Stumping With Cory: Does She Have a Chance?

I arrived early at the Cebu airport on Jan. 11, along with a handful of foreign reporters and 200 campaign workers with caps and buttons and banners and T-shirts all in coordinated yellow. Philippine presidential candidate Corazon Aquino was expected to land and motorcade quickly through the streets of Cebu to an audience with a Catholic prelate. It was all so very American, one reporter joked, “I feel like I’m in Des Moines.”

In the middle of this historic campaign cursed by factional infighting, an inexperienced candidate and very little money--a campaign barely under way after the Philippines’ autocratic president, Ferdinand E. Marcos, called in November for a snap election Feb. 7--the junket to the island of Cebu, at the center of the Philippine archipelago, seemed just another obligatory stop. But a funny thing happened on the way to the church. Half a million people, by reporters’ estimates, showed up; and for five hours Cory Aquino, widow of Marcos’ primary opponent--the housewife, the political novice, the unknown--inched her way through the mob.

Along the roadside yellow curtains hung in the windows of shacks. Babies wrapped in yellow blankets were held up for her blessing (yellow has become a symbol of the opposition, inspired by the American song, “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree”). Workers at the San Miguel brewery stopped to catch a glimpse, and as the crowd grew, hope appeared on the faces of her organizers. “Maybe she does have a chance.”

I rode for two hours on the hood of the press car, 20 feet in front of her open-topped jeep. Passive faces that had waited for hours in the sun came alive. She was breaking through. Yes, people had come because they were tired of Marcos, tired of martial law, tired of the poverty. Yes, people came because they wanted to honor the memory of her martyred husband. But she was beginning to break through on her own. People had come out to see “Cory.”

I rushed back to Manila to watch the evening news. After almost 10 minutes of coverage on Marcos’ presidential activities for the day, including a broadside at Aquino’s inexperience and claims that she would be unable to handle the communist threat, the news turned to Aquino’s day in Cebu. The camera focused tightly on Aquino’s face. She was waving but there was no crowd. She could have been saying hello to a neighbor over the garden wall. The camera cut away to eight or 10 children playing by the side of the road. No excited supporters. No banners. No children wrapped in yellow. Nothing to reflect the spectacle I had seen only hours before.

Aquino broke through in Cebu, but in this nation of more than 55 million people and 7,100 scattered islands, with 6 million people packed into Manila alone, Marcos controls national television--and on television Aquino’s campaign seemed to be going nowhere.

On the streets of Manila, campaign coverage is dismissed with a shrug. There is no expectation that it will be balanced or fair. Almost no one expects the election to be fair, either. Cheating is a tradition in the personality-oriented politics of the Philippines, and Marcos, in office for 20 years, has raised it to a high art. Opposition leaders believe they were cheated out of at least half their victories in the 1984 legislative elections. And now, with complete control of TV and much of the press, a limitless budget, a campaign organization built on patronage and the support of the army, they are convinced that Marcos will cheat again.

When I arrived in Manila two weeks ago, people were speculating that Marcos was worried about losing. He might cancel the election, or reimpose martial law. But by the end of my trip it was apparent that he has no intention of canceling the election. He has every intention of winning. And when Marcos says he will win, he doesn’t mean that he has confidence he will win on election day. He means he knows he will win now.

“Cory will need to win 70% of the vote to offset Marcos’ cheating,” a major opposition strategist told me. “I think she can win 50%, but not 70%. The campaign is too short. We are too factionalized.”

For Cory Aquino the problems only begin with Marcos. She must also navigate a tricky relationship with the revolutionary left, which is well organized and has a substantial base. While she must reject the communists in campaign speeches, she needs them to win. There is considerable frustration among some opposition leaders with the communist decision to boycott the election, because their numbers could be just the margin between her popularity and Marcos’ cheating.

I spent an afternoon with a member of the secretariat of the National Democratic Front, the underground umbrella organization that coordinates revolutionary activities for the communists and other radical groups. His argument against the elections was simple and straightforward:

Constitutional democracy died in the Philippines in 1972, when Marcos declared martial law. He canceled elections and abolished the constitution. He drove moderates into prison or exile. He repressed the left with a vengeance--torturing and murdering union leaders, students and grass-roots church activists as well as communist guerrillas. The Communist Party had been inconsequential to that point, but it regrouped underground, and by all estimates it has grown tremendously in a fertile culture of repression and dire poverty.

There is no turning back from the decision to wage guerrilla war, he said, suggesting it was deceitful to create the naive illusion that Aquino can win when the deck is so stacked against her, or that if by some miracle she did win, that Marcos and the army would allow her to consolidate power.

If Marcos cheats to win, no one will be able to make a credible argument for elections in the future. Marcos will die in office, be overthrown by a coup from within or lose a prolonged war to the communists. The very forces of moderation that most Americans want to support have the most to lose on Feb. 7. Philippine society is becoming polarized between two opposite visions: the uncertain revolutionary future the communists offer, or an indefinite future with Marcos--the promise of of a prolonged and bloody guerrilla war in either case.

Given such a choice, many opposition leaders will make a Faustian bargain with the communists--an uneasy alliance they are unsure of, but feel forced into.

The day before I left I had coffee with a young communist guerrilla in a squalid settlement of squatters on the outskirts of Manila. We could see the skyscrapers downtown. I asked him what he was doing during the election. He said he was waiting for it to end.