A Test for Democracy
Monday, Feb. 03, 1986
Never in the long and turbulent
history of the Philippines has there been an
election campaign quite like it. In the muddy
streets and squares of provincial cities and
villages on the island of Mindanao last week, tens
of thousands of farmers and plantation workers
waited for a glimpse of an unusual political
heroine, a retiring, bespectacled housewife with
only nine weeks of political experience. Sometimes
that vigil lasted for hours, under glaring
sunshine and the occasional tropical downpour, but
the crowds were quiet and uncomplaining. Finally,
when the long-awaited political caravan straggled
into view, the throngs invariably exploded into
ecstasy. As small children ran alongside the open
jeep that bore Opposition Candidate Corazon
("Cory") , Aquino, 53, supporters threw yellow and
white confetti and shouted a welcome: "Cory! Cory!
Cory!"
Back in Manila, the capital, a
different kind of spectacle was unfolding.
President Ferdinand Marcos, 68, an ailing autocrat
possessed of formidable political powers, made an
election foray of his own from Malacanang Palace
to address 7,000 longshoremen on the city's South
Pier. Everything was carefully choreographed: a
stream of local entertainers kept the crowd's
attention until Marcos, looking drawn, tired and
weak, was escorted to the podium. The President
joked about rumors that he had suffered a physical
collapse, and dismissed reports of his obvious ill
health as so much "black propaganda." Wife Imelda
by his side, Marcos then made a fervent pitch for
support as a bulwark against the growing
Communist-led insurgency that is stalking the
country. Said he defiantly: "Once a champion,
always a champion."
For the first time in 20 years,
many Filipinos were not so sure. Less than two
weeks before some 30 million voters are expected
to go to the polls on Feb. 7, the strange election
exercise that has mesmerized the Philippines since
November had blossomed into something unexpected:
a real race. As city and rural folk thronged in
astonishing numbers to Aquino rallies, her
campaign organizers extolled the local outpouring
as "people power," an antidote for the highly
organized and often unscrupulous campaign machine
that has kept Marcos in office since 1965. Members
of the President's ruling New Society Movement,
who had heard their leader predict an 80-20
victory for himself, were shading that estimate
back to 60-40. At least two senior members of
Marcos' Cabinet were even more cautious,
predicting only a 55-45 win for the President.
Exulted Linggoy Alcuaz, an official of one of the
country's myriad splinter opposition parties:
"There are times in history when things come to a
boil, and this is one of them."
Few of his countrymen would argue
with that assessment. The mood in Manila, thick
with political tension ever since Marcos issued
his surprise election call, grew even more
claustrophobic last week with the latest campaign
soundings. The rumor mills that grind endlessly in
the city's crowded coffeehouses increased their
outpourings of speculation. Fears flew that Marcos
might try to cancel the balloting, a possibility
that he has never quite rejected. Opponents of the
President were worried that he intended to rig the
election contest even more blatantly than other
votes have been altered in the past. If that
happened, they warned darkly, Aquino supporters by
the tens of thousands would take to the streets.
The Philippines, said Jose ("Peping") Cojuangco,
Aquino's campaign manager, was "a powder keg."
Agreed Jaime Ongpin, a wealthy businessman and key
Aquino campaign adviser: "I have never felt more
uncertain about the future than I do now."
That sentiment is widely shared in
the Philippines and in Washington. In both places,
there is a near overwhelming sense that a chapter
of history is almost over: the Marcos era. Over
the two decades since his first democratic
election in 1965, the President has run the gamut
of transformation, changing from a populist
reformer to a modernizing strongman to, in recent
years, a fading and often grotesque shadow of his
former authoritarian self. In the process, he has
profoundly changed his country, at times in the
past for the better, but of late decidedly for the
worse.
Now events in the sprawling Pacific
archipelago appear to be moving rapidly beyond
Marcos' fading ability to control them with
anything like the skill and ruthlessness that he
so often displayed in the past. While the
President continues to hold sway in the Spanish
colonial-style Malacanang Palace, the vacuum of
authority outside the palace has reached alarming
proportions. Among other things, it has led U.S.
Assistant Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz to
warn that the Philippines is heading toward "civil
war on a massive scale" within three to five years
if the insurgency spearheaded by the Communist New
People's Army continues to grow (see following
story).
