By Donald Kirk
Asian Time Online
Aug 4, 2009
The dream of People's Power carries its rhetorical magic among millions of Filipinos as they line up to view the body of the woman in the yellow dress whose memory endures as an icon of democracy in a society divided by widening differences in wealth, income and class.
The outpouring of grief evokes memories of the hundreds of thousands who staged the "People's Power revolution" that propelled Corazon Aquino to the presidency over the profligate dictator Ferdinand Marcos in February 1986. More than two decades later, the revolution has faded into a past little remembered by a new generation, while members of an affluent elite trade corruption charges and more than half the country's estimated 97 million people live in urban and rural slums on poverty line incomes.
With Aquino's death on Saturday at the age of 76, after a year-long battle with colon cancer, the dream is born again in an emotional outpouring over the ideals for which she battled long after her six-year term ended in 1992. Rather than consider a fresh bid for power, she campaigned to make certain her successor, Fidel Ramos, did not try after his election by a narrow margin as her successor to amend the constitution that limited the presidency to a single term.
Ramos, as armed deputy forces chief of staff, and Juan Ponce Enrile, the defense minister, were the major figures in the drama of Aquino's takeover as president and Marcos' flight, with his wife, Imelda, two daughters and son, and assorted cronies, to exile in Hawaii, where Marcos died in 1989. She was fighting just as hard to make certain that another woman, current President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, daughter of the president whom Marcos had defeated at the outset of his 20-year-rule, would not also try to find a way to extend her presidency.
It was Aquino who had personally overseen adoption of the constitution in 1987 and battled fiercely to preserve it to the end of her presidency, even as she ordered the country's porous, ill-equipped, graft-ridden armed forces to stave off seven attempts by military malcontents to drive her from office.
In her fight for survival, she counted on the loyalty of military leaders to the government to trump that of pro-Marcos "loyalists", some of them from the same factions on which Marcos had counted during eight years of martial law in which thousands of influential Filipinos, including Aquino's husband, Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino, were imprisoned.
Although People's Power was a peaceful movement in which no shots were fired, Aquino faced the danger of violent overthrow by pro-Marcos zealots as well as military idealists who saw her as a woman with little idea of what she was doing. A coup attempt in August 1987 was staged by members of the Reform Armed Forces Movement.
The same "movement" had spearheaded the anti-Marcos alliance after Aquino's husband Ninoy was gunned down after he got off a plane at Manila Airport, now Ninoy Aquino International Airport, as he returned from exile in the US in August 1983. Three years earlier, Ninoy had been released after years in prison to undergo heart surgery in Texas, after which he and Cory, as Aquino was known, moved to Boston and a fellowship at Harvard.
During this period the US-educated Cory, a graduate of a very proper private Catholic school and then a small Catholic college in New York, picked up some of the democratic ideals that infused the challenge she posed against Marcos when she refused to accept the obviously fixed results of a snap presidential election that he claimed to have won. She also deepened her relationship with the Philippines Catholic hierarchy, counting on the church, led by Cardinal Jamie Sin, for mass popular support.
Not known before her campaign for the presidency as a political thinker or activist, she found democracy enough of a rallying cry before enormous crowds shouting, "Cory, Cory, Cory." She added to the drama by wearing yellow dresses, reminiscent of the yellow ribbons that people were wearing to greet Ninoy when he defied warnings and insisted on flying into Manila on a flight with foreign journalists.
Landed legacy
Aquino as president aimed to restore democratic institutions, including election of senators and representatives and a court system independent of government pressure. In the end, however, there was little that Aquino could do about some of the Philippines' most pressing needs, notably a land reform program that would defy all the traditions and interests of her own enormously wealthy land-owning family, ensconced in their vast sugar-cane-rich estate at Luisita, in central Luzon north of Manila.
While she sought to bring back the trappings of democracy, skeptics realized the system was still in place - the rulers of the haciendas, the old cronies, the inheritors of fortunes in banking and real estate and hotels, sugar and coconuts and bananas, beer and airlines and electric power, remained as they were.
One crony might replace another, but the pattern endured - "a system of rent capitalism", observed political scientist Paul Hutchcroft, "based, ultimately, on the plunder of the state apparatus by powerful oligarchic interests". The term "booty capitalism", he said, described how the oligarchs were "plundering the state".
Aquino was known to have despised her cousin Edouardo "Danding" Cojuangco, one-time coconut king and one of Marcos' closest associates, but she as much as he was born of the system. A Cojuangco, of mixed Chinese, Spanish and Malay blood, like many of the wealthiest Filipinos, she could retreat to Luisita, the hacienda she would never abandon to a land reform program long advocated by the anti-Marcos partisans who so adored her.
