Word: estrada
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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...
...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 uncontrollable...
...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...
...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...
...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...