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Philippines The Coalition Comes Undone (1986-87)
Ferdinand Marcos had perfected the art of ruling by dividing
his enemies: scaring some, chasing others out of the country,
playing one clan against another, and co-opting a few members of
each prominent provincial family. The "oppositionists," as the
controlled Manila press called them, were never united while
Marcos was in Malacañang, and only through the intervention of
Cardinal Jaime Sin did they agree on a unified ticket to oppose
Marcos in the "snap election" that the ailing dictator suddenly
called for February 1986. The widow Aquino had public support but
no political organization, whereas the old-line politico Salvador
H. "Doy" Laurel had an organization but little popular support.
After difficult negotiations, Laurel agreed to run for vice
president on a ticket with Aquino. Aquino won on February 7,
1986, but the margin of victory will never be known, for the
election was marred by gross fraud, intimidation, ballot box
stuffing, and falsified tabulation.
Aquino had to perform a delicate balancing act between left
and right, within society at large and later within her own
cabinet. Aquino and Laurel triumphed in good part because of the
defection of Enrile, who was then minister of defense, and Fidel
V. Ramos, the acting Armed Forces of the Philippines chief of
staff. Both men had served Marcos loyally for many years but now
found themselves pushed aside by General Fabian Ver, Marcos's
personal bodyguard and commander of the Presidential Security
Command. They risked their lives defying Marcos and Ver at the
crucial moment. Enrile and Ramos conceived of the new government
as a coalition in which they would have important roles to play.
Laurel saw it the same way.
In one sense, the Aquino government initially was a
coalition--it drew support from all parts of the political
spectrum. The middle class was overwhelmingly behind "Cory," the
democratic alternative to Marcos. Most leftists saw her as
"subjectively" progressive even if she was "objectively"
bourgeois. They hoped she could reform Philippine politics. On
the right, only those actually in league with Marcos supported
him. Aquino's support was very wide and diverse.
The coalition, however, began unraveling almost immediately.
Enrile thought that Aquino should declare her government
"revolutionary," because that would mean that the 1986 elections
were illegitimate and that new presidential elections would be
held soon. When Aquino made it clear that she intended to serve
out her entire six-year term, Enrile and Laurel set out to
undermine her. Ramos took a cautiously ambivalent position but
ultimately supported Aquino. Without his loyalty, Aquino would
not have survived the many coup attempts she successfully put
down.
Aquino's political honeymoon was brief. Arturo Tolentino,
Marcos's running mate in the February election, proclaimed
himself acting president on July 6, 1986, but that attempt to
unseat Aquino was short-lived. By October 1986, Enrile was
refusing to attend cabinet meetings on the grounds that they were
"a waste of the people's money." Aquino fired him the next month,
after he was implicated in a coup plan code-named "God Save the
Queen" (presumably because the conspirators hoped to keep Aquino
on as a figurehead). The plotters were suppressed, and on the
morning of November 23, Aquino met with her entire cabinet,
except for Laurel, who was playing golf. She asked for the
resignations of all other members of her cabinet and then
jettisoned those leftists who most irritated the army and
replaced Enrile with Rafael Ileto as the new minister of national
defense. Aquino started a pattern, repeated many times since, of
tactically shifting rightward to head off a rightist coup.
Enrile was out of the government, but Laurel remained in,
despite his vocal, public criticism of Aquino. She relieved him
of his duties as minister of foreign affairs on September 16,
1987, but could not remove him from the vice presidency. A month
later, Laurel publicly declared his willingness to lead the
country if a coup succeeded in ousting Aquino. The next year, he
told the press that the presidency "requires a higher level of
competence" than that shown by Aquino.
The disintegration of the original Aquino-Laurel-Enrile
coalition was only part of a bigger problem: The entire cabinet,
government, and, some would say, even the entire nation, were
permeated with factionalism. Aquino also had difficulty dealing
with the military. The first serious dispute between Aquino and
the military concerned the wisdom of a cease-fire with the New
People's Army. Aquino held high hopes that the communists could
be coaxed down from the hills and reconciled to democratic
participation if their legitimate grievances were addressed. She
believed that Marcos had driven many people to support the New
People's Army.
The Philippine military, which had been fighting the
guerrillas for seventeen years, was hostile to her policy
initiative. When talks began in September 1986, military plotters
began work on the "God Save the Queen" uprising that was aborted
two months later. Aquino tried reconciliation with the Moro
National Liberation Front and sent her brother-in-law to Saudi
Arabia, where he signed the Jiddah Accord with the Moro National
Liberation Front on January 4, 1987. A coup attempt followed
three weeks later. In the wake of these coup attempts, Aquino
reformed her cabinet but she also submitted to military demands
that she oust Executive Secretary Joker Arroyo, a political
activist and her longtime confidant. Her legal counsel, Teodoro
Locsin, whom the military considered a leftist, and her finance
secretary, Jaime Ongpin, also had to go. (Ongpin was later found
dead; the coroner's verdict was suicide, although he was lefthanded and the gun was in his right hand.)
Aquino had been swept into office on a wave of high
expectations that she would be able to right all of the wrongs
done to the Philippines under Marcos. When she could not do this
and when the same problems recurred, Filipinos grew
disillusioned. Many of Aquino's idealistic followers were
dismayed at the "Mendiola Massacre" in 1987 in which troops fired
into a crowd of protesting farmers right outside Malacañang. The
military was simply beyond her control. The entire staff of the
Commission on Human Rights resigned in protest even though Aquino
herself joined the protestors the next day. Those people who
hoped that Aquino would liberally use emergency power to
implement needed social changes were further dismayed by the fate
of her promised land reform program. Instead of taking immediate
action, she waited until the new Congress was seated, and turned
the matter over to them. That Congress, like all previous
Philippine legislatures, was dominated by landowners, and there
was very little likelihood that these people would dispossess
themselves.
Aquino's declining political fortunes were revealed in public
opinion polls in early 1991 that showed her popularity at an alltime low, as protesters marched on Malacañang, accusing her of
betraying her promises to ease poverty, stamp out corruption, and
widen democracy. Nevertheless, Aquino's greatest achievement in
the first five years of her term was to begin the healing
process.
Data as of June 1991
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