Declassified docs detail US monitoring of PH during Edsa Revolt
BLOODLESS REVOLUTION During the height of what will be known as the People Power Revolution in 1986, people filled the stretch of Edsa from Ortigas Avenue to Cubao to support and protect the military officials and their followers who demanded the immediate ouster of then President Ferdinand Marcos Sr. Photo below shows Catholic nuns and civilians greeting a government soldier on board his V-150 armored tank on Edsa. —Inquirer file photos
MANILA, Philippines — Washington was all eyes and ears on the political crisis in Manila that culminated in the People Power Revolution in 1986, according to declassified documents by the US Department of State which showed the extent of US involvement in the developments in the Philippines then.
The documents, made available last year on foia.state.gov, suggest that US officials were tiptoeing in their every move as Washington sought to avoid any partisan involvement and limit its role to upholding a fair democratic process in the Philippines.
Marcos, the Senate President in 1965, ran for president and won in that campaign year. He secured a second term amid the violence and vote-buying that marred the 1969 presidential election but was barred by law from seeking a third term. About a year before his second term was supposed to end in 1973, he declared martial law.
US involvement in the Philippines had long been an acknowledged facet of the country’s government affairs but became deeper under Marcos.
According to “Waltzing with a Dictator: The Marcoses and the Making of American Policy” (1987), by former New York Times journalist Raymond Bonner, then US Ambassador Henry Byroade had sought to dissuade Marcos against Proclamation No. 1081, after the Central Intelligence Agency gave the diplomat a copy of that martial law proclamation early in that week of Sept. 23, 1972, when Marcos finally declared that proclamation on national television.
Article continues after this advertisementAfter more than a decade of his iron rule, which Marcos himself described as “constitutional authoritarianism,” his leading critic, Sen. Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr., was assassinated upon his homecoming in 1983 following a three-year exile.
Article continues after this advertisementAquino’s murder triggered a wave of street protests in the next three years, which led to US pressure on Marcos to call a snap election where he was challenged by Corazon Aquino, the slain senator’s widow.
The protests escalated after the rampant fraud and violence of the snap polls, which leading US news magazine 黑料社week described in a cover story as “A Rotten Election.”
‘Avoid use of force’
In one of its telegrams sent at that time to Stephen Bosworth, the US ambassador to Manila, the state department conveyed its message to Marcos urging him to “avoid the use of force by Filipino against Filipino.”
The telegram was dated Feb. 23, 1986—a date that also falls on Sunday this year. Earlier on Saturday morning—according to media accounts of those four days, beginning that day, which led to Marcos’ ouster—his defense minister, Juan Ponce Enrile, was already confronted by coffee-shop talk that the military had exposed a plot against Marcos by officers close to Enrile.
That evening of Saturday, Enrile and Lt. Gen. Fidel Ramos, a second cousin of Marcos and then vice chief of staff of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, held a news conference in Camp Aguinaldo announcing their breakaway from Marcos, which prompted a mass gathering outside the AFP headquarters on the beltway Edsa.
“The hearts of the American people go out to their Filipino friends at this extremely dangerous time. We understand the difficult decisions that face you and other leaders in your country,” read the telegram to Bosworth which quoted US Secretary of State George Schultz as saying. “At this extremely critical juncture in the history of the Philippines, it is crucial to avoid the use of force… [T]his is a step [that] could split your country irrevocably, benefiting only the forces of the [L]eft.”
‘Fluid’ Tuesday
US concern for political stability in the Philippines was prompted then by the need to secure its two military facilities in Central Luzon, amid a growing anti-US communist insurgency fueled by poverty and human rights violations by the police and military on the watch of the Marcos regime.
By the third day of the Edsa uprising on Monday, Feb. 24, Schultz telegrammed “all diplomatic and consular posts” to update him on the ground situation in Manila. By then the foreign media, including correspondents sent by the US networks, had also gathered on Edsa, while embassies in Manila were also monitoring the developments there.
On Feb. 25, around noon that Tuesday, Marcos and Corazon Aquino were inaugurated president by their respective supporters. “At the moment it is a very new development; it is a very fluid situation and we will just withhold specific comment… Until we get a little more settled,” White House Press Secretary Larry Speakes said in a news conference following those events, in response to questions seeking to confirm US negotiations with Marcos to prevail on him to step down peacefully.
Speakes, however, confirmed that US special envoy Philip Habib, a highly regarded negotiator in diplomatic circles, had already been dispatched to Manila. He also disclosed as much when he said that Habib was directed “to see if the United States can be of assistance as they attempt to make a peaceful transition to a new government.”
Marcos’ friendship with US President Ronald Reagan had complicated Washington’s relations with his regime, and Reagan provoked criticism even in the United States when he commented there was “cheating on both sides” amid the fraud and violence of the snap election compounded by the walkout of the staff of the Commission on Elections.
The state department’s next telegram to “all diplomatic and consular posts” by Tuesday afternoon—hours before Marcos and his family were flown out of the country and eventually to Hawaii—stated that “[t]he United States recognized the government of President Corazon Aquino” and also affirmed Schultz’s statement paying “special tribute to Mrs. Aquino for her role in revitalizing democracy in the Philippines and to the Filipino people for their courageous example of the democratic process.”
Post-Marcos briefing
Washington had been forthright about its efforts to provide the Marcoses a “safe haven,” as Speakes himself would put it in his updates following their US exile.
A declassified memo dated Feb. 26 and signed by Executive Secretary Rodney McDaniel granted the Marcoses protection by the US Secret Service.
Bosworth’s predecessor, Michael Armacost, later pointed out, in a since declassified state department briefing, that “President Marcos is a leader of a country with whom we’ve had a long friendship… He has many personal associations with Americans. He’s been a friend of the President.”
But following the ouster of Marcos, the United States knew well that it was crucial to sustain its relations with his successor.
Armacost noted, among other things, Aquino’s “genuine popular mandate” as well as her “very considerable political prowess”—a strength of hers not acknowledged by her critics.
He cited as among the issues that Washington needed to discuss with her the Philippines’ huge foreign debt, its loss of investor confidence and the lack of credibility among the country’s government institutions.
The topmost priority, he said, was getting the Philippine government “organized” and “opening up” its democratic processes after Marcos’ rule.
