So Cory Aquino took over the presidency for six years, 1986 to 1992. But that was not enough. Six or seven coup attempts by RAM led by an ambitious colonel Gregorio Honasan, a right-wing rebel military break-off from the Marcos dictatorship, derailed Ms. Aquino’s efforts to get the nation back on track. When Gringo’s last coup hit in December 1989, the republic almost went under, but for American intervention. True enough, she picked her successor Fidel Valdez Ramos, the nation’s top soldier turned politician, to succeed her in 1998. Another six years in Malacañang.
That too was not enough. Poverty hang tough, the two-party political system sundered into an unruly cluster of political parties out to get their itchy hands and loot into the caves of Ali Baba. Only the rich profited from an economy that slightly progressed. Then calamity came in 1997 when the East and Southeast Asian financial crisis shook the region, capital panicked, banks went out like a light, and the economies went into reverse. The Philippines was back to Square One. The FVR regime took to the exits in 1998, a wiser but sadder administration, riddled too by corruption.
Then came the event the Philippines was not prepared for. Not the post-assassination (Ninoy Aquino) Philippines, anyway.
The Marcos forces had regrouped. Forces we all thought had become extinct like the brontosaur moved. They took advantage of a greatly impoverished nation to burnish the image of long-retired movie actor, Joseph Estrada by name, a Marcos protégé. The man might have been fake, an oil snake sharpie, a voodoo practitioner. But he had magic, and had waited in the wings for six years as the vice president of FVR. The still extant propaganda corps of the Marcos dictatorship worked him over. Soon, he was Erap para sa mahirap, working his campaign spell on the yokels, the poor, the uneducated, the Great Unwashed while the so-called decent spearheads of Philippine politics all ran for the presidency, dividing the vote.
The result was predictable. Estrada, completely unprepared for the presidency, won by a landslide, while Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo laid hold of the vice-presidency by a million more votes than Estrada. We did not know it at the time. But this set the stage for the inept and clumsy and they say corrupt Estrada’s overthrow last January 20 by People Power II and GMA’s accession to Malacañang, not because of EDSA II but because she was vice president.
Get the picture? The chain of succession to revitalize democracy mandated by Ninoy’s assassination was broken.
GMA’s seven-month presidency is not in this loop since she was a collaborator of Joseph Estrada. Gloria never ventured into the floodwaters of People Power II, although in the end Jaime Cardinal Sin, Cory Aquino, and the military brass led by Gen. Angelo Reyes endorsed her while the Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Hilario Davide accorded her the much needed legitimacy. But she was never the choice of People Power II.
The May 11 elections should have been a shoo-in for the so-called People Power Coalition. But they weren’t. The Puersa ng Masa, shoehorned into existence by Estrada and his political lieutenants, performed much better than expected. And there lay the rub. For among the senatorial victors of Puwersa was former Philippine National Police Chief Gen. Panfilo Lacson, also erstwhile leader of Estrada’s fearsome Gestapo, the PAOCTF (Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force).
This was not very significant at the time of Lacson’s victory. It is terribly significant now with the expose of Col. Victor Corpus, head of the ISAFP (Intelligence Services, Armed Forces of the Philippines). It simply goes to prove that the Marcos Mafia never went to sleep, and plotted for the day it would grab power anew. It did when Estrada won. It could repeat in 2004 with Ping Lacson.
As has been its wont in the past 120 years, the Philippines has just taken a crazy turn, unwittingly maybe, but really a ridiculous and preposterous turn. Why? Because if Colonel Corpus is right, dark and sinister forces from way back when Estrada was still vice president and head of the Presidential Anti-Crime Commission had already taken to drugs and narcotics as the No. 1 money-maker in Crime Incorporated, raking in not only millions but billions of US dollars in profits to be eventually laundered in foreign banks such as those in the United States, Canada and Hong Kong.
They meant to stay in power for a long time. But got bushwhacked by history.
Even the Senate has not been spared .Once the saerosanct repository of Philippine politics as its best and brightest, the Senate today has a negative image. The Senate has maligned Lacson’s accusers, criticized civil society, and cradled the man accused into its bosom, as a mother oyster would a black pearl.
The fear has broken out like an epidemic that someday, not so far away, the Philippines may become another Colombia, hapless prey to the vulture that is drugs.
Believe him or not, Colonel Corpus warns that if Lacson is not stopped, he will seek and grab the presidency in the year 2004 because drug money by the billions will buy the elections, as it did the presidential bid of Ernesto Samper in Colombia in 1994. Narco-money corrupts and destroys everything it touches. Shall we succumb to that in 2004?
If the Senate does not do its job, then who will? The courts maybe.
But the government better move fast. If the courts and our justice system do not move, then other elements, other sectors of our society will. Already, nice things are being said about Defense Secretary Angelo Reyes after he testified in the Senate’s Question Hour last Tuesday. Senate minority leader Aquino (Nene) Pimentel and Sen. Edgardo Angara swooped on Reyes, sought to shake him loose of lice, fungi, vermin, fluid poisons, toad stools, bacteria, cockroaches. They found none. Secretary Reyes – for all the nasty things I have said about him in this column – acquitted himself quite well.
The two senators would have been worth our time if they turned on and squealed on their boss ex-President Joseph Estrada, whose truncated three-year presidency has turned out to be one of the darkest chapters in our history. Instead the two played cute, lecturing to Reyes and all of us on what government morality was all about. C’mon, the two of you. Cut out the crap. We know where you are coming from, the dark and dismal recesses of the Estrada administration. Small wonder the Senate is on a toboggan slide.
The messiahs are just waiting in the wings.
If Ping Lacson for some reason or another gets into the clear, then all hell will break loose, as it has broken loose in our country a number of times. The center will disintegrate and President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo will lapse into political limbo. The right, this time a different military right probably under the leadership of Gen. Angelo Reyes will grab power however temporarily to restore order once riots and demonstrations get out of control – and they will. When you have a population of 75 million, more than ten million of them sardine-packed into Metro Manila, you have a scenario for a gadawful eight on the Richter scale. There could be burnings and lootings, a settling of scores by the gun and the machete. Metro Manila could duplicate Jakarta being sacked several years ago by an outraged citizenry.
The Left could also mobilize its forces. Its armed component, the New People’s Army – perhaps backstopped by its natural allies, the Muslim rebels in the South – could bombinate into Metro Manila. And then, really, we would be a Colombia with guerrillas and bandits marauding all over the country. We would have our own version of FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias Colombianas) on a vendetta and terrorist binge. Or as Miguel Perez Rubio mentioned in his article published by a broadsheet titled Colombia and RP: Peas in a Pod?, we would also have an ELN (Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional), Che Guevarra sprouts living the violent ideal of the Bearded One.
Now we are paying the price of having slept after EDSA in 1986. Corruption and traditional politics took over anew, cronies. The ugly face of drugs entered the picture. The rich-poor gap widened. Now the whirlwind?