A major cause of the political
deterioration is the shaky economy. Gross domestic
product has declined by nearly 10% in the past two
years, and in real per capita terms now stands no
higher than in 1972. Underemployment among the 21
million-member work force is estimated at 40%.
Foreign debt exceeds $26 billion. These results
may seem no worse than those of many Third World
countries, except that the Philippines lies within
the most economically dynamic region in the world.
Marcos blames much of the country's doldrums on
external causes. His critics, who now include most
of the influential Philippine business community,
place much of the blame for the stagnation on the
regime's practices of economic favoritism, known
locally as "crony capitalism."
Ricardo Pagusara, 24, a college
dropout in the southern Philippine port , city of
Cebu, puts the country's immediate dilemma more
simply. Says he: "Respect for the present
government is fast disappearing. People have
become so desperate that they are willing to
gamble with a new, untried person." Says Enrique
Zobel, a prominent pro-Marcos businessman: "The
people simply want a change."
The nature of that change is a
matter of major concern to the Reagan
Administration. Officially, the U.S. position is
that it favors no particular candidate so long as
the balloting exercise is "free, fair and
credible." Says U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines
Stephen Bosworth: "We are confident that we can
work effectively with whatever government the
Filipino people elect in a fair and clean
election." In a country where even in the best of
times election procedures have been marred by vote
buying, ballot-box stuffing and other forms of
fraud, that is a tall order. Last week U.S. Senate
Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar
agreed to lead an official delegation of American
observers to the Philippines for the balloting.
Vote rigging would be a calamity,
as Assistant Secretary of State Wolfowitz put it
last week, because it undoubtedly would turn large
numbers of Filipinos to "radical alternatives,
specifically the Communists." Wolfowitz, speaking
before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
also decried an atmosphere of "intimidation" that
is on the increase in some areas of the
Philippines. So far, at least ten Aquino campaign
workers and four Marcos supporters have been slain
during the presidential race.
Behind a facade of impartiality,
however, the Administration has been straining for
months to shape what it feels to be the inevitable
post-Marcos transition. So persistent have the
U.S. efforts been that Ambassador Bosworth is
referred to by some Marcos aides as the "leader of
the opposition." Wolfowitz's gloomy public
assessment of the insurgency, for example, was
part of a U.S. push to reform the corrupt and
inefficient 230,000-member armed forces and
paramilitary, which have been largely ineffective
in combatting the Communist threat. As part of its
approach, the U.S. has also offered the Marcos
government moderate doses of military assistance
(total budgeted for fiscal 1986: $55 million).
Says a senior U.S. official: "Military aid is the
only thing keeping the reform movement alive."
How alive is another matter. Marcos
has proved to be a master at slipping away from
U.S. attempts to lasso him into reform. Much U.S.
effort, for example, has been aimed at getting
Marcos to retire General Fabian Ver, the
President's cousin, as armed forces Chief of
Staff. Washington was pointedly critical of a
Philippine court decision in December to exonerate
Ver in the 1983 assassination of Benigno ("Ninoy")
Aquino, the President's chief political opponent
and the husband of Challenger Corazon Aquino. More
than any other event, the Aquino assassination
galvanized popular opposition to Marcos, leading
up to his snap election call. Subsequent U.S.
pressure led to a vague presidential promise that
Ver would "probably" retire before the elections,
but last week Marcos seemed to backtrack on that.
Washington's greatest
accomplishment so far has been to force Marcos to
address an issue he ducked for more than a decade:
naming a Vice President. At his party's nominating
convention in December, Marcos chose Arturo
("Turing") Tolentino, 75, a former Foreign
Minister whom the President sacked from that job
for espousing views incompatible with his own.
Theoretically, should Marcos die after winning the
Feb. 7 elections, Tolentino would take his place.
The wily Marcos may have been trying to dodge that
likelihood when he chose as Vice President a man
who is seven years his senior. Marcos' opponents
fear that the President may still make a
last-minute substitution of his ambitious wife
Imelda as Vice President. Under a newly
promulgated Philippine election code, such a move
would be legal right up to noon of election day.
