Aquino Holding Firm on U.S. Visit Plans

President Corazon Aquino announced Thursday that she will visit the United States as scheduled on Sept. 17 despite events here last weekend, when supporters of ousted President Ferdinand E. Marcos took the occasion of her absence from Manila to attempt a rebellion.

“I’m very confident now that after the handling of the Sunday event . . . we will be able to prevent future occurrences of this kind of thing,” Aquino told an audience of business executives and Roman Catholic bishops in her first public function since the abortive coup.

Aquino was visiting the southern island of Mindanao when Marcos’ running mate in the Feb. 7 election, 75-year-old Arturo Tolentino, had himself sworn in as acting president Sunday afternoon and, with about 300 soldiers, occupied the luxurious Manila Hotel as his seat of government. Many of the soldiers soon left and Tolentino and the rest gave up after about 38 hours.

Aquino, in her Thursday morning address, made a point of noting that her military chief of staff, Gen. Fidel V. Ramos, had accompanied her to the function.

Pledge Every Monday

Ramos then told the crowd that he and the majority of the 200,000 members of the Philippine Armed Forces are so loyal to Aquino that they pledge an oath of allegiance to her every Monday morning at every camp and field station throughout the country.

Finally, when the president had to leave for another meeting, she asked Ramos if he could stay behind to answer the remaining questions.

“Ma’am,” Ramos said with a smile, “I am under your command.”

Their appearance and remarks illustrated how the attempt to destabilize Aquino’s five-month-old administration has served instead to strengthen her coalition with military leaders, whose February coup helped bring her to power.

As Ramos noted Thursday, less than a fifth of 1% of the Philippine armed forces joined Sunday’s rebellion.

Attempts by leaders of the rebellion to woo Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile to their side by exploiting recent public policy differences between him and Aquino “failed miserably,” Aquino told the gathering. And Enrile himself reiterated his loyalty to Aquino during a speech to Filipino physicians Thursday night.

Cardinal Derides Move

Even the nation’s highest religious authority, Manila’s Catholic Archbishop, Cardinal Jaime Sin, dismissed the Manila Hotel takeover Thursday as “a mindless caper.”

Despite such expressions of confidence and the political gains reaped from the incident by Aquino, the president indicated that she is not really laughing off the rebellion.

It was “a very important lesson,” she said Thursday, that her government has not yet brought total political stability to the nation; that it lacks the internal intelligence capabilities to anticipate such plots, and that, in spite of the apparent closeness, “there is a need for even closer collaboration between the civilian and military sectors.”

“The fight is not over,” she said. “The enemy has many more disguises than the ludicrous one it put on last Sunday at the Manila Hotel. We must be on our guard. . . .”

As she spoke, a second round of the confrontation loomed.

Toughening her rhetoric, Aquino had told the crowd, “We will not allow any rallies of these same rebels, because it is no longer a question of freedom of expression or assembly. What they did Sunday was really open rebellion.”

But one of the rebellion leaders, Marcos’ personal attorney, Rafael Recto, told reporters Thursday that he and the other leaders plan to defy Aquino’s ultimatum that they swear allegiance to her government or face prosecution. And Recto vowed that his group will hold another rally, perhaps as soon as Sunday, and in the same park where last Sunday’s rebellion began.