Peso Drops 10.3% in Value : Filipinos Heed Aquino’s Anti-Marcos Boycott Call

In the money markets, stock market and supermarkets of Manila on Tuesday, there were signs that opposition leader Corazon Aquino’s call for the boycott of products and banks owned by President Ferdinand E. Marcos’ friends is beginning to take hold.

The Philippine peso suffered its biggest single-day decline in 15 years, falling to 22.04 to the dollar from 19.98 on Monday. The 10.3% drop was widely attributed to the uncertain political situation.

Officials at several of the seven boycotted banks reported unusually large withdrawals Tuesday.

And the price of shares in San Miguel Corp., the Philippines’ largest company and manufacturer of the nation’s most popular beer and soft drinks, continued to fall Tuesday after an 18% drop Monday.

Throughout the city, Filipinos began drinking gin instead of beer, and 7-Up instead of Sprite, another popular product of the “crony-owned” San Miguel. But at a refreshment stand in Aquino’s own campaign office, they were still selling Sprite.

“We’re just trying to hide the bottles,” said the woman behind the counter.

That was typical of the obstacles facing Aquino as she launches her populist, nonviolent campaign to isolate Marcos and his “cronies” from a people that they have ruled for two full decades--a last-ditch effort to present a moderate alternative to both an aging, authoritarian president and a burgeoning Communist rebellion that is also intensifying its violent campaign to use the election as a tool of recruitment.

To succeed, Aquino must harness the faith of her supporters against their fears of personal sacrifice, brutal recrimination or legal persecution by the government.

In her post-election campaign for the support of the Filipino people, the 53-year-old widow and political novice is facing a shrewd and calculating leader who still maintains the same powerful government machinery that he has used to control his nation and people for 20 years.

Among the levers of power are a constitution that Marcos virtually drafted with his own hand, a largely loyal, 200,000-man military to enforce the laws he lays down, and a Supreme Court dominated by hand-picked loyalists to ensure that none of his decisions will be challenged.

And in the face of such firepower and force of law, Aquino’s sole weapon remains a force she calls “people’s power.”

Aquino contends that she won the Feb. 7 presidential election by as much as 2 million votes, and that Marcos simply stole it from her through massive fraud, brutal intimidation, widespread vote buying and manipulation of the government election machinery.

Now, she is trying to claim her victory in the streets, hoping that the mass mobilization of the millions of Filipinos who overcame enormous pressure to cast ballots for her will now coalesce into a populist tidal wave that will somehow force Marcos to resign.

The next 10 days are critical for Aquino, who plans to barnstorm key cities in the nation’s thousands of scattered islands and spread the word of her boycott and nonviolent struggle to the rural regions where most Filipinos live. She also plans nightly addresses over the church-owned national radio network.

Aquino’s campaign will be bolstered by the powerful Philippine Roman Catholic Church, which has condemned the ruling party’s conduct in the election as “criminal” and shown unprecedented political partisanship in the wake of the election.

Parish priests throughout a nation where more than 85% of the people are Catholic have been delivering sermons to their faithful endorsing the nonviolent struggle, and the church is perhaps the most powerful medium in the country.

Marcos’ government has countered, as it has against Aquino’s boycott campaign, by devoting large segments of its nightly television news program to condemning the priests and bishops for violating the separation of church and state by trying to exploit their faith for political ends.

The key to the campaign is momentum and morale--for Aquino to convince supporters that the process will be a long but successful one and that each bottle of San Miguel beer they do not drink and each peso they withdraw from the boycotted banks is like a rifle shot into the Marcos regime.

Top Aquino aides concede that her campaign will fail if she cannot maintain that grass-roots momentum, an almost religious personal veneration that she has built up during the campaign and the agonizing vote-counting process still being conducted by the nonpartisan organization of poll-watchers, the National Movement for Free Elections. And they add that such a failure would dash any hopes for restoring a functioning two-party system in the Philippines, thus fueling a burgeoning Communist insurgency that now claims more than 15,000 armed rebels nationwide.

Throughout the campaign, Aquino has pledged that she will continue to offer an alternative to that armed struggle. Each night on the radio and in her every speech, Aquino stresses the need to remain peaceful. The faces in her crowds are not those of angry students but of blue-collar laborers, corporate executives and middle-class businessmen and their conservatively dressed wives.

Indeed, government and business sources confirmed Tuesday that several prominent businessmen have resigned from the Presidential Productivity Council to protest alleged election fraud. However, Trade Minister Roberto Ongpin said they were “courtesy resignations” to enable Marcos to reorganize the advisory body he formed late last year.

The radical left, which includes well-organized and -mobilized student groups and unemployed laborers, may, in the end, be Aquino’s most formidable obstacle as her campaign tries desperately to strike a middle point between the regime and the rebels.

Before the Feb. 7 poll, Joe Castro, leader of the leftist group Bayan, which boycotted the election, predicted that Marcos would win the election through cheating and said such an outcome would only serve as a recruiting tool for groups such as his and the Communist New People’s Army.

Bayan continued its efforts to use the election as a staging ground Tuesday, leading an angry crowd of several hundred students and workers in a protest outside the U.S. Embassy, which then marched en route to Marcos’ presidential palace. The speeches were fiery.

Other Marcos foes were pleased by the election outcome. One of them was newspaper editor Antonio Zumel, a leader of the Communist Party of the Philippines who went underground after Marcos declared martial law in 1972.

The poll, he told a group of select reporters at a mountain hideaway, proved two things: that the majority of Filipinos want Marcos out, and that, “by hook or by crook,” Marcos will not leave until he is driven out by force.

Zumel followed up his assessment with a threat--that the New People’s Army will turn the U.S. bases in central Luzon into “a graveyard for Americans” if President Reagan does not remove them soon.

And unlike Aquino’s pampered, middle-class supporters, Zumel said, the rebels are accustomed to sleeping in the jungle, eating grass and berries and waiting. “We are,” he said, “ready for a long, protracted war.”

So, apparently, is Marcos.

He has shown not even a crack in the mantle of presidency that he will officially assume for six more years at his inauguration next Tuesday. To one television interviewer this week, Marcos said, “I will not do a Baby Doc,” referring to former Haitian leader Jean-Claude Duvalier’s sudden exit from his nation two weeks ago.

Marcos, too, has a strategy in his campaign to remain in office.

Before the election, his top campaign aide, Labor Minister Blas Ople, said Marcos’ intense desire for a new six-year mandate was grounded in his personal sense of Philippine history--his desire to square a presidential legacy now tainted with human rights abuses and massive corruption that has made him and his family and friends multimillionaires.

“I think you will see a new Marcos--a reform-minded Marcos,” Ople said Saturday night after the National Assembly proclaimed Marcos the winner of the election.

At a press conference, Marcos was asked what he will do to Aquino if she continues her campaign of civil disobedience. The president paused, looked thoughtfully, turned angrily to the microphone and suddenly stopped himself.

“No, I won’t say that,” he said almost to himself. Then, he added, “I will pray for her. I will not prosecute her.”

Later, a presidential aide said, “I think the president was about to say he would hunt her down and arrest her, but he quickly caught himself. I just don’t think you’re going to hear those kinds of things from him anymore. This will be the new Marcos.”

Whether the president’s campaign to build a new image will be believed by his people remains to be seen. His supporters say it is never too late to change. But Aquino and her aides say that for the Filipino people, there is only one Marcos, “and he has already lost not only the political and moral will to reform but the credibility as well,” said Aquino aide Ernesto Maceda.

Aides from both camps agree the only “unknown” in the equation of the political future of the Philippines is the Reagan Administration, which has sent envoy Philip C. Habib to Manila for an indefinite stay to determine what role it should play here.

Many opposition leaders say the only way that Aquino can dislodge Marcos now is if the forces of the U.S. Congress and the Administration throw their support behind her by denying Marcos vital military and economic aid. But even the most optimistic of Aquino’s aides concede that the success of their isolation campaign depends upon President Reagan, at the very least, softening his support for Marcos.