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471 15 Estrada’s Racketeering O J 19, 2001, the presidency of Joseph Estrada was in its last desperate hours. For the past four months, a provincial governor had plunged the nation into crisis by repeatedly accusing the president of taking bribes from illegal jueteng gambling. After Estrada’s impeachment trial before the Senate produced damning evidence but collapsed on a technicality, tens of thousands of angry middle-class Manileños massed on the EDSA highway for four days of demonstrations known as People Power II. On the final day, the crowd grew to a quarter million, and the tide turned decisively against the president. That afternoon a phalanx of military commanders appeared on EDSA to announce their support for this “people power revolution.” By 5:00 p.m., all the senior police officials in Manila had joined the military mutiny save one. Returning to National Police headquarters from the palace, Director Panfilo “Ping” Lacson walked into an of- fice occupied by rebel police officers. Within minutes, Lacson telephoned the president, saying, “I am sorry but we will have to withdraw support from you.”In desperation Estrada asked, “Can the police fight the Army?” Lacson replied, “Sir, definitely not.”At that moment President Joseph Estrada fell from power.1 This bizarre conversation was a fitting close to an unconventional political career . More than any other issue, law enforcement was central to the rise of Joseph “Erap”Estrada from tough-guy actor to president of the Philippines. Unlike leaders past who had risen from province to palace, Estrada served his political apprenticeship as mayor in a metropolis that fused state power, police corruption, and commercial vice. As vice president under Fidel Ramos, Estrada headed an organized crime task force, leading the police in a bloody campaign against robbery and kidnapping gangs. Citing this success, Estrada campaigned for the presidency on a populist platform in 1998, deftly combining his law-and-order record with promises to uplift the poor, a full third of the population. He won with 40 percent of the vote in a field of eleven candidates, nearly double the percentage of his predecessor, President Ramos. But along with this mandate Estrada brought personal baggage into the palace. Through his immersion in Manila politics, he had forged alliances with both corrupt police and crime bosses. As an actor who had played Manila toughs in nearly a hundred films, he attracted a presidential entourage that included what one cabinet officer called “underworld characters,” killers, kidnappers, and confidence men. And with four households and eleven children by six different women, he was under enormous pressure to provide far beyond his meager presidential salary.2 At multiple levels Estrada’s presidency seemed the culmination of historical forces that had been gathering for over a century. His use of the police for covert operations relied on both U.S. colonial procedures and Ferdinand Marcos’s coterie of loyal police commanders. During his first two years in office, Estrada emerged unscathed from a string of some twenty financial, administrative, and personal scandals. At the start of his third year, however, allegations that he had used the police to protect jueteng gambling, a game entwined with Philippine elections for decades, sparked a serious crisis that was his undoing. But to dismiss Estrada as merely venal or corrupt obscures the synthesis of syndicated vice and presidential power that prevailed in the decade before his election. With each administration since 1986, the Philippine presidency had been shaped by a deepening nexus of police, crime, and covert action. By the time Estrada took office in 1998, the police were mediating two criminal networks essential to presidential power: illegal jueteng gambling in the countryside and illicit drug imports from Chinese circuits in the capital. In less than twenty years the system of extralegal controls over the vice rackets had become so embedded in Philippine politics that its mastery became a necessary adjunct to presidential power. Yet there was also change. As president, both Corazon Aquino and Fidel Ramos had been surrounded by aides and allies who used proximity for financial gain, although their complex schemes usually shielded the executive from any charges of personal complicity. Estrada, by contrast, seemed boldly, almost defiantly blatant in his corruption. Instead of a few arm’s length transactions at the end of his term, he was tainted from the very outset by hands-on scams that spanned the economic spectrum, from favoritism in financial regulation...

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