Ex-Speaker relives day when he saved GMA
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 06:23:00 11/26/2008
Filed Under: Politics, Books
(Editor’s Note: Pangasinan Rep. Jose de Venecia Jr., the former Speaker, narrates pivotal events in the Arroyo administration in his biography, “Global Filipino: The Authorized Biography of Jose de Venecia Jr., the Visionary Five-Time Speaker of the House of Representatives of the Philippines.” The Philippine Daily Inquirer received an advance copy of the book.
The book was written by American journalist Brett M. Decker, a former editor and editorial page writer for the Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong who has served on the editorial board of the Washington Times.
De Venecia talked, among others, about the fraud that marred the presidential election in 2004, the mass resignation of several Cabinet members in 2005 and his ouster as Speaker. The following excerpts deal with the crisis sparked by the “Hyatt 10” resignations in 2005. Some parts were compressed for the sake of brevity.)
One night in late October of 2007, de Venecia sat down and proceeded to write a document he would send to the President. In their almost 10-year political alliance—which began when he agreed to make her his running mate in the 1998 elections—de Venecia had never once wavered in his support of Mrs. Arroyo.
One such major crisis came in July 2005. De Venecia was being honored with a national award by the Philippine Central Bank and its new governor, Amando Tetangco, in a special ceremony at the Central Bank’s sprawling headquarters on Roxas Boulevard facing Manila Bay. But during the ceremony de Venecia’s attention was elsewhere. An hour earlier, on his way to the ceremony, the Speaker had been monitoring the breaking news over radio which confirmed what people had been speculating about for days. At least ten of the President’s Cabinet secretaries had resigned and called on her to step down. An impeachment case was filed against her in the House of Representatives based on charges that she had cheated her way to victory in the 2004 presidential elections as deduced from her illegally wiretapped conversations with a senior elections commissioner. The Cabinet resignations were the first major defections in her administration. Now de Venecia saw in the Cabinet resignations a very real danger to her and national stability, and the media speculated she might not last more than two days in the presidency.
“The President can be part of the solution to this crisis by making the supreme sacrifice for God and country,” declared her Finance Secretary Cesar Purisima, reading from a prepared statement. “She can voluntarily relinquish her office and allow her constitutional successor, the Vice President, to assume the presidency.” Nine other Cabinet secretaries and government agency heads stood with him at the Hyatt Hotel.
Appeal to doubters
De Venecia arrived at the Central Bank ceremony already busy making calls on his mobile phone. He later estimated that he made 50 calls between the time he heard of the mass Cabinet resignations and the moment he stood on the rostrum to acknowledge the Central Bank award. He made those phone calls, he said, to prevent a further erosion of the President’s political support. Among those he called, many hesitated to stand up and be counted for Mrs. Arroyo, unsure whether she would survive the day as President and uncertain that she has deserved to be defended in the first place. To these doubters, de Venecia pleaded on the President’s behalf for them to stay with the government coalition. He believed the impeachment process was already under way and that the nation needed to preserve its political stability to prevent its economic gains from being squandered.
As the ceremony at the Central Bank concluded, de Venecia rushed off to Malacañang Palace. One man crucial to the Administration’s survival remained AWOL. Former President Fidel Ramos could not be reached by phone. He was out playing golf and would be unreachable for yet another two hours. De Venecia sent one of his aides to the former President’s home in suburban Alabang, an upscale community south of Manila, with his urgent call for support. He also asked his wife Gina and Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita to phone the former President every ten minutes to find out where he was and to persuade him to come to Palace. And until Ramos appeared in Malacañang to reconstitute the Lakas triumvirate with Mrs. Arroyo and de Venecia, the Speaker feared that the political situation was rapidly deteriorating.
To make matters worse, the President was losing the propaganda war on national radio and television. The Hyatt 10—as the Cabinet defectors would be known—was only one flash point during a day long on drama. The Makati Business Club, the Financial Executives Institute of the Philippines, and other civil-society groups added their voices, their influence, and their prestige to the anti-Arroyo outcry. The powerful Makati Business Club had been Mrs. Arroyo’s staunch supporter at the time of Estrada’s ouster and her accession to the nation’s highest office. Now it declared: “It is with a heavy heart that we ask the President to relinquish her position as President for the sake of the common will, for the sake of national unity, and for the sake of moving forward. A transition must now take place following our constitutional processes of succession.”
A potential Brutus
Even former President Corazon C. Aquino, the democracy icon of the 1986 People Power uprising, spoke out from retirement. Reading a prepared statement, she left no doubt about how she felt toward Mrs. Arroyo. “Good and effective government has become an impossible undertaking under the present conditions,” she said, and asked the President to make the “supreme sacrifice of relinquishing her presidency and sparing the country from the threat of violence.”
The night before, the courageous and much admired former President led Ricardo Cardinal Vidal, Archbishop Gaudencio Rosales, and Bishop Soc Villegas, the chief of staff of the late Jaime Cardinal Sin—all heavyweights of the Catholic Church—[were] in a tension-filled meeting in Malacañang Palace to ask the President to resign, but to no avail.
In the climate of betrayal that lurked in Manila during the first week of July, almost everyone in the President’s circle was a potential Brutus. It was difficult for her to trust anybody—and with her husband in California in self-imposed exile, Mrs. Arroyo was increasingly isolated. She could not even speak openly in her own Cabinet meeting for fear that enemies within the gates would use information to hurt her. At this time, during the President’s greatest agony, de Venecia proved to be a reliable ally and friend.
Key Ramos support
By four o’clock Ramos arrived in Malacañang. His appearance, which de Venecia secured not without great effort, answered the most intriguing political question of the entire nation in crisis. Who was Ramos going to support? Six hours had passed since the Hyatt 10’s opening salvo, and now Ramos, smiling and light-hearted, joined the President and de Venecia as they marshaled the Lakas CMD party faithful and their allies in the majority coalition in their own show of force. Ramos’s arrival reunited the three Lakas leaders of the 2001 crisis that drove Estrada out of the presidency.
After the Palace press conference concluded, the three leaders made their way through rush-hour traffic to the Sulo Hotel in nearby Quezon City, where de Venecia gathered more Lakas CMD party faithful. As the Speaker called out their names in a roll call, senators, congressmen, governors, and mayors one by one reaffirmed their support for their beleaguered President. Mrs. Arroyo had begun the day unsure whether she would end it still in office. By dinner time she was all smiles once again—and had de Venecia and Ramos mostly to thank for it. She finished the so-called Black Friday 2005 with more unified support than she had enjoyed in a year.
Another political crisis broke out on the early morning of February 25, 2006—the twentieth anniversary of the peaceful EDSA revolution—and this time it involved no less than a mutiny by key officers of the Philippine Marines and the elite Scout Rangers...
Old Reliable
The coup plot of February 2006 seemed to have been purely a military action because it had no visible civilian component. Instead, the commanders of elite combat units appeared to have been quietly canvassing key staff officers for support. But word of the planned coup d’état leaked out, and the presidential palace suddenly came alive at two in the morning. After buttressing troops around the Palace perimeter, Malacañang officials began rallying political support. At three in the morning, de Venecia was awakened by a phone call summoning him to the President’s side. Once again, the troubled President was reaching out to Old Reliable to help her out of a jam.
Once again, as in numerous crises in the past, he marshaled his multi-party Rainbow Coalition and delivered the savvy political component the Arroyo Administration needed to preserve itself.
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