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Featured Stories

PHILIPPINE DEMOCRACY
People Power and the Perils of Democracy Lite
by Herbert Docena
Beneath the coup plots, shadow plays, and shifting alliances is the old protracted struggle for power in the Philippines.

DISASTER
Preparing for Disaster
by Vinia M. Datinguinoo
For a disaster-prone country, the Philippines is notoriously unprepared to deal with calamity.

WOWOWEE
Wowowee and the Women of 200 P. dela Cruz St.
by Sheila S. Coronel
TV networks benefit from the poverty and despair of their audience. But until the “Wowowee” tragedy, TV executives were oblivious to the perils of peddling dreams.

NEWSCAST
Through the Tube, Darkly
by Sheila S. Coronel
Primetime newscasts are fixated on crime stories, but then that is what their audiences want.

MARTIAL LAW
The Way We Were
On Sept. 22, 1972, the military closed down newspapers and broadcast stations and hauled to jail journalists and publishers.

FOCUS
Unusual Journeys
Most travel pieces by Filipinos involve shopping, but there is more to traveling than searching through the bargain bin. Unusual journeys inspire the traveler to see the world in a new light.

Romancing the Camera
by Howie G. Severino
Filipinos love the camera and the camera loves us.

A Basketball Diary
by Steven Pollit
A Canadian traveler discovers the Pinoy passion for basketball in Visayan villages way off the tourist track.

The Lost Boys of Sagada
by Danilova Molintas
The young men who grew up in the midst of Sagada’s tourist rush have fallen to the temptations of easy money, easy women, and what seemed for many years an easy life.

A Sta. Ana Story
by Grace Loreno
The time-warped district of Sta. Ana in the old Manila is changing fast, the remnants of its storied past now being overrun by fast-food joints and urban blight.

On the Trail of Lost Films
by Nick Deocampo
The pieces of our celluloid heritage are scattered throughout the world.

Beneath the coup plots, shadow plays, and shifting alliances is the old protracted struggle for power in the Philippines.

by HERBERT DOCENA

“History is merely a list of surprises,” the American writer Kurt Vonnegut once quipped. “It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.”

ON THE very day when Filipinos were to mark the 20th anniversary of the People Power uprising that ended Ferdinand Marcos’s strongman rule, Marcos-style dictatorship sprang a surprise by making a comeback: this time, in an attempt to prevent another popular revolt. President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo declared a “state of national emergency” after preempting a group of soldiers’ plan to turn their backs on her and join thousands of protesters in the streets.

	NOT QUITE PEOPLE POWER. The photographs in this article, taken during the February 24 protests commemorating the 20th anniversary of Edsa 1, show that while anti-government groups were determined to oust the president, they have not been able to get popular groundswell for her removal. [photos courtesy of Buck Pago and Malaya]

But this aborted climax is just the latest episode in a simmering political crisis that first erupted in June 2005 with the release of audiotapes that seemed to support allegations that Arroyo cheated in the 2004 elections. Since then, calls for the president’s resignation or ouster have grown louder and louder. Defying government restrictions, protesters have been marching on the streets on a weekly — at times even daily — basis. A dizzying web of political coalitions against the president has been spun and re-spun, each time with different configurations of political ideologies.If this most recent crisis was initially just about Arroyo’s political survival, it is now fast turning out to be about something much bigger than the president herself. While the fallout from the tape scandal could have easily been contained in its early stages, a confluence of events has paved the way for a continuing standoff that has polarized domestic political forces. Arroyo’s fate is now incidental. Beneath the coup plots, shadow plays, and shifting alliances in the days and weeks ahead is the old protracted struggle for power in the Philippines.

DEMOCRACY ACCORDING TO THE ELITE
After the fall of Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, Philippine conservative ruling elites aided by the United States had moved quickly to reinstate the pre-dictatorship political system that since Spanish colonial rule allowed them to entrench their economic dominance over society. Smarting from the lessons of Marcos’s dictatorship and seeing that authoritarianism was not necessarily the most effective way to maintain their collective grip on power, the elite leaders did restore civil liberties. At the same time, however, they restricted democracy to mere electoral contests that — given the ossified distribution of wealth and power in the Philippines — remained structurally skewed in their favor. Dubbed variably as “low-intensity democracy,” “limited democracy,” or “polyarchy” by academics, the post-1986 consensus became both the linchpin of stability and the source of legitimacy for Philippine ruling elites.

Through elections, the elite factions were able to manage competition among themselves while eschewing outsiders who lacked the resources required to challenge them at the ballot box. Those who won the elections were able to command obedience from the masses––not by force as in a dictatorship, but by reminding them that they (the leaders) were the people’s choice.

Having dominated the state through the electoral process, the ruling elites have countered challenges to their rule by successfully thwarting persistent demands for a redistribution of power, wealth, and economic opportunities.The outcome has not been surprising. One rough measure of the entrenched inequality: in 1985, on the eve of the first “people power” uprising, the top 10 percent of the population took 37 percent of the total national income; the lowest 20 percent garnered a mere five percent. Twenty years later, judging by the latest available official data, the top 10 percent still controls 36 percent of the national pie, while the lowest 20 percent remains stuck at five percent.

IT’S STILL THE ECONOMY, STUPID
No wonder then that the post-1986 political system itself has also been inherently unstable. For one thing, the masses were obviously not contented with just being given ballots. They also wanted food on their table, a roof over their heads, and steady employment — things the post-1986 political order has not been able to deliver to the vast majority of Filipinos. Indeed, 20 years after Edsa 1, 57 percent of Filipinos consider themselves poor — slightly higher than the 55 percent who felt the same way in 1983. Up to 20 percent of Filipinos today are unemployed and as many as 2,000 leave the country every day to work abroad. Clearly, economic growth has failed to trickle down to the base of the pyramid, the promises of globalization notwithstanding.

This evident failure to lift the lives of millions of Filipinos, much more than any allegations of cheating and corruption, has considerably eroded the legitimacy of the political order. At the same time, even as the system itself expanded the ranks of the excluded and fueled resentment, it also has had to extend freedoms that then strengthened the movements calling for substantive — as opposed to “low-intensity” — democracy. The openness afforded by “democracy lite” ironically accounts for the left’s continuing vibrancy in the country. So much so that despite the left’s weakness and fragmentation, it has not been quashed to the same extent as in neighboring Indonesia and Thailand.

Increasingly pressured by peripheral political actors, political elites were also increasingly challenged by divisions from within. Historically, internal stability depended on consensus in putting their collective interests above the narrow interests of individual factions. This happened in January 2001, when elite factions displaced by Joseph Estrada’s presidency seized on widespread anger at alleged corruption inside his government and rode to power on the wave of another people-power-type uprising.

But more recent crises have seen elite factions at loggerheads with each other. In an alleged rigging of the 2004 elections — and by being reckless enough to get caught speaking privately with supposedly neutral election officials — Arroyo won the ire of fellow elites. The other factions, meanwhile, have seized on the scandal and are now trying to knock her down from power. Arroyo, however, has adamantly stood her ground. And by doing so, she has further stretched the limits and contradictions of the established political order.