The Philippines Anatomy of a Revolution

TIME

Monday, Mar. 10, 1986

"Senator, what do you think? Should I step down?"

It was the second time that Paul Laxalt, the Nevada Republican and personal friend of Ronald Reagan's, had spoken that day with Ferdinand Marcos, the beleaguered President of the Philippines. At 2 o'clock (EST) last Monday afternoon, Marcos telephoned Laxalt, who had visited Manila in October as a special emissary, with an urgent question: Was it true, as U.S. Ambassador Stephen Bosworth had told him, that President Reagan was calling for a "peaceful transition to a new government" in the Philippines? While the two men talked, Laxalt said later, it became apparent that Marcos was "hanging on, looking for a life preserver. He was a desperate man clutching at straws." He asked whether the reference to a "peaceful transition" meant he should stay on until 1987, when his current term was originally supposed to end, and he wondered whether some sort of power-sharing arrangement with the Philippine opposition could be worked out.

Marcos spoke of his fear that his palace was about to be attacked, but seemed determined to stay on as President. At Marcos' request, Laxalt then went to the White House, where he discussed the conversation with Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz. The President repeated his desire for a peaceful, negotiated settlement in the Philippines and said once more that Marcos would be welcome if he decided to seek sanctuary in the U.S. But Reagan said he thought the idea of power sharing was impractical and that it would be undignified for Marcos to stay on as a "consultant."

At 4:15 p.m. Laxalt called Marcos, who immediately asked whether Reagan wanted him to step down. Laxalt said the President was not in a position to make that kind of demand. Then Marcos put the question directly to Laxalt: What should he do? Replied the Senator: "Mr. President, I'm not bound by diplomatic restraint. I'm talking only for myself. I think you should cut and cut cleanly. The time has come." There was a long pause that to Laxalt seemed interminable. Finally he asked, "Mr. President, are you still there?" Marcos replied, in a subdued voice, "Yes, I'm still here. I am so very, very disappointed."

In Manila it was after 5 o'clock in the morning of the longest day of Ferdinand Marcos' life. Before it was over, he would attend his final inauguration ceremony, a foolish charade carried out in the sanctuary of his Malacanang Palace. That evening, a ruler no more, he would flee with his family and retainers aboard four American helicopters to Clark Air Base on the first leg of a flight that would take him to Guam, Hawaii and exile.

That same night, to mark the end of his increasingly authoritarian 20-year rule, millions of his countrymen would stage one of the biggest celebrations in the Philippines since its deliverance from the Japanese in 1945 and its independence from the U.S. in 1946. At the Malacanang Palace, giddy with excitement, hundreds of Filipinos would scale fences and storm their way through locked doors in order to glimpse--and in some cases to loot--the ornate Spanish-style palace that had served as Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos' seat of almost absolute power.

If there was something inexplicable about the mass phenomenon that rescued the island nation from a failing dictatorship, enabling thousands of unarmed civilians to protect one faction of the armed forces from the other, there was no doubt when the process began. It was Aug. 21, 1983, on the tarmac at Manila international airport. On that day, Opposition Politician Benigno ("Ninoy") Aquino Jr., 50, returning from three years of self-imposed exile in the U.S., was slain by a single bullet as he stepped off a jetliner into a crowd of soldiers and well-wishers. Though Marcos tried to put the blame on Communist agitators, one Filipino civilian and 25 members of the military, including General Fabian Ver, the armed forces Chief of Staff and Marcos stalwart, were indicted on charges of conspiracy to commit murder. The defendants were acquitted in December after a yearlong trial, but few Filipinos doubted their guilt.

The Aquino murder shocked and angered the country, sparking popular demonstrations and intensifying the disaffection with Marcos. It infuriated thousands of professional military men, who bitterly resented the politicization that the armed forces were undergoing and the hatred that this process was engendering. Of the assassination, Colonel Gregorio Honosan says today, "From a military viewpoint, it is technically impossible to get inside a cordon of 2,000 men, so this reinforced our belief that nobody in government could be safe."

The assassination produced a sharp increase in the size and intensity of Communist guerrilla activity by the military organization called the New People's Army. Though the insurgency is concentrated on Mindanao and some other southern islands, it spread after the Aquino assassination to 60 of the country's 74 provinces. In addition, the killing of Aquino created a nationwide crisis of confidence that caused the already stagnant economy to spiral downward, even as most other Southeast Asian nations were prospering. After the assassination, says an American official, "all these concerns took a quantum leap."

Two of the most important elements of Philippine society, the church and the military, began quickly turning against Marcos. The Archbishop of Manila, Jaime Cardinal Sin, is a powerful figure in a country nominally 85% Roman Catholic, and his opposition to Marcos was clear. He increasingly and openly encouraged opposition political figures.

The revolt in the armed forces began to take shape as long ago as 1977, when a power struggle within the Marcos government eroded the influence of the President's longtime political ally Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile. "It began as a self-defense action," recalls Navy Captain Rex Robles, a spokesman for the Reform the Armed Forces Movement, which Enrile now confirms he clandestinely helped establish. Realizing that he was being pushed aside in a power struggle with General Ver, Enrile, a Harvard-trained lawyer, began to work secretly to protect himself and lay the groundwork for the inevitable post-Marcos period.

Late last fall events began to move rapidly. In November, Marcos declared that he would hold a special presidential election to convince the Reagan Administration that he still enjoyed popular support. A month later, immediately following the acquittal of Ver, Corazon Aquino announced that she would challenge Marcos for the presidency. Cardinal Sin then helped persuade former Senator Salvador Laurel to join the Aquino ticket. In the meantime Enrile had been building his reform-movement, a highly visible band of about 100 well-trained soldiers whose aim was not to topple Marcos but to pressure him to reorganize the military. Throughout the election campaign, while Enrile publicly supported Marcos, his reformers conducted a crusade for honest voting that angered the President and the Ver faction in the military. The reformers in turn were enraged by the strong-arm methods used by the pro-Marcos forces in the vote counting, and even more by the assassination of Evelio Javier, a leading opposition figure. Nonetheless they remained inactive because they wanted to appear impartial. The military men had already established links with Corazon Aquino, and before the campaign had helped train her security detail.

Once the voting was over, the reformers prepared to take a more active part in the efforts to topple Marcos. By this time they had won the support of some of the Marcos family's closest security forces. Says one reformist: "I don't think the President thought that so many of his praetorian guards would turn against him. He thought money could buy loyalty. He underestimated the basic decency of Filipinos." The group tested palace security by smuggling cars filled with empty boxes into the palace grounds. Since nobody bothered to stop them, they realized they would be able to bring in explosives if they should choose to do so. Two weeks ago the reformers learned that they were in imminent danger. As the first step in a byzantine crackdown, Marcos arrested a group of soldiers. Though these troops were not members of the reform movement, the reformers theorized that the men would be used to incriminate them. The rebels suspected that the threatened crackdown was a maneuver by Ver and his supporters to reinforce their links with Marcos. At the same time, however, there were reports that some sort of coup might actually be in the making.

Immediately the reformers decided to accelerate their plans. They reached Enrile, who was sitting in the coffeehouse in the Atrium building in Makati, and informed him of what was happening. On Saturday, Feb. 22, Enrile resigned from the government and announced that he was joining the opposition forces. Some of Enrile's reformist colleagues tried to convince him that such a move would merely forewarn Marcos of the group's intentions, but he insisted, "I just cannot do this to the President otherwise."

