Benigno Aquino Between Dictatorship and Revolution in The Philippines

Third World Quarterly
Benigno Aquino: Between Dictatorship and Revolution in the Philippines

Author(s): Walden Bello
Source: Third World Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Apr., 1984), pp. 283-309
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
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WALDEN BELLO
Benigno Aquino: between

dictatorship and revolution in the
Philippines*
It is one of those surprising ironies of history that Benigno Aquino, the
slain Philippine opposition leader, is accomplishing in death what he
could never do when he was alive: bringing down the Marcos
dictatorship. Perhaps the individual most surprised-and en-
venomed-by the dramatic turn of events is Ferdinand Marcos
himself, whom most Filipinos now regard as the mastermind behind the
incredible execution on the tarmac of the Manila International Airport
on 21 August 1983.
It is not difficult to image how bitter it must be for the ailing
dictator-whose concern about his 'place in history' is well known-to
spend his last days with the realisation that his longstanding rival has
passed into history as a hero while he is about to enter it as a villain.
Costa-Gavras the renowned political film maker could not ask for a more
exquisite plot: two master politicians who personify in their personal
rivalry, political struggle, and final deadly confrontation the social
contradictions and historical options of a Third World country. It is also
a story which is laden with the dramatic irony which characterises the
best of classical tragedy: the murder immortalises the murdered and
destroys the murderer.
Like Marcos, the 50-year-old Aquino was a complex, contradictory
figure who was in flesh-and-blood quite different from the devotee of
Gandhian non-violence into which some sectors of the Philippine
opposition are now converting him for their own political ends. But of
one thing there is no dispute: Aquino was a profoundly courageous
man. It was this streak of stubborn courage that earned him a death
sentence in 1977, after five years of imprisonment had failed to extract
from him a pledge of allegiance to Marcos. And it was this courage,
wedded to a driving ambition and a deep concern for the strategic
interests of his class, that propelled Aquino toward his appointment
with history that dog-day afternoon of 21 August.
* All quotations from Aquino which are not footnoted are from private conversations and
interviews with the author which took place between January 1981 and July 1983. Quotations from
confidential discussions of US agencies after the Aquino assassination were provided by
participants and consultants who requested anonymity.
TWQ6(2) April 1984/1ISSN

0143-6597/84.$1.25 283

THIRD WORLD QUARTERLY
The Making of a Ruling-Class Politician

'Ninoy' Aquino was first and foremost a ruling-class politician, and his
brief but meteoric career provides a striking example of the complex
ways in which individual ambition, class interest, and the imperative of
popular legitimacy intersect in a particular kind of Third World
politician: the bourgeois democrat.
Born to a wealthy and powerful landlord family with a history of
involvement in national politics, Ninoy quickly learned to master the
rules of ruling-class politics which governed the parliamentary republic
from 1946 to 1972. He was elected town mayor at 22, became governor
of his province, Tarlac, at 28, and, at 35, earned the distinction of being
the youngest person ever to win election to the Philippine Senate.
The system that Aquino mastered was a formal electoral system
which was superimposed by American colonial officials on the competi-
tion for power among land-based and mercantile elites. These elites
fought for political office by mobilising the lower classes through
kinship and patronage in a society where political organisation along
class lines was still embryonic. Combining the traditional feudal
paternalism of the Philippine elite with the worst features of American
ward politics, 'democratic representation' in the neo-colonial republic
was the art of protecting narrow class interests and engaging in a form of
institutionalised looting. The classic expression of the essence of
patronage democracy was provided by a former president of the
Philippine Senate in a warning to a Philippine president: 'If you cannot
permit abuses, you must at least tolerate them. What are we in power
for? We are not hypocrites. Why should we pretend we are saints when
in reality we are not."
It was exceptional tactical skill in making and accumulating the
'correct' elite alliances, combined with a populist charisma and the
purposely vague rhetoric of 'anti-corruption', 'reform', and 'social
justice', that enabled Ninoy to rise rapidly from being a regional
politician with an inherited power-base to being the Secretary-General
of the opposition Liberal Party by 1969. From this position, Aquino
began his quest for the presidency, which he hoped to gain by 1973,
when Ferdinand Marcos' second term would have come to an end. It was
Aquino's misfortune, however, to have to compete against Marcos,
whose Machiavellian ability to operate in the labyrinthine world of elite
politics was even more formidable than his.
1
Quoted in Steve Shalom, 'Counterinsurgency in the Philippines', Journal of Contemporary Asia
7(2) 1977.
284

BETWEEN DICTATORSHIP AND REVOLUTION IN THE PHILIPPINES
Aquino's career was determined not only by his mastery of the rules
of local politics but of the international ones as well. Success in national
politics in the neo-colonial republic was greatly dependent on winning
the goodwill of the Americans, whose political, military, and economic
presence pervaded their former colony. Ninoy was, at an early age, at
ease with the Americans. He received his early formal schooling at the
hands of the American Jesuits who ran the Ateneo de Manila College,
the prime training ground for the children of the powerful and the rich.
Once out of school, he became one of the 'Magsaysay Boys', some of the
'best and the brightest' Ateneo graduates who surrounded President
Ramon Magsaysay. The latter was a provincial politician whose
emergence as a national reformist and populist figure was engineered by
the 'legendary' Central Intelligence Agency operative, Colonel
Edward Lansdale, during the campaign to defeat the Communist-led
'Huk' Uprising in the early 1950s. Ninoy quickly drew attention to
himself as one of the most intrepid of the lot when he successfully
negotiated the surrender of the Huk 'Supremo', Luis Taruc, in 1954.2
That feat started a long working relationship with the agency which
Aquino made no special effort to hide. In one of his most candid
interviews, Aquino even called attention to his CIA connection with
some pride: 'I've worked with the CIA on many operations-they know
I can be very stubborn ... I was assistant to three Filipino presidents.
And once upon a time I headed our own equivalent of the CIA. We had
joint operations in Indonesia, we had joint operations in Laos, we were
in Cambodia'.'
Thus, by the time he had positioned himself for his advance to
the presidency, Ninoy was reasonably certain that he was some-
one Washington-the ultimate arbiter in Philippine presidential
politics-could live with, if not support.
Aquino and the Crisis of the Republic

But by the time the presidency was within his reach, the political system
he had mastered was on its last legs. It was a system which could only
work if certain conditions existed. One necessary ingredient was a
reasonable degree of adherence to the unwritten rule of parliamentary
2 For a CIA account of the exploits of Lansdale and the Magsaysay Boys, see Lansdale's
autobiography, In the Midst of Wars, New York: Harper and Row, 1972. Descriptions of CIA
interference in Philippine parliamentary politics after Lansdale are provided by ex-agent Joseph
Burkholder Smith in his Portrait of a Cold Warrior, New York: Ballantine Books, 1976.
3 'The Philippines: the more things change, the more they remain the same, an interview with
Benigno Aquino', Multinational Monitor, February 1981, p 17.
285

