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The way political analyst Antonio Gatmaitan sees it,
President Arroyo owes her political survival to overseas Filipinos.
Issue after issue has been raised
against her, from graft and corruption to election fraud. Lately,
her critics have been scoring her for the rising incidence of hunger
and a rash of political killings. Unsurprisingly, opinion polls
now portray her as one of the most unpopular presidents the
Philippines has ever had.
Yet, six years after she was
catapulted to the presidency by the EDSA 2 uprising and nearly three
years after a bitterly contested presidential election gave rise to
impeachment attempts and abortive mutinies, Mrs. Arroyo is still in
Malacañang.
If there is so much public
resentment against her as reflected in her abysmal approval ratings
and the daily barrage from the largely hostile media, why is she
still in power? Why hasn’t Mrs. Arroyo gone the way of Ferdinand
Marcos or her immediate predecessor, Joseph Estrada?
Political ferment has not
combined with economic dislocation, said Gatmaitan at the Kapihan sa
Sulô media forum Saturday.
In the case of Marcos, resistance
to his presidency was widespread especially after his martial-law
regime enriched our political vocabulary with such terms as
“cronyism” and “salvaging.” Yet those excesses failed to
ignite a revolt.
Even the assassination of former
Sen. Benigno Aquino did not immediately lead to Marcos’s downfall.
What did, according to Gatmaitan, was the Philippine government’s
decision in 1985 to declare a moratorium on its debt payments, which
caused the value of the peso against the US dollar to plummet. The
moratorium succeeded in making the economy grind to a halt.
Gatmaitan did not go into the
details of Estrada’s downfall, but the EDSA 2 uprising that
removed Erap from Malacañang was also preceded by a precipitous
depreciation of the peso and a spate of financial scandals,
including the biggest scam the local stock market has ever seen
involving the now infamous BW stocks.
It is the remittances of OFWs
that has assured Mrs. Arroyo’s political survival, said Gatmaitan.
While the country has been deploying its workers abroad since the
mid-1970s, it was only under the current administration that
deployment numbers mushroomed. Overseas Filipinos now number
anywhere from 8 million to 12 million.
It was also under Mrs. Arroyo
that OFW remittances reached record levels. Last year overseas
Filipinos sent home $13 billion, which has not only kept the economy
afloat but gave it the impression of growth, aside from
strengthening the peso.
Gatmaitan may not have intended
to do so, but his analysis somehow affirms the notion that with the
economy showing signs of revival, Filipinos are not yet ready to
bodily remove Mrs. Arroyo from office.
She may or may not have been
responsible for the accelerated deployment of OFWs and their
burgeoning remittances, but the Filipinos working abroad have
nonetheless assured Mrs. Arroyo’s political survival.
Unrepresented OFWs
Despite the fact that OFWs have
kept, not just the President, but also the entire economy afloat,
overseas Filipinos have virtually no representation in the
government. This “anomaly” a party-list organization called Ahon
Pinoy hopes to rectify.
If it manages to get enough votes
on May 14, Ahon Pinoy—unlike several party-list groups—has not
been shy about disclosing its nominees to the House of
Representatives. They are Dante Ang Jr., president of The Manila
Times and son of Commission on Overseas Filipinos chief Dante Ang;
Bernardo Ople, brother of the late former labor secretary and Sen.
Blas Ople; and Niño Herrera, son of labor leader and former senator
Ernesto Herrera.
In the early 1990s the younger
Ang worked in the United States as a reporter and afterward in
Canada as a contractual worker. That experience, he said, opened his
eyes to the plight of millions of Filipinos who have to go abroad
for work in order to support their families in the homeland.
If Ahon Pinoy does manage to win
seats in Congress, Ang said its nominees are committed to introduce
bills that will offer collateral-free loans to returning OFWs that
would enable them to set up small businesses.
Ahon-Pinoy’s four-point program
also includes legislation providing for: guaranteed education up to
college for the children of OFWs under a study-now, pay-later
program; decent and affordable housing for OFW families “patterned
after the Singapore model”; and reducing the cost of long-distance
phone calls and extending the expiry period of cellular-phone cards
as measures to mitigate the separation of OFWs from their families.
At the very least, Ahon Pinoy has
a clear idea of what it wants to accomplish—unlike other
party-list groups that limit their platform to the usual motherhood
statements and platitudinous hogwash.
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