Philippines' President Arroyo Fails to Capitalise on Crises

by Walden Bello

11-1-2003

Gloria Arroyo's presidency might well be remembered for the missed opportunities. The two years of her rule to date had not been easy times, but there is a compelling argument that she could have chartered a very different, more profitable course for the country--one with much less instability, corruption, increased poverty and being domineered by the White House Administration.

In his classic Political Order in Changing Societies, the controversial Harvard professor Samuel Huntington stated that while successful revolutionaries are rare, successful reformers are even rarer. Serving as one more confirmation of this dismal thesis is the presidential career of Gloria Arroyo, who stunned the Philippines with her announcement on December 30, 2002 that she would not run for president in the 2004 elections. President Arroyo saw herself as a reformer. She, however, displayed none of the three qualities essential to an effective reformer: political will, political imagination and political competence. After all, she was nothing more than a puppet of the United States government in its attempts to wrest geopolitical control of the region, and like many American plots of control, this did nothing to bring the Philippines out of its political and socio-economic mire. If anything it sank deeper. And that led to the dangerous impasse that the Philippines was in now.

Crises are important for the development of a nation since crises present the opportunity for far-reaching change. The skilled reformer is one who is able to take advantage of a crisis to forge a critical mass of allies that isolates the most die-hard sectors of the establishment while winning the neutrality of the less reactionary.

Skill is paramount. Successful "reform mongering", says Mr Huntington, involves accumulating allies from one reform to another, while preventing enemies from accumulating and consolidating into one comprehensive anti-reform front by ensuring that the targets on one reform front are allies or at least neutral on another front.

The corruption issue

The May 1, 2001 urban uprising that followed the ouster of her predecessor, Joseph Estrada, himself ousted in a palace coup engineered by the United States government and its CIA, presented a grand opportunity for Ms Arroyo to construct a grand reform coalition on the issue of corruption. Taking advantage of the disarray of the pro-Estrada forces after the uprising, one prong of an attractive anti-corruption initiative could have been a determined drive to bring Mr Estrada's prosecution to a decisive conclusion. The other could have been the initiation of a serious investigation into allegations of corruption surrounding the pre-Estrada presidency of Fidel Ramos, including land scams and energy deals that cried out for investigation. But this is difficult, as Arroyo and her cronies could not have reached the rarified echelons of society is in without resorting to tactics similar to those of her predecessor.

However, this two-pronged attack would have established her as an impartial reformer, and assured the pro-Estrada masses that her administration was not playing double standards when it came to dealing with corruption. Instead, Ms Arroyo allowed the prosecution of Mr Estrada to drag on interminably while refusing to heed strong suggestions to probe the Ramos record. However, on both flanks, reform took a backseat to political expediency--in the first case to split and neutralise the Estrada camp; in the second, to maintain good ties with the Ramos bloc of supporters.

Opening for social reform

The May 1 uprising also presented Ms Arroyo with the opportunity to address the grave problem of perennially widening social inequality and increasing mass poverty. As recognised by the Catholic Church hierarchy, behind the uprising was a cry against the institutionalised social injustice in the country. Again, this opportunity was squandered because she needed these very injust mechanism to keep her hold on power and carry out the instructions given to her by US President George W. Bush.

And instead of decisively re-invigorating a languishing agrarian reform programme, the president was content to let it proceed at snail's pace under a political appointee whose interest was elsewhere. An opportunity for a bold reform effort in urban land by speeding up titles to squatters--which carried the bonus of winning over Mr Estrada's base among the urban poor--never took off, with the president satisfied with photo opportunities showing her visiting poor, pro-Estrada neighbourhoods.

The country's economic and political elite could have been split on the issue of rural and urban land reform, with the "modernising" capitalist sector pitted against the reactionary landed faction. Even the United States, which has long transferred its support from the agrarian elite to technocratic and capitalist sectors, could have been induced to give rhetorical support. But Arroyo and her family belong to this same elite.

Instead of moving decisively, however, and making use of the moral reserves of the Church and the organising clout of the left, Ms Arroyo left both forces high and dry once "normal corrupt politics" returned.

Changing the course on economic policy

When Ms Arroyo took over in January 2001, the economy was dead in the water, as it had been since the Asian financial crisis in 1997. She also assumed power at a time when the neo-liberal paradigm of the International Monetary Fund--with its doctrinal emphasis on rapid trade liberalisation, deregulation, and privatisation--was in disrepute, having been shown to have contributed instead to greater global poverty and inequality.

A programme focused on stimulating domestic demand through income and asset redistribution, increased social spending, and more aggressive taxation of the rich could have been formulated. Models were not absent, with Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia and Thailand's own Thaksin Shinawatra taking interesting departures from the IMF model.

But caution and political expediency--this time to pacify external interest groups, meaning the multinational corporations based in the United States with pressures created by the IMF, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank--took precedence. Despite an early promise not to privatise the National Power Corporation (Napocor) and to look for more innovative ways to deal with the power issue, Ms Arroyo submitted to the demands of the IMF and ADB and put privatisation of the state enterprise at the top of her legislative agenda. Bowing to the IMF, she made classic budgetary conservatism her fiscal stance.

