Crisis and Disintegration of the Arroyo
Fascist Regime
BY THE PHILIPPINE
CULTURAL STUDIES CENTER
Posted by Bulatlat
“Ang sagot sa dahas ay dahas, kapag bingi
sa katwiran.”[The answer to force is force if the other party is deaf to
reason.] – JOSE RIZAL, national hero of the Philippines
The end of the Arroyo
fascist regime is fast approaching. It is bound to implode in one big
catastrophic upheaval that will unleash violence and murderous abuses
symptomatic of the decay of the bankrupt neocolonial system. Or it will
exit peacefully if disciplined mass mobilization in the Metro Manila area
and elsewhere can prevent the regime’s deployment of whatever armed
elements it can use to postpone its ruin. To be sure, U.S. intervention –
military and diplomatic – will try to save its lackeys, or sacrifice them
for a new set of servants who will do Washington’s bidding –U.S.-tutored
military officers and unscrupulous business technocrats tied to
transnational financial-corporate interests. Either way, there is no
escape from the intensifying crisis of a moribund clientelist system
ridden with irresolvable contradictions.
Events seem to be
unfolding with a vengeance. Since her access to government power through
the flawed 2004 electoral exercise, Gloria Arroyo has turned out to be a
huge disappointment to those who supported her in People Power II as an
alternative to Estrada. Arroyo was definitely not a Cory Aquino with the
charisma of the martyred Ninoy. Arroyo’s experience in politics conformed
to the routine career of a member of local oligarchic dynasties; but her
clan grew rich primarily from bureaucratic and business manipulation, not
landlord exploitation. Today, criminal linkages surround her family and
cronies. She might appear for some to resemble Ferdinand Marcos – without
the savvy and pretense to intellectual substance of the latter. Despite
U.S. tutelage, Arroyo’s managerial mode and policies demonstrate an
essentially autocratic style of governance wholly subservient to the
dictates of the World Bank, IMF, WTO, and the Washington Consensus.
Right from the
beginning, Arroyo’s ascendancy was characterized by rampant human rights
violations. She presided over an unprecedented series of political
assassinations of journalists, lawyers, church people, peasant leaders,
women activists, and workers. The human rights group Karapatan (Alliance
for the Advancement of People’s Rights) has documented the brutalization
of 169,530 individual victims, 18,515 families, 71 communities and 196
households. Arroyo has been tellingly silent over the killing and
abduction of countless members of opposition parties and popular
organizations. Most of those killed or “disappeared” belong to progressive
groups such as Bayan Muna (People First), Anakpawis (Toiling Masses),
Gabriela, Anakbayan (Nation’s Youth), Karapatan, KMU (May 1st
Movement), and others. They were protesting Arroyo’s repressive taxation,
collusion with foreign capital tied to oil and mining companies that
destroy people’s livelihood and environment, fraudulent use of public
funds , and other anti-people measures. Such groups and individuals have
been tagged as “communist fronts” by Arroyo’s National Security Advisers,
the military and police; the latter agencies have been implicated in these
ruthless atrocities. Just as what happened to the torturers of the Marcos
regime, no one has been brought to trial and found responsible for any of
the killings and other outrageous brutalities.
Meanwhile, Arroyo has
hired a U.S. lobbying firm, Venable, for national governance. The US firm
will ostensibly raise money for the modernization of the AFP (Armed Forces
of the Philippines). It will also propose crucial amendments to the
Constitution so as to allow foreign ownership of land, public utilities,
and the mass media. Arroyo is also heeding the Bush administration’s
strategy of devising Anti-Terrorism Laws and National ID Systems to
suppress the articulation of grievances by the poor, deprived majority.
Because of severe unemployment, soaring prices of oil products and basic
commodities, unjust salaries and wages, increased tax burdens, chronic
corruption in government, insufficient and costly social services, lack of
genuine land reform, alarming proliferation of gambling, drugs, and State
violence against ordinary citizens, millions of Filipinos, including
landed elite, businessmen and professionals, have called for Arroyo’s
resignation (see March 2005 survey of Pulse Asia; Philippine Daily
Inquirer, May 4, 2005).
