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Political Crisis in the Philippines

The Gamblers of Manila

By Andreas Lorenz

Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo was forced to send her corrupt husband out of the country, but now she's sinking into the depths of a fraud scandal herself. How much longer will the church and the military continue to support her?

The water tower at the end of Del Valle Street in Candelaria is a place where small fortunes are made. Three times a day, Boy Jun fills a San Miguel beer bottle with 37 numbered balls. Under the watchful eyes of the audience, he shakes the "bolillo" and drops two of the balls onto a wooden table.

Then his helpers search through a thick stack of paper tickets on which number combinations are written. Whoever has bet their money on the winning numbers stands to walk away with up to 900 times their initial bet.

The Filipinos call this numbers lottery "Jueteng." Although it's against the law, the lottery is as much a part of daily life here as the church and cock fights. In Candelaria, two hours from the capital, Manila, there are 115 Jueteng sites just like the one beneath the water tower. Up to 8,000 players participate in each of Boy Jun's drawings.

Jueteng is an important factor in local economies. In Candelaria alone, the lottery provides a small income to more than a thousand people, who go from door to door collecting bets. The take for each game at the water tower amounts to about 300,000 Pesos (approximately €4,300). The "cabos," or money collectors, are entitled to three percent of each bet, as well as ten percent of the proceeds for each winning number they sell.

But the true beneficiaries of the game are police officials and politicians who tolerate the outlawed gambling operations. "We spend a quarter of our proceeds on protection payoffs," says one lottery manager. "Most of the money stays in town, but the rest of it reaches Manila through middlemen." The local town hall has even hired an agent who discreetly checks to make sure everyone gets his share.

Even President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo's husband has allegedly padded his pockets with Jueteng payoffs, as has one of her sons and her brother-in-law. The lottery has grown into a raging scandal that threatens to bring down the government. A special parliamentary committee is now investigating the practice -- an illegal business, but one in which everyone seems to be involved.

The lottery for the poor already forced one president out of office in 2001 when Joseph Estrada, a popular ex-actor, was charged with corruption. He now lives under house arrest in a luxury villa.

At the time, Arroyo, 58, drove the former thespian out of office in a popular movement supported by the military, the church and the business community. But now Arroyo is having problems of her own. She has exiled her husband, José Miguel, to the United States so that he "cannot throw a shadow over my presidency," as she announced publicly, fighting back tears -- or, say the smirking gamblers of Candelaria, "so that he can count his money in peace."

Jueteng and a flashy husband are not Arroyo's only problems. Her opponents claim that her 2004 presidential election was tarnished by fraud. According to the most recent accusations, she bribed election supervisors with money. Allan Paguia, an attorney, launched the scandal by releasing tapes on which Arroyo discusses the election results with a member of the election commission shortly after the polls closed in 2004.

Although the recording is illegal, Paguia says that people have a right to learn the truth: "The conversation reveals a criminal act, namely the attempt to influence an election." The tape, he says, was made by the military intelligence service, which he claims tapped Arroyo's telephone conversation.

Arroyo has since admitted that she did in fact call Virgilio Garcillano, an election commissioner she herself had appointed. She calls it "a lapse in judgment." The affair has lead to parliamentary impeachment proceedings against the president, and more and more witnesses are coming forward to bolster the charges. Garcillano, for his part, disappeared without a trace when the scandal broke.

Manila has been in an uproar ever since Paguia's revelations. Protesters marching in front of the stock exchange shout "Gloria, resign -- immediately!" while others are calling for the establishment of a "revolutionary transitional council." It is mostly the poor, the traditional leftists and supporters of populist Estrada who come together in Manila's sweltering heat, giving the thumbs-down signal whenever anyone mentions the name Arroyo. A helicopter drops confetti from the sky, while the widow of actor Fernando Poe, who lost the election to Arroyo and later died of a stroke, stands on a stage shouting "election fraud!"

Meanwhile, about 100,000 supporters of the president stand and pray on the shores of Manila Bay: "Heal our country." Arroyo's biggest fans are high school and university students, as well as public servants. "Gloria, we love you," one of their posters reads. "I'm in favor of a stable government," says a part-time policeman from Caloocan, a Manila suburb. And what about the charges of election fraud? "Nothing but rumors," he says, "nobody has proved anything."