Privately, some U.S. officials see
little hope of a peaceful transfer of power so
long as Marcos is alive. Intelligence sources have
long reported that the Philippine President
suffers from a form of systemic lupus
erythematosus, a disease in which human antibodies
attack the body's tissue, especially in many cases
the kidneys. According to the same sources, Marcos
has undergone one, and perhaps two, kidney
transplants. He is constantly medicated, and his
face shows it, usually being either drawn or
puffed up from the effects of drugs. When Marcos
appears at campaign rallies, he is often carried
on the shoulders of guards, and he visibly
flinches from pain. In the course of his long,
rambling campaign speeches, his voice frequently
cracks and rasps. Nonetheless, he still manages to
muster the will to continue. Warns a Western
diplomat: "This is still a formidable political
figure."
The Reagan Administration's concern
and frustration with Marcos is a far cry from its
attitude a few years ago. Vice President George
Bush, on a visit to Manila in 1981, gushed
effusively to Marcos that "we love your adherence
to democratic principles and to the democratic
process." In 1982 the Philippine leader was
welcomed with open arms at the White House. What
stood uppermost in U.S. calculations at that time
was the fact that Marcos controlled something that
the U.S. badly needs: access to Subic Bay Naval
Base and Clark Air Base, two of the most important
American military facilities in the Pacific. Says
a State Department official: "The bottom line
always was, and always will be, those bases."
In fact, much more is at stake in
the crisis engendered by Marcos' fading grip: the
stability of the Philippine archipelago and U.S.
influence in the entire region. The Philippines is
an important member of the Association of South
East Asian Nations, a six-nation group* that has
enjoyed surprising stability and prosperity in the
wake of the U.S. defeat in Viet Nam. Collapse of
the Philippines in the face of a Communist
insurgency would severely impair the security of
the remaining ASEAN members and pose a threat to
U.S. allies as far away as Australia.
At the same time, Washington's
failure to prevent such a collapse would be
regarded as a sign of U.S. impotence, and might
encourage similar insurgencies elsewhere. Yet, as
in Iran, Central America and other trouble spots
around the world, the U.S. has only limited means
available to help in shoring up its ally-- short
of a military intervention that the American
public and, above all, Congress would undoubtedly
not support.
The U.S. interest in the fate of
the Philippines goes much deeper, however, than
geopolitics. It derives from the fact that from
1898 to 1946, the archipelago was a U.S. colony.
While there were some shameful aspects to the
colonization, notably the violence that
accompanied the consolidation of American rule, no
other country in Southeast Asia has received such
a profound and mostly progressive transfusion of
purely American values, attitudes and democratic
institutions, reflected superficially in the
continuing use of English as the lingua franca of
the islands.
The weight of the common U.S.-Phil
ippine heritage is symbolized by
the 17,000 white headstones of the American
Cemetery at Fort Bonifacio, overlooking Manila.
Many thousands of other Americans are also
interred in the Philippines, their lives lost in
the < Spanish-American War, the U.S. war of
colonial domination and World War II.
The living ties between the two
countries are also vibrant. In addition to at
least 18,000 Americans who serve at Clark and
Subic Bay, an additional 50,000 Americans,
including many of local descent, live and work in
the country; meanwhile, about 1 million Filipinos
live and work in the U.S. Some 500 U.S. firms
operate in the Philippines, representing about
$2.5 billion in U.S. private investment. They
provide 10% of all the economic activity in the
Philippines and directly employ some 50,000
people. Multinational corporations, most of them
with such familiar names as Dole, Procter & Gamble
and Firestone, generate 20% of the sales of the
top 1,000 firms in the Philippines, but they pay
roughly 30% of all Philippine corporate taxes.
Says a U.S. businessman in Manila: "We're a
natural part of the community here, which we are
not in the rest of Southeast Asia."
A Spanish, then American, colonial
heritage (sometimes known as "400 years in a
convent followed by 50 years in Hollywood") gave
the Philippines something else: a sense of
Western-style unity. But even today that cohesion
can be fragile and sometimes misleading. The sense
of national purpose is strongest around Manila
(pop. 8 million) and other urban centers. Roughly
70% of Filipinos, however, still live in rural
areas. A scattering of more than 7,000 islands
spanning 1,150 miles from north to south, the
republic is still a ramshackle agglomeration of
people speaking 86 languages and dialects. Its
citizens range from the animistic Badjao tribe of
the Sulu islands to the Tagalog-speaking natives
of Batangas province on the island of Luzon to the
wealthy, Chinese-mestizo clans, which form a
substantial portion of the country's economic
oligarchy.
