Aquino under the shadow of the gun
INTOXICATED by her electoral victories in February and
May, President Cory Aquino overestimated her margin for maneuver. It took no more than three months for the crisis of the regime to become acute. At the end of August, there was a sudden acceleration in the pace of events.
For a period, a transport strike of exceptional scope paralyzed the capital and various cities. Then, on the night of August 27-28, a faction in the army unleashed a military coup. The rebel soldiers at last had to retreat to the northern part of the country, but did not lay down their arms. The civilian government claimed victory. But on September 9, it resigned, supposedly to give Aquino "a free hand" in her
Our correspondent Paul Petitjean was in the Philippines at
PHILIPPINES
GRINGO
Rebel leader Gringo Honasan (DR)
station from heavily armed rebel soldiers. The cops retreat without a fight.
the time of the general strike and the military coup. The following report looks at these crucial weeks for the future of the country. PAUL PETITJEAN P UNCTUATED by explosions and bursts of machine-gun fire, the night of August 28 seemed very long. The putsch caught us by surprise. It was not preceded by the usual rumors in the press. Moreover, it quickly took on a much more serious look than the many successive coup attempts since July 1986.
Symbolically, the rebel soldiers attacked Malacañang, the presidential palace, wounding Corazon Aquino's son and killing three of her guard. Civilians were coldly shot down, probably to discourage any reaction from the people.
The mutineers took up strategic positions in Manila-Quezon City, the capital. They occupied Camp Aguinaldo, the headquarters of the General Staff; the Villamor airbase, which is close to the Manila civilian airport; and television stations. They were led by Colonel Gregorio "Gringo" Honasan, known to be a tough customer.
Honasan was the "baron," that is, the top of his class of 1971 in the Filipino military academy. He has the reputation of being a military cowboy - doing parachute jumps with a cobra wrapped around his neck! And he is reputed to be just as deadly. A legend has already built up around this prominent leader of the February 1986 military rebellion.
Anti-communism is what Honasan swears by. If the coup succeeds, the repression against the left will be immediate and brutal, in particular as the putschists have no popular support. Activists raise the spectre of Chile in 1973 or Indonesia in 1965.
If the coup succeeds... For hours the outcome remains uncertain. The whole morning goes by without military reinforcements coming to the aid of the government. After a brief speech during the night, President Aquino is silent. The TV transmits startling scenes.
Government counter- offensive finally begins
The soldiers protecting the Congress join the rebellion. A security officer, with the aid of clerks, tries to organize protection of the few legislators present. The speaker of the House of Representatives, Ramon Mitra, seems to pronounce a gloomy political testament. A member of parliament is clearly seen keeping his pistol handy.
The hours drag on. A period of vacillations sets in. The municipal police are at first assigned to retaking a TV
By midday, finally the government counter-offensive begins to take form.
Aquino makes a particularly firm speech: "There will be no terms." There were to be no negotiations with "traitors." The Marines, an elite force, mount an assault on Camp Aguinaldo Fighting seems to rage until nightfall. Two World War II-vintage propellerdriven planes fire rockets. The headquarters of the General Staff is on fire.
In a strange spectacle, helicopters circle a love-nest luxury hotel occupied by the rebels, the Camelot. It is built on the model of a medieval castle. Very modern machine-guns rake its towers and battlements.
This was by far the most serious putsch attempt since the fall of the Marcos dictatorship in February 1986. The provinces were moving. The rebels descended on the capital from the center of the island of Luzon, from Fort Magsaysay in the province of Nueva Ecija, where Gringo Honasan, implicated in previous coup attempts, had been sent to serve as the chief instructor of the Special Forces.
The mutineers took the Olivas camp in Pampanga province bordering Nueva Ecija, and the Legazpi airport in the southern part of Luzon island. They controlled the provinces of Quirino and Cagayan. For a time, they also controlled the island of Cebu, where the country's third largest city is located.
They seemed to be able to move freely through the northern part of the country. In Baguio, in particular, the cadets of the prestigious Philippines Military Academy openly expressed 3 September 28, 1987• International Viewpoint
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negotiations with the generals.
