The Philippines has long been regarded as a “weak” state¹. One common index has been the percentage of GNP collected in taxes. At 10.4% the Philippines ratio is the lowest in Asia and one of the lowest in the Third World. (World Bank, 1987: 39) But the full dimensions of that weakness, and how it affects rural areas, have not been explored.

The reasons for this low state capacity are found deep in Philippine history. There is not time for a careful examination now. Suffice it to say that there was nothing comparable to a “state” in most parts of the Philippines before the colonial period, and even the Spaniards did not establish as strong a state as did other European colonialists in SE Asia, both because of the continued political prominence of the Church and because a particularly noxious form of patrimonialism was introduced in which the governor-general was almost a feudal lord. The Americans contributed to the Philippine problem by the speed with which they transferred the bureaucracy to Filipino hands, hands already deeply enmeshed in patronage politics.

Thus for less than twenty years, early in this century, was there a concerted effort to establish an honest, well-trained, disciplined and well-paid bureaucracy, the necessary core of any strong state. While it is often useful to be able to blame everything on Marcos, in this case he has only a small share of the responsibility. In fact, the only period since independence in which state capacities grew rapidly was the first few years of martial law.

State capacity does, in fact, fluctuate over time, as noted by Skocpol (in Evans, et al, 1985). This may be because of higher or lower levels of state legitimacy, because of a change in relations between state leaders and the dominant class—or certain segments thereof, or because resources from the international system give state leaders new power. Yet long historical tradition seems to set the range of fluctuation within particular societies.

State capacity is neither constant over time, nor across policy issue areas, or in relation to particular targets of policy. Capacity may be higher in educational policy than in land reform, greater when allocating resources than when extracting them. [And with wide emperical support for the neo-Marxist concept of “autonomy”, we recognize that] capacity is higher when enforcing legislation that is contrary to the interests of small peasants than when attempting to coerce unwilling landlords. Autonomy from an undifferentiated “society” is too vague a concept to be meaningful.

We have already alluded to one way in which state capacity is compared quantitatively. The ability to collect revenue certainly counts for something. Yet since some states are blessed with oil wells subject to royalties or some other easily collectible tax, the comparison may not measure only state capacity. Income tax requires a sophisticated administration and is thus more indicative of state capacity than general revenue. Among the four largest ASEAN states, the Philippines, at 8.7%, in 1987 had the smallest percentage of revenue collected in personal income tax. Indonesia reached 12.8% (Asia Yearbook, 1989).

One can also look at the expenditure side to get a sense of the role of the state in the society. Perhaps the most comprehensive figure is “general government consumption” as a percentage of GDP.

Table 1

Coercive capabilities are also compared in terms of military expenditure as a percentage of GDP. In 1987 it was only 2.14% for the Philippines, compared to 3.4% for Thailand, 4.5% for Malaysia, and 5.7% for Singapore (Asia Yearbook, 1989). However, since this figure tells one nothing about how the armed forces are used, it is again only a measure of potential, not actual, capacity.

There are also measures of the economy and society that indicate to some degree the effectiveness of government policy, [such as persons per physician. The Philippines at 6,500 had the second worst ratio among the four large ASEAN countries; Indonesia had only one doctor for 7,400 persons (lbid.).] Economic performance can be measured in GDP growth: from 1983 to 1987 the average annual rate for the Philippines was -.3%, for Thailand, 5.9%, for Malaysia, 3.9% and for Indonesia, 3.4%.

[Except for the high expenditures in Malaysia, the three other ASEAN countries are very close, with the Philippines about 1/3 below the average. But, of course, all figures on expenditures only indicate potential capacity until we know how and to what purpose the funds were being expended. We now realize, for instance, that in the Philippines large amounts in 1972 were already being channeled to Marcos and his cronies [except for the collection of personal income taxes, which we know falls disproportionately on the middle class.] Yet these statistical comparisons reveal nothing about state capacity in relation to different target groups. To examine that dimension one has to look directly at policy implementation, for which cross-national quantitative comparisons are almost impossible.

The Economic Elite

Before looking at different policy outputs, however, we need to establish the character of the Philippine [“dominant class”, or] economic elite, and its relationship to state leaders. Top government officeholders, also referred to in some literature as “state leaders”, constitute the major portion of the Philippine political elite. [In some periods bishops, businessmen and journalists have also been top political decision makers or important advisors to them.] (See Simbulan, 1965; Makil, 1970). There is, clearly, some overlap between state leaders and the economic elite, described in Marxist literature as the “dominant class”. That overlap is particularly noticeable in the make-up of the Philippine Senate (Abueva, 1969), as was revealed recently when they were required to publish their net assets. But the interaction between state leaders, mostly elected, and key figures in the economic elite is primarily determined by the patron-client system and the electoral practices which flow therefrom.

For even if many state leaders are not themselves members of the economic elite, they are their clients. They have found it necessary to seek the patronage of the wealthy to finance election campaigns, which, through the concept of utang na loob, obligates the politician to his benefactor. Though the obligation is perceived to be primarily for the extending of personal favors, not the protection of “elite interests”, there is almost never a contradiction between the two. Thus many top politicians providing favors for their respective patrons amounts collectively to the protection of the interests of the “dominant class”.

That class, or that elite, was long assumed to be largely composed of landowners. And indeed they are still a powerful component—witness the Cojuangco family. However, there is some evidence to indicate (Wurfel, 1979) that commercial and industrial interests have steadily risen in importance, though in part this has simply meant the diversification of economic activities by old families. (Carroll, 1965). In any case, those familiies have in most cases retained agrarian branches. Thus the interests of the economic elite include: protection of existing landownership patterns, crushing peasant movements that threaten to alter those patterns fundamentally, avoidance of taxation in so far as possible, maximizing access to government credit or developmental expenditures, and settlement of legal and political disputes in such a way as to least disturb the economic status quo. Grindle (1980 :8) has summed it up, “To the extent that public actions seek to introduce changes in social, political, and economic relationships, they generally stimulate considerable opposition from those whose interests are threatened by them.” Or, more succintly, reaction to policy depends on whose ox is gored.

To understand the way in which the Philippine state penetrates and/or interacts with the village, we must look at six dimensions of state capacity, or six policy areas. The areas designated differ slightly from those of Almond & Powell (1966) or those of Migdal (1988). We are going to examine extractive (taxation), distributive (land reform), regulative (dispute settlement), developmental (credit, community development), coercive, or order maintaining (counter-insurgency), and responsive (elections) capabilities. We will ask especially how elite interests are affected by these policies and how this in turn affected policy implementation.

Extractive Capabilities

The two types of taxation which have had the most direct and noticeable impact in rural areas in the last decade are land tax and the coconut levy. The coconut levy was a tax decreed by Marcos in 1974 that at one point reached P100 per 100 kgs of copra. Because at the same time copra buying and processing became a monopoly under crony Eduardo Cojuangco, the producer could not pass on the tax. (See Hawes, 1987). Though the smallest farmers were hit hardest proportionately, medium to large landowners suffered the biggest bite in absolute terms. This was entirely untypical of policies toward rural areas and exhibited the fact that up to the mid-1970s the capacity of the Philippine state to impose its will prevailed even when contrary to the interest of local elites. Eduardo Cojuangco was ruthless and had been delegated all necessary powers. But this imposition stirred opposition activity among large and small coconut planters alike, helping to bring down the Marcos regime. The dismantling of the coconut monopoly, including the levy, in 1986 was evidence of the restoration of the influence of the whole coconut planters bloc, including local elites, over state policy.

In contrast to the coconut levy, land tax and its administration changed little during the Marcos era. Research before martial law had established that in most provinces the majority of land taxes due were never paid, and many large and influential owners never even registered their land for taxation—there was no legal penalty for failing to do so! (Aquino, 1974) As with all taxes the fear instilled by martial law’s declaration pushed up collections in 1973- 74, followed by a slump to “normal” levels. Even full implementation of the law only required collection of 1 1/2% of an assessed value that was a small fraction of market.

In those areas where there was some significant implementation of land reform by the late 1970s, the general awareness of extensive landowner delinquency had a curious, though not unpredictable effect, a kind of “sanskritization” of peasant values. Amortizing owners under PD 27, the land reform beneficiaries, were supposed to pay the land tax, but a large proportion did not, perhaps believing that non-payment was a perquisite they had a right to share with their larger counterparts. In any case, the greater number of owners placed a new burden on the relevant bureaucracy, which already lacked the records, the staff or the transportation for field inspections to make them effective tax collectors. And at three stages of land reform, since the 1950s, a proposal to allow government purchase of delinquent land at assessed value never got past the executive drafting process to the Congress. In any case, land tax was a policy area which continued to reveal the weakness of the Philippine state in rural areas.

Distributive Capacity

It is clear from the foregoing that extractive capabilities are closely entwined with those of a distributive character, e.g. land reform. But land reform is unique in that it is the only policy category under discussion where the target of the policy is explicitly one class, large landowners, and the original intent of policy is to diminish their power. (Thus in this area one would expect to find the state at its weakest.) Landlords in Congress have always tried to modify that intent, and have had some success. But the rhetorical commitment to reform in the executive branch always carried the day so that a bill was passed with some small component of reform. Even without a Congress landlords with access to the president in 1972 helped to soften the presidential decree. Yet it has puzzled some observers who have noted the great political clout of the landed elite why they did not simply halt the enactment of land reform legislation entirely. The explanation would seem to lie not only in the endemic pressures for compromise in the Philippine decision-making process, or even the generous loopholes which landlords inserted in the various laws, but also in their confidence that local elites would be able to influence local administrators so as to further soften the impact of the law. This is a pattern Grindle (1980) describes in Mexico, where patron-client politics also prevail.

An aspect of the Aquino “reform” amply illustrates this process. The July 1987 presidential decree relied entirely on landlord self-declaration for identification of lands to be subject to reform. There were no penalties for landowner inaction. Not surprisingly, despite a sophisticated public information campaign, most landlords—in some provinces as high as 90%—ignored the invitation. Even two years later, with a new land declaration provision in the 1988 legislation, backed by an indirect penalty difficult to administer, more than 1/3 of the estimated number of landowners had failed to register. Department of Agrarian Reform officials at the municipal level had neither the staff complement nor the political will to go out and find the delinquents. To a degree unprecedented, elected members of Congress from 1987 had exercised rights of patronage over DAR appointments. So in most districts DAR employees enjoyed their posts thanks to the intervention of landlord-politicians or politicians who were clients of landlords. This was, in fact, a tradition so strong that it even survived to some degree despite the absence of elections in the first several years of martial law. In 1976 the author discovered one local DAR official in Capiz who held office on the veranda of the largest landowner in the municipality!

The next stage of the Aquino “land reform”, the processing of “voluntary offers to sell”, not only produced a multi-million peso scandal which toppled the secretary of agrarian reform, but revealed anew how the system works. The key to the scandal was the overpricing of lands, by multiples of two, three or four, which were then quickly purchased by DAR. Procedures required not only local DAR officials, but also barangay captains to certify to the land’s quality and value. Because of modest monetary inducements, and because pressures for bloated land prices came from powerful politicians, most of those asked went along with the game. In the few instances where they did not, overpriced sales were approved by high level DAR officers anyway. So while cooperation of local bureaucrats and elected officials in the schemes of the landed elite and their clients was desirable, it was not essential. And the higher the price paid to the landlord by the government, the heavier the later burden on the farmer beneficiary of land reform.

Of course, in some instances small farmers and workers at the village level organized to prevent landgrabbing, overpricing or even to accelerate land redistribution. Sometimes such organization was assisted by the Left, but sometimes not. Often such farmers simply occupied idle land and petitioned for reform. This was a very direct challenge to the patron-client system, and thus to the dominant class. The president’s executive order on land reform of July 1987 took up the challenge, and set severe penalities for such land occupations— at the same time that landlord evasion was not penalized at all. (See Wurfel, 1989)

Regulative Capacity

This is a category which could include a type of problem that has only recently received attention in the Philippines, pollution and environmental destruction. But here we will concentrate on a type of regulation that, insofar as it has been implemented outside of the regular court system, has been most often operated as an adjunct of the agrarian reform programme, i.e. rural dispute settlement. It has long been known that the most serious economic disputes in the village usually involved land, and that land disputes brought to the regular courts were decided in favor of the more powerful litigant, whether legitimate landowner or merely landgrabber.

Thus as part of the agrarian reform under Magsaysay in the 1950s there was introduced the principle that “those who have less in life should have more in law”. Such a principle was not, however, central to the legal fraternity and thus had to be implemented outside the traditional court setting. First was established the Agricultural Tenancy Commission, then the Court of Agrarian Relations. By the

1970s agrarian disputes were also being handled by the Legal Division of the Department of Agrarian Reform. Initially the presumption in favor of the tenant was often practiced; in any case, procedures were simplified and the use of the lawyers minimized. But eventually the lawyers, judges and commissioners who operated these quasi-judicial proceedings were influenced by the fact that they were the social equals of the local elites, not of the peasants. Some became activist patrons to exploited tenants, but more often they became compadres of landlords or mayors. Patronage intruded into the appointment process. Thus in many venues the stated class bias for the peasants disappeared in practice and the new institutions became more like the regular courts, arenas for elite manipulation.

In the late 1970s new barangay mediation boards were established, primarily to relieve the overcrowded court dockets. But these were for inter-peasant disputes, and the interests of the landed elite were seldom jeopardized. In any case, where they functioned well, these were institutions so indigenous to the barangay that they could hardly be called instruments of the state.

Developmental Capacity

The allocation of resources by central government has included such programmes as agricultural credit and community development, though irrigation services might also be studied. In this category the implementation of policy may be explicitly class neutral, as with community development, and thus a favored object of foreign aid. But even when the flow of funds is justified in these terms, with high tribute to community “harmony”, the better educated, more articulate and more aggressive local elites often appropriated most of the resources. This was particularly noticeable in the formation of Farmers Marketing Cooperative Associations (FACOMAs) in the 1950s, when landlords were not excluded from being coop officers, and thus usually were. [This tendency was only partially corrected in the coop programme of the 1970s.]

Small farmer credit programmes, such as Masagana 99 and those of the rural banks in the 1970s, involved subsidized interest rates and were supposedly limited to cultivator beneficiaries. However, subsidized interest was too attractive for the local elites to resist. Mayors created “fake farmers” to get loans, after they had paid off field loan officers. The rural banks, on the other hand, temporarily withheld funds provided by the Central Bank to make short-term killings at usurious rates on illegal loans. Or the bankers, who were themselves prominent members of the local elite-often landlords, also established themselves as agricultural input dealers with whom loan recipients were required to deal. All in all the profit for the rural banks was at least as great as the subsidy to the small farmers of concessional interest rates (Wurfel, 1977). A policy explicitly launched with a class bias for small farmers often ended in practice favoring the local elite. Only insofar as the small farmer failed to repay—often concluding, understandably, that this was a form of patronage paid for in other ways—did he gain a greater benefit. But in some provinces the arrearages of rural banks to the Central Bank were greater still.

Responsive Capability

This includes the establishment of processes and institutions that allow a legitimate upward flow of demands from the rural areas, such as elections. However, in the Philippines elections can more clearly be seen as validation of the patron/client system. Elections are, for instance, the best way for a patron to determine the extent of his clientage. They also provide legitimation for the elite factional struggles that exist anyway in local arenas. Since elections are a crucial measure of the loyalty of a client, the end of local elections in 1972 for nearly ten years lent a certain unreality to intral-elite competition. Local elites tended to rely more on the backing of patrons in the central government than on the strength of clientage. And when local elections were first restored in 1980, fraud was often used to confirm the power of the incumbent. The return of much freer local elections in 1988 largely restored their pre-martial law function. In any case, elections are one of the most important activities ordained by the central government in the village.

Coercive Capacity

By definition the order maintaining function should be class neutral. As long as it deals with cattle rustlers or town drunks it may actually be. But in the last two decades the primary role of police and armed forces in rural areas has been counterinsurgency. This was accompanied in early martial law years with an attempt, often successful, to disarm private armies of local politicians. Thus, in some areas the coercive power of local elites was actually reduced.

But the maintenance of a state monopoly on fire arms has long been difficult in the Philippines; the origins of the problem can be traced back to easy availability of surplus weapons after World War II. But low pay for ordinary soldiers has also made the AFP a for-profit supplier of insurgents, bandits and private armies. The problem was complicated with the creation of the Civilian Home Defense Forces soon after the declaration of martial law. The CHDF rank and file were peasants, but the leadership was committed to counter-insurgency and often had personal links to large landowners.

It is only since Aquino took power, however that the linkages between counter-insurgent forces and local elites have become more open and more direct. The 1987 constitution provided for the disbanding of the CHDF, because of their abominable human rights record. But many CHDF units were then recruited en masse by “privately” organized vigilante groups, often financed by large landlords and trained by the AFP, a throwback to Central Luzon in the 1940s. Vigilantes had been organized in most provinces over a six month period in 1987, shortly after the visit of Gen. Singlaub to the Philippines and accompanied by a spurt of anti-Communist political activity by right-wing religious groups. And by 1988 the government had announced a new paramilitary force, the Civilian Armed Force Geographical Units (CAFGU), which absorbed other elements of the CHDF. Thus counter-insurgency forces were composed of a mix of official military/police, official para-military and unofficial para-military. The last category in Negros, called the “PC Forward Command”, was openly and officially funded by the sugar planters association. All three levels received foreign funding, both official and unofficial.

The New People’s Army constituted the fourth type of armed force in rural areas (outside Muslim regions), and was relatively well armed. In some villages it was also a counter government, collecting taxes and administering justice, with a class bias against the landed elite. This is an understandable reaction to the fact that the state’s most important presence in rural areas, ostensibly for the “maintenance of order” is by no means class neutral, but directs its activities against the organized peasantry and their suspected allies. This is now the context in which all other state initiated programmes must operate.

Conclusion

This analysis should help us to understand that a study of policy impact cannot ignore identifying the explicit, or implicit, class beneficiary of the policy. An awareness of this dimension also helps us to understand the role of foreign actors, why some projects receive foreign funding and others do not.

This analytical approach was built on the work of Merilee Grindle and the more recent book of Joel Migdal, whose case studies include Egypt, Mexico and India. Migdal speaks of the relationship between local elites and bureaucrats as being that of “mutual accommodation” (1988:247). But in the Philippines there would seem to be a greater imbalance, with more accommodating being done by the bureaucrat than by the local leader, who Migdal calls “the strongman”. In fact, central bureaucrats at the local level were usually so accommodating that the threat of force against them by the landed elite was very rare, even the implementation of land reform. Migdal characterizes bureaucracies in Mexico, India and Egypt as having “mid level capabilities”, perhaps comparable with Indonesia or Thailand-but not with the Philippines.

Since we find that even government programmes that are designed to favor the small farmer are frequently directed to the benefit of the local elite, with the connivance or acquiescence of the bureaucracy, it is clear that only stronger organizations among the peasantry, with sophisticated political tactics, can change this pattern. Unfortunately, because of links to the Left, most bureaucrats do not regard many existing peasant organizations today as legitimate, or, if they did, would not be allowed to act on that belief by local elites.

REFERENCES

Jose Abueva (1969), “Social Backgrounds and Recruitment of legislators and Administrators”, in Jose Abueva and Raul de Guzman, eds., Foundation and Dynamics of Filipino Government and Politics. Manila: Bookmark.

Gabriel Almond and G. Bingham Powell (1966), Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach. Boston: Little, Brown.

Belinda Aquino (1974), “Dimensions of Decentralization and Development in the Philippines”, Dissertation, Cornell University.

John Carroll (1965), The Filipino Manufacturing Entrepreneur. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press.

Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds. (1985), Bringing the State Back In. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.

Merilee S. Grindle (1980), Politics and Policy Implementation in the Third World. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press.

Gary Hawes (1987), The Philippine State and the Marcos Regime: The Politics of Export. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press.

Atul Kohli (1986), The State and Development in the Third World. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press.

Su Hoon Lee (1988), State-Building in the Contemporary Third World. Boulder: Westview Press.

Perla Makil, (1970), PAASCUIIPC Study of Schools and Influentials, 1969-70. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University, Institute of Philippine Culture.

Joel Migdal (1988), Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press.

Ralph Miliband (1969), The State in Capitalist Society. New York: Basic Books.

Eric Nordlinger (1987), “Taking the State Seriously”, in Myron Weiner and Samuel Huntington, eds., Understanding Political Development. Boston: Little, Brown.

Nicos Poulantzas (1968), Political Power and Social Classes. London: Verso.

Dante Simbulan (1965), “A Study of the Socio-Economic Elite in Philippine Politics and Government, 1946-1963”, dissertation, Australian National University.

Immanuel Wallerstein (1974), The Modern World-System I. New York: Academic Press.

David Wurfel (1979), “Elites of Wealth and Elites of Power, the Changing Dynamic: A Philippine Case Study”, Southeast Asian Affairs 1979. Singapore: ISEAS.

David Wurfel (1989), “Land Reform: Context, Accomplishment and Prospects under Marcos and Aquino”, Philipinas, Summer.

David Wurfel (1977), Philippine Agrarian Policy Today: Implementation and Political Impact. Singapore: Institute of SE Asian Studies, Ocasional Paper No. 46.

NOTES

¹ The weak/strong dichotomy is the earliest usage in this area. More recently the terms” capacity” and” autonomy” have been used together with such adjectives as “high” and “low” indicating calibration across a spectrum. “State capacity” or “capability” is the term coming out of the modernization literature (see Almond and Powell, 1966). Autonomy is the term deriving from the neo-Marxist tradition, as in the “relative autonomy” of the state from the “dominant class” (see Miliband, 1969; Poulantzas, 1968). Autonomy also connotes a certain relationship with the capitalist world system, which is rare, in the world system approach (see Wallerstein, 1974). The terms capacity or capability will be used most often in this paper, because there is a literature which subdivides the category in useful ways. But an awareness of class interests in the neo-Marxist tradition will also be incorporated, as well as a recognition that the autonomy/dependency dimension in the international context must be part of the analysis as well.

The media hype focussed on the Philippines in 1986 has now faded. But many of the factors which produced the drama of the ‘People Power “revolution”¹ remain, making for considerable uncertainty about the prospects for political democracy in the coming decade. Although the international context in which the Philippines must now operate seems on balance somewhat more favourable to the stability of democratic institutions than that which existed when they were first threatened in the early 1970s, the domestic context is even less so. A review of the domestic scene demands our initial attention.

After three years of decline in the gross national product (GNP), with an expanding insurgency and an increasingly corrupt president, the Philippines in 1985 was frequently called the ‘sick man of Asia.’ An impending succession crisis had led to the assassination of the leading figure in the opposition, Senator Benigno Aquino, in 1983, which dissipated what was left of the regime’s legitimacy. President Ferdinand Marcos, in an ill-fated attempt to recapture some of that legitimacy, bent the constitution and called an early presidential election for 7 February 1986. Much to his amazement the opposition united at the last minute around Corazon Cojuangco Aquino, the widow of his long-time foe.

Mrs Aquino campaigned with increasing success as the ‘very opposite’ of Mr Marcos. In anticipation of Marcos-orchestrated fraud, the National Movement for Free Elections (Namfrel), staffed by activists mobilized largely by the Roman Catholic Church and with the help of American money – both public and private, covert and overt – prepared to watch the polls and to undertake their own count. But Marcos was so desperate for a ‘win’ that his minions beat up poll watchers and grabbed ballot boxes even in front of hundreds of foreign journalists and a prestigious American observer team. Thus, though ,the legislature he controlled officially declared him the ‘winner,’ neither the Filipino opposition nor commentators around the world accepted the decision as valid. Mrs Aquino quickly launched a civil disobedience campaign which was designed to drive Marcos out of office.

Meanwhile, there was considerable unrest in the armed forces. The chief of staff, Fabian Ver, had been accused of plotting to kill Senator Aquino, but had been acquitted and returned to command. He was deeply enmeshed in the corruption of the Marcos regime. Grouped around the defence minister, Juan Ponce Enrile, was an increasing number of younger officers (the Reform the Armed Forces Movement or RAM) calling publicly for reform and secretly planning a coup which centred on the seizure of the presidential palace. In fact, they had set a date for late January 1986 but were apparently persuaded to wait until after the elections. (They were in close consultation with military attachés at the United States embassy, the archbishop of Manila, Jaime Cardinal Sin, and Mrs Aquino’s advisers.²)

But on 22 February their plot was discovered. Fearing imminent arrest, Enrile, joined by the vice chief of staff, Fidel Ramos, took a few hundred men to armed forces headquarters. There they declared themselves in rebellion against Marcos and stated that they recognized the validity of Mrs Aquino’s election as president in line with the Namfrel projection. Then followed the ‘Four Days of Courage’ viewed on televisions around the world.’ Nuns with flowers stopped tanks while other devout carried Marian figures in procession before ranks of Marcos troops. Cardinal Sin was primarily responsible for mobilizing hundreds of thousands of Manila residents as a buffer between government and rebel soldiers, just as he had promised the coup plotters weeks earlier.³ Unable to get his commanders to fire on massed civilians, and finally advised by a vacillating United States administration that it was time to go, Marcos and his entourage were lifted out of the palace in American helicopters on 25 February, only minutes before looters entered. Corazon Aquino had already been inaugurated president by a defiant Supreme Court justice before Marcos left. It was an ignominious end to twenty years of rule, but the Filipino people had suffered much more than Marcos.

Most Filipinos were ecstatic. They had ended a dictatorship with very little bloodshed and had gained the world’s respect in the process. Mrs Aquino took office with a national surge of support greater than that enjoyed by any previous Philippines president. ‘People power’ had put her in charge. She called it a ‘miracle’; everyone was surprised. Now, more than three years later, the euphoria has passed. While public criticism of the president was widely frowned upon throughout 1986, it is now rampant. Let us examine how she has used her power, how she has dealt with the nation’s problems, and whether the current criticism in the media and political circles is justified.

Corazon Aquino took office with a vision. She wanted to restore political democracy and to clean up the mess left by Marcos – especially the corruption, the insurgency, and the economic stagnation. She has achieved much of the first objective but is much further from reaching the second. The need to consolidate regime legitimacy through social reform, particularly the redistribution of land, was understood by some of those around her, but was never very high on her agenda as the results of the past three years reveal. National autonomy, another announced goal, has been unevenly pursued.

What President Aquino has and has not accomplished is in large part attributable to the nature of her regime. And that, in turn, was affected by the way she came to power. The best evidence is that she did win a genuine electoral victory against overwhelming odds (although Namfrel was not allowed to complete its count). But that victory would not have been possible without the support of the church and the Americans. The withdrawal of American backing for Marcos set the stage for the events of February. It was most effective in the decisions of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and private banks to cut back on credit for the Marcos-dominated economy. That halted production in many industries and threw thousands out of work. The consequent unrest was an important basis for the upsurge of opposition in 1985 across the whole spectrum from the economic elite to the working class. American financing of Namfrel, although essential, was less important than the mobilization of volunteers by the Catholic hierarchy. It was Cardinal Sin who persuaded Salvador Laurel, the leader of a coalition of opposition groups, to run for vice-president, thus assuring a single opposition ticket, and who then mobilized support for Aquino at crucial times.

A majority of valid votes could not, however, have been translated into presidential power without the intervention of the military. Positive American signals to coup plotters were critical to the RAM initiatives,⁴ even though open United States support for the rebels did not materialize until two days before Marcos left, when victory was already in sight. The RAM saw itself as having made ‘people power’ possible and thus having gained a right to a powerful voice in the new regime.

Co-ordination among the church leaders, the economic elite, the military ‘reformers,’ and United States officials to back Aquino was stimulated by another major political force that had no direct role in the transition, the outlawed Communist party of the Philippines. Fear of the expanding insurgency of the New People’s Army (NPA) facilitated elite co-operation to support the most popular non-communist alternative. The communists and their allies misjudged the situation and declared a boycott of the February election, thereby forfeiting any prospect of influence in the new regime.

With this array of backers it is understandable that Aquino’s success has been less a revolution than a restoration.⁵ To be sure it had some of the characteristics of a political revolution in the extralegal change of leadership followed by the creation of new institutions. But, despite a certain continuity in personnel, structure, and policy with the Marcos era, it was most notably a restoration of the values, elites, and institutions of the 1950s and 1960s, distorted, to be sure, by the intrusion of a politically assertive military. The ethos of Aquino’s political movement has sometimes been compared with that of Ramon Magsaysay in 1953, though Aquino’s was certainly more nationalist. The people on government rosters, and most particularly in the halls of Congress after May 1987, recalled the elite families that had dominated politics before the declaration of martial law in 1972. (The Aquino and Cojuangco clans were not the least of these.) And the new constitution ratified in February 1987 was largely a revival of the 1935 charter which had been discarded by Marcos in 1973. A lower house of Congress based on single-member districts reinvigorated patronage politics, so that the constitutional provision for an extra fifty seats to be elected by proportional representation (a provision designed to strengthen political parties and issue-oriented politics) has not been and probably will not be implemented by legislation. Mrs Aquino’s electoral support in February 1986 was based more on her charisma and on disgust with Marcos than on patron-client networks. But those networks, now nurtured by the president’s brother, Congressman José Cojuangco, have revived and are flourishing. The linkage between patron and client is the mechanism by which wealth is transformed into power, sustaining an elite which Marcos himself often called an oligarchy. In fact, the wealthiest of the oligarchs have regained control of some of their pre-martial law corporations with the help of the Aquino administration.⁶ The economic interests of the military high command seemed to be compatible with those of the elite.

The restoration of political democracy – usually meaning constitutional rule through honest elections with freedom of expression – was widely welcomed by Filipinos who have regularly participated in free competitive elections since 1907 – except during World War II and the martial law era. Mrs Aquino was uncomfortable with the fact that she had to use her decree powers to inaugurate that restoration, but within a month of attaining office she promulgated a provisional constitution which retained much of the 1973 Marcos document, while granting all legislative power to the presidency until a newly drafted constitution could be implemented.⁷ The pro-Marcos National Assembly, which had been elected in 1984, was disbanded. She then decreed the establishment of a constitutional commission, which she appointed, to draft the new basic law. Despite considerable criticism of an appointed, rather than an elected commission – which was unprecedented – Aquino consulted widely and created a body that was accepted by most Filipinos as generally representative, and thus legitimate.

A need for speed had been the major argument for appointed rather than elected commissioners, and this decision proved a valid one. By October 1986 the draft had been completed and in February 1987 with President Aquino’s endorsement it was ratified overwhelmingly in a nation-wide plebiscite.

As noted, almost all the governmental institutions provided for in the 1935 constitution were revived – with the addition of a human rights commission. However, the presidential term was set at six years without re-election, instead of the previous maximum of two four-year terms. With recent memories of an all-powerful executive, presidential prerogatives were somewhat more limited than before 1972. Implementation of the new constitution proceeded on schedule, with elections for Congress in May 1987 and for local officials in November. These elections were seen by both observers and participants as freer and more honest than any since 1971, though some legacies of the Marcos era could not be wiped out overnight.

Unfortunately, restoring democratic institutions turned out to be much easier than repairing the damage to society inflicted by Marcos’ misrule. That aspect of the Marcos regime which received most attention in the world’s media was the massive unprecedented corruption. Whereas the worst of previous Third World leaders had usually measured their loot in millions, that of Marcos had to be calculated in billions of United States dollars. It was quite appropriate, therefore, that one of Aquino’s first decrees created the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG) to recover `stolen wealth.⁸ The corporate shells, equipment, and real property of Marcos’ cronies’ who had received huge loans from government banks – and then defaulted – were also to be sold to the private sector. As well as action to recover the costs of past corruption, there was talk of removing the remaining corrupt officials from office. But the impact of both these policies was undermined by structural dilemmas and a lack of political will.

Even though the PGGG had been given sweeping rights to sequester ill-gotten gains – in one of the few instances where the powers of presidential decree were used effectively – legal challenges mounted quickly. The restoration of constitutional government had, of course, meant restoring the rule of law and the majesty of the courts. The cronies were in deep political disgrace, but they could afford to hire the most skilled lawyers. Thus, in September 1988, the PCGG, under criticism from Congress, could only claim that it had recovered US$65 million from the holdings of Marcos and his cronies when estimates of Marcos’ wealth alone had gone as high as US$ to billion.⁹ The PC GG faced another dilemma as well. Although a large segment of the old economic elite had had little to do with the empire-building of the Marcos cronies, a number of elite families had been either tempted or pressured into various dealings with what was the fastest growing sector of the Philippine economy in the 1970s. Yet in the last days of Marcos many of these same elite families were enthusiastic supporters of Aquino and thus gained influence in the new administration. When sequestration by the PCGG began to hit corporations in which the old elite shared interests with the cronies, there was political as well as legal opposition, expressed through Congress or directly to the president. The same tangled skein produced pressure from the old elite to stop some sales of the remnants of crony corporations.

Cleaning up corruption is a daunting task for any regime, even more so when it has become embedded in the way of life as it had under Marcos. A similar task had confronted Ramon Magsaysay when he was elected president in 1953, but in 1986 the Augean stables were piled much higher. And while her personal probity was beyond assail, it is not clear that President Aquino was as deeply committed to making it the standard of her whole administration as Magsaysay had been. In any case, with the restoration of the rule of law, officials charged with corruption could not be removed without due process, and the most successful thieves acquired the most expensive solicitors. Those removed legally were at best a handful. Aquino therefore fell back on the trusted technique of ‘reorganization.’ With impressive rhetoric about the need to restructure to increase efficiency, whole offices and sections of bureaux were abolished, and new ones put in their places. This not only allowed the dismissal of incumbents but provided patronage rewards for demanding new allies. Those fired were not necessarily the most corrupt, however, but were simply those with the weakest connections to the new authorities.

In 1987 those who regularly dealt with the bureaucracy were reporting that the under-the-table price of services was no longer certain and that with the confusion of reorganization the hapless citizen often did not know whom to pay. But by 1988 that problem was being solved – the ‘right’ recipient was increasingly the president’s brother, José ‘Peping’ Cojuangco or his designates. By 1989 the trend was even more clearly established: the PC G G, once headed by a brilliant and incorruptible former senator, Jovito Salonga, was now chaired by a new appointee, the personal attorney of Cojuangco. The sale of sequestered corporations is now not necessarily for the primary benefit of the Philippines government.