In attempting to restore the appearance of democratic institutions, Aquino appeared strongly pro-American. She got a standing ovation after a triumphant address to the US Congress, which promptly voted $200 million in emergency aid. Nonetheless, she was lukewarm about the American bases, notably Clark Air Base in Angeles City, between Manila and Luisita, and the naval base on Subic Bay, in the city of Olongapo, across a line of mountains west of Angeles. Clark at the time was the largest US air base overseas and Subic Bay the biggest American naval base outside the US
In the face of a barrage of anti-American propaganda, overriding protestations of their value to the Philippine economy, influential Philippine senators responded with loud denunciations. A vote in the Philippine senate in September 1991 fell far short of the two-thirds majority needed to approve an agreement, approved by Aquino, that would have cost US taxpayers more than US$200 million a year in de facto rent for its 10-year duration - and might not have gotten through the US Congress.
In the next few months, as Clark Air Base was systematically looted with the connivance of Philippine military commanders, Aquino turned a blind eye to what was happening. The loss of the American bases did not, however, mean the end of the Philippine-American alliance, which endured over leftist protests. Nor did it mean the government would sympathize with communists banded together as the New People's Army (NPA).
After freeing the communist leader Jose Maria Sison, jailed under Marcos for violating the anti-subversion law that she repealed, Aquino authorized new charges against him for inciting revolution in speeches in the Netherlands. Five years later, in 1991, with "Joma" Sison in exile, she authorized "Operation Thunderbolt", including helicopter attacks on NPA hideouts and strongholds in the mountains and valleys of the island of Negros, forcing the flight of 35,000 people from their homes.
The government's offensives against the NPA - and against Muslim guerrillas in the south - did not diminish Aquino's belief in democratic ideals and institutions. In that spirit, she supported the movement to force the resignation of the corrupt president Joseph Estrada. He stepped down in early 2001 after demonstrations so huge as to be called "People's Power II".
And in the same spirit she called last year for the resignation of Arroyo, who was elevated from vice president to president after Estrada's ouster and later elected to the position in her own right in 2004. Always, Aquino's goal was to maintain the ideals of People Power I.
"We Filipinos showed the world what kind of people we are," she said in February 1996, 10 years after those days of glory. "We are a brave people, we are a prayerful people, and we know how to work with the peaceful process."
Donald Kirk covered the People Power Revolution of 1986, has visited the Philippines many times since then and is author ofLooted: the Philippines After the Bases (1998) and Philippines in Crisis: US Power versus Local Revolt (2005).
The outpouring of grief evokes memories of the hundreds of thousands who staged the "People's Power revolution" that propelled Corazon Aquino to the presidency over the profligate dictator Ferdinand Marcos in February 1986. More than two decades later, the revolution has faded into a past little remembered by a new generation, while members of an affluent elite trade corruption charges and more than half the country's estimated 97 million people live in urban and rural slums on poverty line incomes.
With Aquino's death on Saturday at the age of 76, after a year-long battle with colon cancer, the dream is born again in an emotional outpouring over the ideals for which she battled long after her six-year term ended in 1992. Rather than consider a fresh bid for power, she campaigned to make certain her successor, Fidel Ramos, did not try after his election by a narrow margin as her successor to amend the constitution that limited the presidency to a single term.
Ramos, as armed deputy forces chief of staff, and Juan Ponce Enrile, the defense minister, were the major figures in the drama of Aquino's takeover as president and Marcos' flight, with his wife, Imelda, two daughters and son, and assorted cronies, to exile in Hawaii, where Marcos died in 1989. She was fighting just as hard to make certain that another woman, current President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, daughter of the president whom Marcos had defeated at the outset of his 20-year-rule, would not also try to find a way to extend her presidency.
It was Aquino who had personally overseen adoption of the constitution in 1987 and battled fiercely to preserve it to the end of her presidency, even as she ordered the country's porous, ill-equipped, graft-ridden armed forces to stave off seven attempts by military malcontents to drive her from office.
In her fight for survival, she counted on the loyalty of military leaders to the government to trump that of pro-Marcos "loyalists", some of them from the same factions on which Marcos had counted during eight years of martial law in which thousands of influential Filipinos, including Aquino's husband, Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino, were imprisoned.
Although People's Power was a peaceful movement in which no shots were fired, Aquino faced the danger of violent overthrow by pro-Marcos zealots as well as military idealists who saw her as a woman with little idea of what she was doing. A coup attempt in August 1987 was staged by members of the Reform Armed Forces Movement.
The same "movement" had spearheaded the anti-Marcos alliance after Aquino's husband Ninoy was gunned down after he got off a plane at Manila Airport, now Ninoy Aquino International Airport, as he returned from exile in the US in August 1983. Three years earlier, Ninoy had been released after years in prison to undergo heart surgery in Texas, after which he and Cory, as Aquino was known, moved to Boston and a fellowship at Harvard.
