Word: arroyo
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...coup plotters also underestimated the pig iron beneath the petite 54-year-old President's bulletproof vest. "What doesn't kill you will make you stronger," Arroyo told TIME last week. As the protesters occupied EDSA, Arroyo set up her own war room in the MalacaNang Palace. Tanks, armored personnel carriers and several thousand Elite marines and riot police were brought in to guard the riverside lanes around MalacaNang. They unspooled kilometers of razor wire around the palace; under the venerable trees of its garden marines dug in with .50-caliber machine guns. "Let them come. I'll crush them...
...Come they did. Before dawn on Tuesday, thousands of pro-Estrada supporters swarmed to the palace, bearing stones and clubs. Inside her war room, Arroyo could hear the ominous battle din: the bursts of warning gunfire, a tempest of stones thwacking police riot shields, the mob's murderous roar. Arroyo says she has an intimate knowledge of MalacaNang, having lived there as the daughter of former President Diosdado Macapagal. Therefore, she knew all the palace's secret passages and escape routes. Outside, police battled rioters for more than 12 hours. More than 100 people were injured, and at least four...
...When the battle wound down, Arroyo declared that Manila was under a "state of rebellion," a vague term of dubious constitutionality that allows the President to arrest whomever she likes for a period of three days. She ordered the rounding up of her most bitter political foes, including Senator Juan Ponce Enrile, an Estrada loyalist and one of the heroes who toppled the Marcos regime, and former Washington ambassador Ernesto Maceda. Senator Gregorio Honasan, an Enrile ally and former army colonel involved in seven botched coup attempts in the late 1980s, refused to surrender along with nine others...
...government has failed to produce any hard evidence that Enrile, Honasan or the others were indeed plotting to topple Arroyo. But presidential aides insist that proof does exist, and it will soon be released. Honasan, for one, denies that he was mounting a coup. In a telephone call from "somewhere close to Manila," he explained to TIME: "I've come from the dark arena of armed struggle. The only way for meaningful change to occur is peacefully." So why was he fleeing? "What Gloria is doing is unconstitutional," he explained. "There are no charges, no warrants against...
...Arroyo seems pleased by her show of toughness. "I hope they now realize that this 'wisp of a lady' has an iron fist and an iron will," she crows. Others think she overreacted, considering the demographic profile of the poor, angry protesters and their fury over her treatment of Estrada. (To arrest the former President, she deployed over 5,000 security forces, backed by helicopters and rooftop snipers after Estrada had volunteered to turn himself in.) Says Uderic Auduan, a print shop owner who supported Estrada on the streets: "Estrada was someone who can help us?and they treated...