Estrada’s pardon and the siege of May 2001

Wrong again

Beyond that were people who looked less hostile, passive in fact. I scanned the crowd and zeroed in on a subject for an interview. I chose Teresa Bagorio, 25, and her husband Rolando, 37, who own a boarding house. They were sitting on the curb and were simply dressed and I thought they probably were just folk who lived near the area, kibitzers. I was wrong.

Teresa and Rolando were Estrada loyalists, and they were not kibitzers — they had joined the march from the Edsa Shrine early Tuesday morning. They had spent the last five nights at the Shrine, cheering for Estrada and shouting themselves hoarse cursing President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

“We were at Edsa during People Power II,” Teresa said, taking me and the foreigner by surprise. “We were paid to go there. We had some budget for our community organization,” her husband butted in.

But they were not paid to go to the Shrine for People Power III, Rolando added, as though he anticipated our next question. “We realized that People Power II was a sham and that Estrada still remains the legitimate president,” he said.

The couple took turns claiming that Estrada is pro-poor, that the elite is out to get him, that former President Fidel Ramos is in cahoots with President Arroyo, etc. They also repeated questions that the pro-Estrada rallyists have been asking: “Why single out Erap? Why not Ramos?”

“As long as Estrada is in jail and Arroyo stays in the palace, we will stay here. We will not stop,” Rolando added.

Discomforting thoughts

The short exchange made me go back and reassess this crisis from Day One, on April 26, when Estrada was arrested in his house in West Greenhills. The crowd of supporters that had kept vigil outside the exclusive subdivision where he lived were mostly from the poor communities. They subsequently flocked to the Edsa Shrine where they and the thousands of others who joined them were fed with lines that this was a class war, that Erap was being persecuted, that Arroyo is anti-poor, etc. And they were agitated to march to Malacanang.

But after spending a few moments with these people who had stuck their necks out for Estrada — in exchange perhaps for a few hundred pesos or a stash of shabu — I began to wonder whether my perception of these people is valid, whether I and the rest of us in the so-called petty bourgeois and those in the middle and upper classes were being fair in our judgment of those from the underbelly of our hopelessly benighted society.

To be sure, the pro-Estrada crowd was manipulated. But were they so ignorant and stupid to march to Malacanang, break through the barricades, and allow themselves to be beaten up, even shot at?

That question nagged me as we walked back to Mendiola, passing by the remnants of the violence that had erupted here just hours before. The sight of hundreds of cops and soldiers securing the area was reassuring but, they hardly provided comfort.

I looked back and saw — in the twisted metal, the broken windows, the burned-out car, the worried face of a storekeeper, the exhausted face of a cop, the blank face of a man behind the cop — nothing but rage. When I stepped into the air-conditioned cab that would take me to Glorietta, I felt a stirring deep inside me. (CyberDyaryo)