Word: manila
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...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...
...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 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...
...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...