Word: arroyo
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...Last week, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, the beneficiary of January's people's coup, herself almost fell victim to the fickle mob. For days, crowds jammed EDSA, swelling to 400,000, many of them angry, poor people enraged at Arroyo's brass-knuckled arrest the previous week of Estrada, their former champion. At dawn on Tuesday, a 40,000-strong mob laid siege to Arroyo's rambling presidential palace, forcing her to scurry from room to room for safety, sometimes donning a bulletproof vest. Was she frightened? "Maybe for a split second," she said...
...should have been. Government and diplomatic sources in Manila tell TIME that several key generals in the Philippine navy and air force were contacted by Arroyo's adversaries in the early stages of the Manila disturbances and offered large sums of money to switch sides. Fortunately for the President, the generals balked. They probably did so less out of loyalty than pragmatism: the coup sounded too hastily planned to succeed...
...anti-Arroyo demonstrations at EDSA early last week grew with such velocity that even the coup plotters?allegedly several senators and former police officers?were scrambling to catch up with events. "There was no time for them to organize support in the armed forces," said one ex-military intelligence chief. The nature of the crowd was different, too. Instead of the earnest-but-cheerful street warriors of the first two People Power demonstrations, these were Manila's poor, who had charged out of the slums as much to rage against their own misery as to reinstall Estrada. They quickly became...
...could the golpistas agree on who should take power if Arroyo was ousted. According to diplomats and military sources, one faction wanted Estrada restored to the presidency. (He is now under arrest at a military base 50 km outside Manila on charges of plundering the state coffers.) Another group wanted to forget Estrada and install its own military-civilian junta. If the plot succeeded, says Justice Secretary Hernani Perez, the rebels probably would have killed Estrada and Arroyo. Another mistake the plotters made was using the tried-and-true methods of bribing top men in uniform. Says one Western diplomat...
...weekend, pro-Estrada crowds swelled to more than 50,000 people, and Manila's caffeinated rumor mill started reporting that payoffs were being offered to military personnel to support "Erap," as Estrada is known, over Arroyo. (Estrada still maintains that he is President, and that People Power II was an illegal rebellion.) "The Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Philippine National Police are squarely behind the government and prepared to meet any challenge to the constitution," Arroyo reassured the people. Still, both bodies remain on full alert, and as of the weekend, Estrada was set to be transferred...