PHILIPPINES their solidarity with the rebels.There was a persistent rumor that the bulk of the airforce was on the side of the mutineers.
"The putchists have numbers," a leader of the Bayan coalition of mass organizations told me. "There are thousands of them. They also have quality - field officers who command the loyalty of their troops, the "bright boys in the field.' They include many officers in the Police Constabulary, a military police force, long directed by the present chief of the General Staff, General Ramos. Above all, they have the sympathy of a very large number of junior officers, perhaps the majority."
The coup seemed to be on the verge of victory, at least militarily. There were dozens of deaths, mostly civilians, passersby who were shot down or caught in volleys of gunfire. The battles were waged with heavy weapons. A thousand rebel soldiers were arrested. But there was something of a false note in the military concert.
The majority of the mutineers were able to get out of the capital and regroup in the North. The rebel chiefs, including Gringo Honasan, got away by helicopter without too much difficulty, it seems. And there were very few deaths in the battle for Camp Aguinaldo.
The truth was not long in coming out. Even at the height of the governmental forces' counter-offensive, the Marines refused to shoot-to-kill. In its August 31 and September 1 issues, the Philippine Daily Inquirer retraced the unfolding of the events as seen from Malacañang.
For a good part of the morning, in his headquarters at Camp Crame, General Ramos, chief of the General Staff, avoided responding to urgent telephone calls from the president. He still did not know what troops he could count on, and therefore had nothing to say to Corazon Aquino. At the beginning of the afternoon, fighting began.
The civilian government was incapable of restoring order without the support of a wing of the army. But even in these dramatic circumstances, the army was not ready to crush itself. In the uncertain hours of the morning of August 28, the generals bargained over the price for their support. Undoubtedly they set it quite high. 4 tween two erups dear a brutal one Today, the regime is navigating beInternational Viewpoint • September 28, 1987 along the lines of Gringo Honasan, or a creeping, legal one by generals who present themselves as "constitutionalists," but are anxious to tighten their control over the civilian administration.
The Aquino regime is increasingly a hostage of its military officers. The president is trying to buy the army's loyalty by giving substantial pay increases. But the basic problem lies elsewhere. This has been noted by Senator Aquilino Pimento, who more than once found himself in conflict with the army under Marcos:
"It is important that the country should not be misled and should understand that the threat to this state not only comes from the Armalite of Colonel Gregorio Honasan and his bunch, but that a more insidious enemy is the doctrine he stands for. That is, the National Security Doctrine forged in Latin America, which advocates the absolute primacy of military considerations over politics." 2
The rebellion was launched in the name of the most virulent anti-communism and defence of the country's territorial integrity, which the putchists claimed had been put into question by the negotiations over autonomy started by the regime with the with Conrado representing Northern tribals3
The government was supposed to be insurgency struggle. Nonetheless, Cory Aquino had declared "total war" on the guerrillas. With US advice and aid, she had given the generals new weapons, including combat helicopters and tanks, and greater financial means. If the military did not have more successes in their struggle against the New
People's Army, that was the result above all of their own lack of energy.
The real issue lay elsewhere. It was institutional. In order to understand it, it is useful to go back to the elections of May 1987. Given the extent of the president's personal victory, a hasty reading of the results of the legislative elections could have led one to think that the regime had achieved a relative, if only temporary, stability. That, at least, was one of the elements of analthat I myself suggested ysis at the time.4
A cadre in the National Democratic
Movement, a former political prisoner passing through Europe, warned me against that conclusion: "Aquino's electoral success was in fact too glaring. She did not need that. Too much is too much. There was fraud. But that is not the problem. Fraud is normal in the country's political life.
Confronted with the
Aquino landslide and the new rise of the big traditional families, the felt military cheated, cut out of the game. Instead of bolstering the government's authority over the army, these elections increased the cleavages, the resentments, antagonisms,
We have suspicions.
entered into a period of coups d'etat."
I must admit that I remained somewhat sceptical about this. But the of subsequent course events rapidly proved this analysis correct.
The May 1987 legislative elections had exposed a major institutional problem that could have been discerned when the constitution was adopted last February.S
The military vote went against it, while the civilian population ratified it
1. Bayan — Bagong Alyansang Makabyan, New Patriotic Alliance.
2. The Manila Times, September 2, 1987.
3. A priest, Conrado Balweg joined the NPA in the mountains of northern Luzon, an area inhabited by tribes with their own culture. He broke with the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) in 1986 over the question of regional autonomy and national strategy.
He is negotiating with the government, and his forces have shrunk considerably. He has moved progressively closer to the military, especially since a bloody ambush was laid against him by the NPA. This did not prevent the rebel officers today from denouncing the autonomy agreements negotiated with him, notably, by Butz
Aquino, the president's brother in law.
4. See "Aquino scores another personal triumph," in /V
123, June 29, 1987.
5. See "A temporary and fragile success for Cory," in
TV 114, February 23, 1987. This article gave a more correct perspective than the one on the legislative election.
spectacularly.
With the prolonged imposition of martial law under Marcos, the army had come to the center of the power structure and penetrated into the islands' economy. This was the first time such a thing had happened in the Philippines, which in that respect, as well as in a lot of others, has had a very different history from most of its neighboring countries such as Indonesia and
In the wake of the anti-dictatorial uprising of February 1986, Aquino re-established a bourgeois democratic system marked by elitism and patronage. Even by bourgeois standards, regime was only semi-democratic, since the army continued to wield considerable weight in it. But, as in the situation that prevailed before martial law, the electoral games assured the pre-eminence in political life of the clans, the big provincial families, parties and personalities.
Behind the constitutional
On the other hand, conditions were now different from those existing before martial law, in that the mass movement was broader and precisely because the army was now in politics. Behind the constitutional façade, the balance of the 1950s and 1960s could
Electoral jousts again became the main mechanism for selecting the personnel of political leadership, the acceptable channel for political struggle within the social elite. This system has implications that are not at all congenial to the military.
The electoral mechanisms installed have been thought up by, and for, the ruling class. But, despite the regime's anti-communist declarations civil war it is waging against the guerrillas, the people's movements cannot be excluded totally from the democratic game. It was not possible, for example, to refuse the Partido ng Bayan the right to run in the elections. The rules of an electoral system, even an ist" one, open a "democratic space" that can be occupied directly or indirectly by people's movements.
On this question, the virulently counter-revolutionary language of the rebel officers touched a nerve. A lot of people would like to close off this democratic space by suspending elections purely and simply: for example, by imposing a new reign of martial law.
However, the
The electoral game and its concomitant, the ideology of a civilian regime, places the army outside the institutions of government. This is especially true in the Philippines, where the various military factions have no political parties of their own to repre-
In this area, the Aquino regime has been undermined by an open contradiction. The army has not been purged, and it remains at the center of political power. But it is excluded from such fundamental institutions of governinent as the House of Representatives and the Senate. It was precisely this contradiction that was glaringly highlighted by the excessive triumph of the presidential slates in the legislative
The army reacted before the regime could go any further in building up the forms of constitutional rule, notably in the municipal elections scheduled for late this year or early 1988. In this sense, it is understandable why a number of generals looked favorably on the operation into which Honasan took their colonels. It was a good opportunity to remind the civilian regime forcefully of the fact that it remains under house-arrest.
Today the executive branch is continuing to pay the price for the policy that it adopted in mid-1986. Faced with attempted coups — which have sometimes had comic opera which were always politically grave — pressures of the extreme right, Aquino has refused to rely on mass mobilization and its accompaniment, social reform. She has kept on pursuing her unattainable heart's desire: loyal support from the Americans and a section of
The May 1987 legislative elections did, of course, confirm that Corazon Aquino continued to enjoy great personal charisma among a population on the rebound from the dictatorial past. But with the regime's inability to carry out social reforms - and its nepotism - the wearing thin of the government's moral capital has been no less
Accusations of outrageous corruption have been directed against the immediate entourage of the president herself - her executive secretary, Joker Arroyo; her young brother, Jose "Peping" Cojuangco; and her Francisco Sumulong.
Far from being consolidated after the legislative elections, the government's control weakened over a series of regions. The power of the clans, of the big families, was asserted in the House of Representatives. The president's maneuvers on agrarian reform managed to dissatisfy everyone, or nearly every-
On the eve of the opening session of the new Congress, Aquino issued an incredible number of decrees, including the much awaited one on agrarian reform. Her objective was to be able to
PHILIPPINES say that she had kept her promise, and that Congress was responsible for the legislation becoming bogged down, as it could be predicted would happen. The decree in fact left the resolution of burning questions such as land prices, maximum holdings, scheduling measures to the legislators.
The peasant organizations announced that they were especially dissatisfied with the content of the decree. But the big sugar planters on the island of Nenonetheless, came out in open political opposition to the very term "agrarian reform." threatened to take up arms against the government if it persisted in including their plantations in this scheme.
Groups of "vigilantes," extreme-right more active on the island. One of them - the Negros Anti-Communism Crusade — has not hesitated to distribute a leaflet whose title needs no explanation, "Kill for democracy! Kill for peace! Kill all the communists!"
The leaflet went on to say: "All those who are not on our side, all those who are for land reform, those who were shouting human rights when they do not even denounce the human rights violations of the NPA, are communists. Our enemies are the subversive priests — headed by their leader, Monseigneur Antonio Fortich [the bishop of Bacolod] — the human rights lawyers, the busabos [rag-tag] farmers, the squatters who are always hungry like dogs and who are very dangerous, and the extortionists in the media like those in COBRA-ANS [a progressive organization of Negros journalists]."
Unionists harassed, arrested and tortured
Members of the sugar workers' union, the NFSW-FGT are being harassed, arrested, and sometimes tortured or shot down.? [See the interview on page 7.]
It is in this context that the NPA has taken a series of spectacular initiatives on Negros. Repeatedly and in plain daylight it has occupied sugar mills and rural villages, sometimes throwing 200 fighters into a single operation. pite months of growing militarization, the army has been unable to respond effectively. Thus, the government has had to send in reinforcements, including combat helicopters. But they had still not scored any notable success when the coup d'etat broke out.
The regime's blindness to the erosion 6. Partido ng Bayan or PnB (People's Party). Launched in August 1986 by former political prisoners, the PnB is a radical activist legal party that is trying to introduce a popular and proletarian dimension into the electoral political struggle 7. NFSW-PCT — National Federation of Sugar Work. 5 ers-Food and General Trade. September 28, 1987 • International Viewpoint
PHILIPPINES of its authority was demonstrated in a particularly glaring way on August 15, when it suddenly announced an average 18 percent increase in the price of gas and diesel fuel. In doing this, the government opened up an opportunity for a massive expression of popular discontent. It created the conditions for unity among the unions in a key sector of the economy in which it had been difficult to organize collective action, that is, among the drivers of the Jeepneys, the reconditioned jeeps that are the main means of public transport in the big cities of the Philippines.
Transport strike paralyzed
Philippines
Even the TUCP itself, a union affiliated to the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), that was recognized under the Marcos regime, found it necessary to join in the strike. Together with Bayan, the various mass movements of the popular left formed an ad-hoc coalition against
There were two peaks in the transport strike, a week apart - the first and last days of action. A unifying momentum was obvious. The strike took on exceptional dimensions when all the unions were involved. The three days preceding the coup, August 25-27, repre-
La real turn in the political
Under the pressure of the mobilizations and on the eve of the general strike of August 28, Corazon Aquino suddenly announced over TV a 50 per cent reduction in the price rise for petroleum products. To accomplish this, she dipped into tax receipts rather than touch the profits of the multinationals concerned. She seemed convinced in this way she would cut the ground out from under the feet of the unions
However, on the following day, the transport strike was almost total. Calling for prices to return to previous levels, it paralyzed the capital and five regions. Any increase in price of gas and diesel fuel has immediate and dramatic inflationary consequences for a population suffering from acute impoverishment.