politics Philippine-style: that opposing factions of the elite would

alternate in power and have their chance to gather and distribute the
spoils conferred by political office. In the late 1960s, the rule
increasingly became the exception. At the local, regional, and national
levels, there was a trend toward the formation of political dynasties
which could not let go of the tremendous power that came with elected
office and the riches it unlocked. Such a hold could only be secured-or
broken by opposing elites-by building up private armies that intimi-
dated voters and stole elections. As elections got bloodier, they also
became less legitimate, throwing the system more and more off kilter.
However, it was not until the presidential elections of November
1969 that the elite consensus on the rules of the parliamentary game
irretrievably broke down. That year, Marcos achieved what had until
now been impossible in the first twenty-three years of the republic:
election to a second term in office. It was a feat that Marcos
accomplished by developing alongside the network of political alliances
which served as the traditional route to national power another political
force: the Philippine Army. By manipulating his traditionally close ties
to the officer corps as the Philippines 'most decorated World War II
veteran', utilising the promotions system to place his most loyal
followers in strategic positions, and providing the army with the biggest
slice of the government budget, Marcos was able to create an instrument
of personal control which dwarfed the combined private armies of his
opponents and allies.
Despite their periodic warnings about 'the approaching dictatorship',
most of the opposition elite continued to practise politics in the same old
way. The bombing of the leadership of the opposition Liberal Party
during a political rally in August 1971 and Marcos' suspension of the
writ of habeas corpus following it shook the opposition but what fears
they had were banished by the confidence that the US would not allow
the 'democratic transplant' it had engineered to be destroyed. Aquino
warned of a military-backed presidential coup codenamed 'Operation
Sagittarius' at the same time that he ebulliently predicted, 'I will be
president in 1973'.
Marcos' imposition of martial law on 22 September 1972, was the
coup de grace to a dying system of elite control. Yet the larger meaning
of this historic shift in the system of class rule escaped the opposition
elite who interpreted it as an aberration which stemmed solely from
dark personal ambition. The declaration of martial law is, in fact, an
extremely interesting example of the way historical necessity works
286

itself through the driving personal ambition of men who also sense that
their actions coincide with a larger imperative. The advent of the
Marcos dictatorship was fundamentally a class response to the
emergence of a mortal threat to the system of neocolonial domination.
It was essentially the 'centralised redeployment' of the formerly
relatively dispersed power of the ruling class against the escalating
social discontent of the Filipino masses which marked the late 1960s
and early 1970s.
With the defeat of the peasant-based Communist uprising by the
CIA-sponsored Magsaysay government in the early 1950s, mass
discontent guided by radical politics was rendered quiescent for more
than a decade as Philippine-style McCarthyism blanketed the country.
By the mid- 1960s, however, the irrepressible contradictions of a society
with the worst social inequalities in Southeast Asia cracked the
McCarthyist superstructure, and by the beginning of the 1970s, the
country was being wracked by peasant marches demanding land reform,
militant workers' strikes, and massive student demonstrations demand-
ing basic reforms, an end to American business privileges, and
withdrawal of the US military bases from the country.
Constitutionally guaranteed formal rights were, in short, being
invoked by mass movements to push anti-elite and anti-US demands.
And with class and nationalist consciousness spreading, the capacity of
the elite democratic system to coopt, fragment, and defuse mass
demands through patronage politics began to erode swiftly. The mass
ferment forced the convocation of a Constitutional Convention in 1970
to which many popular representatives were elected to frame a
constitution based on advancing social equality and regaining Filipino
control of the national economy. When mass pressure forced the
Supreme Court to issue a series of significant judgments ending a
number of US business privileges in 1972, it became clear that, like
Frankenstein's creature, the formal democratic system was slipping
from the control of the interests it had originally been designed to serve.
Marcos fully understood the profound challenge to elite domination
represented by the burgeoning movement on the streets, and he cleverly
united the apprehensions of the class in command to his personal drive
to harness absolute power. And he correctly calculated as well that the
United States would not stand in the way. Indeed, it was the US which
provided Marcos with the wherewithal to consolidate his new
authoritarian order by increasing military aid by over 100 per cent in the
first years of martial law. Not burdened with the niceties of state
287

diplomacy, relieved US business interests explicitly articulated in a

telegram to Marcos the policy which the Nixon administration followed
in practice:
The American Chamber of Commerce wishes you every success in your endeavor to
restore peace and order, business confidence, economic growth, and well-being of the
Filipino people and nation. We assure you of our confidence and cooperation in
achieving these objectives. We are communicating the feelings of our associates and
affiliates in the United States.4
It was a betrayal that stunned Aquino and other members of the
opposition elite, who had taken it as an article of faith that the United
States would not allow the formal democratic system it had sponsored to
be destroyed. But just as they had underestimated the gravity of the
internal strains on the system, so did they fail to notice the extent to
which the United States had become disillusioned with 'elite democ-
racy' as a method of neocolonial control.
In the context of the ideological war between East and West during
the immediate post-war period, formal constitutional systems based on
the stable social hegemony of landlord-comprador elites had been the
preferred form of neocolonial domination. The Philippine political
system provided a model which the Americans sought to reproduce
elsewhere in the Third World at a time that they were dismantling the
old colonial empires of the British and the French. One of the nations
Washington targetted was Vietnam, to which it assigned Ramon
Magsaysay's mentor, Colonel Lansdale, and his Filipino subordinates to
try to forge a Philippine-style democracy in the mid-1950s.
The CIA-inspired assassination of their own man, Ngo Dinh Diem,
and his replacement with a military clique in 1963, was a confession that
elite democratic systems could not stabilise East Asian countries
characterised by higher levels of class and nationalist consciousness and
political organisation than existed in post-war Philippines. In the
meantime, the effort by the Kennedy administration to counter the
shock waves from the Cuban Revolution by opening up the traditional
oligarchical democracies of Latin America to the participation of
middle-class political elites like the Christian Democrats in Chile
merely provided the left with unprecedented opportunities for organis-
ing in the electoral arena. US support for the military coup which ousted
the populist Goulart government in Brazil in 1964 and its direct
intervention in the Dominican Republic to prevent the popularly-
4 Quoted in Sam Bayani, 'What's Happening in the Philippines?', Far Eastern Reporter,
November 1976, p 26.
288

elected Juan Bosch from coming to power in 1965 signified the same
American disillusion with the stabilising effects of formal democratic
systems. Then the nightmare became reality: the system allowed the
ascent to power of a pro-socialist government in Chile in 197T. The US
then decisively put itself behind, if not directly instigated, the dismantl-
ing of those governments which its ideologues had praised as models for
the Third World in the 1950s: the Philippines ('the showcase of Asian
democracy') in 1972; Chile ('the England of South America') in 1973;
and Uruguay ('the Switzerland of the Third World') in 1974.
The regime which emerged in Brazil in the mid-1960s provided the
prototype for the new form of elite, neocolonial control which the
Americans were feverishly searching for in response to situations of
acute class conflict: a military-technocrat political leadership which
depoliticised the lower classes through large-scale repression and tried
to forge a social consensus among the middle class, agrarian and
industrial elites, and foreign capital through a programme of economic
growth via 'export-oriented industrialisation'.
But Aquino and other bourgeois democrats in the Third World could
hardly be faulted for their miscalculation of US intentions, since the
foreign policy establishment continued to legitimise the US imperial
presence through the obsolete ideology of missionary democracy. A
pioneering attempt to doctrinally justify the new authoritarian order,
however, was provided in 1968 by Samuel Huntington's Political Order
in Changing Societies, which became a handbook for a new generation
of State Department officials. In the 'chaotic' Third World, argued the
Harvard professor, the building of strong centralised authority must
necessarily precede the question of democratic representation. This was
the first step in a process of theoretical justification of the merits of
authoritarianism which would culminate over a decade later in the
'Kirkpatrick Doctrine'.
Aquino and the New Order

