After Her Triumphant U.S. Tour, Aquino Admits She Came Away Empty-Handed

Wearing a black evening dress and a simple strand of pearls, the demure, middle-aged woman who was introduced as “a true revolutionary” cleared her throat at the podium and looked out at the sea of pinstripe suits and evening gowns.

“I suspect there are two thoughts uppermost in your minds tonight: Curiosity about the unlikely looking revolutionary you see before you, and concern (about) how a ‘people’s power’ revolution can be a good basis for business,” Philippine President Corazon C. Aquino began. “One woman’s people power can be another man’s mob.”

And for the next 30 minutes, Aquino stopped talking about revolution. Instead, she preached “getting government off the backs of people and out of the pockets of business.” She talked tough against the Communist rebels in her country, and she likened her rise to power in a coup against Ferdinand E. Marcos last February to “the Reagan Revolution here.”

Aquino, now a virtual household name in America as the woman who overthrew one of Asia’s most durable dictators, was delivering one of her most important speeches of an already extraordinary week to some of America’s richest corporate magnates. And when she finished, the ballroom exploded with applause. Chief executives of Fortune 500 corporations rose and clapped wildly for a full three minutes.

But when Aquino left for Manila a week later, she left empty-handed.

“If we could have gotten to their checkbooks before dinner was over,” Aquino said the day before she left for home, “I think we might have started a capital flight--from New York to Manila.”

After an eight-day official trip that electrified audiences from San Francisco to New York--a visit that generated unprecedented grass-roots interest for a visiting head of state in university lecture halls and hotel ballrooms from Boston to Washington--Aquino herself was conceding only limited success in one of the most important goals of her mission.

At best, she said, she had laid the groundwork for a complex series of events that must take place if the Philippines is to overcome its $26-billion foreign debt, reduce an unemployment rate that ranks among the world’s highest and again become economically viable.

Critics of the trip, both in and out of Aquino’s government, said the tour, which included what the president herself called a “sentimental journey” to her college alma mater in the Bronx and her former home of exile in suburban Boston, was little more than a victory parade for a politically shaky leader trying to build her image and power base back home.

There were, however, some major, universally accorded successes from the trip, which, incidentally, was paid for by American taxpayers--more than $100,000 for television-satellite hookups to Manila, hotel and restaurant bills and security arrangements by the U.S. Secret Service.

The visit, for instance, cemented her relations with the Reagan Administration. She was able to put to rest any lingering concern among top Administration officials that, with her political inexperience, she is either too weak or too far to the left ideologically to be an acceptable leader of a nation that hosts America’s two largest military facilities overseas.

During private meetings with President Reagan, Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, Aquino reassured them time and again that the bases’ short-term future, at the very least, is secure. She also said that she will not hesitate to use the full force of her 200,000-man military against the Communist insurgents in her country if her current effort to negotiate a cease-fire with them fails.

“We support fully, completely and entirely, what she is doing with the Communist insurgency,” declared a senior Reagan Administration official after Aquino’s 45-minute meeting at the White House. “We are completely in accord.”

Personal Triumph

However, the biggest success of the trip--according to American and Filipino political analysts, Aquino’s top personal aides and Reagan Administration officials--was clearly a personal one, both at home and abroad. Despite continuing political unrest back home, the 53-year-old president emerged from her U.S. trip a far stronger leader of the 54 million Filipino people than she was when she left Manila on Sept. 15, they agreed.

It is a success, these sources said, that will endure far beyond the thousands of inches of newspaper space, the dozens of minutes of American television air time, the standing ovations, honorary degrees and academic medals that were bestowed upon the diminutive leader as she and her 15-member official delegation made their way from university to university, city hall to city hall and coast to coast.

“In the political battlefield back home, there’s no question Cory Aquino emerges from this trip the clear victor,” said one Filipino student leader at the University of California in Berkeley after Aquino spoke at the school Tuesday.

In a reference to the leaders of the right wing in Aquino’s disparate coalition, Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile, and the military chief of staff, Gen. Fidel V. Ramos, the leftist student leader, who asked not to be identified, added: “Enrile and Ramos are the big losers. Cory has drawn off the political forces of the right in America and in Manila, which cuts into the heart of Enrile’s political support.”

Neither Enrile nor Ramos, who together led the military coup that led to Marcos’ ouster, accompanied Aquino on her trip. Enrile, in particular, is widely believed to have personal political ambitions and has been outspoken in his criticism of what he sees as Aquino’s conciliatory approach towards the Communist rebels.

“As for the left, for the Communist leadership back home, Cory has convinced the world that she is trying everything humanly possible to settle the insurgency without firing a shot,” the student leader added. “So when she finally does--and most of us believe she eventually will--Washington and the world will say she is entirely justified. The Communists, quite simply, have lost their moral ground.”

