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There
was supposed to be a wedding reception at the Manila
Peninsula Thursday morning, the same date and setting
for yet another bizarre episode of military adventurism
in the Philippines.
The
bride and groom were understandably dismayed, but what’s
a couple to do when a disgruntled senator and his former
comrades in the military hold your hotel hostage? While
the
Peninsula’s guests were casually herded out by the hotel staff, the newlyweds were
graciously accommodated in another nearby hotel.
Life
elsewhere in
Makati,
Manila’s financial center, similarly went on. Even as
1,500 soldiers were ringing the hotel, work continued
throughout the central business district. Brokers at the
Philippine Stock Exchange less than a kilometer away
heaved a sigh of relief that trades were winding down
just as news of yet another “coup” finally broke on
television.
By
mid-afternoon, at the height of all the tension, the
country’s business process outsourcing (BPO) community
was still humming and the national BPO association saw
it fit and proper to issue a midday statement saying
that it would be business as usual for their 24-hour
operations and their clients worldwide.
In the
scale of what Filipinos have seen and experienced in the
past two decades, Thursday wouldn’t rank very high.
There have been about a dozen coups and mutinies and
uprisings and military adventurisms in the Philippines
since 1986, the year People Power toppled the strongman
Ferdinand Marcos. And by the end of Thursday’s events,
nobody was even sure what to call this latest military
spasm.
Senator
Antonio Trillanes IV was already under trial for
sedition for having pulled a similar stunt three years
ago when, on Thursday, he and his codefendants (plus
reportedly the military soldiers assigned to guard him)
walked out of their hearing and marched to the five-star
hotel a couple of kilometers away.
By the
time they commandeered a function room for an
“impromptu” press conference, there was a brand- new web
site up and online to discuss a litany of complaints and
demands, and the whole country was tuned in via live
radio and television. Trillanes called Philippine
President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo an illegitimate
president and a corrupt leader, and called on her to
step down.
And yet
for all that, the calm and casual demeanor in the rest
of Manila was quick to suggest that the publicity stunt
was not going to get any bigger than what it ultimately
was: a half-day’s worth of news. Or at least, if this
was to become anything more closely hewing to a
political crisis, it would take a lot more than
Trillanes to make it happen.
Trillanes is not the charismatic personality that the
international media may have perceived. For someone who
graduated near the top of his Philippine Military
Academy class, he’s perceived by many Filipinos as
reckless, unthinking, and—worst yet for someone who
holds hotels hostage just for the moral victory of
having a press conference—he’s fairly inarticulate.
It takes
everybody who appears around him—priests, actors, the
media, activists—to express the moral campaign that
Trillanes offers himself up for but ultimately cannot
lead. Given this assessment, the government made a quick
call based on the bet that, even in the worst-case
scenario, Trillanes, who may have the sentiment of
certain junior officers but has never been able to
muster crowds, was not going to be martyred.
The
government bit the bullet with an overkill of an
extraction: 1,500 soldiers to get one guy and 30 of his
followers. That said, Trillanes did get 11 million votes
in the last election, enough for him to win a seat in
the Senate. Yet, he remains peeved because he has never
actually been allowed to attend any session—because he’s
under trial for sedition on account of the first time he
staged a coup by holding another hotel hostage.
The fact
that he’s an elected senator leads some outside analysts
to assume that Trillanes must have a popular following.
But in the last elections, people weren’t so much voting
for him as making a statement against Arroyo. Trillanes
on the campaign trail represented pure unadulterated
contempt for her administration and everything that
makes people exasperated with her presidency:
corruption, ambition, a thick hide to criticism.
To this
day, that’s what Trillanes stands for, and in the
aftermath of Thursday’s events, that’s all he still
represents. Regardless, however, of how small a player
Trillanes really is in the grand scheme of things—at
best, he’s been seen as an unwitting pawn—what he does
symbolize is nothing to totally scoff at. Indeed, what
makes him dangerous is that he’s the stubborn voice for
what people have frankly gotten tired of wailing about.
Trillanes’ mantra is the same sentiment that
Filipinos—hoarse and tired from fighting in the
streets—can now only curse under their breath.
Most
Filipinos by now are in agreement that Arroyo is
corrupt, devious, insincere and power-hungry.
Her
husband has been implicated in what has been exposed as
a rigged multibillion-dollar contract to build an
Internet “backbone” for government. In the face of this,
she pardoned her predecessor and nemesis, the former
president Joseph Estrada—the first Philippine president
ever convicted of plunder—even before he could spend a
day in a proper jail. Filipinos smelled a rotten deal:
Estrada’s freedom in exchange for less heat on the First
Husband Arroyo and an end of calls for a new round of
impeachment complaints against the president. And
they’ve never forgotten—as if people like Trillanes
would ever allow it—that Arroyo had admitted to improper
communications with election officials while they were
busy counting votes for the last presidential elections.
And yet
most Filipinos are now simply resigned to riding out her
term until the next elections are held 2010. Two
impeachment attempts against her have failed thanks to
the corrupted politics and politicians she’s
co-opted—some say threatened—in Congress. Last week
former president Fidel Ramos, formerly an Arroyo
supporter, said for all to hear: “Nobody likes Gloria,
but what choice do we have?”
Many
Filipinos grudgingly take that as a valid point. There
are indicators that Arroyo has the economy—or at least
the business community—on her side. The Philippine peso
is the second strongest-performing Asian currency this
year, next only to the Indian rupee. The day after
Trillanes was arrested, the government announced that
Philippine gross domestic product growth for the whole
of 2007 would likely hit 7 percent, overshooting all
predictions at the start of the year.
What
festers, however, is the feeling that democracy-crazy
Filipinos are selling their souls for long-missed
stability. Trillanes will never be the center or leader
of any new People Power movement. But whenever he’s on
the news, Filipinos are reminded that as inconvenient
and unsophisticated as this soldier is, the people’s
bigger moral issue will still be with Arroyo: the
president whom they believe was caught red-handed
rigging her own election; whose husband they believe was
caught red-handed rigging his own multibillion-peso
government contracts; whose government has shown
contempt for free expression, human rights and, yes,
democracy.
After
Thursday’s events, few people have put Trillanes’
complaint on the top of their agendas. Yet, for two more
years, they will be asking themselves how much more of
these political shenanigans they are willing to endure.
Whenever they see Trillanes, they will shake their heads
but also clutch at their chests, because he will be
there to say again what he said after seizing the
Peninsula Hotel: “The only loser here is the Filipino
people, because Gloria is still there.”
And
whatever Filipinos think of Trillanes, wherever he goes
that they do not care to follow, they are at least in
agreement with the only complete sentence he managed to
utter without stuttering on Thursday.
Roby Alampay is a Filipino journalist based in Bangkok
where he serves as executive director of the Southeast
Asian Press Alliance. The article reflects his personal
views. |