Since 2004, Arroyo’s
administration suffered a stunningly rapid erosion of support from the
traditional comprador and oligarchic segments of the ruling bloc. On one
hand, the ousted Estrada camp has really never reconciled itself to its
loss of power, given its populist tendencies and residual nationalist
leaning. On the other hand, the Arroyo clique failed to offer a viable
compromise to those excluded, given its dependence on bureaucratic
corruption, extortions from business and other criminal activities. Never
really interested in popular mobilization, the Arroyo clique has relied on
bribery and other mendacious machinations. It operates with a narrow
circle of parasitic generals, “trapos” (traditional politicians), and
mediocre hirelings from media and academy. Its popular base is
non-existent. Its influence on landlord oligarchs and the Makati elite has
always been superficial and precarious, mediated by brokers like Fidel
Ramos, Jose de Venecia, and assorted confidence tricksters. In short,
Arroyo’s mode of governance has always been fundamentally unstable,
unconsolidated, and opportunistic.
One of the first
signs of the vulnerability of Arroyo’s position may be found in her
yielding to the massive popular demand for withdrawal of Filipino troops
in Iraq following the Angelo de la Cruz kidnapping. Of course, she tried
to exploit its “nationalist” potential. But her continuing servility to
Bush’s imperialist aggression in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, together
with her obedience to the WTO neoliberal program of privatization and
deregulation, reinforced her utter dependency on global forces that only
served to undermine her authority, her claim to represent the Filipino
nation. Arroyo followed Fidel Ramos in implementing the Visiting Forces
Agreement (VFA), together with other onerous treaties, thus maintaining
U.S. control of the Philippine military via training of officers,
logistics, and dictation of policies toward the Moro insurgents as well as
to the New People’s Army (NPA) guerrillas. This is the profound legacy of
the persisting colonial subjugation of the Philippines and the
instrumentalization of the local bureaucracy and military to carry out
U.S. imperial strategy in the first half of the twentieth-century up to
Cold War anti-communist policies and the current “war against global
terrorism.” Without U.S. support, the Filipino elite cannot sustain the
oppression and exploitation of the propertyless workers, peasants, and
middle strata now driven to flee and settle in other lands.
This explains why the
AFP continues to pursue a fanatical anti-communist program today even
after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the capitalist reversal in
China and in Eastern Europe. Its Christian chauvinist orientation
militates against any pluralist outlook or even multiculturalist sympathy
for the plight of the Bangsa Moro people and other indigenous communities
(Igorots, Lumad) who have organized and armed themselves to fight for
justice and dignity, for regaining their ancestral habitats. But this AFP
subservience to Washington does not insure the absence of internal rifts
and breakdown of “professionalism” due to abuses and corruption of the
politicized officer ranks (see Alfred McCoy’s book, Closer Than
Brothers, Yale University Press, 2000). This is a pattern which has
almost become institutionalized for lack of any genuine democratic,
nationalist ethos, given the function of this organ of government
(established by the U.S. colonial authority) to suppress the revolutionary
forces of the first Philippine Republic, the Moro Sultanate resistance,
and numerous peasant insurrections (including the Huk uprising) constantly
reproduced by the fierce class divisions in a semi-feudal and neocolonized
formation.
We can thus
understand the “Hello Garci” episode, following the Oakwood “Mutiny,” as a
symptom of the internal divisions in the AFP and the loss of Arroyo’s full
control. Whatever sliver of moral legitimacy Arroyo’s administration
still possessed then, gradually dissolved in the AFP squabbles caused by
this exposure. Not even her successful attempt to stop impeachment
proceedings in Congress could really repair the rupture of political
legitimacy dating back to the May 2004 elections. The “Hello Garci”
scandal may be read as a symptom of the advanced disintegration of the
comprador-landlord hegemony eviscerated by the Marcos dictatorship,
temporarily revived by Cory Aquino, and given extension by Fidel Ramos’
mock-utopian resuscitation of Marcosian rhetoric. Arroyo cannot rescue
this coalition of conflicting political forces because of lack of the
abundant foreign subsidies that Ferdinand Marcos then enjoyed. This is
worsened by the depletion of natural resources and educated social capital
(due to emigration, breakdown of schooling, etc.) and the strict limits of
local capital accumulation (no independent industrial ventures) due to the
pressures of globalization and the US “war” to re-establish its global
hegemony by systematic torture and unrelenting bombing.
