Decolonizing the spirit of EDSA

Former President Ramos made an important point in his speech on the 24th anniversary of EDSA people power revolt. He said that the spirit of EDSA “was not the exclusive property of any military commander, neither any religious personality, neither any political leader. It does not belong to any single political party, neither any special cluster of advocates.”

For many Filipinos the spirit of EDSA is a continuing Philippine struggle for freedom and democracy. It is not possible to encompass it in one event. To do so would be a contradiction. The very word spirit escapes definition.

Some fought and sacrificed here and abroad far longer than a single day or week. It is a work in process. Moreover the struggle was not against Marcos or the oligarchy only but against unjust tyranny in whatever shape or form it comes. It is not necessarily against our own government.

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I was happy to find a new blog http://dodongakakakiko.blogspot.com especially the entry on Operation: Hello Garci. It is too long to print in a column so I will select parts relevant to our struggle for freedom and democracy. The blogspot protests the sensationalism and manipulation of public opinion by the commercial mass media. “By following its content and conduct since the People’s Power Revolution of 1986, I have come to believe that the mass media has more often than not, become tools of propaganda to promote the vested economic and political interests of its private stakeholders, to the detriment of the public interest,” Ka Kiko writes.

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The contributor of Operation Hello Garci is Dr. Gonzalo Jurado, vice-president for finance and development and concurrently Professor of Economics of Kalayaan College. This column has also written about his interpretation of events in the past but it ought to be repeated and more widely known to counteract the continuing propaganda so Filipinos can better understand a far more important issue than EDSA as event. It is the issue of this country’s sovereignty.

Jurado writes that the “Hello Garci” tapes was a tool to weaken our government, that it was President GMA at the helm is incidental.

It has happened at other times of our history as a nation to bring us back under control.

The “Garci tapes” happened in June 2005 but it has been played again and again like a broken record with a chorus of surveys to persuade Filipinos to hate President GMA and her government.

“The events unleashed in those days by the playing of the tapes which indicated a woman, said to be President Arroyo, and a man, said to be Comelec Commissioner Virgilio Garcillano, talking about numerical details of the presidential election sparked the resignation of the so-called Hyatt 10 and their demand for the President’s own resignation.”

(CNP: To complete the picture of machination, it is said that some of the Hyatt 10 officials themselves persuaded President to come out in public and apologize for the taped phone conversation with Garci. What better confirmation was needed? At the time our President was unaware of the treachery.

But more independent sources said, a conversation may have taken place but it was not the Hyatt 10 version. Earlier reports both in pre-election polls and exit polls gave her the lead. Foreign observers said “the polls were fair and square and clean.” These were written by the Agence France Presse, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and even the SWS and ABS-CBN. With this very credible information that all polls had GMA well in the lead she had every reason to suspect that her lead was being whittled down.

One nationwide exit survey of more that 20,000 voters interviewed by radio network DZRH showed Arroyo with 36.5 to Poe’s 31.4. Another exit polls by the SWS gave GMA 31 percent to Poe’s 23 percent in opposition Manila. Exit polls are more accurate than pre-poll surveys. Something must have displeased the US operatives between the 2004 election and the Hyatt 10 withdrawal in 2005.) In her state of the nation address in 2004 she asked, “If Angelo de la Cruz were sacrificed what would change for the better in Iraq today?”

 “These officials, some of them of Cabinet rank, were joined by a wide band of political and business groups and individuals including a Liberal Party Faction, the United Opposition, the Makati Business Club, and former Presidents Corazon Aquino and Joseph Estrada, Senate President Franklin Drilon, Senators Aquilino Pimentel and Panfilo Lacson, all demanding not just the President’s immediate resignation but her impeachment as well,” Jurado continues.

And here is a crucial point: “As events unfolded, somebody had wiretapped the President in violation of the law against wiretapping.

It was said that a member of the Armed Forces, TSgt Vidal Doble, did it. After investigating the matter, Armed Forces Headquarters concluded that the armed services did not have the technical capability to do that kind of job.”

He adds the adverse information about the workings of the Philippine Government to the political opposition was delivered to them directly by a Philippine-born US marine working in the White House by the name of Leandro Aragoncillo and, in some cases, indirectly through a former assistant of Senator Lacson, Michael Ray Aquino, who had fled to the United States to escape indictment in connection with the Dacer-Corbito murder case. According to the sources, “the material had been prepared by the US Embassy in Manila.”

Jurado asks:

(1) Could the political and economic forces that got together on that day of June 2005 to unanimously demand the resignation or impeachment of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo have come together by accident or where they organized and coordinated by an Unseen Hand? The diversity of the anti-GMA forces on the one hand and the uniformity of their demand and timing of their actions on the other seem to rule out spontaneous combustion.

(2) How could Leandro Aragoncillo, a US marine whose financial future was assured, or any sensible human being for that matter, have been so short-sighted and so reckless as to jeopardize his lifetime security by violating his government’s State Secrecy Act through delivery of information to anti-government politicians in a foreign land, who were not even in power?

 (3) How explain the breadth and depth of the vilification campaign against the President, mobilizing not just the opposition politicians and the anti-Gloria newspapers and television stations but also a business club, an opinion survey entity, leftists groups, and even a few academics acknowledged for their principled championship of nationalist anti-imperialist causes?

 You’ll have to read the full article to connect the dots between the Garci tapes and America’s displeasure (then under President Bush) when President GMA acting in behalf of a citizen of her country, the truck driver, Angelo de la Cruz, pulled out of Iraq. Neither should we be surprised at continuing articles like Distrust high for Philippine President Arroyo: survey or Support from GMA is fatal.

If some Filipinos are counting the days to June 30, 2010, it is to witness how a Filipino president defied colonial tyranny through machination and made it to finish line.