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Philippines Unsolved Political Problems
In 1991, after five years of democracy, many systemic
political problems remained. These included the twin
insurgencies, the sputtering economy, the skewed distribution of
wealth and land, and widespread human rights abuses.
As of 1991, the New People's Army had been in the field for
twenty-two years and was further from being able to seize power
than it had been a decade before. Many trends were unfavorable.
More than a hundred communist leaders had been captured, armed
troop strength was down, weapons were in short supply, and morale
was low. Still, the government could not eliminate the New
People's Army
(see The Counterinsurgency Campaign
, ch. 5). The
stalemate made the government seem ineffective. Despite the
decline in the late 1980s in the fortunes of the international
communist movement and the Communist Party of the Philippines,
the communists, as the only Philippine political party addressing
the problems of the very poor, could not be discounted.
The Moro National Liberation Front and other rebellious
Muslim armies on Mindanao remained in a state of discontent in
the early 1990s. As had been the case under four regimes
(Spanish, American, Japanese, and Filipino), there were scant
prospects that the Muslims could be fully integrated into
Philippine society. They were unlikely to be satisfied with the
limited autonomy over a limited region embodied in the Autonomous
Region in Muslim Mindanao. Neither the government nor the Moro
National Liberation Front could win a final victory.
Consequently, the problem was likely to continue to fester.
The Philippine economy has exemplified the "revolution of
rising expectations." In the early 1990s, Manileños watched
American movies and provincianos watched films made in
Manila. Even rural villagers dreamed of cars, cities, excitement,
and an end to the grinding poverty that condemned them to hunger
and their children to malnutrition. Filipinos had high
aspirations, as shown by the sacrifices they made to send their
children to college, but most were doomed to bitter
disappointment. The Philippine economy, strapped with a US$28
billion debt inherited from the Marcos administration, offered
only limited opportunities
(see External Debt
, ch. 3).
One of the greatest disappointments of the Aquino years was
the lack of progress in the agrarian reform program. Aquino could
have used her political honeymoon and her inherited dictatorial
powers to divest the old aristocrats of their estates and pass
out land to the farmers who actually tilled it, but she waited
until the new Congress was elected and gave the job to them.
About 90 percent of Congress members were landowners. The version
of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program passed by the
Congress was signed as the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law by
President Aquino on June 10, 1988. It included many loopholes
deliberately added by members of Congress to enable landowners
(including themselves) to evade the intent of the law. A bloc of
landowning legislators led by Aquino's brother, Jose Cojuangco,
resisted efforts to pass more effective agrarian reform measures.
The Commission on Human Rights, established under the 1987
constitution, had not been effective, at least in its first four
years. The Constitution grants the commission broad powers to
monitor the government's compliance with international treaty
obligations on human rights. The commission, however, claiming
that it cannot investigate abuses that occur "in an environment
of war," as of the end of 1989 had resolved only about 10 percent
of the cases brought before it and reverted to investigating
ordinary civil police matters. Even notorious cases, such as the
1987 Lupao Massacre, in which seventeen villagers, including six
children and two octogenarians, were lined up and shot after an
engagement between the army and guerrillas, did not result in any
military or civilian convictions. In 1990 the Supreme Court
decided that warrantless arrests of suspected subversives were
constitutional.
Data as of June 1991
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