2 of Marcos’ Most-Feared Groups Scrapped in Aquino Military Reform

The government of President Corazon Aquino has dismantled two of the most feared instruments of Ferdinand E. Marcos’ dictatorial regime in a sweeping program of military reforms aimed at curbing corruption and human rights abuses, senior Cabinet officials said Thursday.

The recent reforms were a major topic in meetings Thursday between a three-man U.S. congressional delegation and Aquino’s top military commanders. They include the scrapping of a 5,000-man combat force that Marcos created at an annual cost of $25 million just to protect him and his palace and family and the elimination of the former president’s shadowy $6-million-a-year personal intelligence-gathering network that one top Aquino aide compared Thursday to “the Gestapo of Nazi Germany.”

In disbanding Marcos’ Presidential Security Command, Aquino’s military chief of staff, Gen. Fidel V. Ramos, this week has been redeploying the once-loyal presidential troops into rural areas.

There they are being “re-educated and re-integrated” into the New Armed Forces of the Philippines, which Ramos formed when he and Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile led a mutiny that helped to force Marcos into exile last week.

Enrile, too, has made wholesale changes in his ministry in the last two days, dismissing several deputy ministers who have been implicated in past abuses that included the formation of military-backed death squads and official corruption.

Daily Jogging Required

As a final step, Ramos said after he and Enrile emerged from a two-hour meeting Thursday with U.S. Ambassador Stephen W. Bosworth and a team of visiting congressmen led by Rep. Stephen J. Solarz (D-N.Y.), “We are requiring jogging sessions at 5:30 every morning. It makes everybody sweat. It releases the tension.”

Top officials in the U.S. Congress and the Reagan Administration have been pushing hard for reforms in the Philippine armed forces since the Aug. 21, 1983, assassination of Aquino’s husband, Benigno, who was shot to death at Manila International Airport while surrounded by soldiers and military policemen. More than 25 military men were implicated in this still-unresolved murder.

When Enrile and Ramos launched their successful rebellion against Marcos on Feb. 22, both said that the continuing corruption, inefficiency and misplaced loyalties of the 200,000-man Philippine military were among the reasons that they broke with their former leader.

Such reforms are needed, Reagan Administration officials have said, to secure the support of the Filipino people in the government’s fight against a Communist insurgency now active in all 74 Philippine provinces.

Aid for Counterinsurgency

“This is just the beginning,” said Enrile, who officially ordered the disbanding this week of both the Presidential Security Command and Marcos’ internal surveillance group, the National Intelligence Security Agency.

Ramos said that disbanding the security command will improve the government’s ability to fight the Communist insurgency in rural regions.

“These are 10 full battalions that were just sitting here in Manila at the president’s beck and call,” Ramos said Thursday. “Manila became an armed camp, and this is why the combat battalions in the field were so thinly spread.”

U.S. Aid Now Supported

After he was briefed on the reforms Thursday afternoon, Solarz told reporters that he and the majority of Democrats in Congress, who fought hard against increased allocations of U.S. military aid to the Philippines for the last two years of the Marcos regime, will now lobby in favor of full military aid to Aquino’s government.

“Now that you have a government which enjoys the support of the Filipino people rather than a government that oppresses the people, I don’t think we’d have a problem providing the full amount of aid that the armed forces of the Philippines need,” Solarz said.

Solarz, who for the past eight months has headed a subcommittee investigating hidden real estate holdings by the Marcos family in New York, also said at the afternoon press conference that the $350 million in properties his investigators have linked to Marcos in New York alone “is probably only the tip of the iceberg in the most massive movement of leader-led capital flight in the history of the world.”

Solarz’s party also met Thursday with Jovito Salonga, Aquino’s minister of good government, charged with ferreting out and recovering illegally gotten Marcos family assets throughout the world. The Democratic congressmen promised Salonga “any and all assistance” in liquidating Marcos’ U.S. assets and returning the money to the Filipino people.

Bolstering the claim, the Catholic church-backed newspaper, Veritas, published a typewritten receipt Thursday attesting to First Lady Imelda Marcos’ 1978 purchase of a single bracelet of platinum, emeralds and diamonds for more than $1 million from Bulgari’s of New York. The receipt was found in the Malacanang presidential palace soon after the Marcoses fled last week.

In a separate press conference, Aquino’s executive secretary, Joker Arroyo, focused on the new president’s efforts to dismantle a dictatorship she once called “an evil empire.”

The most significant step, Arroyo said, was this week’s abolition of the National Intelligence Security Agency, which was run solely by Marcos and his trusted chief of staff, Gen. Fabian C. Ver.

“All the tortures, the killings, the kidnapings and the brutalities we suffered under the Marcos regime were done on the basis of evidence gathered by this group,” said Arroyo, a former civil rights lawyer who was himself detained as a subversive by Marcos.

So secret was the agency, Arroyo said, that not a single trace of it was found on paper during the new government’s ongoing investigation of the books and records left behind by Marcos.

“There is just no trace of the funds they used,” Arroyo said, adding that the budget did indicate annual expenditures of 130 million pesos (about $6 million) by the agency. “The files that they used against the people are all gone.”

Among the casualties of that destruction of evidence, Arroyo added, may well be documents directly linking the 1983 Aquino assassination to Marcos and his military intelligence community.

In a brief interview Thursday, Enrile, who has said that he suspects Marcos’ hand in the killing, said his ministry is not interested in resurrecting the Aquino case, referring it instead to the Justice Ministry.