ANALYSIS
Time for a Change
The current
presidential crisis may be a threat to Macapagal-Arroyo but it is also an
opportunity for the nation to wrestle with the fundamental question on
what is the best solution.
By Bobby Tuazon
Bulatlat
Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo faces the
biggest threat to her presidency and how she is able to handle this will
determine whether she will complete her term in 2010 or not. Looked at a
different angle, the current political crisis in the Philippines poses as
well an opportunity for the Filipino people led by the organized masses to
seize the initiative to advance their democratic interests and prepare for
the transition in the transfer of political power from the elite to the
people long oppressed by centuries of colonial, neo-colonial and elite
domination.
Macapagal-Arroyo assumed the
presidency on the crest of Edsa 2 – the people’s uprising of January 2001
that toppled President Joseph Estrada who was accused of corruption and
other crimes. She won the presidential race in May last year amid
allegations of widespread fraud, manipulating the Commission on Elections
(Comelec) – a supposedly independent poll body – as well as using the
military and police forces to ensure her victory.
The allegations that she cheated in
the last polls and stole the presidency from actor-turned-politician
Fernando Poe, Jr. have gained credence following an expose’ by a former
deputy director of the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI), lawyer
Samuel Ong. In a news conference more than a week ago, Ong showed
reporters CDs containing conversations supposedly captured by wiretapping
that showed the President clearly directing Comelec officials to enable
her to clinch the election. The wiretapping – in what is now billed as
“Gloriagate” – has triggered calls from almost all quarters of the
political spectrum for Macapagal-Arroyo to resign from the presidency.
That Macapagal-Arroyo is an
illegitimate president is just the latest of a series of accusations
hurled against her that include corruption, jueteng (an illegal
numbers game) and human rights violations. Before all these charges came
up however she – like her predecessors – was already proving to be unfit
to rule. Since the time she became president the country has sunk deeper
into a financial crisis and has seen the worst-ever unemployment in 50
years. The country’s endemic poverty has been aggravated by policies of
new taxation, price increases and destructive pro-globalization programs.
There is a total breakdown of law and order as seen in the series of
killings victimizing media, lawyers and judges.
Most corrupt
Under her watch, the country has
earned the moniker of being the most corrupt in the whole of Asia.
Macapagal-Arroyo also used her “war on terror” as an instrument of state
terrorism against legitimate political dissent and for escalating
militarization in the countryside allowing military and police forces to
commit atrocities with impunity and undermine civilian rule.
Although Macapagal-Arroyo as president
is the center of the current political controversy, the situation cannot
simply be called a presidential crisis warranting the removal of the
current occupant of Malacañang and the takeover by another. If this were
the case, it will not essentially end the vicious process of tolerating
ineptness and incompetence as exemplified by a revolving door where one
inept president exits and another of the same mold enters the seat of
power. This process simply reconstructs and reinvents the elite-oriented
political system that takes its roots in colonial and neocolonial rule
where the bureaucracy is used to support the economic and political
hegemony of the old and new elite and foreign interests.
If a beginning is to be made in order
to end the vicious cycle of presidential crisis, then the current
political situation needs looking into its fundamental roots. There needs
to be a deep understanding of the termites and cancer-causing elements
that are eroding into the seat of presidential power and the system that
it embodies while, at the same time, fueling a social unrest that is
dramatized by mass protests, strikes and armed struggle.
Without delving into its deep
historical roots, the current political crisis can be traced to the
declaration of martial law by Ferdinand Marcos in 1972. The imposition of
martial rule was a rightist coup staged by Marcos as the head of the
faction of the ruling oligarchy in order to stay in power indefinitely
based on dictatorship. While the declaration disenfranchised the
anti-Marcos camp from power it also forced the emerging radical reform
option represented by the militant youth and the organized farmers and
workers into the underground.