Arroyo has no other
way out. The Economic Crisis of 1997-1998 destroyed any illusions of the
Philippines becoming a new Asian Tiger. While Ramos and Estrada offered
compromises to the working people and the intelligentsia, they failed to
halt the advance of the armed struggle in the countryside and the
national-democratic social movements in the cities. Civil society
continues its resurgence despite State/military repression. With a
profit-centered neoliberal hegemony in control, the unimpeded
impoverishment of the countryside has resulted in mass exodus to the
cities and outward, hence a million Filipinos leave every year for jobs
abroad. The failure of the neocolonial regimes of Ramos, Estrada and
Arroyo is also evidenced by the continuing Bangsa Moro insurgency led by
the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, and the breakdown of the MNLF-Misuari
accommodation. Hence the need of the U.S. after the 9/11 attack to
stigmatize the New People’s Army and the Communist Party of the
Philippines as terrorist organizations, capitalizing on the repulsive acts
of the Abu Sayyaf and the pervasive climate of fear following the bombings
in Bali, Indonesia, and elsewhere. This will not stop the disintegration
of the neocolonial order and the defeat of
U.S.
interventionary salvaging of its Frankenstein monster.
Structural
conditionalities continue to extract enormous debt payments to the World
Bank and other financial consortiums, draining two-thirds of the social
wealth of the Philippines and depriving education and other social
services of sorely needed funds. Neoliberalizing schemes enforced by
U.S.-dominated agencies (WTO, IMF) continues to inflict havoc and misery
on the majority of 86 million Filipinos. It has bred criminality, worsened
corruption, inflamed reactionary Christian fundamentalism, and exposed
everyone to the wrath of natural disasters (witness the Leyte flood, a
repeat of previous devastating calamities in Luzon and elsewhere). It has
contributed to the staging of the Wowowee tragedy, a glaring symptom of
how the iniquitous system gambles the dreams of the desperate millions.
Marcos’ institutionalization of “the warm body export” in 1974 to tax the
poor and relieve labor-peasant unrest has structured the economy to be
wholly dependent on regular remittances of Overseas Filipino Workers, the
main source of dollar earnings required to pay the foreign debt. The
remittance topped $18 billion last year, giving the impression that the
country was becoming prosperous. Arroyo prematurely celebrated this index
of an economic recovery entirely contingent on the unpredictable
fluctuation of the global labor market. This infamous “warm body export”
has led to nearly ten million Filipinos displaced to 140 countries,
chiefly as OCWs (Overseas Contract Workers) in poorly paid jobs (mainly as
domestics, caregivers, and semi-skilled labor), often victimized by
unscrupulous racist employers, abandoned by their own government to fend
for themselves – an average of five OCW corpses arrive each day at the
Ninoy Aquino International Airport. These “New Heroes” (“mga bagong
bayani” to Cory Aquino) are now clamoring for Arroyo’s ouster.
Relentless
corruption, cynical manipulation, and the outright lack of any concern for
the people’s welfare have distinguished Arroyo’s unconscionable rule from
its inception. Faced with the loss of moral and political legitimacy,
Arroyo has institutionalized a pattern of terror throughout the country
since taking the reins of government. Particularly with the election of
party-list representatives from BayanMuna, killings, abductions and
outright harassment of anyone criticizing the government have intensified.