In such a melange, family ties and
the traditional Philippines system of reciprocal
obligations between individuals, known as utang na
loob (literally, inner debt), count for as much as
the trappings of Western modernity. Regional
identities are also important. Says Fred Whiting,
47, president of the American Chamber of Commerce
in Manila: "There is a great desire here to make
democratic institutions work, but it is mixed with
a liking for strong leaders."
Marcos is neither the
longest-reigning nor the most dictatorial leader
in the region. Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Kuan
Yew, whose autocratic skills are legendary, has
dominated his city-state for 27 years; Indonesia's
; President Suharto has been unchallenged for 18
years. But both of those men, as well as Taiwan's
Chiang Ching-kuo, have matched their severity with
an ability to provide a rising standard of living
for an ever increasing number of citizens. Says
Whiting: "Many of us are impressed with Marcos'
political acumen but feel that some of his
economic policies are questionable."
The Marcos who came to power by
democratic election in 1965 was a nationalistic
social reformer. In his first inaugural address,
he claimed that "our government is gripped in the
iron hand of venality, its treasury is barren . .
. its armed forces demoralized and its councils
sterile." Marcos strongly identified himself with
economic and social development, land reform and
centralized government. Nonetheless, he soon began
to fall back into the tradition of Tammany
Hall-style politics that, as one American official
wryly notes, is "part of the U.S. legacy in the
Philippines." He also ran afoul of a simmering
separatist insurgency among the Moros, an Islamic
minority in the south of the heavily Roman
Catholic country, and felt the first stirrings of
the fledgling Communist New People's Army.
In 1972, three years after his
re-election, Marcos declared martial law, citing
the economic crisis of the day and the threat,
then barely credible, of the Communist insurgency.
His real motive was to remain in power beyond the
constitutional limit of two four-year terms. For
the next eight years Marcos ruled by decree, with
the aim of building a New Society based on
"constitutional authoritarianism." He claimed to
be a dictator with a social conscience: he pushed
forward with land reform (often at the expense of
his landed political opponents) and carefully
controlled trade unionism. More important, Marcos
extended the sway of his New Society to virtually
every barangay (village) in the archipelago,
creating both a powerful political machine and a
new economic class dependent on government
patronage.
In 1981 Marcos ended martial law,
after finding ways to retain some of his most
important dictatorial powers. Chief among them was
Amendment 6, an addition to a new constitution
that he rammed through in 1973. Amendment 6 allows
the President to rule by decree almost whenever he
chooses. Other laws give Marcos the power to
arrest alleged national-security violators at will
under a so-called preventive-detention authority;
the right of habeas corpus in such cases is
effectively suspended. According to the U.S. State
Department, some 500 to 600 people charged with
national-security offenses were in Philippine
jails at the end of 1985. More sinister are the
so-called "salvagings" or death-squad killings,
which are carried out as part of the war against
subversion by right-wing vigilantes with ties to
the security forces. As many as 219 salvagings
were alleged to have taken place in the first five
months of last year.
Marcos has always paid careful lip
service, and sometimes more than that, to
democratic forms. Some of his more controversial
authoritarian powers were ratified in a carefully
orchestrated 1981 referendum, which he carried
with 80%. The same year, he won a presidential
election against a toothless opponent and also got
approval for a constitutional amendment that
stretched his four-year term to six years. In 1984
Marcos held elections for the Batasang Pambansa,
or National Assembly. Opposition politicians won
roughly one-third of the seats. Despite widespread
accusations of cheating, the elections were judged
acceptable by the Philippine community at large.
Lord Acton, the British historian
who wrote that power corrupts, would have
recognized a fitting subject in the Marcos regime
as its authority continued to expand. For years,
critics have focused on the extravagance of First
Lady Imelda, a former beauty-contest winner who
has channeled huge amounts of money into pet
projects through her roles as governor of Metro
Manila, the administrative unit that encompasses
the capital and its sprawling suburbs, and as
national Minister of Human Settlements. Last week
a U.S. congressional inquiry was looking into
allegations that the Marcos family has been
secretly funneling money, possibly including U.S.
aid funds, into American real estate.
