Latin Ghosts Haunt an Asian Nation : Philippines: Corazon Aquino’s leadership style, forged largely by Hispanic traditions, keeps her nation from being a regional economic power.

What haunts the Philippines? The dead mother of Ferdinand Marcos has been lying in her parlor, embalmed for public viewing, for a year and a half--waiting for her son, the exiled ruler, to be allowed home to bury her. Now her son is dead, yet still forbidden to come home, because his remains could rend asunder the body politic.

The widow of the dictator will very likely keep him, too, on public view as a rebuke to the Aquino administration. The display of bodies may distract some people from Imelda Marcos, who as surviving defendant must still face trial in a New York court for embezzlement, fraud and other crimes.

Corpses above ground in Honolulu and Ilocos Norte, skeletons that refuse to stay in closets in New York City: The atmosphere is right for observances of All Saints Day in Manila. There, on Nov. 1, the families of the departed will flock to cemeteries, celebrate kinship, and observe rituals of Hispanic Catholicism. In the grander mausoleums, they will feast heavily and, if Chinese, play mahjong.

Meanwhile, during Corazon Aquino’s 3 1/2-year-old regime, per capita income has improved each year; foreign investment, though still timid, shows an accruing confidence; the progress of the rebel New People’s Army has been arrested, and two more of its major leaders have been captured. Public popularity still, if less exuberantly than at first, buoys Aquino. With a loyal West Point-trained minister of defense behind her, with several mutinies quashed and some significant political battles won, she should be a leader in whom success breeds charisma, and charisma further success.

But such is not her style. Cory Aquino’s charm and power are still derived from being more a Mother of Sorrows than a Joan of Arc. She leads by appearing to absorb the misery and forgive the errors of her people, rather than by waving them on, sword in hand, to victory. In the Philippines, tax collection is still thin, the civil service still more patronage-ridden than merit-driven, and politics still an anarchy of ruling families mitigated by transient alliances among factions.

These defects of governance are part of Marcos’ historic legacy. He intensified in the Philippines that which resembles not the best but the worst in Latin America: autocracy, gross corruption, bloated debt, a deprofessionalized military, private armies, death squads.

It is difficult for any Filipino leader to generate sustained, programmatic socio-economic change. Aquino may believe she is trying, but her patterns are also neo-Hispanic. It is perhaps significant that the first foreign leader she received on a state visit in 1986 was a Latin American--President Raul Alfonsin, who brought democracy back to Argentina. In 1989 he was able, barely, to achieve the first peaceful, scheduled constitutional change of power in Argentina since 1928. Now his successor, Carlos Saul Menem, copes with outrageous inflation, strikes and looting. To prepare the atmosphere for his amnesty to military officers involved in human rights violations, he brings back from England the bones of Juan Rosas, the brutal caudillo who died in exile in 1877.

The body of Ferdinand Marcos will likely come home faster than that. He was gluttonous for power and increasingly pompous, callous and cruel. But he reigned in an ungrudging country. The Philippine Supreme Court ruled only by 8 to 7 that Aquino has the right to keep Marcos’ body from burial in native ground. The court could conceivably, on appeal, reverse itself.

The rattling of bones may obscure the fact that the Philippines does again have its preferred form of democracy--a press free to the point of license, a legislature able and willing to oppose or check the president, and a self-respecting Supreme Court. Were the body of Ferdinand Marcos soon to come home, it could serve as a focus for rightist subversion. That is as saddening, in its way, as the necrophilia in Argentina that arose over the late Evita Peron. But it is far more sobering to realize the extent to which the major dynamics of Philippine public life bear close analogy to retrograde patterns in Latin America.

The late Benigno Aquino, whose assassination sparked his wife’s ascent to power, took heart and examples from South Korean, Taiwanese and Singaporean development. But his wife, for all her courage and tenacity, does not have the style and values to hold such Asian examples before her people and draw them away from Hispanic historical habits.

Disparities of income in the Philippines are the widest in the region. Despoliation of timberland is by far the worst in Southeast Asia. And population growth, unlike most other parts of Southeast Asia, is running unchecked.

The gains of the Philippines in the last 3 1/2 years have been real. But they have been limited, constituting restoration instead of reform. The ghost of Ferdinand Marcos should not preoccupy Cory Aquino’s nation. Its proper concern, almost a century after revolt against Spain, is to shake free of Hispanic tradition; to leave its Halloween dance among the dead and to join modern Asia.