The decision made, he sought Lieut. General Fidel Ramos' help. "I called Eddie. I had never discussed anything with him over the years, except in terms of the reform movement's general lack of aggressive intentions and its interest in institutional change. I told him, 'My boys are in this predicament, and I will have to be with them. I would like to find out whether you will join us or not.' General Ramos said, 'I am with you all the way.' "

At the moment of showdown, Cardinal Sin again played a crucial role. He publicly praised Enrile and Ramos, and called on the Philippine people to take to the streets in peaceful support of them. Radio Veritas, the Catholic station, became the unofficial broadcaster of the rebellion, reporting on military units that had joined the opposition and giving instructions to crowds.

In the end the ailing Marcos, who is reported to be suffering from a form of systemic lupus erythematosus, a disease in which human antibodies attack the body's tissue, especially the kidneys, was woefully uninformed as to what the reformers were really up to and how much support they had gained. Says Enrile: "Evidently the President was a captive of a group in the military. That was the sad thing about it."

Reagan Administration policy during the final hours of the Marcos reign was set during a meeting last Sunday morning in the Bethesda, Md., home of Secretary of State George Shultz, at which the President's special envoy, Philip Habib, who had returned from Manila only hours before, presented a report on his trip. In attendance were Caspar Weinberger, the Secretary of Defense; Admiral William Crowe Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Robert Gates, deputy director for intelligence of the Central Intelligence Agency; and John Poindexter, the National Security Adviser. Also present were three officials who had been preoccupied with the Philippine crisis for months: Michael Armacost, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs; Paul Wolfowitz, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs; and Richard Armitage, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy.

The group agreed on four principles, which were subsequently presented to President Reagan: Marcos' ability to govern with the consent of his people had ended; any effort by him to crush the reform movement would only worsen the situation; it was of great importance to the U.S. that force not be used; and it would be damaging to U.S. standing in the world if Marcos were treated like the Shah of Iran, who was admitted to the U.S. for medical treatment but was not permitted by the Carter Administration to remain. As it turned out, Marcos was less worried about the fate of the Shah than about what happened to Ngo Dinh Diem, the South Vietnamese President who was assassinated during a 1963 coup. Says one senior American official: "He wanted to make sure he did not leave with a bullet."

President Reagan, who had once solidly supported Marcos, quickly accepted the four-point policy. Reagan's views had already been shifting during the previous three weeks. Indeed, in response to Marcos' deteriorating situation, he had moved rapidly from his dismaying remark after the election that there had probably been voting fraud on both sides to a White House statement condemning the election as fatally flawed by fraud, most of it on the part of the Marcos forces.

At a Sunday-afternoon meeting of the National Security Council, Special Envoy Habib reported flatly, "The Marcos era has ended." Shultz summarized the views of the participants by saying that "not a person here" believed Marcos could remain in power, adding, "He's had it." President Reagan agreed but remained concerned about the fate of Marcos. Said Reagan: "We'll treat this man in retirement with dignity. He is not to wander."

By then the Administration was emphasizing as strongly as possible that Marcos should avoid a military showdown. On Saturday, Reagan sent the Philippine leader an appeal not to use force to remain in power. Next day he dispatched a second message, advising Marcos that he as well as his family and close associates was welcome to live in the U.S. White House Spokesman Larry Speakes announced that American military aid to the Philippines would be cut off if troops loyal to Marcos used the army against the Philippine reform movement forces led by Enrile and Ramos. On Sunday evening, Shultz and Under Secretary of State Armacost met at the State Department with Blas Ople, Marcos' Minister of Labor, who had come to Washington to plead the Philippine President's case. According to Ople, the American diplomats gave him a blunt message: Marcos had lost control of his army, the troops under General Ver were ineffectual, and if Marcos did not step down, the country could be heading for civil war. A similar statement was sent to the U.S. Ambassador in Manila, Stephen Bosworth, who took it to Marcos.

It was early Monday morning before Ople finally managed to talk to Marcos by telephone. The Philippine President was angry that while his palace was being threatened and his television station taken over, the U.S. was telling him not to defend himself. He told Ople that Mrs. Marcos was there beside him and "she doesn't want to leave." Later that day, at about the same time Marcos was calling Senator Laxalt, Imelda Marcos telephoned Nancy Reagan. The message was the same: Mrs. Reagan urged the Marcoses to avoid bloodshed, expressed concern for their family, and assured Mrs. Marcos that they were welcome to come to the U.S.

The Administration was worried about General Ver, who on Monday was still in a position to attempt a last-gasp military move. There were reports that he was about to send tanks to attack the reformers. Accordingly, the National Security Council sent a message to Ver advising him that it would not be in his "interest" to make a military move. Translation: if he called out troops, he would forfeit his chance of being included in the Marcos rescue operation. The warning was heeded.

In the period following the Aquino assassination, American policymakers had become increasingly concerned about the Philippines' rapid political and economic decline. One particular concern was the future status of the two large U.S. military installations in the Philippines, Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base. The leases on those facilities will run out in 1991, but the U.S. hopes that they can be renegotiated. Following a 1984 policy review by the National Security Council, which concluded that Marcos would "try to remain in power indefinitely," the Administration began to work for economic, political and military reform in the Philippines. Shultz laid down the overriding principle: the U.S. must be loyal to the institutions of democracy, not to Marcos.

In October, Reagan sent Senator Laxalt to Manila to tell Marcos that changes had to be made. Said Laxalt last week: "He was getting messages through State, but he just wasn't believing them." Laxalt told him that the Philippine army had to spend more time dealing with the Communist insurgents.

Pressure on Marcos was also building in the U.S. Congress. Senator Richard Lugar, Indiana Republican and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, who headed an official American team of poll watchers that observed the elections, concluded that there had been many instances of fraud, vote tampering, violence and intimidation by Marcos partisans. In a telephone conversation with Marcos just after the voting, Laxalt observed that certain aspects of the elections had been "rather strange," such as reports that Marcos had carried one province by a vote of 13,000 to 0. That was not a province, it was a precinct, said Marcos, and "it was family." When Laxalt answered, "I doubt very much if I ran in my home district I would get all the votes of my family," Marcos, who knew that the Senator's parents were French Basque immigrants, replied, "Well, Filipinos are more clannish than you independent Basques."

Washington's fear of a bloodbath was not unfounded. Early Monday morning a crowd of Marcos supporters armed with batons and tear gas moved toward Camp Crame, where the reformers were gathered. Over transistor radios, Marcos was ! heard vowing, "We'll wipe them out. It is obvious they are committing a rebellion." And over Radio Veritas came Enrile's reply, "I am not going to surrender."

Tanks arrived. When helicopters from the 15th strike wing of the air force began circling overhead, it looked as if the reformist rebellion was all over. If the choppers had fired into the Enrile-Ramos headquarters, the reformers would have been helpless. But then the choppers landed, and out came airmen waving white flags and giving the "L" sign for laban (fight), a symbol of the opposition. Suddenly the crowd, realizing that the air force was now defecting, went wild.

Perhaps the most ominous moment came that same morning, shortly after Marcos announced on a televised news conference that he was declaring a state of emergency. At that point his armed forces Chief of Staff, General Ver, whispered to Marcos in a voice that was audible to the whole nation, "Sir, we are ready to annihilate them at your orders . . . We are left with no option but to attack." Marcos did not respond. Whether he knew it or not, his failure to move swiftly against Enrile and Ramos, one of the more honorable acts of his tarnished presidency, had already cost him the office he was fighting so desperately to retain.