Despite the intervention of the army (which stationed soldiers in the buses and attacked the strike pickets) and the mobilization of
Many jeepneys were to be The activists themselves were surprised: "In all our there has never been such a strike, at least never since martial law."
It was a sharp slap in the face for the President, who had staked her personal authority on the affair. The government International Viewpoint • September 28, 1987 began by denying the evidence, astonished journalists was a failure. On same day, the military repression was stepped up The army killed two strikers at Cavite, south of Manila. The day after, the police rounded up activists of the May 1 Movement (KMU, the radical union confederation), which this time was continuing the strike alone?
More than 150 people were arrested, including Medardo Roda, 53 years old and chair of Piston, a jeepney drivers' union affiliated to the KMU.1º A warrant was issued for the arrest of Crispin Beltran, the chair of the KMU.
Joker Arroyo, a former human rights lawyer and executive secretary to Aquidid not hesitate to justify these arrests by imputing bad faith to the union organizers. He called them leaders "who have no sincere desire to really solve the problem and only want to create anarchy." (The Manila Chronicle, August 28, 1987.) It was no longnecessary to charge actions, it was enough to attribute nefarious intentions to them!
Even before the success of the August 26 day of action, a KMU leader explained to me what the government's "mistake" on the question of petroleum products prices - prompted by pressure from the IMF and pressure on foreign debt interest payments meant for the independent, wing of the union movement:
"Over the year and a half that has just gone by, the KMU has continued to gain strength, but relatively and slowly. And I think that it can be seen that we found ourselves pushed to the sidelines in many respects. It was very difficult for us to regain the initiative on a large scale. On the question of the price of petroleum products, on the other hand, we can be the dynamic wing of a broad trade-union and popular united front. Our demand for purely and simply rescinding the price rise has in fact been understood and supported by the population."
putsch obviously braked the economic struggle that was underway on the question of prices. Everyone's attention was shifted to the political situation. The general tendency at present is toward a tightening grip of the army on civilian adminisand militarization of the country.
A year and a half after the start of the process, the prospects for establishing a bourgeois democratic system in the Philippines look more dubious than
The army is not willing to go back to its barracks. As at the time of the previous coup attempts, today it is forcing the regime to accept a new de facto compromise with the rebel offidespite the fact that Corazon Aquino had sworn publicly not to do this anymore.
### Tendency toward fragmentation of regime
However, now the tendency is also toward a fragmentation of the regime.
orientations and interests are dividing the ranks of the military as well as of the politicians. The Americans obviously have eggs in all the Philippine baskets — the General Staff, the government and business circles. They know that in the present situation such divisions are particularly dangerous. The insurgents are profiting from this situation to press their ad vantage. But even under this threat it is not certain that substantial ground will be found for an accord among the various interest groups, including between the military clans and between the gen-
The military will agree to denounce the dominance of the politicians and to present the army as the guarantor of the higher interests of the nation. The language adopted by the rebel officers about this. They said that the regime "indulges too much in politics." But they did not stop there. In televised interviews, the representatives of the movement, which came out 8. TUCP — Trade Union Congress of the Philippines. 9. KMU -Kilusang Mayo Uno, May 1 Movement.
- Pinagkaisang Samahan ng mga Tsuper at Operators Nationwide, United Association of the Driv-
of the Movement to Reform the Armed Forces (RAM), scathingly criticized the General Staff and their superiors."
The dynamic wing of the late August putsch was made up of colonels and lieutenants: "The stars fall, the sun rises," was one of their slogans. Stars are the insignia of generals; sun rays are the insignia of colonels. General Ramos, the chief of the General Staff, was the direct target of this slogan. But it is likely that all, or nearly all, the generals felt that it was aimed at them.
In reaction to the civilian regime and its corruption, an extreme-right antipolitician current is taking form in the Philippine army, which is very different in its history and its ambitions from the traditional generals. It is fighting for a cause and thereby winning the sympathy of broad sections of
"We need
real land
reform"
IN THE crisis-ridden "sugar kingdom" of the island of Negros, Frank Slegers met Serge Cherniguin, the general secretary of the sugar-workers' union, NFSW-FGT.
HAT SORT of land reform
W
Agrarian reform is an urgent necessary. For 400 years, beginning under Spanish domination, the peasants have been demanding land. Some 200,000 planters on Negros, 9% of the population, own
The whole of the Philippines needs a real general agrarian reform with financial, educational and other forms of aid from the government. If there has to be payment to get the land, the poor peasants cannot put up the money. government will have to do it. And such payment should be equitable, sein installments. Illegitiacquired big landholdings should simply be confiscated. • Do you support Governor Lacson's Lacson, the governor of Western Negros, has proposed a plan providing for 60% of the sugar-cane plantations to remain in the hands of the big landyoung officers.
It differs from "military reformist" currents in other times and places. It has no popular base, no overall program and no revolutionary aspirations. It is using anti-communism as its glue and laying out a typical semi-fascist ideology.
conviction, as well as necessity (its lack of a social base), if this current managed to take power militarily it could plunge the country into an immense wave of repression. It is a new factor in the political equation in the Philippines. Above all it represents a new danger for the people's movement. 11. The military movement that had prepared a coup against Marcos in 1985. In February 1986, it rose up along with the minister of defence, Juan Ponce Enrile. owners and for 40% to be distributed and used for crops other than cane.
With the crisis in the sugar industry, 85% of the planters are already virtually bankrupt. Lacson's scheme comes from the planters themselves. We regard it as a feudal solution for a feudal problem. Nonetheless, we support this plan, because hunger is so acute that the problem of food for sugar workers takes priority over everything. At the same time, we are fighting for a real agrarian reform. • On the haciendas that I have visited, the whole hacienda would have to be divided up into parcels in order to give all the sugar workers adequate plots. Will the planters accept that? We know that the big planters are arming to fight reform. How do the workers regard the land? For them, it is the source of food. For the planters, it is the source of wealth, prestige and political power. We do not expect much from President Aquino. Aquino's reform scheme has been progressively watered-down and deprived of substance. Our only consolation in the present situation is that our organization has
If the government manages to carry out the reform, and that would be a golden opportunity for them, so much the better. But if Aquino yields to the pressure of the big landowners who make up her entourage (isn't she also one of them?), the peasants themselves will force a redistribution of the land. • Have there been real advances for your organization?
Our union has greatly increased its credibility among the sugar workers. For the time being we have no problems about the number of our
The problem is rather finding enough cadres. And there is also
PHILIPPINES the repression. Anyone who calls for justice and peace is accused of being a communist, and a lot of our cadres have been murdered outright. We have a lot of widows and orphans in our movement. Despite that, none of our leaders has yet given up, and that is a great
The planters have formed their own rival unions. These unions accuse us of stealing their members, but their ranks are coming over to us spontaneously. And we are scoring certain successes.
Many workers have been murdered for cultivating strips of land on the fringes of the plantations, alongside the sugar cane. No landowner will give up the smallest piece of land without being
But now, thanks to the strength of our union, we have managed to force many planters to concede plots of land to the workers.
Our union's strength can also be measured by the threats directed at us. We get bomb threats. Our leaders cannot go out alone at night. Our building here is spied on day and night. • How severe has the repression beOnly yesterday, one of our members died. The military caught him, tortured him, cut open his stomach and broke his legs. Under Marcos, only the southern part of Negros was militarized. Today, under Aquino, the entire island is. And every time army control is established in the Philippines, the military run amok against the civilian
Yesterday, in the northern part of the island, there was a New People's Army (NPA) ambush. The army sent helicopters and three fighter planes. result? They were not able to catch a single NPA guerrilla. But it's civilians who pay the cost of the war.
Last week, at a demonstration organized by the Christian base communi. ties in Bacolod, the capital of Western Negros, the army planes buzzed the march to intimidate people. They even arrest 13- and 14-year-old children, who are later used as servants in the barracks. When the sugar workers organize in cooperatives on the plantations in order to cultivate certain parcels, the soldiers call that communism. army also intervenes in union affairs.