Huntington was snapped up eagerly not only by State Department
officials but also by Marcos propagandists in search of an ideology.
Huntington's 'Order First, Representation Later' was translated into
'Constitutional Authoritarianism' in the Philippine setting.5 Strong
I Huntington was popularised in the Philippines by Marcos' Minister of Education, Onofre
Corpuz, who wrote the influential Liberty and Government in the New Society, Manila: 1973. See
also Ferdinand Marcos, The Third World Alternative, Manila: Ministry of Public Information,
1980.
289

authority and the loss of traditional democratic rights, added Marcos'

ideologues, were a precondition for a strong unobstructed effort in
national economic development along export-oriented lines.
The debate between 'authoritarian development' and 'democratic
restoration' became the poles of what little above-ground political
debate was allowed by the martial law regime in its first few years. The
situation brought out the best in the ruling-class tradition in the
imprisoned Aquino, who steadfastly refused to conciliate Marcos, and
when the dictator got rough, defied the death sentence for 'murder' and
'subversion' decreed by a kangaroo court in 1977. Indeed, what little
legitimacy the Philippine ruling elite enjoyed among the masses during
this period was, to a large extent, provided by the embattled Ninoy, who
skilfully exploited his image as a feisty, defenceless David stopping
Goliath with non-violent methods, including an epic 36-day hunger
strike in 1975.
Aquino's pro-democratic stand, however, might have elicited admi-
ration from the elite but not the support of most of his class. Marcos had
correctly calculated that the vast majority of the Philippine national,
regional, and local elites would be cajoled or coerced into taking his
side. Ninoy and a hardy band of nationally-prominent politicians like
former Senators Jose Diokno, Lorenzo Tanada, and Gerry Roxas were
a vociferous group of critics, but their Liberal Party allies at all levels
deserted them like flies as their armed groups were disarmed by Marcos
or their followers bought off. For the hesitant few, the dismantling of
Aquino's political machine in his home province, Tarlac, was made into
an object lesson, with its key leaders intimidated, imprisoned, forced to
go underground, or simply murdered.
While Marcos formed his old and new elite followers into a new party,
the New Society Party (KBL), he supplanted both them and civilian
administrators with army officers as the key decisionmakers at both the
regional and local levels. This new political reality was summed up
incisively by a World Bank report:
Military commanders have, for the first time in modern Philippine history, become an
integral part of the power structure, particularly in provincial administration, and
through their influence (both personal and official) in judicial and administrative
matters.6
At the national level, the generals shared power and interpenetrated

with the two other groups which formed the internal pillars of the
6 World Bank, 'Political and Administrative Bases for Economic Policy in the Philippines'.
Memorandum from William Ascher to Larry Hinkle, Washington, DC, 1980, p 6. This 'political
risk' analysis came to be popularly known as the 'Ascher Memorandum'.
290

regime: Marcos' powerful business cronies, who were able to bring key
sectors of the economy under their control through the methods of
'pirate capitalism'; and the US-backed technocrats, who were charged
with implementing the programme of authoritarian modernisation
directed and funded by the World Bank.
The outlawing of political criticism and the shattering of the elite
opposition pushed mass dissent toward the only force which was
capable of withstanding the Marcos juggernaut: the left. And as the
decade wore on, the key axis of political conflict in Philippine society
became that between a massively armed ruling class and the armed left.
Marcos, Aquino, and the Challenge from the Left

To understand the transformation of the Philippine left from the
demoralised and defeated band of the early 1950s to the tough,
resilient, and expanding movement of the late 1970s requires a brief
mention of the dramatic schism in its ranks which took place in the late
1960s.
After its rout at the hands of Magsaysay and the CIA, the disoriented
and decimated leadership had adopted the 'parliamentary road to
socialism', a line which coincided with the conclusions of the Soviet
Communist Party Congress in 1956. By the mid-1960s, however, the
peaceful road was coming under heavy attack from a new generation of
radicals led by the brilliant Jose Maria Sison, who were emerging from
the reviving nationalist student movement. As these elements joined
the party, a fierce inter-party struggle erupted between the 'peaceful
road', espoused by the old leadership, and the strategy of 'protracted
people's war', proposed by the young insurgents.
Unable to loosen the hold on cadres exercised by the old leadership,
the insurgents 'reestablished' the Communist Party of the Philippines in
December 1968, and founded the New People's Army (NPA) in March
1969 with 68 men and 35 rifles. The founding document, 'Rectify
Errors and Rebuild the Party', was a carefully-argued polemic which
traced the defeat of the Huk rebellion not principally to external causes
but to internal ones-an adventurist military strategy of swift armed
uprising, lack of a coherent policy on the united front, and absence of
thoroughgoing political and ideological training of cadres and the mass
base. It then went on to chart the strategy of revolution: the character of
the current stage of the Philippine Revolution was 'national demo-
cratic'-that is, anti-feudal and anti-imperialist-which meant that it
could potentially appeal to most classes, from the peasantry to the
291

'national bourgeoisie', and draw them to oppose imperialism and its

local base, the landlord-comprador elites. The principal vehicle of the
Revolution was a 'protracted peoples' war' in which the main force, the
peasantry, would be mobilised and armed to gradually encircle and
liberate the urban bastions of imperialism in the final stages of the
revolution. Complementing the armed struggle was a flexible applica-
tion of united-front tactics designed to win as many allies as possible,
isolate the main enemy, and neutralise its potential allies. The insurgent
leadership was attempting, in short, to apply the lessons of the national
liberation struggles in China and Vietnam to the Philippine setting. It
would not be until the mid-1 970s that revolutionary strategy would
acquire characteristics unique to the Philippines.7
The three-and-a-half years between December 1968 and September
1972 provided the left with a precious opportunity to attempt to forge a
mass base without having to bear the full brunt of the military might of a
repressive state. The NPA's assessment that the Filipino peasantry was
ripe for revolutionary mobilisation was proven by its rapid building of a
base area in the Cagayan Valley of Northern Luzon. The radicalisation
of the student ferment in Manila also provided the Communist Party
and the NPA with hundreds of new cadres, many of whom were
deployed to the countryside for NPA expansion work.
The first years of martial law were the 'heroic age' of the reborn
Philippine Left. Its mass organisations in the cities were smashed at the
outset of martial law, while the NPA became the target of several
massive counterinsurgency campaigns. Yet it had rebounded by 1977.
Two critical steps taken by the party in the mid- 1970s explain this. One
was the decision to boldly create multiple base areas in each of the
country's 11 major islands instead of relying on one major base, as had
the Huks in the 1950s. The other was to correct doctrinaire and
'ultraleftist' methods of organising in order to broaden the appeal of the
National Democratic programme to social groups other than the
peasantry and the working class.
Set down in two now classic documents, Specific Characteristicsof
Our People's War and Our Urgent Tasks, the two policies had paid off
7Key works in the development of the strategy of the Philippine 'new left' include, chronologi-
cally, Jose Maria Sison's 'Struggle for National Democracy', a collection of speeches between
1964 and 1968; the Communist Party's 'reestablishment' document, 'Rectify Errors and
Rebuild the Party' (1968); 'Philippine Society and Revolution' (1970), a brilliant reinterpreta-
tion of Philippine history by Amado Guerrero, said to be Sison's nom de guerre; Guerrero's
'Specific Characteristics of Our People's War' (1974); and the Communist Party's 'Our Urgent
Tasks' (1976).
292