Instead he went on with his press conference, but at 8:47 he was interrupted in mid-sentence as the government-run television station, Channel 4, suddenly went off the air. When it reappeared three hours later, the newscaster jubilantly declared, "This is the first free broadcast of Channel 4 . . . The people have taken over." Beside him was Colonel Mariano Santiago, who until last year had been the Marcos-appointed chairman of the country's Board of Transportation. To many Filipinos, the seizure of Channel 4 was one of the most remarkable events of an endlessly astonishing week.

Tuesday was the day of the twin inaugurals. Aquino had wanted a daylight ceremony because, as she said in her address, "it is fitting and proper that, as the rights and liberties of our people were taken away at midnight 14 years ago (when martial law was declared), the people should formally recover those rights and liberties in the full light of day." An hour later Ferdinand Marcos stepped onto the balcony at Malacanang Palace before a crowd of 4,000 cheering supporters and took the oath of office. "Whatever we have before us, we will overcome," he promised, while Imelda vowed to serve the people "all my life up to my last breath." Though she was choked with emotion, few people outside the palace sensed that this was to be the Marcoses' farewell. Then the Marcoses sang favorite songs, at one point offering a duet to the cheers of the invited guests. Conspicuously absent was Marcos' Vice President, Arturo Tolentino, who later said that he had not wanted to take the oath of office because he hoped to play an intermediary role between Marcos and the reformists.

An hour after the ceremony, Marcos telephoned Enrile and demanded that he "stop firing at the palace." Enrile said he had no troops there. Marcos asked him to call Ambassador Bosworth to find out if the U.S. could provide the Marcoses with security in flying out of the palace. Enrile promised to do so. Marcos had previously raised the possibility of retiring to Ilocos Norte, his home province in the northern Philippines, but had been discouraged from doing so by his family and by the new government. At 9:05 p.m., four American helicopters picked up the President, Imelda and a contingent of relatives and aides, including General Ver, and flew them to the U.S. air base.

As the week ended, Reagan Administration policymakers breathed a great sigh of relief that their plans and strategies, so painstakingly worked out over the past two years, had gone so well. Both Republicans and Democrats praised the handling of the Philippine crisis. Officials counted themselves incredibly lucky. Noting that events had passed without appreciable bloodshed, a senior U.S. official in Washington ruefully remarked that the Lord surely looks after "fools, children, the Philippines and the U.S.A."

After its initial concern about how the inexperienced Corazon Aquino would fare as President, the Administration was relieved that she gave important jobs to Laurel, Enrile, Ramos and other centrists, and adopted so conciliatory a tone toward her former opponents. Already there were hints of trouble ahead over the Marcoses' relocation, whether they decided to settle in Hawaii, California, New York or elsewhere, and over the legal status of Marcos' properties abroad. Though Marcos' only known income was his presidential salary of $5,700 a year, the Central Intelligence Agency has reportedly estimated the value of his family's worldwide holdings at perhaps $2 billion. New York's Democratic Congressman Stephen Solarz observed mildly last week, "There is a strong presumption that he had a very good financial adviser ^ or acquired the millions of dollars he has through presumptively improper means." Aboard the plane that carried Marcos to Hawaii, federal authorities found $1.2 million in Philippine currency, and another planeload of Marcos' personal effects arrived at week's end. Solarz said that while he thought it was appropriate for Reagan to offer Marcos sanctuary, the President had certainly not offered Marcos "immunity against civil proceedings brought by the government of the Philippines to recover a fortune stolen from the Philippines."

But for the moment the Administration was relieved to have passed the center of the storm. Even as he praised Marcos for his "difficult and courageous decision" to step down, Reagan congratulated Aquino on the "democratic outcome" of the elections and promised to work closely with her government in rebuilding the Philippine economy and armed forces.


Source: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,960859,00.html

Going into the Streets

TIME

Monday, Feb. 24, 1986

As a parody of democracy, the scene had a certain dramatic charm. Until they were ordered into silence, hundreds of colorfully dressed spectators in the galleries of the Philippine National Assembly cheered and booed passionately as politicians on the turquoise-carpeted floor below walked through their parts. One at a time, brown envelopes containing vote totals from each of the country's 147 voting centers were presented to the legislators for inspection. Tallies were read aloud, and results posted on green tote boards that were lined up before the 200 mahogany desks of the Assembly. Charges flew that some envelopes were improperly sealed, that entire towns had been eliminated from some of the tallying documents. Jeers and accusations rocketed back and forth, and recording the objections to all the voting certificates took hours.

Inexorably, the charade moved the Philippines closer to a new turning point in a potentially explosive national drama. At week's end the National Assembly, dominated by members of President Ferdinand Marcos' ruling New Society Movement, produced its tally after angry opposition members walked out of the legislative hall to protest government railroad tactics. The rump gathering declared that Marcos, 68, had defeated his presidential rival, Corazon ("Cory") Aquino, 53, by 10,807,179 votes to 9,491,716.

Thus, in a final travesty of parliamentary procedure, the Assembly formally declared that Marcos had been re-elected President, in an election whose outcome had been shaped by vote buying, intimidation, outright fraud and bloodshed. The legislative body also proclaimed the election of Marcos' running mate, Arturo Tolentino, 75, ending weeks of speculation that the autocrat might find a way to include Aquino's vice-presidential running mate, Salvador Laurel, 57, in his newly refurbished government.

As the counting proceeded in the cool confines of the Assembly building, each vote recorded for Marcos added anger and outrage to the tension building across the far-flung archipelago. Tentatively but with increasing signs of determination, Aquino supporters were starting to take their frustrations into the streets. Wav- ing clenched fists and chanting "Fight! Fight!," thousands of Filipinos marched in a 13-mile procession through the capital. They escorted the flag-draped coffin of Evelio Javier, 43, a regional Aquino campaign chairman who had been brutally gunned down days earlier in the province of Antique. Though far smaller in scale, the Javier funeral demonstration reminded many Filipinos of the huge outpourings of grief that followed the 1983 assassination of Aquino's husband Benigno Aquino Jr.

Meanwhile, the 104-member Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines added its powerful voice to the clamor of those who claimed that Marcos had stolen the election. After a two-day meeting, the clerics sharply attacked Marcos by asserting that "a government that assumes or maintains power through fraudulent means has no moral basis." To those who agreed with them, the bishops issued a call for a "nonviolent struggle for justice."

Watching closely was the slight, determined figure of Corazon Aquino. The quiet widow who had turned into candidate and crusader, who had ignited a popular passion for change during her 57-day election campaign, continued to insist last week that she rather than Marcos was the rightful President of the Philippines. Deliberately ignoring the National Assembly hoopla, Aquino went on the personal offensive. She staged a giant rally in Manila's Rizal Park on Sunday to protest Marcos' alleged election fraud. That event was the kickoff of a protracted "People's Victory" campaign of nonviolent rallies and boycotts in coming weeks around the country.

The culmination of the Victory plan would be a nationwide general strike, accompanied by other acts of civil disobedience. Aquino's goal was to make Marcos relinquish the power he has wielded from the presidential Malacanang Palace since 1966. Said she: "Let me appeal to all friends of democracy and supporters of freedom abroad. Stand tall by these principles that you and I hold dear."

