Philippine presidency / That movie-star allure: In search of a political action hero 
International Herald Tribune
December 3, 2003
Carlos H. Conde 

When Efren Lacorte lost his job as a welder three years ago, it crossed his mind that having voted for Joseph Estrada, his favorite movie actor, who was president of the Philippines at the time, might not have been a great idea.

"I thought maybe Erap's critics were right — that having an actor for president was not good for the country," he said, using Estrada's nickname.

After Estrada was ousted by a military-backed uprising in January 2001, Lacorte hoped that things would get better. Although he hated to admit it, he began to think that he and the millions of Filipinos who had voted for Estrada were wrong.

But now Lacorte, who has become more cynical toward traditional Philippine politics, is prepared to vote in May for another actor running for the presidency, this time one who is more popular than Estrada and who also happens to be Estrada's best friend.

Lacorte's bet for a better future is on Fernando Poe Jr., the most popular actor in the Philippines and one who, like Estrada, is known for his underdog roles.

For a generation of Filipino moviegoers, Poe has been the unbeatable hero who delivers lightning-fast punches to his enemies and uses his .45-caliber with such exaggerated skill that people actually came to believe they could cock the gun by sliding it against their jeans.

Voters like Lacorte — mostly poor and lower middle-class, many of them slum dwellers and squatters — are crucial in Philippine elections. In 1998, Estrada garnered almost 11 million votes, mostly from this group. Those votes are equal to almost a third of the 37 million voters currently registered.

After he lost his job three years ago, Lacorte, a scraggy father of one child who lived in the slums of a neighborhood in Manila called Putol, turned to scavenging to support his family, going around offices and buildings to rummage for discarded bond paper, office forms, receipts and even used airline tickets, all of which he sold for recycling at seven pesos, or about 13 cents, a kilogram.

Now, more than two years after Estrada was replaced by Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, Lacorte is still living in that slum and is still pushing his rickety cart around the city.

He has grown more cynical about politics but also somehow a bit smug, because to him Arroyo, vaunted as the alternative to Estrada, hasn't done any better. Lacorte is convinced now more than ever that no matter who holds the office, the president won't improve the plight of millions like him who survive on less than $2 a day. "I'm still a scavenger even after Gloria promised to do what Erap failed to do," he said.

And so while Filipino politicians are gearing up for the presidential elections next spring, Lacorte — and practically everybody in his neighborhood who listened in during an interview with him — doesn't want to hear about any more promises. To him, the politicians are all the same, which is why the announcement that Poe was running for president was good news.

"I will vote for Fernando Poe Jr.," Lacorte said. "They say he won't do any good. That may be true, but at least I like him."

The people around Lacorte protested when he said this. "No, that's not true," said one shirtless youth. "He will do good. He will come here and listen to us once he wins. Unlike Arroyo, who has never set foot here!"

"That's true!" a woman chimed in. "In his movies, he is always the good guy and he always wins. He will do the same thing when he becomes president."

Another said: "I will ask FPJ to do to corrupt mayors and politicians what he does to the bad guys in his movies."

Last week, Poe announced that he would seek the presidency, creating apprehension not only among his potential rivals but also among economists, who predicted that the country would suffer if he became president. Unlike Estrada, who was a town mayor, senator and vice president before becoming president, Poe is a high-school dropout who does not have any political experience.

A day after Poe's announcement, the peso plunged to an all-time low, a decline that Poe's people said was manipulated by the administration to give the impression that a Poe presidency would be a disaster. Arroyo, who is finishing Estrada's term, has said she will run, too.

When Poe failed to attend a conference organized by a business group in which he and two other candidates were to present their economic platforms, his opponents grabbed the opportunity to criticize him for his alleged inadequacy in economics.

It has also been claimed that Poe is being used by Estrada's camp, which wants Poe to win and then give Estrada, who is in jail while on trial for corruption, a pardon. Poe has denied this.

Critics of the administration say that Poe's likely ascension to the presidency is just a manifestation of the ordinary Filipino's exasperation with traditional Philippine politics.

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Predicting "almost certain victory" for Poe in the May elections, Crispin Beltran, chairman of AnakPawis, a party of people from the political grass roots, said that result would "not be so much a testament of his popularity as an actor or to the backwardness of the electorate, but of the inutility of the Arroyo administration and the Filipino people's disgust toward Arroyo and traditional politics."

Nena Herrera, a 49-year-old mother of one child and a neighbor of Lacorte's, said disgust was exactly what she had been feeling all this time toward Filipino politicians in general. "I and my husband have been jobless for more than a year now," she said. "We survive because I wash other people's clothes."

She complained that while at least Estrada's people had visited her neighborhood, Arroyo's had come only last week, giving out cheap medicines, and then only because, she said, the election is just six months away and Arroyo is afraid of Poe.

The disillusionment in the electorate is not lost on some of the candidates, foremost among them Raul Roco, a respected former education secretary and former senator who has been consistently coming in highest in polls, even beating Poe. Roco has promised an end to corruption and incompetence and has pledged to do better as a leader than Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew and Malaysia's Mahathir bin Mohamad.

But it is clear that Roco and the other politicians will need to do more to rally people like Herrera and Lacorte to their side.

"This country has been run by politicians for generations and nothing happened — all they do is steal people's money, to enrich themselves," Herrera said, perhaps forgetting that Estrada is in jail because he was accused of precisely those sins. "We only had one actor as president and they even drove him out of office," she added. "Right now, I'm willing to gamble on another one."

Lacorte, meanwhile, waxed optimistic. "I don't mind gathering all this trash for a living, at least for the time being," he said. "I'm hoping that President Poe would make things better."

Copyright © 2006 the International Herald Tribune