Rural Regions See Paralysis in Aquino Rule

On the battered desk of Venancio Baclayo, chief municipal planner for this remote town 350 miles southeast of Manila, is a progress report that reads more like a failing report card for President Corazon Aquino’s 21-month-old government.

Entitled “Department of Public Works Projects 1986-87,” the report lists all $500,000 worth of the ambitious developments Aquino earmarked two years ago for this backward town--the second-largest on the impoverished island of Samar.

The money is gone, and not a single project is finished.

Listed in the report are 11 fresh-water wells that were to have been built in rural villages where infants are dying from water-borne disease. None of the wells is working. Seven are marked “not operational,” three others “not yet constructed” and the final one “water quality not safe for drinking.”

Road Projects Unfinished

There are 16 road projects, which were to have connected remote tenant farms to the town markets. Millions of pesos have been spent, but none of the roads is complete, largely because too little money was allocated and too much was siphoned off in “professional fees” paid to engineers, surveyors and others.

The Aquino government also has promised Basey 11 new rural schoolhouses at 165,000 pesos ($8,250) each. Again, professional fees have eaten up 45,000 pesos on each project. And next to the listing for each school in the report are the words “insufficient funds for ceiling and floor.”

“I’ll tell you what it all means,” said Baclayo, a college-educated municipal planner who has lived his entire life in this remote coastal town. “This government simply isn’t working. Nothing is working. The government isn’t reaching the people.”

Nationwide, rural residents, town planners and even the members of Aquino’s own Cabinet are beginning to agree that after nearly two years in office, the 54-year-old president has failed to get the machinery of government working again in the increasingly poor Philippines.

Aquino, it is true, has found new internal strength since the aborted coup that almost overthrew her last August. And, in a series of powerful speeches that pleased big business, she has successfully ordered projects ranging from massive government garbage collection drives to pothole-filling brigades in metropolitan Manila. Nevertheless, in the underdeveloped rural regions where most Filipinos live, her government remains largely paralyzed.

As in the past, government doctors are not treating peasants in the remote areas where children routinely die from measles and pneumonia; government judges and prosecutors are failing to deliver swift rural justice; government road crews are working in slow motion in almost all rural provinces; government labor negotiators are too afraid or too lazy to arbitrate strikes in regions where law enforcement is lax or undermanned; government teachers are teaching less and less in remote schools, and government “social outreach” workers have stopped functioning.

And as Aquino faces an increasingly violent Communist insurgency that has claimed more than 14,000 lives since 1984 and affected all but five of the nation’s 73 provinces, even her armed forces chief of staff concedes that the rebels may win if the government continues to stand idle in the rural areas, which are home to more than 80% of all Filipinos.

Weakens Counterinsurgency

“That is really the weakness of our counterinsurgency effort until now,” Gen. Fidel V. Ramos recently told a luncheon sponsored by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club here. “Many of our officials have not really been able to function.”

In the absence of a strong bureaucracy, Ramos added, the Communist Party of the Philippines, which is waging the war with a rural-based guerrilla army of about 25,000 regulars, is “making a strong bid to gain control of the local areas. And that is precisely where the weakness of our total effort is today.”

Within days of the nearly successful coup attempt by ultra-rightist military rebels against Aquino on Aug. 28, Ramos went on national television to appeal: “We must get the government working. . . . There must be no paralysis of government action now or we will be in big trouble.”

In an interview two weeks ago, Alfredo Bengzon, Aquino’s health secretary, who also was appointed national peace commissioner earlier this year, tried to phrase it more positively.

“If government is present in the rural areas, the insurgency is not going to be a very big problem,” Bengzon told The Times. “If we can just improve the bureaucracy by 30%, we will eliminate the entire insurgency in several regions of this country. And, in the end, it will be much cheaper than all-out war.”

Aquino’s Leadership Blamed

Those seeking reasons for the widespread government paralysis lay the blame ultimately on Aquino’s inability to motivate an unwieldy, top-heavy bureaucracy that she and her advisers inherited from Ferdinand E. Marcos, her predecessor as president. Marcos fled into exile when military dissidents and the nation’s Roman Catholic Church led a largely bloodless coup against him in February, 1986.