Slowly but steadily, political events in the Philippines seemed to be rolling to- ward a point of no return. Where the pro- cess might lead was unforseeable. Once again the wily, ailing Marcos had seem- ingly entrenched himself by nominally democratic means, a strategy he has used on four occasions since 1972. But this time his victory, and his subsequent authority, seemed more hollow than ever.

Suddenly there was a prospect of dramatic political unrest and repression in the former U.S. colony, which might ultimately pose a threat to the two important U.S. military bases on the islands, Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base. The growing confrontation promised to redound to the benefit of the increasingly powerful Communist New People's Army, whose insurgency will soon, in the Pentagon's view, pose a real military challenge to the Marcos regime.

Few people had more reason to be concerned at the latest turn of events than President Reagan. Increasingly, the White House found itself on the spot in what Richard Holbrooke, a former Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs, called "the most serious foreign policy crisis this Administration has faced."

As part of a U.S. bid to solve the crisis, Philip Habib, 65, a specially appointed U.S. envoy, late last week flew at President Reagan's behest to Manila. Habib's mission: to find some way of reconciling the opposing Aquino and Marcos political camps. On arrival, the diplomat immediately closeted himself for the weekend with members of the U.S. embassy staff.

Even as Habib winged on his way, the Administration was preparing to issue its statement in reaction to Marcos' proclaimed re-election. Among other things, it declared that the election had been "marred by widespread fraud and violence perpetrated by the ruling party." So extreme was the misdoing, the statement continued, that the election's credibility was "called into question, both within the Philippines and in the U.S." The White House then called on "all responsible Filipinos" to seek peaceful ways to achieve "stability in their society" and to avoid violence.

The Saturday statement, which Administration aides touted as a "major blow to Marcos," was the White House's way of extricating itself from a controversy over its earlier reaction to the questionable Philippine election. As official U.S. observers brought back eyewitness reports of widespread election cheating by Marcos supporters, President Reagan's response had been less outraged than many members of his own Administration would have liked --and than many Americans, treated to an unparalleled and intimate view of a foreign election, expected from their President. At a Tuesday news conference, Reagan had ventured the possibility that fraud "was occurring on both sides."

Reagan's words led to a flurry of congressional responses that might . ultimately end in a bid to cut off all U.S. aid to the Marcos regime. Said Democratic Representative Steven Solarz of Brooklyn, chairman of the House subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs: "How we handle aid will be the test of how credibly we have disassociated ourselves from a discredited dictator."

Perhaps even more important to the Reagan Administration than the congressional reaction was a sudden freezing of relations between U.S. diplomats and the increasingly assertive members of the anti-Marcos opposition. Aquino charged the White House with tilting in favor of election theft, and anti-American demonstrations took place in front of the U.S. embassy in Manila. For his part, Marcos seized on Reagan's ill-considered remarks to try to bolster his own position.

The Reagan response raised a broader question of what exactly Washington could do to affect the political course in the Philippines, both to protect important U.S. interests and to further Filipino democracy. To many Administration critics, the answer seemed to lie in some form of anti-Marcos sanctions, but at the White House the problem was seen as more complex than that. Said an Administration official: "We're trying to stay as neutral as possible, gently pushing Marcos into making accommodations with the other side."

Neutrality had been the banner that the Administration carried into the Feb. 7 elections. Washington's oft-stated preference during the Philippine campaign was only for a fair and credible balloting process. The unprecedented foreign-press coverage meant that the campaign was scrutinized almost as if it were a U.S. election. Marcos and Aquino appeared repeatedly on interview shows; U.S. television networks sent anchors to Manila to broadcast the election finale.

What Americans saw on their television sets came as a shock. U.S. viewers were treated to a vivid documentation of Marcos supporters buying votes with money and rice, of poll watchers from the opposition who were beaten and shot after they tried to protect ballot boxes, of voting rolls that failed to include countless Aquino supporters but listed improbable numbers of pro- government voters.

The images of skulduggery at the polls were enhanced by the vast divergence in voting tallies that soon emerged between the official, Marcos-dominated Commission on Elections (comelec) and the volunteer watchdog organization known as the National Citizens Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL). At times COMELEC had Marcos leading by as many as 600,000 votes, while NAMFREL showed Aquino ahead by about the same number.

The sheer range and flagrancy of the cheating charged against the Marcos camp were impossible to ignore. Nonetheless, the Reagan Administration held back its comments pending the return from Manila of Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar, who, along with 19 other delegates appointed by the President, monitored the voting. In interviews on the scene, almost all the observers professed themselves shocked by what they had seen. But even as the Lugar delegation arrived in Washington, the Administration was speaking in a variety of increasingly dissonant voices about how the election results should be viewed and how the U.S. should respond to them.

Privately, many lower- and middle-level U.S. diplomats were outraged by what they considered gross abuses of the democratic process by Marcos supporters. But on Monday, Deputy State Department Spokesman Charles Redman tried to put a conciliatory gloss on the tumultuous balloting process. Whoever was eventually declared the winner, he said, the U.S. hoped that "the two sides can get together to avoid violence." President Reagan struck almost the same note that day in a White House meeting with a group of regional U.S. newspaper editors. While noting that he was "concerned" about reports of election fraud, Reagan declared that the Administration wanted "to help in any way we can . . . so that the two parties can come together."

Those sentiments took on a more assertive tone at a White House press briefing. Spokesman Larry Speakes stated flatly that when the hotly disputed election results were "complete," both sides should "work to form a viable government without violence." A senior White House official was even blunter. Said he: "The main thrust of our statement is not to have demonstrations in the streets just because you did not like the election. A strong government is essential to maintain a peaceful resolution of the problems that face the Filipinos."

The White House remarks could only be interpreted as a warning for Challenger Aquino. The deeply religious mother of five had warned throughout the election campaign that street protests were likely if Marcos cheated during the balloting. But the White House remarks also reflected a more conservative view of the still simmering Philippine election crisis than that held by many officials at the State Department. Simply stated, the dilemma as seen on Pennsylvania Avenue was how to strike a balance between condemnation of Marcos' activities and support for the stability of an important Pacific ally. As a senior White House official later put it, "We're in a no-win situation at this point. If we accent the fraud, it gives Marcos an excuse to throw out the election. If we side with Aquino, it's a signal to her to take to the streets. We're opting for stability, that's the key word."

Whether the White House chose the correct way to achieve that objective is another question. If the Administration stressed stability above all else, it risked giving the impression that it was siding with Marcos. That was very unlikely to make him change his ways, and could conceivably give a helping hand to the country's radical left.

But behind the choice of language was an assessment that for all the uproar following the voting, President Marcos still had the upper hand, at least in the short term. There were no signs last week, for example, that the country's 230,000-member armed forces were about to disintegrate in Marcos' hands. Said a White House official: "It's obvious that Marcos has control."

Above all, White House concern continued to focus on the two U.S. military bases, Clark and Subic Bay. Some U.S. officials feared that if Aquino ever took power, she would prove more susceptible to leftist pressure to remove the bases from Philippine territory. Others were concerned that an Aquino government would be unequipped to cope with the growing Philippine insurgency. Many simply did not believe that Aquino could ever wrest power from Marcos with anything less than armed force.

