Lesser evils and worse
October 16th, 2003
It’s not about “word of honor” but about manipulation. Mostly it’s about rank cynicism—the kind that rejects all principle, sees none in others, and believes the electorate to be children too foolish to see through the candidates they’re regularly forced to vote for.
The question is trust. What should concern the electorate is not Mrs. Arroyo’s supposed lack of a word of honor, but whether it can trust someone who has very likely brought political manipulation to an unprecedented plane, and who was lying through her teeth last December 30.
Perceived, perhaps mistakenly, by the civil society groups in her camp as the lesser among several evils, Mrs. Arroyo’s December 30 strategy and her record since January 2001 suggest a mind solely focused on self-interest, in which that of the nation has little, if any, space.
When President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo announced last December that she would no longer seek the Presidency in 2004, her political and civil society allies, and even some of her enemies in the opposition and other camps, naively argued that she could not possibly have been insincere because if she does run in 2004 she would be accused of going back on her word.
The announcement was thus almost brilliant in its simplicity. It came in the context of widespread belief that everything she had done in government since January 2001 had been for the purpose of seeing to her election in 2004, and therefore undermined that view and made it seem cynical.
It also seemed likely to stop the muck-raking to which candidate Arroyo was being subjected to. Some of those now loudly acclaiming Mrs. Arroyo’s October 4 declaration that she had changed her mind and will run in 2004 led the post-December 30 chorus of praise. Even Senator Panfilo Lacson, whom no one can accuse of being overly principled, was forced to accept Mrs. Arroyo’s declaration at face value in the absence of any evidence to prove that she didn’t mean it.
The opposition’s Senator Edgardo Angara also welcomed Mrs. Arroyo’s announcement, and by implication also accepted it on face value. Lacson and Angara did suggest in their guarded statements less than 100 percent belief in Mrs. Arroyo’s sincerity. But they could not then say that she was lying, lest they be accused of engaging in the very political bickering Mrs. Arroyo said had driven her to declare herself a non-candidate in 2004.
Some of the more naïve civil society groups were less guarded. They hailed Mrs. Arroyo as the statesman they had wanted to assume the Presidency in 2001, sympathized with her suppression of her ambitions, and pledged to help her make her last 14 months in office meaningful by implementing the reforms—focused mainly on new politics and the alleviation of poverty—she had been promising for the last two years.
Over the weekend, the members of one of those groups, the December 30 Movement, were wringing their hands over Mrs. Arroyo’s October 4 announcement. Some, said Teresita Baltazar, formerly of Kompil (Kongreso ng Mamamayang Pilipino-Congress of Filipino Citizens, one of the groups in the Oust Estrada Movement in 2001), are dismayed and disappointed. The December 30 Movement was after all founded to accelerate the tempo of the reforms Mrs. Arroyo allegedly wanted to implement, and which the Movement thought would be realized because she was no longer a candidate.
But Ms. Baltazar herself believes Mrs. Arroyo is entitled to change her mind, and that she is justified in doing so because of circumstances she had not foreseen last December. Ms.Baltazar said the people should once again give the President the benefit of the doubt because the opposition did not heed her call for unity late last year.
Ms. Baltazar is one of those ex-civil society groupies now in government, specifically the Presidential Anti-Graft Commission, and is thus, strictly speaking, no longer in that space between government and business which we know as civil society.
That may be why Ms. Baltazar forgets that the opposition did observe a truce of a sort after Mrs. Arroyo’s announcement. That this period was brief was the result of Mrs. Arroyo’s own actions.
Mrs. Arroyo almost immediately undermined the credibility of her own pledge by revealing a candidate-to-be’s interest in, for example, such things as the Absentee Voting Bill. Last February she suddenly took a trip to Kuwait, purportedly to assure Filipinos in the Middle East that they would be taken care of once Mrs. Arroyo’s US patron invades Iraq. That it was also a way for her to remain in OFW consciousness once the Absentee Voting Bill became law was not lost on the opposition.
The vision of a flood of votes from Filipinos overseas has since turned into a mirage, but at that time it was widely thought that millions of OFWs and immigrants would cast their ballots in 2004, and would decide the election’s outcome. Given the possibility that those votes would be cast overwhelmingly in favor of the administration, Mrs. Arroyo’s interest in the Bill could not but be regarded as a sign that she was, despite her December pledge, running in 2004 anyway.
Immediately after her Kuwait trip, in acts that could only be interpreted as efforts to consolidate US support, she chided the UN and urged it to use force against Iraq despite the effectiveness of the UN weapons inspections. Her government then expelled an Iraqi diplomat on the basis of a raw intelligence report that claimed links between the diplomat and Al Qaeda.
With Mrs. Arroyo’s approval, the Philippine military also launched an offensive against the Moro Islamic Liberation Front last February on the pretext that it was pursuing elements of the Pentagon kidnap-for-ransom gang. It was an act that amounted to sabotaging the government’s own proclaimed peace efforts, but calculated to prove to the US and to the Christian majority in Mindanao that the government was being tough on the MILF.
At about the same time, Mrs. Arroyo made an appearance in the Kuala Lumpur meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement to mouth the US line for war on Iraq. Then the Arroyo government announced the coming of 3,000 US troops, which the US government very clearly and very confidently said would be involved in combat against the Abu Sayyaf in Jolo, despite the Constitutional ban on such involvement.
Obvious in all this was Mrs. Arroyo’s continuing cultivation of US and military support by adopting policies both favored—for example, the return of US troops, US military basing rights, and a military solution to the Mindanao problem. Mrs. Arroyo basically put her trust on the military, in the process enhancing its powers—and incidentally contributing to the unrest that in July led to the first coup attempt in this country in 14 years. In partnership with that trust in the military, she also banked heavily on US and other countries’ support for her remaining in power.
Mrs. Arroyo’s October 4 announcement was thus no surprise, for these as well as other acts and policies. Even after her December 30 announcement of her supposed non-candidacy, the policies she adopted and the decisions she made had been consistent with her dogged pursuit of her ambitions for 2004.
No one can begrudge her those ambitions, or anyone’s changing his or her mind, whether common citizen or President of the Philippines. That is not the issue. As for word of honor, few in this cynical republic really believe in it, or expect any politician to have that for prime virtue. That is not the issue either.
The issue is whether Mrs. Arroyo indeed changed her mind—or whether she declared her non-candidacy last December to gain time, win some respite from damaging political attack, and arrest the decline of her approval ratings, but planned all along to declare later, as she did last October 4, that she would run anyway in response to a clamor for her to do so.
If she had indeed planned this all along, that doesn’t say anything for either her character or her principles, only the lack of them—which does have a bearing on her capacity to craft the policies needed to get the country out of the rut of poverty, injustice, chaos and plain misery that have visibly worsened since she took power. That would make her, not the lesser evil, but one of the worst evils in the field come May, 2004. And the only reason she won’t be the worst is because someone accused of murder and drug dealing already has that distinction.
(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com, October 7, 2003)