COMMENTS: Old Story, New Place (Before Marcos Fell)
Rule, James
JANUARY 1986: See if you can guess the trouble spot for U.S. foreign policy I am describing: A poor country, struggling to industrialize, richly endowed with natural resources but suffering from...
...At the extremes are the underground guerrilla movements, increasingly disciplined and ruthless forces based in the countryside but gradually extending to urban areas...
...it plunders foreign aid projects for its own benefit and sabotages any development efforts that risk broadening political participation...
...The only remarkable thing about the assassination of Aquino was its ineptitude...
...A few glimmers, perhaps...
...Corazon (Cory) Aquino, widow of the martyred leader, is a cousin of dictator Ferdinand Marcos's close political associate Eduardo Cojuangco, who runs the country's corrupt cocoanut monopoly...
...In post-Vietnam geopolitics, these installations represent the ultimate stakes in the struggle over who is to govern the Philippines...
...But the official parties are more a caricature of American machine politics of the turn of this century—a series of alliances for dividing the spoils of office within a closed political class—than institutions for transmitting grass-roots demands...
...The elite has fostered a number of political parties—Salvador Laurel's United Nationalist Democratic Organization, for example, now holds forty-one seats in the National Assembly, making it the largest parliamentary opposition...
...To be sure, there are plenty of peculiarities in the Philippine variation...
...Finally, there is the extraordinary strategic importance of the two huge American military bases at Subic Bay and Clark Field...
...Serving under the senior Laurel in that government was the father of Benigno (Ninoy) Aquino, Salvador Laurel's late political rival whose murder at Manila airport in August of 1983 triggered the present crisis...
...To be sure, alliances made for electoral purposes may be discarded as soon as they have served their purpose...
...Optimism about the long-term prospects of social and economic development dims, and dissident voices become an angry chorus...
...Disaffected intellectuals can be quietly gotten rid of or allowed to emigrate...
...Cory Aquino has made occasional gestures that could lead in this direction...
...For instance, Salvador Laurel, now running for vice president on a fusion ticket with Corazon Aquino, is the son of Jose Laurel, head of the collaborationist government under the Japanese...
...The Philippine political spectrum shades off through various other groups of moderate and extreme opposition, virtually all denied a role in institutional politics...
...EDS...
...Its domestic elite has developed its political instincts under American tutelage, and the population has sent millions of its sons and daughters as emigrants to the United States...
...Standing in the way is a self-serving elite, long opposed to change...
...Come hard times, however, and things get uglier...
...But it is important to remember the historical background sketched by James Rule, so that something may be learned for the future...
...In times of prosperity, discontent remains manageable...
...Even thirty thousand guerrilla fighters would pose no threat to a regime that enjoyed a modicum of popular support in a nation of fifty-five million The Marcos regime has forfeited such support through repressive policies and economic corruption, monumental even by Philippine standards...
...Chile in 1985...
...backs the elite, fearing that any other course would open the way to the loss of the entire country to communism...
...American officials would like to see him gone...
...With the assassination of Benigno Aquino, the regime released a deluge of foreign and domestic disaffection, creating a situation where it must either tighten its repression or risk its own destruction...
...foreign policy I am describing: A poor country, struggling to industrialize, richly endowed with natural resources but suffering from decades of retrograde political leadership...
...Iran in 1977...
...Moderate voices from the universities and the Church have come under growing government repression since martial law was instituted in 1972...
...But when the chips are down, the U.S...
...For one thing, this is one Third World country that has been under direct 140 colonial domination by the United States, having experienced two invasions by American forces...
...A new ultrarightist from the military might commit still more flamboyant human rights violations than Marcos, without making the country more governable...
...141 Hardly an optimistic picture for authentic democrats...
...MARCOS IS NOW A RECOGNIZED LIABILITY...
...But he is proving less gracious about engineering his own political demise than the late Shah of Iran, and less amenable to forcible removal than Diem of Vietnam...
...If forced to apply the authoritarian-totalitarian distinction, one would bracket the Philippines as authoritarian—along with other countries where the government writ is overbearing and cruel, yet where organized opposition remains a hard-pressed source of political initiatives...
...Of course, with a qualification here or there, my description might apply to any or all of these...
...Publicly Washington wrings its hands and privately begs its local agents to clean up their act...
...The resulting love-hate relationship is thus more complex than those linking America and other Third World nations...
...And more moderate figures, including Cory Aquino, would be unreliable on the one issue that overshadows all others to the United States: the future of Clark and Subic Bay...
...Ineffective in combating these movements directly, the elite wreaks vengeance on the moderate opposition...
...q POSTSCRIPT: As we go to press, events in the Philippines are moving too rapidly for comment in a quarterly...
...The Marcos regime is certainly inefficient in its efforts against its antagonists, but murderous for all that...
...But the assassination of Ninoy Aquino and the rise of a new generation to political consciousness have created a new set of imponderables...
...WHO ARE THE PHILIPPINE ELITE...
...But this distinction takes no account of the mayhem exacted by governments in maintaining both authoritarian and totalitarian rule...
...Is there any hope of real improvement in the Philippines...
...Needless to say, Marcos quickly points to this threat whenever pressed for reform...
...Estimates of these underground forces range from twelve to thirty thousand...
...Which country am I describing...
...Nicaragua in 1979...
...There are at least the trappings of democratic forms...
...Unfortunately, this has never been an obstacle to oligarchic domination by the elite...
...A group of old landowning families, linked by multiple ties of marriage, business dealings, and political alliances of convenience...
...The moral and political bankruptcy of the elite stands out more dramatically than ever, as underground movements threaten its survival...
...Indonesia in 1963...
...In its search for enemies, the army has a habit of rounding up the usual suspects and killing them all, no doubt in hopes that the dead will include a few opposition activists...
...After Reagan's absurd remark that both sides in the Philippines were guilty of vote fraud, Washington finally acquiesced in the fall of its friend Marcos...
...Conceivably this might come about through an alliance between the elite opposition and moderate grass-roots opponents of the Marcos regime...
...Most of the people are acutely aware of the gap in privilege between themselves and the elite...
...But people are seeking a rallying point, and institutional politics typically has little to offer...
...The United States, in whose orbit this nation lies, has lately been making stronger noises about the need for social progress, but with little effect...
...and many hold the United States responsible for keeping the cruel hierarchy in place...
...The Philippines also possess, atypically, a set of formally democratic political institutions of relatively long standing, another ambiguous legacy of American colonialism...
...Almost any degree of domestic repression in the Philippines, one fears, would be an acceptable cost for undisturbed control of those bases...
...The interconnections of family and money seem to go on forever...
...The answer this season, though, is the Philippines...
...And as for the future, we watch and hope for something better...
...What's more, American planners can find no one to put in his place...
...But it was the people of the Philippines who brought him down...
...The great majority of the population shows little enthusiasm for the shadowy and increasingly deadly guerrilla movements...
...Vietnam in 1965...
...Perhaps the way is finally open to political participation by an authentic variety of forces and interests...
...On the extreme left, guerrilla forces increasingly vie with the army in ruthlessly terrorizing rural populations...
...Good for them...
...If the bases of political participation could be broadened, these might just evolve into something more than the vehicle for elite domination that they have been in the past...
...Saudi Arabia in 1990...
Vol. 33 • April 1986 • No. 2