Rift in the factions
The ascendance of the fascist
dictatorship showed the irreconcilability of the various factions of the
ruling elite on the fractious issue of the turnover of political power
among them and that such archaic process could no longer be sustained
through election – which had become inutile anyway as a “democratic
exercise” – or the whole bourgeois constitutional machinery itself. It
also showed that the dominant elite-oriented political system will not –
must not - submit itself to any alternative radical reform even if the
society itself is already pregnant with a surgical solution for the
poverty, inequality and social injustice that it continues to breed. Thus
the use of a coercive response through fascist rule.
For the dictatorship to last, Marcos
relied on the military institution, political repression, the support of
the United States and a democratic façade through the 1973 constitution,
the holding of the Interim Batasang Pambansa elections in 1978 – which his
monolithic party, the Kilusang Bagong Lipunan (New Society Movement),
dominated anyway - and the symbolic “lifting” of martial law in 1981.
Martial law also strengthened the military institution and gave its
generals a lesson that the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) can be a
source of corruption as well as a political force by itself on the pretext
of promoting “political stability” and deterring a leftist takeover. This
would be put into good use later during the Aquino presidency – which was
wracked by a series of attempted coups and mutinies - and in the Macapagal-Arroyo
presidency.
Confluence of events
It was the perseverance of the people
led by the radical reformists and the armed struggle of the Left and the
Moro separatist guerillas that undercut Marcos power. This eventually led
to its fall through the confluence of an acute financial crisis and a
nationwide anti-dictatorship struggle that grew by the multitudes
following the assassination of an anti-Marcos opposition leader.
The role of the U.S. proved to be
critical at this point and the years to unfold in the change of the
presidency. To frustrate the Left from positioning itself in the turnover
of power and many anti-Marcos rivals from gravitating toward it, the U.S.
began to withdraw its support for Marcos and worked for his replacement by
a “Third Force” – led by Corazon Aquino - that Washington architects
helped shape and finance. In order to reconcile both the pro-Aquino elite
and the Marcos cronies, however, the new government had to accommodate
these various political camps with the military institution itself making
sure that those perceived to be pro-Left were gradually eased out. What
actually took over, as a Washington political analyst would put it, was
“Marcos without Marcos.”
Material to the legitimization and
validation of any presidency is its ability to deliver the goods, i.e., to
address the fundamental problems of poverty, inequality and social
injustice that breed the conditions for social unrest. Precisely because
both the Aquino leadership and the various regimes succeeding it assumed
power not necessarily to address these fundamental problems but to save
the traditional political system that began to crumble during Marcos – and
to promote their own class interests as well - no government after him
could deliver such goods.
That the country today has seen an
unprecedented economic crisis as shown, for instance, by the fact that 10
percent of Filipinos are forced to work abroad – with many of them willing
to toil in war zones just to feed their own families at home - and that
more and more families are starving by the day signifies the futility of
hanging on to a political rule that has long lost its legitimacy. One need
only look at the surveys of the Social Weather Station or the surveys of
Ibon Foundation showing how Aquino, Ramos and Estrada, began their
presidency supposedly with a high popularity rating and ended up being
discredited with plunging ratings at the end of their term. Compared to
them, Macapagal-Arroyo is supposed to be the lowest by far in terms of
public perception. And she hasn’t even reached her mid-term.
A complex matter
Today, the presidential succession is
no longer simply a matter of who replaces who. This is as much a question
that must be wrestled with by the people themselves in their millions, in
short, how to become masters of their own destiny. It is a question of
ending a political rule that ensures the domination by the rich and
powerful over the majority of Filipinos under conditions of exploitation,
oppression and repression. It is a question of terminating a political
rule that promotes foreign interests at the expense of the country’s
sovereignty and national patrimony.
Can the country continue to be
governed under an already discredited presidency? If the current
illegitimate president is replaced by constitutional fiat or succession,
will this not cause the country further harm? If it is replaced by a
military junta with a civilian façade, will we not be reverting to
Marcos-type authoritarian rule? What then is the next move? What is the
Filipino people’s choice? Bulatlat
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