oakwood
mutiny. That should have sent to government the clear
signal of a deep-seated anger—not just among civilians
but also, most likely, among the foot soldiers in the
AFP who have had enough of thieving generals conniving
with corrupt civilians and election officers while they
spill their guts in Basilan.
Unfortunately, that signal was ignored, and thus the
wounds fester.
Given
the tremendous sacrifice of Filipinos to survive and
make things work in their country—as gleaned from the
positive economic data—episodes such as these can only
underscore the complications of “solutions” such as
those offered by Lim-Trillanes.
The
nation, counseled Akbayan, “must root out the problems
that have led to this incident.”
The
crisis “would continue to fester as long as the
corruption charges and legitimacy questions leveled
against the GMA administration are not resolved with
credibility,” the party-list added.
The
President dealt with this latest challenge with
remarkable calm and true grit, and the markets shrugged
it off. Good for her. But it is too early to predict
smooth sailing between now and 2010. |
