The show's over, Arroyo tells
foes By Leslie Davis
MANILA -
It's not difficult to imagine the shame, humiliation and
revulsion felt by the legions of fans and supporters of
presidential candidate Fernando Poe Jr.
Here was
a Filipino film legend, the man whose movie persona -
the humble but unrelenting savior of the oppressed and
downtrodden, whose quiet manliness and reserved macho
bravado made him the very essence of the perfect
Filipino male - being treated no better than a
cockroach, hunkering down inside a Metro Manila Burger
King last Tuesday while, just down the block, riot
police pounded thousands of his unarmed supporters with
tear gas and powerful water cannons.
His
supporters were there to peaceably protest, a right
enshrined in the country's constitution. They chanted
and shouted that there was rampant, blatant cheating in
the recent elections, cheating so bad, they claimed,
that it literally altered the result of the election.
Their man, Fernando Poe Jr, was the real and
true choice of the sovereign Philippine people, not
President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. There was only one
problem for the protesters: they didn't have a permit to
rally from the Quezon City government. Of course, they
couldn't get a permit even if they tried to grease
somebody at city hall with a cool million in cash. The
mayor of Quezon City just happens to be one of the head
honchos in Arroyo's party.
Poe's supporters
tried to remind everybody that the constitution is a
document that is perhaps a tad more important than a
measly local ordinance. But that didn't seem to carry
much weight with those who matter, especially the mayor
of Quezon City, nor the police working at the behest of
Arroyo. They went in and cleaned house.
Poe
didn't hang around long, nor did he go out and get mixed
up in the fray. He soon left the Burger King quietly,
flashing his trademark "number one" hand sign and saying
nothing to the gathered reporters. Last anyone heard, he
was mulling over his options at his home in the
Greenhills section of Manila.
Meanwhile, Arroyo
was preparing to be sworn into the realm she covets most
of all - the presidency of the Philippines. Her father
was president in the early 1960s, and the position was
hers by birthright. Sure she's been "president" for the
last three years, but her ascendancy to the presidency
in 2001 was tainted with controversy.
What she
and her supporters called People Power, others called
Mob Rule, a power grab, or a plain old coup d'etat. That
her three-year rule was destined from the beginning to
be a daily diet of intrigue and instability was always
truly a no-brainer.
But now she has won a real
election, and now she will be a real president with a
real mandate. Sure, there were, and still are, plenty of
charges of cheating by Arroyo and her allies. But her
administration-controlled Congress, which spent the last
six weeks counting votes, looked after Arroyo's every
whim, stonewalling the opposition's every complaint.
As the vote counting dragged on, the calls of
cheating became louder, more detailed and more
substantiated. Her spokesmen and allies belittled the
claims. Just to make sure nobody got any funny ideas,
riot police were sent in to forcibly break up
demonstrations, even as small as 20 people, all under
the guise of so-called persistent national security
threats, rumors of coup d'etats and destabilization
efforts. Finally, her congress railroaded the process,
proclaiming her the winner by just more than a million
votes over Poe.
But in the case that something
big might have happened, Arroyo kept pressure on the
opposition. Before her inauguration on Wednesday, she
sent in several columns of armored personnel carriers to
secure the metropolis, put the police on something
called, "triple red alert" and then, ducking away from
the controversy and any trouble makers, hightailed it
off to the southern city of Cebu where she took her oath
as the 14th president of the Philippines.
No
Philippine president had ever taken his or her oath
outside the capital, Manila. But Arroyo wanted to thank
Cebuanos for giving her one of her widest margins over
Poe of anywhere in the country, trouncing her rival by
several hundred thousand votes.
Back in the
capital, Arroyo's heavy-handed tactics and the
inauguration have sent a harsh message to the Poe camp.
It's over. Go home. Go back to the movies and shut up.
More than a few sectors have been pleading with the
movie star to concede. "Be a statesman," they tell him.
"Reign in your supporters. It was a close, hard-fought
battle, and yes, you were probably cheated, but now is
the time to heal the rifts, unite the country and move
forward."
Poe doesn't seem to be listening to
any of these calls. He and his supporters are so
convinced he is the rightful winner that they have
refused to concede or reconcile, often stating, "there
cannot be any reconciliation without truth and justice".
Poe's defiance may or may not mean anything. For
Poe, whose support comes mostly from the masses of poor
who make up 60% of the country's 80 million Filipinos,
being chased and hounded had to be the ultimate
humiliation. Giving up a principled fight was never part
of his movie persona, and it probably isn't part of his
true character either.
Outwardly Arroyo doesn't
seem too worried, although the refusal of her
congressional allies to investigate the cheating, and
the heavy-handed tactics by the police belies her claim
she is confident in her mandate. No doubt she is banking
on the famously fatalistic Filipino people to sigh in
resignation, "what's done is done". And indeed, most
Filipinos are so used to being stepped on, to having to
swallow one bitter pill after the next, to being handed
a raw deal throughout their lives, that they simply
never complain. Why should they expect anything
different?
Some commentators have gone to the
extent of admitting that there was obvious cheating in
the race, but have justified it by saying that it's par
for the course in Philippine elections. Others are
claiming it doesn't matter if there was monkey business,
so long as the inexperienced Poe, another actor like
former president Joseph Estrada, hasn't taken the
highest office in the land.
