After Years of Protests, Filipinos Grow Disillusioned

MANILA, July 9 -- Jennifer Santos's eyes gleamed as she recalled her days as a young housewife staring down government tanks ordered to the streets by longtime dictator Ferdinand Marcos. For the better part of a week in 1986, she and tens of thousands of other Filipinos, carrying flowers and rosary beads, camped along the capital's gritty Edsa Boulevard until Marcos fell.

She remembered with less enthusiasm returning to the boulevard four years ago when another graft-tainted leader, Joseph Estrada, left office after a single night of protests. "By the next morning," Santos recounted, "I was in Starbucks drinking coffee, and we had a new president."

Now, that president, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, is facing a crescendo of calls to step down due to allegations she cheated in national elections last year. But like the vast majority of other Edsa veterans, Santos, 44, is not very interested in joining the few protesters on the streets.

"I got tired. It happens over and over again," Santos said. "Our political system never changes."

Across Manila, disappointment in Arroyo is surpassed only by a weary recognition that the Philippines' celebrated protest movement known as "people power" has run its course, and that no new political savior is at hand to rally the masses.

Arroyo has been buffeted by mounting pressure that she resign, from members of her cabinet, prominent political allies and businessmen. But only several thousand flag-waving demonstrators joined the main anti-Arroyo rally Friday in Manila's business district. Local office workers appeared almost oblivious to the event.

On Saturday, the six-lane Edsa Boulevard was clogged with traffic. Not a protester was in sight and the adjacent plaza at the heroic People Power monument was empty.

Luzviminda A. Santos, 52, a compact woman with intense brown eyes and shoulder-length black hair streaked with gray, was invited by several friends to join a small anti-Arroyo demonstration Saturday morning outside the local Santo Domingo church. She told them she would try to make it, but instead stayed home drinking coffee and watching the dizzying political developments on television.

"I said to myself, 'What for?' "

She said she held no affection for Arroyo; a poster of the president with snakes writhing in her hair hangs in her foyer. But she frets there is no worthy successor -- Vice President Noli de Castro and Senate President Franklin Drilon are no better in her view -- and the public is divided over whom to support.

"Who will replace her? Another politician? Another trapo?" Santos asked, using the local slang term for traditional politician.

Luzviminda shares more with Jennifer Santos than their common Philippine last name. She is also a disheartened veteran of the two earlier protest movements. Luzviminda is part of a small group of Filipinos who have long fought for political change.