Despite the importance of the fight against corruption to Aquino’s legitimacy, the attempt to halt the insurgency was given higher priority and had more immediate political ramifications. The communist-led insurgency, which was eighteen years old in 1986, is a major national tragedy. Thousands on both sides have been killed and hundreds of thousands are refugees from the fighting. When Aquino promised during her campaign to seek a ceasefire, it was a very popular move. But in 1986 when she tried to make good on that promise, she was caught between hard-line revolutionaries and the short-sighted intransigence of powerful factions in the Philippines military and their Pentagon backers.¹⁰

In her commitment to correct human rights abuses and as a step towards building the trust necessary for ceasefire negotiations, she quickly announced her intention to release all political prisoners; even José Maria Sison, founding chairman of the Communist party, was let go. Formal negotiations got under way in August 1986 with an all-civilian panel representing the government. Meanwhile Enrile, now the minister of defence, escalated his charges that Aquino was ‘soft on communism’ and finally in November was caught in a coup plot; his dismissal strengthened Aquino’s hand, even though he was not prosecuted. This helped speed negotiations, and an agreement on a 6o-day ceasefire was signed in November. Although talks then began for a longer term settlement, neither the military brass nor the N PA’S leaders found a prolongation of the ceasefire to be in their institutional self-interest, and full-scale fighting resumed in late January 1987.¹¹

Ironically, the mere commencement of ceasefire negotiations, which so frightened the Pentagon, contributed more to undermining the revolutionary movement than all the military efforts of the previous decade. Just as President Aquino and some of her advisers had hoped, the hard line taken in the negotiations by the NPA leaders, which helped prevent a renewal of the ceasefire, caused some of their political support to evaporate; they had underestimated the national longing for peace. Mrs Aquino’s miscalculation was her judgment of the reaction of the armed forces. Enrile was not the only problem. Her attempt to bypass the military in the 1986 negotiations and other perceived slights stirred resentment among younger officers, and in August 1987 she was very nearly overthrown by the RAM under the leadership of Colonel Gregorio Honasan – in a country which had never seen a serious coup plot before 1986.¹²

The absence of any credible coup attempt since then is largely a result of the fact that the president has gone a long way to accommodate military demands. She has increased the deficit to raise their pay and has otherwise expanded the defence budget to a level much higher than it was under Marcos, and she appears to have abandoned her earlier policy of protecting human rights. No military officers have been punished for their part in torture or disappearances, and no effective steps have been taken against the increasing number of assassinations by vigilante groups trained and funded by the military. Nor has she dared to go after corruption in the armed forces, although she certainly does not promote it, as Marcos did.

In sum, the politicization of the military first by Marcos and then against him, which proved essential for toppling the autocrat, produced the primary threat to the consolidation of democracy since 1986. The double irony is that the laudable attempt to end the insurgency peacefully stimulated a greater political assertiveness by the military which not only threatens central democratic institutions in the short run but has led to military behaviour that, whatever its present success in frightening rebel supporters, must ensure the survival of the insurgency in the long run. In 1988 the church and the non-communist left both promoted the idea of regional ceasefires and of localized zones of peace. There were reasonably successful two-day ceasefires at Christmas and the New Year, but neither side has shown a willingness to support broader restraint. In any case, President Aquino herself no longer appears to be providing leadership towards peace.

For most of Mrs Aquino’s elite and urban middle class supporters, the revival of the economy was undoubtedly the first priority, because the GNP had plunged more than io per cent since 1984. In a distinctly unrevolutionary fashion, the new administration chose to retain the nation’s top economic policymaker, Governor José Fernandez of the Central Bank, even though he was a Marcos appointee. The sense of continuity was reinforced by the first plan of the Aquino administration’s National Economic and Development Authority which appeared in late 1986; the economist who had directed the authority in the 1970s found no basic change from objectives or strategies he had set.

The improvement in the economy which did, in fact, take place in the next three years was more a result of Aquino’s luck than of her administration’s policy, though ‘pump-priming’ public works expenditures did contribute. World commodity prices, which had penalized the Philippines in the last years under Marcos, rose during 1986-7. The prices of coconut products, the country’s largest export, rose more than 100 per cent from third quarter of 1985 to third quarter of 1988.¹³ The sugar price index went from 362 to 520 in the same period. Copper and lumber prices increased somewhat less dramatically. Furthermore, the overthrow of Marcos unleashed foreign credits and a renewed flow of investment: direct foreign investment, which had been negative in three quarters of 1985, jumped to US$343 million in the first half of 1988. A key stimulus of economic expansion was a change in bank lending rates, which fell from 35 per cent in early 1985 to 13 per cent by mid-1987. At the same time the rate of inflation dropped dramatically, less than 5 per cent for the two-year period. Prices levelled off, and with the easing of credit factories reopened and many former employees returned to work. By 1987 the GNP was growing by nearly 7 per cent. It is not surprising that Mrs Aquino’s popularity remained very high. (Real per-capita income is not expected to match 1981 levels until 1991, however.)

Favourable growth figures were primarily the result of an expansion of industrial production; even in 1987 agricultural production grew at less than half the rate of population. The awareness of gross inequities was thus most intense in rural society. That awareness led to increasing support for sweeping land reform. After being attacked by Marcos in the 1986 presidential campaign for coming from a great landowning family, Mrs Aquino had been pressed into making her own promises about land reform. But she did nothing for nearly a year after taking office, even though some of her key advisers were arguing that land reform was the best way to win over the peasants. Only after troops surrounding the presidential palace fired on peasants demonstrating for land reform in January 1987, killing more than a dozen, did the president appoint a cabinet action committee to draft an agrarian reform decree.¹⁴

Landlords countered with their own crescendo of protest – obviously with more success than the peasants. In July a presidential decree declared the principle of land reform in all crops but left decisions on the most important provisions to Congress. In the lower house, where members were elected almost entirely by patronage politics, landlords were amply represented, and their most effective spokesman was the president’s powerful brother. Despite extensive lobbying by a newly formed coalition of radical and moderate peasant organizations, which had strong support from the president’s brother-in-law, Senator Agapito Aquino, the bill finally passed by Congress and signed by the president in June 1988 was, in the eyes of its opponents, ‘a landlords’ law.’ Extension of land reform beyond rice and corn was entirely ineffective. Provisions for enforcement were so weak that most landholdings covered by the legislation will never even become known to the Department of Agrarian Reform, and any moves by the department which displease landlords can be blocked in the courts. Finally, even if landlord evasion severely limited the area to be transferred to the cultivators, the act required compensation of owners at market price, for which available government funds are completely inadequate.

Landlord attachment to their estates is very emotional; they feel they are protecting their way of life – as part of which farm workers are paid less than US$1 per day. They perceived that the communist threat was passing, given the popularity of Aquino, the capture of several top party officials, and the establishment of pro-landlord anti-communist vigilantes with military backing in hundreds of towns. Thus there was no need to sacrifice. Impatient cultivators who seized idle lands to plant food for their families were often removed by force with the co-operation of absentee owners and the military. Except in areas controlled or influenced by the guerrillas, perhaps some 10 per cent of all villages, the rural power structure was as firmly based on wealth as it had been two generations ago. Agrarian ‘reform’ under Aquino was in some respects a step backward from the policies of Marcos, providing a severe restraint on the prolongation of her regime’s legitimacy.

There seems little doubt that the dominant elite hoped that the experience of the 1950s would be repeated. Then the Huk-balahap rebels, concentrated in central Luzon, were roundly defeated by a reformed military. At the same time the guerrillas’ erstwhile peasant supporters were charmed by the charismatic Ramon Magsaysay, first as secretary of defence and then as president. After Magsaysay’s death peasant participation in politics was largely rechannelled into the traditional patron-client relationship. Since the election of Aquino in 1986 and the brief ceasefire which her representatives signed with the NPA,there has been a repetition of that earlier process to some extent. But taming the current revolt is not nearly as easy as dealing with the Huks in the 1950s. First, the revolutionary movement of the 198os is much broader. It is spread over nearly all the provinces and is based on a much more intense and extensive political education of peasant supporters. Even if those who have been co-opted by the president’s popularity and patronage politics should number in the millions, there is probably still a critical revolutionary mass in the countryside. Furthermore, the wooing of the Huks in the 1950s was based in part on the promise of free land in Mindanao and other frontier areas. This option is no longer available – in fact average farm size has been declining since the 1960s. Finally, the military has not been reformed into an effective fighting force; corruption is again on the rise, factionalism is deep, and human rights violations are often an integral part of tactics. Most military units create more enemies of the government than they destroy.

It is probably fair to say that all domestic policy, even the negotiations with the Muslim rebels, has been pursued with less vigour under Aquino than under Marcos, partly because there is less cohesion in policy-making circles and partly because there is less sense of urgency. The personal popularity which Corazon Aquino enjoys and the legitimacy lent her regime by free elections have placed less emphasis on policy output as a means of gaining support for the government.

This confidence in regime legitimacy has even coloured foreign policy, which under Marcos was primarily a ‘tool for regime survival.”¹⁵ Of course, Mrs Aquino faced many urgent domestic tasks in her first year and deliberately delayed giving attention to the most compelling foreign policy question – the future of the United States military bases of Subic Bay and Clark Field – with the formula, ‘I am keeping my options open.’ Furthermore, decisive action in foreign affairs was difficult while the political divide between the president and Vice-President Laurel, who also served as foreign minister, grew ever wider. Attention to foreign policy quickened after Laurel was eased out in late 1987 and replaced by Raul Manglapus, who had been foreign secretary for a time under Magsaysay.¹⁶ (Manglapus took the unprecedented step of resigning his elected Senate seat to accept a cabinet appointment, which surely must have required some assurances from the president about future policy.)

Soon after taking office Manglapus was faced with the five-year review of the current bases agreement with the United States, which would focus primarily on the question which the Filipino side called ‘compensation.’ To justify his initial demand for US$1 billion per year, Manglapus stressed the dangers for the Philippines inherent in serving as a base location and asserted that the bases were primarily for the defence of the United States, not the Philippines. These arguments taken from the nationalists’ quiver gave new legitimacy to the anti-bases movement, which the government had hitherto described as ‘leftist.’ The Americans were unaccustomed to such feisty and sophisticated negotiating tactics from the Filipinos; some officials said that they would not again deal with Manglapus on the bases question – but American unhappiness, which was widely reported in the press, seems to have served to prolong rather than shorten his tenure. The executive agreement finally signed in October 1988 provided the Philippines with US$48o million per year – according to American reckoning – nearly three times the previous level of grants and loans primarily for military purposes.¹⁷ (Manglapus claimed that ancillary sources of aid were also mentioned which brought the yearly package to nearly a billion dollars.)

Many of the issues raised during this negotiation were, of course, relevant to the discussions that will begin in 1989 on a new agreement to replace the present one which expires in 1991. The Philippines constitution of 1987 provides that any extension of the United States use of these bases beyond that date must be governed by a treaty ratified by two-thirds of the Senate. In fact, much of what goes on in the Senate these days is designed to influence the question of ratification. Like their American counterparts, Filipino senators sometimes try to take foreign policy initiatives away from the president. The issue of nuclear weapons is a case in point.

The Philippines constitution includes a ‘declaration of principles’ which, among other things, states that ‘the Philippines, consistent with the national interest, adopts and pursues a policy of freedom from nuclear weapons in its territory.’ Even though the United States refuses to confirm or deny the presence of nuclear devices at its bases, the belief that they are there is almost universal in well-informed circles. Thus the utility of the bases for the United States, if this provision were fully implemented, would be severely restricted. In August 1987, without consulting the president, ten members of her party out of the twenty-four newly elected senators sponsored a bill that would outlaw ‘possession, storage or transport’ of nuclear weapons on Philippines territory.¹⁸ In June 1988 it passed the Senate overwhelmingly. But the bill remains stalled in the House of Representatives and the secretary of justice has ruled that the regulation of nuclear weapons is a presidential prerogative. In November 1988 the Senate’s frustration was expressed in a resolution, passed overwhelmingly, which declared the bases agreement amendment of the month before in violation of constitutional provisions on nuclear weapons. The Senate also attempted to legislate a partial repudiation of the Philippines’ massive foreign debt – whose interest and principal payments now take more than 40 per cent of the export of goods and services – but was again blocked by the house, which is both less nationalist and more effectively controlled by the administration.

The overweening importance of the bases issue is confirmed by the connection to it of so much of the other activity of the Department of Foreign Affairs. Manglapus’ tour of the other countries of the Association of South-East Asian Nations in 1988 was designed to get from their governments either open support for the maintenance of the bases as essential to the security of the whole region, or quiet agreement to their removal. (He was not successful.) He improved relations with Hanoi and Moscow to signify a reduction of external threat to the Philippines. In December 1988 the first ever visit to the Philippines by a Soviet foreign minister won Filipino approbation when Mr Shevardnadze hinted that the Soviet Union might dismantle its bases in Vietnam even before Washington made a decision on whether to withdraw from its bases in the Philippines. The strengthening of relations with communist countries was also related to the government’s desire for frequent reassurances that neither China, nor the Soviet Union, nor Vietnam had any intention of supporting the NPA. (Despite claims in Heritage Foundation publications and the Washington Times, there is no solid indication that the assurances given have been violated.¹⁹) Mrs Aquino’s trip to China in 1988, after a meeting with Deng Xiaoping, also included a nostalgic visit to the village of her ancestors, thus putting Sino-Philippines relations on a new level.

Even the Philippines need for foreign economic assistance has been linked – by the United States – to the extension of the bases agreement. The Multilateral Aid Initiative (MAI), sometimes called the ‘mini-Marshall Plan,’ which originally called for US$10 billion in grants and loans over five years but has now been greatly scaled down, was seen as an American technique to encourage the Philippines to extend the bases agreement, even though half or more of the funds would come from other countries.²⁰ (Indeed, members of the United States Congress are quite open in their warnings of ‘no bases, no aid.’) The initiative’s prospects are now endangered by new constraints on the United States budget – administration requests have already been cut in the House Appropriations Committee²¹- and by severe clogging in the Philippines aid pipeline which raises doubts among donors about the capacity of the Philippines to absorb a larger flow of foreign assistance.

An increasing number of Filipino leaders counter that the best way for friendly countries to help is to forgive the debt, which is nearly US$3o billion – by far the largest as a percentage of GNP in Southeast Asia- and rising at more than _US$I billion per year. Debt servicing now requires a net outflow of US$2.2 billion per year.²² It is not likely to be matched by new credits; nor is that necessarily a desirable solution. The Aquino administration, despite initial reluctance, seems to have revived the frantic search for foreign loans pursued under Marcos and has thus come under increased pressure from the International Monetary Fund to adopt the same budget-cutting, deflationary policies that helped topple that regime.²³ The debt crisis sharpens both domestic and foreign constraints on the search for solutions to the Philippines’ many problems, most especially the maintenance of democratic stability.

Without minimizing the seriousness of this constraint, it should be noted that there are four developments on the world scene that may facilitate the Philippines quest for autonomy, economic development, and stable democracy. First of all, economic problems in the communist world have caused interest in or support for revolutionary movements abroad to wane or; more precisely, to collapse. Neither Soviet nor Chinese support for the Huks or the NPA was ever very significant, but Filipino revolutionaries have even less ground now to hope for assistance. Second, economic pressures in the United States are forcing some constraints on Washington’s imperial reach. Although the Central Intelligence Agency still spends millions on the anti-insurgency campaign,²⁴ Filipino demands for compensation forbase use may have hit the fiscal ceiling. Thus the prospects for destabilizing Filipino-American conflict over the extension of the lease on the bases have been reduced. Washington is also worried about long-term instability in the Philippines and is thus less likely to try to impose an extension of the lease at all costs – for example, by supporting a military coup to remove an intransigent nationalist Senate, a scenario which some Filipino observers feared until last year. Both governments seem to view a phase-out as the most cost-effective alternative. Third, these two developments have, in any case, contributed to the reduction of Soviet-American tensions and even given rise to the possibility of disarmament within the region. The strategic rationale for the bases has been correspondingly reduced. While the eventual phase-out of the bases may well undermine the justification Washington relies upon for appropriating high levels of military and economic ‘aid’ for the Philippines, there are many analysts who suggest that forgoing reliance on these funds would not only bolster Philippines autonomy but enhance democratic processes. Finally, as the United States and the Soviet Union experience relative decline, Japan and the newly industrializing countries of Asia continue to grow at a rapid rate, which provides new opportunities for the Philippines to diversify its sources of aid, trade, and investment, and to gain additional room for manoeuvre in the process. The Japanese opposition to the use of the MAI as a lever for extension of the bases lease is a case in point. The new danger, of course, could be over-reliance on Japan, which may perhaps help to explain Filipino overtures to China.

In sum, while the Philippines faces severe restraints, both at home and abroad, in its efforts to pursue autonomous democratic development, there are also opportunities. A popular president who has so far not been blamed by the public for government mistakes and failures, an energetic and resourceful private sector, recently restored constitutional processes, and a people showing signs of weariness of armed struggle even to achieve laudable goals – these are assets not to be squandered.

But whether the leadership has the vision to build on these assets or the unity to implement goals once identified is in grave doubt. Politicians and military officers, businessmen and bureaucrats alike tend to have very limited horizons. Thus attention seems to be riveted on short-term prospects, such as who is going to win the 1992 presidential election.

If Corazon Aquino really does not run (and she has so far said she will not), there will be a scramble for her mantle among at least three major contenders: Fidel Ramos, the present secretary of defence is the most popular, seems to have the strongest American backing, and, of course, works most smoothly with the military. The speaker of the house, Ramon Mitra, is a master of patronage politics and has the backing of the president’s brother – and the money to go with it. The Senate’s president, Jovito Salonga, was a close friend and ally of Benigno Aquino and is the only one of the three who fought Marcos from the beginning; he has his own set of clients in various provinces but is also backed by the more progressive elements in the original Aquino coalition. (Unless massive Marcos funds are made available, no legate of the ‘New Society’ is likely to be a major contender.) If Mrs Aquino does not wield her endorsement forcefully, the outcome could be close, perhaps producing a president with only minority support – a somewhat dangerous, because unknown, outcome in the Philippines.

But even if Aquino herself, or an anointed successor, is easily elected, there is still a great danger of governmental immobilism and increased domestic strife in the 199os. The collapse of any coherent population planning has caused a new surge in the birth rate, and no new efforts to control it are in sight. This will probably mean even higher unemployment. Land hunger and destruction of the environment will also be accelerated. Despite benign pronouncements, government is unable to stop – in truth many officials are among the guilty parties – the destruction of the forests, once one of the Philippines’ great natural resources. Most of the political elite are blind to the consequences of the failure of reform, and even if a bold policy were enacted, the bureaucracy – thanks to early politicization in the American period and the ravages of postwar inflation even before Marcos – is so riddled with corruption as to be an ineffective instrument of state policy.

Thus partly for international and partly for domestic reasons, the situation in the Philippines is one of unstable stalemate. Although a highly politicized population (by Southeast Asian standards) demands reform, reform is unlikely to be implemented so as to reduce unrest. On the contrary, incomplete, uneven reform, as in the past, is much more likely – and such a policy creates rather than reduces social conflict. Thus the insurgency is likely to regain momentum, but without major foreign support it cannot seize power. The revolutionary movement can, however, sustain conflict at a level which inhibits economic growth. It might also gain sufficient strength to frighten an intransigent elite into the reimposition of authoritarian rule, as in 1972, thus intensifying conflict. Declining world prices for Philippine exports and rising interest rates would speed the spiral of decline.

The marvellously non-violent way in which ‘people power’ won restoration of constitutional government in February 1986 may someday be recognized as a fleeting moment in Philippines history, an opportunity with great potential, which was lost.

Notes

¹ Raymond Bonner, Waltzing with a Dictator: The Marcoses and the Making of American Policy (New York: Random House 1987), 434.

² See Bryan Johnson, Four Days of Courage (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1987).

³ Lewis Simons, Worth Dying For (New York: William Morrow 1987), 269.

⁴ Alfred McCoy, Marian Wilkinson, and Gwen Robinson, ‘The plot to topple Ferdinand Marcos,’ Veritas (October 1986).

⁵ David Wurfel, Filipino Politics: Development and Decay (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press 1988), 323.

⁶ See, for instance, Manila Chronicle, 14 March 1987.

⁷ Carl Lande and Richard Hooley, ‘Aquino takes charge,’ Foreign Affairs 64 (summer 1986), 1087-107.

⁸ See Belinda Aquino, The Politics of Plunder: The Philippines under Marcos (Manila: College of Public Administration, University of the Philippines, 1987); Francisco Nemenzo, ‘From autocracy to elite democracy,’ in Aurora Javate-de Dios et al, eds, Dictatorship and Revolution: Roots of People’s Power (Manila: Conspectus 1988), 223-5.

⁹ Manila Chronicle, 1 September 1988.

¹⁰ Gareth Porter, `Philippine communism after Marcos,’ Problems of Communism 36(September-October 1987), 14-35.

¹¹ See A Record of the Peace Initiatives Offered by the Government of the Republic of the Philippines to the NDF (Manila: Information Division, GRP Negotiating Panel for Peace, 1987); Nemenzo, `From autocracy to elite democracy,’ 155-61.

¹² Alfred McCoy, `RAM boys: reformist officers and the romance of violence,’ Midweek (Manila), 21 September 1988, 29-33, 28 September 1988, 30-4, 12 October 1988, 29-32.

¹³ United Nations, International Financial Statistics, 1989, 428-29.

¹⁴ See D. Wurfel, ‘Land reform under Marcos and Aquino: contexts, accomplishments and prospects,’ Pilipinas I e ; James P%%{=text-decoration: none}utzel and John Cun-nington, Gaining Ground: Agrarian Reform in the Philippines (London: War on Want Campaigns Ltd 1989).

¹⁵ D. Wurfel, Philippine Foreign Policy: Strategies for Regime Survival, Canada and the Pacific: Agenda for the Eighties, Working Paper 15 (Toronto: Joint Centre on Modern East Asia, University of Toronto/York University, 1983).

¹⁶ See Raul Manglapus, `R.P.‘s foreign policy thrust: development diplomacy,’ Philippines Free Press, 28 January 1989, 10-13, 38.

¹⁷ D. Wurfel, ‘Philippine foreign policy and neo-patrimonial dependency,’ in D. Wurfel and Bruce Burton, eds, The Political Economy of Foreign Policy in Southeast Asia (London: Macmillan, forthcoming).

¹⁸ Washington Post, 21 August 1987.

¹⁹ See, for example, Richard D. Fisher, ‘The international anti-Aquino network: threat to Philippine democracy,’ Asian Studies Backgrounder, 4 May 1987, 9; Washington Times, 24 March 1987.

²⁰ ‘Not in the bank,’ Far Eastern Economic Review, 23 March 1989, 75.

²¹ Jon Melegrito, ‘Maxi-rough road for mini-Marshall Plan?’ Katipunan 2(April 1989), 7-8.

²² Augusto Cesar Espiritu, The debt trap: how do we get out of it?’ Manila Chronicle, 21 September 1988.

²³ Rigoberto D. Tiglau, ‘Manila tests its credit,’ Far Eastern Economic Review, 23 March 1989, 74-5.

²⁴ New York Times, 18 February 1987; Philadelphia Inquirer, 15 February 1987.

Land reform is the consequence of mass demands — and threats — and elite perceptions of interest. The interaction of these factors produced a spurt of land reform in 1972-3 which dissipated in a few years.

In February 1986 the threat of peasant revolution was much greater than In 1972 and thus there was early talk of more sweeping reform. However, unlike Marcos, Mrs. Aquino came from a family of very large landowners. Furthermore, the impact of Cory’s charisma, followed by her offer of cease-fire negotiations with the NPA, quickly began to undermine the revolutionary appeal. The president declined to use decree powers to launch reform, and landlords, over-impressed by the fading of the peasant threat, were emboldened to register strong opposition to reform. Congressmen — especially those led by the presidents’ brother — were sensitive to the pleadings of landed interests and enacted an unworkable law. Perceptions of self-Interest by the landed elite in 1986-88 were so short sighted as to have produced policy that will feed the revival of the revolutionary threat.

“Land reform means the redistribution of property or rights in land for the benefit of small farmers and agricultural labourers” according to a pioneer in its analysis (Warriner, 1969: xlv). The United Nations, typically, has used a definition both broader and less precise: Land reform is “an integrated programme of measures designed to eliminate obstacles to economic and social development arising out of defects in agrarian structure” (Progress In Land Reform, 1962: vi, cited In Warriner, 1969). This broader meaning has most often been termed “agrarian reform” by others. The trouble with the broader concept is that some poIicymakers can claim to do “agrarian reform” even if they are avoiding “land reform”. On the other hand, effective land reform cannot take place without supporting programmes included in agrarian reform.

But since land reform is the centerpiece of agrarian reform, that will be our focus here. The purpose of land reform is conceived differently by economists, who are primarily concerned with its impact on production, and by political scientists who are most interested in its impact on the distribution of wealth, and thus of power. We confess to the latter preoccupation. A considerable degree of equality is, of course, a crucial basis of social satisfaction, and thus stability. It is also a prerequisite-and to some degree a product-of genuine democracy. In a dominantly agrarian society equity in land ownership is central. Democratic stability appears to be the goal of the Philippine government today, and thus the interest in land reform.

It has been suggested elsewhere that political elites initiate land reform to gain political legitimacy (Hung-chao Tal, 1974: 88). While this is undoubtedly true, there are other necessary conditions for its enactment and implementation. It is our task here to spell out those conditions and examine the extent to which they were present in 1972 and again in 1987 and what the consequences were-or will be-for policy accomplishment.

The Necessary Context for Reform

Successful land reform takes place in the context of mass threats and/or pressures, elite needs and opportunities, and an appropriate institutional framework to facilitate implementation. Let us examine the nature of these factors before noting their appearance in two different eras of Philippine politics.

Fear is a powerful motivation and may produce constructive as well as destructive outcomes. The threat posed to a landed elite by actual or impending peasant rebellion or revolution is a potent stimulus for reform, though the perception of threat varies among elite segments. Ever since the 1930s this has encouraged elite interest in land reform In particular periods In order to -preserve the system. – The threat has been embodied in the Sakdals, the Huks, and the NPA, or the more recent series of land seizures organized by the KMP (Kilusang Magbubukid sa Pilipinas).

However, threats alone may not activate elites to introduce land reform if not accompanied by other pressures. After all, a rise in Huk strength in the early 1950s did not impel Pres. Quirino to champion land reform. Wishful elites are often too quick to imagine that a threat is weak, or has ended, and that their wealth is secure. Peasant organizations capable of exercising effective pressure in the policy process-skillful lobbyists — are an important complement. This was most notable in 1971, when the NPA was still feeble — and could have become important again in 1988.

Elites may also be pushed toward land reform by motivations often Independent of mass demands, whether revolutionary or reformist. The search for legitimacy may turn toward land reform because of an expectation of peasant appreciation, but it may also be primarily concerned with pleasing foreign governments, as in Vietnam, or the Philippines In 1972. Legitimacy is sought because it reinforces power. Power may derive more directly from policies that undermine elite segments that pose actual or potential opposition to rulers. This was most obvious in the KMT reform in Taiwan that undercut the landed local elite, unhappy about KMT carpetbaggers.

Land reform may also arise out of institutionalized elite competition, in elections and legislatures, by aspiring elites attempting to build a mass following. The most important steps toward land reform before martial law were the amendments to the Land Reform Code enacted In 1971 under the leadership of middle-class legislators seeking to woo an organized peasantry, despite the subtle opposition of the president. This experience was clearly inconsistent with Samuel Huntington’s dictum that there is a basic incompatibility between parliament and land reform (Huntington, 1968: 388).

While the foregoing may be the contexts facilitating the enactment of land reform, to move from enactment to implementation also requires an appropriate institutional framework. A specialized national bureaucracy headed by a decision-maker with weight in the central policy process is only one essential. But in addition it is necessary to encourage input into implementation by peasants themselves. The strength of local farmers’ cooperatives was, for instance, crucial to the success of land reform in Japan. In fact, in a study of ten countries John Montgomery found that where central authority was in part devolved to the village, peasant farmers enjoyed clearer security rights as a result of land reform (Montgomery, 1974: 5). Without such formal devolution, the bureaucracy in a country with a powerful landed elite is too susceptible to landlord pressures-often itself springing from that class. But, of course, even with appropriate institutions, land reform will not be fully implemented without the continued commitment of the top leadership. This is why some of the most sweeping and successful land reforms have been undertaken in the aftermath of revolution. Sustained leadership commitment to reform does not require a revolution, but it is much less common without it.

Land Reform under Marcos

Ferdinand Marcos sometimes liked to call the New Society, “a revolution from above”, but those “below” had difficulty in discovering the “revolutionary” content. He also called land reform the “cornerstone” of the New Society, even adding “If land reform fails, there is no New Society” (PDE, 22 Sept. 1973). In the end it was too accurate a prediction.

Presidential Decree (P.D.) No. 27 was the most sweeping land reform document that the Philippines had ever seen. It subjected to government purchase and resale to tenant occupants all tenanted rice and corn lands of more than 7 hectares. Compensation, for the first time, was not to be based on the market price, but was to be equivalent to 2 1/2 times the annual harvest, the Taiwanese and Vietnamese formula. This initiative was motivated by a special complex of factors.

Primary was the desire to undermine the strength of landed elites that had provided troublesome opposition before martial law. Aquino family land was among the first to be seized — and not just because it was in the “A’s”. Sergio Osmelia, Jr., of Cebu, who had opposed Marcos In the 1969 elections, owned extensive corn land. (Marcos’ opposition among sugar and coconut planters was dealt with somewhat later in another fashion, through marketing monopolies. There was clearly an advantage in confronting different elites at different times.) “Operation Land Transfer” of the Department of Agrarian Reform started to cover large estates first, and, in fact, never finished the category below 24 has. It appears that the presidential disinterest in the programme after the first few years was related to the fact that his primary goal had already been accomplished.

Land reform was also sold in Washington as a justification for the imposition of authoritarian rule. Marcos advisors were careful students of Huntington. This justification was based on the assumption that armed—as well as unarmed-agrarian unrest since 1970 revealed intense dissatisfaction with land tenure arrangements in some segments of the peasantry and that it could only be met effectively by executive decree. But unrest had been concentrated in Central Luzon, so that is where land reform efforts were concentrated as well. Reform, which included a crash programme to organize village cooperatives, was thus a way to win peasant support and place it within malleable organizations at the same time that revolutionary mass movements were being forcibly crushed. The two-pronged attack was apparently successful in the short run in destroying the “threat”.

Marcos succeeded as well in building a longer term political base in those Central Luzon provinces where the policy was most fully implemented. Nueva Ecija, which had perhaps the most mobilized peasantry, received the most attention. It had the largest U.S. aid project, was the site of the first Cooperative Bank, the first Area Marketing Cooperative, etc., etc. More than a decade after the reform had been implemented there, Ben Kerkvliet found that land reform beneficiaries voted for Marcos in gratitude-and because they had been persuaded that the election of Mrs. Aquino might invalidate P.D. 27. (Landless laborers, on the other hand, were more likely to support Aquino; they had received no benefit from Marcos reform). In other regions, where implementation had been flawed and incomplete, the reform itself contributed to agrarian unrest-raising and then dashing hopes-and so to the rise of the NPA, even in provinces which had never before seen a revolutionary movement.

The imposition of martial law ended open, legitimate interest group activity, except for coopted organizations. The Federation of Free Farmers, which had launched such a sophisticated and effective lobbying effort for land reform in 1971, was reduced to near impotence, even though it was often invited to participate in inconclusive government consultations on policy and its implementation. Other farmers’ organizations affiliated to the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) or the Department of Agriculture were more cheering squads than pressure groups, in the corporatist style, even though their leaders were capable of very cogent critiques of policy problems.

The central institution necessary for reform, DAR, was already in existence prior to martial law, though under P.D. 27 it was substantially expanded. (Nevertheless pay and equipment was mostly inferior to other line departments, making for poor morale.) Secretary Conrado Estrella, formerly the governor of Pangasinan,had easy access to President Marcos, though after 1974 this seldom produced a major decision. Estrella did not lose favor — in the late ’70s he became regional coordinator for Central Luzon of the government political party, Kilusang Bangong Lipunan (KBL), and member of the party executive-but the president had lost Interest in agrarian policy. Estrella was himself a landlord, and had many friends in the same category. Rumors were rampant in the Department about the special deals these friends could strike, softening the impact of the law. Nor were landlords loath to approach DAR officials at the provincial and district level; in one town the DAR office was located on the veranda of the spacious residence of the largest landlord. While some DAR officials were harassed by landlords, and their lawyers, because of their honesty, others were rewarded for “cooperativeness”. In thousands of cases officials simply “overlooked” the existence of tenanted estates.

Perhaps the landlord’s greatest advantage was the Department’s reluctance to implement P.D. 27’s provision for Barrio Committees for Land Productivity, composed of four tenants, two owner-cultivators and two landlords as well as a few local officials. These Committees were supposed to examine the records and establish land productivity, which would determine the price. They might have been used more generally to supervise village level implementation. But landlords found initially that these committees produced a finding that resulted in a land price less than the market rate, and so they subsequently refused to come to meetings. DAR usually was reluctant to push for a decision without landlord representatives and instead allowed the extra-legal practice of price negotiation, in which local DAR officials often played a corrupt role. The land price nearly doubled as a result. The one institution which might have allowed substantial peasant input into the implementation process had been deactivated by landlord intransigence (see Wurfel, 1977: 13-14).

