COMMENTARY || 1017: The President’s Coup
By Vergel O. Santos
CERTAIN things are likely to be overlooked about the presidential proclamation of a state of national emergency—1017. Here are three that deserve particular attention for their dire consequences:
One, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has withdrawn the proclamation only nominally; the suppressive spirit behind it remains. The trick is not unlike the paper lifting of martial law (1081 in this case) in 1981: Ferdinand Marcos went on ruling as a dictator for five more years. With Arroyo, it is her desperate desire to continue governing until the end of her term, in 2010, despite an overwhelming popular wish, as the polls have revealed consistently, that she exit now; it is a wish predicated on damning indications she cheated in the election.
Two, 1017 has been meant not really as a warning to the nation of some great danger from rebellious forces (if there was any serious rebellion, especially involving soldiers, such as made to appear, surely it would be in the interest of the government to downplay the idea, lest the general opposition be emboldened or otherwise inspired); 1017 has been meant, rather, as a strategic assertion of presi-dential power, which has its own dangers.
Three, while its immediate target may have really been certain disaffected and restive, if not yet rebellious, soldiers, 1017 also has been intended to set the stage for a campaign of intimidation against the news media—a campaign that will put, in the fetching phrase of the times, a “chilling effect” in jour-nalists’ spines. If the news media have been in fact the chief target, that is no surprise; it falls into a pattern.
At every chance, Arroyo has expressed her contempt for certain newspapers and broad-cast networks, even stone-walling them off sometimes. And for what offense? Reporting bad news—bad news, that is, to her. But how can it be helped during a presidency plagued by scandals?
Ever alert to her cue, Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez, her most aggressive enforcer, has been quick to seize the first suitable occasion to follow up. At the height of an international alarm on terrorism last year, for instance, he warned the media against giving news time or space to rebel sources.
In turn, the National Telecom-munications Commission has not failed to remind the networks of its power to revoke broadcast franchises. A quasi-judicial agency, the commission is supposed to answer only to the superior courts, but, having been put under the administrative supervision of the Department of Transportation and Commu-nications, it now comes under the president’s shadow.
The president’s cue is picked up so widely indeed—and irrelevantly sometimes—that suspicions of a conspiracy are aroused. Even the assembly Arroyo formed to rewrite the constitution has not missed it. In fact, if only to ensure being counted in, it has risked ridicule for challenging the wisdom of the ages. It has rewritten a Bill of Rights provision that has gone unchallenged for two centuries. The provision now begins to read thus:
No law shall be passed abridging the responsible exercise of the freedom of speech, of expression, and of the press. . . .
The ludicrous irony is that the insertion (set here in italic) precisely constitutes a case of such forbidden abridgment.
At any rate, 1017 would seem the perfect final coup: it comes down so hard it will retain its intimidating power even after it has been lifted.
Sure enough, since the withdrawal of 1017 the govern-ment has continued picking on the news media. Within hours, the publisher and editor in chief of The Daily Tribune, Ninez Cacho-Olivares, and two of its columnists were charged with “inciting to sedition.” And the next day, Gonzalez, again, followed up with a warning that the media would continue to be watched, in fact singling out, though without yet naming, seven practitioners as themselves candidates for the charge.
Gonzalez cannot be blamed for his special fondness for the phrase “inciting to sedition.” It is a legality so unclear in any concrete sense it has served presidencies desperate to find someone or something to shift blame to as a diversion from their own wrongdoing; and, apparently, this sense of despe-ration goes so deep in the Arroyo presidency it just has to keep the phrase handy even after 1017.
Neither can Gonzalez be blamed for zeroing in on the news media. By their very nature, the news media, of all democratic institutions, are the most capable and credible watchdog—the most capable because they have the most effective and efficient technological means and the widest reach, and the most credible because, while cast as an adversary toward the govern-ment, they are naturally, inevitably, in competition with one another, constantly subject, therefore, to the neutralizing power of the market.
At the moment, however, Gonzalez is obsessed with the news media for more real and specific—and, again, desperate—reasons:
First, the news media have refused to be intimidated by 1017; in fact, they have largely ignored the policemen he planted on or around their premises, some-thing that goes apparently to the heart of his amor propio.
Second, they have caused the revelation of some of the most sensitive chinks in the armor of the Arroyo presidency.
And, third, and conse-quential to the second, they have brought the nation’s attention back to the basic issue—vote-rigging.
The issue has hugely eroded her authority, both legal and moral, to govern. Polls have shown her to be the least trusted president in the nation’s history. Indeed, the accusations have gained more credence now than at any other time since tapes appeared of incriminating conversations supposedly between Arroyo and an election commissioner.
One never known for subtlety of disguise, or of anything else, for that matter, Gonzalez is a man posses-sed—by Arroyo, who else?—with finding incitements he can make stick against the news media, and he is looking this time in one particular place.
He is looking in the Marine headquarters, where on the very day 1017 came down an officer screamed his corrobo-ration of the cheating and soldiers protested they had been “used”—used in the sense that they had been ordered precisely to ensure the integrity of the vote only for it to be violated at higher levels of power.
All this having been aired on national television, the news media, in Gonzalez’s twisted interpretation of the law, shall pay for it. On the other hand, being a strategic command, in fact a proven swing force in any extra-constitutional change of leader-ship, the Marines shall be let off.
In fact, they have the pre-sident’s conciliatory attention. She is “ready to hold a dialogue with the different sectors of the armed forces,” says Press Secretary Ignacio Bunye. “There is a need to provide a quick response to their complaints.”
To the news media, to be sure, “quick response” comes in less benign forms, but it may well be the Arroyo govern-ment’s undoing: It picks on the news media, it picks on the people’s watchdog, it picks on the people.
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