Madame Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (GMA) is both the beneficiary and repressor of People Power which is popularly called EDSA – the name of the avenue where the 1986 People Power Revolution happened.
GMA rose to power on January 21, 2010 after the second staging of People Power ousted President Joseph “Erap” Estrada for plunder. That event is now called EDSA II – an event GMA did not even bother to commemorate the past several years. Perhaps it bothered her that she failed to deliver the clamor for reform and justice of the people who took the risks to install her as president.
Save for a few self seeking NGOs who operated under the umbrella of Kompil II, with many of them eventually landing jobs in the GMA regime – the majority behind EDSA II wanted a ‘resign all’ situation. This was because the majority realized that GMA was not the person who can be trusted to usher the desired reforms and restore justice in the land.
Owing to the decision of EDSA icons Jaime Cardinal Sin and Cory C. Aquino to follow Constitutional succession, GMA being the vice president succeeded Estrada as president. Yet, despite what she owed Cory Aquino, GMA inflicted some of the biggest hurts our beloved late president suffered – something Cory shared with yours truly and close friends.
Cory hardly moaned about the sufferings she and her family had undergone during the Marcos dictatorship. If Cory shared what they suffered under Marcos, it was more of setting the record straight than anything else. In the case of what Cory suffered under GMA, you saw that Cory visibly felt the hurt when she narrated these incidents. Cory described the attacks on her and her family under GMA as vicious.
Upon settling down in Malacañang Palace, GMA wasted no time projecting that the co-opted Kompil II members comprised the majority that engineered EDSA II and were thus its real heroes. Kompil II could not even muster half the crowd that EDSA II player, the late labor leader Popoy Lagman, could produce and GMA had the temerity to attempt to project her lapdog group Kompil II as the real movers of EDSA II. That was but one of the many deceptions we were to experience under GMA.
Today, Dictator Ferdinand Marcos is beginning to look good largely because of the Filipino experience with GMA. Thanks to Mike Arroyo, Imelda Marcos is now also seen in a different light.
Truth to tell, Marcos had better plans for the country compared to GMA. His vision for the most part would have placed us in a better situation had he not betrayed it himself with lust for power, murder and corruption — to such a scale that his regime established a new bar in the country’s history of plundering and murdering leaders. Many suspect that the Marcos corruption bar may have already been exceeded.
It was not surprising that when GMA attended last February 25 what would be her final EDSA celebration appearance as a Malacañang Palace resident, she made it appear that EDSA was a failure instead of admitting the truth that she failed to live up to the ideals of EDSA. A galvanizer of patriotic Filipinos, EDSA was made to appear by GMA that it had transformed into something partisan and divisive.
It was either idiotic — the state of not knowing the truth — or deceptive of GMA to have asserted that EDSA had become partisan and divisive. Does GMA not realize that EDSA is precisely the people’s Constitutionally enshrined mechanism for espousing the side of good over evil, the side of democracy over tyranny, the side of truth over falsehood, heroism over opportunism and so forth? In that regard, indeed EDSA is divisive.
Perhaps GMA begrudged EDSA because in many instances she was caught stuck on the side of evil, tyranny, falsehood and so forth. It should not surprise us when the worst sociopaths in prison hate the brave cops and diligent prosecutors who succeeded in placing them behind bars where they pose no more threat to society. By the same token, there is no love for Jesus Christ among the demons of hell.
Many wondered why GMA bothered to attend the February 25 Flag Raising Ceremony when she had opted to snub these EDSA events since 2005 when the Garci scandal surfaced. One could not help but think that she went there to precisely deliver her tirade against EDSA – perhaps fearing that another EDSA is facing her if things go wrong in the May 10 elections which the people could perceive as her machination.
GMA repeated what she said before during another occasion: “The world embraced EDSA I in 1986. The world tolerated EDSA II in 2001. The world will not forgive an EDSA III but would instead condemn the Philippines as a country whose political system is hopelessly unstable.”
Does that not grab you as the pre-emptive statement of someone in great fear of being the target of another EDSA?
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Chair Wrecker e-mail and website: macesposo@yahoo.com and www.chairwrecker.com