In this context, with incentives as well as deterrents to reform, what was accomplished by the “Land to the Tiller” programme under P.D. 27 in the little more than 13 years that Marcos had to supervise its implementation? The Operation Land Transfer (OLT) target varied in different reports in the early years, but by 1976 had settled on about a half-million tenants on about 750,000 has. of tenanted rice and corn land held by owners with more than 7 has. (This was only half of the tenants on tenanted rice and corn land according to DAR’s 1972 announcement.) (See Wurfel: 1977, 6-7.) As of the end of 1984 DAR (which had become a Ministry, or MAR) reported that 440,239 tenants had received Certificates of Land Transfer (ClTs) covering 755,172 has., or in excess of target. This Certificate merely identified the parcel of land which the tenant farmed, to which, under P.D. 27, he had a future right to secure ownership, pending completion of landlord compensation and cultivator repayment. MAR, and USAID, however, were passing off the ClT as land title in press conferences in Manila and congressional testimony in Washington. In any case, a large percentage (perhaps more than half) of ClTs described in official reports as “Issued” had never actually been received by the tenant farmer (Harkin, 1982: 11-12). The remainder sat in some MAR office either as a result of bureaucratic error, corrupt deal, or sloth, or because landlords had posed some objection, which usually took years to investigate. The actual number of “Emancipation Patents”, or land titles, produced by December 1984 were 164,881 for 120,702 tenants, or less than 25% of the originally accounted scope of the programme. There had been continued growth in this category In the 1980s and by January 1986 180,656 patents had been issued to 132,106 beneficiaries. But even the issuance of patents was not a sure indication of the longer term impact of the reform, since the cumulative rate of payment on amortizations was less than 20%.

To summarize the impact over 13 years we must note that 75% of expected beneficiaries, either because of bureaucratic ennui or landlord evasion (legal or illegal), had not become owner cultivators. Many of those had In the meantime lost the chance by selling (illegally) their CLTs. Furthermore, because landless laborers had never benefited from the reform and because population continued to grow, pressure on the land was intense; even the 25% of tenants who were supposed to have received “emancipation patents” did not necessarily remain owner-cultivators. Many-especially if they lived near towns-had taken on urban occupations and accepted share-tenants at traditional rates to farm their land. The pattern of Philippine land reform since the ear1y 1900s was at work: the removal of big landlords to be replaced by small ones. Nevertheless there had been some reduction in rural Inequity. And despite — or perhaps because of — the failures and inadequacies of the past, by 1986 the demand for the broadening and intensification of land reform was greater than ever before, both by peasants and their middle class spokespersons.

Land Reform Prospects under Aquino

Clear1y the threat of peasant-based revolution was far greater in ear1y 1986 than it was In 1972. There is now evidence that Marcos exaggerated the threat In order to justify the declaration of martial law. He claimed that the NPA had 10,000 armed men, but it was actually a fraction of that number. In 1985, on the other hand, there were over 20,000 guerrillas, an approximate figure at which the military confirmed Communist claims (see Porter, 1987). And the political base was numbered in the millions, scattered throughout most Philippine provinces. The military estimated near1y 20% of the nation’s villages under Communist Influence. Even American officials were talking about a Communist takeover in five years if trends were not reversed. The behavioral evidence of elite fears was the fact that by 1984-85 a number of leading figures in the reformist opposition had been willing to accept office in a broad coalition, the Nationalist Alliance, itself linked to the Communist-led National Democratic Front. The confidence of the revolutionary movement was shown, in turn, by the fact that It began to organize peasants more openly. In a two year period the Kilusang Magbubukid sa Pilipinas (KMP) rose from obscurity to become, with its affiliates, the largest peasant organization in the country, demonstrating on the streets of the capital and mobilizing peasants for mass action in the province.

Nevertheless elite perceptions of the threat altered dramatically in 1986-87. The mass outpouring of support for Cory Aquino and the “February Revolution”, with religious symbolism rampant, and the awkward election boycott by the CPP and its allies, discrediting party leadership even in the eyes of some members, caused more and more of the elite to act as if the danger had passed. This mood was reinforced in 1987 by the May election results and the rise of anti-Communist vigilantes in province after province. Despite the efforts of the leftist Partido ng Bayan, with several released political prisoners among the candidates, e.g. NPA founder Dante Buscayno, campaigning around the country, only three persons identified with the Left were elected to the House House than In 1946) and none to the Senate. In fact, the Left’s slate made a much poorer showing on election day than the supposedly discredited Marcos loyalists. The armed vigilantes, launched first by the military in Davao, but appearing within months in dozens of provinces (see Death Squads In the Philippines, 1987), were one deterrent to mass support of PnB candidates. They continued to grow after the election with military and often local government backing, but also with some community support.

It is not surprising, therefore, that within a landed elite eager to ignore the policy demands of a mass-based revolutionary movement, these indicators were read as its “collapse”, strengthening intransigence. While the instance of this phenomenon may not have been as frequent as he claimed-for he had been a strong supporter of Marcos, Jeremias Montemayor, president of the Federation of Free Farmers, claimed that many landowners were telling their tenants that under the Aquino dispensation, P.D. 27 and other agrarian reform decrees were no longer valid . By May the problem was serious enough, however, for the MAR itself to warn landowners not to nurse the “false hope that land reform would be reversed by the new government” _(MS, 4 May 1986). But this mood was even reflected by Pres. Aquino herself, who said in a speech at the Philippine Military Academy in early 1987, “The answer to the terrorism of the left and the right is not social and economic reform but police and military action.” (Quoted In Bello, 1987: 174).

Nor was the waning image of a revolutionary threat replaced by an effective mechanism for peasant pressure on the policy process. In fact, despite the efforts of some groups, pressure tactics for land reform were perhaps less productive than in 1971 — though the 1971 precedent was well-remembered in 1987-88. The basic problem in the late 1980s was that there was no nationwide peasant organization that was ideologically acceptable to decision-makers. Though Catholic Involvement in the land reform policy process increased significantly at the Manila level, there was nothing comparable to the FFF in the provinces. Jerry Montemayor by 1987 was trying to work his way into the good graces of the regime, but was neither well-respected in church circles nor strong in the countryside.

In an unexpected way the radical KMP did provide a temporary filip to land reform policy making. In January 1987 there had been little progress for some months in the drafting of a presidential decree on land reform. (Under the provisional constitution the president had full legislative powers, and even under the constitution which had just been drafted, she would retain powers until the convening of the newly elected Congress In July.) In June 1986 the KMP had issued a “Program for Genuine Land Reform” which emphasized free distribution of land to the peasants, though adding that “landlords who are not despotic and abusive shall be compensated”. (Schirmer and Shalom, 1987: 370-383.) Minister of Agrarian Reform Heherson Alvarez initially pronounced KMP demands “reasonable”. But in October the Philippine Peasant Institute, which advised the KMP, opined that “It is apparent that no genuine program of land reform can be had under the present administration” . Demonstrations in front of the Ministry of Agrarian Reform were thus perhaps as much for broader political effect as for influencing policy decisions. On January 22 the KMP decided to march on Malacanang Palace. The demonstrators, halted at Mendiola Bridge, about 300 meters from the Palace, broke through police lines and were fired on with live ammunition, especially by a unit of marines. Eighteen were killed and nearly 100 wounded. It was bloodier than any comparable incident in the Marcos era. Some quickly blamed KMP president Jaime Tadeo for provocation, but Gen. Ramon Montano, the Constabulary officer in overall command at the scene, admitted that provocation may have been by some military elements. _(NYT, 23 Jan. 1987). Marines were notorious for containing a high percentage of Marcos loyalists.

In addition to an almost immediate effort to dialogue with peasant and other leftist leaders after what came to be known as “The Mendiola Massacre”, Pres. Aquino visited the victims in hospital. To deflect criticism — even by the Catholic church — for her inaction on land reform, she soon appointed a Cabinet Action Committee to hasten the drafting of a decree. Its early drafts accepted the principle of extending reform to all crops and forms of cultivation, and several other KMP demands. A nationwide sample of public opinion in March, done by Ateneo’s Social Weather Station, found that 2/3 of those asked wanted the president to use her decree powers to enact land reforms “right away”, rather than waiting for Congress. It is obvious that the “martyrs of Mendiola”, whatever their aim, had temporarly speeded the process of reform.

But this tragic drama was soon forgotten in a welter of other political surprises, and the more sustained and wide-spread effort to influence policy which the KMP had undertaken, land occupation (see Malaya, 21 March 1986), seemed if anything to be counter-productive. To be sure peasant direct action to occupy and cultivate idle land — in most cases owned by Marcos cronies — was as much a response by KMP leadership to rice-roots impatience as it was a calculated national strategy. In many instances KMP organizers simply advised on new techniques to seize idle land that had already been subject to peasant initiatives years earlier. In any case, many expected this tactic to create the tension that would raise a national sense of urgency about land reform. The targeting of crony land in 1986, widely regarded as legitimate, inhibited elite retaliation. Even some officials of the Ministry of Agrarian Reform looked kindly on this activity as a way to put higher national priority on agrarian issues. By mid-1987 approximately 70,000 hectares had been seized by KMP-Ied peasants in 15 different provinces (FBIS, 23 July 1987, L-12).

But by 1988 there was some indication the tide had turned. Expected new seizures did not materialize, and military or vigilante harassment increased against those which had taken place. In several instances peasants were driven off by armed force; in others peasant leaders were victims of vigilante assassinations (Peasant Update International, Jan. 1988,8-9). The re-emergence of traditional politicians at the local level — landlords or their friends — encouraged these reactions. And in some instances the Philippine Commission for Good Government, which acquired title to some of these lands, became concerned about resale price and thus favored strong-arm methods to free the land of unwanted occupants. A devastating blow was Executive Order (E.O.) No. 229 of July 22nd which permanently disqualified from receiving benefits under agrarian reform persons, associations, or entities who prematurely enter the land to avail themselves of the rights and benefits hereunder. Landlord reaction, not peasant pressure, had had the most influence on the president’s thinking.

E.O. 229 and the associated E.O. 228, issued on the eve of the reconvening of Congress, reaffirmed P.D. 27 and established the provisions of the new agrarian reform policy, but fell far short of expectations in other ways as well. Most crucial issues, like compensation, retention limit and coverage were left to the legislators chosen in the May 1987 election. That election was famous for its revival of “political dynasties” and other patronage politicians; In Negros the conservative sugar planters rallied to Mrs. Aquino, received her blessings, and were restored to power. As the chairman of the Agrarian Reform Committee of the House of Representatives himself remarked, “If you have a Congress dominated by landlord Interests, then the laws they make will certainly … not make them commit political and economic suicide.” The articulate Representative Boni Gillego went further, saying “Most of [these Congressmen] remind me of Tara In ‘Gone with the Wind’. … They would like to cling to the days of glory… “ . The bill presented by Gillego, and supported by the pro-peasant forces of all ideological stripes, only had 43 co-sponsors. The landlords’ bill, effectively preventing the extension of coverage to plantation crops, had more than 100 sponsors, or a majority of the House. The urgent need, if there was to be _any progress, was for sustained and effective peasant pressure.

This need was recognized especially by some elements in the church and by various centrist activists. They launched the Congress for a People’s Agrarian Reform (CPAR) and planned their first assembly — following several smaller consultations — for the end of May 1987. (The organizing committee included both a Protestant and a Catholic bishop, two Jesuit scholars, economist Mahar Mangahas, and agriculturist D.L. Umali.) They hoped to entice Pres. Aquino into announcing her land reform decree on that occasion, but they failed. Thus an even stronger organization was needed. The affiliation of 13 major organizations of peasants and fisherfolk was arranged through a consultative council, which included KPM, and was directed by a left-of-center executive committee (without KPM) (see Agrarian Reform: Today’s Imperative, 1987). CPAR leaders met with Pres. Aquino and the Cabinet Action Committee in June. On July 14 the Catholic Bishops’ Conference Issued a pastoral letter, “Thirsting for Justice”, which urged the adoption of comprehensive and effective land reform. But landlord pressures on the President were more potent, so that Executive Orders 228 and 229, issued July 22, were — as noted above — sharp disappointments. So CPAR switched the locale of its efforts to Congress. A “tent city” was soon erected on the grounds to house peasant groups coming from the provinces to lobby the legislators. However, despite the attempt by CPAR to bridge the gap, these pressure tactics suffered severe polarization. The largest mass organization was a reluctant and sometime participant, while the sophisticated talent which directed the lobbying, including Bishop Francisco Claver, worked closely with smaller groups, less impressive to hardened politicians.

At the same time some of the brightest Filipino intellectuals have become involved in lobbying Congress in a systematic fashion on a range of issues. In late 1986 a network of voluntary associations was formed to press for improved legislation; it was called ADVOCATE (Alternative Development Canter for Advocacy, Training and Education). Seven issue areas were identified in which lobbying would take place, including industrial democracy, media policy, debt repudiation, and agrarian reform. The overall coordinator is Karen Tanada, grand-daughter of the highly respected doyen of Filipino nationalism, Lorenzo Tanada. Supporting organizations range from centrist to non-party Left. On the question of land reform they coordinated their activities with CPAR (Intersect, Oct. 1987,9).

The elite configuration, however, was not as conducive to reform as it had been In the 1970s. The ruling elite felt no lack of legitimacy or popular support, and the lack of any scheduled national election until 1992 reduced the urgency for aspiring elites to seek mass support. Furthermore presidential leadership was lacking.

Cory Aquino was much less committed to land reform than was the late Ramon Magsaysay, with whom she was often compared. Both were naturally charismatic leaders, tremendously popular. Both were also strongly anti-Communist and had been elected with American support. But Magsaysay was not to the manor born8. On the other hand, the Cojuangco family was one of the largest landlords in the whole country, and the social circles in which it moved were certainly not conducive to a reformist orientation on the agrarian question by Cory Aquino. In his last election campaign Marcos and his minions had bitterly attacked Mrs. Aquino for her landed origins. Court action to force the break-up of the Cojuangco’s Hacienda Luisita was speeded Just before February, and hacienda workers were mobilized for Marcos (see BT, 1 Jan. 1986; Malaya, 3 Jan. 1986). Aquino’s campaign advisors pressed her to counterattack; in a speech in Davao City she promised, 81 shall sit down with my family to explore how the twin goals of maximum productivity and the dispersal of ownership can be exemplified for the rest of the nation in Hacienda Luisita . Two weeks later in Batangas she promised to make Luisita ‘the prime model of what a genuine land reform program should be _(Malaya, 3 Feb. 1986).

But on assuming office, despite the fact that four or five different research groups, in and out of government, were exploring how best to deal with Hacienda Luisita, Mrs. Aquino began to back away from what had appeared to be an earlier commitment. In December 1986 the Cojuangco family filed a motion with the Court of Appeals to pursue their fight to reverse an earlier court order for the sale of the hacienda to its tenants (Komisar, 1987: 181). When asked by journalists about the president’s failure to take action on Luisita, the minister of agrarian reform replied, this is a very democratic president. She will have to talk to her brothers and slsters.8 Family members were, in fact, more concerned with profit than moral example. In January 1988 Manila radio, TV and press trumpeted “President places Hacienda Luisita under land reform”. But a closer reading of Aquino’s words showed a more limited commitment: Hacienda Luisita, will, I repeat, comply with the requirements for registration of all agricultural lands pursuant to Executive Order 2298 (FBIS. 22 Jan. 1988, p. 35). To have done otherwise would have been in violation of law, and, in any case, whether registration would actually lead to redistribution depended on the action of Congress. Cojuangco wealth was not in great danger! But any pretense at moral leadership by the president had been forfeited.

By another criteria, land reform received the Aquino government’s lowest priority. She waited longer to appoint a new minister of agrarian reform than to any other position in the cabinet, i.e. nearly two months. While the Marcos appointee, Conrado Estrella, remained as a caretaker, little that was constructive happened in the Ministry. Twice politicians arrived to take over the minister’s office, only to discover that they had not been appointed after all. Opposition critics claimed Aquino inaction was encouraging landlord efforts to roll back P.D. 27 . At the end of April 1986 President Aquino appointed Heherson Alvarez who had been head of the Ninoy Aquino Movement in the U.S., and had just returned to the Philippines after more than a decade in exile. Though bright, and seemingly committed to genuine reform, he was politically inexperienced and unfamiliar with the agrarian reform program. He quickly made his mark by announcing that expansion of agrarian reform to sugar and coconut lands was being seriously studied _(MS, 5 May, 1986). He was as quickly opposed by the much more influential minister of agriculture, Ramon Mitra, who was himself a large coconut planter. Mitra publicly asked the president to defer any action on expanding the scope of land reform, arguing that reform in rice and corn should be completed first (PDE, 9 May, 1986).

When the campaign opened in March for the 1987 Congressional election the position of (now) secretary of agrarian reform was again left vacant. Alvarez was nominated to Pres. Aquino’s senate slate. Not until after the July 22, 1987 executive order on land reform, or about four months later, was the post again filled, by the then undersecretary of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, Philip Juico. Juico, who had been in Aquino’s media bureau during the presidential campaign, was husband of the president’s appointments secretary. In the Marcos era he had been a protege of agriculture minister Arturo Tanco, but in 1976 had resigned from government to take positions in a series of agribusiness consulting firms (MC, 31 Jan. 1988). In an Interview he admitted the delay in making key decisions on agrarian reform had harmed agriculture, reducing investment and drying up credit. At the same time he indicated that the executive branch was not supporting any Congressional bill on land reform.

In sum, Cory Aquino was so confident in her own popularity and in the legitimacy of the first freely elected regime in nearly 15 years, that she did not see the need of seeking further support through policy. Furthermore, her own family’s interests were threatened by the land reform being demanded by peasants and their friends. While no one accused the president of greed, she was certainly susceptible to family pressure. In fact, her brother Jose became increasingly powerful in her regime.

Because of the early stage of her regime and her continued-though failing-popularity, it was difficult for a reformist opposition to stake out a position on policy to the left of President Aquino. Her opposition on the right, even within her own bloc, was led by landlords reinvigorated by the recent revival of competitive patronage politics. Thus the position of Congressmen opposing the landlord bloc, led by Jose Cojuangco, was precarious. Rep. Bonifacio Gillego, who introduced the most radical land reform bill in Congress, was soon thereafter accused by an intelligence agency of being a “communist”. Gillego, a Korean War veteran and former military intelligence officer, is an admitted student of Marxism. His articulate support by the Partido ng Bayan members of the House made it even easier for anti-Communist landlords to make wild charges. On the other hand, a legislative fight for land reform was not necessarily an effective tool for mobilizing peasant voters five years later.

An appropriate institutional framework, as we have noted, is also a requirement for effective implementation of land reform. There were potential pluses for this dimension in the Aquino era, but minuses as well. We have already mentioned the inactivity in the Department of Agrarian Reform which resulted from the president’s delay on appointments. In July 1987, alongside the executive order spelling out the principles of land reform was EO 129-A, which provided for a reorganization of DAR. Though a housecleaning was long overdue, especially given the earlier charges of corruption, this indirect method tended to put more emphasis on political loyalties. New patronage appointments were made, bringing in a number of inexperienced people to middle levels. Nor were the secretary’s connections in agribusiness a good omen. In the turmoil of reorganization the Department was a less effective tool for reform than it had been in 1972.

However, there was a potentially significant improvement in the executive orders. Not only was the Barrio Committee for Land Productivity reestablished in E.O. 228, but E.O. 229 provided for Barangay Agrarian Reform Councils “to participate and give support to the implementation of programs on agrarian reform; [and] to mediate, conciliate or arbitrate agrarian conflicts and issues that are brought to it for resolution” (Section 19). While all relevant interests in the village were to be represented on the Council, its exact composition was not specified. Thus whether it really turns out to be an “appropriate institution” remains to be seen. There is no indication that very many such councils have yet been formed.

E.O. 229 also provided for another new structure, a Presidential Agrarian Reform Council, chaired by the president, with all relevant cabinet secretaries as members. The president was authorized to appoint in addition “representatives of agrarian reform beneficiaries and affected landowners”, but in six months none had been appointed. A more effective means of high level coordination would seem to be useful, in principle, but the large number of cabinet secretaries included would severely dilute reformist priorities.

This disappointing review of the context of land reform in the Aquino administration should help prepare one for a review of accomplishments, which will be grouped in three categories: the ongoing Implementation of P.D. 27, other redistribution possible without Congressional enactment, and the progress of policy-making.

It is difficult to judge what has actually happened in implementation in view of the radical discontinuity in figures reported by DAR. We earlier noted the MAR claimed that as of January 1986, at the end of the Marcos era, 180,656 “emancipation patents” had been “generated” for 132,106 farmer-beneficiaries. It was figures at that level that were accepted even by critical journalists and scholars as representing the number of new owner cultivators created by P.D. 27. But “generation” only meant printed and implied nothing about where the patents were actually kept. Another figure which MAR officials regularly compiled which was less well known, was the number of patents “issued”, or “distributed”. Though this figure was not reported in 1984, as of March 31, 1983 only 39,011 patents to 36,712 tenants had actually been “issued”, or 8.6% of the then stated goal. (MAR: “Summary, Operation Land Transfer, Program Accomplishment,” as of March 31, 1983, p. 1) On March 10, 1986 MAR’s “Status Report on Emancipation Patent Issuance” cited only 21,998 as having been “distributed to farmer beneficiaries”. And as of October 1986, MAR told the Far Eastern Economic Review (5 March 1987, p. 35) that 19,903 patents had been distributed to 11,187 farmers, or only 3.1% of the target. Then in DAR’s accomplishment report of June 30, 1987 it was stated that as of December 1986 43,661 patents had been issued to 33,237 beneficiaries! At the same time the January to June 1987 accomplishment was reported at 52,443 patents issued to 40,046 farmers, or more than in the previous fifteen years!

As of October 1986 the rapid progress to the rear may have been simply greater honesty of reporting In the Aquino era. But in June 1987 the picture looked rather different. The new figures appeared to represent a super-human effort over the previous several months, particularly remarkable in view of the large number of empty desks evident day after day for visitors to DAR’s Quezon City offices in that period. A certain healthy skepticism has always been necessary in analyzing statistical reports from Philippine government agencies; DAR’s figures are particularly remarkable.

The other area of land reform policy in which the executive branch was free to act without legislative guidance was in the distribution of idle, abandoned or foreclosed lands. Lands foreclosed by government banks needed not be expropriated, but only redistributed. No national figures were released, but land foreclosed or eligible for foreclosure probably involved over one hundred thousand hectares nationally. President Aquino had directed in mid-1986 that such lands be placed under the administration of MAR, but in January 1987 no lands had yet been released by the banks. Especially in Negros, sugar planters vigorously resisted such a process.

In “Agrarian Reform: Transition Report” MAR officials in mid-1986 recommended that all private agricultural lands idle or abandoned since 1980 be placed under the jurisdiction of MAR for distribution to qualified landless tillers. Some of it had already been illegally occupied by peasants. But without drafting any guide lines for distribution, the president retaliated against peasant occupiers In E.O. 229. Then in August 1987 DAR Assistant Secretary Salvador Pejo announced that an 800 ha. estate in Cavite and Laguna provinces would soon be transferred to DAR for redistribution to tenants by the Philippine Commission on Good Government (PCGG), trying to recover the ill gotten gains of Marcos and his cronies (MC, 19 Aug., 1987). It is not yet known how many other such estates are slated for redistribution. Government banks have resisted transfer of foreclosed lands to DAR, fearing lower returns on resale.

The aspect of land reform which has received most public attention since Mrs. Aquino took power is the formulation of new policy to expand the coverage. The very first task force appointed by Pres. Aquino in March 1986 to review agrarian policy — including former political prisoner Gerry Bulatao — recommended the extension of coverage beyond rice and corn to all crops. As noted above, when Heherson Alvarez was appointed minister he reiterated that the matter was under “serious consideration”. Spurred to action by the tragedy at Mendiola, the Inter-Agency Task Force on Agrarian Reform produced a report on April 27, 1987 which laid out plans for an “Accelerated Land Reform Program” covering all agricultural lands of owners with more than 7 has., imposed in stages beginning with 50 has. and above. Compensation was to be provided at the same level as the landowners tax declaration. It recommended also a land rent ceiling on leasehold land of 20% of gross production. The report made specific recommendations about the contents of an executive order which the president was expected to issue before the Congress convened. The drafting committee went through 14 versions before the executive order was actually signed by the president.

As late as May 25th the draft was still strong, with the coverage extending to all private agricultural land (see PRRM, 1987). Failure of landowners to register land for purposes of reform could be punished with fine and imprisonment. Beneficiaries could pay for the land received in 17 annual installments without interest. For these and other provisions the draft was still acceptable to peasant advocacy groups. But landlords, especially in Negros, were already threatening defiance of the law if such a reform were pushed through, and calling its terms .communist”.

The draft of June 3rd was softening (see PRRM, 1987). The Implementation of the 7 has. retention was set back five years, thus giving more time for landlord evasion. Perhaps most fundamental, the draft shifted from land tax declaration to “owners’ declaration of current fair market value” as the primary basis for determining compensation, greatly increasing benefits to landowners and cost to government. The burden on the farmer beneficiary was also raised by stating that land amortization payments would be adjusted for inflation. The Congress for People’s Agrarian Reform (CPAR), in a May 31st “Declaration of Principles” had called for zero retention, progressive compensation (with less than full compensation for larger holdings), and for village level councils made up only of cultivators, which would elect delegates to councils at higher levels, all of which would have a voice in the formulation and implementation of agrarian policy. The CPAR document obviously had little impact.

The gap between the June 3rd draft and the final product of July 22nd — the eve of the opening of the newly elected Congress — was most dramatic. The president and her advisors had been talking to some irate landowners — and to her brother, “Peping” Cojuangco. Provisions on retention limit were omitted entirely, as were any particulars about level of landlord compensation. Amortizations were stretched over a 3O-year period, but a 6 percent interest rate was imposed. Corporate landowners were excused from redistribution if they adopted an approved plan of stock distribution to their workers. The most contentious issues in land reform were left to determination by Congress. The language in Sec. 1 of E.O. 229 was thus of doubtful utility: “The Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program shall cover, regardless of tenurial arrangement and commodity produced, all public and private agricultural lands.”

House of Representatives bill No. 400 was quickly introduced by Rep. Gillego, Chairman of the Committee on Agrarian Reform. His bill, which had the strongest support from peasant groups, called for zero retention and no compensation for lands over 50 has. But to fend off amendment by substitution, Gillego soon had to retreat on the retention limit, first to 3 has. and then to 14. Even so his bill was estimated to have the support of only about 47 members, compared to 117 for the “landlords’ bill”, introduced by Representatives Guanzon and Starke of Negros, both large sugar planters. This bill had a 24 has. retention limit-which alone would exclude nearly 87 percent of private agricultural land-but also exempted retirees, seed farms, and private research centers. It provided that every land acquisition by the government had to be reviewed in court If the landlord claimed an exemption, and that full compensation could be claimed in cash. While this language would probably have been sufficient to prevent any significant reform in sugar, coconut or other crops, rice and corn landlords were also wooed by a provision which would have junked the compensation procedures In P.D. 27 and replaced them with a figure based on the “owner’s declaration of current fair market value”.

In the Senate the differences between the Senate Bill No. 133, presented by Sen. Heherson Alvarez, Agrarian Reform Committee Chairman, and by the more radical bill of Sen. Butz Aquino (SB No. 123) were much narrower than between the two bills in the House. In fact, they were soon compromised in SB No. 249. And there were strengthening amendments later. However, the compromise still based compensation on landlords’ declaration. While it allowed livestock enterprises, aquaculture enterprises and orchards” to avoid redistribution, the provisions for sharing gross revenues or for stock ownership offered a real opportunity to the workers. The make-up of the Barangay Agrarian Reform Committee under E.O. 229 was also altered to increase the likelihood of dominance by actual cultivators or their representatives, though the method for choosing members was still vague. A penalty, not found In E.O. 229, was imposed on landowners failing to register their lands.

The public controversy over land reform heated up in March as the House approached a final decision on two very different bills. In Davao City Rep. Hortencla Starke, a Negros sugar planter and one of the most vehement opponents of agrarian reform, rallied a friendly crowd “to raise your voices against this unjust, unconstitutional, unfair and divisive bill. That will cause a civil war in this country” (MC, 20 March 1988). But she added that owners should not give up their land until paid- “take up your guns”, she cried. Some landlords were embarrassed, but many around the country cheered her on.

In this atmosphere the president showed courage. For the first time she took a pro-reform message to hostile territory. “The nation’s circumstances dictate that we look beyond self-interest to national preservation”, she declared to a convention of the National Federation of Sugar Planters, which sat in stony silence (MC, 23 March 1988). The same day the first pro-land reform rally organized by the Catholic hierarchy brought five thousand marchers to Congress for a mass led by Bishop Teodoro Bacani. Placards favored HB 400, but some also said “Land: God’s gift to all”, and “Land reform counters Insurgency”.

As the Catholic Church became even more prominent in the campaign for a tougher land reform bill, landlords turned their attacks on the church, challenging the bishops to give up their material wealth before asking landlords to give up their land. It was also suggested that Congressman Gillego, HB 400 sponsor, should be deported to the Soviet Union! (MC, 22 March 1988). Anti-reform landowner’s organizations even went so far as to buy large newspaper adds accusing the Philippine hierarchy of being unfaithful to papal encyclicals-of 1891 and 1931, without mentioning the dates (MC, 25 May 1988). The 1987 bishops’s pastoral letter on land reform was reissued April 30th, though some bishops cautiously defended the landlords.

The direction the wind was blowing in the House of Representatives was confirmed by a late March vote on retention limits. Congressmen voted 118 to 49 to amend HB 400 to allow retention of 7 hectares for the landowner and 3 has. more for each legal heir, which was estimated by Rep. Gillego to exclude 97 percent of private agricultural lands from the agrarian reform program (MC, 23 March 1988). After that and other crippling amendments — such as 50 percent cash payment to landowners — Gillego and a dozen other sponsors of the original HB 400 withdrew their sponsorship. HB 400 had become “the landlords’ bill”, and was adopted on second reading by the full House; the Alvarez-Aqulno compromise, after some additional amendment, was passed by Senate, both prior to the Easter recess.

A massive national protest of unprecedented proportions was still not able to head off passage of HB 400 on third reading after the recess. On April 22nd 10,000 to 20,000 farmers and their supporters rallied in a Manila plaza, many of them enroute from northern or southern Luzon for three or four days (DG, 22 April 1988; MS, 22 April 1988). Hundreds had been prevented from entering Manila by military checkpoints. This rally, addressed by congressmen and senators (including the president’s brother-in-law) and peasant leaders, was the major effort of CPAR which had been lobbying for months. The wide coalition, Including church and social democratic groups, as well as affiliates of the NDF, was held together — despite tensions — by the common outrage at the actions of the House (MC, 20 April 1988). Even the somewhat conservative Trade Union Congress of the Philippines, once under Marcos influence, opposed HB 400 and warned that passage of a pro-landlord bill would only trigger peasant revolt (PDI, 6 April 1988).

After passage on third reading the two rather different bills went to a carefully chosen conference committee — from which both Rep. Starke and Rep. Gillego were excluded. Six weeks of hard bargaining finally produced a compromise and what came to be known as Republic Act 6657 was passed by both houses on June 7th. Both the content of the law and the reactions to it need to be examined.

Despite the bold statement in Sec. 4 that the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law of 1988 shall cover, regardless of tenurial arrangement and commodity produced, all public and private agricultural lands, the scope of coverage is going to be very much smaller. Not only does Sec 6 assure the landlord retention of 5 has. for himself and 3 has. for each child over 15 years of age who is “actually tilling the land or directly managing the farm”, but it gives landlords an additional three months beyond the effectivity of the act to evade reform by transferring ownership to other parties.

While there are other important legal exemptions in the act, the largest loophole is the provision for registration of lands, without which government has no cognizance of the pattern of landholding. The census is done on the basis of sampling, land taxation administration is so weak that vast areas of fertile cultivated land are beyond the official ken, and repeated efforts at parcellary mapping by the Bureau of Lands have had minimum success. The registration of agricultural land ordered, as in E.O. 229, is backed up by no penalty for noncompliance; and registration under the provisions of E.O. 229, despite an expensive publicity campaign, are estimated so far to have been 5 percent of the total. Landlord resistance at the very first step of the administrative process can be fully effective; landlords are well aware of the fact that registration cannot be compelled (MC, 6 Feb. 1988).

If a later amendment should provide a penalty, however, landlords have defense in depth. The provisions for compensation are hopelessly complex. There is no clear definition of “just compensation”, though “the current value of like properties” is prominently mentioned. And landlords are invited to challenge in the courts every valuation set by the Department of Agrarian Reform. Even though Sec. 16 provides that DAR may take possession of any land it intends to acquire if the landowner challenges the compensation offered, this provision will itself surely be challenged in the courts on constitutional grounds. In any case, the appropriation of funds is quite inadequate to support compensation at market value if it were acceptable to the owner.

Market value compensation in RA 6657 is, of course, a regression from PD 27 which set compensation as a multiple of land productivity. There is a widespread impression that the simpler procedures of PD 27, more favorable to the cultivator-beneficiary, will continue to operate on rice and corn land, to which PD 27 applies. However, the little noticed language of Sec 75 provides that “PD 27 … and other laws not inconsistent with this Act shall have suppletory effect.” Since the compensation provision of PD 27 are entirely inconsistent with RA 6657, this language would appear to be saying that such provisions are null and void. Imaginative legal interpretation may avoid this conclusion, but the Act seems to be a dramatic step backyard for the prospect of land reform in food crops. In this and other passages, the law is very poorly drafted, thus helping to solve the unemployment problem in the legal profession.

When President Aquino signed the law on June 10 (FBIS, 13 June 1988,32), she pronounced wistfully: “This act, I hope: will end all the acrimony and misgiving of the contending parties to the program and unite the nation behind the effort to make agrarian reform a success In our country.” If the president had any real expectation of this actually happening, she herself will quickly be disillusioned. The disillusionment of peasant groups was Instantaneous. Said the KMP on June 13 (PDI, 13 June 1988),

“From where the farmers stand: the CARP Law is but a mockery of our aspiration for genuine agrarian reform. . . . CARP is the protection of the Interests and privileges of the landlord class and the multinationals. . . . The much flaunted ‘centerpiece’ of the US-Aquino regime boils down to nothing more than a hoax. . . . Now that the US-Aquino regime has killed the Filipino farmers’ hope for land and for a better life, we are left with no other choice but to rely on ourselves and strength of our unity in attaining this aspiration.” Though the ideological color of this statement is clear, more objective observers could readily agree on the term “hoax”. This legislation will accomplish very little land reform and will only heighten agrarian conflict. For purposes of political mobilization, the KMP should find its enactment very useful. To paraphrase Pres. Aquino, “the primacy of self-interest will prevent national preservation”. The bloody, debilitating and often fruitless struggle of the Filipino peasant for social justice, which has already lasted off and on for one hundred years, will continue, probably at an accelerated pace.

Conclusion

Given the contextual limitations, including the Cojuangco family, there were still other options for the Aquino administration that might have improved the lot of the small farmer, increased regime legitimacy, and reduced agrarian unrest. One such option had been proposed by top officials of MAR within the first few months of the Aquino government: vigorously redistribute lands seized by PCGG from Marcos and his cronies. This might have avoided confrontation with KMP over land occupations. If at the same time early attention had been given to improving the regulations for and speeding the implementation of PD 27, an area in which there was ample experience and several well-grounded critiques, the administration’s record and its image could have been improved.

There was a fundamental mistake in talking early and often about a sweeping reform in all crops and doing nothing about it while the power was still in the president’s hands. One effect of this was to re-enshrine in the 1987 Constitution the requirement for just compensation, a phrase which in Philippine jurisprudence had always meant full market value. Sugar and coconut landlords and their friends in the Constitutional Commission were precisely wary of a repeat of P.D. 27, where this principal of compensation was ignored, while some well-intentioned delegates supporting reform did not realize the full consequence of its inclusion.

Big talk and little action had the net effect of activating the landlords and lulling the proponents of reform, until after July 1987. That this happened can be blamed in part on a lack of leadership, for the constraints of a situation, both economic and political, never entirely eliminate some scope for the leader’s initiative. Cory Aquino has never adequately understood the plight of the peasants or the political consequences of being inattentive to them. Her leadership style on land reform legislation has been described by a church critic as “hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil”. (MC, 9 Jan. 1988). In fairness, however, she was thrust so rapidly into the role of presidential candidate, and somewhat unexpectedly into that of president, that she had little time to prepare. This was not a problem for Marcos In 1972. Nor was he faced with a fractious cabinet of varied interests which added to the confusion and indecision of the Aquino administration. But there is no evidence that in her first year in power Mrs. Aquino even attempted to set a strategy on land’ reform that would guide her government. In historical perspective it may be viewed as a tragic omission. For it is now unlikely that her government can regain sufficient momentum in land reform to head off a new Intensification of agrarian unrest.

Dire warnings come from all sides. Said Malaya, “the government should not permit the support of the peasantry to be lost by default to the rebels. It should implement genuine land reform now.” Defense Secretary Rafael Ileto warned, “Land reform. . . is one of the demands of the insurgents. . . so we must be sure that it will succeed. (MC, 7 June 1987). The Toronto Globe and Mall summed it up editorially, “One of Mrs. Aquino’s most enthusiastic supporters in the U.S. Congress, Rep. Stephen Solarz, has predicted that ‘the Philippines will see either agrarian reform or agrarian revolution.’ For the moment, the slide is perceptibly toward the second of those possibilities.” (25 Jan. 1988).

Perceptions of so many in the landed elite, and perhaps that of the president herself, that the revolutionary movement has collapsed are almost certainly wrong. It is hard to disagree with the author who said, “with a few notable exceptions, the Philippine establishment which replaced Marcos’ reign seemed … to be as uninformed about the CPP and leftist movements as its predecessor” (Chapman, 1987: 260). The comforting thought that the late ’80s is like the mid ’50s, with a similar outcome impending, seems to be sufficiently widespread to feed elite Intransigence. But it is a failure of historical analysis. One cannot assume that 80 percent electoral turnout in May 1987 for candidates mostly involved in the old patronage politics means that peasants have abandoned their interest in fundamental change. They are simply pragmatic enough to try all avenues. It seems likely that if the political, constitutional channel fails them again they will be willing to rejoin the march to revolution. Many are already battle weary. Few relish the thought of additional years of struggle. But an elite that assumes that the rural poor are willing to resume the social and economic patterns of the 1960s, with a few crumbs to keep some hope alive, may be sowing the seeds of its own destruction. To be sure there are still some political figures who understand this; they may some day emerge in more prominent leadership roles. But in 1988 the choices for action — or inaction — were still being made by Corazon Aquino.

UNIVERSITY OF WINDSOR

References

Books and articles

Bello, Walden (1987), Counterinsurgency’s Proving Ground: Low Intensity Warfare in the Philippines, in Michael Klare and Peter Kornbluh, eds. Low Intensity Warfare. New York: Pantheon, 1988.

Chapman, William (1987), Inside the Philippine Revolution: The New People’s Army and Its Struggle for Power. New York: W.W. Norton.

Death Squads In the Philippines (1987). San Francisco: Alliance for Philippine Concerns.

Harkin, Duncan A. (1982), Land Reform in the Philippines, 1972-1982., Seminar paper presented at University of the Philippines, Los Banos, ACCI.

Huntington, Samuel P. (1968), Political Order in Changing Societies. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Komisar, Lucy (1987), Corazon Aquino: The Story of a Revolution. New York: George Braziller.

Montgomery, John (1972), Allocation of Authority in Land Reform Programs: A Comparative Study of Administrative Processes and Outputs, Administrative Science Quarterly, March.

Philippine Rural Reconstruction Movement (1987), Comments on the Differences between the June 3 and May 25 Drafts on the Presidential executive Order on Agrarian Reform., (mimeo).

Porter, Gareth (1987), Philippine Communism after Marcos, Problems of Communism (Sept-October), 14-35.

Schirmer, Daniel B., and Stephen R. Shalom, eds., (1987) The Philippines Reader: A History of Colonialism, Neocolonialism, Dictatorship and Resistance. Boston: South End Press.

Tal, Hung-chao (1974), Land Reform and Politics: A Comparative Analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press.

The Filipino Peasantry: Images of Poverty and Revolt (1986). Quezon City: Philippine Peasant Institute.

Warriner, Doreen (1969), Land Reform in Principle and Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wurfel, David (1977), Philippine Agrarian Policy Today: Implementation and Political Impact. Singapore: Institute of SE Asian Studies, Occasional Paper No. 46.

Periodicals:

Bulletin Today (BT)

Dally Globe (DG)

Far Eastern Economic Review (FEER)

Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS)

Intersect: The Intersectorial Communicator. Quezon City: Institute on Church and Social Issues

Malaya

Manila Bulletin (MB)

Manila Chronicle (MC)

New York Times (NY7)

Philipplne Dally Express (PDE)

Philipplne Dally Inquirer (PDI)

Why study images? An image, in Deutsch’s sense of the term, “Serves as a screen for the selective perception and interpretation of messages” being received by the individual from the environment.¹ It is our filter for reality, and is the effective basis for decision making. Thus to understand images is to have a better insight into the policy process, and the context for all interactions. Kenneth Boulding has said, “What I believe to be true — my image of the world — largely governs my behavior”.²

The images — a mixture of values, attitudes and cognitions — which any community holds are the legacy of past experience and the framework for interpreting the future. Thus interactions between two communities will be greatly affected by the images they have of each other. But as interaction patterns change, so also will the images, especially when the relationship is essentially cooperative, and each party is open to feedback. Our emphasis in this paper will be on trying to understand the determinants of both stability and change in the composition of mutual images of two national communities. We will note cultural as well as socio-economic factors in the process.

The Philippine-Japan relationship, though regarded as insignificant by many until recently, is fast becoming preeminent for the Philippines and has received vastly increased attention in Japan in the last few years, especially since the Aquino assassination. For example, in Asahi Shimbun up until August 21, 1983, coverage of the Philippines averaged 12 column centimeters per day. The remainder of the year this coverage averaged 67.5 column centimeters — and the increased interest has been sustained in many fields. In some respects the Philippine-Japan relationship is unique, but it is typical of Japan’s links with ASEAN countries in being an unequal cooperative dyad.³

I

The inequality of this dyad is easy to demonstrate, primarily in economic terms. For instance, in trade in 1981 22% of Philippine exports and 19% of imports either went to or came from Japan. For Japan, on the other hand, Philippine trade amounted to little more than 1% of its world wide total. If one looks at particular commodities, the inequality is even greater. Almost all copper concentrate exports go to Japan, but the Japanese have several suppliers. The same was true of bananas, until the Philippine found new markets in Singapore, Hong-Kong and the Middle East. Or, if one examines investment, Japan had $786 million invested in the Philippines in 1983, while the reverse flow is negligible.⁴

Though the relationship has not, of course, always been cooperative, the above evidence already implied considerable economic cooperation. In addition, economic aid (including both grants and interest bearing loans) from Japan was reported by JICA as having reached ¥ 70,136 million in 1983, making Japan the primary source of bilateral economic assistance in the Philippines.⁵

The assymetery can also be found in the internal characteristics of the two societies, both economic and cultural. For instance, the hourly wage in manufacturing in 1975 was only $0.24 in the Philippines compared to $3.28 in Japan, and the per capita GNP was comparably skewed. Yet a 13 nation Gallup survey in 1979 reported that Filipinos were both more satisfied and more hopeful than Japanese. Only 49.5% of Japanese said they were “satisfied with life” compared to 76.8% of Filipinos. Nearly 85% of Filipinos described themselves as “hopeful”, compared to only 58% of Japanese.⁶

In fact, the two cultures are about as different as any two in Asia: Japanese tend almost to be workaholics, while Filipinos value their leisure very highly. Filipino women enjoy freedom and high status within the framework of bilateral kinship, while Japan is still a very much male dominated patrilineal society. Loyalties tend to be long lasting in Japan, while they are much more instrumental in the Philippines. The style of work is very different, in both business and politics. Japanese are rather bureaucratized, while Filipinos are more ad hoc. Because Filipinos derive considerable enjoyment from street demonstrations even on urgent questions, Japanese, who take such activities very seriously, cannot understand that Filipinos are, in their seemingly light-hearted manner, also engaged in serious political enterprise.⁷ (This is a real obstacle to Japanese understanding of Philippine politics).

II

Perhaps the most fascinating cultural inversion, with profound consequences for Japan-Philippine relations, is in the meaning of apology, sumimasen. Filipinos regard apology as an admission of guilt, with the guilty party having a responsibility to compensate the aggrieved. Thus the more you say, “I’m sorry”, the more you admit guilt and the more you must pay in compensation. But the Japanese feel that if you are ready to say sumimasen, you show penitence, a commendable attitude which deserves sympathy even from the aggrieved. Thus the aggrieved should not require full compensation for the wrong done—the more sumimasen, the less compensation.⁸

The impact of the inequality between the two societies is pervasive. Attention to and formation of images are affected by differences in both motivation and capability.

A. Japan, like any great power dealing with a weak one, needs to cultivate attitudes that are receptive of investment, and conducive to expanding markets, as well as tolerant of persistent negative trade balances. Thus Japanese government and business are very interested in understanding ASEAN images of Japan in general, and Filipino images in particular. For instance, when the Philippine Senate in January, 1972 rejected the Treaty of Amity, Commerce and Navigation with Japan (after twelve years of deliberation), Japan’s trade attache, after voicing a protest, asked in exasperation, “What we want to know is whether a rejection is caused by deep-rooted ill-feelings against Japan or simply because of political whims?⁹ The Japanese need to know was acute.

Considerable amounts have been spent to research SE Asian images. Gaimusho (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) has funded two large surveys in ASEAN, the first in 1979 and the second in 1983. Mombusho (Ministry of Education) is funding a hugh study of images of Japan in a few ASEAN and several other countries. The Toyota Foundation has recently entered the field as well. And other Japanese organizations have held conferences on the subject and invited ASEAN scholars to give papers. The promotion of Japanese language and culture and of science and technology thru student and faculty exchanges, and in other ways, are all designed to bolster the Japanese image.

Japan is assisted in this effort by the fact that Filipino sources of information on Japan are almost exclusively Japanese. Japanese institutions have the resources to gather, process and store large quantities of data.

Most Filipino businessmen, for instance, would never bother to approach the Philippine government or Filipino academics when looking for Japanese data or its interpretation. The language barrier is, of course, formidable. And for every Filipino fully literate in Japanese there are thousands of Japanese who have mastered English.¹⁰ Thus the ability to mold the Filipino image of Japan is maximal.

Japanese images of Filipinos are also greatly affected by the inequality of the relationship. Filipino poverty and acceptance of exploitation, both in the sordid business of “sex tours” and the simple willingness to work at very low wages are an important part of the Japanese image of Filipinos.

B. Filipinos do not have the same economic interest in knowing the Japanese images of them, but it is a matter of concern, although the Philippines is unable to fund research on the matter. There is a widespread assumption that Japanese images are quite negative; it is often a matter of shame. As Sen. Oiokno has said, Japanese tourists deal with riff-raff and businessmen with corrupt officials, so what can you expect? One former cabinet member tells of an incident that is quite revealing. The Japanese construction company, for which he was an advisor, made a kanji ‘chop’ for him meaning “a duck who remained clean while swimming in dirty water”. He added, “It was a personal, but not a national, compliment. Japanese think that most Filipinos are crooks”.¹¹

Because of a lack of Philippine resources, and a preference for Japanese interpretations, Japanese tend to rely almost entirely on their own research institutions for materials on the Philippines.

The perceived need by Filipinos for aid and investment from Japan leads to adjustments of their public stance which may appear as ambivalence to Japanese. On the one hand, they layout the proverbial Filipino hospitality for Japanese visitors; on the other, they provide sufficient reminders of their wartime suffering to keep alive a Japanese sense of obligation to compensate. Said one Filipino prominent in his country’s dealings with Japan, “The Japanese government and people made efforts to win back the friendship of countries it occupied. They stated their sorrow, paid reparations and started cultural exchange; Japan benefitted as much or more than the Philippines from reparations. Japan needs to do more to win back Filipino friendship.

Filipinos may already have forgiven Japan for wartime atrocities, but they have not forgotten”.¹²

III

The non-economic dimension of the dyad, the historical legacy, has already crept into our discussion. It may be even more important than the economic structure in determining mutual images.

Most obvious, of course, is that in the living memory of the Filipino elite Japan was a conqueror, and a very brutal one at that. Other SE Asian nations also experienced Japanese conquest, but (with the exception, perhaps, of Chinese in Singapore and Malaysia) did not suffer as much. Certainly many Filipinos believe their ordeal was unique. In the account of a leading Filipino historian and journalist the emotion was intense: “In the midst of this hideous chaos and suffering [during the liberation of Manila] beyond words to describe, the Japs began to commit horrors the like of which had never been heard of or seen before”.¹³

The Americans too had conquered the Philippines, at the turn of the century, and with considerable brutality against the Ihsurgents—but not against the elite. The U.S., however, had five decades of predominant influence over the educational system to reshape Filipino perceptions,¹⁴ not to mention the fact that American behavior sharply improved after 1901. Thus a very positive emotional attachment to Americans, American values and American-style political institutions by Filipinos was the historical legacy in 1941. This legacy produced a resistance which in turn helped trigger a very particular brutality. As David Steinberg has reminded us, “Filipinos continued the fight as staunchly after the formal surrender as before This will of the people was virtually an insurmountable obstacle to Japanese planners “.¹⁵ And the Japanese had a consistent explanation for this; said Gen. Honma in 1942, there are those “who cannot rid themselves of their pro-American sympathies and who continue to resist in vain without understanding” Japanese intentions.¹⁶ The Americanization of the Filipino sometimes produced such outbursts as that of Shozo Murata, chief wartime political advisor to the Japanese army in the Philippines: “Filipinos have no culture of their own; [they are] a people culturally bankrupt…¹⁷

Even today the mutual image is bedeviled by these two dimensions of the historical legacy: the Japanese disdain for Filipinos as lacking “culture” (i.e., a strong Asian tradition) and the Filipino recollection of Japanese brutality. A Japanese journalist with considerable experience in the Philippines reminds us that Japanese academics, and thus journalists and officials influenced by them, still have less respect for Filipinos than for other SE Asian peoples because of their lack of Ajia dento; Filipinos are not considered “real Asians”. In contrast, Japanese political style is very appealing to Japanese. Japanese attitudes are revealed in the lack of strength in Philippine studies in Japanese universities, with Tagalog taught in a university setting only for the last two. years. Said one Filipino businessman with considerable Japanese contacts, “Japanese regard Filipinos as imitators of U.S. culture, as U.S. puppets. Thus the Japanese sense of cultural superiority toward Filipinos is much greater than toward other ASEAN countries”.¹⁸ This was confirmed in a recent survey of Japanese attitudes towards 15 countries – including four from ASEAN – in which the Philippines had the lowest percentage for positive interest in its culture.¹⁹

The recollection of wartime brutality by Filipinos is perhaps even more salient. “Forgiven, but not forgotten” is probably an accurate assessment of Filipinos attitudes among those over 50. Though most members of the Filipino elite interviewed in 1985 specifically said that the “war experience is behind us now”, most also could recite cases of family members tortured or killed or property damaged by the Japanese. A leading Japanese businessman relates that over the last five years not one of his Filipino colleagues has ever alluded in conversation to wartime suffering at Japan’s hand.

But since the memory is not too far beneath the surface, a nasty incident can bring it up all too quickly. For instance, about a year ago, Toshio Yamamoto, a physical education teacher from the Japanese School in Manila was on the golf links; exasperated with his caddies, two Filipinas, he “knocked them lightly” on the head with the handle of his club, according to his version. A member of Parliament charged they had been “slapped and hit” and demanded Yamamoto’s deportation. In the Times Journal they were “beaten up”. But it was Jess Bigornia of the Bulletin Today who wrote what many others must have been thinking: he likened Yamamoto to the hated kempeitai.

In order to avoid a legal imbroglio, the Japanese Embassy agreed to have Yamamoto leave “voluntarily”.²⁰

On the Japanese side the war experience prompts various responses. A longtime Japanese resident of Manila laments, “War destroyed all trust in Japan. It will take more than 100 years to restore the trust that existed in the 1930s”.²¹ One prominent Filipino, now a cabinet member, said that in his experience older Japanese businessmen on first meeting almost always began their conversation with an apology for the war.

Many Japanese would, on the other hand, appear to want to forget the unfortunate aspects of the war entirely, as the textbook revision incident revealed. Textbook revision, softening the account of Japanese brutalities, came at a time when the Philipines, seeking additional economic aid, could hardly afford to be critical of Japan. But the Chinese and Koreans were not so reticient. Some officials rejected their criticism, however, labelling the question within Japanese “domestic jurisdiction”. One Japanese writer interpreted the incident very sensitively. Said he, the indignation shown by the Chinese and South Koreans “is directed at the fact that the Japanese people do not appear to have seriously reflected on the criminal acts Japan has committed against China and Korea It is undeniable that once having repented their sins, the Japanese have conveniently forgotten about their wartime crimes and have tended to believe complacently that all is forgiven”.²² The comment could, of course, be generalized beyond China and South Korea.

The popularity of the book and TV film Ennetsu Shonin revealed in 1984, however, that many Japanese have not forgotten wartime crimes, and are still struggling with the consequences. The film, produced by NHK and broadcast at least three times, was based on a book written by a former JAL employee, a prize winning novelist. His plot incorporated a true incident, the shooting of a Sumitomo manager in Manila by an aggrieved Filipino logger. This was the first movie or novel about postwar Philippine-Japanese relations; and there has been no comparable Japanese treatment of relations with any other ASEAN country. Even though kempeitai atrocities were portrayed, as well as the consequent survival of Filipino hostility, this was softened by a hero who was attempting to meet the needs of Filipinos, even over the criticism of his Japanese corporate colleagues. He was conscious of trying to redeem Japan’s image in the Philippines, of trying to be a “beautiful Japanese” in the midst of the corporate jungle. The book and film raised wartime memories and dealt with contemporary exploitation, but extolled a hero who tried to do good within the system. The fact that the Japanese Embassy in Manila originally planned to show the film widely to Filipino audiences (with English subtitles), but subsequently decided against it, is a good indication that the ambivalence of the film produced a mixed reaction in official circles.

The reaction of a few Filipino intellectuals in Japan to its TV broadcast probably indicates that the Embassy’s caution was wise. A treatment of such a delicate subject in a way to make it acceptable to Japanese audiences was not designed to make it credible to their Filipino counterparts. The gap between nations in perceptions of the war years is still too great.

IV

Trends in the content of mutual images have been deeply affected by the intensification of an increasingly unequal relationship. Not only has trade and investment grown, so has the movement of people and messages.

Imports from Japan in the decade starting Jan. 1972 grew by more than 4 times. Since exports to Japan grew more slowly, the trade surplus of the early 1970s had turned to a trade deficit by 1976.²³ Japanese investment grew more than 8 times in the same period, rising from less than 5% of total foreign investment, to over 25% in the mid-1970s, and then back to 18% in 1981.²⁴ Since Japan in the mid-1980s has become the world’s largest exporter of capital, the chances of Japan overtaking the U.S. as the major foreign investor are rather good. In the field of government economic aid, Japan extended grants and loans in 1983 which were nearly twice those just five years earlier. Quite clearly the Japanese economic presence in the Philippines was growing rapidly.

The intensification of the relationship can also be seen in the movement of people and messages. The number of Japanese entering thePhilippines annually grew from 8,086 in 1969 to 143,934 fifteen years later, or 927% in the second five year period over the first, and 30% in the third period over the second. That was a more rapid rate of growth of Japanese entry than in any ASEAN country except Singapore.²⁵ The most rapid growth category was tourism, which in some years accounted for more than 90% of entrants, but actually declined after 1979. Business entries were rather stable at a bit over 12,000 for the last several years, growing less rapidly than in the rest of ASEAN. At the same time telegrams between Japan and the Philippines (from 1969 to 1982) increased by nearly threefold and telephone calls nearly 16 times. In 1969 the Philippines had the largest number of such messages in ASEAN, but by 1982 had been displaced by Singapore with more than twice as many in each category than the Philippines.²⁶ Interactions between Japanese and Filipinos, both business and personal, remote and face to face, had multiplied spectacularly.

Two eminent Japanese scholars, K. Kojima and S. Matsumoto, have suggested that when increased interaction is based on a rapid growth in Japanese investment and trade, and when Japan’s share of both is also rising, that “over-presence” becomes a problem, leading to friction and resentment. Their views find wide support in Japan.²⁷ Matsumoto gave Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines as examples during the period 1969-76.

Kojima concentrated on investment. Said he, “When Japanese investments in a certain host country increase to more than critically substantial importance, or, in other words, a peril point, condemnation begins to arise If Japanese investments share.more than half of the total foreign investments in the host country, a fear of Japanese domination may appear.

Behavior of the foreign firms and their staff are condemned from various points of view: too many Japanese expatriaties, local staff are not promoted; low wages; transfer pricing and tax evasion; bribing local officials, etc. Though less theoretical in analysis, the comment of a Filipino businessman intimately involved in contacts with Japan agrees that “friction grows from expanded commerce”.

But, it would be hard to prove the “over presence” theory from available evidence on the Philippines. In the first place, the problem there was less important. Only the Philippines within ASEAN had the prime source of exports and imports and well as foreign investment from a country other than Japan, namely the U.S. Yet by 1983 on two out of three major economic issues, i.e. Japanese aid and investment, it was the Philippines which shared, with Thailand, the most negative response pattern in a Gaimusho survey.²⁸ (For Indonesia and Thailand in the early 1980s, on the other hand, Japan was pre-eminent in all three roles. The theory seemed to fit in those two countries at the time of the “Tanaka riots” of 1976, when the Japanese prime minister received such a “warm” reception from students.)

Furthermore, the most rapid growth of Japanese investment and imports was in the first two years after the ratification by Pres. Marcos of the Treaty of Amity, Commerce and Navigation on December 27, 1973. But this did not produce anti-Japanese outbursts for the visit of Premier Tanaka, or for any other occasion. In part this is to be explained by Marcos’ tight control, but since Suharto was not exactly a liberal democrat, there were obviously other explanations. (On this there will be further thoughts below).

An increasingly unequal relationship was, of course, the consequence of unparalelled Japanese prosperity. According to UNCTAD statistics, whereas the per capita GDP in 1967 was four times in Japan what it was in the Philippines, by 1977 the ratio was 16 to 1, despite considerable growth in the Philippine economy. This had its attitudinal spinoffs on the Japanese side. The most widely noted was the rise of Japanese self-confidence, which, for one who had listened to the orgies of self-deprecation in the early post-war years, seemed a healthy change. In a very careful research which analyzed quantitatively the speeches of the Japanese foreign minister in the Diet from 1955 to 1967, Kiyoko Nitz concluded that already by the late 1960s there was evidence that the earlier official “lack of self-confidence” had disappeared.²⁹

Self-confidence also produced arrogance. For instance, in the mid-1970s the chairman of Sumitomo Chemicals, trying to fend off criticism from Japanese environmentalists, assured a TV audience that they need not worry, since “any business with harmful chemical pOllution can be sent to the Philippines”. Japanese themselves began to comment on the phenomenon. For instance, in the midst of the textbook revision controversy in 1982 Shinkichi Eto “expressed anxiety over a new arrogance surfacing in Japan Recently many younger politicians and civil servants have been indulging in proud arguments”.³⁰ From a scholar who disagreed with Eto on the issue at hand there was nevertheless consensus on the deeper concern: “What is the psychological basis of the arrogance of Japanese people in neighboring countries [a qualification not placed by Eto] today?…It must be due to the economic success of their country If such behavior invites secret antipathy and contempt from…neighbors, the textbook issue may be the harbinger of very unhappy events in the future”.[3l] Another Japanese scholar himself displayed some boldness in publishing in the Philippines an article which concluded that, despite the brutality that actually occured under its aegis, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was designed “to construct a new moral order…in which each nation would take its proper place”.³²

A Filipino business man with links to Japan contends that Japanese arrogance grew most noticably when Americans began praising Japanese management techniques.³³ But another Filipino business leader insists the Japanese are no more arrogant than other foreign investors or traders.³⁴ In the response to the Gaimusho survey in 1983 Filipinos used the word “arrogant” to describe Japanese five times mqre frequently than any other ASEAN nationality, and the frequency jumped sharply from 1979 to 1983.³⁵

A great increase in the flow of people, as well as goods, between the Philippines and Japan, if in the context of increasing inequality, leads to new types of exploitation which serve to increase negative images on both sides. A conservative Japanese politician stated the view from Tokyo most baldly. Said he, “The chief Philippine exports to Japan these days are dope, prostitution and illegal hand guns”.³⁶ In the Filipino elite the problems of yakuza and “sex tours” were most frequently mentioned, though they were painfully aware of the large number of Filipina “entertainers” in Japan and the bad name that this gave the whole country. The root of these problems was the desperate unemployment and low wage of the employed Filipino workers, and, secondly, the corruption in the Philippine government which invited the operation of Japanese gangsters. But neither would the problems have existed without the willingness of some Japanese to gratify their sexual appetites at whatever human cost—the monetary cost, by Japanese standards, was a special bargain.

As we have already mentioned, there was a phenomenal increase in Japanese tourism in the Philippines in the 1970s. It grew, encouraged by the government, from 1972 to 1979 by more than 25 times — 6,803 in 1972 and 175,691 in 1979. Philippine crime helped cause some decline in the inflow after that. Tourism fosters social problems in many countries, but its magnitude in the Philippines can only be understood by looking more closely at the figures. In 1980 there were more than 151,000 Japanese adult males entering the Philippines, with less than 14,000 on business, government or research assignments. Since less than 31,000 adult Japanese females went to the Philippines in the same year, that meant more than 105,000 unaccompanied adult males entering with the status of “tourist”, though some may actually have been on brief business trips. In the same year there were only about 72,000 unaccompanied adult male tourists from Japan entering all other ASEAN countries combined. The implication clearly is that though “sex tourism” was not a problem limited to the Philippines (it was rather flagrant also in Thailand), it was concentrated there.

But the tour operators who made so much money out of this tawdry business did not reckon on aroused feminists and church organizations in both the Philippines and Japan. The protest in the Philippines embarrassed the Japanese government and business leaders, while the protests in Japan were often quite embarrassing to the individual involved. Thus with the help of pressures from the Japanese government, such enterprises were discouraged, though not, of course, stopped. From 1980 to 1983 the annual entrance of adult Japanese males into the Philippines dropped by over 43,000, while the female ingress only fell by 1,554. Negative images helped produce action.

There are some hints that the Japanese yakuza, who have had a role to play in prostitution in Manila, switched the major venue for their activites in the late 1970s when the heat was on againts “sex tours”. In any case, the entrance of Filipinas into Japan grew nearly five-fold from 1977 to 1983, so that in the last year there were 30,530 Filipino women entering, as against 17,357 men, making the Philippines the only ASEAN country with more female than male entrants. In the same period the overall increase in the entrance of “ASEAN aliens” into Japan was 2.6 times. (The entry of Thai women grew 3.2 times in the same period).³⁷ Many of these women were brought in as domestics, skirting government regulations and being paid much below Japanese rates, but living a decent life. Many others, however, were brought in by the yakuza as virtual slaves, told in advance that jobs as waitresses or nightclub entertainers had been secured for them. A man arrested in Osaka for operating a “date club” with Thai and Filipino women was reported to have “earned” Y42 million in the previous year.³⁸ Yet the practice continues.

In 1980 the problem was sufficiently widespread that the Japan Christian Women’s Temperance Union began raising money for an Asian women’s refuge center. The construction began in 1985 and the center is to open in April 1986. Ironically the first efforts of the WCTU in this area had been in 1894, on behalf of the karayuki-san (women sold by impoverished peasant families into overseas prostitution, including in the Philippines) to help them to return home with dignity.³⁹ Economic circumstances between the Philippines and Japan had since been reversed, as was the nature of the prostitution problem. Catholic groups also organized counselling and refuge centers for Filipino girls caught in this trap, and their plight was sometimesportrayed on Japanese television.

The Japanese police seemed to be more concerned , however , about one of the other dimensions of yakuza activity in the Philippines, the smuggling of handguns. It was a more direct threat. In April of 1984 the police seized an illegal shipment of 301 guns aboard a container ship, and identified Hitoshi Kaneda, living in Manila, as the head of the smuggling ring. At first the Philippine government was unwilling to extradite Kaneda, who had apparently made some generous gifts to certain high officials. But in May 1985 he was handed over to Japanese police at the Manila airport.⁴⁰ While the trafficking may now be brought under control, the negative image which many Japanese and Filipinos acquired of each other as a result of this interlude will take some time, and a lot of good news, to counteract.

V

Whatever negative images of Japan which may flow from the increased inequality and intensity of economic and human interaction, they would be more salient were it not for the overwhelming American presence in the Philippines. The “over presence” theory quite properly accounts for American investment and trade as a factor reducing anti-Japanese sentiment. But it has no place for the political, military or cultural presence, which are at least as significant. While there is a strong Filipino tendency to share American cultural values, it is also true that Filipino nationalism for nearly 90 years has struggled with what was called at different stages American imperialism, colonialism, or more recently neo-colonialism. The steady political, economic and military support for the Marcos regime earned it the sobriquet from many of its opponents “the U.S.-Marcos dictatorship”. In 1970 among 200 Filipino students, obviously caught up in the nationalist mood of that time, 72% identified the U.S. as a threat to their country, the highest percentage naming the U.S. among students in an ASEAN country.⁴¹ Only 58% identified Japan as a threat, less than among Singapore students, but higher than among Thai. The respondents were already in the postwar generation and thus had no memory of Japanese military might. But in 1970 the older generation were still quite wary of a militarist revival in Japan.

The crux of the matter is that the Filipino nationalist movement, both Marxist and non-Marxist has been so busy analyzing, criticizing and organizing around the American threat that there has been little time left for Japan. When Jose Ma. Sison (under the pen name Amado Guerrero) wrote Philippine Society and Revolution in 1970 Japanese investment was still only 10% of U.S. holdings in the Philippines, and it received no mention. Four years later when he wrote Specific Characteristics of our People’s War considerably more mention was made of Japan, but not as a threat or an exploiter. The first major Filipino treatment of the Japanese role was by Raul Manglapus, Japan in SE Asia: Collision Course. In it he did raise the spectre of a Japanese threat, but he was writing at the request of the Carnegie Endowment shortly after the Tanaka riots, and was expected to represent views of all SE Asians, not just Filipinos.

Not until the end of the 1970s did there begin to be a Manila-based nationalist literature criticising the growing Japnese role in the Philippines. Ever since the declaration of martial law the government-dominated Manila-centered press had been full of laudatory accounts of the benefits of Japanese investment. But new outlets for expression were found. Renato Constantino’s The Second Invasion in 1979 was the mostcomprehensive treatment at the time, and remains so. He has helped to spawn similar treatments by Sta. Romana, Randolf David, and Eduardo Tadem, all of the University of the Philippines. Tadem’s “The Japanese Presence in the Philippines: A Critical Reassessment”, prepared for an international symposium at Sophia University in Tokyo, is the most recent major analysis.

As early as 1974 ex-Sen. Jovito Salonga—who with Senate colleagues Lorenzo Tanada and Lorenzo Sumulong had stopped ratification of the Japanese treaty in 1972—mentioned the Japanese threat in a lecture on “The Role of the MNCs in Development”, and later helped stimulate the concern of Protestant colleagues in that direction. They together protested the signing of the revised Treaty of Amity, Commerce and Navigation. In 1979 another prominent opposition leader and banker also criticized the Treaty and condemned Japanese economic policy: “Japan clearly intends to make of us sustained suppliers of cheap raw materials and buyers of her own finished products at dictated prices Is Japan to dominate us again? Is this the second invastion,?⁴²

One saw here a pattern not uncommon of attempting to link current criticism of the economic role with dark memories of war.