Whatever the ups and downs of his
health, Marcos has always insisted on keeping a
patriarchal grip on the apparatus of power. An
outsider who was allowed to visit a caucus of the
ruling New Society Movement last year reported
that the session resembled "a big meeting of all
the warring tribes, in which the President was
like the chief, called upon to arbitrate all of
their family feuds." None of the burning national
difficulties of the day, such as the Communist
insurgency and the ailing economy, were discussed.
Instead, local and provincial party bosses offered
up their special pleading to Marcos, who listened,
scolded, took matters under advisement and
rendered judgment.
Nowadays, according to a Western
diplomat, the lack of reality surrounding the
governing machinery is even more pronounced. Says
he: "It's as if the central nervous system of
government has broken down. Orders are issued at
the center, but nothing happens in the provinces."
The woman who has challenged the
lame but still powerful Marcos machine has few
formal qualifications for her dragon-slaying role.
Corazon Cojuangco Aquino is nonetheless fully at
home with the local perquisites of privilege and
authority. Her family and that of her martyred
husband Benigno are charter members of the
Philippine political and economic oligarchy that
was pushed aside by Marcos. Corazon Aquino's
father was a sugar baron, and her maternal
grandfather was a Philippine Senator. One of her
cousins, Eduardo Cojuangco Jr., is reckoned to be
the President's closest economic crony. He is
controller of a national coconut monopoly.
Educated at private Philippine
schools run by Roman Catholic nuns and at New York
City's College of Mount St. Vincent, where she
earned a degree in French and mathematics, Aquino
originally dabbled with the idea of a career in
law. Eventually she decided to concentrate on
being a helpmate to her spouse. But while raising
five children during 28 years of marriage, she was
exposed to the rough-and-tumble of backroom
politics. For most of that period her husband was
considered the second most important political
figure in the country, after Marcos.
In 1972, after Marcos invoked
martial law, Benigno Aquino was arrested on
charges of murder and subversion. Many Filipinos
believe that his most serious crime was to be a
virtual shoo-in to win 1973 presidential elections
that were scheduled but never took place. During
Aquino's 7 1/2 years of imprisonment, his wife was
the sole link between the Philippine opposition
leader and his followers. In 1980, when Marcos
freed Benigno so that he could have heart surgery
in the U.S., she accompanied him in a three-year
exile in Boston. She later said it was one of the
happiest periods of her life.
That idyll ended on Aug. 21, 1983,
when Benigno was shot while getting off a China
Airlines Boeing 767 jetliner at Manila
International Airport. The killing was initially
blamed by the regime on a lone, allegedly
Communist gunman, whom government security guards
shot instants later. The majority of members on a
Marcos-appointed commission of inquiry later said
that the evidence pointed to a far-reaching
military conspiracy that might have included Chief
of Staff Ver. But after an eight-month trial
tainted by questionable legal procedures, Ver and
24 other military defendants were acquitted.
Out of the tragedy Corazon Aquino
attained the status of a national saint. She first
threw that prestige openly into the political fray
in the 1984 National Assembly elections, when she
stumped the countryside on behalf of the
splintered opposition. A deeply devoted Roman
Catholic, Aquino finally decided to run for the
presidency after repeated consultations with Jaime
Cardinal Sin, leader of the Roman Catholic Church
in the Philippines, who encouraged her decision.
Sin also brokered an alliance between Aquino and
her running mate, Salvador ("Doy") Laurel, 57,
head of the well-organized United Nationalist
Democratic Opposition.
Reserved and moralistic by nature,
Aquino has shown that she also has a steely
streak. Unrelentingly stubborn concerning the
alleged injustice of the Marcos government's
investigation of her husband's murder, she can
also crack the whip among her sometimes fractious
followers. More than once, she has demonstrated a
street-wise familiarity with the grittier ins and
outs of Filipino politics, such as fund raising,
that she learned at her late husband's side.
As a public speaker, Aquino strikes
few sparks. Her voice is high pitched and lacks
inflection. She seldom gestures with her hands.
