Word: arroyos
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Technology is energizing grassroots politics of all stripes: call it powering up. In the Philippines, protesters using cell-phone text messaging mobilized hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in January to help oust President Joseph Estrada. Miguel Arroyo, husband of new President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, says her supporters kept urging everyone to head to the edsa shrine, the main focus of the People Power II movement. "We texted everybody to go running there: 'edsa. edsa: everybody converge on edsa!'" In China, tens of thousands of followers of the spiritual group Falun Gong continue to exist - despite a harsh crackdown...
...most part, however, governments are still on the defensive. One of the first acts of Arroyo's new administration in the Philippines was to persuade the two largest mobile-network operators, Smart Communications and Globe Telecom, to block "malicious, profane and obscene" texting, a move that would make a text-messaging revolt like the one that unseated her predecessor more difficult. To censor chat rooms, Beijing has adopted broad guidelines that ban content that "is against the national constitution, endangers state security, reveals state secrets, sabotages unity among ethnic groups and spreads heretical ideas." In Britain, laws against terrorism...
...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...
...Arroyo tried making amends by visiting Estrada last Thursday in his new, two-room jail cell. She beamed when Estrada shook her hand for the cameras and, ever the gallant actor, called her "our President." She still faces a more difficult p.r. job: to persuade poor Filipinos that despite her haughtiness and her ties to the oligarchy, she genuinely wants to help them with jobs, schools and public medical care, none of which she has done in her first 100 days. Judgment may come during May 14th senatorial elections, when her handling of Estrada and the arrests of her foes...
...Arroyo still has enemies at large. At dinner last Wednesday, a text message flashed on the President's cell phone warning that an air force general had sold out for $600,000 and joined the coup plotters. The report was wrong; the general was sitting across the table from Arroyo, and they both laughed. But unless the President starts mending ties with the military and her political opposition, the next warning to flash on her cell phone could be real...