Aquino Backers Open Drive to Dump Her 2 Top Aides

President Corazon Aquino’s political supporters and relatives began a campaign Thursday to persuade her to dismiss her two closest aides and withdraw an amnesty program for Communist rebels, in order to halt growing unrest in the armed forces and prevent a recurrence of last week’s military uprising.

In visits with the president, in speeches to both houses of Congress and in interviews with the press, the nation’s most influential political leaders have told Aquino that she may lose the support of the military, and put her government at risk, if she persists in defending her executive secretary and special counsel.

House Speaker Ramon Mitra, who met with Aquino for nearly an hour Thursday, told The Times in an interview that “there must be an immediate cleansing of our own people” and added, “We have some people who should not be here in government.”

Mitra, a close personal supporter of the president, named Aquino’s executive secretary, Joker Arroyo, and her special counsel, Teodoro Locsin Jr., as key Cabinet members who must be replaced.

Men in the Philippine armed forces, ranging from senior commanders to enlisted men, have accused Arroyo and other Cabinet members of being “closet communists” and have criticized Locsin for interfering in military operations.

But Aquino has made it clear that both men are indispensable to her.

Their replacement was one of the demands of the troops who took part in last Friday’s abortive coup, which left 53 dead and hundreds wounded, and left many in the armed services asking themselves which side they will be on if there is another such attempt.

Even Gen. Fidel V. Ramos, Aquino’s trusted armed forces chief of staff, is known to want Arroyo out. And on the day after the uprising, in remarks apparently aimed at Locsin, Ramos expressed anger at interference by “political personalities” who had hampered his efforts to block the coup.

Through much of last Friday’s drama, Locsin was at Ramos’ side in the war room, often giving advice. Locsin, a graduate of Harvard Law School who had been ordered by Aquino to assist Ramos, questioned several of the general’s moves during and after the crisis, including his failure to act more quickly to crush the uprising.

Additional criticism of Cabinet members was leveled in other quarters. Rep. Tessie Aquino Oreta, a sister-in-law of the president who is so close to her that the president personally campaigned for her last May, delivered a speech in the House calling for the resignation of the entire Cabinet.

Referring specifically to Locsin and Arroyo, Oreta said the nation may be dangerously close to “the day when the president, by the indiscretion and ambitions of some of the people around her, will have been isolated from the people and fail to meaningfully address their real needs.”

An Aquino cousin, Rep. Emigdio Tanjuatco, also attacked Arroyo and Locsin for publicly criticizing Ramos’ performance in putting down the uprising. He said it was Ramos and his senior commanders who had saved the country from almost certain military rule.

“We should all work to strengthen Ramos, give him all the support he needs,” House Speaker Mitra said. “And we ought not to have extended amnesty to the rebels--that was wrong--and certainly not when we’re in a state of all-out war with them.”

Aquino recently decided to extend for six months a program that makes available millions of dollars for compensating Communist guerrillas who surrender.

“We all must realize now that it is not Ramos or even Cory (Aquino) that is at stake at this critical moment,” Mitra said. “It is the entire institution of representative government that is at stake. If you break down this institution, all we will have is one banana republic after another.”

Sympathy appears to be spreading in the military ranks for the grievances aired last week by Col. Gregorio (Gringo) Honasan, who led the uprising and managed to flee afterward. In interviews Thursday, several senior military commanders agreed that the president can halt this spreading sympathy only by dismissing Arroyo and radically changing her policy toward the Communist insurgency.

Aquino has stubbornly resisted previous attempts by her military advisers to purge her Cabinet. In a similar crisis last November, when Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile and his military supporters were urging Arroyo’s dismissal and hinting that they would undertake a coup if she failed to cleanse her government of corruption, Aquino fired Enrile instead.

Col. Honasan was Enrile’s chief of security at the time. Many suspect that Enrile, who is now a senator and leader of an opposition political coalition, was involved in the Aug. 28 coup attempt, but Enrile has said repeatedly that he was not.

Aquino has not commented publicly on the call for sweeping Cabinet changes. Instead, she has called on the people and the armed forces to support her government. In one such appeal Wednesday night, military sources said, she alienated many officers and men who were loyal to her last Friday.

In recounting details of the uprising, Aquino reserved most of her praise for Gen. Voltaire Gasmin, commander of the presidential security force. And immediately after her speech, a 15-minute documentary glorifying the presidential guards was broadcast nationally.

“It was as if these were the only soldiers who saved the president last Friday,” an air force colonel said. “She is doing exactly what (deposed President Ferdinand E.) Marcos did. She is isolating herself inside a small, elite military force. This is a fatal mistake. I have heard so many officers and men who are angry about this. It is stupid.”

Meanwhile, military officials reported that 44 people have been killed in the last week as the Communist New People’s Army intensified its attacks to take advantage of the weakened state of the armed forces in the wake of Friday’s uprising.

In one incident, 21 soldiers were reported killed Wednesday when about 200 guerrillas ambushed a 28-man patrol 40 miles east of Manila in Quezon province.

In the northern province of Cagayan, at least 19 soldiers and civilians have been killed in four attacks on police stations and military detachments in the past five days.