The Ecumenical Movement for Justice and Peace has confirmed that the
majority of human rights violations have been committed by the AFP, the
Philippine National Police, and the CAFGU (Civilian Armed Forces
Government Units). And this could not have occurred without the tacit or
covert approval of Arroyo and her advisers. As the Promotion of Church
People’s Response put it in their Feb. 24 Statement: “GMA cheated her way
to victory in the May 2004 elections, using public funds to secure votes
in her favor and rig the election results… GMA’s record of political
killings and violations of civil liberties, especially with her Calibrated
Preemptive Response scheme, is now the worst since the downfall of
Marcos.”
Having reviewed the
history of this current conjuncture, we take the position of denouncing
President Arroyo’s flagrant violation of the Philippine Constitution via
the pretext of a “National Emergency.” In truth, it is Arroyo’s emergency.
This has been convincingly demonstrated by the lawyers of CODAL (Counsels
for the Defense of Liberties) and the Catholic Bishops. Arroyo’s
suppression of civil liberties and democratic freedoms imposed by
Proclamation 1017, carried out by the military and police, opens the way
to militarist brutal dictatorship similar to Ferdinand Marcos’
authoritarian rule. Unlike Marcos, however, Arroyo does not have the full
support of the comprador and landlord oligarchy; Ramos, Estrada, Aquino
and other factions of the ruling class that they represent have demanded
her resignation. Clearly these groups, with obvious support from the U.S.,
would prefer “business as usual”—a managed transition to a legitimate
administration elected by the majority, with a program of economic and
political reforms to solve rampant graft and corruption, endemic
unemployment, deepening poverty and hopelessness of the masses. Can such a
transition be peacefully administered by the traditional politicians (such
as De Venecia) with U.S. patronage?
Utilizing the pretext
of a coup by right, left and other anti-Arroyo forces, Arroyo issued
Proclamation 1017 chiefly to intimidate, harass and selectively punish her
critics. With her emergency powers, she has arrested all the duly-elected
representatives of Bayan Muna, thus intimidating others who might voice
criticism and protest. Her police and military have suppressed street
demonstrations and public rallies, raided the offices of newspapers and
other media, and threatened the arrest of hundreds, including such
prestigious members of political dynasties such as Jose “Peping” Cojuangco.
It appears, however, that Arroyo is using the usual “divide-and-rule”
tactic, isolating the “communist” elements, frightening their allies, and
threatening others with “warrantless arrests.” Arroyo and her advisers
believe that we are still engaged in the Cold War, fighting agents of the
Soviet Union and Communist China. However, this bogey of a “coup”
conspiracy fails to convince people because those arrested do not include
the military officials that the regime has named as complicit in the plot
to overthrow the Arroyo clique. Arroyo surely cannot afford to alienate
the military hierarchy she depends on; but can she fool all the honest
nationalist officers whose sympathies are with the people? Systematic
State terror has been unleashed on the progressive and nationalist sectors
of the citizenry. Clearly the hand of the U.S. and its agents has been
exposed in directing this selective dragnet, even as the U.S. Embassy
continues to refuse to surrender four American soldiers charged by the
Philippine Court with rape. Meanwhile, thousands of U.S. Special Forces
and their mighty warships are standing by, just in case….
Exposed for cheating,
lying, and stealing the people’s money, Arroyo’s fascist rule can no
longer claim even a semblance of legitimacy. Nor can the State apparatus
controlled by Arroyo claim the authority that solely emanates from the
Filipino people, assuming that a constitutional democratic republic is
still the framework of order and security. The Arroyo regime’s moral
rottenness and political decay have precipitated its total repudiation and
condemnation by the Filipino masses.
We call on all
conscienticized Filipinos, democrats and nationalists to unite and rally
against the Arroyo fascist group imposing terror on the whole country.
Civil liberties promulgated in the 1987 Constitution and by the United
Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights can only be guaranteed by
public demonstrations, street rallies, strikes, and other visible
manifestations of the exercise of social and civic rights. We call on all
peoples around the world concerned with justice, democracy, and human
dignity to express solidarity with the Filipino people in overthrowing the
Arroyo regime, releasing all political prisoners, and restoring full and
genuine sovereignty to the Filipino people. Posted by Bulatlat
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