| 6/2000
BALITA! |
 Erap
helps ISM
Acting Leader
Ex-film star Joseph Estrada's backslapping style served
him well as a
small-town mayor but can't help him solve the Philippines'
abundant woes
By TERRY MCCARTHY Manila
It is Joseph Estrada's birthday, April 19, and he is visiting
Taytay, a
slum-redevelopment area north of Manila. In a dusty square
beside a
half-finished housing project, the Philippine President
sits down with
cabinet ministers and several local inhabitants to plates
of rice and roast
pig. As they eat, an old man in tattered clothes is ushered
through the
crowd. The President recognizes the man, who had been
a security guard in
San Juan 15 years ago, when Estrada was the town's mayor.
Master of the
common touch, Estrada converses warmly for several minutes.
As the man
turns to go, the President pulls out his wallet and discreetly
slips his old
buddy a few bills.
Go back one month. Perfecto Yasay, the Philippine Stock Exchange
Commissioner, goes public with allegations that Estrada asked him
repeatedly to block an investigation into Dante Tan, a gambling magnate
accused of
share-price manipulation. Tan is also a buddy of Estrada's. Yasay is
talking about the scandal on Debate, a late-night TV show, when the
switchboard
gets an unusual call. It is from Malacañang, the presidential
palace, and the
guy who lives there wants to go on air. The engineer patches him through,
and
Estrada launches into a tirade against Yasay, the man who threatens
to ruin
his friend. "You're such a liar," the President rants. He accuses Yasay
of
seeking a 1 million peso ($24,000) bribe and calls on the heavens to
blast
him with lightning.
Estrada likes to keep things personal. It is both part of his charm
and his
greatest failing, an endearing trait of an aging actor but a screaming
liability in a man entrusted with the fate of 76 million Filipinos.
The
President has vowed to change--since January he has overhauled his
administration to give more responsibility for policy to technocrat
advisers. But that runs against his own instincts. In a country where
kinship ties far outweigh institutional loyalty, Estrada still seems
to see
himself in the role of Marlon Brando in The Godfather, looking after
his
friends and making his enemies offers they can't refuse. In Estrada's
eyes,
there appears to be little difference between giving a security guard
a
couple hundred pesos and helping a billionaire business associate out
of a
fix.
When Estrada had lunch recently with the American
Chamber of Commerce,
the topic turned to finding land for a new
international-school campus. The
President whipped out his mobile phone, spoke
to his Education Secretary,
then handed the phone to U.S. Ambassador Thomas
Hubbard, saying: "Here, you
explain it to him."
The code of loyalty is reflected even in his nickname, Erap, which is
the reverse spelling of pare, Filipino slang for buddy. "He is a very good
friend, to a fault," says Nelson Navarro, a Manila newspaper columnist.
"Being a good friend, he can't say no."
And that, of course, is the problem. As the future brightens
for the rest
of Asia, the Philippines continues to limp from one crisis
to the next--from
today's renewed warfare and hostage drama in the south,
to the near closure
of the stock exchange in March to a series of scandals
involving cronies of
the President that sap investor confidence. Each problem
cries out for
delicate, reasoned management. Instead the fate of the
nation depends on
Estrada getting on his mobile phone, often in the early
hours of the
morning, to persuade a friend to call a colleague to
help out a buddy. The
result: confusion and inertia. In the space of three weeks,
Estrada has
appointed three different negotiators to free the 21
hostages kidnapped
from a Malaysian diving resort and held on the southern
island of Jolo. Not
surprisingly, the government still hasn't received a
list of the
hostage-takers' demands.
The most serious problem of Estrada's administration is
the President's
indebtedness to a cabal of businessmen, many of them
ethnic Chinese, who
are regarded with increasing xenophobia by Manila's self-styled
Hispanic élite.
These corporate climbers donated huge sums to Estrada's
1998 election
campaign. The President probably didn't need all their
money: he easily
beat the nine other candidates with 40% of the vote,
compared with just 13% for
his closest rival, Jose de Venecia. But it gave the cronies
a seat at the
table--or at the bar, in the legendary late-night drinking
sessions that
got Aprodicio Laquian fired in March when the then-chief
of staff said he was
often "the only person sober in the room at four o'clock
in the morning."
The perception that a carousing Estrada has been handing
out favors--like
calling off a tax investigation into Philippine Airlines
head Lucio Tan, or
making Mark Jimenez, a fugitive from U.S. justice, presidential
adviser on
Latin America--has done more damage to the presidency
than any of Estrada's
other gaffes. "It took him a year and a half to realize
that he was
President for all, not just for his friends," says opposition
Senator Raul
Roco.