But in the wild and
careening democracy that is the Philippines, there are
plenty of others who will not stay silent, insisting
that the only way the Philippines can find political
peace and move forward, is to have a leader who was
truly elected by the people, no matter who he or she is,
no matter his or her supposed qualifications, or lack
thereof. This has led groups from various sectors, not
just Poe supporters, to come together to say they will
work to oust Arroyo. These people include leftists,
activists, retired military officers and even those from
religious groups. One Poe adviser is calling for the
formation of an anti-government alliance of various
sectors to expose the cheating that took place.
In every Philippine election it is common for
the losers to cry foul. Publicly admitting defeat does
not seem to be a part of the culture. In this case,
though, the complaints might have gone the way of the
wind were it not for two reasons: the sheer amount of
apparently solid allegations brought forth by the
opposition and others; and the incredibly paranoid
behavior of Arroyo's allies who control Congress and
refused to even look into any of the anomalies in hopes
of unveiling the truth of the election results.
According to former solicitor general Frank
Chavez, who ran for senator and lost on a ticket not
aligned with Poe, the cheating was extensive. He
recently filed a plunder case against Arroyo alleging
that the president dispersed money from the Department
of Agrarian Reform to local officials just in time for
the election.
Elections in the Philippines are
often won at the village level, with money flying to
local officials to ensure their area votes solidly for
the powers that be. That there was a coordinated effort
to buy and even alter the vote with public money was
corroborated by another man, Rudy Galang, who came
forward two weeks ago claiming that he was tapped by an
Arroyo adviser to employ a massive cheating and
vote-buying scheme in the southern Philippines to ensure
Arroyo's victory. Galang said a minimum of US$4 million
in government funds were used to finance the
administration's operations in the southern part of the
country. The adviser predictably debunked the claim.
According the Chavez, though, the cheating
didn't stop with payouts. Chavez recently released a
video detailing how the cheating was executed. He showed
how the Certificates of Canvass, the documents in which
the votes of the various villages and municipalities
were handwritten, and which were used by Congress to
tally the overall votes, contained erasures and
alterations. He even produced official documents from
Arroyo's camp with instructions to party leaders on how
to condition the mind of the public to Arroyo's victory
through trends in polling.
Other anomalies have
poured in since the May 10 election. In one area of
Mindanao, 14 communities never even held elections.
Instead, the Certificates of Canvass were just penciled
in, to show Arroyo "trouncing" Poe. In various other
communities Arroyo received the votes of every single
eligible voter - some 4,000-plus votes in one town - and
her rival received nothing, a statistical improbability.
More than a million registered voters were not
able to vote, finding their names missing from the list
of registered votes at the precincts on election day.
And in the ultimate irony, two senators from Cebu, where
Arroyo held her inauguration as a thank you to the
people for giving her a large margin in the province,
presented evidence of substantial cheating in favor of
Arroyo. In all, the opposition claims that nearly 1.7
million votes were taken from Poe, and which, if
restored, would make him the new president of the
Philippines.
Yet when the tortuous job of adding
up the votes began in Congress, the opposition's
complaints were shot down at every turn. The opposition
claimed, and even showed proof of vote shaving,
statistical improbabilities, erasures and alterations.
Because there were so many glaring irregularities, the
opposition insisted that the 22-man committee canvassing
the votes look into the Election Returns, the source
documents backing up the Certificates of Canvass.
The source documents would have proved if the
Certificates of Canvass were genuine or not, but the
committee, made up mostly of Arroyo partisans, rejected
the idea. They made excuses that it wasn't their job,
that it would take too much time, that the public was
getting tired of the delays. This led to a widely held
impression that the majority appeared to be hiding
something.
"By blocking every opposition move to
make the canvassing more credible," wrote columnist Neil
Cruz in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, a popular daily
paper that usually backs Arroyo strongly, "they [the
majority] show how much they fear the Election Returns.
You fear them only if they will show proof of cheating.
But if there was no cheating in the first place, what is
there to be afraid of? The answer to that can only be
that they're afraid to open the election returns because
they would show clear proof of cheating."
So
while Arroyo touts her fresh mandate and her rival Poe
slinks away (for now) to mull his next move, the lessons
of the elections have become painfully obvious.
Democratic elections are designed to settle the score
once and for all, to bring stability to a country, to
determine with unquestioning finality just who is the
leader. With the political divisions wrought by her
highly questionable rise to the top office the first
time in 2001, the last three years have been a disaster
for the Philippines politically. If there was ever an
election where the Philippines needed a clear cut
winner, a result that could not be questioned, 2004 was
it.
Clearly the last thing the nation needs is
six more years of political fireworks. Forty-six percent
of the population lives on $2 a day or less. Rising oil
prices have rippled throughout an already battered
economy, raising the prices of food and nearly
everything else. Already high electric rates are due to
double in the coming months. The communist and Muslim
insurgencies still fester and perhaps grow. The
government's debt has soared under Arroyo and borrowing
continues, much of it just to pay off previous loans.
Unemployment has skyrocketed in recent months and the
country's astronomic population growth shows no signs of
abating.
But the result that it so needed was
not to be. Instead, the Philippines got an election that
many consider to be the dirtiest in the country's
electoral history. Instead of determining a clear future
for the nation, the unsatisfying outcome has opened up
fresh wounds, exacerbated old rifts and made the picture
even more murky than before.
One couldn't help
but notice the general lack of euphoria in the air when
Congress proclaimed Arroyo the winner in the elections.
Sure there were those who were happy that another actor
hadn't taken the reigns of power. Others were happy that
it was simply over. But there was no dancing and
celebrating in the streets.
In a country starved
for a leader whose mandate cannot be questioned, that
can only mean one thing: that the Philippine elections
of 2004 were a complete and total failure.
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