MANILA, 27 April — Following the arrest of former president Joseph Estrada on Wednesday, many Filipinos awoke yesterday morning satisfied and happy that at last a former leader had been jailed on corruption charges.
Others charged that Estrada had been framed by a vicious press and that the 5,000 policemen deployed to serve his arrest warrant was the usual overkill that the Macapagal administration has used whenever dealing with Estrada.
For sure the former president has plenty of angry supporters who converged at the EDSA Shrine last night and today to rally against his arrest. Estimates of the crowd’s size varied from 3,000 to 5,000.
Traffic on the EDSA highway was severely disrupted Wednesday night because of the gathering of Estrada supporters.
Filipinos on Wednesday watched on television four hours of dramatic helicopter footage of police convoys descending upon Estrada’s luxury home in Greenhills to arrest the former president.
The police pushed 5,000 Estrada supporters back after brief skirmishes with tear gas and batons, but reports said that it was all over in five minutes.
Some Estrada supporters were seen on TV bloodied after clashes with riot police.
Estrada, his son San Juan Mayor Jinggoy Estrada, who is also charged on corruption charges, and his wife Dr. Loi Ejercito were taken in a dark van to the Philippine National Police’s Camp Crame headquarters, only a ten-minute drive from Greenhills.
Estrada was fingerprinted and photographed like any other common criminal, a scene that was caught by a TV camera and flashed around the world.
On Thursday, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s spokesman Rigoberto Tiglao admitted in an interview that the filming of Estrada being photographed inside Camp Crame was unfair.
“We had no way of knowing a television station would bring in a camera. The policy of the national police is not to have television coverage like that.
Even ordinary criminals, you don’t see them being fingerprinted that way,” Tiglao said.
“Someone slipped through. That is a problem with some media,” he added.
Estrada allegedly spent an uncomfortable night in his Camp Crame cell, and his lawyers were on Thursday filing a petition before the anti-graft Sandiganbayan Court to have him placed under house arrest.
An earlier suggestion to do so last week was rejected by the court, so it looks like Estrada will have to stay at Camp Crame for the time being.
Many Estrada supporters have complained that jailing Estrada is not the way to treat a former president, especially when his trial has not even begun.
Puwersa ng Masa senatorial candidate Edgardo Angara complained in a TV interview Thursday that the jailing of Estrada was excessive, and that he should have been accorded more respect.
Estrada supporters have been especially critical of the way that the press has attacked the former president, singling out the Philippine Daily Inquirer newspaper for its often nasty headlines.
Some analysts have noted the way in which the Inquirer has slanted many of its news stories and deliberately misinterpreted statistics to make Estrada and his allies look bad.
Herman Tiu Laurel, in are recent Manila Times column, complained that the Macapagal administration (as reported by the Inquirer) was wrong in blaming all of the country’s 225 billion peso budget deficit on Estrada.
As Laurel pointed out, it was the Ramos administration that left a budget deficit of 150 billion pesos, with Estrada’s legacy having added only 75 billion pesos to the deficit.
The Inquirer was banned from certain presidential press conferences during the Estrada administration after the former president accused the paper of being biased against him.
The rift grew so large that Estrada eventually called on movie producers to pull ads from the paper, a move that hurt the Inquirer’s bottom line.
The paper’s gleeful bashing of Estrada after he was forced from office last January by the People Power II revolt, is explained by some as just being a reaction to the long history of bad blood between the two.
Inspite of all of this, a majority of Filipinos seem optimistic that their justice system will be able to provide Estrada with due process.
People Power Coalition senatorial candidate Juan Flavier said Thursday that 68 percent of Filipinos want to see the wheels of justice turn.
A taxi driver said on Thursday he was happy that Estrada was now facing possible punishment for alleged corruption.
But when asked what about the scores of other corrupt government officials, including the Marcoses, he admitted that they too needed to be jailed and hauled before a court of law.
Unfortunately, in the Philippines of today the justice system is still applied in a highly erratic manner, leaving many scoundrels on the loose.
