MY answer is maybe. What is obvious, though, is that we have people repeating history, and President Duterte must look at this very seriously as a national security issue, because it involves his survival, the institution he represents and his covenant with the millions who overwhelmingly voted for him.
The history I am talking about is the unconstitutional removal from power of President Joseph E. Estrada on January 20, 2001, which this writer wrote in comprehensive details into a book, Power Grab, published locally and by Amazon, one of the world’s largest publishing houses, in 2001.
The oust, Duterte plot has similarities with what Estrada experienced, and some people involved in the anti-Estrada campaign are also involved today, including people in the government and the private sector, elite businessmen and a selective group from both broadcast and print media.
These people depend heavily on their Trojan Horses inside Malacañang and officers and men with mercenarian tendencies in the police and military organizations, hoping they will stage a mutiny or a coup like what happened in Estrada’s time.
In the case of Estrada, the information filtering into his office about the plot was screened out by their insiders in Malacañang. The tragedy was that Estrada just ignored the information when it finally reached him, including one occasion over dinner in a Singapore Hotel on November 26, 2000. “He thought he was too popular to be affected by it,” a former Cabinet member said. The ousting of Estrada was not a spontaneous event, but a deliberate plot that started a year before as rumors, similar to what is now circulating as LeniLeaks, using massive disinformation and black propaganda carefully crafted to provide half-true, misleading or wholly false information to deceive the public and appeal to their emotion.
Every day thousands of propaganda messages against Estrada, his family, friends and cronies were drummed into the minds of readers, radio listeners, TV viewers, teachers, students and other citizens. The rich elite, backed by moralist-prelates and the communists who have been craving to kick out Estrada from his post because of his nationalist policies and mundane traits, were behind it.
That he was corrupt, a plunderer,
womanizer, binge drinker and
gambler, traits that they said do not sit well with a President, were their favorite issues against him.
In December 1999 Stratfor, a political forecasting service founded in Austin, Texas, in 1996, ran on its Internet site a report that he would be removed from office before his term expires in 2004. The report was anchored on the belief that Estrada restored cronyism and was guilty of committing graft, fueling speculations that a coup was in the offing.
Then came the banner story of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, a widely circulated newspaper owned by the Rufino-Prieto family highly critical of Estrada, quoting the World Bank as saying that $48 billion had been lost to corruption in 20 years.
Both Stratfor’s and World Bank’s stories, although devoid of logic and substance, nevertheless created an impression that the Estrada administration was somehow shaky and corrupt.
For example, if $48 billion (P2.4 trillion at P50 to a dollar) had been lost to corruption in 20 years, whose administration was it referring to? Ferdinand E. Marcos’s 20 years in office or Corazon C. Aquino’s and Fidel V. Ramos’s 12 years and four months in office? This cannot be because all three presidents had a total of 32 years and four months only?
Marcos’s indebtedness to the International Monetary Fund-World Bank and other foreign financial institutions was only $26.3 billion in 20 years, compared to Aquino’s more than $38 billion in six years and four months, and Ramos’s $85 billion in six years, including domestic debts.
In fairness, it cannot be Estrada’s, because he was only in office for nearly 32 months. Although Stratfor ruled out coup, it mentioned two possibilities of removing Estrada from office: impeachment and people’s power revolution. Impeachment on the basis of Chavit Singson’s bribery allegations and incompetence which, according to them, resulted in the fall of the peso.
Even during the campaigns for the 1998 presidential election, the anti-Estrada forces were already at work. The late President Aquino, for instance, led a campaign called “Anyone but Estrada,” which sought to sway voters away from Estrada. This campaign backfired, since it further solidified the poor to back Estrada after they saw the rich rallying against him.
The elite and hypocrites who were at the forefront of the campaign appeared to be afflicted by some kind of perverse streak or a kind of moral degradation that ignored what Estrada has been doing for the masses or were embarrassed that their presidential candidates lost by a landslide in the 1998 elections. Or, perhaps, there was a deeper and subtler reason than plain ignorance and malice of what he does for the poor.
These people who relentlessly maligned Estrada in rallies through the media were mostly the same self-proclaimed do-gooders who were shocked to see Duterte winning the polls by a mile despite their protestation that the man they hated most was a killer and a womanizer.
For Duterte, history teaches us that forewarned is forearmed.
To reach the writer, e-mail cecilio.arillo@gmail.com.
1 comment
Learning a lot of lost or suppressed history from you…. Thank you.