In 1983 there was formed under the umbrella of the National Councilof Churches of the Philippines a Committee on Philippines-Japan Concerns, which later reconstituted itself as a Foundation. Its projects included the submission of a brief to the Minister of Labor in support of Philippine unions in Japanese corporations. The brief condemned the “neo-colonial pattern” of increasing Japanese investment and credit, and also warned that the government “must not lose sight of the growing resurgence of Japan as a military power in ASia”.⁴³

This warning about the Japanese military build-up found parallels in comments by Tadem and Oonstantino, but it was a tiny voice indeed compared to the chorus of protest about U.S. bases. In the meantime, in addition to an escalating military budget Japan was taking ever so cautious steps for a measured reassertion of a military role in the Philippines. Japanese naval vesels visited Manila, while Filipino officers were invited to Japan for consultation; about 1979 a Japanese naval officer was attached as military attache to the Japanese Embassy.⁴⁴ Marcos was reputed to have sought military aid from Japan during his state visit in 1977; but Prime Minister Fukuda gave him no encouragement.⁴⁵ Japan has also adhered to a strict policy of no weapons exports. “On the other hand, there have been exports of para-military equipment to [ASEAN] nations on a small scale…such as the sale of trucks and jeeps to be used for troop transport, telecommunications equipment to be used by the military, the contracting of private firms to construct…naval ports, etc.”.⁴⁶

Not until 1984, because of the increased Japanese economic assistance that was so crucial for the survival of the Marcos regime, did the Filipino nationalist movement mount protest action. When Prime Minister Nakasone made his first visit to Manila in May, eight progressive organizations signed and circulated a report entitled: “Japan’s Second Philippine Invasion”. Backers included Kilusang Mayo Uno, the labor federation, League of Filipino Students, Cavite-Laguna-Rizal Fishermen’s Association, and other sectoral groups. Fisherman and workers from Navotas, Rizal picketed Nakasone’s hotel,protesting Japanese employers who withold wages and Japanese fishing trawlers which reduce the catch of small fishermen.⁴⁷ After the announcemnt of a new $247 million loan to the Philippines, former Senator Lorenzo Tanada, chairman of the Nationalist Alliance, and Butz Aquino of ATOM and CORD led ademonstration outside the Japanese Embassy, while Reagan, Nakasone and Marcos were burned in effigy.

Two months previously Sen. Tanada had made an unprecedented trip to Tokyo. He had gone with the hope of influencing the Japanese Diet’s deliberations on additional aid for the Philippines. Never before had an opposition Filipino politician attempted to make an impact on the Japanese policy process. Perhaps he did not realize it at the time, but the decision was fraught with controversy, even within the cabinet.⁴⁸ In any case all that Tanada could do was meet with Diet oppositionists, led by Upper House Councillor Hideo Den and his informal Philippine Study Group. Diet members were impressed by his forceful message, but could not buck Liberal Democratic Party discipline. Tanada stressed that if the loan was given, Japan should at least carefully monitor its use.⁴⁹

It appears that the trip was not at Tanada’s initiative; he was invited by a small non-Communist left wing party called Minshu Heiwa Undo, or MPD (Movement for Peace and Democracy). Its arrangements were, of course, essential for a fruitful visit. This party has continued to maintain close contact with the Philippine nationalist movement, as well as with the opposition in South Korea.

While this intervention was unique in Japan, it has been a familiar pattern for opposition politicians from Manila to visit Washington and meet Congressmen. This reemphasizes the point that Philippine preoccupation with the American presence and the pressure inherent therein has had the effect of relieving Japan of a lot of criticism. Thus if U.S. influence in the Philippines should be reduced, Japan would quickly feel the effects. The Tanada visit also calls attention to the function of new kinds ofPhilippine-Japan linkages, which we will treat in the next section.

VI

So far we have talked of trends which have or could increase the negative content of mutual images. But fortunatly there are more positive trends as well. Improved images are likely to be the result of generational change and of increased “people to people” contact.

A. Generational change on the Philippine side means, of course, theincreasing ability to forget the war. The 1983 Gaimusho survey of ASEAN countries provided evidence of such a sharp shift on this question that one is almost inclined to be a bit skeptical, especially since the survey sample included 40% over 34 years of age. Those reporting that they could not forget the bad experiences during the war dropped from 45% in 1979 to 20% in 1983, while those saying that “Japan’s wartime role never disturbed me” rose from 14% to 36%. Responses to both questions put Filipinos in the most positive position towards Japan of any ASEAN country, an unlikely result.

But there are many other indicators of a shift. The pUblication of a book in 1978, Philippine-Nippon Tales, would not have been possible earlier. It was written by a retired professor of English at the University of Philippines, Alfonso Santos, who traveled throughout the country to gather accounts of incidents in which Japanese military were gentle and kind, including those in which they saved Filipino lives. Alfonso recounts 87 stories, of one to four pages in length, with titles such as “The Japanese Family Friend”, “Music Has Charms”, “They Spared My Grandfather”, or “Not All of Them Were Bad”. It is probably well to remember, however, that there are probably many more stories, not recorded, that tell of cruelty and death.

Family socialization often allows even the younger generation to remember the horrors of the war. The schools contribute too. A former JOCV volunteer tells of the Filipino family with whom he was living where an elementary school girl blurted out at the supper table one evening, “I don’t like Japanese!” Her father asked why, and she answered, “Because they did bad things to Filipinos during the war.” On further questioning, the girl said she had learned this at school.⁵⁰ Thus a percipitate change in image is improbable.

A 1985 survey of students at Ateneo de Manila High School by the author found 57.7% of them classifying Japan as “a peace loving country”. Thus a 60% support for that proposition by a generationally representative sample in the Gaimusho survey may have been a bit high. But there is no question that moods are changing.

Generation change on the Japanese side may in some cases create ayouthful arrogance without historical perspective, since so little about the war is taught in public schools. But a massive study of 3829 students in 44 high schools across Japan in 1984 revealed an image pattern that should have favorable implications for the Philippines.⁵¹ One question revealed the heavily Western orientation of Japanese youth. When asked, “For which part of the world do you have close feelings?”, 46.9% answered Europe and North America and only 28.8%, Asia, out of which 24% said they felt close to China. Only 1.6% chose SE Asia. While this last figure must be especially disappointing for people from ASEAN countries, at least the overall response would reduce the tendency to feel, as in the older generation, that a society’s worth was measured by its Ajia den to. One cause of Japanese disdain for Filipinos is thus being removed by generation change.

Furthermore, the ahistorical arrogance that one might have feared did not appear to be present. When asked, “Do you think that Japanese are regarded kindly by other Asians?”, only 12.8% said “yes”, while 56.4% said “no”, and 27.2%, “don’t know”. The “no’s” were asked to explain their answer and the two most frequently chosen explanations were, “because Japanese have strong superior feelings toward Asian people”, and “because Japan invaded Asia in the past”. The awareness of a gap was also found in response to the question, “Do you think Japan is really an Asian country?” Nearly 62% said “no” and only 28%, “yes”. Confidence was not lacking, but it did not seem to spawn blind arrogance. While 72% thought that Japan was the leader in Asia in the fields of economics, science and technology, and another 20% saw Japan as leader in all fields, 2/3 admitted that Japan took advantage of Asians in the course of her relationships with the region. And when asked to choose a statement that best expressed their views on the textbook revision controversy, nearly half remarked, “Because the historical facts seemed to be distorted by the authorized textbooks, it is only natural to have criticisms from foreign countries which actually experienced damage during the war”. Less than 12% chose defensively nationalistic comments.

Despite the initial disinterest in Asia, especially beyond China, an overwhelming 72% agreed when asked if they thought it was important to increase friendship and mutual understanding with Asia. Explanations for this answer were mostly sentimental or ideological, but a large minority were quite pragmatic, e.g. “in order to recognize accurately the Japanese position in Asia”.

If this is an accurate cross section of Japanese youth’s images of Asia, then generational change will indeed improve the relationship. In fact, the attitudinal shift both facilitates and is fueled by the new phenomena of “people to people” relations, the second major factor to contribute to more positive mutual images.

B. Some types of “people to people” exchanges are newer than others. The first, and older, type was more likely to receive government assistance or at least be encouraged by government officials, for it complemented government policy.

The “people to people” approach was first launched by the Japanese government itself in 1965 with the establishemnt of the Japan OVerseas Cooperation Volunteers . In fact, when it began, there were several provinces in the Philippines where it was still regarded as unsafe for Japanese visitors. Idealistic, well-trained youth were an appropriate “advance column” for the Japanese return to the Philippines.

Over the years the Philippine contingent of JOCV has become the largest in the world, with 98 volunteers resident in 1984.⁵² (Thailand and Malaysia are the only other ASEAN countries where JOCV is active). The size of the program was probably determined by Japanese priorities, by the initial ease of contact in English (though all volunteers are now trained in a Philippine language), and the proverbial Filipino hospitality to foreigners.

Some volunteers go primarily intent on aChieving a particular goal of assistance—usually those with highly technical training—while others are looking for an “intercultural experience” or simply “to make friends”.⁵³

The success of the program is measured in part by the fact that after nearly 700 volunteers have come and gone, Filipinos do not remember any particularly unpleasant incident. More positively, nearly 10% of the Japanese volunteers have married Filipinos.

Within a few years after JOCV began operating in the Philippines, a private organization with government assistance also began to bring in young Japanese agriculturists to provide technical assistance, and to train young Filipinos in Japan. The groups’ name was “Organization for Industrial, Spiritual and Cultural Advancement”, OISCA, founded in 1961 by Rev. Yonosuke Nakano, leader of a post-war religious sect, Ananai-kyo. By 1983 336 agricultural experts had been sent to the Philippines by OISCA and 245 Filipinos had been trained at OISCA centers in Japan. (Nearly twice that number of Malaysians had attended OISCA training). The tone of OISCA activities is set by its present president, Dr. Yoshiko Nakano, who warns that “materialistic approaches to the solution of the [North-South] problem will only result in growing differences and animosities rather than harmonious relations”, and thus stresses the spiritual dimension.⁵⁴

Miss Nakano has assured continued Japanese government funding for her projects by organizing a parliamentary support group, which in 1983 numbered 230, all LOP. In 1978 this group had included seven members of the Fukuda cabinet. In the Philippines OISCA organized a national chapter, which now has 19 branches with seven rural development and youth training projects in Mindanao, Negros, Palawan, Mindoro and Luzon. In 1982 Prime Minister Virata inducted the new chapter officers; Gov. Arsenio Villaroza of Mindoro Occidental was president. Many OISCA projects were associated with the KKK; in fact, in October 1983 certificates of appreciation for OISCA were presented by the First Lady in Malacanang.⁵⁵ Obviously this is a type of “people to people” exchange which is hardly disruptive of official relations.

Japanese Rotary clubs began projects in the Philippines from the early 1970s. By 1984 there were 60 World Community Service Projects funded by Japanese and implemented by Philippine clubs. Fire engines, used clothes, medical instrument and supplies, “sanitary facilities”, scholarships and sponsorship of needy children through the Christian Children’s Welfare Fund were among the projects.⁵⁶ Japanese Rotarians frequently went to the Philippines to inspect the projects and to get acquainted, often on the golf course, with their Filipino brethern. In addition to the WCS Projects there were many more arranged on an ad hoc basis between Japanese and Philippine clubs, of which there is no central record. Some projects were rather strategically located, such as the one providing sanitation for a school in Navotas, Rizal, where fisherman had frequently protested Japanese encroachment. The entire program was clearly useful in strengthening ties between upper middle class men in the two societies, contributing to more positive mutual images at that level.

A somewhat similar effort was launched in the late 1970s by Prime Minister Fukuda to carry out his proposal for more “heart to heart contact” with ASEAN countries. Recognizing that 26,000 students from the ASEAN region had at one time or another studied in Japanese schools (with another 54,000 having undegone “training”), Fukuda invited ASEAN alumni to a reunion in 1974, and it became an annual affair. In 1977 this group was organized into the ASEAN Council of Japan (ASCOJA), spurred in part by the urging of some ASEAN alumni. And after Fukuda’s ASEAN tour of that year, during which some ASEAN a1umni organized welcome parties for him, a Japanese support group was also formed, the Japan Solidarity Committee for Asian Alumni. Fukuda is the honorary chairman, and for many years the chairman was Shigeo Nagana, president of the Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry. In 1984 JAASCA launched a scholarship fund with an endowment of Y400 million, designed to bring “junior leaders” to Japan from ASEAN for a few months—patterned after Eisenhower Fellowships, it was said.

The current head of ASCOJA is Leocadio de Asis, a wartime ryugakusei from the Philippines. De Asis, a lawyer and businessman, also heads the Philippine Federation of Japan Alumni, an ASCOJA affiliate. (It is not, however, the only association of Japanese university alumni in the Philippines).⁵⁷ Former Ambassador Jose Laurel III has also been active in ASCOJA,and will, in fact, be in charge of the selection of JAASCA fellows from the Philippines.

The whole range of ASCOJA and JAASCA activity has, in fact, relied very heavily on the leadership of the wartime ryugakusei, partly, of course, because they include senior people in the political and economic circles of their respective countries. One JAASCA publication about ryugakusei caught in Hiroshima in August 1945⁵⁸ is quite nostaglic and helps describe the context in which these old ties are being revived: “Did the government achieve its objective with the SE Asian Ryugakusei? In fact, it can be said the Ryugakusei have made a strong bond of friendship between their mother countries and Japan. The most distinguishing characteristic of all Ryugakusei is that they support Japan strongly in their respective countries’ trade relationship with Japan. It may have been in the Philippines that the Ryugakusei received the worst treatment after their return home but they hold feelings of affection and respect toward Japan and her people. Perhaps a little unexpectedly their experiences in Japan proved very beneficial in their careers”. Several are, in fact, engaged in joint ventures with Japanese business.

These, and a number of other organizational exchange programs, e.g. Lions, former Manila residents, and others, promote comraderie within the framework of existing political-economic ties between Japan and the Philippines. Given the ages of most Japanese involved, there is still considerable paternalism in their approach to most Filipinos.

The second type of “people to people” relations is of a very different character, with the possibility of a much more profound impact on mutual images, since it involves both Japanese and Filipinos breaking stereotypes that each have held of the other. This type of relationship frequently includes as well rather direct criticism of the policies of both governments. These activities are initiated by those Bishop Julio Lebayan calls “humanists”.

The small Christian church in Japan, in both its Catholic and Protestant manifestations, has had a disproportionately large role in these activities. In fact, the Japanese Committee for Philippine Concerns (JCPC), which fulfills a very weak coordinating function for many of these groups, is church supported. Under the JCPC umbrella are Catholic, Protestant and Buddhist organizations, as well as labor unions, consumer, human rights and environmental groups, and some small but quite creative publications and dramatic groups. It will only be possible to describe a few in any detail. The perspective of this account will be primarily from the Japanese end because in Japan such groups have been better funded and thus better able to take initiatives than their Philippine counterparts, even though without a positive Philippine response the linkages established would not survive. In any case, the assymetric language barrier, which we have already described, favors Japanese leadership. These activities have been initiated not just in Tokyo, but in several Japanese cities: Nagoya and Osaka are particularly active.

Fr. Noel Keizo Yamada, S.J., a professor at Jochi Daigaku (Sophia Univ.), went to the Philippines for the fist time in 1975 for a Church conference. Afterwards he was taken by a Filipino Jesuit to Mindanao and was shown the site of the Kawasaki Steel sintering plant, soon after construction began. He found that this Y62 billion Japanese investment was to displace some 2,000 people from their land and was to spew forth extremely toxic pollution. In fact, about the same time in Chiba—just across Tokyo Bay from Japan’s megalopolis—while citizens’ groups were fighting Kawasaki pollution there which had killed scores of patients, the steel company attempted to reassure them: “Don’t worry, because we are moving those dirty plants to Mindanao”.⁵⁹

The Chiba Citizen’s Anti-Pollution Movement, then under Communist Party influence was suing Kawasaki, but was not aware of the Philippine scene. Fr. Yamada, after further investigation in Mindanao, and the assistance of PARC and some Tokyo University researchers, brought the plight of Filipinos before the Chiba citizens, and persuaded them to adopt the slogan “Don’t Make Mindanao a Second Chiba~” (The concern with the Philippine situation was so great, in fact, that since the Communists in the movement seemed uninterested in that dimension, the Anti-Pollution Movement chose new leadership). Kawasaki tried to pretend that they were actually being welcomed by Filipinos in Mindanao, while the opposition there was actually being crushed, with two leaders apparently kidnapped. The corporation’s initial response to Filipinos was, in essence, “since we are helping you to develop, why compain to us about pollution”. One company official asked, “Isn’t going barefoot worse than pollution of the environment?” But Fr. Yamada was sufficiently successful in getting the Philippine facts before the Japanese public, through Asahi and Mainichi, and to Filipinos in Manila that eventually Kawasaki was forced to increase its expenditures on pOllution control devices. The Filipinos in Mindanao were amazed at the committed action of Japanese in Chiba; and as a result both reached a new level of mutual understanding.⁶⁰

In this issue the Catholic Council for Justice and Peace was quite active. Other Catholic initiatives were also multiplying. In 1981 the Association of Major Religious Superiors in Japan began to send groups of 25-30 sisters to the Philippines for two weeks of exposure to the realities of the Third World. They have thus begun to see Japan from a Third World perspective, and since many are high school teachers, the exposure tours have had some impact on Catholic high schools.⁶¹

At the local level a parish in Ohnomichi, Hiroshima-ken, has established an exchange with Gen. Nakar parish in Infanta; over five years there were four trips to the Philippines, and one visit to Japan, at Japanese expense. But Ohnomichi has no “aid program” for Gen. Nakar. The parish priest in Gen. Nakar was obviously very progressive, having been the previous director of the Luzon Secretariat for Social Action. Since many Catholic people in Gen. Nakar were protesting a port, dam, airport and other Japanese-aided construction projects because of the way in which the land had been acquired, some in the small Ohnomichi parish had strong reservations about the exchange. They feared that it would appear that the Japanese Catholics were “anti-government”. But this was an exchange that seemed to avoid the paternalism that often characterized older projects.

On the Protestant side there were also a variety of exhanges and cooperative action. In Tokyo in 1983 a joint consultation between the National Council of Churches of the Philippine and its Japanese counterpart, discussed prostitution, pollution, Japanese investment, and “the challenge of mission”. The chaplain at Rikkyo University, Rev. Christopher Ohgo, has taken about 50 studnets every summer for the last several years to a work camp in Sagada, Mt. Province, with exposure tours as well to the slums of Tondo and the factories of Navotas. The Philippine Episcopal Church has sent trainees for some time to the Asian Rural Institute in Japan. But while some inter-church contacts wtih Japan have been going on for years, Filipinos are impressed with the proliferation of Japanese Philippine support groups since 1983. Their gage of increased activity is the frequency of invitations to Filipinos to speak in Tokyo and elsewhere.⁶²

There were also exchanges in the labor field. The major federations, from left to right, were not active, though Domei had formal links with the government-sponsored Trade Union Congress of the Philippines. Despite the progressive rhetoric even Sohyo has shown almost no concern for the Philippines. Thus contact with Kilusang Mayo Uno, the largest Philippine federation, which was anti-Marcos, was primarily through smaller unions, such as the National Union of General Workers, based on small and medium firms.

Over the past few years there have been from 10 to 20 visits by KMU representatives to Japan, usually invited by Christian groups.⁶³ In July 1984 a group of Japanese labor movement and Philippine support group representatives visited the head office of Mitsubishi Corporation to protest against the illegal dismissal of union leaders at Interasia, a Mltsubishi subsidiary in the Bataan Export Processing Zone, which triggered a strike during which the Zone police assaulted workers. The Mitsubishi official who met the protesters claimed that the dispute had “already been settled”, and offered the additional comment that “Filipinos are poor because they are lazy”, according to a protest spokesperson.⁶⁴ This was a type of labor action relatively new to Japan which earned deep gratitude when reported to Filipino workers.

Certainly the most inovative way in which young Japanese have attempted to relate to the Philippines in recent years is expressed in the Ajia Idobata-kai, or Asian Well Society. In 1980 a Waseda University anthropology student, Miss Mikiko Wada, went to the Philippines, guided to Agusan Province by a staff member in the Ecumenical Rural Health Project. She was particularly impressed with the importance of clean water as a key to health, and talked to Japanese friends about her concern on return. She soon learned that in nearby Chiba Prefecture there was a traditional method of well drilling still used that might be “appropriate technology” for Filipino peasants, who could not afford the most modern methods. (She had not read Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful)⁶⁵ Through mutual friends she was introduced to Mr. Harutsugu Kondo, one of the few remaining practitioners of this ancient skill, which utilizes bamboo poles and very little metal machinery. Mr. Kondo had retired from his trade in 1955, and then from farming altogether in 1970 and was working as a security guard. But after an appropriate amount of sake,⁶⁶ Miss Wada persuaded him that he should teach his skill to Filipino farmers. In 1981 she returned to Agusan to tell the farmers what she discoverd, and they expressed great interest in kazusa-bori, the traditional techology.

Meanwhile an independent film maker had become interested in kazusa-bori, because of the display at the Chiba Prefectural Museum, where Mr. Kondo worked, and produced a film about the process. When shown to classes at Sophia University, a number of students became quite interested. There was such enthusiasm, in fact, that funds were raised to send Mr. Kondo, the film maker and the film to Agusan. The Filipino audiences were fascinated, and Mr. Kondo, in a preliminary feasibility study, found that the sandy soils in the area he visited were suitable for kazusa-bori. Hearing this report on his return, optimism fueled the establishment of the Asian Well Society at Sophia University. In 1982 Mr. Kondo again went to Agusan, to do more carefulresearch and to begin to train local farmers. Returning to Mindanao a third time in July 1983, along with several student members of the Society, Mr. Kondo began the drilling; the first well was completed in late August, and soon the Filipino farmers were able to complete new wells on their own.⁶⁷

Just at this peak of activity, however, when more young Japanese were being trained by Mr. Kondo, a split occured in the Society. It was to a
The transfer of technology proceeded, however, without the Asian Well Society. Mr. Kondo went to Thailand with OISCA for a brief tour, and a student he trained went to Malaysia with JOCV to teach kazusa-bori. In 1986 he returned to the Philippines to begin a project under Rotary sponsorship in Bago, Negros. His technology had practically died in Chiba, but will live on in the Philippines. Mr. Kondo claims that one of his wells will last for 50 years. Though he still speaks no English, the message he has given to many Filipinos is certainly a positive one. Miss Wada does not regret what she started.

Though less constructive, in any concrete sense, the story of Rutsuki Fujisaki is more poignant, and will certainly have a lasting impact on the images of many Filipinos about Japan. The daughter of a Japanese pastor and graduate in social welfare from the Japan Lutheran Theological Seminary, Rutsuki went to the Philippines in 1982 to enroll in the community development program at the University of the Philippines. (She had attended a work camp in Botolan, Zambales a few years before, and had long considered returning). During Holy Week in April 1983 she returned to Botolan with UP classmates to revisit the Botolan Social Action Center under the direction of Sister Fe Villanueva. On Saturday afternoon they went swimming. Very quickly an undertow pulled out to sea one of the Filipinas and Rutsuki, who was a strong swimmer, tried to rescue her. But Rutsuki too was pulled under, and before some of the strong fishermen nearby were able to launch their small boat, she had drowned; resucitation efforts faled. For someone who had been so kind and so helpful, it was a very special loss. Said the Dean of St. Andrew’s Seminary, where she boarded, “As a Filipino I would like to point out that Rutsuki has presented a different image of the Japanese to the Filipino.

Older Filipinos know of the image of a Japanese soldier or kamikaze [sic]. Most Filipinos now know of the Japanese tourists. But these images of the Japanese are not the same as the image that Rutsuki has projected. For Rutsuki has come to extend service;…to love the Philippines and to make many friends… [She was] a Japanese who gave her life for Filipinos”.⁶⁸

A visitor to Botolan several weeks later was told a remarkable story by the villagers. “One day after her death, more than 1000 fish were caught in the fishing nets of the village, though around a dozen fish was a usual haul. It was the biggest catch that the villagers had ever experienced—and they believed that it was a miracle due to Rutsuki”.⁶⁹ A new image of Japan had become incorporated into Filipino folk religion.

VII

In conclusion, we must reemphasize the necessity of looking at the cultural implications of the historical legacy as well as at socio-economic factors determining national images. The “over presence” thesis of Japanese economists trying to explain anti-Japanese sentiment in SE Asia, even without incorporating the cultural dimension, would have to be expanded to include the movement of persons as well as of yen and trade goods. Tourists certainly may contribute to “over presence”. Though this theory has only been applied to an effort to understand attitudes toward Japan, it is also true that the overpresence of Filipino “entertainers” in Japan produces negative images of the Philippines. In any case the likelihood that Japanese presence in the Philippines will continue to displace the American could produce attitudes that would validate that thesis. But in the next generation such a displacemnt may still not be sufficient to remove the U.S. from the role of main target of Philippine nationalism.

We have noted that increased inequality facilitates the growth of negative images, even as generational change helps to erase harsh memories and thus contribute to improved images. But it would be very difficult to say which trend is stronger. And even as Filipino wartime images recede, their revival is capable of being triggered by relatively minor incidents. There’ is no evidence that since 1972 domestic political controversy has motivated Filipino attacks on Japan, such as the “Tanaka riots” in Indonesia, though this may well have been a factor in the non-ratification of the Treaty of Amity, Commerce and Navigation before ma~l law. But this could become a factor in the future. The opposition in Japan made a feeble effort to criticize Nakasone for his late-in-the-day increase of aid to Marcos in 1984, but inspite of the great growth in interest in the last few years, the Philippines has not yet become an issue in Japan salient enough to allow any group to make significant capital out of support or opposition to Japanese-Philippine policy, another dimension of inequality.

The impact of the new type of “people to people” linkages, which challenges the status quo, is also practically impossible to quantify. But it is likely that their power to shape mutual images will be much greater than the number of people or the strength of the organizations involved would indicate. These exchanges involve highy participant segments of each society, with a strong moral framework for their action, and with relatively good access to communication media. The nature of these linkages, with primarily Japanese initiatives, also illustrates the pervasive impact of inequality.

The second type of “people to people” exchange is likely to be an especially potent force for improved images because neither war guilt nor a desire for more trade or investment seem to be the primary motivation, as with so much earlier activity. A sincere pursuit of peace, human rights and social justice or the application of appropriate technology jointly by Filipinos and Japanese will surely improve the mutual images of the two people more, just as side effect, than an endeavor which consciously sets out to do just that. If these exchanges continue to grow, and acquire an increasing mutuality of spirit, that is the most hopeful dimension of Philippine-Japanese relations now apparent.

Endnotes

¹ Karl Oeutsch, The Nerves of Government (N.Y. Free Press, 1963).

² The Image (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959).

³ There is a considerable literature on Japan-SE Asian relations some of which helps to provide background for this paper: Bernard Gordon, “Japan, the US & SE Asia”, Foreign Affairs, (April 1978), 579-600; Donald Hellman, “Japan and SE Asia: Continuity Amidst Change”, Asian Survey, XIX: 12 (Dec. 1979), 1189-1198; S. Ichimura, “Japan and SE Asia”, Asian Survey, XX (July 1980), 754-62; Frank Langdon, “Japanese Policy toward SE Asia”, in M. Zacher and R. S. Milne, eds., Conflict and Stability in SE Asia, (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974), 327-354; Raul Manglapus, Japan in SE Asia: Collision Course (NY: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1976); Lawrence Olson, Japan in Postwar Asia (NY: Praeger, 1970); Josefa Saniel, “Japan’s Thrust in SE Asia in the Sixties”, paper read at Seminar on ‘SE Asia in the Modern World’, Institute fur Asienkunde, Hamburg, Germany, April 1970, 44 pp; M. Shinohara, The Japanese Economy and SE Asia (Tokyo: IDE, 1977); Toru Yano, “The New Era of ASEAN & Japan”, SOlidarity, X:4 (July-Aug. 1976), 3-5; L. Yoshihara, Japanese Investment in SE Asia (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1978). On the question of images in the relationship the literature, more limited, includes: Renato Constantino, “Third World View of Japan”, Journal of Contemporary Asia, IX:3 (1979), 362-9; Willard Elsbree, “Japan and ASEAN in the 1980s”, SE Asian Affairs 1981, 49-61; T. Ikehata, “ASEAN Reluctant to Accept Japanese Imposition”, Business Japan, XXII: 10 (Oct. 1977), 36-38; Sumiko Iwao and Shigeki Hagiwara, Zai-Nichi Ryugakusei no Tai-Nichi Imeji [Images of Japan of resident foreign students] (Tokyo: Shimbun Kenkyjo Nenpo, Keio University, 1978, 1979); Yasumasa Tanaka, “A Cross-CUltural Study of National Stereotypes Held by American and Japanese College Graduate Subjects”, Japanese Psychological Research, IV: 2(1962), 65-78; K. Toba, “Toward Genuine Exchanges with SE Asia”, Asian Pacific Community, 11 (Fall 1978)” 69-77; Toru Yano, “SE Asia: A Kaleidoscope of Japanese Images”, Kyoto Lhiversity Center for SE Asian Studies, Sept. 1975, Discussion Paper no. 80; and Hiros~li Wagatsuma, “Some Cultural Assumptions among the Japanese”, Japan Quarterly. (1984) 371-9. The specific literature on Japan-Philippine relations is also limited; included are: E. R. Sta. Romana, “Dependency and Philippine-Japanese Economic Relations”, Japan Interpreter, XII: 2 (Spring 1978), 234-47; Renato Constantino, The Second Invasion: Japan in the Philippines (Manila: 1979); Akira Takahashi, “Firipin to Nihon”, Kokusai Keizai, 152 (1976); Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Firipin to Nihon (1958); Yoshiyuki Tsurumi, Ajia 0 Shiru Tameni [In order to know Asia], (Tokyo: Chikama Books, 1981); Yoshiyuki Tsurumi, Banana to Nihonjin (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1982); Tsuneo Ayabe and Akira Nagazumi, eds., Motto Shiritai Firi in [I want to know more about the Philippines], (Tokyo: Kobundo, 1982 ; Julio Lebayan, “Firipin”, Sekai, 457 (Dec. 1983), 169-173; Unda Guilatco, “Japan in the Philippines: 1947-1977”, AMPO, IX:2 (July-Nov. 1977), 72-81.

⁴ Trade: Takeo Tsuchiya, “The Japanese Sphere of Influence: Multinational Investment in Asia”, AMPO, XVI: 1-2 (1984), 58. Investment: Japan, Ministry of Finance, reported at 11th Conference of Japan-Philippine Economic Cooperation Committees, Manila, November 8-9, 1984.

⁵ Japan International Cooperation Agency, Annual Reports, 1984, p. 410 [in Japanese].

⁶ International Conference on Human Values, Survey in 13 Countries of Human Values, p. 27 (Tokyo 1980).

⁷ Interview with Takushi Ohno, Tokyo, April 4, 1985.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Quoted in Elpidio Sta. Romana, “Dependency and the Philippine-Japan Treaty of Amity, Commerce and Navigation: Focus on Trade and Investment”, MA Thesis, University of the Philippines, 1976, p. 10.

¹⁰ The teaching of the Japanese language began at the University of the Philippines in 1960, and in the next two decades course enrollment in the first semester rose to more than 100. By 1983 six other university campuses also enrolled more than 100 students in Japanese language courses. Even at the University of the Philippines, with a major graduate program in Asian Studies, enrollment dropped off sharply however, in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th semesters. Not until 1975 was “intensive Japanese” offered. From 1968 the Japan Information and CUltural Center, attached to the Embassy, also offered language classes. By 1983 more than 300 were enrolled for the first quarter. But their enrollment also dropped sharply in the more advanced classes. (See Josefa Saniel, “Japan Studies in the Philippines: Developments and Prospects”, [Asian Center, University of the Philippines, Quezon City, 1984, Occasional Papers, Series 11, No. 1]). It appeared that the incentive was not strong enough to lead Filipino students to mastery of Japanese on the basis of study in Manila, and very few went to Japan for the requisite 1-2 years of full-time language study.

¹¹ Interview, Feb. 13, 1985, Manila.

¹² Interview, Feb. 13, 1985, Manila.

¹³ Eliseo Quirino, A Day to Remember (Manila, 1961), 251.

¹⁴ Renato Constantino, The Second Invasion: Japan in the Philippines (Manila, 1979), 26.

¹⁵ Philipine Collaboration in World War II, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967 , p. 56.

¹⁶ Ibid., p. 57.

¹⁷ Theodore Friend, Between Two Empires: The ordeal of the Philippines 1929-1946” (New Haven: Yale Un1vers1ty Press, 1965 , p. 232.

¹⁸ Interview, Manila, Feb. 13, 1985.

¹⁹ Bottom spot was shared, somewhat surprisingly, by Malaysia, perhaps because of primary Japanese contact with an Anglicized elite. See Nippon Reserach Center, Ltd., “A Summary Report on the Syndicated Study on Japanese Perceptions of and Attitudes Toward Foreign Countries”, Feb. 1984.

²⁰ Japan Times, May 2, 1985.

²¹ Interview, Feb. 18, 1985, Manila.

²² Hiroo Suzuki , “Uberalizing Textbook Screening”, Keizai orai, Oct. 1982, translated in Japan Echo, IX:4 (1982), p. 23.

²³ Calculated from Japan Customs Statistics, in Eduardo Tadem, “The Japanese Presence in the Philippines: A Critical Re-Assessment”, Third World Studies Center, Univ. of the Philippines, Jan. 1983, 16.

²⁴ Central Bank of the Philippines, in Ibid., 19.

²⁵ Japan, Minister of Justice, Annual Report of Immigration Statistics.

²⁶ KDD International Telephone and Telegraph, Annual Report of Overseas Telegraph and Telephone.

²⁷ See Kiyoshi Kojima, Ja anese Direct Forei n Investment: A Model of Multinational Business Operations, Tokyo: Charles Tuttle, 1978 , ch. 8; and Shigekazu Matsumoto, “Nihon no Tonan Ajia keizai enjo to seiji rikigaku” [Japan’s economic assistance to SE Asia and its poltical dynamics], in Nihon Kokusai Seiji Gakkai, ed., Kokusai Keizai no Seijigaku (Tokyo: 1978).

²⁸ Gaimusho, Joho bunka kyoku, Kaigai kohoka, ASEAN goka koku tai nichi yoron chosa [Foreign Ministry CUltural Information Office, OVerseas Publication Section, “ASEAN Five Country Opinion Survey on Japan”] (Nov. 1983) .