handsomely by the beginning of the 1980s. In 56 of the country's 72

provinces, an estimated 10,000 NPA regulars-some of them in
company-sized units-kept Marcos' 250,000-man army stretched
perilously thin. In the cities, skilful organising had created intersecting
layers of illegal, semi-legal, and legal organisations among workers,
students, certain professional sectors, and the Catholic clergy. The
National Democratic Front (NDF), the preparatory commission of
which was created in 1973, had become a major political reality by the
end of the decade. Church sources estimated that, all in all, the NDF had
40,000 active organisers throughout the archipelago and a mass base of
about six million Filipinos.
The emergence of the expanding NDF as the spearhead of the
popular opposition to Marcos was a source of grave worry to the United
States and the opposition elite. After a three-month investigation of
political developments on the island of Mindanao, the Philippines'
second largest, in early 1982, a US consul cabled the then Secretary of
State, Alexander Haig, that in some areas, the NPA had become 'more
important than the local government structure'. He concluded: 'This
may sound like a worst case scenario but present circumstances are not
encouraging and the future is ominous'8. The same concern was
underlined by the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia, Paul
Wolfowitz, in testimony before Congress: '. . .[T]he growing challenge
of the Communist New People's Army insurgency ... if unchecked
could ultimately threaten US military facilities.9
The challenge of the NDF elicited different reactions from the
opposition elite. Former Senators Jose Diokno and Lorenzo Tanada,
two leading figures who had longstanding credentials as nationalists,
completed their break with elite politics by closely cooperating with
organisations known to be sympathetic to the NDF. On the other hand,
notables like former President Diosdado Macapagal and the Liberal
Party President, Gerry Roxas, exhibited a reflexive anti-Communism
and stridently promoted the view that 'Marcos is driving the country to
the Communists' in their effort to persuade the Carter administration to
abandon the dictator.
Aquino's stance was the most complex. He was, on the one hand, very
sceptical of Diokno's tough nationalist stance, saying 'It will get us
nowhere'. On the other hand, he was scornful of the anti-Communist
S
Confidential airgram from G S Sheinbaum, US Consul, Cebu (Philippines) to Secretary of State
Alexander Haig, Washington, 13 April 1982.
9 Quoted in Asia Record, April 1983, p 2.
293

posture of many of his colleagues. 'I don't understand these people', he

said in exasperation when he was in exile. 'We're all united in the
objective of overthrowing Marcos. We have differences with the
Communists, yes, but we'll worry about them when we're rid of
Marcos'.
A populist politician, Ninoy had always prided himself as one who
'could work with the Communists'. Prior to martial law, Aquino was
reported to have successfully worked out a modus vivendi with units of
the New People's Army operating in Tarlac. While in prison, he called
for the protection of the rights of Jose' Maria Sison, the reputed
chairman of the Communist Party, who was captured in 1977. An effort
by Marcos to link Aquino to the top NPA leaders, Bernabe Buscayno
and Victor Corpuz, in a murder rap failed because none of the three
would say anything against the others. It was an experience which
elicited mutual, if cautious, respect.
Aquino proposed a strategy of bringing the left into the electoral
process in order to neutralise it. 'They must have the right to participate
in elections and compete in the market place of ideas', he asserted. But
he also warned, 'If they resort to violence after that, then that's a
different story'.10It was the image of a man who could communicate
with the left while successfully competing with it that Ninoy projected in
order to secure American support.
The Frustrations of Exile

It was, however, a proposition that the US would not buy. While Jimmy
Carter's State Department was'initially critical of the repressive record
of the Marcos regime, by 1979 the Democratic administration whose
'human rights policy' at first buoyed the hopes of the elite opposition had
become reconciled with the Filipino strongman. It was a reconciliation
born of the realisation that Marcos had so effectively decimated the
power bases of the opposition elite that he had become the only
effective bulwark against the left.
In return for secure tenure over the two huge military bases in the
Philippines, Subic Naval Base and Clark Air Force Base, the US agreed
to provide Marcos with $500 million in military and military-related aid.
To soften the blow on the hopes of the elite opposition, however, the
Carter administration pressed for the release of Aquino.
A perfect opportunity presented itself in May 1980, when it was
1? Talk at Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, 20 February 1981.
294

discovered that Aquino needed to undergo triple-bypass heart surgery

which could not be performed in the Philippines. For Carter, it was a
face-saving gesture which he hoped would silence the critics who
accused him of making the Philippines, like Iran, an exception to his
human rights policy. For Marcos, the decision to release Aquino was a
gamble worth taking: Aquino in exile might make waves for a while, but
the dictator would be rid of the embarrassment of having a highly
publicised and popular opponent in prison; once out of the country,
Marcos estimated, Aquino would recede to the background.
It was a gamble that the cunning Marcos won. Aquino accepted the
offer in the hope that he could more effectively lobby in Washington for
an end to US support for Marcos. He banked on a long association with
agencies like the CIA and the State Department. But by the time he
reached the US, Ninoy found Washington on the defensive against the
charge hurled by the resurgent right that it was the pressure for
liberalisation from the US which had undermined the solidly pro-
American regimes of the Shah of Iran and Somoza of Nicaragua.1' He
found, to his dismay, that the Carter administration was, in fact,
attempting to coopt him into the Marcos order: Assistant Secretary of
State Richard Holbrooke offered him the prime ministership of the
country while Marcos would remain president. He angrily refused.'2
Aquino then behaved exactly as Marcos predicted he would. He went
on speaking tours of the US loudly criticising the regime. Then, in the
summer of 1980, his followers in Manila participated in a series of
bombings of government buildings and Marcos-linked establishments
designed to scare Carter away from Marcos by creating an image of
urban instability a'la Iran. These moves provided the dictator with the
perfect excuse for permanently banning Aquino from returning by
refusing to guarantee either his personal freedom or personal safety.
It gradually dawned on Ninoy that in leaving the Philippines, he had
allowed himself to be tactically outmanoeuvred once more by 'the evil
genius'. Publicity tapered off a few months after he settled as a visiting
fellow at Harvard University's Centre for International Affairs. And
when the Reagan administrationtook office in January 1981, he realised
that exile politics was a lost cause.
The new administration embraced Marcos with a vengeance, with
' Key works in the conservative attack were Jeane Kirkpatrick's 'Dictatorships and Double
Standards', Commentary, July 1979. and Robert Tucker's 'America in Decline: the foreign
policy of maturity', Foreign Affairs, Winter 1980-81.
12 'The Philippines: the more things change . . .', p 16.
295

Vice-President George Bush toasting the dictator in the following

fashion: 'We love you, sir . . . we love your adherence to democratic
rights and processes'. Bush's gushing remarks were paralleled by a
doctrinal effort to make authoritarianism in the Third World respect-
able and finally to bury the obsolete ideology of missionary democracy
after what was regarded as the destabilising attempt of the Carter
administration to revive Kennedyite Alliance for Progress policies. The
most able representative of the new right-wing thinking in foreign policy
was the US Ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrickwho
argued:
. . . [T]he fabric of authority unravels quickly when the power and status of the man at
the top are undermined or eliminated. The longer the autocrat has held power, and the
more pervasive his personal influence, the more dependent a nation's institutions will be
on him. Without him, the organized life of the society will collapse, like an arch from
which the keystone has been removed.13
'Well, I guess their rhetoric has finally caught up with their practice',
Aquino wryly commented after reading Kirkpatrick. Investigated by
the FBI at the request of Marcos for allegedly 'exporting terrorism' and
harassed by immigration officials whenever he returned from trips
abroad, Aquino had had enough of exile. In mid-1981, Ninoy bade
farewell to the opposition in exile, only to return-sheepishly-from
Tokyo after failing to obtain a 'safe conduct' pass from Marcos. In early
1982, news of Marcos' deteriorating health made Aquino ebullient once
more, even manic at times, as he predicted to one and all: '1982 is the
year we shall all return to the Philippines'. But by the end of 1982, after
Marcos had concluded a state visit to the US, Ninoy was still chafing in
what he called 'our American prison'.
By mid-1983, Aquino's political future was in deep trouble. His
prime role in the elite opposition was being steadily usurped by two
figures: former Senator Jose Diokno and Mayor'Nene' Pimental. While
neither populist nor charismatic, Diokno had gained widespread
prominence both internally and internationally for his firm nationalist
stance, his unrelenting criticism of the regime, and, most of all, for his
energetic defence of the rights of political prisoners. Pimental, a
populist and charismatic politician in the Aquino mould, drew national
attention when he successfully stopped Marcos' effort to oust him from
his office as mayor of Cagayan de Oro City. In early 1983, Marcos
unwittingly converted Pimentel into a national hero when he had the
latter jailed for allegedly contributing assistance to the NPA.
13 Kirkpatrick, op. cit., p 37.
296

