On this date 25 years ago, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo became the 14th President of the Philippines. It happened thus:
[President Joseph ‘Erap’ Estrada], elected in 1998, received considerable support from a base of rural poor. An ex-movie star, he had been a supporter of the Marcos dictatorship in the 1970s and was vice president between 1992 and 1998...
[Support] began to wane rapidly during the early part of Estrada’s administration. First, during 1999 and 2000 there was little evidence of any concrete measures of poverty reduction...Second, there was a widespread perception of a failure to implement any programme of substantial social reforms...Third, the Estrada government in early 2000 engaged in an opportunistic escalation of the war against the long-standing Moslem insurgency in Mindanao...
These factors combined to make the Estrada government increasingly unpopular by mid 2000. The perception of this unpopularity was probably a factor that led to major moves within political elites to prepare the way for Estrada’s ouster...
[Vice President Arroyo's] decision to resign from the Estrada cabinet was in response to concerns over corruption. Estrada would become the decisive issue that caused the collapse of his government. The immediate cause of Arroyo’s resignation were allegations by the Governor of Ilocos Sur Province, Luis ‘Chavit’ Singson, of Estrada’s involvement in the illegal Jueteng gambling syndicate. Questions had already arisen over the president’s involvement in corruption, especially in relation to the BW Resources scandal that emerged in late 1999.
With Arroyo established as a potential constitutional successor to Estrada, the attempts to remove the president followed three main strategies. First, there was an organised campaign of protests aimed at securing Estrada’s resignation or ouster. The regime responded with its own counter-rallies, under the banner of the ‘guardians of the constitution’. The latter events were generally quite small and relied on mobilisation of poorer communities through bribes by local officials.
Second, the opposition within the House of Representatives proceeded to pursue Estrada’s impeachment and succeeded in November 2000 in obtaining the necessary two-thirds vote by house members. The conclusions of the resulting impeachment trial, presided over by Chief Justice Hilario Davide, would ultimately be subject to vote by the Senate.
Third, there was always some threat of military intervention to resolve the conflict either in Estrada’s favour or otherwise. There was continual suspicion of coup plots by various factions of the military and police...
The immediate catalyst for the eventual revolt was the vote by pro-Estrada senators to withhold crucial evidence from the impeachment trial on 16 January 2001...The result was the collapse of the impeachment trial after the resignation of the Senate president, and then the entire prosecution team, in protest. The pro-Estrada senators probably did not foresee subsequent events.
Indeed, following the Senate vote there was a series of mostly spontaneous demonstrations that centred on a mass assembly at the EDSA shrine. An important figure in the first EDSA uprising, Philippine Catholic Archbishop Cardinal Sin, had called for mass demonstrations on 12 January in the event of Estrada’s acquittal. He added his authority by calling for a mass prayer session at EDSA on 17 January.
Over the succeeding days numbers gradually increased at the shrine, while other rallies occurred at other areas within Manila such as Monumento, Makati and Mendiola Bridge. Other protests occurred outside Manila in provincial centres. Pro-Estrada elements organised much smaller protests, occasionally resulting in minor clashes with anti-Estrada forces in places such as Makati. The stage at the EDSA shrine became a centre of opposition activity, with an array of leaders addressing the crowd...
[T]he final motion for Estrada’s collapse came from contradictory forces. On the one hand, the Chief justice Davide declared his opinion that the resignation of Estrada’s cabinet meant there was ‘no legal basis’ not to allow Arroyo’s swearing-in as president. This occurred at midday on Saturday 20 January. On the other hand, the leftist and more militant section of the protest again played a significant role.
Against the insistence of Sin and other moderates, these forces left the main part of the rally that morning to march on the Malacanang presidential palace. The marchers increased the pressure on Estrada to vacate Malacanang, forcing him to leave just after 2pm. Otherwise, Estrada may well have stayed there and continued to claim to be president. However, the combination of events ensured that Arroyo was sworn in and Estrada was forced to accept that he had, at least ‘temporarily’, stepped aside.
Anyway, power to the people, and whatnot.
<exits, singing: Don't you know it's gonna be alright>
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