Power and Gloria

It sounded like an unexpected act of charity by Abu Sayyaf rebels, who are holding three Americans and more than 20 Filipinos hostage in the jungles of the southern Philippines. Calling a Mindanao radio station by satellite phone last Tuesday, harsh-voiced rebel spokesman Abu Sabaya said: “As our gift in the celebration of Independence Day, we have released unconditionally Guillermo Sobero” (one of the three American captives). The spokesman then paused before delivering his taunting punchline: “But we have released him without his head.” That morning, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo was due to oversee Manila’s Independence Day parade with its marching bands and martial displays, but first she checked with her “security cluster,” a special team camped out in the ornate dining room of MalacaNang, the presidential palace, to monitor the three-week-old hostage crisis. Arroyo was told Sobero’s body had not been found, but as the Philippine Chief of Staff General Diomedio Villanueva later admitted: “The possibility of (the killing) having happened is very, very high.”

Arroyo, say aides, was shattered. Earlier, Abu Sayyaf, a group that uses an Islamic banner to justify kidnapping, massacres and extortion, had given the President 48 hours to accept a Malaysian businessman as negotiator. After that, Abu Sayyaf threatened, it would start killing the hostages. With the clock ticking away, Arroyo gave in to the rebels’ demandsonly to have them boast of beheading the Californian tourist anyway. Jeered Abu Sabaya: “It’s up to you to find Sobero’s head … but the dogs may beat you to it.” Speaking to diplomats after the 103rd Independence Day festivities, the diminutive President flourished some of her trademark rhetorical steel. The alleged murder, she said, “only strengthens our resolve to decimate once and for all this cold-blooded bandit group.” But later that afternoon, aides found Arroyo praying, alone, in the chapel of MalacaNang.

A devout Catholic, Arroyo may feel a bit like Jobnot an unfamiliar sensation for any head of state of the often-chaotic Philippines. Since being swept into office by a People Power demonstration this January, Arroyo has faced plenty of challenges. Predecessor Joseph Estrada insists he’s still the real President of the country; a mob of 40,000 anti-Arroyo demonstrators attacked MalacaNang in May, prompting an unsuccessful coup attempt. There has been criticism of the appointment of her businessman-husband’s cronies to key government posts, and a high-profile Senate race that required all of Arroyo’s personal charisma to stave off a humiliating defeat for her Peoples’ Power Party. “My reaction to all this? I think: ‘What must I do next?'” she told TIME in an interview last week. “I don’t dwell on my feelings.”

Abu Sayyaf is Arroyo’s hardest challenge yet: she’s forced to deal not only with a gang of cutthroat kidnappers motivated by lucre and Islamic zealotry but also the needs of Big Brother in Washington, concerned about the fate of the three Americans. Arroyo wants to crush the “bandit-terrorists,” as she calls them. “We’ll give you the peace of the grave,” she vowed after the rebels escaped an army siege two weeks ago. That’s a good demonstration of the determination that is the bedrock of Arroyo’s characterwhich transformed the former economist and bureaucrat into a popular politician who wasn’t afraid to assume her country’s presidency in the wake of a popular revolt rather than in a traditional election.

But Arroyo is also impulsive, famously stubborn, with a tendency to do things her own way and on her ownpretty dangerous habits when dealing with a serious hostage crisis. The U.S. is publicly backing Arroyo’s guns-blazing approach, but some Washington counterterrorism experts are worried. Says one official: “We need a more coordinated, deliberate Philippine strategy, rather than running blindly through the jungle in hot pursuit, putting the hostages at maximum risk.”

Petite, girlishly slender and wearing a suit of iridescent ink-blue silk, Arroyo, 53, is nearly dwarfed by her phalanx of aides and bodyguards as she strides, with her fashion-model smile, into a vast, wood-paneled living room in MalacaNang. She exudes the haughtiness of someone for whom privilege is a birthright: Gloria grew up literally roaming the corridors of power. Her father Diosdado Macapagal governed the Philippines from 1961-65, and Arroyo reclaimed her old teenage bedroom when she moved back into the palace. Sitting primly on the edge of a sofa, she comes across like a college professor (she taught economics at the Jesuit-run Ateneo University) who doesn’t hesitate to grimace when she feels a question is wasting her time. Her Cabinet secretaries sometimes feel chastised for not having done their homework, and they dread it when she dismissively bangs their dossiers on their desks, her dark eyes flashing with disdain.