BETWEENDICTATORSHIPAND REVOLUTIONIN THE PHILIPPINES
Aquino's concern about his political future, however, intersected

with a larger worry: that the Filipino people's rapid movement toward
the left was nearing the point of no return. His fears were reinforced by
increasing coverage of the NPA in the American press which depicted
the Philippine left as leading the only growing guerrilla insurgency in an
otherwise quiescent Southeast Asia. The movement threatened to
sweep away not only Marcos but the whole system of elite control to
which Aquino as a ruling-class politician was fundamentally wedded.
He found himself, in fact, adapting to the growing popularity of the
left's positions. When he first arrived in the US, for instance, he
defended the US bases as necessary to 'protect the region against the
Soviet Union'. But prior to his departure, he was reluctantly favouring
their 'eventual withdrawal'. Until the end, however, he believed that the
anti-imperialist position was misguided. 'You know', he asserted, 'we
overestimate the impact of the US on the Philippines. We can manage
the US by using the carrot and the stick. We can arrive at more equal
terms with multinationals. What we need is more political will and less
rhetoric'.
The film Gandhi had a strong impact on a political figure shorn of all
weapons except courage. An act of non-violence, especially if it was
covered by the Western press, would draw international and national
attention to both himself and his political alternative to both Marcos
and the NPA. By June 1983, Aquino had made up his mind. 'There is no
turning back now', he grimly asserted, and in a dramatic farewell to the
US Congress Subcommittee on Asia-Pacific Affairs, he stated that his
mission was to 'press for two-man negotiations with Marcos for a return
to constitutional democracy' before it was too late.
Aquino, of course, realised there were grave risks to his personal
safety. But in figuring out Marcos' probable response as a rational
politician, Aquino convinced himself that the dictator had only three
options:
-He could simply refuse him entry into the country and send him
back to the United States. In this event, Aquino would be awarded a
great propaganda victory;
-He could jail Aquino again and resume the 'legal' proceedings to
execute him. Not only would this return Aquino to centre-stage but
the international publicity, as before, would make it politically
impossible for Marcos to carry out his death threat;
-He could allow Aquino to enter the country freely, then wait for the
appropriate opportunity to have him assassinated in a 'clean' fashion.
297

Ninoy figured, however, that the more time he had to move about
freely, the more political and personal defences he could erect to ward
off an assassination attempt.
For Aquino, the ideal scenario-which he felt he had a 50-50 chance
of pulling off-was the last one. Immediately after arriving, he would
then lead his followers waiting at the airport on a ten-mile march from
the airport to the presidential palace in downtown Manila. '"By the
time we reach Malacanang [the palace], we will be 20,000 strong" he
mused prior to his departure from the United States'."4 It was a scene
right out of Gandhi.
The Irrational Takes Hold

It was Aquino's third major miscalculation in his battle with Marcos,
and this time it was fatal. Ninoy's mistake lay in judging Marcos as a
rational politician with a reasonable degree of control over develop-
ments. By August 1983, neither of these conditions held.
Things were slipping from the control of a dictator wracked by
disease. The most serious manifestation of this situation was a bitter
struggle for the succession to the throne between two powerful factions
of the Marcos coalition. A palace clique led by Imelda Marcos, the
president's powerful wife, and the Armed Forces Chief of Staff, Fabian
Ver, confronted a group headed by the Defence Minister, Juan Ponce
Enrile, and Eduardo Conjuangco, who also happened to be the first
cousin of Aquino's wife, Cory. The two sides were roughly matched in
terms of firepower and followings within and without the military.'5
Aquino's coming threatened to upset the rough equilibrium estab-
lished between the two groups. For while Ninoy's grassroots political
machine might have been dismantled by the regime, the latter retained a
healthy respect for his ability to mobilise people through his populist
charisma. Aquino, in short, could act as a 'wild card' in the succession
process, and tip the balance against the Imelda-Ver faction, to which the
dictator inclined.
Aquino also erred in overestimating the extent to which Marcos
would use rational political calculus to figure out his response to his
rival's arrival. Close observers of Marcos have remarked that the few
times that the dictator-the apotheosis of the calculating Machiavellian
14 Interview with Joel Rocamora, associate of the Southeast Asia Resource Center, 4 August 1983.
5 For the implications of this struggle on the assassination, see Alfred McCoy, 'A Political Death in
Imelda's Territory', Sydney Morning Herald, 23 August 1983.
298

politician-has 'lost his cool' while making political judgments have

been in matters involving bitter personal enemies.
Ninoy was not just a bitter personal and political foe. He was the great
nemesis himself. This man was defying what the dictator regarded as an
implicit agreement when he released Aquino in 1980: that the latter
could not expect to be allowed back in if he criticised Marcos abroad.
Moreover, Ninoy was coming home, in perfect health, while he was
edging toward the grave. In a turbulent post-Marcos succession crisis,
this hated foe could still come out on top and claim the empire he had
built up over 17 years!
It was most likely this dangerous intersection of bitter personal and
political enmity and the volatile succession crisis which pushed Marcos
over the edge and led him to order the assassination of Aquino-a
conclusion to which most Filipinos, who know how tightly the dictator
controls decisions big and small, have come.
The Middle Class Upsurge

But it was a case of Aquino losing the battle-and his life-but winning
the war. For the unbelievable execution on the tarmac of the Manila
International Airport was the spark which set off the social tinderbox
that was urban Manila. What the murder did was to push the cities' large
white collar and bureaucratic middle strata as well as their business
elites into active opposition to the regime.
To grasp the full significance of this development, one must realise
that ever since the beginning of martial law, the regime had assiduously
cultivated the middle class as a support base. Marcos' projection of
strong authority to dispel the 'chaos' and 'lawlessness' of the 'old
society' was meant to appeal to one side of this traditionally volatile
class: its yearning for political and economic stability. Prior to martial
law, the idea of a man on horseback 'disciplining an undisciplined
people' had circulated widely in this class and, curiously, coexisted with
the antithetical yearning for a real democratisation of the society. To
douse middle class concern over the loss of political rights, Marcos
asserted that economic prosperity was contingent on the temporary
suspension of these rights, the 'abusive' exercise of which had led to the
'democratic stalemate'.
It was in order to keep the rural middle strata on his side that Marcos
stopped the land reform programme in 1974 when land reform agents
met great resistance from the schoolteachers, clerks, retired officers,
and small merchants who constituted the overwhelming mass of
299