Nonetheless, she has the capacity to hold her
audiences through simple, unaffected recitation of
the sufferings of her family at the hands of the
Marcos regime, and her blunt accusation that "Mr.
Marcos is the No. 1 suspect in the murder of my
husband." She also charges Marcos of being,
because of his authoritarian methods, "the most
successful recruiter for the Communists."
Aquino's lackluster speaking style
is counterbalanced by her running mate Laurel. He
has the kind of folksy, joke-telling manner that
Filipino audiences love. The vice-presidential
nominee usually serves as Aquino's lead-off
speaker, warming up crowds for the less practiced
message to follow.
Increasingly, however, the shy
Aquino has learned how to use her bare knuckles in
political repartee. Last week Marcos accused his
opponent of lacking femininity. The ideal woman,
he said at a Manila rally, is someone "gentle, who
does not challenge a man, but who keeps her
criticism to herself and teaches her husband only
in the bedroom." The President had been visibly
stung by an earlier Aquino remark accusing him of
cowardice for declining to campaign on the island
of Mindanao, a hotbed of the Communist insurgency.
Four days later Aquino told a warmly receptive
audience of more than 1,200 Rotarians in Manila
that Marcos was an "inveterate liar," and summed
up her speech with the line "And may the better
woman win!"
Marcos had further reason to be
angry and humiliated later in the week, after the
New York Times published an article claiming that
Marcos' wartime record as a guerrilla fighter
against the occupying Japanese, to which he makes
frequent and boastful reference, was judged by the
U.S. Army back in 1948 to be "fraudulent" and
"absurd." Ever since his early political days
Marcos has claimed to have played a hero's role as
leader of a Philippine guerrilla unit called Ang
Mga Maharlika (Free Men) between 1942 and 1944. An
Army report squirreled away in U.S. Government
archives shows that Marcos had instead deserted
his guerrilla unit, eventually to join up with an
American force during the 1944 Philippines
invasion. Within hours of the article's
publication in New York City, the information was
being announced in Manila with banner headlines in
an opposition newspaper. Marcos called the
revelations "crazy" and "laughable."
During the campaign, Aquino has
learned how to turn aside with a sharp reply any
Marcos attacks on her lack of political
experience. As she told the Rotarians, "I concede
that I cannot match Mr. Marcos when it comes to
experience. I admit that I have no experience in
cheating, stealing, lying or assassinating
political opponents."
Aquino can draw upon lots of
experience in her opposition coalition. Her circle
of advisers includes a number of Filipino
political figures who have chafed on the sidelines
of power for years. Among them: former Senator
Jovito Salonga, head of a left-of-center splinter
party and one of the country's best lawyers, and
Jose Diokno, another former Senator and human
rights activist. Aquino can call on economic
expertise from the disaffected Philippine business
community. She and her advisers have also been
cultivating relations with high- and
medium-ranking members of the armed forces. The
question of whether the military is loyal to
Marcos or to the national constitution remains one
of the most delicate issues in the country.
Aquino is learning how to forge
positions that no longer sound startlingly naive,
if idealistically attractive, to her listeners.
One of her earliest promises was that if elected,
she would not move into Malacanang Palace; instead
she would open the residence for public wedding
ceremonies. Now she sounds much less like a
Filipina flower child. In her Rotary speech last
week, Aquino laid out a program for lifting
Marcos' "institutionalized dictatorship" that
included an appeal to the Marcos-controlled
National Assembly to repeal the presidential
powers of preventive detention and return to the
rule of habeas corpus. If the Assembly balks, she
will use the rule- by-decree Amendment 6 to repeal
those powers herself. Aquino would then work for a
series of constitutional changes that would
finally eliminate the dangerous Amendment 6.
Aquino's plan for dealing with the
Communist insurgency is more controversial. She
says that she would, if elected, call for an
immediate six- month cease-fire in order to open
negotiations with the guerrillas. She would also
offer a pardon to any political prisoner willing
to renounce the use of force. Aquino believes that
the insurgency will lose much of its momentum once
Marcos leaves office. But she insists that she
will use force to fight any group that seeks to
overthrow a genuinely democratic government or
"destroy our cultural heritage, including our
belief in God." Early in her campaign Aquino gave
Marcos a target of opportunity when she said that
she would offer Communists who eschewed the use of
force a place in her government. Later she backed
away from that statement, choosing to emphasize
instead her personal anti-Communist beliefs.
