Nicolas Maduro is not the only head of state that was whisked away by the United States. Before him, there was General Manuel Noriega, de facto ruler of Panama, who was snatched by U.S. troops on orders from President George H.W. Bush in December 1989. And before Noriega, there was Ferdinand Marcos, president and dictator of the Philippines. In the case of Maduro and Noriega, they were flown to a U.S. prison. In the case of Marcos, however, this close ally of the United States was removed and flown to peaceful retirement in Hawaii by President Ronald Reagan to save him from the wrath of a popular uprising that broke out 40 years ago, in February 1986. Reagan’s move came in the wake of an unexpected interruption by Manila’s urban masses of a larger operation designed by State Department “pragmatists” to derail a revolution and manage a restoration of a compliant liberal elite.
The EDSA Uprising, or “People Power Revolution,” was an unexpected byproduct of Washington’s push for Marcos to share power with the Philippine elite opposition in response to the mass effervescence following the assassination of the anti-Marcos personality Benigno Aquino, Jr, in August 1983. The uprising was not planned by Washington, but it quickly adjusted to changed circumstances and was central in bringing about a transfer of power from Marcos to Aquino’s widow, Corazon. To confer legitimacy on the new liberal democracy, both the anti-Marcos elite and Washington had an interest in not revealing the full extent of U.S. involvement for years after the uprising. But later research was able to document Washington’s central role.
The Aquino Assassination
The Aquino assassination shook the country’s middle class into political action, providing a mass base for the elite opposition.
The Roxases, Osmeñas, Lopezes, and other families disenfranchised by Marcos were invigorated, and they began to distance themselves from the left with which they previously had established active lines of communication, owing to their desperation. Unlike in Chile, where the left that was in power was seen as the main threat to its interests, the middle class in the Philippines viewed the dictatorship as the principal enemy and joined with the traditional elite on a program of “democratization.” The National Democratic Front and the network of political formations and civil society organizations allied with it were no longer seen as the only effective opposition to Marcos. A liberal mass opposition had spontaneously been triggered by Aquino’s death, and in the next few months, it became a stronger force than the left.
The left responded cautiously to this new actor, joining forces with it in street mobilizations but unaccustomed to not playing the leading role in these escalating protests. The Marcos regime was just as surprised as the left, and cracks in the once formidable iron fist began to show, with discontent beginning to simmer in the military and civilian elites that had previously exhibited unqualified loyalty to the dictator. Also surprised was Washington, but it adjusted to the new political configuration much quicker and more effectively than the left or Marcos.
Being in Washington, with sources of information in Congress and the State and Treasury departments, I was able to monitor the changes in the U.S. government’s policy toward the Philippines, though, like my comrades at home, I did not fully appreciate their implications. They certainly did not shake our conviction that the armed struggle or people’s war would be the decisive force that would end the dictatorship. It was only after the EDSA Uprising in 1986 that I was able to piece together and write the only comprehensive, nuanced picture of the fluid interaction between U.S. policy and the post-Aquino assassination developments on the ground in the Philippines that I am retelling here.
The NSSD
It was in late January 1985 that one of our contacts at the State Department sent me what turned out to be one of our most important intelligence coups: the National Security Strategy Directive on the Philippines (NSSD), which reached our hands shortly after it was adopted as policy. The essence of the NSSD was its now classic formulation:
While President Marcos at this stage is part of the problem, he is also necessarily part of the solution. We need to be able to work with him and to try to influence him through a well-orchestrated policy of incentives and disincentives to set the stage for a peaceful and eventual transition to a successor government.
The NSSD revealed that “pragmatists” in Washington’s national security establishment were getting impatient with President Ronald Reagan’s ideological approach towards Marcos—unwavering support simply because of the latter’s strong anti-communism. A loose “interagency group” set up after the Aquino assassination, I later learned, had moved to forge a common approach after Admiral William Crowe Jr., chief of the U.S. Pacific Command, came back from a visit to Manila with an alarming report on the growth of the insurgency.