medium landowners.16The urban middle class, on the other hand, was

assured that opportunities for social mobility would be opened up by an
economic development programme based on the attraction of massive
amounts of foreign capital. Middle-class prosperity was the promise of
what Marcos' PR men called 'the Revolution from the Centre'.
It was a formula that worked ... for a while. Though suspicious of
Marcos and resentful of the extravagant ways of Imelda, the middle
class was nevertheless neutralised and rendered quiescent by policies
which sustained economic growth at 6 per cent a year while keeping
inflation-the great scourge of middle class psychology-within toler-
able limits. It was the Brazilian model of depoliticisation: so long as the
middle strata felt that their living standards were rising, they would turn
a blind eye to the fall in living standards among the peasantry, labour,
and the urban poor.
The collapse, beginning in 1979, of the export-oriented, foreign
capital-dependent economic strategy from a combination of external
recession, mismanagement and corruption, and growing resistance
from the victims of development, triggered the alienation of the middle
strata, whose ranks were hit hard by rising unemployment and whose
pocketbooks were worn thin by inflationary pressures resulting from
World Bank/IMF-imposed devaluations of the peso.
The bitterness created by the gap between the promise and the dismal
consequences of the 'Revolution from the Centre' was expressed in this
fashion by one middle-class intellectual who apparently had believed
the earlier rhetoric:
Marcos launched a revolution from the center. If it was indeed a revolution from the
center, it would have survived. It would have brought a lot of people from below to the
middle class. There would have been this broad belt of stakeholders in the new society
which would have been its impregnable defense mechanism. This didn't happen. Anong
lumitaw? [What emerged?] The new oligarchs. So it would appear that the revolution
sold out to the Commies.Y
It was a process of disillusionment that heartened Aquino, whose
hopes of coming to power someday were bound up with support from
the urban middle groups. 'The trade-off (between the loss of political
liberties and economic development) no longer works', he asserted.
'Now, you have both political repression and economic depression'.18
18 This is the conclusion of 'Agrarian Reform in the Philippines', a summary of the discussions in a
seminar on the Marcos agrarian reform sponsored by the US Agency for International
Development in Washington, DC in December 1977. See especially pp 12, 13.
17 Jose Romero, member of the executive committee of the Makati Business Club (MBC), quoted
in Who Magazine (Manila), 2 November 1983.
1 Talk at Yale University, Connecticut, 10 May 1983.
300

BETWEENDICTATORSHIPAND REVOLUTIONIN THE PHILIPPINES
On another occasion, he declared: 'Economics is Marcos' Achilles

Heel'.
Aquino was also elated by another development: the alienation of the
national capitalist class from Marcos. In the early years of martial law,
the dictator had tried to keep these national entrepreneurs who enjoyed
the privileges of a protected internal market on his side by resisting
World Bank/IMF pressure to bring down tariff walls. When the
multilateral agencies issued the ultimatum to deprotectionise in 1979,
however, Marcos complied, forcing the national entrepreneurs into
opposition. A World Bank report candidly painted the situation into
which it had forced its client:
[T]he elimination of protective tariffs and special subsidies has led to great dissatisfac-
tion within the industries targeted for 'streamlining.' Therefore, in the Philippines,
where the additional element of strongly perceived favoritism to Marcos' personal
friends has created considerable resentment, the local business community has several
reinforcing reasons to try to undermine the policy directives of the current govern-
ment.20
It was the 'strongly perceived favoritism to personal friends' that

prompted two other sectors of Manila's business class to join the
national entrepreneurs threatened by the elimination of protectionism:
the traditional local financial elite, which had tight links to the US
financial world, and key American foreign investors.
Initially supportive of Marcos for establishing a 'sound business
climate' in the early 1970s, the local financial elite and foreign investors
began to worry when Marcos' cronies were able to secure control of key
industries, like sugar, coconut, construction, and energy. The rapid
expansion of these conglomerates was fuelled by the contraction of
foreign and domestic credit. When this hothouse borrowing created a
major financial crisis in 1981, Marcos' severely indebted friends were
left high and dry and bankrupt, provoking a sigh of relief among their
business rivals.
Marcos, however, would not allow his cronies to die. He persuaded
the World Bank and the IMF, which now had the last word on foreign
credit to the heavily indebted regime, to allow the establishment of a
US$600 million 'rescue fund' for his cronies, then promptly overshot
the level of financing agreed upon with the two institutions. The rescue
scandal shattered whatever confidence was left among the financial elite
and foreign investors.
9 Quoted in Robin Broad, 'Philippine Crisis Leaves Investors Wary', Multinational Monitor,
November 1983, p 6.
20
World Bank, op. cit., p 8.
301

'The Philippines will never solve its economic problems,' a prominent

member of the financial elite with close ties to foreign capital warned
the regime publicly, 'unless the administration demonstrates in un-
equivocal terms that it is prepared to abandon its failed policy of
favoritism and to start dealing a fresh deck and an even hand'.2'
Reflecting foreign investors' disillusionment with the regime, one of
the leading 'political risk analysis' firms serving multinational corpora-
tions warned its clients against making 'any long-term commitments in
the Philippines'.22In the meantime, the big US private banks which held
the bulk of the country's $22 billion debt drastically scaled down their
loan programmes out of fear that instability, unbridled corruption, and
economic stagnation had made the Philippines a major credit risk.
The US Examines Its Options

Aquino hoped to bring about a middle-class/business alliance to set
against the National Democratic Front's influence among the peasan-
try, workers, urban poor, religious clergy, students and selected
professional sectors like teachers and health workers. And it was, in
fact, such a force that came spontaneously and suddenly into being after
his assassination.
The post-Aquino ferment has been produced by the confluence of
two movements: the spontaneous surge of the newly politicised
white-collar and bureaucratic middle sectors and the 'conscious'
response of the organised sections of the student population, lower
clergy, selected professional strata, and the urban poor. While the NDF
provides the political leadership for the latter groups, which have been
the targets of its urban organising work for over a decade, the
ideological and political direction of the middle-class movement
continues to rest, if unsteadily, with the elite oppositionists grouped in
UNIDO (United Democratic Opposition), centre forces in the Church
hierarchy led by the outspoken Archbishop of Manila, Cardinal Jaime
Sin, and the local financial elite dominated by the billionaire banker,
Enrique Zobel. The two movements even have their two distinct
geographical headquarters. Demonstrations 'uptown', in the plush
Makati financial district of Manila, are invariably led by the financial
elite and traditional elite politicians, while mass actions 'downtown', at
the Manila Post Office and other more popular sites, are usually
mobilised or strongly influenced by NDF forces.
21 Jaime Ongpin, Letter to the Editor, Fortune, 24 August 1981.
22 BERI, S A, 'Force 83 Report on the Philippines', New York, 15 March 1983, p 2.
302