At the same time, the Philippine President's grave problems with systemic lupus erythematosus, a disease that frequently attacks the kidneys, make it likely that there will be a change in power in the country before too long. Said a senior Administration official: "Marcos isn't going to last forever. We're trying to help hold things together over there until some of the personal obstacles to change are gone."

That line of argument came most strongly last week from National Security Adviser John Poindexter and his staff expert on Asian affairs, Gaston Sigur. Among others who reportedly felt the same way was White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan, an ex-Marine, who said on This Week with David Brinkley last ; month that the U.S. would condemn any electoral fraud, but added that "if it's a duly elected government, so certified, you'd have to do business with it."

There was a competitive edge to the White House analysis. Some staffers apparently felt that the State Department, and in particular U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines Stephen Bosworth, had prejudged the Philippine election. Said a White House official: "They in effect told us that unless Aquino won, that would be proof positive of widespread vote fraud. That falls into the realm of prognostication and outside diplomacy."

Finally, there still seemed to be a question in at least some White House minds about Aquino's qualifications for running the country. The Administration had previously said that it could work well with either presidential candidate. Last week, however, one White House official said in exasperation, "How State thinks that Aquino can govern on her own is just beyond us."

State Department staffers were dismayed by the statements that emerged from the Speakes briefing. The diplomats at Foggy Bottom requested a "clarification" of the White House views. But before that request was formally answered, President Reagan held a 40-minute meeting at the White House on Tuesday with the returning Lugar.

The Reagan-Lugar meeting was an ambiguous exercise. Sitting in on the session were Poindexter, Regan, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and Secretary of State George Shultz. Lugar spent much of his energy at the meeting trying to convince the skeptical majority of his Executive Branch audience that they should not give up too soon on support for the unobstructed democratic process in the Philippines. The normally terse Senator spoke movingly of brave souls like an ordinary Filipino housewife who confronted armed thugs in order to defend her ballot. He urged the White House not to resign itself to a Marcos victory too quickly.

Reagan replied with an anecdote of his own. He told of a Marcos election worker who had allegedly pitched a supply of Aquino ballots into a ditch, and he doubted aloud that anyone would try to cheat by doing that. Said the President: "If he was really trying to get away with fraud, you'd think he'd have burned those ballots."

When the President emerged from that session, he mollified some State Department concerns by describing the Philippine elections as "flawed" and "disturbing." He announced the appointment of Special Envoy Habib as a would-be mediator. The choice was shrewd. A tireless career diplomat, Habib is a veteran Asia hand who retired from the Foreign Service in 1983 after serving as the President's special emissary to the Middle East. Habib's new job, said Reagan, would be to advise on how the U.S. can "help the people of the Philippines overcome the grave problems their country faces, and to continue to work for essential reforms."

Less than five hours later, the President stunned Senator Lugar and most of the other election observers with his casual but devastating news-conference remarks. Reagan said Lugar's delegation had briefed him on the "appearance of fraud" during the voting. Then he said the observers had told him that "they didn't have any hard evidence beyond that general appearance." At this point he got in real trouble by adding that it was also possible that fraud "was occurring on both sides."

Reagan's contentious remark was a flub, pure and simple. It was based on intelligence reports from U.S. operatives in the Philippines, who stressed that fraud by Marcos forces was overwhelmingly more pervasive than any by the Aquino opposition. Reagan first made the accusation during a practice question-andanswer session with his staff before the Tuesday-night news conference. The President was corrected. But, says a Reagan aide, "he had it in his mental computer, and it couldn't be erased."

The statement turned out to be a painfully important mistake. Senator Lugar, for one, quickly bridled at the President's observation. Claiming that Reagan "was not well informed," Lugar asserted that the predominance of fraud "was by the government." Later the Senator said he would probably consider curtailment of U.S. aid to the Philippines if the balloting was discredited by an obviously orchestrated Marcos declaration of victory.

Intentionally or not, the President soon discovered that he had knocked down a hornet's nest. Increasing numbers of Congressmen used his remarks as a springboard for issuing their own foreign policy prescriptions for the Philippine mess. Two days after Reagan spoke, for example, Democratic Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, an influential member of the Armed Services Committee, sent the President a two-page letter demanding "clear statements" that the Marcos regime had committed massive electoral fraud. Nunn asked for a pledge that the White House would refuse to recognize a Marcos election victory. Finally, Nunn wanted the U.S. to terminate all aid to the Philippines if, as he put it, "the will of the voters, as expressed at the ballot box, is not followed."

Another harsh reaction on the Hill came from Congressman Solarz. After Speakes' Monday press briefing, Solarz charged that "they are smoking hashish in the White House. They appear to have lost touch with reality." A number of other Senate and House Democrats vowed to cut U.S. military- and economic-aid appropriations for the Philippines (1986 authorization: $245 million) unless the Administration agreed to something like a rejection of the election results. After the proclamation of Marcos' win, prospects for a friendly reception in Congress for further aid requests looked even dimmer.

Finally, it seemed that the new situation was prompting some influential Congressmen to examine alternative sites for the valuable U.S. military bases in the Philippines. During his Tuesday news conference, President Reagan alluded vaguely to the existence of contingency studies on where to move the sensitive facilities, an extremely difficult and costly proposition. On Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole of Kansas took that search a step closer to reality. He announced that he would formally propose legislation this week that would ask the Pentagon to evaluate the cost and feasibility of setting up alternatives to the installations. No one doubted that the cost of such a move would run into the billions.

What virtually everyone in Washington agreed on was that Marcos emerged from the election in a somewhat weakened position. Said a top Pentagon official: "It's an exceptionally unstable situation." The very instability compounded U.S. difficulties in deciding what to do next. Said a White House aide: "There's no magic solution to this situation. Nobody is claiming he has any inspiration on how to solve this."

Indeed, the number of short-term U.S. options for dealing with the Philippine crisis remained embarrassingly small. The decision to send Envoy Habib to the Philippines may have bought the Administration some time--but not much--to think further about the problem. Says a Pentagon official: "The longer it takes to come up with some sort of reasonable policy in the Philippines, the better it is for the Communists."

In that context, many of the more extreme proposals being advocated on Capitol Hill run the risk of proving counterproductive. Sweeping moves to cut off military aid to the Philippines (a modest $55 million this year) seem especially likely to do more harm than good. Morale among the often corrupt and ill-equipped Philippine armed forces is already bad. An aid cutoff might make things worse, although some Philippine military reformists dispute that. Even so, eliminating all American money might prove especially hazardous for armed-forces reformers, who have been chafing at the stagnation of the late Marcos years. Without protective U.S. influence, many of the approximately 1,200 reformers in the 14,500-member Philippine officer corps might be purged.

Selective withholding of funds, however, might have positive effects if properly done. Such calibrated coercion might allow the Administration to demand specific reforms that would allow some degree of reconciliation to take place in the Philippine political cauldron.

There is a great deal to be said for statements like the one the White House made on the weekend. As a senior Senate Foreign Relations Committee aide points out, every U.S. President has enjoyed enormous prestige in the Philippines--more, perhaps, than any Philippine incumbent. Marcos is aware that public U.S. statements deeply affect his legitimacy, and the threat of further broadsides might force him to make political concessions.

But the stark fact of Marcos' stubbornness cannot be overlooked. On the basis of his track record, it is not clear that Marcos would submit to even the toughest U.S. pressures. Indeed, the Philippine President, who has long honed his skills as a ruthless infighter, might lash out independently if he felt he was dangerously cornered. In an explosion of violence, the lives of his opponents might be even more directly at risk.

The limited range of those options underlined the importance of Aquino and her proposed nonviolent campaign. This is a mighty challenge for someone who has spent most of her life in the wings of politics rather than at center stage. Aquino's wrenching entry into an active role in Philippine public life can be dated from Aug. 21, 1983. On that date her husband, Opposition Politician Benigno Aquino Jr., was gunned down while getting off a China Airlines Boeing 767 at Manila International Airport on his return from three years of exile in the U.S. Suddenly his wife was catapulted into the position of a national saint.

Politics, however, had always been in her background, and she was hardly an average homemaker. The daughter of one of the Philippines' patrician political families, she was a helpmate during 28 years of marriage to the country's most prominent opposition figure. As a spouse, Aquino remained largely on the political sidelines, but within eight months of her husband's assassination, she was stumping the Philippine countryside on behalf of opposition candidates for the country's 1984 National Assembly elections. She was prodded into running in the presidential campaign by, among others, Jaime Cardinal Sin, leader of the Roman Catholic Church in the Philippines.

Once committed to the presidential race, Aquino quickly showed a steely determination that belied her reserved, soft-spoken manner. She displayed remarkable stamina. The galvanic response that she elicited from ordinary Filipinos as she flew from town to town during the 57-day campaign came to be known as "people power." Now a battle-hardened political veteran, Aquino intends to harness the same force in her dangerous and quixotic struggle to occupy Malacanang Palace.

Last week she spent much of her time huddling with aides and planning strategy. Aquino and her closest advisers realized very early that they had been outmaneuvered by Marcos in the questionable election balloting. On Tuesday, the day that President Reagan gave his news conference, a group of pro-opposition legislators told top Aquino campaign officials there was no way to stop Marcos from steamrolling to victory in the National Assembly tallies. Reason: he has complete political control in two important areas of the northern island of Luzon plus the central Visayan islands. In all those regions, he would be able to pad voting results with impunity, thus overcoming any Aquino lead at the polls elsewhere.

The Aquino camp was badly shaken on Tuesday when Javier, the campaign director of Antique province, was brutally and publicly murdered by men with alleged ties to a prominent leader of the Marcos forces in the National Assembly. Late last week the bodies of ten more people, all said to be opposition supporters, were reportedly discovered in northerly Quirino province. At least 156 people have been killed in election-related violence since the presidential campaign began.

That grim figure was above average even for the Philippines, where violence is a traditional fellow traveler of politics. In 1961, for example, before Marcos appeared on the presidential scene, 35 people were killed during an election campaign; that is still considered a postwar low. In 1984, during National Assembly elections, more than 100 fatalities were reported.

Aquino last week was watching Washington for important political signals. She was badly stung by President Reagan's offhand reference to opposition fraud during the election. She responded immediately with a press statement that coolly noted the appointment of Envoy Habib but observed that on his last White House assignment before retirement in 1983, Habib had failed to end civil strife in Lebanon. Said Aquino: "I hope neither Mr. Reagan nor Mr. Marcos is expecting to see our beloved country go the same way." Claiming that she had been cheated out of as much as 25% of the national vote, she declared that it would be folly for her supporters to "settle down to a Western-style opposition role."

After Reagan's press-conference remarks, U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines Bosworth arranged a meeting with Aquino to discuss Special Envoy Habib's impending visit. The atmosphere during the session was both awkward and frigid. Bosworth, a highly regarded career diplomat who has worked hard to gain the opposition's confidence, had apparently been taken by surprise by the President's remarks. Says a key Aquino supporter who walked in on the Bosworth-Aquino meeting: "I don't know what the Japanese Ambassador looked like when they were bombing Pearl Harbor, but I imagine he looked like Steve."

Any pessimism that Aquino may have been feeling about the future, however, did not impede her actions. Before the memorial service for Javier, she paid a luncheon call on the country's 104-member Bishops' Conference to lobby for support for her People's Victory campaign and to assure the bishops of her commitment to nonviolence. Shortly afterward she went public with her Victory plans.

A key factor in Aquino's decision to go forward quickly with a civil- disobedience campaign was the fear that her moderate forces would soon be overtaken by pro-Communist groups eager to exploit the popular frustration at Marcos' formal election victory. As she planned her forthcoming rallies, Aquino continued to act forcefully to keep radical leftists from climbing aboard her campaign. One would-be partner: the 1 million-member leftist coalition known as Bayan, whose leadership is widely believed to have links to the Communist New People's Army. Aquino has every reason to be leery of newfound leftist allies. Throughout the campaign, she was repeatedly forced to rebut Marcos' accusations that she was little more than a stalking horse for the Communists.

Aquino's closest supporters are aware that leftist forces are still waiting in the wings. Says an Aquino campaign troubleshooter: "The biggest problem we have is that if Cory does not act, the moderates will be put out of business." On the other hand, he added, "if Cory acts, it will place this country on the brink of revolution."

Aquino's continuing resistance to Marcos' victory is nothing more than a calculated gamble that may yet provoke incalculable upheaval. Says Ramon Mitra, a National Assemblyman and an Aquino adviser: "We don't know whether we will be able to keep control over this. But we thought we would take the risk. We have to send a message to our friends that we are not taking this sitting down."

That stark problem was clearly in the minds of President Reagan's White House advisers when they drafted his weekend statement. It was impossible to deny that, as Reagan noted, the people of the Philippines are "at a major crossroads in their history. There are no easy answers. And in the last analysis, they will have to find the solutions themselves." One way or another, Aquino and Marcos will soon determine that solution.

Source: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,960712,00.html

Philippines Standoff in Manila

TIME, Monday, Feb. 17, 1986

By George Russell.;Sandra Burton and Barry Hillenbrand/

The contest could never really have been called fair. On one side was an ailing but wily autocrat, whose authority was waning but whose hands remained firmly clenched around the levers of political power. On the other was an unassuming but determined housewife-crusader, whose political resources were meager but whose brief and meteoric candidacy had fanned the desire of millions of her countrymen for political change. What had kept the mismatched sides in balance during the course of their 57-day election battle was a promise as potent in appeal as it was frail in prospect. The hope was that the issue would be decided democratically.

In that uncertain balance, at least for a moment last week, hung the future of the Philippines, a once vibrant Asian archipelago that is wallowing in social and economic stagnation and bedeviled by a growing Communist insurgency. On foot, by horse cart, even by boat, upwards of 24 million Philippine voters went to the polls to do something they had not done for 16 years: freely select a President. The choice appeared to be clear-cut. The candidates were President Ferdinand Marcos, 68, who has ruled for 20 years from the Spanish colonial-style Malacanang Palace, and Challenger Corazon Aquino, 53, who in the space of just ten weeks had emerged as the standard- bearer of a new force in the country, known as "people power."

There was only one clear-cut thing about the election ritual that unfolded at some 90,000 polling stations around the Philippines. Sporadically at first, then with increasing blatancy, the long-awaited exercise was marred by unsettling levels of violence, fraud, vote buying and ballot theft. More than a day after the polls closed, the official vote count by the Marcos-dominated Commission on Elections (COMELEC) had slowed to a crawl. Communications linking that effort to a parallel, informal vote count by a volunteer organization known as the National Citizens Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL) had been severed. In many parts of the country, private citizens spent the night after the vote protecting ballot boxes with their bodies. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar, who headed a 20- member delegation of official U.S. observers at the election exercise, declared that a "very disturbing pattern of incidents" had emerged. Said he: "The count is being shaped to what the President needs."

Some 18 hours after the polls closed, Marcos, in a U.S. television interview, serenely declared himself the election winner. Citing unofficial vote counts by the government-controlled Philippine press, he claimed that he had gained some 13 million votes, vs. 11 million for Aquino, a margin of roughly 54% to 46%. Marcos blandly denied any attempt at fraud. An official vote count, he said, would be available in "a few days."

Aquino also declared victory, eight hours after the polls closed. In a statement, she said that "the trend is clear and irreversible. The people and I have won, and we know it." Aquino Spokesman Rene Saguisag added that the election had been "the dirtiest we have ever had."

The confused and contradictory situation was greeted with gloomy silence by the Reagan Administration, which had worked hard to try to ensure a free, fair and, above all, credible outcome to the balloting. In Washington, State Department officials said that they would delay any formal U.S. response to the election until this week. Nonetheless, Spokesman Bernard Kalb took note of the reports of fraud and violence and termed them "regrettable." Privately, one Administration official disclosed that he and his colleagues were observing the Philippine developments with "nausea." Said he: "Marcos is running scared. He is letting it all hang out, and doesn't care who sees him. It's a bigger mess than we expected."

The murky outcome left the Administration in an excruciating dilemma. It was American unhappiness with the drift of Marcos' government and ensuing social restiveness in the Philippines that led him to call the surprise election last November. For months Administration officials had been publicly warning that the far-flung country was drifting toward a dangerous right-left polarization. On the right stands Marcos. On the left is an insurgency spearheaded by the estimated 16,500 members of the Communist New People's Army, which has been steadily gaining in force. As has happened so often before, the political center was in danger of disappearing. The Administration was also worried about the fate of its two most important military installations in the Pacific, Subic Bay Naval Base and Clark Air Base. Both are in the Philippines, and both are subject to a lease that expires in 1991.

Marcos' call for elections caught Washington flat-footed. The strongman, who suffers from a form of systemic lupus erythematosus, a disease that often affects the kidneys, had grown increasingly withdrawn from the country's plight; he had craftily evaded previous U.S. pressures for reform. Most experts were skeptical that the vote would lead to any significant power shift in Manila. But among many Filipinos, the notion that the balloting might lead to change seemed to take on a life of its own. Philippine voters might even provide the occasion for an all too rare peaceful transition from authoritarianism to democracy.

Organizationally, the odds were always stacked in favor of Marcos and his governing New Society Movement (K.B.L.). The President's war chest bulged with about $160 million in campaign funds, and he also had at his disposal uncounted millions from the government pork barrel.

As the campaign wore on, Marcos scattered more and more giveaways from the stump. At a typical stop in the economically depressed, sugar-producing province of Negros Occidental, where anti-Marcos sentiment is known to be strong, the President went on just such a vote-getting spree. He announced the gift of $25 million in additional credits for a sugar-marketing organization, a cut in interest rates for sugar planters from 42% to 16%, a reduction in the cost of area electricity, and the electrification of some nearby towns. His audience of farmers and townspeople, many of whom had been paid between $1.50 and $2.50 to attend the rally, applauded each announcement fervidly.

Aside from money, he could count on a near monopoly of local political machinery. The K.B.L. controls 73 of 74 provincial governorships and all but a handful of the 1,592 mayors' offices. Virtually every one of 41,615 Filipino barangays (villages) has a K.B.L. ward heeler. Such a network was invaluable for getting supporters to campaign rallies, and even more important in turning out voters on election day.

Marcos' personal supervision of that network was impressive. Every night after 10 o'clock, the President for several hours fielded calls from K.B.L. officials around the country. The party hands reported on the pro-Marcos voting prospects in their locales, the lineup of poll inspectors and campaign issues. Meanwhile, more detailed election data were fed into a newly installed computer system in a presidential office building. According to opposition critics, the high-tech apparatus could be used to estimate the number of false ballots that might be required to win at each location.

Another Marcos source of strength was his hold on the country's news media. Presidential supporters own almost all of the 14 major daily newspapers and four of the five major television networks. The remaining TV outlet is owned outright by the government. Nearly all of the country's 270 radio stations owe allegiance to Marcos. Most presidential forays were covered in detail throughout the campaign, and many Marcos speeches were broadcast from start to finish.

Aquino, the widow of assassinated Opposition Politician Benigno Aquino Jr., was rarely seen on television news and was blocked by a series of bureaucratic ruses whenever she tried to buy political advertising time. The challenger's lawyer finally filed a petition against the government-owned Channel 4 in Manila to force increased coverage of her campaign. In the three days after the lawyer's petition was filed, Aquino's name was mentioned on the government channel only four times, once in a false charge that she had agreed to cede the southern part of the nation to Muslim separatists.

Aquino received some unsolicited television attention from Marcos' department of dirty video tricks. As the campaign wound down, presidential supporters put television footage of the challenger on the air on all Philippine stations. Each spot featured a female voice that sounded like Aquino's and showed the candidate in a montage of foreign war footage and other scenes of chaos. Despite Aquino's strenuous complaints, the offending spots were not removed.

In other times, such tactics might have prevailed, but the mighty Marcos machine was running against a totally unconventional movement. The Aquino campaign, long on enthusiasm and short on organization, sometimes resembled a political Woodstock. As Aquino and her vice-presidential nominee, Salvador ("Doy") Laurel, crisscrossed 68 provinces, hundreds of thousands of Filipinos from all walks of life swarmed to hear the presidential challenger repeat a simple talk. At each stop, Aquino related the alleged suffering her family had endured at the hands of the Marcos government, culminating in her husband's 1983 assassination. She capped each speech with a slogan: "Sobra na, tama na, palitan na!" (Too much, enough, let's change!)

As the campaign progressed, Aquino began to outline her program in increasing detail. At a speech last week to a joint meeting in Manila of domestic and foreign Chambers of Commerce, she put forth a reform plan for an initial 100 days in office. She promised that she would attack Marcos-inspired corruption "with the zeal of a crusading housewife let loose in a den of world-class thieves." She said she would break up the last elements of the sugar and coconut monopolies run by Marcos cronies, remove taxes on seeds and fertilizers, and cut taxes on fuel and electricity. Her audience of at least 2,000 applauded enthusiastically.

Public support for Aquino reached a spectacular climax three days before the balloting, at the challenger's final rally. The gathering easily ranked among the largest in Philippine history. An enormous crush of humanity flocked to Manila's Rizal Park to hear Aquino and Laurel make their concluding speeches. A sea of yellow T shirts and banners, reflecting Aquino's campaign color, overflowed the sprawling harbor-front park. Yellow ticker tape and confetti rained down from office buildings surrounding the capacious square. < In contrast to earlier Aquino rallies, which had had a decidedly homespun air, an array of professional singing and television stars held the throng's attention for three hours before the opposition candidates arrived. When Aquino and Laurel finally appeared, a cacophony of auto horns erupted, fireworks lighted the evening sky, and the crowd launched into a deafening welcome chant of "Cory! Cory! Cory!"

Aquino first led the crowd in singing the Lord's Prayer. She then castigated the Marcos regime for economic mismanagement and human-rights violations, declaring, "I am sure we have won the election." Said she, surveying the crowd: "Marcos will not be able to stop this. It's our chance to write history."

