Philippine President Joseph "Erap" Estrada has staked his future on a controversial plan to globalize the economy by rewriting the national constitution. Estrada believes that the key to economic prosperity is to allow foreign corporations to own Philippine land, natural resources, public utilities, TV stations and newspapers.
Estrada's proposed Charter Change (Cha-Cha) has provoked a burgeoning Anti-Cha-Cha movement. On August 20, Former President Corazon Aquino and Manila Archbishop Jaime Cardinal Sin addressed a rally of 70,000 Anti-Cha-Cha protesters in Makati City. A second demo - convened on Sept 21, the 27th anniversary of Philippine Dictator Ferdinand Marcos' declaration of martial law - drew more than a quarter-million Antio-Cha-Cha protestors into the streets of major Philippine cities.
"The Philippines may not even qualify as a state if the basic requirement to be considered a state - supremacy over land and territory - is lost," said Former Senate President Jovito Salonga. "Once [foreigners] take over our media, we could lose our national soul; once they take over our public utilities, we could lose our political will."
The BAYAN (New Patriotic Alliance) claims that Estrada's Cha-Cha poses "a threat to the democratic rights of the people" and warns that "human rights and civil liberties appear to be a target."
"As far as economic policy goes, there is only one: keep the foreign investors happy," BAYAN declared.
Because the existing Constitution "expresses recognition of the need to protect, preserve and develop the national economy and patrimony for the Filipino people," BAYAN noted, it remains "one of the major legal stumbling blocks to ... efforts to sell the country and its people down the drain."
As Tricia Concepcion, Earth Island's tuna monitoring program coordinator in Manila, observes, "The Philippines, being a developing nation, is an experimental run of how the WTO would seek to change whole countries' laws to suit its purpose."
The fight against globalizing the Philippines