The country's influential Catholic bishops and army generals are still supporting Arroyo, and as beleaguered as she is, this support strengthens her position. Moreover, the "People Power" movement, which in 1986 drove Ferdinand Marcos -- and later Estrada -- out of office, has lost some its appeal and momentum.

Manila is filled with rumors that if a few hot-blooded members of the military had their way, there would be a coup. Retired Colonel Hernani Figueroa saunters through the lobby of the Hotel InterContinental, whispering to everyone he meets: "I heard that a military group plans to strike today, but the generals can't agree on what to do next." If Arroyo is toppled, Vice-President Noli De Castro -- a former talk show host and a political also-ran -- would take over. "But we don't want him," says the elderly colonel.

The Arroyo administration's crisis is in keeping with the desperate situation in the Philippines. Gone are the days when the island republic was considered one of the Asian Tigers. Instead, the country has turned into Asia's loser. About half of all Filipinos earn less than two dollars a day, and even Vietnam is more affluent. Because the Catholic church prohibits contraception, the population is growing so quickly that fewer and fewer young people stand a chance of getting a job.

While Southeast Asian countries like Thailand and Malaysia have recovered from the severe financial crisis of the 1990s, the Philippines must spend 80 percent of its economic output on debt repayment. International investors are staying away, and banks have just lowered Manila's credit rating.

A symbol of the Philippines' decline is a run-down building on the corner of Epifanio de los Santos Avenue and Ortigas Avenue where, in 1986, tens of thousands of Filipinos defied the tanks of Marcos' dictatorship, ultimately forcing him to flee the country. Now, while traffic surges by outside, young women and men fill out forms inside the building. Everyone who wants to move to Hong Kong, Dubai or Seoul to work in construction, as maids or as nurses is required to register first.

The counters are mobbed with people. More than seven million Filipinos -- almost ten percent of the population -- work menial jobs abroad. Each year, they send an estimated €6.6 billion home to their families. But teachers, doctors and engineers are also leaving the Philippines for better opportunities elsewhere.

The curse of the Philippines also includes the deeply entrenched dominance of a few families that have thrown a dense network of patronage over the country. Clans, like the Cojuangcos, Aquinos and Ayalas, control more than half of the economy from their haciendas, and they also control the country's Senate and House of Representatives.

The oligarchs maintain a flashy throng of actors, hangers-on, celebrity widows and businesspeople. Many are essentially political clowns who like to use nicknames like "Bambi," "Bong" or "Bullit," and who ransack the country and give loud-mouthed interviews whenever they donate so much as a streetlight to their villages.

Popular economist and columnist Solita Monsod calls the country a "soft state," in which "people who break the law get away scot-free."

"Our political system has deteriorated to such an extent that it's difficult to survive within it without getting one's hands dirty," says Arroyo, sounding more like some left-wing critic of the administration than the president.

Now the struggling Arroyo is demanding that the House of Representatives be strengthened, while the powerful Senate and the presidency be deprived of some of their powers. The Filipinos call the president's planned reform "Challenge Charter," or "Cha-Cha."

Senator Richard Gordon, the ex-mayor of the former US military base at Subic Bay, stands in front of the ballroom at the Makati Shangri-La Hotel, waiting for a tourism promotion event for diplomats to begin. He has just learned that US courier giant FedEx plans to move its Asian headquarters from Subic Bay to China, meaning the Philippines stands to lose business, tax revenue and jobs. "I'm devastated," he says, although he seems pleased as he glances at his young female assistant, who is busily writing down everything he says.

Gordon believes that the country must be restructured from the ground up. "We need strong parties and not just the loose campaign alliances we have had until now." Besides, he says, the country needs a "strong leader with vision."

Almost 20 years since the downfall of the Marcos dictatorship, the calls for a savior, someone who could even be authoritarian, are becoming increasingly vocal. Left-wing intellectuals, in particular, argue that a new "People Power" movement is no longer sufficient. It would simply hand over power to the next greedy family.

But such thoughts are foreign to the Jueteng players at Candelaria's water tower. "We want a president who will allow us to gamble again," one of them says. "We don't care about anything else."

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan