Aquino, in Painful Cabinet Overhaul, Fires 2 Trusted Aides

Philippine President Corazon Aquino fired her two most trusted Cabinet aides Thursday in a personally painful move aimed at reducing widespread military unrest and resolving the nation’s worst political crisis since she took office 18 months ago.

After three weeks of intense pressure from her most powerful political supporters following a military revolt that nearly drove her from power, the president announced on national television that she had accepted the resignations of her executive secretary, Joker Arroyo, and her special counsel, Teodoro Locsin Jr.

The two men were “like family” to the president, one top aide said. Both ranked among the closest friends and advisers to Aquino as well as to her late husband, Benigno S. Aquino Jr. Both served in her innermost circle, first as key campaign strategists in her 1986 election bid to unseat Ferdinand E. Marcos and later as Cabinet aides so powerful that many Filipinos believed they were actually the ones running the government.

Just 12 hours before, Aquino had quietly accepted the resignation of her trusted appointments secretary, Narcisa Escaler.

One official close to Aquino commented Thursday: “This must be one of the worst weeks of Cory Aquino’s life. She must feel so alone.”

In announcing what officials later said was the final installment of the president’s much-heralded Cabinet restructuring, Aquino said Arroyo “made his resignation irrevocable . . . in the hope that this would bring peace and quiet to the government.” She praised the former human rights lawyer and street activist as “a man of proven courage.”

Aquino, her expression strained, told the nation that she is “on top of the situation” and appealed to her 58 million countrymen not to “listen to this disinformation campaign,” an apparent reference to the propaganda war being waged by Col. Gregorio (Gringo) Honasan, the leader of the Aug. 28 rebellion.

Gen. Fidel V. Ramos, the armed forces chief, launched a propaganda campaign of his own Thursday night, organizing a 75-minute live national broadcast on all but one of the country’s television stations from inside the burned-out hulk of the armed forces general headquarters building in the Manila military camp briefly held by the rebel troops last month.

Ramos announced during the broadcast that the armed forces are investigating reports that “foreign personnel”--perhaps representatives of right-wing political groups in the United States, he said--assisted Honasan. He added that the new U.S. ambassador to Manila, Nicholas Platt, “emphatically denied” recent published allegations here that the coup attempt was backed by the CIA.

Ramos refused to comment on whether Aquino’s Cabinet changes will please his officers and men.

“I would like to think that the president has made these recent decisions not so much because the military said so in surveys but because the president feels she needs a good team,” he said.

Within minutes of the announcement, however, there was cautious celebration in military camps throughout the country.

The ouster of Arroyo, whose championship of human rights and longstanding hatred for the armed forces under Marcos caused him to be labeled a political leftist, ranked among the chief demands of the leaders of the coup attempt, which left at least 53 dead and more than 250 wounded.

Such complaints found sympathetic ears at every level of the Philippine armed forces, which have long held that Aquino and advisers such as Arroyo have not been sincere in their political efforts to end the nation’s violent 18-year-old Communist insurgency.

Military Views Surveyed

In one recent survey of more than 400 junior and senior officers by prominent Filipino sociologist Felipe Miranda, only 16% said they trusted Arroyo. That compared to 76% for Ramos and 69% for Aquino. More than half of the officers added that they believe Aquino has been harboring Communists in her government, and Arroyo was most often mentioned in that regard.

To replace Arroyo, Aquino named career bureaucrat Catalino Macaraig Jr., who served Marcos for more than a decade as an undersecretary of justice but later switched his loyalties to Arroyo, serving as deputy executive secretary, several sources in the presidential palace said.

“Joker, Macaraig, it’s the same,” said Sen. Ernesto Maceda, a former Aquino Cabinet member and an influential Aquino supporter in Congress. “Joker will still control the palace; he’ll just do it through Macaraig.”

Special counsel Locsin, although fired from his Cabinet post, was retained by Aquino as a “consultant.” Locsin, a widely respected speech writer for Aquino, alienated the armed forces during the coup by publicly demanding that Ramos move far more decisively and quickly to crush the mutineers.

There were several other indications Thursday that the crisis facing Aquino will continue despite her firing of Arroyo and Locsin.

In meetings Wednesday night and Thursday morning, the nation’s principal opposition group, the Grand Alliance for Democracy, decided to form a “shadow government” based loosely on the leaders of the defunct Nationalista Party, which most political analysts believe would be headed by the former defense minister and Aquino foe, Sen. Juan Ponce Enrile.

Blas Ople, who served for 18 years as Marcos’ labor minister but later helped Aquino draft the new national constitution before joining the opposition coalition, said the group is forming the shadow cabinet because “we think that the process of deterioration within the Aquino government is well under way.”

“We see no way President Aquino can retrieve the momentum of this decline.”

The firing of Arroyo, which the rightist opposition also has demanded several times, will have little effect on the government’s crisis, Ople added.

“Paradoxically, by making his exit, he is consolidating his power,” Ople said. “He has placed more men and women in office than the president herself, and those people will remain in place. And this is not lost on the armed forces.”

The president’s fundamental political problems remain, he added.

“The government has already come to a standstill right now,” he said. “The ministries are not functioning.”

Several of Aquino’s top supporters agreed. Most said that Aquino should change at least five and probably seven top Cabinet secretaries after 24 senior members and several other lesser government officials resigned to give her a free hand.