Overkill, 2004
June 22nd, 2004
Borrowed from the term favored by the United States to describe its capacity to incinerate the world several times over, “overkill” was aptly used to describe how Ferdinand Marcos campaigned for reelection in 1969.
The very same term could be used today — except that it would apply not only to Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s campaign for the presidency. It would equally apply to the vast amounts of political muscle, intimidation, and — some say — money expended to have her finally proclaimed.
Speaker Jose de Venecia Jr.and Senate President Franklin Drilon have not yet raised her hand in victory, but her proclamation is a conclusion almost as foregone as the new taxes the Arroyo II administration will impose to make up for the massive hemorrhage of public funds Mrs. Arroyo and company caused by opening up the veins of the public treasury to finance her campaign.
The canvass of presidential and vice-presidential votes by the joint congressional committee was concluded on Sunday. As predicted, Mrs. Arroyo and her vice-presidential candidate Noli de Castro ended up in the winning column, despite the motion of opposition Senator Aquilino Pimentel to have the election returns from at least three places examined. Although that seemed a reasonable enough request, the majority promptly struck it down and rushed the canvass to completion.
The opposition, true, has said it won’t give up and will now take the fight to the joint Senate and House plenary session that’s likely to start Wednesday. But it just doesn’t have the numbers to stop the joint session from eventually proclaiming Mrs. Arroyo and de Castro.
As in the first plenary sessions when the two options of either having the entire joint session act as the canvassing body or giving that task to a joint committee was debated — and as in the joint committee deliberations during the last 13 days — the opposition is likely to find itself being allowed to talk, but only so it can be voted down.
Mrs. Arroyo and company are thus breaking out the champagne and planning for her inauguration. When she’s finally proclaimed, Mrs. Arroyo shall have achieved two missions impossible. Not only has she made her supposed win over the most popular actor in Philippine movie history at least halfway credible. She’s also managed to put the fear of God — or at least of the Armed Forces and the police — into whoever and whatever’s planning to “destabilize” the government by protesting fraud.
Both have come at a price. Not only the opposition but other groups that were monitoring the conduct of the elections as well have documented innumerable instances of fraud and pointed out how unprecedented even for Philippine elections the violence before, during and after the elections was.
The Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting, in a report that should have stunned the nation, but for some reason hasn’t, also said that some 33 percent of the Manila electorate was disfranchised, with about the same number likely nationwide, thanks to Comelec incompetence — or, even worse, Comelec complicity in a conspiracy to assure Mrs. Arroyo’s election.
Despite all these, what’s odd is how much the media and the middle classes doubt that the fraud and even the corruption and disfranchisement were enough to change the outcome. Part of the reason is the fear of a Fernando Poe Jr. presidency, which extends to the justifiable fear of the clowns and idiots, Marcos-era throwbacks and other denizens of the black lagoon of political opportunism, mendacity and plain evil that Poe has in his retinue. But there’s also the belief that Mrs. Arroyo just might have actually won over Poe — if only by the skin of her teeth — by using the vast resources of the government to her advantage. The middle classes, in fact, seem not only to have readily accepted this misuse of public funds as a given. They even seem to admire Mrs. Arroyo for it — even if, as has been alleged by the poll watch group Patriots, it might have cost the government as much as P15 billion.
The poor are something else. From all indications, not the least the prayer rallies and miniprotests of the last two weeks, there’s enough disbelief among them that Poe lost to create a fund of resentment against Mrs. Arroyo that could erupt into the disorder the police and the military have been harping on, despite her patubig projects and health insurance giveaways.
Mrs. Arroyo, however, was not just giving away PhilHealth cards. She also put together a network of political alliances of convenience and, what’s more, saw to it that practically the entire bureaucracy, including the police and the military, would be focused on the single-minded effort to make her win. No group was too small or too unprincipled, no individual too despicable as to merit Mrs. Arroyo’s indifference, and no effort too petty for her to ignore.
What is really surprising is that, for all these efforts, if she indeed won the elections, it was very likely with a margin much less than the one million that’s now being attributed to her.
To get herself proclaimed, on the other hand, Mrs. Arroyo relied not only on the numerical superiority of her allies in Congress. She also leaned heavily on the usually reliable instruments of coercion at her disposal, the police and the military. If military officers and policemen were at times involved in counting the ballots themselves at the precinct level, distributing fake ballots, or even preventing voters from exercising their rights, during the canvassing they were put to even graver use.
To these bureaucracies was given the post-May 10 task of demonizing the groups and individuals protesting fraud. They applied themselves to the task with enough vigor to assure the after-retirement futures of their most senior officers.
The effort was not limited to claiming that a joint destabilization effort by the opposition and its allied groups and the New People’s Army was afoot, and the contradictory claim that the NPA was plotting to assassinate Poe, Mrs. Arroyo, former defense secretary Angelo Reyes and Comelec chairman Benjamin Abalos. The police legions also dispersed demonstrations with tear gas and water cannon on the streets of the capital, and even broke up protesters’ dinner parties in restaurants by proclaiming that assemblies of more than 20 people were now prohibited.
The price is not necessarily an uprising to prevent an Arroyo proclamation or even a campaign to bring down Mrs. Arroyo in the near future, although both are distinct possibilities. The price of Mrs. Arroyo’s putative victory is much costlier.
The Arroyo victory has been achieved at the cost of the very laws that govern elections and, therefore, at the cost of the integrity of the electoral process. It is to the lasting interest of the Philippine political and economic elite to protect the credibility of that process. It is the only thing that legitimizes their monopoly of both wealth and power in this society. Obviously, however, the protection of the system is not as critical to the Arroyo wing of the elite as the enhancement of its interests.Equally costly is how much the two most problematic institutions in this country, the police and the military, are likely to emerge stronger than ever in terms of the dominance of their viewpoints in the policymaking councils of the Arroyo II administration.
The payback for the support of the leading lights of these institutions, given so enthusiastically during the elections, will not come solely in the form of appointments to juicy positions. Even more significantly will it come in terms of their enhanced power and louder voice in the management of the country’s affairs.
The price of their continuing support in the event of the political crises that are likely to occur as various adventurists, the constituencies of the opposition among the poor and other forces take to the streets to protest Mrs. Arroyo’s flawed mandate will be even higher. Let us hope that it will not be in the form of a military junta presiding over a version of martial law that while undeclared could be as bad as, and even worse than, Marcos’s declared one.
(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com)