During this period the US-educated Cory, a graduate of a very proper private Catholic school and then a small Catholic college in New York, picked up some of the democratic ideals that infused the challenge she posed against Marcos when she refused to accept the obviously fixed results of a snap presidential election that he claimed to have won. She also deepened her relationship with the Philippines Catholic hierarchy, counting on the church, led by Cardinal Jamie Sin, for mass popular support.
Not known before her campaign for the presidency as a political thinker or activist, she found democracy enough of a rallying cry before enormous crowds shouting, "Cory, Cory, Cory." She added to the drama by wearing yellow dresses, reminiscent of the yellow ribbons that people were wearing to greet Ninoy when he defied warnings and insisted on flying into Manila on a flight with foreign journalists.
Landed legacy
Aquino as president aimed to restore democratic institutions, including election of senators and representatives and a court system independent of government pressure. In the end, however, there was little that Aquino could do about some of the Philippines' most pressing needs, notably a land reform program that would defy all the traditions and interests of her own enormously wealthy land-owning family, ensconced in their vast sugar-cane-rich estate at Luisita, in central Luzon north of Manila.
While she sought to bring back the trappings of democracy, skeptics realized the system was still in place - the rulers of the haciendas, the old cronies, the inheritors of fortunes in banking and real estate and hotels, sugar and coconuts and bananas, beer and airlines and electric power, remained as they were.
One crony might replace another, but the pattern endured - "a system of rent capitalism", observed political scientist Paul Hutchcroft, "based, ultimately, on the plunder of the state apparatus by powerful oligarchic interests". The term "booty capitalism", he said, described how the oligarchs were "plundering the state".
Aquino was known to have despised her cousin Edouardo "Danding" Cojuangco, one-time coconut king and one of Marcos' closest associates, but she as much as he was born of the system. A Cojuangco, of mixed Chinese, Spanish and Malay blood, like many of the wealthiest Filipinos, she could retreat to Luisita, the hacienda she would never abandon to a land reform program long advocated by the anti-Marcos partisans who so adored her.
In attempting to restore the appearance of democratic institutions, Aquino appeared strongly pro-American. She got a standing ovation after a triumphant address to the US Congress, which promptly voted $200 million in emergency aid. Nonetheless, she was lukewarm about the American bases, notably Clark Air Base in Angeles City, between Manila and Luisita, and the naval base on Subic Bay, in the city of Olongapo, across a line of mountains west of Angeles. Clark at the time was the largest US air base overseas and Subic Bay the biggest American naval base outside the US
In the face of a barrage of anti-American propaganda, overriding protestations of their value to the Philippine economy, influential Philippine senators responded with loud denunciations. A vote in the Philippine senate in September 1991 fell far short of the two-thirds majority needed to approve an agreement, approved by Aquino, that would have cost US taxpayers more than US$200 million a year in de facto rent for its 10-year duration - and might not have gotten through the US Congress.
In the next few months, as Clark Air Base was systematically looted with the connivance of Philippine military commanders, Aquino turned a blind eye to what was happening. The loss of the American bases did not, however, mean the end of the Philippine-American alliance, which endured over leftist protests. Nor did it mean the government would sympathize with communists banded together as the New People's Army (NPA).
After freeing the communist leader Jose Maria Sison, jailed under Marcos for violating the anti-subversion law that she repealed, Aquino authorized new charges against him for inciting revolution in speeches in the Netherlands. Five years later, in 1991, with "Joma" Sison in exile, she authorized "Operation Thunderbolt", including helicopter attacks on NPA hideouts and strongholds in the mountains and valleys of the island of Negros, forcing the flight of 35,000 people from their homes.
The government's offensives against the NPA - and against Muslim guerrillas in the south - did not diminish Aquino's belief in democratic ideals and institutions. In that spirit, she supported the movement to force the resignation of the corrupt president Joseph Estrada. He stepped down in early 2001 after demonstrations so huge as to be called "People's Power II".
And in the same spirit she called last year for the resignation of Arroyo, who was elevated from vice president to president after Estrada's ouster and later elected to the position in her own right in 2004. Always, Aquino's goal was to maintain the ideals of People Power I.
"We Filipinos showed the world what kind of people we are," she said in February 1996, 10 years after those days of glory. "We are a brave people, we are a prayerful people, and we know how to work with the peaceful process."
Donald Kirk covered the People Power Revolution of 1986, has visited the Philippines many times since then and is author ofLooted: the Philippines After the Bases (1998) and Philippines in Crisis: US Power versus Local Revolt (2005).
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