²⁹ K. Nitz, “National Power and SE Asia in Japanese International Image: An Exploration”, Asian Profile, X:4 (August 1982), 365-386.

³⁰ S. Eto, “The Need for Magnanimity”, Seiron, (Nov. 1982), translated in Japan Echo, IX: 4 (1982), p. 41.

³¹ Keiichiro Kobori, “The Pitfalls of Easy Compromise”, Shokun (Oct. 1982), translated in Japan Echo, IX:4 (1982), 50.

³² Kimitada Miwa, “Not Another Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere”, Solidarity (1983), No. 1, 17.

³³ Interview, Feb. 13, 1985.

³⁴ Interview, Nov. 16, 1984, Mnai1a.

³⁵ “ASEAN Five Country Opinion Survey on Japan,” Question 10.

³⁶ Interview, April 10, 1985, Tokyo.

³⁷ Japan, Ministry of Justice, Annual Report of Dnmigration Statistics.

³⁸ Japan Times, Oct. 19, 1984.

³⁹ Betty Swain, “Kyodan Woman Works for Asian Women’s Refuge Cent er”, Kyodan Newsletter, No. 191 (Jan. 20, 1985), 6.

⁴⁰ Japan Times, Jan. 11, 1985; May 26, 1985.

⁴¹ Yasumasa Tanaka, “Pacific Basin Nations: A Cross-National Value-Attitude Study”, paper presented at the Canadian Society for Asian Studies, Fredericton, N.B., May 1977, table 7.

⁴² Tito Guingona, “Land of Bondage”, speech delivered at the lhiversity of Santo Tomas, July 27, 1979.

⁴³ Letter to Minister Op1e from Rev. Toribio Cajiuat, Spokesman, Committee on Philippine-Japan Concrns, August 26, 1983.

⁴⁴ Tadem, “The Japanese Presence in the Philippines”, p. 12.

⁴⁵ New York Times, April 28, 1977.

⁴⁶ Research Institute for Peace and Security, Asian Security 1981 (Tokyo 1918), 119. The Institute is partially government funded.

⁴⁷ Amadis Ma. Guerrero, “The Japanese Threat”, Sunday Malaya, January 20, 1985, 14.

⁴⁸ Interview, Shintaro Ishihara, MP, Tokyo, April 10, 1985.

⁴⁹ Business Day, April 9, 1984, 3.

⁵⁰ Interview with Yosuke Hasegawa, Tokyo, April 9, 1985.

⁵¹ Kazuo Shiroto, Masahiko Kurata, Aya Etsuda, Yoshitaka Murai, and Jun Yoshioka “Survey of High School Students Awareness of Asia, 1984” [in Japanese]

⁵² Japan International Cooperation Agency, Annual Report, 1984.

⁵³ Interviews, May 24, 1985.

⁵⁴ OISCA Bulletin Board, No. 8, July 1978.

⁵⁵ OISCA Bulletin Board, No. 37, October 1983.

⁵⁶ Rotary no Tomo, No. 22 (Spring 1985), 20ff.

⁵⁷ For a full listing see Wilfrido Villacorta, “Japanese Presence in the Philippines: Filipino Reactions”, paper presented to the Confernece on Japan-ASEAN Relations, Japan Centre for International Exchange, Oiso, Japan, June 29-July 1, 1984.

⁵⁸ JAASCA The Day A Sun Fell to the Earth: Foreign Students from SE Asia and the Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima (Tokyo [ca.1984], 51.

⁵⁹ Noel Yamada, S.J., “Japanese Responsibility in our Times: Facing the Invasion of Big Business into the Third World”, Sophia Economic Review (1979), 170. See also his “The Japanese TNCs and the Transfer of Technology to Asian Developing Countries”, paper presented to an international conference sponsored by International Federation of Catholic Universities, Lisbon, Portugal, Oct. 13, 1983.

⁶⁰ Kawasaki’s pressure on Sophia, however, halting gifts and refusing to hire graduates, nearly cost Yamada his teaching position. He was saved by the intervention of the Jesuit Superior in Rome. (Interview, April 10, 1985, Tokyo).

⁶¹ Interview with Sister Filo Hirota, April 3, 1985; Tokyo. Sister Hirota spent some time as an assistant to Bishop Julio Lebayen in the Office of Human Development in Manila, which is under the Federation of Asian Bishop’s Conference. In that position she was an important link between Japan and the Philippines on human rights, social justice and pollution issues.

⁶² Interview with Danny Ocampo, chairman, Japan-Philippine Foundation, Feb. 12, 1985, Manila.

⁶³ Interview with Ben Watanabe, NUGW, April 11, 1985, Tokyo.

⁶⁴ Rodo Joho, No. 12 (1984), 6.

⁶⁵ Interview with Miss Wada, March 20, 1985, Tokyo.

⁶⁶ Interview with Harutsugu Kondo, Yokota, Chiba, May 18, 1985.

⁶⁷ Asian Well Society, Asian Well Society : Its Activity and Development [in Japanese] (no date); Idobata News, in Japanese No. 13, Oct. 1984.

⁶⁸ Rutsuki, Her Departure (Tokyo, 1985), 154-5.

⁶⁹ Ibid., 206.

This research was made possible by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, from the University of Windsor and from the Joint Centre for Modern East Asia, University of Toronto York University. The invaluable assistance of Mr. Sueo Sudo, Mr. Satoshi Tanahashi, Mrs. Yoko Marushima, Miss Chieko Nabetani and Mr. Brad Zubyk is gratefully appreciated. The cooperation of numerous Filipinos and Japanese who granted interviews and provided materials was also essential for the endeavor, but for the most part they prefer to remain anonymous.

Greater excitement and greater instability in Philippine politics than at any time in the history of the republic marked developments in 1983-84. But what is as yet unclear is whether the excitement is merely the accompaniment of impending leadership change within fairly persistent structures or whether it marks the beginning of fundamental alterations in the nature of the whole political system. As in any political community, the more intense the conflicts within the elite, the more likely that there will be basic changes in elite-mass relations as well, though other factors, for example, the pre-existing structure of power or the nature of foreign intervention, also impinge on the outcome. Poorly institutionalized systems, such as the Philippines, are especially vulnerable to the break-up of the ruling coalition in the succession process, which already seems to have been set in train.

This kind of breakup would have two ongoing causes: increasing doubts about future stability because of the failing health of the supreme patron and diminishing opportunities for profit within the economic elite. As economic conditions worsened after 1979 those opportunities diminished most rapidly for those outside the narrow circle of political favour. And even for some originally within that circle, the costs to the regime of inefficiency and corruption forced cutbacks and contributed to the infighting.

The Assassination of Benigno Aquino

The fatal shooting of Benigno Aquino, Jr. at the Manila airport on 21 August 1983, brought the succession struggle in Philippine politics to world-wide attention and greatly accelerated the elite breakup. To understand that event one must first try to appreciate Aquino’s motives for return. Then we can examine how it was perceived and handled in Manila.

President Marcos’ brief hospitalization before his triumphal state visit to the United States in September 1982 had intensified speculation about his longevity. Benigno Aquino in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was on the telephone to Manila almost every day, must have received indications that the event was sobering to the President himself. He did appoint his wife to the Executive Committee, which had been given interim powers in case of the death or incapacity of the President. In any case, Aquino began to contemplate returning home. But the state visit boosted Marcos’ morale and despite the rigorous pace he followed, his health seemed to improve thereafter.

The lesson that Benigno (Ninoy) Aquino took from the Marcos state visit only reinforced his experiences ever since Reagan took office. His hope of American backing as an alternative to Marcos – typical of many in the elite opposition – had been dashed. His Washington connections had been largely swept away by the Reagan tide. The signing in June 1983 of a new five-year bases agreement on terms more favourable to Marcos than before may have confirmed his pessimism on this score. Thus he was thrown back on his own resources, good rapport with the world press, a crowd-pleasing charismatic appeal, a strong sense of his political destiny, a streak of bravery, and his Filipino friends. His timing was not significantly delayed by his second meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria with Mrs Marcos, in May 1983. After a renewed effort to buy his co-operation had failed, Aquino later told friends, Imelda took on a vehement, bitter tone. She warned him gravely of plots against his life even “beyond the control of the President”. But Aquino thought assassination unlikely, perhaps because of American assurances. Ultimately Aquino chose to return home, despite considerable contrary advice, because of an almost naive faith in the prospect of rational dialogue with President Marcos. New reports of his deteriorating health in early August made the need for dialogue more urgent to Aquino, who hoped that a man who felt closer to the end of his life would be more philosophical.

The bloody scene on the tarmac of the Manila airport is all too vivid in many memories. But the true nature of the event remains behind so many screens that it may be years before we fully understand it. Still, informed speculation about what happened, and why, is a necessary prelude to assessing present and future consequences of the shocking murder.

It was a shock even to those familiar with Philippine politics, not because there were no fears for Aquino’s safety, but because the manner of the killing was so brazen, and so calculated to focus blame on someone in government.

The Filipino opposition now blames Marcos, while the U.S. Government absolves him personally. In any case, if Marcos did authorize the killing, it may not have been the same man with a well-earned reputation for tactical genius in politics. There is widespread speculation that the President has suffered for several years from systemic lupus, an incurable disease which progressively affects different organs, including the kidneys. The impact of lupus on the brain can produce paranoia, which could have helped to explain some of the President’s unusual statements in 1983. One quote from his 22 August news conference has never been clarified; said Marcos, “No matter what explanation we make now, there will be some kind of shadow over the government, and this was never, never our purpose. We had hoped the matter could be handled with a little more finesse.”¹

Suspected U.S.-Aquino Links

Whatever the influence of lupus on the decision, however, President Marcos had long had a deep suspicion about the links between Aquino and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of which Aquino had openly bragged in the 1950s. In the 1978 Batasan campaign, when Aquino was an opposition candidate from his prison cell, government broadsides stressed his connections with American intelligence. Thus events of June and July 1983 must have looked especially ominous to Marcos.

In early June, U.S. Secretary of State George Schultz went to Manila to see the President. Later one of his aides told the New York Times that “the Marcos regime is entering its twilight and we don’t want to find ourselves in the same position as we did in Iran when the Shah was overthrown”. On 23 June Aquino himself told a House sub­committee in Washington that the Philippines was on the brink of disaster unless Marcos shared power with the opposition. A few days later the Assistant Secretary of State for Asia and the Pacific delivered a softened, but similar, message on Capitol Hill.

President Marcos may well have viewed this series of statements as the orchestration of a new U.S. policy. The apparent foolhardiness of Aquino’s determination to return, even after receiving the direst of warnings, would have confirmed for Marcos his suspicion of American backing. Some of his statements and actions at the time were consistent with this interpretation.² For instance, in late July Marcos “clarified” lines of authority in the military, revealing that the power of Defence Minister Enrile and Police Constabulary General Commander Ramos, both considered to have good American connections, had been severely downgraded while the control of General Ver over the entire military had been solidified. The President also appointed 27 new general officers, almost all of whom were reputed to be Ver’s protégés.

It is easy to imagine that opponents of Aquino believed the only way to control him, given his powerful foreign backers, was to eliminate him, and quickly, so they would have no time to play a protective role.

Questions Concerning the Assassination

The President’s own version of the assassination was that the blame was on “the communists”. (Prime Minister Virata, however, admitted early that “some elements of the government” may have been involved.)³ Yet if he were to admit the communists had the capability, it would require the admission also of a terrible, unparalleled breach in military security. This is not impossible, but most unlikely. The argument for motive is also inconclusive. While it is true that the removal of a popular, pro-American critic of the regime could have been seen as tipping the balance of opposition forces more towards the communist party by weakening the moderate voice, it must also be recalled that the party in recent years has had a generally cautious policy of avoiding provocations, especially moves that would rapidly enhance the power of the military, as this event has. (In late August 1983 student organizations friendly to the National Democratic Front (NDF) condemned violent demonstrations. And if the 21 September violence had been planned by the communists, there would have been militant follow-ups, which were absent. In fact, some friends of the party believe its leadership had great difficulty in developing a consensus on how to deal with the entire post-Aquino crisis.) Ultimately what makes one most sceptical about the official version is that after more than a year the awesome power of military intelligence was not able to come up with a credible witness.

But whatever the fascination with various details of timing, ballistics, identification of bodies, and disappearing witnesses, about which a society with a superabundance of lawyers is particularly curious, the overweening fact was that most politically conscious Filipinos believed that their President was responsible for the shooting of his major rival. Thus they could not imagine that any investigating commission appointed by that President would reveal the truth about the incident. In fact, the inability of the first investigation commission either to gain legitimacy or to begin its work were major indicators of the damage which the assassination had inflicted on the regime. The second commission, headed by Judge Agrava, showed surprising initiative, in part as a result of public American encouragement and probably also private assurances of U.S. support. In fact, as the investigation progressed they became bolder in their questioning.

In the short term, Aquino’s bloody sacrifice may have gone further towards undermining the regime than any contributions he could have made in the complex compromises of life. The anger at this brazen killing quickly spread to segments of the population which were never before politicized, those both high and low. For instance, the normally apolitical Philippine Social Science Congress issued a scathing indictment of the regime in November. And when an ageing regime has already been perceived by the relatively well-informed as suffering from increasing corruption and ineffectiveness, this mass emotional release rapidly creates a wider acceptance of that perception, even as it is radicalized and becomes more intense. An indicator was an escalation in the language of protest, and in the uncontrollable explosion in press freedom, first in newly appearing tabloids and then by force of competition even in the expanded comment in the officially sanctioned and heretofore, controlled press. (By 1984 many observers were calling the Philippine press the freest in Southeast Asia.) Furthermore, large demonstrations are a welcome form of political expression for masses who have had no effective way of voicing their dissatisfaction since the declaration of martial law. A more rapid erosion of regime legitimacy and a sudden acceleration in the growth of political expression and participation were thus the most immediate consequences of the assassination, setting a new stage for the succession struggle.

Economic Ramifications of Aquino’s Death

Changes of mood have a direct impact not only on politics, but on economics as well. The increasing prospect of political instability shattered the confidence of investors and creditors, both domestic and foreign. The actual flight of capital in the first two months after the assassination was estimated at over US$1 billion,⁴ including large amounts controlled by those friendly to the President, according to reports. The devaluation of the peso in early October by 21 per cent (which followed close on the heels of a nearly eight per cent devaluation in June) may have been an adjustment to reality, but it only slowed the flight of hard currency. And in the atmosphere of crisis most foreign banks stopped proffering any credit.

The shift in mood in the Philippine business community, and its behavioural consequences, was one of the more dramatic developments after 21 August. This is not to say, however, that Filipino businessmen were without long-standing grievances. They had prospered under martial law in the 1970s, thus their bitterness against favoured Marcos cronies or discomfort at the inroads of foreign corporations was muted. But in 1981 the world-wide depression began to wreak havoc in the Philippines. The Gross National Product (GNP) growth rate fell sharply to 2.6 per cent in 1982 and nearly reached zero in 1983. The cut-back in markets and in available credit sharpened whatever lines of conflict already existed. Manufacturers who had enjoyed tariff protection were especially shocked and embittered by the Prime Minister’s acceptance of World Bank conditions on its “structural adjustment loan” which required a 30 per cent drop in import duties by 1985.

In 1981 the most articulate representative of business interests became the newly-formed Makati Business Club (MBC), headed by the ambitious and dynamic Enrique Zobel, president of Ayala Corporation, one of the major concentrations of old wealth. The MBC eclipsed the long-established Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry in debating and criticizing government policy and in proposing alternatives, which sometimes extended beyond the purely economic sphere to include restoring a free electoral process or reforming an inefficient bureaucracy⁵

Reaction of Business Groups

Business support for the frequent anti-Marcos demonstrations in Makati became widespread, extending by November to provincial cities. Jaime Ongpin, president of Benguet Corporation, primarily a gold-mining firm, and brother of a Marcos cabinet member, became an even more articulate Marcos critic than Zobel, calling for free elections, immediate choosing of a vice-president, and the resignation of Imelda Marcos from all offices. In any case, the shift among the economic elite from dominantly covert to more overt opposition to the government had profound consequences. Already in 1983 it complemented the protests of the moderate opposition alliance UNIDO, and thus helped compensate for that group’s organizational weakness. In 1984 business leaders became even more vocal in opposition. This made it easier for the United States to think about alternatives to Marcos.

UNIDO, which was formed in January 1980 as the United Democratic Opposition, in 1982 changed its name to United Nationalist Democratic Organization, without changing its acronym. It began as an alliance of several opposition groups, and has yet to be transformed from an alliance into a single party, though there has been such talk. It was generally assumed that Senator Aquino would return to the Philippines to become chairman. In the meantime Salvador Laurel, son of the wartime president of the Philippines under Japan, a long time Nacionalista, who was elected to the Batasan in 1978, acted as head of UNIDO, while making frequent trips abroad to consult with Aquino. He had neither the personality nor the reputation, however, to command the respect of UNIDO members to the extent Aquino could, though in September 1983 he resigned from the Batasan to emphasize the strength of his opposition to the regime. Thus while Aquino’s sacrifice altered the national mood, it may have been a blow to the organizational strength of the group he would have led. UNIDO did not in 1983 have a local-level structure in most provinces (and when it did the integration of local affiliates and national leadership was poor), nor was it organized down to the neighbourhood level in the metropolis as was the government party, Kilusang Bagong Lipunan (KBL). From November, however, UNIDO expanded its provincial political activity, recruiting many scions of old political families.

The liberal side of UNIDO leadership to which Aquino belonged, was decimated by an assassin’s bullet in August but could have been substantially bolstered, if the senior remaining political exile, Jovito Salonga, were to return – considered likely in late 1984. He had left in 1980, partly for health reasons and partly because he had been falsely charged for complicity in the September and October bombings. Successor to the title of president of the Liberal Party when ex-Senator Gerry Roxas died, ex-Senator Salonga has a reputation for nationalism, intellectual integrity, and social progressivism that makes him much more in tune with the times than the Liberals’ elder statesman, ex-President Diosdado Macapagal (the predecessor of Marcos), or the leader of a competing Liberal faction ex-Senator Eva Kalaw.

The Catholic Church

In addition to the business community, UNIDO protests have been augmented by the vocal role of Jaime Cardinal Sin. But in the present situation the church is riven by deep cleavages. Cardinal Sin’s political leadership is designed in part to hold the church together as well as to reform the government. As a good shepherd of his flock he voices the discontent that they cannot, but also maintains political dialogue with the regime to decrease the likelihood of a thoroughly damaging attack on the interests of the church, for example, full taxation of church property. By attending to the concerns of both progressives and conservatives, he helps prevent further cleavage.

However, in general the hierarchy in 1983 was increasingly concerned about Marxist influence in the church. Until a few years ago there were still a number of bishops who not only sympathized with the inclination of some of their priests to work with communist-led organizations, but were themselves capable of dialogue and autonomous co-operation. Since then the impact of experience and of Vatican intervention appear to have polarized views on this subject. Perhaps as many as five per cent of priests and nuns are committed to the NDF or the New People’s Army (NPA) and in one way or another are working with them. Dialogue with their bishops on their position has become more and more difficult, however. Testimony from an arrested NDF priest in Samar shocked moderates and conservatives. Several of the progressive bishops also went through their own experiences in which they felt that Catholics working with the NDF had deceived and misled them. At the same time they were receiving messages through the hierarchy urging disengagement. In a more fundamental sense the incompatibility of Christian teaching on violence, to which many progressives have tried very hard to be faithful, and the Marxist line have become more evident as the armed struggle heats up, as guerrillas as well as soldiers succumb to the temptation for revenge.⁶ (For some conservatives in the hierarchy their “abhorrence of violence” has been a double standard, a convenient tool with which to flog only communists. They must have welcomed the President’s July appeal for an alliance between church and state against communism.) By February 1983, with a variety of motivations, the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) agreed unanimously, for the first time, on vigorous criticism of the excesses of the regime, coupled with a condemnation of the use of violence for political ends, and of the subordination of Christian to atheist ideologies, which provided a firmer theological basis for clerical anti-communism.⁷ NDF recruitment of and co-ordination with the Catholic clergy is unlikely, therefore, to expand at the rate it has in recent years, unless military abuses escalate further.

In March Cardinal Sin had begun to call for a Council for National Reconciliation, with representatives from church and opposition as well as government. After August 1983 Cardinal Sin, who was a personal friend of Aquino, lent dignity and force to the protest over Aquino’s death. In his funeral homily, however, he returned to his theme: “In our grief over the passing of Ninoy, let us not blind ourselves to the fact that he came, not in the spirit of confrontation, but in that of reconciliation.”⁸ On 27 November Aquino’s birthday and the beginning of Advent, the CBCP issued another pastoral letter urging “reconciliation” as a way to avoid the “bloodbath of revolution” and asking those who espouse violence to reconsider in light of “the unique demands of a gospel of love”. It also called for an “end to graft and corruption”, honest elections in May, and the restoration of people’s basic rights.⁹ The church retains a much better communications system than does the secular opposition, having added a business-backed weekly newspaper, Veritas, in November 1983. Church bodies could become more important informal allies of the UNIDO, of the Jesuit-backed Pilipino Democratic Party (PDP) – under the increasingly active Aquilino Pimentel – and of business activists in the near future. Cardinal Sin’s unprecedented call for a massive non-violent protest on 7 October 1984, which prompted President Marcos to accuse the Cardinal of “fomenting rebellion”, was a step in this direction. The march, protesting earlier police violence against peaceful protestors, was also joined by many business leaders not previously involved in street demonstrations. Cardinal Sin’s initiative was clearly part of a pattern designed to avoid “the bloodbath,” the danger of which was, in fact, growing.

The Communist Party

The greatest source of rivalry to elite and middle-class politicians in the campaign to unseat Marcos has stemmed from the Communist Party of the Philippines and the NPA.

Given the urban focus of the political reaction to the murder of Aquino, however, the work of the Party’s National Democratic Front and its affiliates becomes more important though less obvious. Formed in 1973, the NDF is open to all “patriotic and democratic forces”. Its “organizational base” is claimed by the party to be the Kabataang Makabayan (or Nationalist Youth), an underground workers’ federation, an organization of the urban poor, and Christians for National Liberation, which pre-dated the NDF.¹⁰ Presumably each of these named organizations is party controlled; but the NDF has also had temporary alliances with a great variety of other organizations. If any of these others are party controlled, that, understandably, is a well-kept secret. But given the fluidity of political organizations in the Philippines generally, it is unlikely that many are.

Opposition Groups in Coalitions

Political crisis favoured new and broader coalitions. As early as 1981, when Marcos created conditions under which the only logical response to what was perceived as a rigged presidential election was boycott, a coalition to promote electoral abstention was formed, “People’s MIND”, which spanned the entire opposition spectrum. In addition to UNIDO and well established church, labour, and student groups, there were thoroughly independent peace and human rights organizations led by ex-Senator Jose Diokno, along with newer ad hoc formations reputed to receive some inspiration from the NDF. These last were best at organizing crowds. In 1982 there were efforts to initiate such a broad coalition on a more permanent basis, but they did not come to fruition.

The killing of Aquino created a new crisis in which it was relatively easy to find common ground regardless of ideological differences. JAJA, or “Justice for Aquino, Justice for All”, was a coalition formally headed by the elderly, but still vigorous, ex-Senator Lorenzo Tanada. More active leadership seems to have come from Diokno, JAJA secretary, now probably the most widely respected nationalist and human rights advocate, who has strong support in the church and close connections with Amnesty International. The Aquino and Laurel families were also at first represented in JAJA’s planning sessions, along with representatives of more radical groups. It co-ordinated most major demonstrations in late 1983, far surpassing the importance of UNIDO in that regard. But as in 1981, effective co-operation over such a broad spectrum did not survive. In 1984 JAJA favoured boycott of the May legislative elections, so Laurel and others wanting to participate broke off. It declined in importance as another broad coalition, led by Aquino’s brother Agapito (Butz) Aquino, organized the boycott.

The launching of still another new organization in November 1983, the Nationalist Alliance for Justice, Freedom and Democracy, also under the chairmanship of ex-Senator Tanada and with a stronger secretariat than JAJA’s, had been preceded by preparatory meetings in the provinces and was clearly designed to survive for a longer period. Its structure is based on individual membership rather than group affiliation. (Diokno is not involved.) The language of the voluminous secretariat publications would seem to imply that the orientation towards the NDF is considerably closer than in the case of JAJA.¹¹ But there are also some key UNIDO and PDP-Laban figures in its national council, including several Assemblymen. The incentive to build bridges between left and right opposition remained strong as long as crude military repression persisted and purely electoral approaches seemed inadequate.

The Military

The behaviour of the military after 21 August 1983 did not remove the threat. The shooting of demonstrators, as on 21 September, has fortunately been a rather rare occurrence under martial law in the Philippines. But the illness of the President could leave the military more and more without any moderating political guidance.¹² Peaceful demonstrators were again killed and wounded by the military near Malacañang Palace in September 1984. Another profound consequence of the assassination seems to have been intensification of factionalism within the armed forces. More messages of dissatisfaction at middle levels filtered through to the opposition. Retired officers criticized the high command openly.

Some Features of U.S.-Philippine Relations

Changes in U.S.-Philippine relations brought about by Aquino’s murder may still be largely under a classified security blanket, as is true of those within the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP). But some outlines did emerge, and the changes are crucial to the succession process. Both Congress and the State Department seemed to be come more willing to distance themselves from Marcos than they were when the 1983 renewal of the Bases Agreement was signed. Immediately after Aquino’s murder the State Department called it a “cowardly and despicable act”. A few weeks later the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific, Monjo, testifying before a House of Representatives sub-committee, went further, saying, “Many Filipinos, and not all of them opposed to the current government, suspect the complicity of elements of the government in the crime. It raises very disturbing questions that demand answers.”¹³ He concluded with the assertion that the May 1984 parliamentary election had become “more important than ever” since “a free and fair electoral process in which Filipinos can place their confidence is the key to the resolution of the political problems left in the wake of the Aquino assassination”.

The planned Presidential visit to Manila in November 1983 became, of course, the key indicator of any shift in U.S. policy. Despite the widespread editorial advice in the United States to cancel both on the grounds of Reagan’s safety and because it would send the wrong message to the Philippine Government and people, few thought the White House would change its plans. But it did. The reason given only thinly disguised real official thinking, but the indefinite postponement to other ASEAN countries softened the blow to Marcos. Clearly the visit would have triggered a political explosion of primary benefit to the left which Reagan’s advisers sought to avoid. Ironically this postponement thus helped to prolong Marcos’ power rather than weaken it, as some had argued earlier.

The next important American policy decision was of necessity a product of private/public sector consultation – on how to respond to the urgent plea from Manila for more credit. It may be that the broad thrust of American policy was reflected in a speech by Ambassador Michael Armacost to the Makati Rotary Club on 17 November. While describing new and accelerated American assistance to alleviate the Philippine “financial crisis” he also insisted that Philippine problems were “precipitated by questions concerning social and political stability”.¹⁴ At the same time he mentioned that additional U.S. aid awaited the final decision of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on credit for the Philippines. The December 1983 decision of the committee of 12 leading private creditors of the Philippines to offer US$1.4 billion in new funds – still dependent on a final IMF determination – plus a re-scheduling of old debt, implied the same two-track policy: enough aid to avoid the “worst-case” scenario, but much less than hoped for in order to maintain leverage for political change. Most economists believed US$3 to US$4 billion in new money was needed to make possible real growth. One could assume that in the midst of crisis, American leverage – in concert with the IMF – would be especially effective.

The Call for Free Elections: Participation or Boycott

In 1984 “free elections” became a major pillar of U.S. foreign policy in the Philippines; it was equally a concern of creditors around the world, worried about the stability of an authoritarian regime with a sickly ruler. In a letter dated 29 March 1984 President Reagan sent Marcos a warning that “continued movement towards fully functioning democratic institutions appropriate to the Philippines is the key to the rebuilding of both economic and political confidence.¹⁵ Other messages through private and public channels were sent by a variety of officials to the same end prior to the May poll. At the same time, to soften the impact of the foreign exchange drought in the Philippines, the United States accelerated the disbursement of funds under existing aid and credit categories amounting to nearly US$1 billion.¹⁶

The socio-economic context in which the Batasan election campaign began was indeed grim, contributing to unrest and therefore reinforcing opposition appeals. Because of the continuing failure to reach agreement on the terms of a new IMF loan (which IMF officials themselves suggested was because of Marcos’ judgement that the conditions to be imposed would be so politically unpalatable as to be best postponed until after the election),¹⁷ private banks and other governments were reluctant to extend new credit as well. Credit was not sufficient to fund imported production goods, so factories continued to close, putting people out of work – more than 300,000 by best estimates (but denied by the Ministry of Labour). Disinvestment was a more subtle and insidious cause of unemployment. Strikes, usually for payment of the minimum wage, became more frequent and more militant. Necessary inputs for the most productive form of agriculture were also in very short supply, contributing to lower yields of food crops. Even the banking system was teetering on the edge of disaster, revealed in the Central Bank takeovers of more than a dozen shaky private banks.

Reagan, the IMF, and the most militant Filipino opposition, despite their different persuasions, all agreed that the purpose of the electoral exercise was to legitimize, and thus stabilize, the Marcos regime. Only a segment of the moderate opposition expressed hope for a change in the composition of political leadership as a result of the election. This latter group had as its most prominent spokesman ex-Senator Salvador Laurel, president of UNIDO. UNIDO, along with some regionally-based political parties, especially PDP-Laban (strong only in the Manila area, Cebu and northern Mindanao), decided to participate, despite the fact that they had supported a joint declaration in January with all other opposition for electoral boycott unless Marcos would undertake basic reforms of the electoral system and renounce his powers of decree under Amendment VI of the Constitution, among other conditions. It was, as most understood, an impossible dream. UNIDO’s ultimate participation, however, was hedged with a threat to withdraw if fraud should escalate. (Multiple registration of thousands of pro-government voters and the President’s refusal to name opposition nominees to the Commission on Elections, despite his promise to do so, were among the issues that brought howls of opposition protest, but did not alter UNIDO’s decision.)

Laurel, confident that Marcos was under strong pressure by business, the church, and the IMF to have clean elections, said UNIDO could win. (He predicted his party would win 40 per cent of the votes even in a “relatively dirty” poll)¹⁸ With a legislative majority they could convene a constitutional convention to draft a new basic law, as well as elect the Speaker – who until 1987 would be in line to presidential succession.

The biggest boost to the prospect of free elections was actually given by the re-emergence of NAMFREL, first organized in 1951 as a national movement for free elections with alleged U.S. assistance; it had lapsed into inactivity before the end of that decade. NAMFREL had been a major factor in creating the conditions for the election of Ramon Magsaysay as president in 1953. In 1984 NAMFREL recruited tens of thousands of Filipinos from around the country to monitor registration and voting and to organize a vote-counting mechanism independent of the official Commission on Elections (Comelec). Even its admirers admit that it was part of a U.S. effort to force Marcos to hold free elections.¹⁹ Marcos noted that they received “private” U.S. funds; the U.S. embassy gave open “moral” support. NAMFREL chairman, Jose Concepción, a flour mill owner, was sufficiently uncomfortable with the frequent charge from boycotters that NAMFREL was a tool of the CIA that he explicitly denied it in an open letter published throughout the Philippines shortly before the election.²⁰

The boycotting opposition could not be accurately described as simply a “communist-inspired movement”, as did UNIDO vice-chairman Eva Kalaw, General Ver and some foreign journalists, though elements of the Communist Party’s united front were certainly part of the broad movement, and particularly influential in organizational work. The Coalition of Organizations for the Restoration of Democracy (CORD), headed by Aquino’s brother, Butz Aquino, co-ordinated most boycott activities. Its backers included staunch anti-communists as ex-President Diosdado Macapagal, Liberal Party President and ex-Senator Jovito Salonga, and ex-Senator Raul Manglapus, temporarily resident in the United States, as well as nationalist leaders Lorenzo Tanada and Jose Diokno, both ex-Senators, and an array of other elite opposition and church leaders. While radicals characterized electoral participation as “collaboration … with the executioner of the Filipino masses”, and church workers likened compulsory voting in the May elections to the “golden image” which Daniel refused to worship – hoping that their own abstention would have less severe consequences – constitutionally-minded lawyers saw participation as lending legitimacy to an illegal regime. All agreed the Batasan was a powerless institution in any case.

Boycotting was not a passive activity. CORD organized rallies and seminars throughout the Philippines to explain the purpose of boycott, delivering a strident anti-Marcos and nationalist message in the process. They were encouraged by the low turnout for the January referendum, which was perceived as a response to the boycott movement then.

Both boycotters and participants may have miscalculated the impact of their particular strategies, however. The former aimed to deny the legitimacy of Marcos and his institutions, but the experience of the only two previous electoral exercises since 1972 revealed that a well-organized boycott campaign weakens the opposition challenge, and thus reduces the government need for such extensive fraud, in turn damping the fire of outrage in the election’s aftermath. Boycott also constrains popular anger by lowering expectations of the electoral process. In 1978 when an attempt to participate was the dominant opposition response, Marcos’ manufacture of the returns more rapidly eroded his own legitimacy than in 1981, when he ran for re-election practically unopposed because of a widely supported boycott. Outrage was subdued after a fraud long anticipated.

On the other hand, the goal of a parliamentary majority, which UNIDO needed to posit in order to fully justify election participation, was wildly unrealistic. Marcos made it clear that he perceived legitimation for himself in an election so “free” as to allow the opposition 20 seats or ten per cent of the Batasan. Thus, many expected him to use fraud, coercion, money and pure concoction if he feared the threat of much greater opposition success. And this is exactly what happened.

