The President's Daughter

By Alexander Martin Remollino
Bulatlat.com


Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is the first presidential daughter to become a president herself. Her father, the late Diosdado Macapagal Sr., served as Philippine president from 1961 to 1965. She was catapulted to the presidency in January 2001 by a popular uprising against then President Joseph Ejercito Estrada.

Her biography in her official website says she descended from the Pampango nobleman Carlos Lakandula. When Estrada followers taunted her with the moniker “Gloria Labandera,” alluding to a ditty about a laundrywoman, she replied that she in fact hailed from a family of laundrywomen and was proud of it. She frequently cites as her political idol her father, who was fond of calling himself "the poor boy from Lubao."

She took most of her pre-university education at the Assumption College, where Senators Loren Legarda-Leviste and Tessie Aquino-Oreta also studied. After a two-year stint at Georgetown University, where former United States (U.S.) President Bill Clinton was her classmate, she returned to Assumption and finished commerce with high honors. She earned her masters degree in Economics at the Ateneo de Manila University and doctorate at the University of the Philippines (UP).

In an interview with the now defunct Pinoy Times shortly after she became president, Macapagal-Arroyo said she was involved in activism while in graduate school at UP. That was shortly before the declaration of martial law, she said. She recalled that Gary Olivar was then the leader of student activists at UP.

After graduate school, she taught economics at the Assumption College, and later at Ateneo and UP.

During the Aquino administration, she joined the government service as assistant secretary of the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI). She afterward became executive director of the Garments and Textile Export Board and, later, DTI undersecretary.

In 1992, she was elected senator, a feat she would repeat three years later. As senator, she was a leading advocate of the General Agreement of Tarrifs and Trade (GATT), an agreement that has been criticized by progressive quarters for further opening the economy to the inroads of foreign investment without developing local industries.

She was elected vice president in 1998. She also served as secretary of the Social Welfare and Development department until her resignation in 2000.

As president, she has had to contend with a lot of issues against her. Critics have condemned her seeming willingness to make compromises in the campaign against corruption, as shown by her having expressed, in several instances, readiness to accommodate the demands of the Estrada camp for special treatment.

Her refusal to grant a P125 wage increase is a source of constant conflict between her and the progressive labor movement. From 2001 to 2002, the government registered the lowest rate of land redistribution since 1992. Militant groups and their nationalist allies have consistently hit her for continuing the globalist policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and for maintaining a subservient foreign policy, as shown by her ready approval of the Balikatan military exercise and the Mutual Logistics Support Arrangement (MLSA). Human rights groups have seen in her the capacity to match the human rights record of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, and cite as proof the many brutal killings of activists under her administration.

Having assumed the presidency in a manner beyond the electoral process, the Constitution allows her to compete for another term in 2004. She has declared that she will not run in 2004. However, observers have commented that she may take back this declaration shortly before the elections, especially if her popularity rating should rise again. She is after all, a Macapagal. In his time, Macapagal the father took back his withdrawal from the presidential race after an alleged popular clamor for his candidacy. Bulatlat.com

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