Ever since the days of strongman Ferdinand Marcos, the
Philippines has been
struggling to develop the rule of law and governmental
institutions that
are not subject to the whim of one man. There is no sign
that Estrada is
stealing from the public purse as Marcos did. But the
President's
personalized form of government and indebtedness to friends
is unerringly
pulling the Philippines back into its bad old patron-client
habits.
Meanwhile, society isn't progressing. One third of the
population is below
the official poverty line, the annual birth rate averages
a whopping 2.3%
and the country's economic growth, forecast by the Asian
Development Bank
at 3.8% this year, will put the Philippines close to
the bottom in Asia. The
country is barely keeping its head above water.
The rhetoric is good: Estrada and all the members of the
Economic
Coordinating Council he created this year say that fighting
poverty is the
administration's top priority. But implementation is
something else. "We
are a country in love with elocution lessons," says former
presidential
spokesman Jerry Barican. "If you could only build the
country with words,
we would be No. 1 in Asia." Estrada's genuine concern
for the poor is hampered
by a lack of comprehensive policymaking and the interference
of local
officials keen to cash in on the "anti-poverty" bandwagon.
On a recent
presidential inspection trip to Mindoro Oriental province,
the governor,
Rodolfo G. Valencia, has the helicopter fly low to show
off two "Erap
bridges" and an "Erap highway" put up in advance of the
visit. But even as
the chopper banks sharply around the new concrete structures,
the governor
hands the President an inflated budget request for the
following year.
"It's almost double what he will get," says Agriculture
Secretary Ed Angara, also
on the helicopter. "We know how much each province really
deserves."
Such is the daily routine in the presidential palace for
the Chief
Executive of the Philippines, besieged by requests from
cronies, sycophants, friends,
foreign embassies, competing branches of government--and
the 5,000 members
of the Association of Erap's Godchildren, whose ranks
have been swelling
from the days when he first rose to prominence as a movie
star in the 1960s.
"Some people call Malacañang a snake pit," says
Barican. "That is an insult
to the snake."
Born in 1937 as the eighth of 10 children in a relatively
well-off family,
Estrada grew up in the Manila suburb of San Juan. The
black sheep of the
family, he played with the poorer kids of the neighborhood,
drifted out of
college and finally became a movie actor. His macho style
and
self-deprecating humor led him to star in 80 films and
earned him five
Famas, the local equivalent of Oscars. In 1969 he was
elected mayor of San
Juan, where he became hugely popular for paving roads
and cleaning up
crime.
He rode to the presidency in 1998 on an image of being
the poor man's
savior.
Immediately after the election, Estrada enjoyed high popularity
ratings. He
burnished his reputation internationally by speaking
out strongly against the arrest of Anwar Ibrahim by Malaysian Prime Minister
Mahathir Mohamad and by meeting with Anwar's wife on a visit to Kuala Lumpur--something
no other
asean leader dared to do. He also bucked asean's "don't
see, don't tell"
policy on Burma by denouncing that country's military
junta. But in the
middle of last year, mounting allegations of cronyism
and a badly managed
attempt to change the constitution to attract more foreign
investment led
to a sharp drop in his ratings. For a movie actor used
to the adoration of his
fans, it was a huge blow and prompted a panicky overhaul
of his
administration in January.
In person, Estrada likes to play the lovable rogue, as
if he were still on
the film sets of four decades ago. A warm host, he seems
to enjoy nothing
better than to sit around over a meal trading jokes--often
bawdy--with a
deadpan expression and a Lucky Strike clamped between
his teeth. When he
reaches a punchline, he flashes his trademark leer, then
laughs
uproariously. His favorite movie is Gone with the Wind
("seen it 10
times--great plot"), and he says he molded himself on
actors like Steve
McQueen, Anthony Quinn and Gregory Peck. But his favorite
model of all is
actor-turned-politician Ronald Reagan. "When he made
governor, I thought I
could get into politics--and so I became mayor of San
Juan," says Estrada.
"Then when he became President, I thought--I can do that
too." Though he
doesn't share Reagan's conservative ideological leanings,
Estrada mimics
his style of governance, eschewing long cabinet sessions,
briefing charts and
the other details of administration. Estrada's instinct
is to project his
personality to the masses, and he clearly enjoys speaking
to a crowd: "I
know how to make them laugh--and when to make them cry."
"Erap is game--he is fun to be with. He is very showbiz,"
says Baby Arenas,
a Manila socialite and close friend of Fidel Ramos, Estrada's
predecessor
in Malacañang. At a recent wedding, Arenas found
herself seated next to
Estrada. During the service he leaned over and whispered
to her, "I know
where you used to go with Ramos in Malacañang."
Arenas tried to protest,
but Estrada insisted with one of his leering grins: "I
checked out the room for
myself."
Estrada's extramarital affairs are well-known--he makes
no attempt to hide
them, admitting to 12 children born out of wedlock, on
top of the three he
has had with his wife, Luisa. During a visit to Cebu
in April, Estrada
owned up cheerfully to another of his children, born
to a movie starlet. At a
public rally he pointed to a teenage girl in the crowd
and asked, to the
cheers of the audience, "Doesn't she look like me?"
No longer young at 63, Estrada walks heavily, rolling
his shoulders like an
old boxer. He has arthritic knees, although he likes
to say that "above the
knees, everything works." Since his makeover in January,
he says, he has
stopped drinking the old reliable--Johnny Walker Blue
Label--and now
imbibes only red wine, on the grounds that it is better
for the health.
But Estrada's bitterest critics in Manila's high society
have made up their
mind about him, and they are in no mood to give him a
second chance. They
regard his common touch as simple vulgarity and resent
being shut out of
the parties in Malacañang that they had grown
used to attending under previous
administrations. They have conducted an unrelenting campaign,
spearheaded
by the Philippine Inquirer, to defame the President.
A "Silent Protest
Movement Against Erap" has even been set up--its paradoxical
strategy being "noise
barrages" of cars honking horns in Manila's Makati business
district. To
the Establishment, Estrada is simply not one of them.
In a society that reveres
gold Rolexes and Cartier Tanks, Estrada doesn't even
wear a watch--just a
white sweatband with his crest on it. He jokes about
his clunky English and
his preference for the native Tagalog. And no meal at
Malacañang is
complete without the trademark lechon, roast fat pig
that no restaurant in trendy
Malate would even dream of putting on the menu.
And then there are the Erap jokes--like the jigsaw puzzle
he reputedly
finished in six months, and proudly told his friends
"it says 3-4 years on
the box." Thousands of such jokes circulate around Manila,
and Estrada
himself has his own store--most of them unprintable.
Part of his charm is
his self-effacing humor--he once told former Interior
Secretary Rafael
Alunan that he didn't mind the jokes at all: "They are
good for brand
recognition."
Despite his warm personality and good intentions, Estrada
retains the style
of a small-town mayor who tries to get things done by
tapping his buddies.
The longer reach and policy grasp required of a president
still escape him.
Since January he has tried to distance himself from what
aides call "his
more unsavory friends." He has begun to make some progress
in economic
liberalization, pushing the privatization of the electric
power industry
and initiating some reform in securities regulation.
But many of his policies
are ad hoc, like the inept negotiations with the Muslim
Moros that have
restarted the war in the south. Lacking a coherent vision,
many of his
ideas are likely to end up like unused footage from one
of his movies on the
cutting-room floor.
To boost his ratings, Estrada has taken to the road with
his message of
poverty reduction, population control and economic development.
After
flying down to the island of Mindoro last month, he tells
a group of farmers in
Calapan that, with 2.3% population growth, the Philippines
will always stay
poor. "Men, control your sex drives," he says, bringing
roars of laughter
from the crowd. The fact that his own child-making prowess
is already well
into double digits doesn't seem to faze him.
In San Jose, on the other side of Mindoro, he makes a
speech about how the
Philippines has fallen behind the rest of Asia economically.
"In the 1950s
we were second only to Japan in terms of economic growth,"
he says, "Now we
are 10th." Although he has ordered officials to lift
10 million people out
of poverty by the end of his term in 2004, he announces
no concrete plan
for how to achieve this, in Mindoro or anywhere else.
In the helicopter on the way back to Manila, he ruminates
about whether
anyone can fix the country. "There is too much politics
in the Philippines,
everyone arguing with everyone else," Estrada says. "We
need to be more
disciplined." Then he falls asleep. The helicopter, flown
by Philippine air
force men, lands at Malacañang just as the sun
is setting. Before getting
out, the President and Supreme Commander of the Armed
Forces gets out his
wallet and tips an embarrassed pilot a 1,000-peso bill.
The man is
incorrigible. |