Should Marcos prove uncooperative, the NSSD recommended that Washington “send signals that noncooperation . . . delayed disbursement of funds, delayed program approvals, negative votes in multilateral forums” and “discreetly publicize the fact that cooperation is not forthcoming on matters important to the welfare and security of the Philippines,” with the expectation that “these signals should increase pressure on Marcos from the public opposition, business leaders, and even his close associates.” At this stage, Washington’s approach was one of “cueing in to initiatives pushed by the business class and the middle class,” which were seen as the “ultimate arbiter of the succession.” Nor was the end the overthrow of Marcos. Rather, it was to force him to share power. “Ultimately,” as Undersecretary of State Michael Armacost was later to describe it, “our role was one of helping Marcos reach the right conclusions from events and developments.”
Marcos was not cooperating, leading Washington to tighten the screws. At a large interagency gathering at the National Defense University in late July 1985, officials from the State Department, the Pentagon, and the intelligence agencies heard a panel recommend that “while the United States should not work for the overthrow of Marcos, it should take an open view about his removal from office.” It was around this time that the pragmatists came around to a consensus that Marcos had to be really pushed to hold “free and fair elections.”
Pushing Marcos to Hold “Elections”
That was the message to Marcos that Senator Paul Laxalt brought to Manila in mid-October 1985, along with a toughly worded message from President Reagan that he stop “screwing up” the counterinsurgency effort. Then followed an orchestrated outpouring of administration statements that sounded an apocalyptic note. Typical of this was the warning to Congress of Paul Wolfowitz, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, that “time is running out, but time is not being used well.” Only “dramatic action” would “turn back the tide of communist insurgency.”
On November 3, in response to mounting pressure from Washington, Marcos dramatically announced on U.S. television that he had decided to hold presidential elections sooner than 1987, when they had originally been scheduled. On November 6, on the occasion of a visit by Richard Holbrooke, the tough-talking former assistant secretary of state for East Asia, Philip Kaplan, charge d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy, assembled key leaders of the anti-Marcos political parties and, according to a confidential embassy cable, “emphasized the need for the opposition to get its act together given the limited time left before the campaign starts, if the election is going to be held on January 17 or some date soon thereafter. He said the US cannot get involved in the issue of the date of the election—this was something to be worked out in the Philippine political process.” The charge emphasized that “what we can do—and are doing—is to press for free and fair elections.”
The cable also revealed that “both the charge and Holbrooke . . . underlined the importance of avoiding being portrayed as anti-bases or soft on communism. These postures would not play well in the United States.”
The State Department pragmatists had apparently come to the conclusion that an electoral victory by the elite opposition would be in the best interests of the United States. As early as February 1985, Ambassador Stephen Bosworth had cabled Washington:
If the opposition should succeed in uniting behind a single candidate, and that candidate should be elected president, what would be the overall impact on US–RP relations? Based on our frequent contact with most of the opposition leaders, our judgment at this time is that the opposition could be expected to act responsibly and that the US–RP relationship would prosper.
The electoral campaign leading to the elections of February 7, 1986 provided an arena for mobilizing Filipinos in support of the candidacy of Corazon Aquino, the widow of Benigno Aquino Jr. The U.S. strategy during the elections was, in the words of Michael Armacost, to “encourage the constraints” on Marcos by sending an observers’ delegation from the U.S. Congress, encouraging Western media coverage, and pressing Marcos to set up the legal framework for free elections. Less obvious to the public was U.S. funding of various opposition initiatives. U.S. government funds, for instance, went to the National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections, or NAMFREL This reincarnation of the Magsaysay-era citizens’ electoral watchdog body was set up to neutralize Marcos’s Commission on Elections. U.S. funds, Armacost also later revealed, also went to the Catholic Church-run Radio Veritas via the Asia Foundation, a well-known conduit of CIA and State Department money.
Even the cautious Pentagon exerted its own forms of political pressure. Given the widespread expectation that Marcos would use the AFP to steal the elections, Richard Armitage, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, appealed to the military to disobey Marcos if he used them to subvert the electoral process:
The AFP would be faced with a supreme challenge during the electoral process. At stake would be nothing less than the credibility of the AFP and, in particular, the honor of its officer corps. The conduct of the Philippine military during this critical period would determine whether the AFP is, in fact, loyal to the Constitution and a true pillar of support for the democratic process, or whether the AFP is a more perverse entity, bent on a course which will accelerate the spiral of instability.
The Left’s Gift to Washington
Although the United States was actively intervening in favor of the opposition, the National Democratic Front acted out of character. Key to its rise over the previous 18 years had been a nondoctrinaire, flexible, and innovative approach to political mobilization and organizing. When Marcos called for snap elections, the NDF correctly saw that the United States was behind the strategy and that the goal was to deprive it of leadership of the anti-dictatorship movement. But it then went on to cavalierly dismiss the elections as another “meaningless contest among reactionaries” after heated debate on the contention of some in its ranks that this particular election was different and that people were, in fact, taking it seriously as a means to oust Marcos. The NDF leadership then made the fateful step of calling for a boycott of the elections, a move that elated the Americans. It was a major blunder, the key consequence of which was that the left sat on the sidelines during the fast-moving developments that followed Marcos’s claim of “victory.”
The United States, however, nearly squandered this gift from the left. In the critical period following Marcos’s theft of the February 7 elections, Ronald Reagan, still undecided on Marcos’s fate, hesitated, remarking that the elections had been marred by “fraud on both sides.” This brought to a boil the frustration of State Department and CIA officials with Reagan and the ideologues around him. Veteran diplomat Philip Habib was sent on a last- ditch effort to set up a “power-sharing arrangement” between opposition candidate Corazon Aquino and Marcos, but events could no longer be contained within the State Department–written script of an eventual peaceful transfer of power to the elite opposition.
On February 22, Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile, AFP Chief of Staff Fidel Ramos, and the Reform the Armed Forces Movement (RAM) staged their mutiny with an initial strength of only 200 out of 250,000 troops, after their plans for a coup were discovered by Marcos. Thousands of civilians, mainly from the middle class, rushed to Camp Aguinaldo on EDSA (Epifanio de los Santos Avenue) to protect the vastly outnumbered rebels after hearing the plea of Jaime Cardinal Sin that was aired by the U.S.-financed Radio Veritas. Angry protesters prevented troops with tanks from entering the camp to oust the mutineers. There were many other acts of mass intervention in those critical hours, including people stopping soldiers from firing on a television station broadcasting news of the uprising. Marcos was not, however, going to allow the civilians to stop his army from crushing the rebels and made preparations to move against them. He was prepared to shed blood. At that point, under pressure from the pragmatists of the national security establishment, Reagan finally relented and told his old, trusted ally resistance was futile and the dictator had to step down.
Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory
Shorn of the principal basis of his power—support from Washington—the hated dictator had no choice. With the Americans stepping into the power vacuum, on February 25, under cover of darkness, the shell-shocked Marcos and his entourage were ferried by U.S. helicopters to Clark Air Base and from there to exile in Hawai‘i. “We played a constructive role in getting him out of the country,” Undersecretary of State Armacost recounted frankly later on. “He wanted to go north [Marcos’s stronghold in Ilocos Norte], but this would have provoked civil war since there were elements in the military still loyal to him.” The State Department and CIA pragmatists breathed a sigh of relief that Reagan, under pressure from them, finally cut his buddy loose. But it was a close call. As William Sullivan, a former envoy to Manila, put it, they had “saved the Reagan administration from its own worst instincts and stopped it from snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.”
Washington’s aim had been to derail the left with an electoral strategy that would eventually transfer power peacefully from Marcos to the opposition. The plan went off-script with the unexpected unplanned EDSA Uprising, but in the view of its authors, that was a good thing. