A short history of Charter changes

I’m what one would say a post-martial law journalist having started my media career after the EDSA Revolution in 1986, after I joined that budding new broadsheet The Philippine Star. A year later when I started writing columns in The FREEMAN, one of my early advocacies as a columnist aside from my anti-communist stand was my call for Charter change because I felt that the Cory Constitution wasn’t adequate to promote real and genuine changes that our nation needed after the Marcos dictatorship left in a huff. But in those days, no one cared to listen to a neophyte columnist … and everyone wanted to give the new Cory Constitution a chance to succeed.

At that time the new dispensation under then Pres. Cory Aquino felt that they had no time to go into a full blown constitutional process called a Constitutional Convention (con-con) hence she created a constitutional body compose of 49 people to put in a new Constitution rebuffing the call by then Vice-President Salvador “Doy” Laurel to return back the country’s best constitution, the 1935 Constitution. In the end, years later we heard calls for cha-cha because there are just too many of us who want changes in our politics because, in the last 24 years, nothing much has changed.

Because of lack of genuine changes under the Cory administration, she ended her six-year term with a whimper instead of a bang! All I can say about that is, under Tita Cory, she brought us back to the times of her husband Sen. Ninoy Aquino before the declaration of Martial Law was made on Sept. 21, 1972. While most Asian countries have since moved forward, we have reversed course, stagnated or worse, even moved backward. 

What in effect Tita Cory did was to return the hated oligarchy that came back with a vengeance. But in the end, because she was a weak president, the so-called Marcos cronies who left the country with the Marcoses for fear of reprisals, slowly came back home to reestablish themselves economically and politically and today … they have blended into the political landscape as if we never had that historic political exercise called EDSA.

Attempts to come up with Charter changes came up after the Cory administration left Malacañang and the Ramos administration came in. But then Pres. Fidel V. Ramos thought that it wasn’t time to do Charter changes (Cha-cha) as of yet. But towards the end of his term, Cha-cha almost became a reality, but it was then tainted with accusations that Cha-cha under FVR was designed to keep him in power by shifting to a parliamentary form of government. Hence cha-cha became so unpopular, it was shelved by FVR.

During the 2004 presidential elections, I interviewed Pres. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo on my TV Show “Straight from the Sky” at the Waterfront Hotel and it was there that I was able to convince Pres. Arroyo that she was the only presidential candidate that had Charter changes as part of her program of government. When she won her 6-year term, suddenly cha-cha became unimportant to her administration and was shelved.

Then like the proverbial Phoenix, during her last year in 2009, she revived Cha-cha as a means to exact genuine political change. But like the Ramos administration, she met the same flak by people suspicious of her motives that Cha-cha was designed to perpetuate her political power. There is some truth in that in the sense that after Pres. Arroyo’s term as president, she did not “fade away” but ran for Congress in her district in Pampanga.

Enter the 2010 presidential race and out of the many presidential contenders, only then Defense Secretary Gilbert “Gibo” Teodoro, Jr. had Cha-cha as its principal reform program that he vowed to pursue early on his term. Meanwhile, almost exactly a year ago when then presidential candidate now Pres. Benigno “PNoy” Aquino, III was asked about Cha-cha, he merely replied by saying: “My government will be one of consultation, so if questions on Cha-cha, it will have to be asked from the people first.”

Apparently this week, the issue of Cha-cha has been resurrected in reaction to the statement of PNoy that he was not seeking any elective post after his 6-year presidency, which sent many oppositionists calling for the convening of a Constitutional Convention. But Malacañang doused cold water into this new Cha-cha proposal; after all, I have always said that PNoy would never change the constitution that is named after his mother!

I myself wasn’t elated by this new call for Cha-cha unless that branch of the government is all for it because there are just too many ways to block this political exercise. As the song lyrics say, “Maybe this year, maybe next year, maybe never!” Perhaps it just might take another EDSA revolt to right the wrong things in this country so that someday we will truly move forward in the right direction with our ASEAN neighbors. We’ve been denied our rightful place for so long by people who rule us who are just happy with their comfort zones. I’m referring to the political establishment.

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For email responses to this article, write to [email protected]  or [email protected] . His columns can be accessed through www.philstar.com .