Linking the two movements are Cory Aquino, the slain senator's
wife, and two nationalist figures who have broken with elite politics but
continue to enjoy enormous prestige with their former colleagues,
former Senators Diokno and Tanada. It is an uneasy coalition: on a
number of occasions, the business executives have sponsored demon-
strations with pro-US slogans to differentiate their politics from that of
the radicals. The left, on the other hand, has teamed up with Tanada and
other 'bourgeois personalities' to set up the National Alliance for
Justice, Freedom and Democracy which seeks 'the dismantling of the
US-Marcos dictatorship ... and the establishment of a coalition
government based on a truly democratic and representative system'.23
But the NDF has also issued strong warnings against attempts by the US
to split the movement.
There is a third actor, whose movement will probably be the decisive
element in the urban ferment. Between these two relatively 'conscious'
and organised forces lies the majority of Manila's vast urban mass-the
struggling lower middle-class sectors of clerks, small stall-owners, small
transport-operators; unorganised workers; and unorganised residents
of the city's expanding shantytowns. This great 'mobilisable' mass,
which formed the bulk of the five million marchers and mourners at
Aquino's funeral in late August, is deeply anti-Marcos but continues to
await the 'political formula' which can move it into decisive and
sustained street protest. It is the base for which the upper-middle class
opposition and the National Democratic Front are now quietly compet-
ing while preserving the broad unity against the dictatorship. This is a
struggle that the NDF, with its class-based programme and eleven-year
organising experience appears to be confident of winning. But sharp
competition there is and will be, if we are to take the word of one
energetic middle-class leader:
What's happening in Ayala [site of many demonstrations]? These are the managers at
work. They were the radicals of the 1970s who are now putting on a coat and tie but who
still aspire for a better life. This is the revolution from the center. Yet these managers are
found not only in Makati [the business district] but in the government bureaucracy. Note
that movements like JAJA, ATOM, and other groups are led by managers. You see
management and corporate tactics at work where you can mount 20,000, 30,000, a
million funeral cortege. That's a reflection of the management behind the protest
movement. That is the leadership of the opposition.24
The US has not been a disinterested observer of this process. Initially
23 Nationalist Alliance for Justice, Freedom, and Democracy, 'Primer,' Manila, 5 November 1983.
24 Jose Romero, member of the executive committee of the Makati Business Club, quoted in Who
Magazine, 2 November 1983.
303

taken aback by the rapid political deflation of an erstwhile ally, the US

foreign policy establishment has been actively debating the preferred
'scenario' for a post-Marcos transition. In 1982, even before the Aquino
assassination, the Central Intelligence Agency had recruited Philippine
academic specialists to elaborate on possible alternatives to Marcos.
The CIA effort was expanded into an 'inter-agency' venture after the
assassination, with CIA, State Department, Pentagon, and congres-
sional officials participating in a flurry of marathon meetings on the
'Marcos problem'.
The internal debate hit the press on 3 October, the same day
President Reagan decided to cancel a November visit to Manila. In an
opinion piece in the New York Times, the former US Ambassador to the
Philippines and CIA officer William Sullivan recommended that the US
'take action, however messy, to assist a peaceful and democratic
transition in the Philippines'.25 The Wall Street Journal attacked the
Sullivan line saying, 'Not only does Mr. Marcos have enemies worth
fighting; he is waging his fight with a skill that gives us little reason, now
at least, to count him out'.26
The Sullivan proposal, which is said to be favoured by professionals at
the middle levels of the CIA and State Department, received a great
boost when the US House of Representatives passed a resolution, by a
resounding 413 to 3 votes, calling for a 'thorough, independent, and
impartial investigation of the Aquino assassination' and 'genuine, free,
and fair elections' to the National Assembly in May 1984.
In the debate on the resolution, Representative Steven Solarz, author
of the resolution, bluntly stated the anti-leftist objective of the
'constitutional democratic option':
I think that these [May 1984] elections may well constitute a historic watershed in the
history of the Philippines. At a time when there is growing support in the country for the
Communist-dominated New People's Army . .. this may well be the last opportunity to
demonstrate to the Filipino people that peaceful change is possible in their country.27
By mid-October, another force of immense consequence threw itself
behind the electoral alternative: Marcos' major international creditors,
who were worried that the massive flight of capital triggered by the
Aquino assassination, which had reduced foreign exchange reserves
from $2 billion to $435 million-less than the equivalent of one month's
imports-in two and a half months' time, had damaged the regime's
25 New York Times, 3 October 1983.

26 Wall Street Journal. editorial, 6 October 1983
27 Congressional Record, 24 October 1983, p H8566.
304

ability to repay its now burgeoning $24.9 billion debt. Political reform, a
consortium of the Philippines' biggest creditors told the regime's
representatives in New York, had become an essential condition for the
restoration of a good business climate, and they refused to grant more
loans until 'political changes' took place.28 In Manila, the American
Chamber of Commerce, which had been among the first to congratulate
Marcos for imposing martial law eleven years earlier, now joined other
business bodies to demand 'political reforms, restoration of democratic
rights, and an end to pervasive militarisation'.29
From the standpoint of its proponents, the 'peaceful electoral option'
provides a chance for the US to clothe itself with the mantle of Aquino
in order to split the opposition and isolate the National Democratic
Front. The urban middle strata would provide the base of a government
legitimised by 'free elections'. In the opinion of some State Department
and CIA officials, because of the weakness of the traditional elite
opposition, the 'professional sectors' of the officer corps would have to
be drawn in to serve as a prop of the government, as would the current
group of technocrats who continue to enjoy the confidence of the
international banking community and whose presence would serve as a
guarantee that the country's enormous debt would be repaid.30
There are, however, several formidable obstacles to this scenario.
One is the White House itself. Reagan and his trusted advisers are
known to make foreign policy from their 'hip pocket', ignoring or going
against the advice of the professionals and experts at the CIA and the
State Department. The policies of the White House toward the Third
World continue to be characterised by reflex anti-Communism, by a
strong preference for strongman repressive allies, and by a belief that
liberalisation is the ante-chamber to revolution. The conviction is strong
in this circle that elite democratic systems are obsolete as mechanisms of
pro-US social stabilisation and that it was precisely Carter's pressure for
liberalisation which undermined both the Shah and Somoza. And, at a
time when the administration has fundamentally redefined US foreign
' 'Bankers Say Marcos Must Move', New York Times, 29 October 1983.
29 'Marcos Blames Businessmen for Economic Crisis', Washington Post, 11 November 1983.
30 Almost all consultants or participants we talked to who have been attending the 'interagency
discussions' on 'post-Marcos scenarios' emphasise the stress placed by US policymakers on the

role of the military professionals and the technocrats as 'stabilisers' in the 'transition'. If General
Ramos is the Pentagon's preferred man in the Philippine military, Prime Minister Cesar Virata is
the bankers' favourite in the technocracy. Virata has already distanced himself from Marcos by
saying in public that he does not 'rule out' the possibility that people high in the government were
responsible for the assassination, and by his publicly expressed opposition to Marcos' threat to
reimpose martial law following the late September demonstrations in Manila.
305

policy from merely containing national liberation forces to 'rolling them

back' from states where they have come to power (like Grenada), it
is unlikely, say some observers, that the administration would
prove sympathetic to an exercise which might bring the left closer to
power.
Another key obstacle is Marcos himself. Supporters of the electoral
option are hoping for an early demise-from natural causes-of the
dictator, for they realise, as one specialist puts it, 'there is no way
Marcos will go except in a coffin'. While they see the dictator playing a
'stabilising role' in bringing the country to the May 1984 National
Assembly elections, his presence in any 'arrangement' thereafter would
only discredit it.
A third complicating factor is the likely resistance to any 'peaceful
transition' from the Marcos base-the army, cronies, and local and
regional satraps grouped together in the New Society Party (KBL).
With or without Marcos, this sector will demand strong guarantees for
the privileges and positions which it has acquired through fraud and
force.
Sizeable numbers of Marcos loyalists see as their insurance policy a
post-Marcos government led by the Army Chief of Staff, Fabian Ver,
who now doubles as chief of Marcos' praetorian guard, and the First
Lady, Imelda Marcos, the first providing the repressive muscle, the
second the political base. Since Ver and Imelda are extremely unpopu-
lar, this possibility is a nightmare which some US planners are
determined to prevent.
Ver is seen as a 'political', as opposed to a 'professional officer'-that
is, one who made it to the top through connections to the First Family
and whose position is dependent on a network of similar political
appointees to key military positions. US hopes of controlling the army
are based on the discontented professionals, represented by the Vice-
Chief of Staff Fidel Ramos, who have had traditionally close ties with
the Pentagon through US-sponsored military training programmes and
education at US military schools. A great many of the professionals are
captains and colonels commanding units in the field who are doing the
actual fighting against the NPA, while the 'politicals' are either in
comfortable general staff positions or connected to urban-based units
charged with protecting the dictator. 'If Marcos dies and Ver moves, the
professionals won't leave the barracks if the Americans say so', says a
consultant to the Defence Department, reflecting the Pentagon's belief
that without Marcos, the professionals would gravitate toward direction
306