Since taking power, Aquino has authorized several salary increases and doled out benefits packages for the more than one million civil servants in an attempt to win their support and get them working. Other moves she has made, however, have alienated the bureaucrats on all levels, according to a number of political analysts.

One month after she took power, Aquino followed the advice of her executive secretary, Joker Arroyo, and fired all 1,600 mayors and 73 governors who had been elected under Marcos. Arroyo feared that it would be too difficult for Aquino to win over their loyalties and that the local officials could undermine the new president at the grass-roots level.

The effect of the firings, however, was to leave virtually every city and province without a popularly elected local leader--a significant lack in this clan-based culture, with its emphasis on respect for the local chief.

“The firings really paralyzed us,” said one general who asked not to be named. “We cannot fight a guerrilla war without total support from local leaders. She (Aquino) removed them all.”

See Hope in Elections

Local elections have finally been scheduled for Jan. 18, and Cabinet officials such as Bengzon hope that the voting will bring to power the respected local leaders necessary to combat the growing insurgency.

But critics charge that Aquino also has caused irreparable harm to her government machinery by announcing--although not yet implementing--a sweeping government reorganization plan that reportedly will eliminate thousands of government jobs, throwing thousands more into the already swelling ranks of the unemployed.

“The 1,200,000 government employees now have no security,” Marcos’ former labor minister, Blas Ople, charged recently. “The tendency now is for government employees to simply lapse into indifference.”

In opinions gathered during a reporter’s trips to more than a dozen provinces in the last several months, local officials universally registered the same complaint.

“Government has got to deliver to the people or the war is lost,” said Julian Cea-Napal, vice governor of the war-ravaged province of Camarines Sur, 275 miles southeast of Manila.

Doctors Scarce

Cea-Napal said the ratio of government doctors to people in his province is now 1 to 36,000; the province has dozens of schools with empty classrooms because teachers are afraid to venture into the remote villages, and local labor strikes have gone on for weeks simply because labor department mediators have not responded to telegrams pleading for their intervention.

In the strategic province of Bataan, just across Manila Bay from the nation’s capital, Ernesto Franco is, according to several prominent criminal lawyers in Manila, typical of what one called “the sad injustice of the judicial system in our country today.”

Franco, 56, has been in jail since June 1, 1983. He is charged with only a single count of falsifying commercial documents, yet he has already served more than four years in prison. And even now, his case is still pending in the local courts.

“Are you kidding?” the now-toothless Franco laughed to a visiting journalist who asked if the delay was caused by appeals in the case. “Hell, no, the prosecution is still presenting its evidence. I haven’t even gotten a chance to present my defense yet.

Legal System ‘Still Archaic’

“The prosecution has been presenting its case for the past four years,” Franco went on. “There’s a hearing once a month, but most of the time the prosecutors aren’t prepared or they forget to come and the case is continued. Our legal system is still so bureaucratic and still so very archaic.

“It has been paralyzed.”

Aquino’s current secretary of justice, Sedfrey Ordonez, has announced several reorganizations of the criminal justice system, but none has been implemented in earnest. One Justice Department source confided recently, “Everyone’s still too busy in this department trying to find Marcos’ hidden wealth to worry about the poor people--many of them completely innocent--who are languishing in jails throughout the country.”

Most of Aquino’s aides hope relief will result from the upcoming local elections, which the president has promised will finally put democracy in place and help stabilize the politically turbulent country. Once the nation has mayors and governors with clout, the advisers said, the local officials will pressure the national government officials in their region into delivering the basic goods and services that many towns desperately need.

But inmate Franco is one of many who prefer a different solution.

Asked what President Aquino could do to help him, Franco recently concluded: “She should resign. There should be a new government--a real government. I’m sure Mrs. Aquino is sincere and means well for our people, but, my God, she doesn’t even know people like me are here.”