Arroyo marks first year in power, but hounded by protests
Arroyo marks first year in power, but hounded by protests
Agencies, Manila
President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo plunged into Manila's slums and
ate with squatters on Sunday to commemorate an uprising which
swept her to power, while an army faction vowed to defend her
from coup plots.
Arroyo, marking the first anniversary of a popular revolt on
Jan. 20 last year which ousted Joseph Estrada, urged followers of
the ex-actor to give up attempts to destabilize her, saying
another revolution would not happen unless God supported it.
Manila's slums, where five million squatters live, have been
Estrada's power base. Many of its residents remain loyal to him,
accusing Arroyo of caring only for the elite.
"Come on, eat your food," Arroyo prodded about 20 children
chosen to lunch with her in Manila's Promised Land shantytown,
where over 200 slumdwellers died in July 2000 after a mountainous
dump site collapsed and crushed their shanties.
Arroyo, in the style of poor Filipinos, used her bare hand to
eat, scooping up a lunch of chicken, boiled eggs and tomatoes
spread over banana leaves as the media recorded the scene.
The 54-year-old economist, in green slacks and white blouse,
spent the day visiting poor ghettoes, handing out food baskets,
in an apparent bid to blunt the elitism criticism.
In one area, she pledged to repair a drainage system, in
another she promised residents land.
Arroyo received a major boost when the Young Officers Union
(YOU), a military faction linked to failed coup attempts in the
late 1980s against then president Corazon, declared their
unequivocal support for her.
"We warn plotters and destabilizers, whoever they are, that we
shall fight to the death such conspiracies against the people,
the Constitution, the government and the state," YOU said in a
manifesto released to the media.
The group, composed of idealist middle level and junior
officers in the 115,000-strong armed forces, said it had
renounced coups as a means to achieve political change.
The capital has been awash with rumors for weeks that
disgruntled military factions and some opposition groups,
including die-hard supporters of Estrada, would launch their own
"people power" uprising to unseat Arroyo.
Estrada's supporters among the slumdwellers, who stormed the
presidential palace gates on May Day last year to demand his
return to power, plan to march to the palace on Monday.
Estrada is on trial for economic plunder, an offense
punishable by life in prison or death. He denies the charge.
While Arroyo was visiting the slums, 3,000 leftists marched on
the palace and pelted an effigy of her with rotten tomatoes.
Arroyo, a staunch Roman Catholic, began Sunday's celebration
by attending mass with Aquino and former president Fidel Ramos at
a religious shrine on Manila's Edsa highway.
The shrine was the rallying point for last year's uprising
against Estrada and for the first people power revolt in 1986
which ended late dictator Ferdinand Marcos's 20-year rule.
Arroyo has pledged to reduce poverty within 10 years by
pursuing open-market economic policies that she said would lead
to job creation. Four out of 10 of the 78 million Filipinos are
poor.
The left maintains the Arroyo government has been a failure,
but the incumbent on Sunday received encouraging words from
former president Corazon Aquino.
"I am a fan of President Arroyo. We have many problems but she
is doing her best to address them," Aquino told reporters after
the church service.
But the leftwing group Bayan said in a statement handed out at
the rally that Arroyo "is a hypocrite just like Estrada," Just
like the Estrada regime, Arroyo's is a "hopelessly corrupt,
rabidly pro-American, militaristic regime."
The protesters took issue with Arroyo's decision to allow U.S.
Special Forces troops to deploy in the southern Philippines for
six months of joint military exercises in which they would advise
their Filipino counterparts on how to deal with the Abu Sayyaf
Moro guerrilla group.