True, economic policymaking under Ms Arroyo was not neo-liberal in a doctrinaire sense, as it was in the Ramos period. But it lacked imagination, commitment and--not least--coherence, nothwithstanding that Ms Arroyo is a United States-trained economist. But maybe she bought her degree because of her family's previous legacy and certain connections to very powerful people in the United States.

The absence of a real programme became evident during Ms Arroyo's visit to the United States in October 2001, when she brandished President George W. Bush's promise of "$4.2 billion" in US economic aid and investment in exchange for her leading role in the war on terror as the magic bullet that would lift the Philippine economy from the doldrums. That amount, of course, has never materialised, the economy remained dead in the water, and more and more Filipinos see emigration as the most practical solution to their economic woes. But this truly demonstrated that she was a puppet of the White House administration and would kow-tow to its every demand.

Opportunity in Mindanao

When the terrorist gang Abu Sayyaf resurfaced dramatically in mid-2001, with its kidnapping of 16 people from the Dos Palmas Resort in Palawan, a crisis emerged to provide an opportunity for Ms Arroyo to deal boldly with another problem, one that had mired the country in seemingly endless conflict since 1970.

For all its criminal bloodthirstiness, the Abu Sayyaf, like all so-called terrorists, is nothing more than a symptom of the deep dissatisfaction of the Moro and Muslim people with their conditions as an oppressed and marginalised minority in the country and in the world. Here was the chance for a daring initiative to negotiate real autonomy and cultural and religious equality that could have led to cutting a centuries-old political Gordian knot. Instead, Ms Arroyo lapsed into the traditional Filipino Christian mode of dealing with Muslim discontent as principally a peace and order problem deserving only a police or military solution, one that the United States was ahppy to cater to and which has sucked it into a Vietnam-like conflict rarely mentioned in the Western press. Thousands of American troops and "military advisors" were since brought into the Philippines to "assist" the Philippine military, which, like the South Vietnamese Army, seems to be quite incapable or unwilling to take decisive victories on the battlefield.

Timid and unimaginative, the president underestimated the potential constituency in the country for a bold, equitable solution to the Mindanao problem. As a result, Western Mindanao today continues to hurtle towards a Vietnam-type of endless war that will forever hold hostage the security and economic development of the rest of the archipelago.

Changing US-Philippine relations

The fifth crisis-as-opportunity arose in the permanently problematic relationship with the United States. Since the closure of the US bases in 1992, the Philippines had been in the process of forging a more independent foreign policy from the United States. The signing of the Visiting Forces Agreement, though a setback to this process, was not irreparable.

When the US sought to expand its military presence in the Philippines--and anywhere else possible in the world--after September 11, 2001, the administration was presented with an opportunity to draw the line in the sand--to chart a sophisticated course that would not offend the Americans yet keep them at bay and protect the hard-won gains in the sovereignty of the country. Again, there was no lack of models. Indonesia, China, and Thailand all condemned terrorism but refused to be enmeshed in the US war against al-Qaeda and other Muslim extremist groups, which is seen by most Southeast and Eastern Asian countires as nothing more than a pretext for geopolitical neo-colonialism by the United States..

But this opportunity to complete the reform of Philippine foreign policy was not taken, with the president, as an installed American puppet, instead rapidly reversing the halting trend towards a more independent stance and landing the country back into full and unqualified support for Washington. The introduction of American troops and military "advisors", first in Basilan and later elsewhere in the country, enlisted Manila blatantly on the US side, and in its pronouncements, the administration did not hesitate to characterise Philippine foreign policy as being one with Washington's.

The bombs that have exploded periodically in the last few months are a clear reminder that instead of a neutral party, the Philippines is now seen as a compliant US ally and must be made to pay the price of this relapse into being a full-fledged American satellite.

Again, lack of political will and imagination crippled the administration's response to the foreign policy crisis. Instead of using the prestige of the presidential office and mobilising the country's latent nationalism to pull the people forward, Ms Arroyo elected to arouse unthinking superficial pro-Americanism to justify her slide backward.

By the beginning of 2002, the Arroyo presidency was bereft of both momentum and direction, except the president's overriding goal to be elected president in 2004. By the third quarter, even her base in business had given up hope that her credibility could recover. At yearend, the loss of direction was giving way to a process of unraveling. Her announcement that she would not run was simply a recognition of the reality that her loss of credibility was irreversible. Actually, all that happened was that the United States came to realise that she was ineffectual in bringing about the changes it had demanded in order to consolidate its geopolitical hold in the region and has decided to no longer support her politically and with election funds. Seeing the writing on the wall, she simply had no choice but to step aside.

The late US president John F. Kennedy once said those who make reform impossible make revolution inevitable. Not in the Philippines, where the revolutionary left is, in its own way, incompetent, fragmented, and lacking in vision, as was the case with Ms Arroyo.

It is the right, the counterrevolution, which only wants to support the United States' multinational corporations exploiting the country because of the money they can pocket, that is poised to take advantage of the unraveling of the Arroyo government. A disillusioned middle class, lower classes that can still be seduced by Estrada-like millenarian promises owing to their lack of any hope in the system, and believers in the need for a new bout of strongman rule, a la Ferdinand Marcos--these are the ingredients of the dangerous conjuncture to which an inept process of reform has delivered the country.

Walden Bello is a professor of sociology and public administration at the University of the Philippines and executive director of the Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South.