Pomp, Extravagance Linger : Trappings of Marcos Era Still in Style in Manila

Cardinal Jaime Sin, a key figure in the February coup that sent President Ferdinand E. Marcos into exile, stood atop a 40-foot scaffold recently and, with disco music blaring, blessed a Boeing 747 jetliner.

The ceremony took place in a hangar at Manila International Airport, where 1,000 of the creme de la creme of Manila society, all in the finest Hong Kong silk, sipped French wine, nibbled canapes and cheered as the most powerful religious leader in this overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country intoned: “O Lord, please bless these planes. . . . Let them be the engine that drives us into a future of prosperity.”

A 40-piece band then struck up the theme from the movie “Star Wars.” Hundreds of pulsating multicolored lights transformed the hangar into a giant discotheque, and four dozen professional dancers engaged in a choreographed celebration beneath the wings of the latest addition to the Philippine Airlines’ international fleet.

The occasion was the official dedication of a new logotype for the government’s international airline--a symbol that, in the words of the airline publicity director, commemorates a new era in the country’s history after the overthrow of Marcos.

But the scene was vintage Old Manila, complete with the disco pomp and extravagance that accompanied most of Marcos’ two decades in power. Even by conservative estimates, the ceremony cost tens of thousands of dollars. And it was sponsored by the cash-strapped government of President Corazon Aquino.

“My God,” a Filipino newspaper columnist lamented as Cardinal Sin waved his six-foot gold scepter over the plane’s nose. “The more things change here in the Philippines, the more they stay the same.”

An army officer who was part of the occupation force that seized the Manila Hotel on July 6 in an attempt to wrest the government from Aquino put it even more strongly.

‘Is 4 Days Enough?’

“They call themselves reformists,” Col. Dictador Alqueza said of the military and political leaders who carried out the the four-day coup that overthrew Marcos last February. “Is four days enough to transform all this foolishness of the last 20 years? No way. A four-day revolt is not my idea of a revolution.”

Indeed, nearly six months after the Feb. 22 coup that ousted a regime now infamous for its excesses, life in Manila has returned to its own version of normal.

Every evening in Manila these days, thousands of middle-class Filipinos flock to sophisticated fashion shows in hotel ballrooms. They attend the latest laser-light shows and rock to top-40 tunes at more than a dozen rooftop discotheques. They jam fancy restaurants featuring everything from pasta carbonara to cordon bleu cooking .

And they continue to frequent the massage parlors and go-go joints that Cardinal Sin once said made Manila’s tourist district “the Sodom and Gomorrah of the Pacific.”

Dining in Elegance

Not even the 38-hour siege at the Manila Hotel last week interrupted the routine. At the height of the incident, Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile spent three hours dining in elegance with the Manila Rotary Club, and President Aquino had tea with a group of West Germans in her richly appointed office at the presidential palace.

These are customs and institutions that have endured despite Aquino’s pledge that hers will be a government of austerity, of morality and of charity.

And they are customs and institutions that stand as reminders that despite the rhetoric of the new government, many Filipinos believe that there has not been a true revolution in the Philip1885957733but in the words of a human rights activist, “no fundamental change in our society.”

“In many ways, it is true that only the faces have changed,” said Ricky Avancena, an activist member of Aquino’s Presidential Commission on Human Rights. “The problem is, the mold has remained the same. If the mold is Mickey Mouse, it doesn’t matter what you put into that mold. It’s still going to come out Mickey Mouse. What we have to do is start from scratch and remold our whole society.”

‘Demarcosification’

On some levels, President Aquino has been trying to do just that. In a program a member of the Cabinet describes as “demarcosification,” the government has been looking for ways to purge Marcos and his associates--in name, image and substance--from every aspect of Philippine society.

Already the minister of local governments has dismissed hundreds of pro-Marcos governors, mayors, councilmen and village chiefs. The Commission on Good Government has seized control of more than 200 corporations owned by Marcos and his associates. And Manila city employees have scoured the city for Marcos posters and photographs, scraped them off utility poles, walls and billboards and tossed them into the rubbish.

On July 5, Aquino announced that she will require mandatory classes in human rights for all military personnel, labor leaders, teachers and police officers. The classes will be aimed at eliminating the torture, abuse and fraud that marked the Marcos years.

The Ministry of Education has gone a step further. Not long ago it announced a massive program to revise the 68 million textbooks used in the public schools. The goal, according to Education Minister Lourdes Quisumbing, is to delete all positive references to Marcos and his wife, Imelda, and to insert critical interpretations of his regime.

New Teaching Guides

But Quisumbing, faced with budget problems and a task so sweeping that textbook publishers said it cannot be completed until late 1988, announced an interim measure: new teaching guides that will be distributed nationwide and will provide instructions in how to explain or replace the Marcos references.

The attempt to “demarcosify” the Philippines has also been extended to parks, streets, hospitals and public buildings. Dozens of newly appointed city governments throughout the country have adopted resolutions renaming all the boulevards, hospitals and bridges that were named after Marcos or his wife, Imelda.

Again, the process has been peculiarly Philippine. This country tends to venerate personalities, and Aquino’s supporters have not been content to purge their society of the image and traditions of Marcos. Many are insisting on replacing the cult of personality Marcos built for himself with an Aquino cult.

Portraits of Marcoses

Noting that several remote provincial classrooms are still decorated with portraits of Marcos and his wife, a group of several hundred teachers submitted a petition to Aquino last week formally asking her to distribute an official presidential photograph.

A teachers’ union leader, Exequiel Leynes of Lipa City, complained: “Our children are just going to end up confused. The children must be taught who the rightful leaders are.”

When one of Aquino’s aides demurred and informed the teachers that the presidential palace estimated it would cost about $50,000 to supply an official Aquino portrait to the nation’s 200,000 classrooms, the schoolteachers suggested to their students that they clip pictures of the president from magazines and paste them up near their desks.

Noting the tendency toward personality cults and the continued jet-set life styles of Manila’s rich, many skeptics, both inside and outside the new government, have begun to ask whether the attempts that have been made to change the Philippines are little more than cosmetic.

Expensive Trips Abroad

Critics of the new government point out that nearly half the members of Aquino’s Cabinet have already taken expensive trips abroad--trips of a kind that brought charges of extravagance against the Marcos government.

Salvador Laurel, the vice president and foreign minister, is on his fourth foreign mission, this one an extensive tour of Europe. Two of his previous trips were made not by commercial airliner but in private jets with his entire family aboard; all were made at government expense.

“The nation today is in a state of drift,” the Manila Chronicle said in a recent editorial. “The euphoria over the events of last February that overthrew a hated regime has dissipated, and the people’s expectations once again collide with the reality that nothing much has changed in their lives.”

Commenting on the poverty that continues to flood Manila’s streets with half-naked beggars and fill the city’s houses of prostitution with new recruits, the editorial added:

“The nation has a charismatic leader, but her magnetic spell is not creating jobs. There is a slump in the national spirit--a depression of the national mood. The high expectations that a revolution could produce miracles are not being fulfilled.”

Against this background of national malaise, the ousted government workers and once-powerful local leaders known as Marcos loyalists, who had continued to hold weekly rallies in a downtown Manila park, tried July 6 to take the country back.

About 24 hours into the siege, an upper-middle-class woman in the occupation force that packed the lobby of the Manila Hotel was complaining to an American journalist about the new society Aquino is trying to build in this island nation of 55 million people.

‘What’s New About It?’

“What’s so new about it?” she asked. “Cory (Aquino) is doing just what President Marcos did. She has seized four of our radio stations because they’re considered (Marcos) loyalist stations. Where’s the freedom of the press? Her ministers are going on junkets around the world with the people’s money. Where’s the austerity budget? And Cory is firing all the mayors and governors just so she can put her own people in there.”

The woman asked not to be identified by name because she is trying to hold on to a high-paying job she got through the old administration.

And as she spoke, the people around her were busy making it clear that what she was complaining about has become deeply ingrained in Philippine society.

Ragged pro-Marcos villagers had broken into the hotel’s room-service stores and were sitting in clumps on the lobby’s marble floor, nibbling Swiss chocolates, drinking cognac and talking about how much they wished they could live like this all the time--”You know,” one said, “like Imelda done.”