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All of the essential ingredients, which justified the
resort to people power, described the government of President
Corazon C. Aquino. These included massive government corruption
which infected the highest reaches of government, widespread
election cheating, human rights abuses, the resignation of honest
government officials who could no longer stomach the corruption, and
the corresponding cover-up.
These ingredients may be
substantiated to the requisite degree, just as the corruption
involved in the looting of Malacañang Palace and in the illegal
transfer of property to Mrs. Aquino’s relatives and friends was in
the previous article. Unfortunately, due to space constraints, only
the Mendiola massacre is discussed here, it being particularly
relevant.
A year into Aquino’s
presidency, some 15,000 farmers marched toward Malacañang to demand
genuine land reform. State security forces blocked their approach to
the Palace on Mendiola St. and fired at them. When the smoke
cleared, 13 farmers were killed and 51 wounded in the bloodiest
street protest that ever befell Metro Manila.
Mrs. Aquino appeared genuinely
concerned. She joined public demonstrations against the carnage. She
created the Citizen’s Mendiola Commission to investigate it. She
promised government redress of their grievances.
The commission recommended the
criminal prosecution of some soldiers and compensation for the
victims. This was ignored. When sued by the farmers for
compensation, the government invoked state immunity from suit as its
defense, an argument which the Supreme Court sustained in Republic
v. Sandoval (G.R. No. 84607).
Till today, neither prosecution
nor compensation has materialized. Genuine land reform remains
a dream. Curiously, the President’s own Hacienda Luisita has
managed to escape coverage by the Agrarian Reform Law. The Catholic
Church, so vigorous a defender of human rights against military
abuse in other times, prudently refrained from strongly condemning
her or her government.
As a result of the carnage, the
communist rebels, recognizing the hypocrisy, discontinued peace
negotiations with the government. Mrs. Aquino, now at the receiving
end of people power, appeared ruthless and unrepentant. Her military
behaved abominably, far more ruthlessly violent than her
predecessor’s military ever did, and she did nothing about it.
The rightists were as acutely
aware of the hypocrisy but misunderstood people power politics.
When Col. Gringo Honasan, led a military uprising which almost
toppled the Aquino government in 1989, more than ample corruption
existed to justify people power support. Unlike Edsa 1, that
did not happen. The conventional wisdom was that his cause lacked
widespread support.
This view was belied when Gringo
was elected senator in 1995. Such a victory cannot adequately be
explained in terms of his good looks or swashbuckling image. Rather,
it indicated that the people sympathized with his cause although
they may have disapproved of the means used to achieve it.
It was a slap on the face of
President Aquino, the same way that the election of Lt. Antonio
Trillanes IV as senator constituted a slap on President Gloria M.
Arroyo’s face.
More importantly, it reinforced
the observation that people are not so much concerned with process
as with substantive justice, finding the violation of the former
justifiable for the sake of the latter, an attitude glorified by
EDSA 1.
Since then, Philippine society
alarmingly manifested such an attitude particularly in celebrated
criminal cases such as that of Hubert Webb’s. Decisions have been
rendered due more to public opinion than to the merits of the case
or the evidence at hand.
The people power phenomenon
provides the paradigm for bypassing process for justice, involving
as it does the violation of the legal rules for presidential
succession. However, conventional analysis of this phenomenon is
crude and simplistic, ignoring as it does the complex interplay of
powerful forces within Philippine society.
On one side lies the
administration with its political and bureaucratic machinery. On the
other are the opposition politicians, the business elite, the
Catholic Church, the media and the Left. Both sides compete for the
support of the intellectuals, the middle class and the student
population in Metro Manila.
Waiting in the wings is the
military, gauging the strength of the opposition. Much as the
business elite and the Catholic Church would like to aggrandize
their role in people power politics, they are, in actuality,
woefully ineffective without military backing. They can only spur
the public to manifest massive indignation, which will lead to
results only if the military withdraws its support from government.
Outside the equation exist most
of the poor and the provincial masses. They constituted the power
base of both Presidents Ferdinand E. Marcos and Joseph Estrada.
In reality, the people power
victors did not unify Philippine society by their success but
further divided it. Acts deemed just by the victors are perceived as
persecution by the losers. To the latter, the conflict was not so
much between black and white, as between them and us.
When the people power victors
gained power, therefore, they did not strengthen democratic
institutions, such as due process and the rule of law. Instead they
institutionalized corruption, militarization, the politics of
division and the politics of terror.
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