Recurring Theme

That sensitive balance between what Aquino called in her televised address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress “the olive branch of peace” and “the sword of war,” was, perhaps more than any other single issue, a recurring theme in the two dozen speeches Aquino delivered to audiences throughout America.

In a lecture on nonviolence to college deans, chancellors and university presidents at Harvard University last weekend, Aquino said, “The moral imperative of my presidency is that we do not resort to violence where there is a peaceful way, . . . but it is also my duty to defend the interests of the Filipino people, and in that final option, we will have to use force against force for the good of the people.”

She struck the same balance even in her speech to a packed ballroom of American human-rights lawyers at New York’s swanky Pierre Hotel the following night. She is aware, she said, that she must “be careful about how rebels as human beings should be treated,” but at the same time, she is “obligated . . . to eliminate the insurgency.”

In her private meetings with Shultz and Weinberger, though, Aquino’s aides said she took a far harder line against the insurgents. She virtually guaranteed the use of force against them in the coming months and repeated several messages of reassurance that Ramos had asked her to convey to the U.S. military establishment.

During a press conference just hours before she returned to Manila on Tuesday, Aquino conceded that she had all but begged Weinberger and Reagan for massive medical aid for “my soldiers” back home. She said she also urged Washington to expedite the $200 million in military equipment and training that the United States has committed to the Philippines this year.

In an immediate response to Aquino’s pleas, Reagan shipped $10 million in additional military medical supplies to Manila by a U.S. Air Force transport two days after their meeting.

Aquino dismissed suggestions during the press conference that her strong stance on the insurgency, together with her obviously warm relationship with Reagan, would alienate leftists back home, including leaders who supported her February presidential bid.

‘No Excuse’ for Leftists

“They have no excuse whatsoever to hit at me,” she said. “Everyone knows this is where I stood from the beginning.”

And she was careful to sound a consistently nationalist note in her speeches, stressing that, whatever the solution to a civil war that she and Washington see as the most pressing problem in her nation, it will be decided and implemented by the Filipinos themselves “in our own time and in our own way.”

Another crucial but largely unnoticed victory for Aquino during the trip was the relegation of her old enemy, deposed President Marcos, once a close friend of President Reagan, to political obscurity.

The subject of Marcos, who has been attempting to finance a political comeback in the Philippines almost since a U.S. Air Force helicopter evacuated him from the Malacanang presidential palace Feb. 25, never even came up during Aquino’s meeting with Reagan.

“This is a man of the past,” a senior Administration official said following the Oval Office meeting.

None of the massive anti-Aquino demonstrations that Marcos loyalist leaders had promised materialized, not even in San Francisco where many of the loyalists now live in self-imposed exile.

When Aquino appeared for a reception at San Francisco City Hall, where the loyalists had announced that they would hold the largest of their rallies, fewer than 20 demonstrators stood behind police lines, shouting insults. Above, a biplane circled overhead with a banner that proclaimed: “Aquino: Communist Coddler.” Few noticed the banner; it had been affixed to the plane’s tail backwards.

Aquino herself noted Marcos’ eclipse as a major achievement in a speech to business and political leaders in San Francisco on the last day of her visit.

“It has put the froth and antics of a handful of grudging losers in perspective,” she declared. “Others may have guns, but nobody else has the people.”

It is only on the economic front that Aquino’s success was limited. “The Philippines is back in business,” Aquino declared, stressing that the International Monetary Fund, which must take the first step in approving the Philippine program for economic recovery, has agreed to a financial package that will lead to a restructuring of the nation’s foreign debt and a growth rate next year of about 6%, after several years of decline.

However, the IMF’s approval in Washington 10 days ago was only tentative. The fund’s full board will vote formally on the program next month. Then, Aquino’s economic ministers must take that agreement to a committee representing the more than 400 commercial banks that hold the Philippine debt.

No concrete action is likely until the middle of next year, at the earliest, on the Philippine proposal that the repayment of about $9 billion of the country’s debt be deferred for six years, Aquino’s economic Cabinet ministers said.

Having failed to win any concrete aid, Aquino insisted, as she had done before her trip, that she did not come with a shopping list. But that did not mean she was not shopping, as evidenced by her powerful appeal to the corporate magnates at the New York Hilton.

In that speech, Aquino pictured her nation as a phoenix, “that mythical bird that dies only to rise again, more brilliantly, from its own ashes,” and as a “reborn” land that is offering $7-billion worth of idle, yet asset-rich, corporations that her government is willing to sell at a discount to foreign investors.

Then she challenged the businessmen: “Can you match our miracle with one of your own and help us get started?”

In a telephone interview after Aquino had left for home, one of the executives in the audience that night said: “She should have gone for our checkbooks when she had the chance. For most businessmen, miracles are still a bit risky as investments.”