Will Recent Bombings Lead to Declaration of Martial Law?

13Jul09

The idea of self-preservation means nothing to people who equate self with power. Whose sense of meaning, whose self-worth, whose defining characteristic is power. I suspect that between Marcos and Gloria, the latter has the deeper need for it. She has people kneeling before her, she can ignore the derision, the ridicule, all the slights that have come her way in her life, real or imagined. She loses that, she is nothing. She has no meaning, she has no life, she has no self. None that is worth preserving.

- Conrado de Quiros

Will she do it?
by Conrado de Quiros

Here’s a quite literal blast from the past.

It was the evening of Sept. 5, 1972, a Tuesday, and most of the stores in Carriedo had just closed. People were hurrying by on their way home from work, or from shopping. Then, suddenly, at half past eight, the entrance of Joe’s Department Store let out a loud roar and sent debris flying in all directions. A woman who was standing in front of it was hurled backwards and thrown into the pavement. Her face was torn off, making her completely unrecognizable. She died there and then. Forty-one other people were wounded and brought to the hospital, some of them critical—though they eventually managed to pull through. The bomb blast—which it was—left a gaping hole where a wall and a door used to be. And it left a city in shock.

It was a good thing, the newspapers would say later, that it was a Tuesday and days after payday. Or else more people might have died or gotten wounded. Less than three weeks later, Marcos declared martial law.

Jose de Venecia says he is certain President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo will stay on and probably do the same thing. Well, he is not entirely wrong about it even if he is a little late warning so. In fact, even if he isn’t the best person to warn so. If not for him and Fidel Ramos, the two people who were deluded enough to imagine they could control the uncontrollable, we would not have to deal with the thing he is warning us about. If martial law happens, he and Ramos will have to take a good deal of the blame for it.

I myself have no doubts that Arroyo is resolved to stay and have been saying so all these years. Those who think Arroyo is now working on an exit plan to avoid prosecution fail to grasp her true nature. Her greatest fear is not being prosecuted, it is being out of power. In my lifetime, I have not seen anyone other than Marcos who craved power that badly. For both of them, power is not a means to an end, it is the end. The acquisition of it, the accumulation of it, the possession of it, is everything. It’s like a miser’s need for money: The thrill, or fulfillment, of it does not lie in the using, it lies in the having.

The idea of self-preservation means nothing to people who equate self with power. Whose sense of meaning, whose self-worth, whose defining characteristic is power. I suspect that between Marcos and Gloria, the latter has the deeper need for it. She has people kneeling before her, she can ignore the derision, the ridicule, all the slights that have come her way in her life, real or imagined. She loses that, she is nothing. She has no meaning, she has no life, she has no self. None that is worth preserving.

As they were crossing the river, the scorpion bit the carabao on whose back it had been sitting. “Why did you do that?” the carabao groaned, “now we’ll both drown!” “Alas,” said the scorpion, “but it is in my nature to bite.”

The bombings are the surest sign she means to stay. Her government has of course put the blame alternatively on the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and the al-Qaida, without bothering to explain why either one would want to throw Metro Manila in a state of chaos on the eve of her departure. Gilbert Teodoro, who puts on airs of wanting to be president, even if he has absolutely no chances of winning, which makes you suspect a Palace moro-moro—my deepest apologies to the MILF and al-Qaida—has just ordered the Armed Forces of the Philippines to catch the bombers posthaste. The public should have no problems pointing him in the right direction, if he’s interested.

The bombings share common characteristics with the ones that peppered the country in the weeks before martial law. Like them, the bombings increased in frequency shortly before the fateful day. Like them the bombings were loud and attention-getting. Like them the bombs were placed in places that were guaranteed to produce few casualties. The logic being to make people more fearful than furious. And of course to set the case for things spinning out of control.

No, I have no doubts about Arroyo wanting to stay and doing everything in her power to do so. What I have a doubt about is her declaring martial law.

Let us be clear: I have no doubt that Arroyo will use force to achieve her goal. But I doubt she will impose the kind of martial law Marcos did, the kind that put the military in charge of government. I’ve advanced my arguments for that in previous columns. Suffice it to say here that that is so because unlike Marcos, she does not control the military, she controls only some key people there. Arroyo’s talents do not lie in the politics of intimidation, they lie in the politics of calculation. She is past master at transactional politics, showing no peer in the ability to corrupt people. She can, and will, thrive under a civilian government; she can’t under, and will be devoured by, a military government.

Her best bet is to use the bombings, and other apparent signs of a slide to anarchy, real or manufactured, to declare a state of emergency. One that would last just long enough to ram through Charter change and shift the country to parliamentary rule. A plebiscite for it could be held afterward, producing the same spectacular results favoring it that Marcos did—the machinery to steal the vote is in place with the Comelec’s version of automated elections. That is the same machinery that will allow her to win as Pampanga representative to a unitary Batasan under a parliamentary system. There she would be elected by her party, the biggest one in the country, the Lakas-Kampi, as prime minister.

I have little doubt Arroyo will try this. The only question is: Will she succeed?

Ah, but there Robert Burns may have the last word: The best-laid plots of mice and women have a way of going astray.

But that is another story, best left for tomorrow.

Source: de Quiros, Conrado. “Will she do it?”. Philippine Daily Inquirer, 13 July 2009. http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view/20090712-215131/Will-she-do-it. Accessed 13 July 2009.

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Tags: Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, Martial Law