Arroyo's call, no mere lapse of judgment

Gwynne Dyer, London

If you are a politician, there are few more embarrassing experiences than to be caught at an airport with the equivalent of US$100,000 stuffed into your underpants. Only one political gaffe has a higher embarrassment quotient: Being tape-recorded on the phone to a senior electoral official, as the votes are being counted, asking him to boost your total.

That is the problem that currently besets Philippines President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. The phone call was made over a year ago, when Arroyo squeaked back into the presidency with a majority of only a million votes, but the existence of the audio recording was only made public by the ABS-CBN television network last month.

Arroyo's office immediately released the tape of her election- day conversation with election commissioner Victoriano Garcellano together with an explanation that it involved "the illegal bugging and subsequent electronic doctoring, alteration and revision of that conversation so as to introduce elements that were not really there."

Maybe the tape was re-edited and new elements spliced in, or maybe not, but at the very least Arroyo made the call. She has publicly apologized for her "lapse of judgment," but for a candidate to call up an election official in the middle of the count is not just a lapse of judgment; it is, in political a hanging offense. Yet it is the Philippines, not Arroyo, that will probably be left hanging.

Contrast the curious case of the overstuffed underpants in Brazil. The garment in question belonged to Jose Vieira da Silva, a junior official in Brazil's ruling Workers' Party (PT) who was stopped at Sao Paulo airport on July 9. It was the latest in a series of political disasters that began with accusation early last month by Roberto Jefferson, leader of the small Labour Party, that the PT was handing out regular monthly payments ("mensalaos") equivalent to $12,500 to a number of deputies in the Brazilian Congress in order to get its legislation through. (The PT does not have a majority in Congress).

The accusation came as a particular shock because President Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva, Brazil's first left-wing leader in a generation, was widely seen as an incorruptible figure. Jefferson himself, while urging the PT's chief of staff, Jose Dirceu, to take the blame for the "mensalaos" and quit, exempted the president from his accusations: "If you don't get out of here quickly," he told Dirceu, "you are going to make a defendant out of an innocent man, President Lula."

So Dirceu quit -- but then came the underpants episode this month, and the resignation of the president of the PT, Jose Genoino (whose politician brother employed the owner of the underpants). Suddenly Lula's whole career, and all of the considerable good that he has achieved for Brazil's poor, seemed to hang in the balance.

Yet Lula probably won't go under, for there are varieties of corruption, and the particular kind that the PT has engaged in is almost traditional in Brazil. There are several smaller parties in Congress whose deputies are elected mainly in the more feudal parts of the country, and who regard political office as a business opportunity. When the governing party lacks a majority in Congress and their votes are needed to pass essential legislation, it is normal to gain their support either by appointing them to public jobs or directly by paying them.

Lula's performance in office has been sufficiently impressive -- 5.2 percent economic growth last year, three million new jobs, a higher minimum wage, and new programs that give social assistance to 7.5 million poor families -- that he would be reelected tomorrow if there were an election. Whereas President Arroyo's performance in the Philippines has been a good deal less impressive, and she would not be reelected.

Trying to steal the presidency, which is the crime she is widely suspected of committing, is more serious than just trying to grease the skids to get some legislation through Congress. Moreover, constitutional order is a lot less stable in the Philippines, which has seen two presidents removed by street protests in the past twenty years. But the likeliest outcome is that Arroyo will hang on in office, widely discredited and fighting off endless impeachment proceedings in Congress, while her country's economy and politics both go into a steep decline.

"Lapse of judgment" or deliberate bid to corrupt the election process --it scarcely matters at this point. If she were a patriot, she would resign and spare her country the ordeal that awaits it.

The writer is a London-based independent journalist.