On economic issues Aquino has drawn
cheers from Filipino businessmen by promising to
return the country to the path of free enterprise.
Among other things, she has vowed to break the
Marcos government's bureaucratic stranglehold on
the national economy, to dismantle local
monopolies over sugar and coconut marketing and
production, and to renegotiate the country's
foreign debt.
Aquino has received two important
boosts in her low-budget, grass-roots campaign.
One came from the organized left, which decided to
boycott the election. That decision by a variety
of organizations that have proved to be
susceptible to New People's Army influence made it
easier for Aquino to defend herself against
Marcos' charges that she is a cat's-paw for the
Communist insurgents.
The other boost came from the Roman
Catholic Church. With some 13,000 priests and nuns
spread across the country, the church is probably
the only | force in the Philippines that matches
the organizational might of Marcos' political
machine. Two weeks ago Cardinal Sin sent a letter
to all 2,200 Philippine parishes instructing the
faithful to vote for "persons who embody the
Gospel values of humility, truth, honesty, respect
for human rights and life." Few Filipinos had to
guess whom he meant. Aquino, says the Cardinal,
"is always listening to me."
Increasingly, members of some
influential Philippine groups that have
traditionally backed Marcos seem to be shifting to
Aquino. One sign: the Chinese business community
is said to have begun to funnel sizable amounts of
cash into the challenger's campaign.
As the final days of the campaign
tick away, the level of political tension
engendered by the battle can only increase. So too
will the diplomatic challenge for the U.S. To the
Administration's credit, policy toward the
Philippines is more coherent than that on any
other recent foreign challenge of similar
magnitude. In contrast to the situation in Iran
during the final days of the Shah, U.S. diplomats
are in close contact with the opposition. Unlike
Central America, the Philippines has created no
major divisions between Congress and the White
House, nor among the various Executive
departments.
By officially adopting a hands-off
stance toward the election outcome, the Reagan
Administration has now swung almost as far away as
possible from its earlier fond embrace of Marcos.
To U.S. policymakers, a sure sign that Washington
is now perceived as being impartial is that, as
one diplomat says, "neither side is happy with
us."
The onetime U.S. role as a colonial
overlord is still firmly fixed in the minds of
many Filipinos. Any direct threats against a
Philippine government, even one that had rigged an
election, would be widely resented. But Marcos is
also on notice that he cannot count on any U.S.
support whatsoever in case of civic upheaval
brought on by voter fraud. Nor is it likely that
either domestic or international business
confidence in the Philippines would return to
normal with a cloud of that magnitude hanging over
the political horizon.
The important thing, as Ambassador
Bosworth told a Philippine audience last year, is
that the U.S. recognizes that its permanent
interest in the Philippines lies not with any
particular government but with the values the two
countries have come to share during their long and
intimate association. Said Bosworth: "We will be
judged--and we will judge ourselves--by the fate
of democracy in this country and by the success of
your national efforts to strengthen your
democratic institutions and to ensure that they
function effectively. We have a moral and
political stake in a democratic Philippines, which
transcends all our other interests here, strategic
as well as economic."
The kind of democracy Bosworth was
talking about is not a matter of authoritarianism
decked out with consultative rituals and slogans.
It clearly involves the removal of the
deformations that Marcos has introduced to the
Philippine political system. No matter who wins
the election, Washington seems to be willing to
adhere to that position, a fact that is not being
lost on Filipinos. As Richard Holbrooke, a former
Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and
Pacific Affairs, puts it, "The only way Marcos can
reform is to dismantle his regime."
Only the Philippine people can
decide whether Marcos will be forced to do that.
As the day for that decision approached, friends
of the Philippines in the U.S. could only watch
and wait and renew their vows not to abandon their
support for the democratic aspirations of a
longtime friend and ally, regardless of what
turbulence might lie ahead.
FOOTNOTE:
*Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei,
the Philippines.
With reporting by
Sandra Burton, Nelly
Sindayen and William Stewart/Manila
