Aquino Must Stop Infighting, Launch Reform

As a liberator and restorer who led her country in reclaiming its lost democracy, President Corazon Aquino already has an honored place in Philippine history. To assure the health of that democracy, she will also have to be a builder. For that, she must assume firm direction of her government’s policies and use her popularity to introduce some long-needed but controversial reforms, including ones to improve the lot of the rural and urban poor.

After she assumed office last February, her admiring people allowed her to take dictatorial legislative power until a new democratic constitution, now being written, comes into force. If she fails to use that time productively, and allows her Cabinet members to fight among themselves while policy decisions flounder, she risks leaving her country on dead center, as economically stagnant and socially divided as before.

Especially divisive issues are economic development strategy and the future of the U.S. military bases. The former issue turns on whether the Philippines should follow an outward-oriented strategy for industrial development by pushing industrial exports, lowering tariffs, holding down wages to make Philippine products competitive abroad and welcoming foreign investors, or whether it would be wiser to seek self-sufficiency in an unpredictable world economy through protection for Filipino manufacturers and industrial wage-earners and a concentration on production for the domestic market.

The first strategy--outward orientation--is favored by most professional economists, international financial agencies and parts of the Philippine business community, who see in export expansion the best hope for a reversal of the Philippines’ recent negative rate of economic growth. In the Aquino Cabinet, Finance Minister Jaime Ongpin is its leading champion.

Opposed to such a policy are some Filipino economists, new Filipino manufacturers who built their firms under the protectionist policies of the 1950s and a variety of political, academic and journalistic nationalists. In the government, the main advocates of economic nationalism are Economic Planning Minister Solita Monsod and Labor Minister Augusto Sanchez.

Aquino, whose campaign speech on the economy was written for her by Ongpin, now seems committed to his outward-looking approach. At the same time, she has supported Sanchez in his defense of labor’s right to strike and backed the Commission on Good Government in its sequestering of corporations controlled by former President Fernando E. Marcos or his cronies. Businessmen cite uncertain economic policy as the reason for their slowness to invest. In turn, Aquino, in a July 21 speech to Philippine and foreign businessmen, has accused them of timidity and of abandoning her and the nation.

The military bases are the most hotly contested part of the broader issue of Philippine foreign policy and national defense. Since independence in 1946, successive Philippine governments have tied their national security to a close U.S. alliance, which includes the presence of two American facilities, Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Station. Nationalists, including the political left, want an end to the “special relationship” with the United States. They call for the closing of the bases on the grounds their presence might involve the Philippines in a war between the United States and the Soviet Union.

In the Aquino government, the strongest advocate of base retention is the military. Vice President Salvador Laurel also appears to value the bases, and has proposed that the matter be decided by a plebiscite, which most think would favor retention. Nationalists in the government urge base abrogation. Aquino has stated that she will maintain the bases until the current U.S. lease expires in 1991; in the meantime, she has reportedly rebuffed proposals to write a ban on foreign military bases into the new constitution.

On these issues, each Cabinet faction finds support among elements of the opposition. The Communist Party, at war with the state, has long been a strident champion of economic nationalism. It has made the abrogation of the American bases a condition for ending the New Peoples Army rebellion. Marcos, on the other hand, made the American alliance and the retention of the U.S. bases a cornerstone of his foreign policy. He favored trade liberalization and foreign investment, in principle if not in practice.

The battle over foreign and defense policy is now being played out in a contest between two skillful antagonists, Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile and Presidential Human Rights Commission Chairman Jose Diokno. Each has sympathizers and opponents within and without the Aquino administration.

Enrile, Marcos’ minister of defense, spearheaded the military revolt against his former chief, and as a reward became defense minister in the Aquino government. Like his subordinates, he favors retention of the U.S. bases. Long-time Marcos opponents among Aquino’s followers question both his motives and his policies. Communist leaders also have made it clear that they would like to see him ousted. His departure would weaken those who oppose them most strongly. Marcos’ followers, on the other hand, would like to see Enrile as the next president. As a former Marcos man, he could bring them in from the political cold.

Diokno, a distinguished former senator and ardent nationalist who was jailed for a time by Marcos and Enrile, is now in a position to strike several blows for nationalism. Through the Human Rights Commission, he can investigate Enrile’s conduct during the Marcos years and has threatened to do just that. Should he force Enrile out of the Cabinet by uncovering evidence of wrongdoing that Aquino could not ignore, the nationalists would be in a strengthened position in the Aquino government.

Enrile is seen by many as aspiring to the presidency. His best chance of coming to that office and of then governing successfully lies in serving Aquino as a loyal minister and seeking her office when she retires. But if threatened with premature removal from the government, he might well fight back.

Corazon Aquino came to power with the help of a broad spectrum of policy-oriented groups, all of which won places in her Cabinet. She now faces decisions on many economic, social, and foreign-policy issues that divide members of her government into contending factions, while aligning each faction with outside forces that would be happy to see the Aquino government fall.

How she deals with these issues can affect not only the course of Philippine government policy but also the future of the new government, as well as that of Philippine democracy itself.