Word: edsa
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Revolution philippine-style is a two-step affair. First, you stop traffic in Manila by drawing a large crowd on Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, or EDSA, one of the city's main thoroughfares. Next, you recruit a couple of ambitious generals who can enlist the troops and scramble the jets. That's the way two Philippine Presidents were overthrown: kleptocrat Ferdinand Marcos in 1986 and party-loving, mah-jongg crazy Joseph Estrada last January...
...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...
...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...
...arrest brought thousands of Estrada sympathizers out on the street. Inspired by pervasive pictures of their suffering hero on a too-thin mattress in a too-small cell with malfunctioning air conditioning, demonstrators congregated at the edsa shrine, which commemorates the anti-Marcos People Power revolution of 1986. Arroyo's right-mindedness, in the short term anyway, began to look like a public relations blunder. What's more, it might scare investors away. Two days prior to the arrest, Moody's Investors Service issued a "negative" rating for the Philippines, due to continuing political instability. Following Estrada's detention, both...
Perhaps this represents confusion between democratic passions and the rule of law. More likely, though, People Power has become its own institution, and one that seems monopolized by a certain clique. I spent many days in crowds like the ones on EDSA last week. They were the nicest mobs I have ever been in - they gave mobs a good name. People Power has become an acceptable term for a troubling phenomenon: one that used to be known as mob rule...