Scenes of anger: Military police officers restraining a protester near the White House as demonstrations against George Floyd’s death continued. — AFP
ABSORBING news of US President Donald Trump emerging from a secure underground bunker to threaten protesters that he could use “vicious dogs” and that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”, the mind goes back to an October morning in the Philippines in 1987.
On that day, then President Corazon Aquino showed up in a government prosecutor’s office to file a lawsuit against popular columnist Luis Beltran of The Philippine Star newspaper who’d suggested that she “hid under her bed” during a coup attempt that August – “perhaps the first commander-in-chief to do so”.
While Filipino journalists have enjoyed significant leeway when it comes to what is fair comment, this allegation had particularly riled the nation’s 11th president. As she showed journalists, her bed had little room beneath for anyone to crawl under.
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