‘Ghosts’ of EDSA coups haunt FVR, GMA

A man died due to an accident. Upon reaching heaven, he was asked by St. Peter.

St. Peter: "What country are you from?" The man meekly replied: "From the Philippines, my Lord." St. Peter replies: "Enter the kingdom of heaven, my son, for you have suffered enough!"

An enterprising but obviously politically-aware young man included this joke in the flyers he was distributing to sell pre-need services offered by a memorial park. His sales pitch was "Remember what you had to go through before? Allow us to take care of all the hassles so you can mourn properly!" It was a cute sales pitch but cutting deeply into our sense of the present situation in our country.

I think we Filipinos honor the memories of our dead longer than any other people in the world. Many of us also believe about souls that come back to reach out to their grieving loved ones, or as ghosts to haunt and bother the living.

But in the case of former President Fidel V. Ramos, he is continually haunted not by ethereal manifestations but by his past involvements in two People Power Revolutions in the country that removed from office two sitting Presidents.

As then PC-INP chief, Gen. Ramos helped in the successful ouster of the late dictator, President Ferdinand Marcos at the end of the February 1986 EDSA-1. And while already in retirement and fondly calling himself "senior citizen Eddie," Ramos led anti-administration groups that joined together to remove President Joseph Estrada from office on Jan. 20, 2001 dubbed as EDSA-2.

The direct participation of Ramos in EDSA-1 and EDSA-2 People Power Revolutions stuck to him both as a badge of honor and like ghost stories that haunt him over and over again.

So even while he vehemently denies most recent stories linking him to alleged plots to oust President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, no amount of denials from an angry Ramos can convince his arch critics. I was not surprised at all to see last week on television tobacco-chomping Ramos visibly very angry denouncing as non-existent and fictitious the supposed US report he was again allegedly cooking up coup plots vs GMA.

Ex-Budget Secretary Salvador "Jun" Enriquez Jr. and ex-Defense Secretary Fortunato Abat, who served in the Ramos Cabinet, invited us to a luncheon press briefing at the Manila Hotel last Friday while on that same day a broadsheet screamed in its headline "US Embassy report links FVR to plot."

Abat and Enriquez defended Ramos despite their supposed falling out with the former President after the latter’s last-minute decision to support Mrs. Arroyo in July this year that saved the day for the embattled administration from anti-government groups calling her to step down.

Abat and Enriquez formally introduced their group as the Coalition for National Solidarity-Christian Nationalists Union (CNS-CNU) which they admitted is working for the replacement of the Arroyo administration through constitutional means. They call it the "Constitutional protectorate provision" that mandates the military to enforce the rights of the people. And one of these rights of the people, they contended, is the right to call for a change in government.

While they claim this coalition is connected with the international groups of Christian Democrats, the two vehemently denied it is clandestinely supported by Ramos.

Ramos and House Speaker Jose de Venecia were the founding fathers here of the ruling Lakas-National Union of Christian Democrats (NUCD), which was renamed last year as Christian-Muslim Democrats (CMD). They have actively pursued together Charter change (Cha-cha) as the cure-all solution to the national problem of our malingering political system.

Both Ramos and De Venecia have consistently maintained that Mrs. Arroyo has tacitly agreed to the proposition that her term of office will have to be affected once the shift to a parliamentary-federal system of government through Cha-cha gets approved by the people in a plebiscite.

This agreement was reached during the crucial meeting at the Palace in July when Ramos sided with the beleaguered administration. Their former EDSA-2 allies however, led by former President Corazon Aquino joined the ouster calls against Mrs. Arroyo. The problem is some administration people have conveniently forgotten this agreement after the political situation stabilized a bit and Mrs. Arroyo got a breather from her foes.

In fairness to Mrs. Arroyo, she has not made any statement one way or the other that would make either FVR or De Venecia look like a liar. The official denials were merely issued by Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita and presidential spokesman Ignacio Bunye, both known FVR allies also. Another Palace official closely identified with FVR, Gabriel Claudio, who is Presidential Political Adviser of Mrs. Arroyo, publicly stated that such term shortening would come only through a change in the form of government. And this is exactly the essence of the proposition of FVR and De Venecia.

I can only hazard a guess why Mrs. Arroyo has remained silent on this issue. She, too, is haunted by her own ghosts of EDSA-2 and the impeachment proceedings in Congress which were overwhelmingly "killed" by pro-administration House solons. Of course, she cannot declare one way or the other that she agreed to a cutting of her term. That would make her a "lameduck" President, as she already is, after being badly battered by the "lying, cheating and stealing" impeachment charges. Worse, she can be impeached again for cutting such a deal when she is an elected President and sworn to perform her duty for a six-year term.

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Some more good laugh for "All Souls Day" today: A busload of politicians crashed into a tree. After seeing what happened, a farmer dug a hole and buried the politicians. Then policemen arrived at the scene of the accident to investigate.

Police: Where are the politicians?

Farmer: I have already buried them.

Police: Were they all dead?

Farmer: Some of them protested, saying they weren’t. But you know how politicians lie!

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