It was reported that NAMFREL watchers were driven away from the polls at many locations so that ballot-box stuffing could proceed apace. Multiple voting was also rampant. But the biggest government gains seemed to have been made simply by the “cooking” of returns. The first NAMFREL report, based on 27.5 per cent of the returns had opposition and independent candidates leading the KBL by 91 seats to 66, with the rest yet undecided.²¹ The next day Marcos told U.S. television audiences in a live broadcast that he expected the KBL to win about 140 seats. (To be sure the early returns were more heavily from urban areas, where the opposition was known to be strong.) About the same time NAMFREL was reporting independents and opposition parties ahead in 94 and KBL in 89. A few days later, with 90 per cent of returns in, NAMFREL – which had to rely on official village tabulations – was reporting a KBL lead for 101 seats and opposition and independents for only 82.²² By the time the reports emanated from the Commission on Elections, opposition and independent seats were down to 73, with 110 for the KBL.²³ Thus within about ten days the opposition and independents had lost 21 seats as the count “progressed”; the KBL moved from minority to majority. Some of the late returns were from villages or districts where the KBL vote was greater than the total population. In Cebu the switch was particularly dramatic. Whereas the NAMFREL tally gave five out of six seats to the opposition, the Commission on Elections proclaimed only one opposition candidate.²⁴ It is not surprising then that as the citizens of Cebu began to learn of the switch being pulled, they protested; the protest was large and noisy. The police were jittery and at one point began firing on the crowd: four persons died and 18 were injured.²⁵ The reaction of UNIDO president Salvador Laurel to the evidence of fraudulent counting was also very strong: he asked for new elections in 21 provinces and threatened a UNIDO boycott of the Batasan session.²⁶ PDP-Laban chairman Pimentel warned, on the contrary, that his party would enter the Batasan and file a motion of impeachment against the President. Marcos himself, still not satisfied with a two-to-one margin in parliament, called for a special session of the lame-duck Batasan to adopt legislation permitting presidential appointment of an additional 18 members. And as if the atmosphere were not sufficiently tense already, on 24 May the Metropolitan Commission (METROCOM) Brigadier General Tomas Karingal was assassinated, ostensibly by an NPA hit squad in retaliation for police killing of striking workers a short time before. The police reacted with a “red alert”, establishing numerous checkpoints around Manila.

Many feared that the massive post-election crackdown on the opposition which had been rumoured for months was about to happen. But it did not. Such a move would have jeopardized the mood of reform and stability which the foreign backers of the regime had hoped to create out of the elections. The U.S. Embassy had already labelled them “an amazing example of democracy and participation of the people”.²⁷ On 18 May the Wall Street Journal had jumped to conclude editorially that the elections “moved the Philippines closer to democracy, and that should please all of us”. The New York Times applauded in a similar vein. Accentuation of the positive was continued by Cardinal Sin who called the 14 May poll “by and large, the … freest, cleanest since 1972” – in itself faint praise. But he then added with Sin-ful hyperbole that it might rank “among the best elections since World War II”,²⁸ despite NAMFREL’s conclusion that only fraud earned a KBL victory. He called for the shelving of opposition plans for impeachment. The President abandoned his plans to appoint more members to the Batasan, which had infuriated his most moderate opponents.

The electoral scenario had not proceeded just as the participant opposition had hoped, but they were perhaps more pleasantly surprised than the boycotters. Why had the boycott failed? In part it failed because the political analysis in the message of the boycott movement, as some activists themselves pointed out,²⁹ was too complex, too abstract for the average citizen, compared to the “simple” choice of voting for the “good guy” instead of the “bad guy”. Many Filipino voters simply did not want to be deprived of a chance to vote against the regime, a traditionally concrete form of protest. Furthermore, some middle-class citizens may have been scared off by the “red” charges against the boycott movement. There was also a great deal of money spent; best estimates are that P4.6 billion of new currency was printed during the campaign, about a tenth of all government tax revenue in 1983!³⁰ (The IMF was understandably disturbed.) Some KBL candidates spent more than P10 million. The willingness to offer short-term loyalty for material favours, especially in a time of great hardship, is another traditional habit hard to break, though many thousands did. The immediate financial rewards also help explain the multiplicity of candidates – nearly ten aspirants for every KBL nomination.

What was more difficult to explain was the great number of opposition and independent candidates, who were not primarily interested in Marcos’ largesse, for a powerless legislature in a declining regime. It is probable that many were thinking in terms of positioning themselves for the 1986 local elections and the successor regime, building the traditional local power base to gain influence at the centre, in the medium even if not the short term. Some became UNIDO candidates after being denied KBL nominations. UNIDO as well as KBL candidates included a number of sons or other relations of powerful patrons of an earlier era. President Marcos had at one point announced himself against “political dynasties”, but in one race he was not above writing personal letters to competing candidates to get them to withdraw, thus assuring election of his daughter Imee from Ilocos Norte.³¹

In any case, arguments for and against participation and boycott, which had even riven the Aquino family, abated after the election. Some in UNIDO argued at first that without the boycott to sap their strength they could have won, but the actual turnout would seem to belie that thesis. Some leading boycotters made the fascinating suggestion that the role of the boycott movement and the electoral parties had been quite complementary. On the one hand international attention to the elections had prevented the regime from cracking down too hard on mass movements, and the possibility of driving the parliamentary opposition into the arms of the boycotters restrained Marcos somewhat from his tendency to electoral overkill. The ideological split between the two types of opposition did not disappear, however. They could not even agree to a common anti-Marcos rally on the anniversary of martial law. Aquilino Pimentel of the PDP-Laban, whose election the Marcos-controlled Comelec tried to reverse, was one of the few who could keep one foot in each camp.³² The much stronger nationalism of the “boycotters” sustained the split, as well as the differences on tactics, a contrast between confrontation and the moderates’ “critical collaboration”.

Though the election did provide Marcos a bit of the international legitimation that he so desperately needed, he still faced two very serious challenges, each of which was capable of triggering the collapse of the regime, if handled poorly; but, in fact, both had to be dealt with simultaneously. First was the need to finalize the agreement with the IMF in order to get foreign credits flowing in again; second was the upcoming Agrava Commission report on the Aquino assassination and the need for Marcos to make an adequate response. Both posed fundamental dilemmas, and the regime had gained no domestic legitimacy to facilitate their disposition.

The IMF

Negotiations with the IMF were not easy to get back on track after the election, given the residue of distrust from the much earlier overstatement of reserves and the printing of new money during the campaign, contrary to IMF advice. There were also a number of other points at issue, as became apparent later.³³ The IMF was quite unhappy with new taxes imposed in June on imports, on exporters’ windfall profits, and on certain foreign exchange transactions. The international watchdogs were also intent on curbing inflation, reducing government spending and breaking up the monopolies in sugar and coconut, which touched at the centre of the regime’s power structure. Thus it took until September to get a “letter of intent” from the Philippines to comply with IMF conditions, and open the way for the eventual release of the expected US$613.5 million in Special Drawing Rights.

The revenue measures in June had been sufficiently unpopular so that KBL Assemblymen had joined the opposition in a September motion in the Batasan to end the 30 per cent export tax, a coalition which President Marcos had only hours earlier described as “impossible”³⁴ New taxes affecting jeepneys had triggered a Manila-wide one-day strike. And a motion of non-confidence in the Prime Minister triggered a Batasan debate in which very few KBL members came to his defence.³⁵

But the IMF was demanding a shift of the burden of new revenue necessary to reduce the budget deficit to domestic excise taxes, especially on tobacco, liquor, and petroleum products – with the last helping to trigger inflation to about 65 per cent by the end of 1984. This would probably have a more adverse political impact than even the unemployment-producing drought in foreign credits of the last year. Certainly the hurt would be felt more widely, by middle as well as working-class families. It raises the interesting question as to whether the IMF, which is certainly not unaware of the political consequences of its policies, underestimates the ability of the opposition to exploit the impending unrest or whether they are over-confident of the military’s ability to control the protest, under American guidance.

IMF-requested “reforms” will not only stimulate mass unrest, with additional unemployment to be caused by a continuing schedule of tariff reductions at IMF insistence, but they will also aggravate intra-elite conflict which has already escalated dramatically in the last year. As noted earlier, members of the business community outside the circle of power have been mobilized to anti-Marcos protest since the death of Aquino and thus are more vocal than ever in criticism of government economic policy; since May their views are more often presented in the Baiasan as well. Some leading figures in the KBL, anxious about the regime’s future, are themselves becoming more attentive to the complaints of business leaders, who have attacked both the technocrats under Virata, for their “subservience” to the IMF, and the Marcos “cronies”. But the cronies have themselves long been unhappy with Virata, an attitude which will surely worsen as IMF puts more and more pressure on Marcos to dismantle the sugar and coconut monopolies. With both Benedicto and Cojuangco members of the powerful KBL Central Committee and dominant figures in their respective regions (Central Visayas and Central Luzon), as well as in the crop-based industries they control, these two will be very difficult to dislodge. They are closely allied with major factions in the military as well. Since the technocrats have no political base, implementation of the IMF requirements, by further alienating both autonomous economic elites and masses from the regime, make it more dependent than ever on the military.

The Agrava Commission and its Implications

This has intensified Marcos’ other dilemma – how to handle the Agrava Commission. Despite the commission’s initial lack of credibility, as it proceeded to its investigation it showed genuine signs of courage and independence, undoubtedly aided by strong American backing. The evidence piled up linking the military to the assassination plot and discrediting the official line of Galman as a communist “hit man”. The commission first went into seclusion in early July to write their report, promising it by 21 August, the first anniversary of the killing of Aquino. But three times they reopened hearings to listen to additional witnesses. By October there was leaked to the press a preliminary draft of the commission report and a staff memorandum, clearly to pressure Marcos. They concluded that the military were responsible and named nearly 20 members of a conspiracy. However, while four of the five members were willing to name General Ver himself as being involved in that conspiracy, Chairman Agrava was unwilling to go higher than airport security chief General Custodio in placing blame, it was reported.³⁶ Two Philippine bar associations had already publicized their own findings, which implicated the military.³⁷

While the commission remained in seclusion, unable to agree on a final draft, the military counter-attacked. A key witness to the AFP involvement in the killing wrote a retraction to the commission which was delivered by the Presidential Security Command, headed by General Ver. A spokesman for the commission quite correctly interpreted this as a move to discredit its work. But as long as there was a danger of Ver being named by the commission, it should not have been surprising that he would use whatever tactics he felt necessary to try to stop it.

In fact, the commission’s delay in reporting was indicative of a deadlock between the two most powerful forces in Philippine politics today, the dominant faction in the military and the U.S. Government. And the deadlock was not simply on the question of the commission’s findings, but on the crucial issue of succession. General Ver, widely rumoured to be allied with the First Lady, as intelligence chief as well as head of the Palace guard and AFP chief of staff, was in the key position to control the succession, regardless of constitutional provisions. Yet both the United States and the international banking community regarded him, with Imelda Marcos, as likely to establish a regime so corrupt, so ruthless and so devoid of economic rationality as to trigger much more severe political instability, a grave threat to the United States as well as IMF/World Bank interests. Thus the United States and her allies were determined to get rid of Ver. Being named as part of the conspiracy to kill Aquino by an official inquiry would provide strong grounds for his dismissal by the President. In fact, no other legal grounds seemed available. Thus the commission was at the eye of a much larger storm.

If its members could not be deflected from charging the military by fair means or foul, then efforts had to be made by Ver and friends to limit the damage, to restrict the naming of names to lesser officers, certainly no higher than General Custodio. This was the tactic of Mrs Agrava’s minority report, and its quick acceptance by the President. But even that move failed, since by the majority report General Ver faced possible indictment. Perhaps a trial will be sufficiently frustrated that it fails to convict. But a military reshuffle, perhaps in the form of a palace coup, may remain the only tactic to protect Ver’s position. Ver would undoubtedly try in that event to dethrone the technocrats at the same time, since IMF-imposed budgetary restraints have already begun to cut into perceived military needs. (The take-home pay of a Philippine Army major in early 1984 was already down to less than US$50 per month.) But with Ver’s forced “leave of absence”, such a move became much more difficult to accomplish successfully.

An extremely well-informed article by Time correspondent Ross Munro in the prestigious Foreign Policy magazine spelled out the preferred scenario with remarkable frankness: “Washington should signal Marcos that Ver’s continuation as armed forces chief is unacceptable. No other single reform promises such an early payoff as does a halt in the armed forces’ decay.” He also noted the West Point backgrounds of some top Filipino officers, for example, General Ramos, and a receptiveness to U.S. intervention which is unique in the Third World.³⁸

Whatever the “back-up scenarios” may have been, however, international economic pressure obviated the necessity of more obtrusive U.S. intervention in this case. The dimensions of the context just prior to the release of the Agrava Commission report may help explain the Marcos capitulation on Ver. Firstly, President Marcos was not involved in public activities for two weeks because of a “regular medical check-up”, surely an unsatisfactory explanation except for its reference to the President’s health. It is possible that Marcos was persuaded during that time, as his creditors already were, that if his condition worsened sharply with Ver more and more in charge, this could lead to a collapse of the economy and ultimately of the political system as well. Secondly, the negotiations for debt re-scheduling and new private credits were going on at the same time. Apparently the message given in those meetings was straight forward – no money until the Agrava Report is treated seriously, including the trial of Ver. Marcos, who earlier might have tried to put on his nationalist hat and rally support against the IMF now saw that this was not possible. He merely fulminated about U.S. pressure. Thirdly, both journalists and American officials³⁹ had in the meantime been building up a case for greatly expanded military aid to the Philippines. And if that case were only half exaggerated – the AFP was certainly in dire need of help, which Marcos must have known – it provided another powerful source of U.S. leverage. Thus he succumbed to pressure he had long resisted.

In sum, neither foreign creditors nor the Filipino people could long tolerate the continuation of the existing situation. Temporarily, at least, the crisis was resolved through international pressure, pleasing to foreign backers, but not necessarily to the Filipino opposition: removing Ver while retaining Marcos. But no matter how benevolent, intelligent or politically skilful the autocrat may once have been, he cannot now long survive the destruction of that regime’s core. Struggles between technocrat and crony and among military factions will intensify. If Ver cannot make a comeback, the removal of the kingpin in the gathering of intelligence and the application of force could begin to unravel the networks that gave form to the Marcos regime.

Some Possible Scenarios

If events since the assassination of Aquino are best understood in the context of a succession struggle, we can hardly avoid commenting on where present trends in that struggle are leading. By the end of 1983 the emerging pattern seemed to be a gradual augmentation of power by General Ver, perhaps in concert with Imelda Marcos, as the President’s health deteriorated, culminating in Ver’s de facto seizure of power at the time of the President’s incapacity. In 1983 Ver had gained a determined ally in the wealthiest and most aggressive of Marcos “cronies”, Eduardo Cojuangco, the “coconut king”. Imelda and her allies had successfully frustrated in the Batasan a U.S.-backed plan to have Prime Minister Virata, the IMF favourite, named vice-president. The constitutional amendment on succession actually ratified in January 1984 promised vice-presidential elections in 1987, but otherwise reverted to an earlier arrangement by which the Batasan Speaker, a powerless tool of the KBL (which means to say the First Lady, plus key bureaucratic and capitalist allies), would become interim president.

However, as the economic crisis deepened in 1984 both the World Bank/IMF and the U.S. Government became more convinced that political stability was the essential foundation for renewed economic progress and that in the Philippine case only democratization and restoration of the rule of law could re-establish that stability. So the United States promoted free elections, even to the point of helping to finance NAMFREL, tried to encourage the renunciation of presidential powers of decree, and gave strong backing to stoutly independent members of the Agrava Board. That backing and credible threats of economic demise by foreign exchange starvation forced Marcos to accept an investigation report that even implicated Ver in Aquino’s murder, forcing Ver to take leave and face trial. His removal was clearly seen by the IMF as a prerequisite to removing the baneful influence of the “cronies” on the economy.

Future scenarios in the succession struggle depend in the short run on whether Ver can recoup his pre-eminence within the military or whether as acting chief of stall General Ramos can consolidate his control. Both seemed prepared to try, Ramos speaking of the need to “restore morale” and Ver mobilizing support from 58 general officers (out of 83) in a newspaper advertisement. Reinstatement of Ver, would be anathema to the United States and the IMF. It would lead to further narrowing of regime support, erosion of technocrats’ power in favour of cronies, and would make implementation of IMF conditions almost impossible. Ver in any case would then control the future succession process more tightly than ever.

Prospects of a Ver recovery might trigger a U.S.-backed, Ramos-led coup that neither Washington, nor Marcos wants, but which Washington would require to avoid political/economic disaster.⁴⁰ Even if launched in the name of Marcos it would probably accomplish his early retirement. A Ramos-backed regime, achieved gradually through consolidation of his present position or by abrupt intervention to block Ver, would be both a victory for the technocrats and for expanded democratization. The KBL majority in the Batasan might break-up, with some sensing the wind’s direction, and a new majority formed around the present opposition, providing a semblance of new legitimacy. The President’s death, incapacity or resignation would be handled legally with a successor elected either from among prominent dissidents in the present regime, from moderate opposition figures or someone mutually agreeable to both categories.

No matter how well-intentioned, the leadership of such a regime would face a profound dilemma. On the one hand it would receive intense pressure for wider participation, for example, new, unfettered Batasan elections, and the drafting of a new constitution. Yet to open the political process to all groups and to re-examine all the old rules would release a flood of new ideas and new leaders likely perceived as threatening to the core interest of the regime and its military, business and foreign backers. Thus after briefly allowing “one hundred flowers to bloom” a new round of restrictions on participation, even repression, would be a lively prospect. With all the frustrations that have built up in the Filipino body politic since 1972, it is no longer possible to keep “the lid on”, but terribly difficult to take it off slowly. Any significant opening would produce a participation explosion. And the Philippines does not have as large a middle class as Argentina, which helps temper demands in that decompression chamber. A new cycle of repression would produce the concomitant alienation and erosion of regime legitimacy as well as provide renewed justification for violence. Only a charismatic leader with sufficient self-confidence to disregard pressure from economic elite and foreign banker alike could re-enthrone the ballot and undercut the appeal of the bullet, but such calibre of leadership is very rare. Aquino – who may or may not have been such a leader – was very conscious of the dilemma described here, and was thus, in his reflective moments, reluctant to succeed Marcos. And yet no one now on the political horizon has the appeal of Aquino, even before his martyrdom.

Thus whether modest liberalization with the backing of the professional military were first or second in succession to the present regime, in each case with American support, it could well be followed by a revived revolutionary movement, which would include some of those who once hoped for a liberal democratic restoration. Mass mobilization under radical leadership is no longer a passing phenomena in the Philippines. Nor do powerful economic or military interests, domestic or foreign, face dissolution without a tussle. Thus short, or even medium-term, prospects in the succession struggle are for rather modest changes in the political or economic character of the regime, while long-term possibilities include profound systemic transformation.

Conclusion

In sum, the Philippines in 1984, for the first time in this century, stands on the brink of a revolutionary situation. And even if it pulls back from the brink in the near future, events could again propel the society towards violent transformation. This does not mean that all the necessary elements of such a “situation” are yet in place. Foreign support for the regime would need either to erode or be manifest in ways increasingly antagonistic to nationalist sensibilities. Mass unrest would need to spread further and cleavages within the ruling elite, especially within the military, would need to sharpen – but the trends are all there.

Historians may ultimately identify the assassination of Aquino as the accelerating or triggering event that led to revolution. But it now seems likely that at least one more accelerator may still be needed. Given the lack of consensus on succession, the President’s incapacity or demise prematurely rumoured to have occurred in November 1984 could be that trigger, or even, perhaps, Ver’s restoration.

In any case, even if a revolutionary “situation” were fully manifest, a movement must develop and implement the strategy and tactics that will translate potential into revolutionary actuality. Revolutionary leadership and organization skills are improving, though whether they are adequate for the tasks the movement has set for itself will only be revealed in the next stage. Revolutionary “situations” may pass without revolutions.

But whether for revolutionaries or for those committed to maintaining the socio­political system, and especially for those in between, the leadership choices in the coming year will be excruciatingly difficult. The excitement and instability that we have observed in the past 15 months could well be surpassed in 1985.

DAVID WURFEL is Professor at the Department of Political Science, University of Windsor, Ontario.

Notes

¹ Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBA), 24 August 1883, quoting RPN Television Network, 23 August 1983.

² For the roost convincing version of this analysis, see J. Rocamora, “Marcos, Aquino and the Succession”, Southeast Asia Chronicle, no.. 92 (December 1983): 20ff.

³ Hong Kong, Agence France Presse (AFP), 9 September 1983.

⁴ Guy Sacerdoti, “The Crunch Comes”, Far Eastern Economic Review (FEER), 20 October 1983, p. 66. Also, Asia Wall Street Journal Weekly, 21 November 1983.

⁵ Guy Sacerdoti, “Stirrings at the Club”, FEER, 24 September 1982, pp. 107-109. See Issues and Prescriptions, 1982, Makati Business Club Plenary Conference, 28 August 1982.

⁶ See, for instance, Bishop Francisco Claver, “An Option for Peace”, address to PDP convention. Cagayan de Oro City, 5 February 1983.

⁷ “A Dialogue for Peace”, Joint Pastoral Letter, Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, 20 February 1983.

⁸ Jaime Cardinal Sin, Selected Writings on Church-State Relations and Human Development (Manila: Centre for Development of Human Resources in Rural Asia, 1984), p. 32. &July 1984 Joint Pastoral !Alter, “Let There be Lite”, continued the theme on non-violence, but also advised an end to the President’s decree-making powers.

⁹ New York Times, 27 November 1983, P. 3.

¹⁰ “Preparing for the Revolution: The United Front in the Philippines”, Southeast Asia Chronicle, no. 62 (May-June 1978): 6-7. Also, “Turning Point: The NDF takes the Lead”, Southeast Asia Chronicle, no. 83 (April 1982): 2-7.

¹¹ For instance, see National/Political Issues, 11 (Manila: NDF Secretariat, 1983).

¹² Though Cardinal Sin described the President as “troubled” and “rattled” in late September, he seemed to improve after that. But there were also indications of his illness in 1984. For the Sin statement see Hong Kong, AFP, 25 September 1983.

¹³ John C. Monjo, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, Bureau of Fast Asian and Pacific Affairs, Statement on “The Consequences of the Aquino Assassination for the Philippines and U.S.-Philippines Relations-before Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs, House Foreign Affairs Committee, 13 September 1983.

¹⁴ Philippines Daily Express, 19 November 1983; Veritas_,_ 27 November-3 December 1983.

¹⁵ See Ross Munro, “Dateline Manila: Moscow’s Next Win?”, Foreign Policy, no. 56, (Fall 1984): 176.

¹⁶ Nayan Chanda, “A Gloomy View of Reform and Rebellion from the U.S.”, FEER 30 August 1984, p. 29.

¹⁷ FBIS, 14 March 1984, p. 2.

¹⁸ FBIS, 30 April 1984, p. 3.

¹⁹ See Munro, op. cit., p. 176. FBIS, 10 May 1984, p. 3.

²¹ AFP, Hong Kong, 15 May; FBIS, 15 May 1984, p. 33.

²² FBIS, 23 May 1984, p. 5.

²³ FBIS, 29 May 1984, p. 16.

²⁴ FBIS, 23 May 1984, p. 6; 12 June 1984, p. 6.

²⁵ FBIS, 21 May 1984, p. 2.

²⁶ FBIS, 23 May 1984, p. I.

²⁷ Solidaridad 11 (April-June 1984), p. 10.

²⁸ FBIS, 1 June 1984.

²⁹ See Alex Magno, “The Boycott Movement: Did it Fizzle Out in the May 14 Polls?”, WHO, 6 June 1984.

³⁰ FEER, 30 August 1984, p. 24.

³¹ FBIS, 30 May 1984, p. I.

³² Business Day, 24 September 1984.

³³ See, “The IMF Sets its Price”, FEER, 18 October 1984, pp. 64-65.

³⁴ Business Day, 21 September 1984.

³⁵ fn_Business Day,_ 25 September 1984.

³⁶ Japan Times, 14 and 15 October 1984.

³⁷ Japan Times, 6 and 28 September 1984.

³⁸ The liberal interventionist stance on U.S.-Philippine policy publicly backs away from the promotion of a coup, but nevertheless advocates pressure for a kind of “reform” which could lead to a situation where a coup was seen as a necessary protection of U.S. interests. See William Sullivan (former U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines), “Living Without Marcos”, Foreign Policy, no. 53 (Winter 1983-84): 153.

³⁹ See Richard Armitage Assistant Secretary of Defence for International Security Affairs, “Statement to the Sub-Committee on Asian and Pacific Affairs, Committee on Foreign Affairs, House”, 4 October 1984.

⁴⁰ A U.S.-supported coup would probably be a response to an actual Ver takeover. In a journal which represents establishment views as carefully as Foreign Affairs, reference to such an event is only found in cryptic passages, for example “U.S. leverage should not be under estimated; U.S. efforts to shape the setting for the inevitable transition can almost certainly. have some benefit.” See Robert Manning, “The Philippines in Crisis” in Foreign Affairs. 63, no. 2 (winter 84/85): 410.

Introduction

The history of Philippine agrarian policy since independence is a sadly monotonous one for the scholar, a bitterly disappointing one for the hopeful tenant cultivator. It is a story of repeated initiative from the center of government that did not result in anywhere near the announced change in the countryside. Explanations for this series of ineffectual reforms have varied from insincerity and corruption to lack of peasant interest in getting ownership of the land. The most convincing analysis, however, seems to relate to the political and economic interests of the top decision makers, those initiating policy and supervising its implementations, and to the socioeconomic characteristics of the agrarian systems being reformed. The cumulative political consequences of agrarian policy also find both political and socioeconomic explanations.

Agrarian reform is a complex of policies designed to transform rural society in the direction of greater equality of wealth and power among groups and classes, and greater equality of opportunity for individuals. Where agrarian reform has followed a successful revolution it has usually involved the uncompensated redistribution of land. A much more modest attempt at transformation may be the creation of cooperatives in which small cultivators are given greater opportunities than their large competitors. But the type of reform on which we will focus here is the redistribution of tenanted land with compensation to the original owner, land for which the beneficiary of reform must repay the government. Despite all the permutations in Philippine policy over more than 30 years, these basic elements of land reform have remained constant: government purchase of tenanted land and its resale to tenants.

Philippine land reform has been further restricted over the years to grain cropsrice and corn-for domestic consumption. Export crops have consistently been exempted, the official argument being that land reform might disrupt production and thus jeopardize foreign exchange earnings. Perhaps a more important reason, however, was that large landowners in sugar, coconuts, and tobacco were politically too powerful to be touched. The scope and nature of the reforms that were implemented posed no threat to the interests of the political elite, but were, in fact, perceived as strengthening their position. The changes in the content of reform from the 1940s to the 1970s indicated the waning influence of rice and corn landlords within that elite.

Land Reform Under Roxas and Quirino (1946-1953)

Agrarian policy initiatives had for the most part begun in the 1930s under President Quezon who was sensitive to the peasant unrest in Central Luzon and wanted to appear to meet some of its demands, without too seriously discomforting his landlord friends and allies. (His national political organization depended on local leaders who were usually either landlords or their proteges.) Components of that policy included regulation of tenancy relations, organized land settlement in Mindanao for the landless of Luzon and Cebu, the long-standing anti-usury law, issuance of free patents to homesteaders on cultivable public land, and a “landed estates policy” which provided funds for the negotiated purchase of large holdings for resale to the tenants.¹

Before World War II, the Rural Progress Administration (RPA) had purchased tenant homesites on four estates and the agricultural land of two more; the area of the six totaled to little more than 6,000 hectares.² The RPA had also leased the huge 27,000 hectare Buenavista Estate with future prospect of redistribution. But disputes about tenant rights abounded and none had become amortizing owners. The American “liberation” of Manila was terribly destructive of government offices, so that landed estate records after the war were either chaotic or nonexistent.

Nevertheless, the acquisition of estates by the RPA resumed in 1947, so that by 1950 another 19 had been purchased amounting to over 10,000 hectares in addition to the vast Buenavista Estate. Over 3/4 of this area was owned by some official or agency of the Catholic Church. Most of the land acquired was in Central Luzon where the Huk rebellion made many villages unsafe for landlords or their agents; much of the area was uncultivated. Some of the estates were purchased from persons whose legal ownership was in question. Clearly the landed estates policy was not “land reform” primarily designed to transform tenants into owner-cultivators, but was a social service agency for landlords with shaky titles or poor profit ratios. Landlords who were opposed to appropriation were usually able to stop it in the courts. In fact, it was RPA policy to discourage tenant petitions for estate purchases by the impossible requirement that petitioners deposit an amount equivalent to the assessed value of the land in question on the date the petition was approved) The RPA was starved for funds, receiving no post-war appropriation; they operated largely with borrowed funds. Even when landed estates were purchased, the cultivating tenant was not likely to be the main beneficiary. Many of the estates had cash tenants who in turn sublet to cultivating sharecroppers. The tenants who were allocated lots for purchase often had farms of 10 to 50 hectares, while the average size of a cultivator’s plot was under 3 hectares.³

Many of the cultivating tenants who were fortunate enough to acquire purchase rights could not afford to keep them. Despite the explicit rules against transfer, such rights had become a saleable commodity. Poor tenants deeply in debt surrendered their rights to creditors. The same processes that resulted in concentration of land ownership in the Philippines generally operated within the government estates. Thus, large portions of the estates under RPA administration continued to be cultivated by share tenants with no prospect of becoming owners. The “landed estates policy” had simply displaced some large landlords to create many medium sized ones. And since the RPA, a government agency, became directly involved in the burgeoning disputes over land rights, that traditional source of peasant anger and frustration more quickly than before produced political unrest. Not surprisingly the Bell Mission to the Philippines appointed by President Truman in 1950 concluded that “the land problem remains the same or worse than four years ago.”

The Bell Mission Report was, in fact, expected by many to be the impetus for the next stage of land reform. It recommended that “a broad program should be inaugurated of acquiring large estates at fair value for resale in small holdings to tillers of the soil.” At the same time the report recommended expanded programs of agricultural credit, organized land settlement on virgin land, and the improved administration of land registration and homesteading on public land. Each of these other recommendations, less threatening to elite interests, was backed with some U.S. aid, but not land redistribution. The U.S. land reform advisor drew up a detailed proposal, but it was blasted by leading Filipino congressmen, and not even supported by the U.S. aid mission. In fact, in 1950 the Rural Progress Administration was abolished and its functions transferred to a newly created landed Estates Division of the Bureau of Lands. No new estates were purchased throughout the remainder of the Quirino administration, and redistribution policy on RPA-acquired estates dropped even the pretense of preference for the tiller. The simulation of land reform was suspended in the early 1950s.

This was the same period in which the Huk rebellion peaked and then was put down. The Liberal Party’s political elite under Quirino certainly did not view land reform as a cure for peasant unrest, though a number of opposition figures did make the connection. Liberals were, in fact, even less interested in land reform in 1953, when the Huks had been largely defeated, than in 1950 when the rebellion was at its height. The election of Ramon Magsaysay as president in 1953 made some difference in this regard, however.

Land Reform Under Magsaysay and Garcia (1954-61)

Magsaysay had brought his campaign directly to the peasantry in a manner unprecedented. After he was elected, several of his advisors understood the importance of taking concrete action to meet peasant complaints and thus reduce unrest. Since the “landed estates policy” remained in the Bureau of lands, the aggressive new Undersecretary of Agriculture, Jaime Ferrer, had an important role, as did some of the pro-tenant young officers in the Tenancy Division of the Judge Advocate General’s Office. In two instances, in San Luis, Pampanga and San Pedro Tunasan, Laguna, within a few months of Magsaysay’s assuming the presidency, the Executive Office took initiative directly to acquire landed estates. The landed Estates Division began a number of negotiations and expropriations, and within the estates they already administered, dramatically increased the rate of redistribution, giving clear preference for the first time to cultivating occupants of the land. All this activity clearly raised the expectation of tenants. During FY 1955 the Bureau of lands received 116 petitions for the expropriation of landed estates covering more than 113,000 hectares.⁴

But those expectations could not be adequately met without new legislation and new implementing agencies. The Inter-Departmental Committee on land Tenure, appointed by the President in March 1954, worked at unusual speed and produced a draft of the land reform bill by 6 May which was immediately introduced into the House of Representatives. At about the same time, however, legislation to improve landlord tenant relations was introduced and this received priority attention. No action was taken on land reform in the 1954 regular session, and it did not even appear on the agenda of the special session of that year.

In his 1955 State of the Nation message Magsaysay did reiterate his desire for new land reform legislation. But just as the President announced that he would take land reform seriously, so did its opponents. At every stage of the legislative process landlord interests attacked both directly and with subtle indirection. Magsaysay was neither so persistent nor so skillful. He never issued a public statement in favor of any portion of the bill. His only significant effort was to call a special session with the “land tenure bill” as highest priority. Nevertheless, the bill was almost scuttled at the conference committee stage. The final legislative product was so inadequate that Atty. Fernando Santiago, one of the authors of the first draft, sent a memo to the President recommending that he veto it and ask for a simple appropriation instead.⁵ Congressman Casas of la Union tried to amend the bill’s title at the last minute, so that it would read — ironically but accurately — “An act defining a landlord tenure policy,” Republic Act 1400⁶, signed by the President in September, had only one improvement over preexisting legislation, a modest appropriation and authorization of a bond issue.

The power of expropriation was more restricted than it had been under Commonwealth legislation. It was limited to that portion of individual land holdings in excess of 300 contiguous hectares, and corporate holdings of more than 600, though there were no such restrictions on negotiated purchase. Petitions signed by a majority of tenants in the whole estate were required to initiate an expropriation, or negotiations.

The Land Tenure Authority (LTA) established by the Act to implement this policy, did not begin to actually function until January 1956; Magsaysay had named a defeated Congressman to head it. In large part, perhaps, because of the administrative reshuffle resulting from the closing of the Landed Estates Division in the Bureau of Lands and transfer of its personnel to LTA, the pace of activities slowed down in early 1956: only one estate with 187 tenants was purchased. Within the same 6 months petitions from tenants came in at a rate of one a day.⁷ Aspirations had clearly been raised by the new Act, but were not being fulfilled. (Yet not all such petitions could be regarded as indicative of pure tenant aspirations; there were many cases in which tenants were manipulated by landlords .who wanted to sell unproductive, partially idle or improperly titled land.)

Strangely enough, landlords sometimes seemed to favor expropriation over negotiated sale. They had friends in court. The price set by courts in expropriation proceedings were sometimes nearly double those of negotiated settlements, disadvantaging the tenant who had to repurchase the land at the same price. (Landlords were paid in cash and/or negotiable bonds.)⁸ Rights of repurchase remained confusing with LT A policy often failing to protect the actual cultivator.⁹ Only on estates where cultivating tenants were well organized could they be assured of priority in land redistribution, and most were not. Even when lots were allocated, and before they were fully paid for, the transfer of rights for cash – especially to non-cultivators-was rampant.¹⁰ Nor could tenants on sugar estates expect to benefit from LT A programs in any way; there was an informal understanding that petitions for the expropriation of sugar land would not be acted upon favorably.¹¹

Despite confusions in implementation, the LTA increased the pace of land acquisition several times over in FY 1957; seven estates were purchased. The rising number of investigations in 1957 resulted in the acquisition of 18 estates in FY 1958 encompassing over 14,000 hectares with more than 5,200 tenants. But in March 1957 President Magsaysay died, succeeded by his Vice-President, Carlos P. Garcia. Within a year many of the officials committed to land reform left the Administration. In the next two fiscal years only 6 estates were acquired, and corruption in the process became more widespread.¹²

During the time of President Garcia there was “what amounts to a stalemate between landlords and their allies in Congress and in the executive departments, and the elements favoring land reform.”¹³ The hopes of accomplishment raised in 1954 had again been dashed. Though other agrarian programs may have somewhat improved the bargaining position of the tenant vis-à-vis the landlord, only an insignificant portion of the nation’s tenant farmers were on the way to becoming owners. The land acquired for redistribution by the LT A in the first 5 years of its existence amounted to less than 10 percent of the area of landed estates over ISO hectares in the five provinces of Central Luzon alone!¹⁴

At the rate of progress maintained under Magsaysay and Garcia it would have taken approximately 700 years to repurchase and redistribute the 1.8 million hectares of tenanted agricultural land in the Philippines.¹⁵

The defeat of President Garcia in the 1961 election was not, therefore, a great loss to the cause of land reform. Nor did it appear to be any particular gain. It was hardly mentioned in the campaign, nor was it referred to at the inauguration of the victor, Diosdado Macapagal. Though a congressman in the 1950’s, Macapagal had not participated in the land reform debate in 1954 or 1955, and had not even voted on the bill that became R.A. 1400.¹⁶

But in January 1963 President Macapagal appointed a special committee on land reform, headed by Acting Secretary of Labor Bernadino Abes, to draft what eventually came to be known as the Agricultural Land Reform Code of 1963. It was introduced into Congress in March and adopted by both houses in July. What had led the President to issue an emotional call in his State of the Nation Address: “We must give the tenants liberty from economic peonage, in which they have long languished”? In part it seemed to be the arguments of his top economic advisor, Sixto Roxas, that land reform was a necessary component of a strategy for rapid economic development, permitting, for instance, the transfer of capital in land to industry. It was also apparent to many that Macapagal intended to create mass support among tenants, thus insuring his reelection.¹⁷ Nor was he unresponsive to the views of American advisors.

Macapagal was not the popular leader Magsaysay was, coming into office on a wave of proreform sentiment. But Macapagal was a much more skillful strategist, using successfully what influence he had to gain early passage, even though the Senate was not under his party’s control. He had appointed Federation of Free Farmers’ leader Jeremias Montemayor and Philippines Free Press editor Teodoro Locsin to his special committee, thus helping to provide some active support for his legislation in the press and from tenant groups. And when the legislation had not yet been passed by Senate at the end of the regular session, he called seven special sessions of a few days each until it was adopted, helping to direct tactics from Malacanang.

The Land Reform Code of 1963 was the most comprehensive piece of legislation ever enacted in the Philippines on the subject. It reorganized and strengthened land settlement, small farmer credit, the dissemination of new agricultural technology, legal assistance to tenants and small farmers, and created a structure for better coordination of all these functions, as well as dealing with land reform more narrowly defined. A Land Authority was created to take over most of the activities of the LTA and a Land Bank was established to handle the financial aspect of land acquisition.

Though the initial bill was somewhat weakened before final passage, the emasculation was nowhere nearly as great as in 1955. The most serious excision was the chapter on land taxation which would have imposed a progressive tax based on assessment of potential productivity and could have greatly improved collection. A major incentive for landlords’ acceptance of government purchase and redistribution was thus lost.

The Code had several advantages over previous legislation, especially the authorization for the Land Authority to acquire estates of more than 75 hectares, whether owned by individuals or corporations, removing the term “contiguous.” However, the earlier absence of any effective restraints on landlord evasion by transforming land use or transferring ownership to family members remained. And while in 1955 sugar and coconut were excluded from land reform by tacit agreement, in 1963 this exclusion was made legislatively specific, with fruits and other crops added to the list. Furthermore, the provision that the National Land Reform Council needed to declare all government agencies dealing with land reform fully operative in a region before implementation could begin was, while logical from one standpoint, an additional juncture at which landlord pressure and bureaucratic wrangling could delay any action.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy, however, was that after President Macapagal had shown considerable political sophistication in getting the Code enacted, he was lax in pushing its implementation. It. was a dramatic example of the politics of symbolism that has so permeated Philippine public affairs. It was as if Macapagal, having signed an important document, found little compulsion to act on it. The new agencies established by the code were not fully operative until March 1964.¹⁸ As late as 1966 no agricultural land had yet been purchased under the terms of the Code!¹⁹ Even under the provisions of previous legislation in the 2 years following enactment of the Code only 1,610 hectares were purchased, or less than the annual average under Magsaysay and Garcia.²⁰ A few months before the November 1965 election Macapagal panicked, and made vigorous efforts to implement the Code.²¹ But it was too late to turn the political tide against him.

President Marcos came to office, like his immediate predecessor, without any record of interest in land reform. The fact that machinery for implementation was established by his defeated rival may have caused him to be even less enthused. Certainly the commitment of funds was modest. None other than Conrado Estrella, appointed chairman of the Land Reform Council by Marcos and later secretary of the Department of Agrarian Reform, called attention in early 1972 to the fact that in 1965 the total appropriation for all land reform agencies was PI56 million, but that “out of this amount only … 20 percent was released. This trend has continued through the years. The proportion of the amount released against appropriations ranged from 20 to 30 percent.” “In 1971 only … 24 percent [was] released from an appropriation of PI82 million.”²² As of September 1971 land reform, had not even been “proclaimed” in more than 236 of the nation’s 1,506 cities and municipalities (varying in size from a country to a township), Agricultural land purchase and redistribution had fallen to a low level: during the first 4 years of the Marcos presidency approximately 2,600 hectares had been purchased by the Land Authority and another 1,500 by the Land Bank, or about 1,000 hectares per year. Though slightly above the pace of activity in Macapagal’s last 2 years in office, this was only {%} of the annual average during the Magsaysay/Garcia years.

The way in which Mr. Marcos won reelection in 1969 with charges of massive fraud, inducement and intimidation, triggered a political reaction that had a profound impact on the national attention to and perception of land reform. It marked the beginning of a new stage in the history of Philippine agrarian reform.

Land Reform Since 1971

The raucous demonstrations that accompanied President Marcos’ second inauguration marked the tenor of the times. Students were aroused and were making common cause with tenants and trade unionists. The only positive response in the President’s State of the Nation address was a proposal to sell military camps near Manila to generate funds for land reform. Later special committees in both chambers of Congress conducted hearings which heard representatives of peasant groups and land reform Agencies.²³ On 5 May as a consequence of those hearings, omnibus bills were introduced to promote land reform in both the Senate and the House, but the problems and costs which became associated with the idea of selling military land scuttled that plan. For the first time in Philippine history legislative initiative on land reform did not come from the President, but resulted in large part from popular clamor heeded by Congress.

The Senate bill was favored by peasant organizations since it incorporated their demands for a lowering of the retention limit to 24 hectares and a prohibition on the creation of subdivisions or the “resumption of personal cultivation” (through wage laborers) as justification for the ejection of tenants, and thus avoidance of land reform. (Both were widespread practices since 1955.) They were less enthusiastic about the Estrel1a-favored bill to create a Department of Agrarian Reform. But the regular session ended without any land reform related bills being passed. The first and second special sessions saw little progress either, and before the third special session was called a meeting of Congressional leaders with the President agreed to strike land reform from the agenda.²⁴ It was decided to suspend action on land reform while a special committee conducted an in-depth study, submitting its report to the regular session beginning in January 1971. Peasant and student groups were angry.²⁵ Jeremias Montemayor, President of the Federation of Free Farmers, questioned the sincerity of President Marcos for saying that land reform would become the “epicenter” of all government activities.

Soon after the January regular session began sitting, debate on land reform was again suspended to refer the matter to another subcommittee, chaired by Senator Salvador Laurel. The peasant-favored Senate Bill 478 was amended, omitting the lowered retention of 24 hectares. Despite 2 days of demonstrations at Malacaftang in May by 5,000 farmer-members of the Cooperative League of the Philippines, demanding to see the President, the regular session ended without land reform legislation having been certified as urgent.²⁶ Both peasant leaders and progressive legislators increasingly blamed the President for inaction.

With the calling of the first special session of 1971 there was launched a unique form of political action, the “live-in picket.” On 1 June hundreds of small farmers, supported by students, priests, nuns, and urban trade unions, encamped in front of the Congress building to insist on effective reform legislation. At the beginning of the second special session, when legislative action on land reform was still far from complete, the demonstration had already lasted for 2 months.²⁷ Peasant organizations, especially the Free Farmers, brought in buses and jeeps loaded with tenants from villages as far as 200 kilometers away. During each legislative day small groups badgered individual Congressmen demanding to know how they would vote on each article of each pending land reform bill, and why, and explaining the importance of the reforms proposed. Members of Congress had increasing difficulty in handling this unprecedented pressure. In the early days of the second special session they began to question the legality of such action; debates on land reform were even suspended, to reinforce the demand that demonstrators abandon their round-the-clock picket.²⁸ But the picketers only gained greater mass support. Representatives of the Philippine Public School Teachers Federation joined the demonstration. The 87,OOO-member Philippine Federation of Labor threatened to strike nationwide if farmer demonstrators were evicted from the Congress building.²⁹ Finally on 9 August House Speaker Villareal announced that the leadership had decided to withdraw their demand for the pickets’ removal and to resume debate on land reform. Said a spokesman for the Philippine Congress of Trade Unions, “this proved that democracy, if given a chance, can still work in this country.” One observant Congressman threw light on the motivation for the turnabout when he commented, “those who would evict the demonstrators would be doing exactly what the Russian aristocracy … did just before the October revolution began …³⁰ From then on debate on land reform, especially in the House, was more constructive. Two bills had been enacted, R.A. 6389 and R.A. 6390, when the fifth special session ended on 5 September.

Unlike every experience in the past, the final version of the first piece of 1971 land reform legislation was in some ways more favorable to the tenant than the first. Certainly lowering the retention limit to 24 hectares and preventing landlords from claiming “personal cultivation” or subdivision as an excuse for ejectment of tenants would not have survived the legislative process without intense peasant pressure. Furthermore, the piecemeal approach was ended and the whole country was declared a land reform area. R.A. 6390, the funding bill, was more disappointing, providing appropriation for on1y P50 million, no higher than the funding level in the previous few years, and much less than the original Senate bill. It was, in fact, the President’s intervention which tipped the scale for the much more modest figures in the House version.³¹ Only the provision in R.A. 6389 creating a Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) received consistent Administration backing.

There are two major conclusions to be drawn from this legislative history. The more general one was articulated by both conservative solons and radical peasant leaders: the democratic process works, the people may peaceably assemble to redress their grievances. More specifically, genuine progress toward land reform was possible through Congress if small farmers were organized. Neither of these conclusions was consistent with the contentions in September and October 1972 that only through the setting aside of Congress and presidential rule by decree could genuine land reform be accomplished. The evidence of peasant mobilization in 1971 and the implications it had for the future of the Philippine political system, were undoubtedly factors that helped President Marcos decide to reduce mass participation through Martial law. (A fuller explanation for the abrupt transition in September 1972 to authoritarian rule must be found elsewhere, however.)

Presidential Decree No. 17

In the early years of martial law agrarian reform was given great prominence. One month after its declaration the President issued Presidential Decree No. 27 for “the emancipation of the tiller from the bondage of the soil.” And on the first anniversary of P .D. 27 he went so far as to say: “land reform is the only gauge for the success or failure of the New Society. If land reform fails, there is no New Society. “³²

In the decree’s preamble President Marcos hinted at one of the motivations for this emphasis: “Inasmuch as the old concept of land ownership by a few has spawned valid and legitimate grievances that gave rise to violent conflict and social tension, the redress of such … grievances … [becomes] one of the fundamental objectives of the New Society…“The fear of agrarian unrest, and Communist leadership thereof, was certainly the explanation for the fact that only 2 weeks after martial law had been declared, Dr. Roy Prostermann, of the University of Washington, author of the

1970 land reform in Vietnam (and the subsequent program in El Salvador) arrived in the Philippines with a draft decree in his pocket. (His draft influenced but did not determine the final document.) About the same time, Executive Secretary Alejandro Melchor was in Washington trying to justify martial law on the grounds that it was necessary for the quick implementation of broad social reforms. But for the President himself, land reform’s most important political function was to strike a blow at the “oligarchy,” those wealthy elite who had formed the core of his political opposition. Not surprisingly the Aquino estates were among the first to be expropriated. The subsequent pattern of implementation helped to confirm this interpretation. The President simply lost his originally keen interest after the owners with more than 100 hectares had been dispossessed.

In sum, the political purpose of land reform and its ancillary policies was to create mass support for the New Society and its leader, legitimize him abroad, and undermine support for alternative leadership on both the right and the left. Since great estates in sugar, coconut and other export crops were excluded from its coverage in any case, it is probably fair to say that in the long run none of these goals were accomplished. In the first few years of martial law, however, agrarian policy did help create support for Marcos in the countryside, blunted foreign criticism of his regime, and put the landed elite on the political defensive.

In principle P.D. 27 was a great improvement over previous legislation because all rice and corn tenants whose landlords owned more than 7 hectares were to be sold the land they tilled at a price 2 1/2 times the average annual production; they were given 15 years to pay the land Bank at 6 percent Interest. No tenant initiative was required. When the tenant fully paid, and only then, he would receive a title transferable exclusively to his heirs. (Landlords were to be paid 10 percent in cash and 90 percent in Land Bank bonds.) In the meantime the eligible tenant would receive a “Certificate of Land Transfer” (CLT) identifying his cultivated area and promising him the right to purchase the land.

The number of tenants to benefit from this decree quickly became a controversial question. In the first month the Department of Agrarian Reform (which had already been created before martial law) announced that over I million tenants tilled 1.44 million hectares of rice and corn land. But research in 1975 established that 57 percent of tenants farmed land owned by persons with less than 7 hectares. Subsequently DAR announced that based on its own “field identification,” its goal was to service more than 390,000 tenants on 730,000 hectares, or little more than 1/3 of all rice and corn tenants. By 1980, DAR claimed to have “issued” CLTs to 90 percent of the targeted tenants, but best estimates are that nearly half of those printed in Manila never actually reached the hands of the cultivator.

CL T holders were still being asked to pay rent to their landlords. Not until the price of the land was fixed and the tenant began to pay installments to the land Bank was he an “amortizing owner.” Only 86,500, or 22 percent of the target, had reached that stage; and of that number only 1,667 had completed payments early and become full owners.³³ Most amortizing owners were delinquent.³⁴

Delay in fixing the price, and delinquency in amortization resulted from the fact that instead of setting land price on the basis of production as the decree provided, landlords were allowed to negotiate with tenants and DAR field officials sometimes aided the landlord, already the stronger party. On other occasions, to be sure, when DAR officials stood up for tenant rights under the law, they were verbally threatened or judicially harassed by landlords. Many DAR officials had court cases initiated against them for merely doing their duty.³⁵ Landlord foot-dragging could postpone a pricing agreement indefinitely. Thus by 1977, the average price per hectare being paid by the tenant of nearly P7,000 was 44 percent higher than it would have been if it had been based on the average yield as reported by the Ministry of Agriculture.³⁶ Since land Bank bonds could be sold for cash by landlords, at a discount to be sure, in order to make other investments, or could be invested in approved projects at face value, the loss of land usually did not involve a significant loss of wealth. By 1980, 5,860 landowners had been paid by the Land Bank an average of P207,347 each.

The net result of land redistribution was to put more than 86,000 tenants on the road to ownership (with only 2 percent completing the process); while this was less than 9 percent of a very conservative estimate of all rice and corn tenants, it was, nevertheless, a greater accomplishment than in any previous administration. However, since the announcement and the early stages of implementation gave the vast majority of all tenants a feeling that they personally were going to benefit, the consequence was that for every farmer who was grateful to the government for having achieved a new status, and perhaps improved income, there were many resentful that their hopes had been frustrated. Probably the thousands of tenants who first received CLTs, and then had them recalled — either because of simple bureaucratic confusion or because of landlord intervention — were most upset. Though the thousands more who were illegally ejected from their tenant holdings in 1972-74 by foresighted landlords wishing to evade the reform may have been at least equally frustrated.

The slow pace of implementation was due partly to a chronic bureaucratic complaint, lack of personnel because of lack of budget. Even though there was a real increase in funds (even after compensating for inflation) for agrarian reform between FY 1973 and FY 1977, the priority for the Ministry of Agrarian Reform within the total national budget continued to slide, however. In 1973 it was 0.8 percent of the total, in 1977 only 0.7 percent and in 1981 down to 0.5 percent).³⁷ More serious, however, was the delay, and even retreat, in the face of landlord pressure by top decision makers. Nor was this the result of inattention by the President; Minister of Agrarian Reform Conrado Estrella, who remained in office from before the declaration until after the lifting of martial law, boasted of easy access to President Marcos to consult on problems within the ministry. There was apparently a feeling in Malacanang that more was to be gained politically by easing the pressure on landlords (especially those with less than 24 hectares) than by pushing through to the full extent of the law. Foreign analysts, however, were more inclined to conclude that half measures were worse than none at all, i.e., that incomplete reform raised expectations and thus intensified the frustration of those who did not benefit. Revolutionary political organization in the countryside by 1981 would seem to have justified that conclusion. Some prime land reform areas had become bases for the Communist-led New People’s Army (NPA).

In any case, government spokesmen did not bother themselves with trying to explain shortcomings; they proclaimed complete success. The government-owned Philippine News Agency release on the eve of the 8th anniversary of P.D. 27 stated: “359,000 farmers now own the land they till via the issuance of 501,364 certificates of land title [sic]. The figures represent 82 percent of the total target.”³⁸ The previously subtle attempt to equate CL Ts with titles had lost its subtlety. Some foreign publications used the language of the release, thus perpetuating the gross inaccuracy. Even AID officials in Washington bought this line, though their Philippine specialists knew otherwise. The AID presentation to the House Foreign Affairs sub-Committee on Asia and Pacific Affairs hearings in Washington in March 1981 reported flatly that “88 percent of eligible families had received land titles” under Philippine agrarian reform.³⁹

Conclusion

To look at the sweep of policy over more than 30 years raises the very basic question whether “conservative land reform” is possible, i.e., whether the announced goals, to transform cultivators into owners, can be accomplished by any regime dominated by men of great private wealth. Does its achievement either require a period of foreign domination, as in Japan, or a prior sociopolitical revolution, as in China? Or, posed another way, does the goal of peasant ownership require rapid industrialization as the context for agrarian change, as in Japan? And is the only alternative agrarian revolution that ultimately denies the principle of cultivator ownership anyway, as in China? Perhaps farmer owners are a transitory breed in any case; both Japan and Western societies that were long based on peasant ownership are seeing the rise of the corporate farm.

These questions lead us into the broad field of comparative history, fascinating, but sometimes speculative. The questions which are more directly related to the historical survey of Philippine land reform policy here presented are: Why was this type of policy enacted? Why was implementation so consistently frustrated? And what are the political consequences of such programs?

It is abundantly clear that until 1911 peasant demands had no direct effect on policies enacted. Thus heroic rhetoric, e.g., “The evolution of the various land reform legislations since 1905 is the story of accumulated piecemeal concessions bitterly fought for by the Filipino peasantry,” sometimes lacks historical accuracy.⁴⁰ The presence of the Federation of Free Farmers (FFF) president on Macapagal’s special committee gave an opportunity for a peasant leader (balanced by an influential landlord on the same committee) to present his ideas in the drafting process. But peasant mobilization was insignificant; thus it was only the perceptions of the political elite about possible future peasant reactions that affected policy. And those perceptions were important to decision makers primarily as they entered into broader calculations of self interest, i.e., how elite interests are influenced by peasant reaction.

Insofar as peasant protests were violent, and constituted a threat to system stability, they stimulated concern within the elite, though without legislative consequence at least until the 19205.⁴¹ As early as 1933, however, the Rice Share Tenancy Act may be seen to be a kind of response to the furious Tayug uprising of January 1931. The more extensive peasant mobilization in Central Luzon of the late 1930s frightened President Quezon into launching the landed estates policy, though the more short-sighted members of the National Assembly effectively hamstrang other agrarian reform measures. Ultimately, “Quezon’s desire simultaneously to placate both landlords and tenants … pleased neither, and in 1941 rural class conflict was more acute than ever.”⁴² This characterization of the 1930s aptly fits, as we shall see, the interactions in later stages of land reform policy.

The Roxas Administration, the first after independence, was closely linked, as had been Quezon, to the landed elite of Central Luzon. Its response to the rising Huk Rebellion was the “mailed fist,” thus contributing to mobilization of the peasantry by the left. Roxas’ Vice-President and successor, Elpidio Quirino, was himself from the Ilocos region and was therefore less closely tied to the great landowners of the Philippines’ “ricebowl.” He saw some political advantage in wooing the dissidents, called for a cease-fire, granted amnesty to the Huks and seated Taruc in Congress. But the accumulated distrust was too great; militants on both sides sabotaged the cease-fire and the guerrilla movement was resumed. Under U.S. prodding, Quirino did attempt, however, to mount some agrarian reform programs except for land reform. The Hardie Report from the U.S. aid mission, which proposed a sweeping land redistribution, was branded as “communist” by vehement congressmen, undoubtedly speaking for the landed elite. Land reform had to wait until after the election of Magsaysay.

In the Magsaysay Administration the elite composition again changed, bringing in younger, and more middle class elements, dedicated to solve the underlying problems that caused unrest. Magsaysay himself had aroused the expectation of reform among the masses. But Magsaysay was, in politics, a tactical neophyte. And the landed interests in Congress were still strong. Since he delayed more than a year in pushing land reform legislation, the threat of the Huk Rebellion had drifted into the hazy past for most parliamentarians – they lost interest in forestalling unrest. “Community development” was a more comfortable concept, without implications of class conflict; it was thus a high priority program. Garcia, who became president on Magsaysay’s death, was fortunate to inherit a relatively tranquil society, which could afford an interlude of old fashioned politics.

Macapagal had indeed grown up a poor boy, but he had been co-opted by the landed Pampanga elite. His sudden conversion to the virtues of agrarian reform in 1963 is thus all the more surprising. Certainly he was respectful of American advice, and like every other Filipino politician adored the prospect of new agencies to fill with his appointees, and the Agricultural Land Reform Code created several of them. But his reaching out for mass support on the land reform issue was a harbinger of change in the Philippine system, a harbinger of trends that many thought had died with Magsaysay. But Macapagal started too late in the building of a new mass base to succeed.

With Marcos during his first term, as with Garcia, there was little interest shown in land reform. There were no new agencies to staff and Central Luzon was comparatively quiet. The quiet was deceptive, however, and by the end of the 19605 a new rebellion had been launched by the New People’s Army. The landed elite was not as influential in Congress as it once was and peasant organizations were larger and more politically skilled than ever.⁴³ For the first time they had the commitment, the leadership and the allies to put direct pressure on Congress for reform..

The reaction of Marcos to the land reform debate of 1971 is curious. He was certainly not displeased with the prospect of a new administrative structure, the Department of Agrarian Reform, which would allow him to make new appointments. But his negative approach to other peasant demands reflected either a serious miscalculation of the changing political realities or a hidden agenda. One could almost imagine that there was a desire to see land reform efforts in the “Old Society” frustrated, while plans for the unveiling of the “New” were being quietly laid down. His discomfort with the “oligarchy” was already apparent, thus his posing as the champion of land reform might have seemed appropriate. But that role was saved until after the declaration of martial law. And when the purposes of land reform after 1972 seemed to enjoy short-term success, the program was allowed to languish.

Tai has quite rightly pointed out that political elites initiate land reform “to gain political legitimacy, i.e., to strengthen popular support for a new political order or to safeguard an existing regime against threatened political changes.”⁴⁴ The first case may fit land reform after martial law, and the latter is typical of the earlier examples. Tai continues, “Elites are sensitive to the danger that in initiating reform they may immediately encounter the opposition of the landed class but only slowly gain the support of the peasants.” Conceivably, they may lose the loyalty of the former before gaining that of the latter. In fact, this sensitivity is sometimes developed only after the reform process has begun, thus inclining the same leadership which initiated it to leave it half finished. (This seemed particularly apparent in the Philippines in the late 1970s.)

The incomplete reform is also a function of the nature of the Philippine political elite. It is in Tai’s classification a “conciliatory elite, “⁴⁵ one in which landlord interests are strong enough that they must be conciliated. Conciliatory elites, he says, Hare generally more committed to passing some kind of law than to fighting for its effective implementation.”⁴⁶ He also recognizes that it is in countries where land reform has made the least progress, as in the Philippines that the greatest threats to stability persist.⁴⁷

Land reform exacerbates class conflict in rural communities, especially when landlord evasion causes suffering for peasants, e.g., eviction to make way for mechanization and wage labor, inappropriately termed “personal cultivation” in Philippine parlance. If such a period of conflict is only a brief transition to full peasant ownership it is not destabilizing to the whole political system. But when it continues indefinitely and is exploited by sophisticated radical leadership, the consequences can be devastating. The spread of guerrilla warfare in land reform areas in the 1980s is such a consequence.

The lack of follow through in land reform may have explanations other than the character of a “conciliatory elite.” It may be the result of the rampant “ritualism” that characterizes so much of Philippine politics, the belief that appearance is reality, that to make a declaration is to create a condition. This style is so pervasive that many leaders may not even be conscious of the lack of substance to their declarations.

The acceptance of ritual may also result from the clogging of communication channels in an authoritarian regime, where the opportunity for bad news to reach the top is very limited. In a centralized system of decision making, when the reality is not fully known at the center there can be no rectification of errors. Authoritarianism does not provide efficient feedback. Yet many authors have extolled the advantages of highly centralized regimes for implementing land reform. Samuel Huntington has been one of these. He adds, however, that in addition to concentration of power in an elite committed to reform there must be “the mobilization of the peasantry and their organized participation in the implementation” of reform. That is an intriguing combination, with a severe internal contradiction.

A concentration of power is not compatible with freedom of organization, which is based on the assumption that various interests in society have a right to share in the decision-making process. That sharing took place for the first time in 1971. When power was concentrated in 1972, independent peasant organizations were crushed. By the late 1970s even those groups that had been domesticated by martial law tried to bring to the President and Secretary Estrella the complaints of small farmers, but their message fell on deaf ears. They had no legitimacy within the decision-making process; they were powerless.

The critique of a close observer of the Philippine program, one who follows the Huntington school of thought, reveals a similar inconsistency. He points out that land reform has been handicapped since 1972 because the relationship between central authority and the peasantry has been one of central dominance.⁴⁹ He emphasizes the value of greater local initiative, then in the next paragraph recommends that wider use might be made of the military in implementing land reform! One wonders what such analysts mean by “local initiative.” The military constitute the greatest single constraint on autonomous peasant political activity especially in relation to agrarian questions.

The final point that must be made in the attempt to understand the inconclusive character of Philippine land reform relates to the differences between central and local elites. While it is true that in the last decade landed elements in the national political elite have declined in influence, permitting ever stronger legislation in 1963, 1971 and 1972, changes in local elites have been much slower. Despite the highly centralized character of Philippine public administration since the Spanish times local political leaders expected to be able to intervene in administrative matters to protect their own interests, and did so with impunity. Furthermore, at the provincial and municipal level civil servants were often relatives or recommendees of local politicians. And even though local politicians from the 1950s or 1960s had become a distinct category from the landlords, they were usually closely linked. The habits of nearly three generations of electoral politics died hard after 1972, so that local political leaders did not easily accept the supremacy of the bureaucracy, continuing to manipulate into their own ends. Thus the failure to implement land reform was often the gap between central policy and local practice, which could not be effectively corrected from the center. A mix of both authoritarian and democratic elements combined to frustrate the implementation of reform.

If land reform is to be fully implemented, there must be a cleansing of the bureaucracy of those who do not support it, along with much greater autonomy for peasant organization and an adequately funded, clearly committed central authority. It is difficult to foresee when these conditions may prevail.

Notes

DAVID WURFEL holds a Ph.D. in government and Asian studies from the Cornell University. He has conducted extensive research on land reform in South Vietnam. Thailand and the Philippines, and reports his findings on the subject in various periodicals and a compilation entitled, Government and Politics in Southeast Asia. Wurfel has, at onc time or another, served on the faculties of the University of Missouri, University of Michigan, International Christian University in Tokyo and the University of Singapore.

References

¹ See D. Wurfel, Philippine Agrarian Policy: 1946-1961 (Unpublished MS, 1962), ch. V.

² Resolution No. 42, Nov. 14, 1946.

³ See Bahay Pare Eswe Investigating Committee, “Findings,” July 24, 1954; Presidential Committce created to look into the conditions of the Buenavista &we, “Rcpon,” Aug. 20, 1954, and others.

⁴ Bureau of Lands, Annual Report, 1955, p. 53.

⁵ Wurfel, op. cit., p. 317.

⁶ House, Congressional Record, July 8, 1955, p. 3599.

⁷ LTA, Annual Report, 1956, p. 17.

⁸ see Manila Times, July 10, 1956; also Official Gazette (August 15, 1956), p. ccclxvii.

⁹ Note especially the case of Hacienda Dina Jupihan. MT, May 10, June 29, July 16, 1956, and author’s field notes.

¹⁰ see LTA Resolution 112, March 24, 1956.

¹¹ Wurfel, op cit., p. 331.

¹² Land Tenure Administration, Annual Report, FY 1959, (Manila, Sept. 25, 1959), pp. 100-101; Manuel Castalleda. A Report on Philippine Land Tenure Problems and Recommended Solutions Thereof (Manila: Land Tenure Administration. 1960) pp. 24-25.

¹³ Harold Koone and Lewis Glccc:k. “Land Reform in the Philippines,” AID Spring R (June 1970), p. 76.

¹⁴ Castalleda, op. cit., p. 4.

¹⁵ Don Ferry, “The Constitutional and Social Aspects of Land Reform.” in Gerardo Sicat, ed., The Philippine Economy in the 1960s (Quezon City: U.P., 1964) p. 128.

¹⁶ Diana E. Sabater, “Congress and Land Reform in the Philippines,” unpublished MS. Honolulu, 1977, p. 10, based on a research of the Congressional Record.

¹⁷ See Koone and Glccc:k, op. cit., p. 70. Though his goal was not achieved, be did win in tenant-dominated Central Luzon.

¹⁸ Exccutive Order No. 7S. March 19, 1964.

¹⁹ The Philippine Land Reform Program: A Country Stlltement (Diliman, Q.C.: Land Authority, 1966), p. 33.

²⁰ Benjamin Gozon, “Land Reform: Tool in Fight Against Poverty” Manila Times, Aug. 2, 1965.

²¹ Sabaler, op. cit., p. 85.

²² Hernan V. Gonzales 11, “Big Job on Small Budget,” Manila Times, March 23, 1972.

²³ Edward Kiunisala. “Land Reform at Last,” Philippine Free Press, August 28. 1971, p. 2.

²⁴ Manila Times, August 31. 1970.

²⁵ Edward Kiunisala, “Lip Service to Land Reform.” Philippine Free Press, September 12, 1970.

²⁶ MT, May 20, 1971.

²⁷ Manila Times, August 3, 1971.

²⁸ MT, August 4, 1971.

²⁹ MT, August 8, 1971.

³⁰ MT, August 10, 1971.

³¹ MT, August 24, 1971.

³² Philippine Daily Express, September 22, 1973.

³³ ST, October 21, 1980, p. 10.

³⁴ Rolf Hanisch. “Decision-Making Process and Problems of Implementation of the Land Reform in the Philippines,” Asia Quarterly, (1978. no. I).

³⁵ Hanisch, op cit., pp. 21.22.

³⁶ see Germelino Bautista, Philippine Rural Anti-Poverty Programs (Quezon City: Institute of Philippine Culture, Atenco de Manila University, 1978), pp. 27-28.

³⁷ See Presidential Budget Message. FYI975, p. 8A; Philippine Development, August IS, 1979. pp. 13.16; and ST, Seplember 2, 1980, p. 2. Agrarian reform seemed to get priority, instead, when announcing reversion of appropriations to the general fund. See reversion order for P.157 million in June ID7, an which P6S, million came from DAR. (Presidential letter of Instructions No. S48.)

³⁸ ST October 19, 1980.

³⁹ statement of Frederick Schieck, Acting Assistant Administrator, Bureau of Asia, AID, March 31, 1981.

⁴⁰ alondie Po, Land Reform (Unpublished MS, 1978).

⁴¹ See Jim Richardson, “Does Grass-roots Action Lead to Agrarian Reform?”, Philippine Sociological Review, Vol. 20(1-2), 1972, pp. I44-4S.

⁴² ibid., p. 149.

⁴³ See Wurfel, “Elites of Wealth and Elites of Power, The Changing Dynamic: A Philippine’ Case Study,” in SE Asian Affairs, 1979 (Singapore: ISEAS, 1979), 233-45.

⁴⁴ Hung-chao Tai, Land Reform and Politics: A Comparative Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), p. 56.

⁴⁵ ibid., p. 90ff.

⁴⁶ ibid., p. 128.

⁴⁷ ibid., p.441.

⁴⁸ Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), p. 383.

⁴⁹ William Overholt, “Land Reform in the Philippines,” Asian Survey, XVI: 5 (May 1976), p. 449.