U.S. Aid to the Philippines

This is a response to Wilfrido B. Villarama’s letter (June 24), which expressed his stand against ending U.S. military aid to the Philippines.

As one among thousands of Filipinos in this country who do not necessarily share Villarama’s sentiment, I find ending such aid a wise and sensible course to follow.

In these critical hours the United States should think twice in dealing with her strategic Far Eastern ally or she will commit the same blunder she made in Nicaragua and Iran.

Villarama suggests that in combating “. . . an ideological group whose objective is to overthrow the present government through armed revolution,” the fact the “the Marcos administration is and has been working for the establishment of a more efficient government” is not enough.

Which sounds honest, yet how deceitful!

Take a look at these phenomena: the equally strong government of Taiwan already served justice for the 1985 opposition murder of Henry Liu, giving life sentences to some of the guilty parties--a move to boost credibility for oversea investors. The Philippines is not even halfway in the trial for the 1983 murder of opposition leader Benigno Aquino, with all these Marcos-appointed judges delaying, trying to save not so much the national credibility as the faces of some of the military.

If such corruption is not a priority over public interest, who needs a devil?

No matter how foreign disinvestment, capital flight, countless folding business corporations and thousands upon thousands of jobless workers may punish the Philippine economy as a consequence, which is now shambling beyond recognition, dictator Ferdinand Marcos still thinks nothing but reinstating, if exonerated, one of prime suspects in Aquino assassination, the gory hand in Malacanang, his first cousin and former bodyguard, Gen. Fabian Ver, as the Army chief of staff.

The strong man thinks of nothing but the military whose loyalty he succeeded in buying.

Such is the New Society’s system where a young democratic republic is forced to sway under a one-man leadership for 20 years, where huge numbers of murders, disappearances, extra-judicial executions and other atrocious acts proper only to a slave country are attributed to the military.

Why not use this military aid in cleaning cobwebs out of the country’s Congress and make frowning Filipinos smile again. The people’s democratic hopefuls just need help in this coming election.

PETER C. FERRER

Van Nuys