Estrada names poverty as biggest enemy today

Estrada names poverty as biggest enemy today

MANILA (AP): President Joseph Estrada said Saturday that 101 years after Philippine independence from colonial rule, poverty has replaced foreign invaders as the main enemy.

In an Independence Day message, Estrada urged his countrymen "to make our forebears proud by proving that we are a people capable of charting our own destiny."

Estrada, a former popular movie actor who often portrayed underdog heroes, won last year's presidential election on a pro- poor platform.

"My goal is to free the Filipino from his enslavement to poverty," he said.

"Let us help each other to make our country free from poverty, free from fear and a nation where there is equal opportunity for everyone to improve their life."

Estrada made the appeal following traditional flag raising ceremonies on the balcony of the home of revolutionary leader Emilio Aguinaldo in Kawit town south of Manila.

"Foreign invaders were our enemies in the past. Poverty is our enemy today," he later said in his weekly radio program that coincided with the Independence Day festivities.

Estrada's economic planners say 1999 will be the start of the recovery of the Philippine economy, which was battered by the Asian financial crisis and then by a severe drought last year.

The government predicts the economy will grow steadily in the next six years, with average growth in gross domestic product for the period seen at 4.7 percent to 5.3 percent.

With economic growth will come a substantial drop in the country's poverty level - from 32 percent in 1997 to 25 percent to 28 percent by the time Estrada steps down in 2004, economic planners say.

The financial crisis and the drought worsened income distribution last year, with the wealthiest 10 percent of families becoming relatively better off, the National Statistics Office reported in April.

The top 10 percent received 42.9 percent of all income, up from 33.9 percent in 1997, according to a poverty survey. The share of the lowest 10 percent fell from 2.3 percent to 1.2 percent. All other income brackets also declined, the report said.

Filipino revolutionaries proclaimed independence and established Asia's first democratic republic on June 12, 1898, the climax of Asia's first revolution against Western colonial rule.

The Philippines was a Spanish possession for 333 years, from 1565 to 1898.

Unwilling to hand over power to the Filipino revolutionaries, Spain ceded the country to the United States for US$20 million in December 1898.

The following year, hostilities broke out between Filipino revolutionaries and American forces sent to occupy the new U.S. colony. The brief but brutal Philippine-American war is considered by some historians as the "first Vietnam" of the United States.

The United States formally granted the Philippines independence in 1946, after a four-year occupation of the country by the Japanese during World War II.