Some Filipino businessmen call it the “lost decade,” the first 10 years of the third millennium that was characterized by scandals, graft and corruption, political violence and intense political divisiveness that, in turn, resulted in lost opportunities for them and more difficult conditions for the Filipino people.
It was a decade ushered in by hope and ended in despair for millions of Filipinos, who had hoped early on that the ouster of an immoral and inept president and the crowning of a new face in Malacanang would start a glorious era for the country. Instead, the decade was marked by disunity, decadence and despair.
Many Filipinos had hoped that the ouster of President Joseph Estrada and the rise of an untested, but promising Gloria Macapagal Arroyo would finally put the country on the path to economic recovery. Arroyo, after all, had promised in her first State-Of-The-Nation Address (SONA) to pursue job creation, education, housing and food security as the central points of her promised war against poverty. She even towed along three impoverished Payatas kids who, she said, had launched paper boats that contained wishes for jobs for their parents, food on their table and roof on their heads. The paper boats were supposed to have landed in Malacanang.
But one could see that beyond the dramatics was a clear shade of hypocrisy, because none of the four goals of her administration was ever accomplished. Instead of the Enchanted Kingdom that she promised a few years later, one could only see signs of a Disenchanted Population and a Despaired Nation.
Less than a year into her presidency, which took nearly the entire first decade of the millennium, the true colors of the Arroyo administration surfaced with the Jose Pidal Scandal when her husband, Jose Miguel Arroyo, was implicated in a jueteng payoff controversy that pointed to a multi-million peso bank account under the name of Jose Pidal. Mike Arroyo was identified as the Jose Pidal, but Gloria Arroyo didn’t lift a finger to investigate the matter. Mike’s brother, Ignacio Arroyo, later claimed he was Jose Pidal and that he owned the account, as if it made any difference that he was not the presidential husband, but just the presidential brother-in-law.
Scandals after scandals rocked the Arroyo administration, but she would just ignore them and ask the nation repeatedly to do the same and move on.
On December 30, 2003, Arroyo’s hypocrisy became even more evident when she promised before the monument of the country’s national hero, Jose Rizal, on the day the nation commemorated his ultimate sacrifice, that she would not run for the presidency in 2004, and that she would instead focus on her administration’s goals of combating poverty uplifting the lives of the people. The statement, of course, smacked of hypocrisy and many, including this writer, could see it in the usual smirk on her face.
True enough, the announcement was just a ploy to hopefully reverse her precariously sliding popularity. And when she thought nobody was looking, she suddenly announced that she would, after all, seek a second shot at the presidency in the May 2004 elections.
Her dishonesty became evident right then and there, but was not as flagrant as a few months later when she and her aides initially denied knowledge of the “Hello Garci” conversations wherein she hinted the need for then Comelec Commissioner Virgilio Garcillano to do something to make sure she had at least a one million-vote margin over her opponent, the popular actor Fernando Poe Jr.
She was later forced to admit to be the person at the end of the line with Garcillano with an anti-dramatic “I…am…sorry” speech taped from Malacanang that would have been a strong candidate for FAMAS Best Actress award had it been shown in theaters.
When the protests mounted in the aftermath of the controversy and threatened her presidency, Arroyo showed again another aspect of her personality – her penchant to circumvent the law and impose her will on the Filipino people. She was not just a hypocritical, scheming, callous and dishonest leader, she was emerging as a tyrant.
In quick succession, Arroyo issued three executive orders that challenged the Constitution – the Calibrated Preemptive Response (CPR) that ordered the police to break up protest rallies, thereby stifling the people’s right to peaceably assemble to redress their grievances; Proclamation 1017 or a state of emergency that allowed warrant-less arrests and seizures, resulting in the arrest of several opposition leaders and media personalities and the padlocking of a newspaper; and Executive Order 464 that suppressed Congress’s constitutional power to investigate in aid of legislation by preventing high government and military officials from giving incriminating testimony to Congress.
Emboldened by the passive resistance to these obviously unconstitutional measures and by the Supreme Court’s acquiescence, Arroyo would move in the latter part of the decade to circumvent the constitutional limit on her term by pushing for charter change (cha-cha) that would replace the present presidential form of government to a parliamentary one, where she hopes to be elected prime minister for as long as she could hold the loyalty of members of the Parliament.
So far, the Supreme Court and the Senate have steadfastly refused to bow to her wishes, but Arroyo has not the least given up on her desire to remain in power. In the meantime, she has redrawn her strategy by running for a congressional seat in her home province of Pampanga, where she is obviously unbeatable. She is obviously hoping to get elected Speaker in a new Congress still hopefully dominated by her allies blinded by pork barrel, and either become acting president in a scenario where there would be no elected president, vice president and a half of the senators because of failure of elections, or become prime minister in a parliamentary shift she hopes to achieve while Speaker of the House.
Thus, the decade 2000-2009 came to an end with a tentative celebration for the end of a despicable era and with an uncertain hope for a change in leadership. A new decade has started, ushered in by the Year of the Tiger, a year Chinese feng shui masters describe as one characterized by “political turbulence with sights of military might coming into the picture.”
Will it be a decade to look forward to, or one to be wary about? The events of the first half of the dreaded Year of the Tiger will decide which path the country will tread in the next 10 years.
(valabelgas@aol.com)