from the US, which provides the military aid which keeps the
counterinsurgency machinery working.
A fourth problem in the electoral scenario is the state of the elite
opposition. Not only has this sector been severely weakened by Marcos'
effective work of demolishing their grassroots political machinery, but,
with the loss of Aquino, they are without a credible unifying figure.
Former Assemblyman Salvador Laurel, the head of UNIDO, is
discredited by a past of corruption and opportunism. Mayor Nene
Pimentel of Cagayan de Oro City is an attractive populist figure, but one
unlikely to be accepted by the older, entrenched elite politicians, at least
for the time being. The man who approaches Aquino's stature, former
Senator Diokno, is one who has repudiated old-style politics and
refuses to cut any deal with the Americans. Moreover, the elite
opposition realises that to be seen making a deal with any faction of the
Marcos coalition-including the 'cleaner sectors' like the military
professionals and the technocrats, whom the Americans find indispens-
able in a post-Marcos tradition-would be the kiss of death in the mass
movement.
Economics is the fifth major obstacle to the parliamentary demo-
cratic option. Economics, to paraphrase Aquino, is the Achilles heel not
only of Marcos but of any would-be successor government. There is no
way any US-supported regime can avoid making the regularpayments on
principal and interest on the massive external debt contracted by the
regime, which is estimated to hit $26 billion by the end of 1983. Some
calculate that these payments now come to $3 billion a year.
In the aftermath of the Aquino assassination, the government
suspended principal payments for three months beginning in late
October 1983 and is now in the process of concluding a standby
agreement with the International Monetary Fund which would provide
it with $650 million to pay off arrears to the private banks and cover the
costs of necessary imports. Future private loans, which are necessary to
keep the regime from declaring bankruptcy, have been made contingent
on the application of the severe austerity measures-cutbacks on
imports, big reductions in government spending, heavier taxes, wage
cuts-which go with IMF 'stabilisation' programmes.
The banks have, in fact, thrown themselves behind the electoral
option out of fear that the regime has lost the legitimacy necessary to
impose austerity successfully. In other words, to succeed, austerity must
be 'democratised', or applied by a government with some legitimacy
derived from elections. There is no easier way, however, to erode the
307

legitimacy of a parliamentary government, even among the middle

classes, than for it to act as a collection agent for the IMF and the private
banks. This is a dilemma which haunts would-be parliamentary
successors to dictatorships not only in the Philippines, but also in Brazil,
Argentina, and Chile.
In his more lucid moments, Aquino could presciently sketch the grim
scenario for a post-Marcos parliamentary government:
Look, you have a situation when Marcos falls, you come in, the communists back off,
and people expect you to make miracles. How do I put back three million jobs? How do
I bring down the price of gasoline, for Pete's sake . . . So the people will say, 'Jesus
Christ, you're the guy we waited eight years for? You're even worse! ... The thing I can
say is, the first guy that will come in will be blown out in six months. Then a second guy will
come in and he'll be blown out in six months.3'
The Turbulent Future

The immediate future then holds out the dismal prospect of a series
of unstable US-supported governments-authoritarian or parlia-
mentary-composed of changeable sets of officers, technocrats, and
elite democrats, each unsuccessfully attempting to stop the historic
momentum of the Philippine polity toward the left.
Hungry for power after eleven years of deprivation, some sectors of
the elite opposition are only too likely to walk into the parliamentary
trap. Only one actor in the Philippine political drama fully comprehends
the unfolding scenario-the National Democratic Front (NDF), the
political force which both Marcos and Aquino regarded as the strategic
threat but attempted to deal with in radically different ways.
The NDF has stated that it is not willing to be drawn into a premature
bid to seize state power at this point. The lessons of the disastrous
strategy of 'swift armed uprising' adopted by the old left in the 1950s are
much too deeply ingrained. Despite the migration to the cities, its
spokepersons have reiterated that the dynamics of the armed struggle in
the countryside, where 60 per cent of the population live, will continue
to be the principal determinant of the decision on when to make the
definitive drive for state power. That will wait until the movement has
achieved the political following and military power-the 'critical
mass'-to pass on to what NPA strategists call 'the strategic offen-
sive'-a phase characterised by a final massive campaign conducted by
large regular NPA units to destroy the Philippine military on the rural
battlefield, coordinated with uprisings in Manila and other urban
31 'The Philippines: the more things change . . .', p 16.
308

centres. Liberation Day a'la 1975 in Vietnam is a few years down the
road, say the leaders of a movement which has attained a reputation of
carefully calibrating its advances to its actual strength.
And it will be at that point that the United States, having failed to
stabilise the social situation, with either the formal democratic mechan-
ism or the authoritarian solution, will have to confront once more the
issue of whether or not to openly intervene with troops to destroy
another national liberation movement in Southeast Asia.
309


Benigno Aquino Between Dictatorship and Revolution in The Philippines

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Third World Quarterly

Benigno Aquino: Between Dictatorship and Revolution in the Philippines

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Benigno Aquino: between

TWQ6(2) April 1984/1ISSN

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The Making of a Ruling-Class Politician

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Aquino and the Crisis of the Republic

Benigno Aquino', Multinational Monitor, February 1981, p 17.

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politics Philippine-style: that opposing factions of the elite would

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diplomacy, relieved US business interests explicitly articulated in a

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Aquino and the New Order

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authority and the loss of traditional democratic rights, added Marcos'

At the national level, the generals shared power and interpenetrated

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Marcos, Aquino, and the Challenge from the Left

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'national bourgeoisie', and draw them to oppose imperialism and its

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handsomely by the beginning of the 1980s. In 56 of the country's 72

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posture of many of his colleagues. 'I don't understand these people', he

The Frustrations of Exile

1? Talk at Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, 20 February 1981.

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discovered that Aquino needed to undergo triple-bypass heart surgery

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Vice-President George Bush toasting the dictator in the following

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Aquino's concern about his political future, however, intersected

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The Irrational Takes Hold

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politician-has 'lost his cool' while making political judgments have

The Middle Class Upsurge

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medium landowners.16The urban middle class, on the other hand, was

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On another occasion, he declared: 'Economics is Marcos' Achilles

It was the 'strongly perceived favoritism to personal friends' that

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'The Philippines will never solve its economic problems,' a prominent

The US Examines Its Options

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taken aback by the rapid political deflation of an erstwhile ally, the US

25 New York Times, 3 October 1983.

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discussions' on 'post-Marcos scenarios' emphasise the stress placed by US policymakers on the

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policy from merely containing national liberation forces to 'rolling them

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