People not fired up for campaign vs Corona

The impeachment trial of Chief Justice Renato Corona takes a back seat as public attention shifts its focus to the streets and the Aquino administration’s capacity to mobilize People Power behind its punitive campaign to hold officials of the previous regime accountable for alleged venalities is tested.

The nation marks the 26th anniversary of the 1986 People Power Revolution tomorrow and the administration has a problem trying to mount a popular demonstration of the scale of the uprising at Edsa that toppled the Marcos dictatorship, when more than a million people took to the streets. The administration wants to demonstrate that it incarnates the Edsa spirit, that it owns People Power, and that this People Power is at its beck and call to use against its enemies tagged as blocking its anticorruption drive.

But on the eve of the Edsa anniversary, there are scant signs that the people are fired up to mass in the streets to show that they are overjoyed that Chief Justice Corona is now being tried by the Senate impeachment court and former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has been arraigned on charges of electoral sabotage. The two are the main villains and targets of an unprecedented vindictive campaign being passed off as a crusade to flush out corruption in the Philippine political system and also to prove that this administration is the epitome of official probity and integrity.

A week ago, President Aquino kicked off the first of a series of events to mark the 26th Edsa anniversary and declared that Corona’s failure to fully declare his multimillion-peso bank deposits was sufficient to remove him from his post. In an appalling act of prejudgment and preemption of the impeachment trial, the President followed up his tirade with a speech in Baler, Quezon, the bailiwick of Edgardo Angara, a senator-judge in the impeachment trial. In that speech, the President said he did not intend to stop his attacks on Corona despite pleas from senator-judges to restrain the word war while the Senate was trying very hard to conduct a fair trial. He said his attacks were not directed at the Chief Justice but at “the system,” of which Corona was the face that the administration was fighting against.

The attacks failed to stop the Senate impeachment court from handing down decisions that set back the prosecution. As a result of these reverses, the prosecution dropped the other day two other charges against Corona in Article 3 of the impeachment complaint, which alleged Corona’s “excessive entanglement” with former President Arroyo following the appointment of his wife Cristina to Camp John Hay Development Corp. This followed a decision of the impeachment court to comply with a Supreme Court temporary restraining order banning the senator-judges from opening Corona’s dollar accounts in the Philippine Savings Bank.

But the more the impeachment court showed its independence and rebuffed the prosecution, the more the President intensified his campaign to attack Corona and has redirected his attack on the court itself. On Wednesday, his spokesperson, Edwin Lacierda, scored Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile, the presiding officer, for disallowing the presentation of witnesses for Article 3. Lacierda said the decision was “unfortunate,” in that the witnesses would have given evidence of Corona’s flip-flopping in the Supreme Court’s final ruling on the cases brought to it.

As the prosecution’s case appeared to crumble progressively, while gloom descended on the prosecution’s camp, the administration started to read signs that its public campaign to demonize Corona outside the impeachment court was not catching fire among the populace. The public has  been increasingly perceiving the impeachment case against Corona as driven more by vindictiveness over the high court’s decisions, such as the temporary restraining order on the restrictions on Arroyo for medical treatment abroad, and the high court’s unanimous ruling ordering the transfer of 4,000 hectares of Hacienda Luisita, owned by the Aquino-Cojuangco clan, to its farmer-tillers.

The Aquino dynasty, from President Cory Aquino to President Benigno Aquino III, cannot claim ownership or control of the People Power Revolution for a  number of reasons. First, Edsa I was a revolt to remove a dictatorship. Second, it can’t be used by P-Noy as a rallying issue against the head of another branch of government, the Chief Justice. The people cannot relate to this issue, unlike in the case of Edsa I, when they rose in revolt after suffering much from the abuses of the Marcos regime. They are finding it hard to fathom in what way they had suffered at the hands of Corona.

Despite the publicity trial unleashed by the government to vilify Corona ahead of the impeachment trial, the campaign failed to achieve resonance with the people. It failed to make the people hate him in such a way that they are ready to jump into the bandwagon of the government’s Edsa celebration to demonstrate support for its prosecution and persecution of its targets.

This is why organizers of the Edsa commemoration are finding it hard to harness a People Power demonstration to support a campaign that is being increasingly viewed as an instrument of vindictiveness and heavy-handed government exercise of power, rather than as a strike for liberty, which is what Edsa is all about.