The United States would oppose another “people power” revolt to oust embattled President Arroyo, a senior US diplomat said on Monday.
Mrs. Arroyo, battling allegations of election cheating and corruption in her immediate family, could face impeachment in a drawn-out process in Congress. Investors fear the crisis could divert attention from economic reforms.
Joseph Mussomeli, the US embassy’s outgoing charge d’affaires, said a repeat of the popular uprisings that toppled dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986 and president Joseph Estrada in 2001 may weaken the country’s democratic institutions.
“I think twice is enough,” Mussomeli, who is due to take his new post as US ambassador to Cambodia next week, told the Foreign Correspondents Association in Manila.
“Each time you do it, it’s like breaking the same bone over and over. It gets weaker and weaker.”
Mrs. Arroyo has weathered street protests demanding she quit after members of her economic team, political allies and supporters in the powerful business community abandoned her.
Despite her worst crisis since she rose from vice president in 2001 after Estrada’s ouster, Arroyo has held her ground with the backing of a network of provincial and local politicians.
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On Farthest U.S. Shores, Iraq Is a Way to a Dream
By JAMES BROOKE
Published: July 31, 2005
From Pago Pago in American Samoa to Yap in Micronesia, 4,000 miles to the west, Army recruiters are scouring the Pacific, looking for high school graduates to enlist at a time when the Iraq war is turning off many candidates in the States.
The Army has found fertile ground in the poverty pockets of the Pacific. The per capita income is $8,000 in American Samoa, $12,500 in the Northern Marianas and $21,000 in Guam, all United States territories. In the Marshalls and Micronesia, former trust territories, per capita incomes are about $2,000.
The Army minimum signing bonus is $5,000. Starting pay for a private first class is $17,472. Education benefits can be as much as $70,000.
“You can’t beat recruiting here in the Marianas, in Micronesia,” said First Sgt. Olympio Magofna, who grew up on Saipan and oversees Pacific recruiting for the Army from his base in Guam. “In the states, they are really hurting,” he said. “But over here, I can afford go play golf every other day.”
[…]
Clouding Saipan’s economic future, Japan Airlines, the carrier for one-quarter of Saipan’s tourists, is to suspend service here in October. The garment industry, the island’s largest source of employment, laid off thousands of workers after the recent liberalization of American import rules for clothing made in China.
To a tourist, Saipan may look like a paradise. For a restless teenager, it may look like a dead end. On the eastern flank of Mount Tapochao, Ross Delarosa, 18, looked beyond the cows and chickens near his front yard and seethed with ambition.
“There’s hardly any life this island,” Mr. Delarosa said. The son of Filipino immigrants, he confronts a society where land ownership and government jobs are largely the preserves of the indigenous Chamorro and Carolinean groups. A self-taught mechanic, he said: “Here it is not what you know, but who you know.”