Managing the end of the Marcos regime
Intent on actively opposing the rule of Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos, senator Benigno Aquino Jr. returned from exile in the US in August 1983, only to be assassinated upon his arrival in Manila. Public outrage in response to this and to the regime’s corruption led to calls for Marcos’ removal. Corazon Aquino, the widow of Benigno, became a leader of the People Power Revolution and was convinced to run against Marcos in the election of February 1986.
Once election results were released, Marcos claimed victory despite accusations of vote tampering and fraud. At Corazon Aquino’s urging,
protestors took to the streets to demand Marcos’ removal. The protestors blocked government troops from dispersing the crowds in the capital and the forces retreated, peacefully ending the three-day revolution. On Feb. 25, 1986, Corazon Aquino was inaugurated as president, a victory officially recognized by the US. That same day Marcos fled the country for permanent asylum in Hawaii, ending 20 years of autocratic rule.
Stephen Bosworth served as US Ambassador to the Philippines from 1984 through 1987. In his February, 2003 interview with Michael Mahoney, Bosworth reflected on the shifting US policy toward the Philippines during Marcos’ final months, his personal experience with Corazon Aquino during her rise and the initial stages of establishing US relations with a new Filipino government.
[ U. S. Ambassador to the Philippines] Michael Armacost was coming back [ to the State Department to become Under Secretary for Political Affairs] and then [Secretary George] Shultz needed to put somebody in the Philippines. This was of course a very delicate time in the Philippines because these decisions on personnel were all made in January and February of ’84, and in August of ‘83 Benigno Aquino had been assassinated. Our relationship with Marcos was under great pressure both from our own congress and elements in the Philippines… (Bosworth is seen at left)
There was something of a course correction policy toward the Philippines… The Philippines, of course, is a very curious place because it is in Asia, but it’s not really of Asia in many respects. Someone joked that probably given my experience in Central America I was as well suited to go to the Philippines as anyone could have in terms of background.
[In April 1984] the Philippines is getting ready for national assembly elections. This was the first significant political event since Aquino’s assassination. The first electoral process of any note that had taken place since Marcos had lifted martial law, which I think, was done in ‘81 or ‘82 or something like that… We were distancing ourselves from Marcos and from the Malacañang Palace. Marcos himself by this time was not well. We knew that, we didn’t know exactly how ill. We weren’t sure what was wrong with him, but we knew he was not well.
There was a political legal process that had been launched after Aquino’s assassination in response largely to pressures from the US Congress to try to ascertain what actually had happened and who was responsible. It was a national commission that was interviewing witnesses and laboring away on this subject. This election was scheduled for May of 1984 and was the first time that members of the democratic opposition were allowed to run for office.
The Philippines was a very tense place. Marcos had ruled there since 1965. He had imposed martial law in 1972. He had lifted martial law in the early ‘80s. There was an unbelievable level of corruption in the country. The military was both corrupt and repressive. The communist insurgency known as the New People’s Army had begun to attract the attention of Washington intelligence analysts because of their growth.
The democratic opposition lacked someone to rally around, who had been active politically before martial law, some of them even during martial law. Corazon Aquino, Benigno’s widow, had gone back to the Philippines after he was killed, she was there. She, at that point, was not very active politically other than as a symbol. The economy was in terrible difficulty. It had very little if any foreign exchange. Demand was repressed, depressed. The Philippine businesses were unable to obtain letters of credit. They couldn’t do normal commercial business. It was just not a very easy time for the Philippines, and for the US it was not an easy time.
Many people had begun to accuse us of having propped Marcos up and having kept him in power. We were trying to distance ourselves from him but not to the extent to which we would bring him down. Reagan was president. He and Marcos had what they considered to be a close personal relation- ship. I couldn’t quite understand that because they had never spent all that much time together.
Reagan had been elected on a platform, which included among things the need for American support for longstanding friends. This was after the Shah had fallen in Iran and it seemed to happen after that. Somoza and Nicaragua, so there was a belief deeply held in the Reagan administration that we had to stick with our friends and Marcos was a friend…
Jeane [Kirkpatrick] came to the Philippines in the first two months that I was there and we called on Marcos and had a long conversation with him. I got her together with some members of the democratic opposition as well as other people in the Marcos government. I think she came away with a clear understanding of the complexity of what we were facing and just to say that we supported Marcos was not sufficient. We had to also be supportive of a democratic process. That basically was the horse that we rode in the Philippines for the next couple of years…
You go in and talk to them. Without being too blatant about it you make it clear that some elements of the American relationship are dependent on their beginning, and in this case Marcos beginning, to allow more space to the democratic opposition and express concern over the gross extremism on the left. You push for economic reform and end the corruption, etc. All of this, of course, gave Marcos very much the impression that we were pushing him, we were putting him in a stressful situation, which we were indeed doing…
The bases at Clark and Subic, remember this was the height of the Cold War and the early years of the Reagan administration; we needed those bases we thought to offset a growing Soviet presence in Vietnam. Those were always seen as being very important to us…
Marcos continu[ed] not to be healthy. He was suffering from various things including what we now know was a kidney malfunction. He was on dialysis and had a kidney transplant in 1985, which did not work. Anyway, ‘84 was relatively calm after the national assembly elections. Then we went into ‘85 and we were putting more and more pressure on Marcos at my recommendation. We were encouraging the political opposition to organize themselves more effectively.
He reached a point where his moral compass had gone badly astray. He had no vision of his own life beyond being president of the Philippines.
