The Presidency of Corazon Aquino (1986–1992)
Loading ...Corazon Aquino was born the daughter of a wealthy family. Her father was Jose Cojuangco of Tarlac, and her mother was Demetria Sumulong, daughter of distinguished Juan Sumulong of Antipolo. She received a convent education in the Philippines and went to the United States, where she obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in French and mathematics from the Catholic College of St. Vincent, run by Sisters of Charity in New York.
After graduation, she returned to her homeland, where she met and married Benigno (Ninoy) Aquino Jr. on October 11, 1954. She led the quiet life of a Catholic housewife and mother of five children, until her husband was assassinated and she became the new leader of the People Power revolution. Corazon Aquino was democratically elected as the new president of the republic on February 25, 1986. She entered office on a pledge to fight corruption and poverty. She immediately established a revolutionary government under the Freedom Constitution, which was eventually replaced by the Constitution of 1987, drafted by the Constitutional Commission and ratified on February 7, 1987. This served as the basis for the restoration of democracy.
On May 25, 1986, in an effort to hasten the reconstruction of a democratic government, President Aquino established the Constitutional Commission. She appointed to this commission former senators, congressmen, judges of the Supreme Court, and conservative members of the Catholic hierarchy. There were 48 delegates selected, most of whom were upper-class, educated lawyers, not unlike the delegates almost a century earlier.6 However, these appointments demonstrated President Aquino’s goal of reestablishing the old order that existed prior to martial law. For example, by not including members of peasant organizations on this commission, she missed an opportunity to formulate genuine land reform policies that could have reduced rural poverty and unrest.
Basically, the new constitution established a presidential form of government and reinstated many of the features of the 1935 constitution, including a bicameral legislature and an independent Supreme Court. The president is limited to one six-year term; senators to two six-year terms; presidents, vice presidents, and senators are elected by popular vote in national elections. Voters may vote for presidents and vice presidents from different or opposing parties.
Representatives are elected by legislative districts, with an additional unspecified number to the registered party-list representing the different national, regional, and sector-based organizations that represent labor, peasants, the urban poor, indigenous cultural communities, women, and other underrepresented groups. The constitution provided for the protection of private property, a centralized form of government, civil and political rights, the importance of education, and a bill of rights. It also included a provision for land reform.
However, some found this land reform provision to be deceptive because it “allows for land reform opponents to define the scope of land reform” as indicated in the following: The State shall, by law undertake an agrarian reform program founded on the right of the farmers and regular farm workers, who are landless, to own directly or collectively the lands they till or, in the case of other farm workers, to receive a just share of the fruits thereof.
To this end, the State shall encourage and undertake the just distribution of all agricultural lands, subject to such priorities and reasonable retention limits as the Congress may prescribe, taking into account ecological, developmental or equity considerations, and subject to the payment of just compensation. In determining retention limits, the State shall respect the right of small landowners. The State shall further provide incentives for voluntary land sharing.
The provision, while respecting the right of “small landowners,” does not define the term small landowner. Implicitly, the provision states that the term refers to “teachers, clerks, nurses, and other hard working frugal people,” but, at the same time, it lumps these small owners who cultivated their own land in the same category as “absentee landlords,” whose land was farmed by tenants and farm workers. Also, this provision could actually limit the amount of land available for agrarian reform, and it provides constitutional mechanisms that could be manipulated by those landowners who seek to evade land redistribution.
Upon entering office, President Aquino’s two most pressing challenges were how to deal with the economic crisis and the restoration of a democratic government.
Marcos left the economy in shambles, causing a severe recession and the flight of capital from the Philippines. Poverty dramatically increased under his administration: social indicators show underemployment affected more than 20 percent of the labor force; real wages for skilled and unskilled labor declined from 100.0 in 1972 to 53.4 in 1980.10 The Asian Development Bank provided data that ranked the Philippines below India, Indonesia, and Bangladesh in average per capita consumption, and the Ministry of Health documented that some four-fifths of Filipino children suffered from some form of malnutrition. By the fall of Marcos’s government, 50 percent of the total population was living in abject poverty.
As a bailout effort, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank restructured the national debt repayments, while exerting a formative influence over the political economy. Later, in 1989, the Aquino government was given a US$1.3 billion loan from the IMF on the condition that the liberalization of the economy (e.g., price decontrol, labor control, export-oriented development) continue, along with privatization of government-owned industries and institutions. Meanwhile, the responsibility for the provisioning of needed healthcare and social welfare was being increasingly shifted from the government to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and the churches. Gerard Clarke defines NGOs as “private, non-profit, professional organizations with a distinctive legal character, concerned with public welfare goals.
Within this definition, NGOs include philanthropic foundations, church development agencies, academic think tanks, human rights organizations and other organizations focused on issues such as gender, health, agricultural development, social welfare, the environment, and indigenous people,” and this definition is used here. Under Marcos, there was a proliferation of NGOs that arose to provide social services, since these services were not being adequately provided for by the government. Outside nonprofit donor organizations and churches directly funded non-government organizers to implement programs to help poor people succeed in improving their circumstances for themselves, by promoting income-generating projects and, in the agricultural sector, sustainable organic farming techniques, among other projects.
Politically, President Aquino became caught between three opposing forces: the Left and Right, and the traditional ruling elites from which her own family derived and that pressured her to protect their interests. Had she decided to promote social and economic programs for reform, the people’s movement and their network of NGOs that had proliferated in reaction to the Marcos dictatorship would have supported her. Marcos already had replaced the traditional Nationalistas and Liberal parties with his own KBL Party (Kilusang Bagong Lipunan), which crumbled after his fall. So, there was no traditional political party when he was ousted; instead, there were numerous people’s organizations and NGOs that came from different sectors but were united in their cause for greater equity and social and environmental justice.
However, Aquino felt obliged to appoint members to her cabinet who were politically opposed if not outright antagonistic toward each other: From the conservative camp, she appointed General Ponce Juan Enrile, secretary of defense, and General Ramos, chief of staff. Her vice president, Laurel, represented the interests of the traditional ruling oligarchies.
Then, from among her husband’s moderate left-wing friends and associates who formed her campaign, she appointed Jaime Ong finance minister; Jose Concepcion, a businessman and cofounder of NAMFREL, minister of trade; Aquilino Pimentel minister of local governments; and Senator Jose Diokno, a world-class human rights lawyer, the head of the Presidential Commission on Human Rights. Solita Monsod became minister of economic planning. Joker Arroyo, her late husband’s attorney and longtime human rights activist, was appointed executive secretary. She entered office when the nation’s mood for major reform had reached its pinnacle, right after the fall of the Marcos regime.
There were frequent and ongoing demonstrations in the streets, and the media, freed from the strictures of censorship, publicized a whole range of alternative political views, internal criticisms, and new possibilities for social change. But, Aquino did not have sufficient experience to govern and had to work with a military that she distrusted, for good reason.15 The armed forces that she inherited was a creation of the Marcos dictatorship, and no sooner had she assumed power than did RAM (Reform the Armed Forces Movement) attempt to overthrow her government in May 1986. They made another attempt in November, in the first of a series of seven coups, which she quelled through the help of General Ramos. Fearing a military takeover, she appeared to have shifted her political allegiance to the right wing and made concessions.
Those involved in the initial coup attempts were not punished. After the second coup, she asked for and accepted the resignations of four her own cabinet members who were longtime human rights advocates, including Secretary of Labor Bobby Sanchez, because they were being labeled Communist sympathizers by the military. With each subsequent coup attempt, she made more concessions, reneging on her promises of social change. To her credit, Corazon Aquino is remembered for transitioning the Philippines from an authoritarian to a democratic form of government.
Instrumental in this transition were reformist NGOs and people’s organizations, which, even as Aquino moved to the right, continued to advocate for reform from below. Henceforth, in the Philippines, political and economic policies could not be so easily imposed from the top down, without taking into consideration the deliberations and responses of peoples’ organizations and NGOs. Also, the Aquino administration passed the Republic Act 7160, Local Government Code of 1991 in an effort to decentralize some of the big powers of government. Under this legislation, local and provincial governments were given a larger share of the tax revenue and power to fund local development projects directly.
Under subsequent administrations, NGOs and people’s organizations continued to participate in this development arena at the local levels. During her six-year term, Aquino quelled seven attempts to overthrow her government, thereby preventing the return of a military dictatorship and affecting a peaceful and democratic transfer of power on June 30, 1992, when Fidel V. Ramos, the newly elected president, took office.