When presented with new data or surprising briefings, Arroyo will hit the phones to cross-check the info herself. She insists on hourly updates about the drive against Abu Sayyaf. She rings her own network of contacts, built up during her days in the Senate and as Estrada’s Vice President and Social Welfare Secretary. Says Rigoberto Tiglao, the palace spokesman: “As President, you get so much advicewrong or rightthat after a while, if your intellect isn’t that good, you stop trying to process it and you hide in a cocoon of close advisers. But President Arroyo is always checking things out with her own sources.” She despises gossip and fuzziness, and her demand for “empirical evidence” has become a palace mantra.

Her stubborness is also legendary: jealous at the birth of a younger brother, Gloria, at age four, refused to stay with her parents and went off to live with her maternal grandmother. She remained there for three years until she was finally coaxed home. Arroyo also refuses to speak to her half sister, Cielo Salgado, after she wrote in a book how her step mother (and Arroyo’s biological mother) treated Cielo like “an errand girl.”

That stubborness doesn’t stop Arroyo from making new allies. Since taking office in January, Arroyo has taken time to get to know her generals and regional brigade commanders. She is mindful of the seven failed coup attempts against her idol, Cory Aquino. Her schmoozing paid off, she claims, after pro-Estrada supporters tried to turn a May 2 protest against the arrest of the ex-President into an uprising against Arroyo. “Everything was in place for this coup,” she says about the spring plot, “except the military component.” These threats have subsided, Arroyo claims, “but we have to remain vigilant.”

While her Cabinet advisers tried to reassure Arroyo that the mass protests against her were nothing more than rent-a-crowds, she knew better. She understood that social discontent was bubbling away over the country’s high unemployment rate, corruption and nonexistent social services, and Arroyo was an obvious target for their rage. Not only had she arrested the poor’s favorite politician, former film actor Estrada, but many dispossessed Filipinos considered Arroyo a typical member of the Philippines’ heedless aristocracy. That’s not a view Arroyo accepts: she considers herself a far more humble person than is popularly imagined, and likes reminding people that her father grew up poor and her paternal grandmother took in laundry.

After the May riots, Arroyo blamed her fashion advisers for dressing her up “too rich.” These days, she makes a visible effort to visit more slums, wearing jeans and traveling by cycle-rickshaw. As part of her makeover, her image doctors tried to promote Arroyo as Ate Glo, or “older sister” in Tagalog. But her polished hauteur has made it difficult for the sisterly tag to stick. Nobody doubts her guts or commitment, though: after being booed out of Tondo shantytown, she bravely went back and listened to the residents’ many gripes.

By last weekend, there was still hope that Sobero, 40, a California-based pool waterproofing contractor, might still be alive since his body was never found. There was another cause for optimism of a convoluted sort: the rebels called CNN offering to sell it a videotape of Sobero’s beheading for $20,000. One counterterrorist expert in Washington thought that might signify Sobero hasn’t been killedthe group is cold-bloodedly deciding if the spectacle of his death might be worth more than sparing him. (CNN and other networks approached by the rebels all refused.)

The rebels also suffered an internal setback last week. A powerful Abu Sayyaf commander named Ghalib Andang from Jolo island is negotiating his surrender, presidential sources said on Friday. Commander Robot (as Andang is commonly known) carried out a kidnapping on a Sipadan island diving resort in Malaysia last April, netting more than $425 million in ransom from European nations, Libya and Malaysia. Robot’s surrender won’t necessarily help the current hostages, who are being held by a different faction, but it means the Basilan-based rebels can no longer count on reinforcementsor on an easy escape route to other islands. If Commander Robot does give himself up, say palace sources, Arroyo will be there to meet him when he steps out of the jungle. Arroyo may not dwell on her feelings, but at that moment, she might emit a small sigh of relief.