Aquino Cabinet Joins 15,000 in Protest March

Nearly all of President Corazon Aquino’s Cabinet locked arms Monday and joined more than 15,000 militant leftists who marched on Aquino’s presidential palace to protest last week’s killings of 19 peasant demonstrators outside the palace gates.

Aquino had personally ordered her entire Cabinet to join the marchers in a shrewd strategy aimed at defusing mounting anger from the nation’s political left and averting another blood bath that would have deepened the crisis facing her young government.

On the surface, the march, led by the Movement of Filipino Farmers, the same group that was attacked by military riot troops last week, appeared to resurrect the “people’s power” coalition that brought Aquino to power and drove Ferdinand E. Marcos into exile 11 months ago.

Justice Demanded

Wealthy society women, university intellectuals and other members of Aquino’s so-called “middle forces” joined ragged peasants and members of the Communist New People’s Army as they marched under red banners demanding justice for the 19 peasants shot to death when they tried to present their demands to Aquino last Thursday.

But there were lingering fears that the political right and the military, which Aquino had ordered to take up positions well away from the protesters’ route Monday, would feel alienated by Aquino’s attempts to renew her ties to the left.

“Well, all I can say is it worked--nobody’s going to get killed out here now,” Agriculture Minister Ramon Mitra said as he walked arm in arm with the peasant leaders. The military was not consulted on the strategy, Mitra added.

He conceded that last week’s killings have done “very, very bad damage” to the image of Aquino and the nation, and he was uncertain whether Monday’s strategy would help repair it.

The protest leaders, who had pledged to march beyond the bridge where their supporters were shot to death and into the palace grounds Monday, were surprised and impressed by the Cabinet ministers’ gesture.

“I guess we’re seeing some genuine attempts for national reconciliation,” said Joe Castro, a leader of the leftist People’s Party after the first of Aquino’s ministers joined the marchers half a mile from the palace.

“But after the gesture, it must be followed through with concrete actions . . . and the concrete moves will have to be coming fast.”

As the marchers passed the main palace gates, which had been torn down by members of the same leftist groups the night Marcos fled last February, they sang nationalist songs with their fists raised, and a leader standing on a jeep shouted through a megaphone: “The Aquino regime is worse than the Marcos dictatorship!” and “The government of Cory Aquino is serving the interests of foreigners!”

Deployment of Troops

Before the march began, Aquino and the military had been deeply concerned about the possibility of another round of bloodshed. More than 2,000 riot troops had been deployed around the palace, and Aquino met for more than an hour with the leaders of the peasant movement and other leftist groups.

The meeting ended in a stalemate, and in a three-hour rally before the march, protest leaders again angrily called on Aquino to implement true land reform. Less than 2% of the Philippines’ population owns one-quarter of the wealth.

Behind a makeshift stage at the rally outside Manila’s General Post Office stood a graphic, 20-foot mural of a dead peasant with bullet holes and a stake through his hand, lying in a pool of blood beside a pile of spent shell casings.

“When the Marcos loyalists took over the Manila Hotel (last July), they were armed, and they wanted to take over the government, but their punishment was only 30 push-ups,” declared peasant leader Jaime Tadeo from the podium. “But the farmers who are peacefully marching for land reform are killed.

‘Important Challenge’

“The important thing is the challenge we are facing. If we do not move, they will wipe us all out through hunger and violence.”

And Tadeo called on Aquino to take down the barricades on the Mendiola Bridge, where the protesters were killed. “It is like they are putting a wall between the president and the people,” Tadeo complained. “This government should be building bridges, not blocking them off.”

The left was not alone in building up the pressure on Aquino--herself a wealthy landlord who owns a 12,000-acre feudal hacienda north of Manila--to begin a sincere land-reform program.

Roman Catholic Cardinal Jaime L. Sin, the nation’s senior religious leader, declared during a Sunday Mass, “We ask our government, in the wake of this tragedy, to turn its urgent attention to the issues of land reform and the concerns most closely related with it.”

Sin, one of Aquino’s closest personal advisers, also urged the government to “repent” and take conciliatory steps to reunify the crumbling coalition that brought it to power.

In the end, Aquino heeded the call. Against the recommendation of several senior military commanders, she ordered the military’s eight riot-control fire trucks pulled back to the main gates of her palace. She disarmed the riot policemen and kept them several hundred feet away from the marchers.

‘Deliberate Strategy’

Aquilino Pimental, the president’s national affairs adviser who also joined the marchers, said the Cabinet’s presence in the streets was “a deliberate strategy . . . to defuse the situation.”

Asked whether the military will accept the strategy, Pimental said: “I think so. They know that if they do not, there will be the most adverse circumstances in the peace and order situation in the country.”

Pimental, whom the military has accused of being a leftist in the past, added that his presence and that of the other ministers in the protest march was not an indication that Aquino’s government now sides with the left. “The government is siding with the people,” he said.

Gen. Alexander Aguirre, who took over as Manila’s military chief of police after last week’s shootings, agreed that the military will accept the government’s show of solidarity with the left in its proper context. “I would say that it was a tactical technique in order to prevent trouble,” he said.

But Aguirre warned that the coming week, leading up to a Feb. 2 referendum on Aquino’s proposed new constitution, continues to look tense. “There are many groups that are trying to destabilize the government. . . ,” he said. “We only hope that the situation will continue to be manageable.”

Wiretap Transcript

As the date of the vote approached, Aquino’s aides also tried to put out another political fire that surfaced last week, when the president’s opponents released the transcript of a wiretapped conversation in which she and her executive secretary allegedly plotted to interfere with the drafting of the new constitution.

Executive Secretary Joker Arroyo spent nearly an hour at a weekly breakfast forum trying to refute the charges.

Arroyo acknowledged that the conversation had, indeed, taken place last Sept. 19 while Aquino was in New York City at the height of her celebrated American visit, but he asserted that parts of the tape had been “spliced.” He further contended that he had been talking “in code” at several points and that his quoted comments endorsing the two large U.S. military bases in the Philippines was meant only to please “our American hosts.”

“We assumed there was an American bug,” Arroyo said. “We also assumed there was a Philippine bug. But we were more worried about the American bug.”

Arroyo further hinted that supporters of now-ousted Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile, who was still in office but battling with Aquino at the time, was responsible for the wiretapping.

‘A Very Good Job’

“We had asked the armed forces--the Defense Ministry--to secure our phones,” Arroyo said. “They must have done a very good job. Instead of securing and removing bugs, they placed bugs.”

But Arroyo voiced little confidence in the situation Aquino now finds herself in as she approaches a constitutional referendum that she considers crucial in stabilizing her government.

“You see a situation where the government is buffeted from the left and the right, and the government has to survive,” he said.

“To say that we are in complete control is a very problematic matter.”