Never in the long and turbulent history of the Philippines has there been an election campaign quite like it. In the muddy streets and squares of provincial cities and villages on the island of Mindanao last week, tens of thousands of farmers and plantation workers waited for a glimpse of an unusual political heroine, a retiring, bespectacled housewife with only nine weeks of political experience. Sometimes that vigil lasted for hours, under glaring sunshine and the occasional tropical downpour, but the crowds were quiet and uncomplaining. Finally, when the long-awaited political caravan straggled into view, the throngs invariably exploded into ecstasy. As small children ran alongside the open jeep that bore Opposition Candidate Corazon ("Cory") , Aquino, 53, supporters threw yellow and white confetti and shouted a welcome: "Cory! Cory! Cory!"
Back in Manila, the capital, a different kind of spectacle was unfolding. President Ferdinand Marcos, 68, an ailing autocrat possessed of formidable political powers, made an election foray of his own from Malacanang Palace to address 7,000 longshoremen on the city's South Pier. Everything was carefully choreographed: a stream of local entertainers kept the crowd's attention until Marcos, looking drawn, tired and weak, was escorted to the podium. The President joked about rumors that he had suffered a physical collapse, and dismissed reports of his obvious ill health as so much "black propaganda." Wife Imelda by his side, Marcos then made a fervent pitch for support as a bulwark against the growing Communist-led insurgency that is stalking the country. Said he defiantly: "Once a champion, always a champion."
For the first time in 20 years, many Filipinos were not so sure. Less than two weeks before some 30 million voters are expected to go to the polls on Feb. 7, the strange election exercise that has mesmerized the Philippines since November had blossomed into something unexpected: a real race. As city and rural folk thronged in astonishing numbers to Aquino rallies, her campaign organizers extolled the local outpouring as "people power," an antidote for the highly organized and often unscrupulous campaign machine that has kept Marcos in office since 1965. Members of the President's ruling New Society Movement, who had heard their leader predict an 80-20 victory for himself, were shading that estimate back to 60-40. At least two senior members of Marcos' Cabinet were even more cautious, predicting only a 55-45 win for the President. Exulted Linggoy Alcuaz, an official of one of the country's myriad splinter opposition parties: "There are times in history when things come to a boil, and this is one of them."
Few of his countrymen would argue with that assessment. The mood in Manila, thick with political tension ever since Marcos issued his surprise election call, grew even more claustrophobic last week with the latest campaign soundings. The rumor mills that grind endlessly in the city's crowded coffeehouses increased their outpourings of speculation. Fears flew that Marcos might try to cancel the balloting, a possibility that he has never quite rejected. Opponents of the President were worried that he intended to rig the election contest even more blatantly than other votes have been altered in the past. If that happened, they warned darkly, Aquino supporters by the tens of thousands would take to the streets. The Philippines, said Jose ("Peping") Cojuangco, Aquino's campaign manager, was "a powder keg." Agreed Jaime Ongpin, a wealthy businessman and key Aquino campaign adviser: "I have never felt more uncertain about the future than I do now."
That sentiment is widely shared in the Philippines and in Washington. In both places, there is a near overwhelming sense that a chapter of history is almost over: the Marcos era. Over the two decades since his first democratic election in 1965, the President has run the gamut of transformation, changing from a populist reformer to a modernizing strongman to, in recent years, a fading and often grotesque shadow of his former authoritarian self. In the process, he has profoundly changed his country, at times in the past for the better, but of late decidedly for the worse.
Now events in the sprawling Pacific archipelago appear to be moving rapidly beyond Marcos' fading ability to control them with anything like the skill and ruthlessness that he so often displayed in the past. While the President continues to hold sway in the Spanish colonial-style Malacanang Palace, the vacuum of authority outside the palace has reached alarming proportions. Among other things, it has led U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz to warn that the Philippines is heading toward "civil war on a massive scale" within three to five years if the insurgency spearheaded by the Communist New People's Army continues to grow (see following story).
A major cause of the political deterioration is the shaky economy. Gross domestic product has declined by nearly 10% in the past two years, and in real per capita terms now stands no higher than in 1972. Underemployment among the 21 million-member work force is estimated at 40%. Foreign debt exceeds $26 billion. These results may seem no worse than those of many Third World countries, except that the Philippines lies within the most economically dynamic region in the world. Marcos blames much of the country's doldrums on external causes. His critics, who now include most of the influential Philippine business community, place much of the blame for the stagnation on the regime's practices of economic favoritism, known locally as "crony capitalism."
Ricardo Pagusara, 24, a college dropout in the southern Philippine port , city of Cebu, puts the country's immediate dilemma more simply. Says he: "Respect for the present government is fast disappearing. People have become so desperate that they are willing to gamble with a new, untried person." Says Enrique Zobel, a prominent pro-Marcos businessman: "The people simply want a change."
The nature of that change is a matter of major concern to the Reagan Administration. Officially, the U.S. position is that it favors no particular candidate so long as the balloting exercise is "free, fair and credible." Says U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines Stephen Bosworth: "We are confident that we can work effectively with whatever government the Filipino people elect in a fair and clean election." In a country where even in the best of times election procedures have been marred by vote buying, ballot-box stuffing and other forms of fraud, that is a tall order. Last week U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar agreed to lead an official delegation of American observers to the Philippines for the balloting.
Vote rigging would be a calamity, as Assistant Secretary of State Wolfowitz put it last week, because it undoubtedly would turn large numbers of Filipinos to "radical alternatives, specifically the Communists." Wolfowitz, speaking before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also decried an atmosphere of "intimidation" that is on the increase in some areas of the Philippines. So far, at least ten Aquino campaign workers and four Marcos supporters have been slain during the presidential race.
Behind a facade of impartiality, however, the Administration has been straining for months to shape what it feels to be the inevitable post-Marcos transition. So persistent have the U.S. efforts been that Ambassador Bosworth is referred to by some Marcos aides as the "leader of the opposition." Wolfowitz's gloomy public assessment of the insurgency, for example, was part of a U.S. push to reform the corrupt and inefficient 230,000-member armed forces and paramilitary, which have been largely ineffective in combatting the Communist threat. As part of its approach, the U.S. has also offered the Marcos government moderate doses of military assistance (total budgeted for fiscal 1986: $55 million). Says a senior U.S. official: "Military aid is the only thing keeping the reform movement alive."
How alive is another matter. Marcos has proved to be a master at slipping away from U.S. attempts to lasso him into reform. Much U.S. effort, for example, has been aimed at getting Marcos to retire General Fabian Ver, the President's cousin, as armed forces Chief of Staff. Washington was pointedly critical of a Philippine court decision in December to exonerate Ver in the 1983 assassination of Benigno ("Ninoy") Aquino, the President's chief political opponent and the husband of Challenger Corazon Aquino. More than any other event, the Aquino assassination galvanized popular opposition to Marcos, leading up to his snap election call. Subsequent U.S. pressure led to a vague presidential promise that Ver would "probably" retire before the elections, but last week Marcos seemed to backtrack on that.
Washington's greatest accomplishment so far has been to force Marcos to address an issue he ducked for more than a decade: naming a Vice President. At his party's nominating convention in December, Marcos chose Arturo ("Turing") Tolentino, 75, a former Foreign Minister whom the President sacked from that job for espousing views incompatible with his own. Theoretically, should Marcos die after winning the Feb. 7 elections, Tolentino would take his place. The wily Marcos may have been trying to dodge that likelihood when he chose as Vice President a man who is seven years his senior. Marcos' opponents fear that the President may still make a last-minute substitution of his ambitious wife Imelda as Vice President. Under a newly promulgated Philippine election code, such a move would be legal right up to noon of election day.
Privately, some U.S. officials see little hope of a peaceful transfer of power so long as Marcos is alive. Intelligence sources have long reported that the Philippine President suffers from a form of systemic lupus erythematosus, a disease in which human antibodies attack the body's tissue, especially in many cases the kidneys. According to the same sources, Marcos has undergone one, and perhaps two, kidney transplants. He is constantly medicated, and his face shows it, usually being either drawn or puffed up from the effects of drugs. When Marcos appears at campaign rallies, he is often carried on the shoulders of guards, and he visibly flinches from pain. In the course of his long, rambling campaign speeches, his voice frequently cracks and rasps. Nonetheless, he still manages to muster the will to continue. Warns a Western diplomat: "This is still a formidable political figure."
The Reagan Administration's concern and frustration with Marcos is a far cry from its attitude a few years ago. Vice President George Bush, on a visit to Manila in 1981, gushed effusively to Marcos that "we love your adherence to democratic principles and to the democratic process." In 1982 the Philippine leader was welcomed with open arms at the White House. What stood uppermost in U.S. calculations at that time was the fact that Marcos controlled something that the U.S. badly needs: access to Subic Bay Naval Base and Clark Air Base, two of the most important American military facilities in the Pacific. Says a State Department official: "The bottom line always was, and always will be, those bases."
In fact, much more is at stake in the crisis engendered by Marcos' fading grip: the stability of the Philippine archipelago and U.S. influence in the entire region. The Philippines is an important member of the Association of South East Asian Nations, a six-nation group* that has enjoyed surprising stability and prosperity in the wake of the U.S. defeat in Viet Nam. Collapse of the Philippines in the face of a Communist insurgency would severely impair the security of the remaining ASEAN members and pose a threat to U.S. allies as far away as Australia.
At the same time, Washington's failure to prevent such a collapse would be regarded as a sign of U.S. impotence, and might encourage similar insurgencies elsewhere. Yet, as in Iran, Central America and other trouble spots around the world, the U.S. has only limited means available to help in shoring up its ally-- short of a military intervention that the American public and, above all, Congress would undoubtedly not support.
The U.S. interest in the fate of the Philippines goes much deeper, however, than geopolitics. It derives from the fact that from 1898 to 1946, the archipelago was a U.S. colony. While there were some shameful aspects to the colonization, notably the violence that accompanied the consolidation of American rule, no other country in Southeast Asia has received such a profound and mostly progressive transfusion of purely American values, attitudes and democratic institutions, reflected superficially in the continuing use of English as the lingua franca of the islands.
The weight of the common U.S.-Phil
ippine heritage is symbolized by the 17,000 white headstones of the American Cemetery at Fort Bonifacio, overlooking Manila. Many thousands of other Americans are also interred in the Philippines, their lives lost in the <>
The living ties between the two countries are also vibrant. In addition to at least 18,000 Americans who serve at Clark and Subic Bay, an additional 50,000 Americans, including many of local descent, live and work in the country; meanwhile, about 1 million Filipinos live and work in the U.S. Some 500 U.S. firms operate in the Philippines, representing about $2.5 billion in U.S. private investment. They provide 10% of all the economic activity in the Philippines and directly employ some 50,000 people. Multinational corporations, most of them with such familiar names as Dole, Procter & Gamble and Firestone, generate 20% of the sales of the top 1,000 firms in the Philippines, but they pay roughly 30% of all Philippine corporate taxes. Says a U.S. businessman in Manila: "We're a natural part of the community here, which we are not in the rest of Southeast Asia."
A Spanish, then American, colonial heritage (sometimes known as "400 years in a convent followed by 50 years in Hollywood") gave the Philippines something else: a sense of Western-style unity. But even today that cohesion can be fragile and sometimes misleading. The sense of national purpose is strongest around Manila (pop. 8 million) and other urban centers. Roughly 70% of Filipinos, however, still live in rural areas. A scattering of more than 7,000 islands spanning 1,150 miles from north to south, the republic is still a ramshackle agglomeration of people speaking 86 languages and dialects. Its citizens range from the animistic Badjao tribe of the Sulu islands to the Tagalog-speaking natives of Batangas province on the island of Luzon to the wealthy, Chinese-mestizo clans, which form a substantial portion of the country's economic oligarchy.
In such a melange, family ties and the traditional Philippines system of reciprocal obligations between individuals, known as utang na loob (literally, inner debt), count for as much as the trappings of Western modernity. Regional identities are also important. Says Fred Whiting, 47, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Manila: "There is a great desire here to make democratic institutions work, but it is mixed with a liking for strong leaders."
Marcos is neither the longest-reigning nor the most dictatorial leader in the region. Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, whose autocratic skills are legendary, has dominated his city-state for 27 years; Indonesia's ; President Suharto has been unchallenged for 18 years. But both of those men, as well as Taiwan's Chiang Ching-kuo, have matched their severity with an ability to provide a rising standard of living for an ever increasing number of citizens. Says Whiting: "Many of us are impressed with Marcos' political acumen but feel that some of his economic policies are questionable."
The Marcos who came to power by democratic election in 1965 was a nationalistic social reformer. In his first inaugural address, he claimed that "our government is gripped in the iron hand of venality, its treasury is barren . . . its armed forces demoralized and its councils sterile." Marcos strongly identified himself with economic and social development, land reform and centralized government. Nonetheless, he soon began to fall back into the tradition of Tammany Hall-style politics that, as one American official wryly notes, is "part of the U.S. legacy in the Philippines." He also ran afoul of a simmering separatist insurgency among the Moros, an Islamic minority in the south of the heavily Roman Catholic country, and felt the first stirrings of the fledgling Communist New People's Army.
In 1972, three years after his re-election, Marcos declared martial law, citing the economic crisis of the day and the threat, then barely credible, of the Communist insurgency. His real motive was to remain in power beyond the constitutional limit of two four-year terms. For the next eight years Marcos ruled by decree, with the aim of building a New Society based on "constitutional authoritarianism." He claimed to be a dictator with a social conscience: he pushed forward with land reform (often at the expense of his landed political opponents) and carefully controlled trade unionism. More important, Marcos extended the sway of his New Society to virtually every barangay (village) in the archipelago, creating both a powerful political machine and a new economic class dependent on government patronage.
In 1981 Marcos ended martial law, after finding ways to retain some of his most important dictatorial powers. Chief among them was Amendment 6, an addition to a new constitution that he rammed through in 1973. Amendment 6 allows the President to rule by decree almost whenever he chooses. Other laws give Marcos the power to arrest alleged national-security violators at will under a so-called preventive-detention authority; the right of habeas corpus in such cases is effectively suspended. According to the U.S. State Department, some 500 to 600 people charged with national-security offenses were in Philippine jails at the end of 1985. More sinister are the so-called "salvagings" or death-squad killings, which are carried out as part of the war against subversion by right-wing vigilantes with ties to the security forces. As many as 219 salvagings were alleged to have taken place in the first five months of last year.
Marcos has always paid careful lip service, and sometimes more than that, to democratic forms. Some of his more controversial authoritarian powers were ratified in a carefully orchestrated 1981 referendum, which he carried with 80%. The same year, he won a presidential election against a toothless opponent and also got approval for a constitutional amendment that stretched his four-year term to six years. In 1984 Marcos held elections for the Batasang Pambansa, or National Assembly. Opposition politicians won roughly one-third of the seats. Despite widespread accusations of cheating, the elections were judged acceptable by the Philippine community at large.
Lord Acton, the British historian who wrote that power corrupts, would have recognized a fitting subject in the Marcos regime as its authority continued to expand. For years, critics have focused on the extravagance of First Lady Imelda, a former beauty-contest winner who has channeled huge amounts of money into pet projects through her roles as governor of Metro Manila, the administrative unit that encompasses the capital and its sprawling suburbs, and as national Minister of Human Settlements. Last week a U.S. congressional inquiry was looking into allegations that the Marcos family has been secretly funneling money, possibly including U.S. aid funds, into American real estate.
Whatever the ups and downs of his health, Marcos has always insisted on keeping a patriarchal grip on the apparatus of power. An outsider who was allowed to visit a caucus of the ruling New Society Movement last year reported that the session resembled "a big meeting of all the warring tribes, in which the President was like the chief, called upon to arbitrate all of their family feuds." None of the burning national difficulties of the day, such as the Communist insurgency and the ailing economy, were discussed. Instead, local and provincial party bosses offered up their special pleading to Marcos, who listened, scolded, took matters under advisement and rendered judgment.
Nowadays, according to a Western diplomat, the lack of reality surrounding the governing machinery is even more pronounced. Says he: "It's as if the central nervous system of government has broken down. Orders are issued at the center, but nothing happens in the provinces."
The woman who has challenged the lame but still powerful Marcos machine has few formal qualifications for her dragon-slaying role. Corazon Cojuangco Aquino is nonetheless fully at home with the local perquisites of privilege and authority. Her family and that of her martyred husband Benigno are charter members of the Philippine political and economic oligarchy that was pushed aside by Marcos. Corazon Aquino's father was a sugar baron, and her maternal grandfather was a Philippine Senator. One of her cousins, Eduardo Cojuangco Jr., is reckoned to be the President's closest economic crony. He is controller of a national coconut monopoly.
Educated at private Philippine schools run by Roman Catholic nuns and at New York City's College of Mount St. Vincent, where she earned a degree in French and mathematics, Aquino originally dabbled with the idea of a career in law. Eventually she decided to concentrate on being a helpmate to her spouse. But while raising five children during 28 years of marriage, she was exposed to the rough-and-tumble of backroom politics. For most of that period her husband was considered the second most important political figure in the country, after Marcos.
In 1972, after Marcos invoked martial law, Benigno Aquino was arrested on charges of murder and subversion. Many Filipinos believe that his most serious crime was to be a virtual shoo-in to win 1973 presidential elections that were scheduled but never took place. During Aquino's 7 1/2 years of imprisonment, his wife was the sole link between the Philippine opposition leader and his followers. In 1980, when Marcos freed Benigno so that he could have heart surgery in the U.S., she accompanied him in a three-year exile in Boston. She later said it was one of the happiest periods of her life.
That idyll ended on Aug. 21, 1983, when Benigno was shot while getting off a China Airlines Boeing 767 jetliner at Manila International Airport. The killing was initially blamed by the regime on a lone, allegedly Communist gunman, whom government security guards shot instants later. The majority of members on a Marcos-appointed commission of inquiry later said that the evidence pointed to a far-reaching military conspiracy that might have included Chief of Staff Ver. But after an eight-month trial tainted by questionable legal procedures, Ver and 24 other military defendants were acquitted.
Out of the tragedy Corazon Aquino attained the status of a national saint. She first threw that prestige openly into the political fray in the 1984 National Assembly elections, when she stumped the countryside on behalf of the splintered opposition. A deeply devoted Roman Catholic, Aquino finally decided to run for the presidency after repeated consultations with Jaime Cardinal Sin, leader of the Roman Catholic Church in the Philippines, who encouraged her decision. Sin also brokered an alliance between Aquino and her running mate, Salvador ("Doy") Laurel, 57, head of the well-organized United Nationalist Democratic Opposition.
Reserved and moralistic by nature, Aquino has shown that she also has a steely streak. Unrelentingly stubborn concerning the alleged injustice of the Marcos government's investigation of her husband's murder, she can also crack the whip among her sometimes fractious followers. More than once, she has demonstrated a street-wise familiarity with the grittier ins and outs of Filipino politics, such as fund raising, that she learned at her late husband's side.
As a public speaker, Aquino strikes few sparks. Her voice is high pitched and lacks inflection. She seldom gestures with her hands. Nonetheless, she has the capacity to hold her audiences through simple, unaffected recitation of the sufferings of her family at the hands of the Marcos regime, and her blunt accusation that "Mr. Marcos is the No. 1 suspect in the murder of my husband." She also charges Marcos of being, because of his authoritarian methods, "the most successful recruiter for the Communists."
Aquino's lackluster speaking style is counterbalanced by her running mate Laurel. He has the kind of folksy, joke-telling manner that Filipino audiences love. The vice-presidential nominee usually serves as Aquino's lead-off speaker, warming up crowds for the less practiced message to follow.
Increasingly, however, the shy Aquino has learned how to use her bare knuckles in political repartee. Last week Marcos accused his opponent of lacking femininity. The ideal woman, he said at a Manila rally, is someone "gentle, who does not challenge a man, but who keeps her criticism to herself and teaches her husband only in the bedroom." The President had been visibly stung by an earlier Aquino remark accusing him of cowardice for declining to campaign on the island of Mindanao, a hotbed of the Communist insurgency. Four days later Aquino told a warmly receptive audience of more than 1,200 Rotarians in Manila that Marcos was an "inveterate liar," and summed up her speech with the line "And may the better woman win!"
Marcos had further reason to be angry and humiliated later in the week, after the New York Times published an article claiming that Marcos' wartime record as a guerrilla fighter against the occupying Japanese, to which he makes frequent and boastful reference, was judged by the U.S. Army back in 1948 to be "fraudulent" and "absurd." Ever since his early political days Marcos has claimed to have played a hero's role as leader of a Philippine guerrilla unit called Ang Mga Maharlika (Free Men) between 1942 and 1944. An Army report squirreled away in U.S. Government archives shows that Marcos had instead deserted his guerrilla unit, eventually to join up with an American force during the 1944 Philippines invasion. Within hours of the article's publication in New York City, the information was being announced in Manila with banner headlines in an opposition newspaper. Marcos called the revelations "crazy" and "laughable."
During the campaign, Aquino has learned how to turn aside with a sharp reply any Marcos attacks on her lack of political experience. As she told the Rotarians, "I concede that I cannot match Mr. Marcos when it comes to experience. I admit that I have no experience in cheating, stealing, lying or assassinating political opponents."
Aquino can draw upon lots of experience in her opposition coalition. Her circle of advisers includes a number of Filipino political figures who have chafed on the sidelines of power for years. Among them: former Senator Jovito Salonga, head of a left-of-center splinter party and one of the country's best lawyers, and Jose Diokno, another former Senator and human rights activist. Aquino can call on economic expertise from the disaffected Philippine business community. She and her advisers have also been cultivating relations with high- and medium-ranking members of the armed forces. The question of whether the military is loyal to Marcos or to the national constitution remains one of the most delicate issues in the country.
Aquino is learning how to forge positions that no longer sound startlingly naive, if idealistically attractive, to her listeners. One of her earliest promises was that if elected, she would not move into Malacanang Palace; instead she would open the residence for public wedding ceremonies. Now she sounds much less like a Filipina flower child. In her Rotary speech last week, Aquino laid out a program for lifting Marcos' "institutionalized dictatorship" that included an appeal to the Marcos-controlled National Assembly to repeal the presidential powers of preventive detention and return to the rule of habeas corpus. If the Assembly balks, she will use the rule- by-decree Amendment 6 to repeal those powers herself. Aquino would then work for a series of constitutional changes that would finally eliminate the dangerous Amendment 6.
Aquino's plan for dealing with the Communist insurgency is more controversial. She says that she would, if elected, call for an immediate six- month cease-fire in order to open negotiations with the guerrillas. She would also offer a pardon to any political prisoner willing to renounce the use of force. Aquino believes that the insurgency will lose much of its momentum once Marcos leaves office. But she insists that she will use force to fight any group that seeks to overthrow a genuinely democratic government or "destroy our cultural heritage, including our belief in God." Early in her campaign Aquino gave Marcos a target of opportunity when she said that she would offer Communists who eschewed the use of force a place in her government. Later she backed away from that statement, choosing to emphasize instead her personal anti-Communist beliefs.
On economic issues Aquino has drawn cheers from Filipino businessmen by promising to return the country to the path of free enterprise. Among other things, she has vowed to break the Marcos government's bureaucratic stranglehold on the national economy, to dismantle local monopolies over sugar and coconut marketing and production, and to renegotiate the country's foreign debt.
Aquino has received two important boosts in her low-budget, grass-roots campaign. One came from the organized left, which decided to boycott the election. That decision by a variety of organizations that have proved to be susceptible to New People's Army influence made it easier for Aquino to defend herself against Marcos' charges that she is a cat's-paw for the Communist insurgents.
The other boost came from the Roman Catholic Church. With some 13,000 priests and nuns spread across the country, the church is probably the only | force in the Philippines that matches the organizational might of Marcos' political machine. Two weeks ago Cardinal Sin sent a letter to all 2,200 Philippine parishes instructing the faithful to vote for "persons who embody the Gospel values of humility, truth, honesty, respect for human rights and life." Few Filipinos had to guess whom he meant. Aquino, says the Cardinal, "is always listening to me."
Increasingly, members of some influential Philippine groups that have traditionally backed Marcos seem to be shifting to Aquino. One sign: the Chinese business community is said to have begun to funnel sizable amounts of cash into the challenger's campaign.
As the final days of the campaign tick away, the level of political tension engendered by the battle can only increase. So too will the diplomatic challenge for the U.S. To the Administration's credit, policy toward the Philippines is more coherent than that on any other recent foreign challenge of similar magnitude. In contrast to the situation in Iran during the final days of the Shah, U.S. diplomats are in close contact with the opposition. Unlike Central America, the Philippines has created no major divisions between Congress and the White House, nor among the various Executive departments.
By officially adopting a hands-off stance toward the election outcome, the Reagan Administration has now swung almost as far away as possible from its earlier fond embrace of Marcos. To U.S. policymakers, a sure sign that Washington is now perceived as being impartial is that, as one diplomat says, "neither side is happy with us."
The onetime U.S. role as a colonial overlord is still firmly fixed in the minds of many Filipinos. Any direct threats against a Philippine government, even one that had rigged an election, would be widely resented. But Marcos is also on notice that he cannot count on any U.S. support whatsoever in case of civic upheaval brought on by voter fraud. Nor is it likely that either domestic or international business confidence in the Philippines would return to normal with a cloud of that magnitude hanging over the political horizon.
The important thing, as Ambassador Bosworth told a Philippine audience last year, is that the U.S. recognizes that its permanent interest in the Philippines lies not with any particular government but with the values the two countries have come to share during their long and intimate association. Said Bosworth: "We will be judged--and we will judge ourselves--by the fate of democracy in this country and by the success of your national efforts to strengthen your democratic institutions and to ensure that they function effectively. We have a moral and political stake in a democratic Philippines, which transcends all our other interests here, strategic as well as economic."
The kind of democracy Bosworth was talking about is not a matter of authoritarianism decked out with consultative rituals and slogans. It clearly involves the removal of the deformations that Marcos has introduced to the Philippine political system. No matter who wins the election, Washington seems to be willing to adhere to that position, a fact that is not being lost on Filipinos. As Richard Holbrooke, a former Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, puts it, "The only way Marcos can reform is to dismantle his regime."
Only the Philippine people can decide whether Marcos will be forced to do that. As the day for that decision approached, friends of the Philippines in the U.S. could only watch and wait and renew their vows not to abandon their support for the democratic aspirations of a longtime friend and ally, regardless of what turbulence might lie ahead.
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A Test For Democracy
(Monday, February 3, 1986)