Marcos faced the same Chambers of Commerce in Manila the day after Aquino, but his reception was markedly tepid. The President attacked his opponent for naively believing that the country's Communist insurgents would lay down their arms in response to a six-month cease-fire, which is part of her campaign platform. But even though Marcos announced that he would, among other things, cut sales taxes and reduce domestic oil prices, applause from the business audience was merely polite.

Later in the day, Marcos held his own concluding rally at Rizal Park. A horde of workers had descended on the area and replaced yellow-and-green Aquino-Laurel posters with red-white-and-blue placards extolling Marcos and his running mate, Arturo ("Turing") Tolentino, 75. Buses and flatbed trucks full of New Society faithful rolled in from outlying suburbs. Estimates of the crowd in the area ranged as high as 500,000. Many of those gathered for the extravaganza admitted openly that they had been paid from $2.50 to $5 to attend. As the time approached for the scheduled appearance of Marcos and his wife Imelda, helicopters flew overhead trailing red-white-and-blue smoke. Top- ranking Philippine show-business figures worked the crowd into a pleasantly receptive mood. Red-uniformed marching bands began to blare as the faithful chanted the President's campaign slogan, "Marcos pa rin!" (Marcos still!)

Then, just as Marcos prepared to mount the dais, disaster struck. It began to rain. As water poured down, the President's audience fled in all directions, ignoring loudspeaker pleas to stand fast and "sacrifice for what we are fighting for." Those who remained huddled closer to the speaker's platform. After the ten-minute downpour had ended, Imelda Marcos took the stage. Supporters cheered loudly when she urged the country to stand behind her husband because he was "maka-Diyos, maka-tao, maka-bayan" (pro-God, pro- people, pro-nation).

Marcos was conciliatory and bellicose by turn when he finally addressed the soggy gathering. For nearly 40 minutes he attacked his opponent's political inexperience and pleaded that it was the desire of the Philippine people, rather than his own wishes, that kept him in office. Then he warned that if his opponents took to the streets, "I will use the whole might and strength of the armed forces to protect the people and stop the opposition." Said he: "All we want is peace, not civil war."

The same day, Aquino received her strongest boost yet from Jaime Cardinal Sin, the ranking Roman Catholic prelate of the Philippines. The Cardinal praised the presidential challenger as someone who will "make a good President." He added, "I am tempted to ask, Is this a presidential election, or is this a contest between good and the forces of evil?" Sin's all-but- explicit endorsement carried considerable weight in a country that is nominally 84% Catholic.

Any final doubts about the Cardinal's sympathies were ended when he turned down an invitation from President Marcos and his family to pray together for honest elections. Said the prelate: "I think they can pray without me. It's better that they pray and ask the Lord for mercy and compassion."

The day after Sin's objurgation, Marcos raised the level of political tension yet again by placing the 230,000-member armed forces on red alert. Under that status, which was extended indefinitely, all military leaves and furloughs were canceled. Marcos' reason: Aquino, he claimed, had said that his re-election would spark a civil war.

As Filipinos thronged to their polling stations, problems with voting registries began to crop up almost immediately. At the Araullo High School, a rambling wood- and-concrete structure on United Nations Avenue in midtown Manila, Policeman Oligario Remiruta, 46, lined up to cast his vote. The local poll chairman could not find Remiruta's name on the voters' list. By noon, 84 people at the school had received the same treatment.

Other peculiarities cropped up. In the Manila dockside slum of Tondo, teachers at the Imelda Marcos Elementary School complained that they were being asked to recruit ten voters each for Marcos. Well before the voting began, Marcos operatives in northerly Quezon City were openly offering indigents money to fill out their ballots in advance.

Nonetheless, both Marcos and Aquino were ready to declare victory. As he prepared to fly from Manila to his hometown of Batac in the northerly province of Ilocos Norte, the President declared that "if the difference is only 3 million (votes), I'll be disappointed." Aquino voted in her hometown of San Miguel, in the southern province of Tarlac. Said she: "Today is my day. I hope to see you all at my inaugural."

She spoke far too soon. As election day dawned in the village of Balutu, not far from Aquino's home, the atmosphere was tense. Difficulties began as soon as balloting commenced at the local elementary school, when an opposition poll watcher discovered that some 20% to 30% of the barangay's voters were not listed on the rolls and were therefore disqualified. Then, some 35 minutes before the 3 p.m. close of the polling station, a red vehicle with MARCOS- TOLENTINO stickers on the bumper pulled up behind the school. Six men armed with M-16 rifles that had MARCOS decals on the barrels jumped out and headed for the school- yard. Their objective: the ballot boxes. Terror-stricken poll watchers huddled around the boxes in a nervous effort to prevent an obvious theft. At the last moment, a carload of opposition poll watchers arrived. One of the newcomers, a former Filipino Minister of Agriculture, somehow arranged to rescue the ballot boxes and have them carried by election officials to the nearby town of Concepcion for tabulation.

Many similar scenes were taking place across the country. In the Manila district of San Andres, a residential suburb, men wearing military uniforms snatched an undetermined number of ballot boxes. In the industrial suburb of Pasig, more than 100 men armed with knives, pistols and high-powered rifles ordered everyone present at one station to lie down on the floor and then walked off with the voting receptacles.

In some parts of the country, cheating hardly seemed necessary. One such place was Danao, a city on the coast of southerly Cebu island, where a road sign proclaims WELCOME TO FERDINAND MARCOS COUNTRY. Danao is the fiefdom of Businessman Ramon Durano, who owns, among other things, almost all the local cement, sugar, mining and banking industries. He may well have control over most of the 59,000 registered local voters, an unusually high proportion of the 80,000 population in the area. Not a single volunteer could be found in & Danao and surrounding suburbs to act as an opposition poll watcher at the 147 local polling precincts. Said Voting Registrar Roque Loro: "New Society Movement, there are plenty. But opposition, there are none."

After the polls closed, the vote counting started slowly across the Philippines and then almost stopped. Nearly 48 hours after balloting ended, only about 28% of the votes had been officially tabulated. The government's COMELEC tally showed Marcos ahead with 3 million votes, compared with Aquino's 2.9 million. The sluggish pace of the count indicated to many opposition leaders that COMELEC was having trouble making its totals come out to the government's satisfaction. Meanwhile, the volunteer group NAMFREL said that in its unofficial tally Aquino had 5.3 million votes, while the President had about 4.5 million after 46% of precincts had reported.

As the weekend wore on, the situation in Manila remained surprisingly calm. Since Marcos had hunkered down in the presidential Malacanang Palace, it seemed that it might be up to the opposition to make the next move to break the election deadlock. Aquino's first step in that direction was a mild one. On Saturday she called a press conference to demand that Marcos concede "in the best tradition of democratic politics." Three hours later, the President held a press conference of his own to reiterate his claim to victory, by a new margin of 1.5 million votes. He reminded journalists that the formal naming of a winner was the responsibility of the National Assembly, which he controls, and even raised the vague possibility that he might declare the whole election invalid.

Sadly, the vote that many Filipinos had hoped would improve their country's doleful lot looked as if it would leave the Philippines more divided, more dangerous and angrier than ever.

Source: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,960673,00.html

A Test for Democracy

TIME

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.-Philippine 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.

Source: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,960545,00.html