Hothouse of rebellion

TODAY, as Conrad de Quiros rightfully reminds us in his Inquirer column, is no longer a day devoted solely to celebrating Labor Day in the country. For today also marks the fifth year since hundreds of thousands of poor folk — the “Great Unshod/Unwashed” — massed up at the Edsa Shrine for six days to protest the arrest of their fallen idol, ousted Pres. Joseph Estrada, culminating in the Labor Day riots in Mendiola.

Many were shocked at the Edsa protest and its bloody May 1 aftermath that saw violent clashes between the poor and the police near the gates of Malacañang Palace. As our i magazine report in the wake of “Edsa 3” pointed out, many Filipinos had never seen class antagonisms expressed in this fashion.

“Contemporary Philippine history has its share of poor people’s revolts, but these have mainly taken the form either of millenarian peasant movements like the Lapiang Malaya, whose members, oblivious to bullets, were mowed down by the Philippine Constabulary right on Taft Avenue in 1967, or the Marxist-influenced but still peasant-based rebellions led by the Huk in the 1940s and ’50s and the Maoist New People’s Army in the 1970s and ’80s.

In 1987, the police fired at communist-led farmers who trooped to Malacañang demanding land reform. For the most part, however, the major protest actions that have taken place in the city in recent memory were organized either by Left-wing workers and students or middle-class protesters taking part in movements against dictatorship as in the 1980s, or against corruption, as in Edsa 2.”

Sheila Coronel, who wrote that i magazine piece, “Hothouse of Rebellion,” said an uprising of the poor should have come as no surprise. “The depths of urban misery, especially in the teeming slums of Metro Manila, combined with the politicization of the capital, the site of two largely middle-class “people power” revolts, provided the ingredients for the sort of spontaneous combustion that took place on May 1.”

Analysts commiserated then, saying that the rage of the poor is real and their taking to the streets was justified, even if their sympathies were unfortunately misplaced — on a popularly elected president who enriched himself in public office without making a dent on poverty.

Five years since, under Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, the continuing disparity in wealth distribution in the country has not alleviated the plight of the poor. As economist Maitet Diokno-Pascual highlighted in her recent critique of Arroyo’s brand of economics, while the income of all families, rich and poor, fell between 2000 and 2003, the poor have had it the hardest with the family income of the poorest 10 percent falling by 8.7 percent.

Such conditions of falling incomes, increasing joblessness, prices rising faster than wages, hunger, and dwinding access to “commons” (e.g. safe drinking water, etc.) only continue to provide fuel for unrest. The deep-seated explosion of the wrath of the poor over their lot that de Quiros said lay beneath Edsa 3 may have been quelled but the anger — albeit a silent one — has not simmered down. The possibility of the “social volcano” again exploding, he said, remains, though for the moment tempered by coping mechanisms like migrant work abroad.

Revisit “Hothouse of Rebellion” here.