Washington was more or less backing us on that. Shultz was backing us very heavily. He saw very clearly that the longterm relationship with Marcos had been changed here. Marcos had to change or our relationship had to change, otherwise we were placing our longer term interests in the Philippines at risk, because it was not in our interest to prop Marcos up beyond the time when his own national constituency didn’t want him.
I kept telling Marcos that his problem was not how the message was being transmitted, it was what was in the message. He was not too fond of hearing that. I got along with him during all of that time pretty well. I rather admired him in some ways. He was a man of enormous intellect. The only man in the Philippines I ever found I could sit down and have a kind of global conversation with.
He was not in good health. He was under pressure from his wife and various cronies around him to just keep plunging around him because they knew if he left or if he reformed to any significant extent that they were, their status was very much at risk.
[ His wife] was always subservient to his decision. The notion of Imelda is as a kind of an independent presence; presence, yes, but independent decisionmaking? I’ve always found that difficult to accept. For example, there were those who thought that she was the one responsible for the assassination of Aquino, she and the chief of staff of the armed forces. I never was able to agree with that because it seemed to me neither of them would have dared do that without Marcos’ informed consent.
Finally, in the fall of ‘ 85 the pressure on Marcos had become quite severe… I was continuing to tell him very strongly that he had to allow more space for the opposition, he had to do something about bringing those who most people thought had been responsible for Aquino’s assassination, at least have been the agent of that, he had to bring them to justice in credible fashion. He really couldn’t bring them to justice in credible fashion because that would have cost him all of his support or much of his support that he had within the senior ranks of the military.
So, in November of ‘85, while being interviewed on one of the Sunday morning talk shows on American television, suddenly Marcos said, well, I’m tired of you
guys pressing me and I’m going to have an election and then I’ll show you who really deserves to run the Philippines.
He called an election, the so-called “snap election.” This was in November. The election was scheduled for early February. Corazon Aquino was persuaded by some people in the opposition that she should be a candidate. She and a fellow named Salvador Laurel fought it out as to who would be the presidential candidate. She won and Laurel became vice president. [Laurel] was constantly besieging me to try to get me an interview with her and persuade her that they should be reversed. The ranking should be reversed and he should be the presidential candidate.
The US position in the Philippines was really in a way kind of unique. We were, on the one hand in the minds of many Filipinos, seen as the great Satan of the West. On the other hand we were seen as the deus ex machina from whom all solutions would come if only we decided that’s what we wanted to do. Most of the Filipinos were saying two thoughts in their minds simultaneously. There was a degree of dependence, if you will, on the US that was very much exaggerated in many respects. People really thought that Marcos was still there because we wanted him to still be.
December and January were given to campaigning. The campaign had developed fairly rapidly and was quite vigorous. Marcos himself was not in good health, but he had a tremendous will; he was out there on the campaign trail, making speeches and shaking hands. I think from the beginning he thought he was going to win easily. He was out of touch with popular sentiment.
I think his fall back was he thought, well, if I don’t win I can always cheat enough to win. What he didn’t anticipate was that the level of international interest would be as great as it was and the presence of the American journalists, foreign journalists and the various election inspection observation teams that came from the congress and from the civil societies in the country and elsewhere around would be as great as they were.
So, his ability to win it by cheating became very constrained. To this day no one really knows who won that election. My belief has always been that she won it probably not by as wide a margin as some people thought, but nevertheless she won it. He, however, then within the week after the elections, sort of seized the process and managed through his minions and the national assembly predictably to introduce the vote saying that he had won.
Well, that wasn’t the end of it, contrary to what I think he had assumed to be the case, because then the public antipathy began to rise. They didn’t just shut up and go back to being a housewife. The opposition became even more vigorous.
Because of pressures in our own congress and in our own public, we remained very engaged. We came to the position of pushing away from Marcos in that week or two after the election. There was one, I remember, one statement out of the White House that Reagan was quoted as saying, well, there was probably some cheating on both sides, at which point the Filipinos went nuts. I fired back a message to Shultz and to the White House saying that we couldn’t stay on that position. Fortunately over the next three or four days, with a lot of heavy lifting from George Shultz, the White House issued another statement that said the government had not run a fair election.
There were partisans of a view that we should not abandon our friends and Cory Aquino (seen right) was a non-entity, unknown and untested, and that the democratic opposition in the Philippines was dangerously leftist and that our presence at the bases would be at risk and that we should continue to back Marcos.
Phil Habib, who was then retired from the Foreign Service, came out as an envoy from the president about a week after the elections when all of this was boiling away; he came out basically to gain us some time. I mean, there was nothing he could do other than go around and see a lot of people, which he and I did, including Marcos and Aquino.
Phil came away from that week convinced that Marcos had lost the capacity to govern and was no longer capable of governing because he didn’t have the support of the Filipino people anymore. He went back to Washington to expound that point of view, which was the point of view that I was expounding from the embassy.
Marcos’ forces basically knew that these guys were plotting a coup. We knew it in the embassy as well. I had been sending word back to the coup plotters to stop it, not to do it, because as much as I thought Marcos should go, I thought it would be in some ways be totally disastrous to have him replaced by a military government.
They also knew that Juan Ponce Enrile, the minister of defense, was involved. That was of course quite a shocker because he really had been a long-time supporter of Marcos. This group of colonels and young officers took refuge in one of the military camps out on the outskirts of Manila.
To be continued