Editoryal:
The US-Arroyo regime is digging its own grave

Basahin ang artikulong ito sa Pilipino

The US-Arroyo regime is hastening its own downfall in the face of the ruling system's intensifying crisis. Almost all of its moves inflame the people's raging anger and broaden the ranks of the forces determined to fight it.

The regime's grip on power weakens as calls for its ouster spread. Its desperate measures to suppress the forces opposed to it bring the regime closer to the brink of collapse.

Worsening corruption

The recent three-day visit of the president's husband Mike Arroyo to the luxurious MGM Grand Hotel in the US is but the latest scandal to hound the regime.

Mike Arroyo squandered millions of pesos by staying in the hotel's exclusive $20,000 a night villa reserved only for its richest clients. At an exchange rate of P54 to US$1, the accommodations cost P1.08 million a night, or over P3 million.

Mike Arroyo spent three million pesos for three nights while most Filipinos make do with shanties, the sidewalks or pushcarts. That�s three million pesos gone in the blink of an eye even as the regime prates about the supposed need to impose ever onerous tax burdens on the people because of the government's near-empty coffers.

But no matter how much the regime wants to deodorize itself, the public retches with the stench of its corruption and the people are filled with loathing.

In fact, the MGM scandal provides but a whiff of the Arroyo regime's festering corruption. Aside from the percentage that the Arroyos receive from every major business project and deal, the couple also controls the largest criminal syndicates involved in smuggling rice, sugar, luxury vehicles and illegal drugs. Their partner in crime is none other than their henchman Gen. Angelo Reyes, who recently was appointed czar of an anti-smuggling task force! What better way to conceal one's own villainy?

The Arroyo couple's corruption is reflected in every branch, agency and department of the reactionary government, and above all, in the military and police. Hence, upon retirement, Arroyo's staunchest accomplices in the AFP and PNP are assigned to the most lucrative positions in the civil bureaucracy such as the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH), positions like Executive Secretary, and of course, the Department of National Defense (DND) and the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG), which oversees the police. Their loyalty to the regime is guaranteed for as long as their gratification is assured.

Even discontented military and police elements rumored to be planning coups d'�tat are paid off by the criminal and corrupt Arroyo regime. For the latter, money can buy everything�not just the presidency of the puppet republic but the assurance of maintaining oneself in this position.

The Arroyo clique's inordinate greed inevitably exposes the breadth and intensity of its corruption. Thus, it has been slowly eliminating its own cohorts. A glaring example is the massacre of known leaders of the Abu Sayyaf bandit group in Bicutan in March.

Talk is likewise rife about plans to liquidate the plunderer Maj. Gen. Carlos Garcia due to growing fears that he would expose the Arroyo couple and the regime's other ranking officials as the actual owners of multi-million dollar properties discovered abroad.

Intensifying repression

For political forces that assiduously expose the rottenness of the ruling regime, have genuine concern for the people and fight for their welfare, Arroyo responds with a mailed fist policy. Scores of leaders and activists of progressive organizations and parties have already been murdered, abducted, illegally arrested and harassed this year alone.

To justify intensified people's repression, the military has been Red-baiting organizations critical of, or opposed to, the Arroyo regime. The reactionary armed forces use such accusations as pretexts to attack unarmed people.

The worsening repression is a throwback to martial law in 1972 and manifests the Arroyo regime's desperate attempts to crawl out of the ever-deepening grave it is in. The promulgation of the proposed Anti-Terrorism Act which suppresses civil and political rights will aggravate the situation.

The regime's isolation

Not even paid opinion pollsters can conceal the people's widespread anger at the Arroyo regime. The latest Pulse Asia survey in March shows the Arroyo regime's popularity plummeting to its lowest since its assumption to power in 2001. Arroyo received the lowest marks for her failure to curb spiraling prices of prime commodities and government corruption.

The Arroyo regime's overwhelming corruption and the people's intense hatred for it necessitate the expansion of the united front that would topple it.

The regime thinks that force and deception are all that is needed to suppress the emergence of such a united front. It forgets that the Marcos and Estrada regimes likewise underestimated the broad-based people's forces that toppled them from power. Arroyo also forgets that her regime is far more unstable than the fascist Marcos dictatorship. Her rotting regime has also dug itself a much deeper grave to bury itself in.

07 April 2005
English Edition

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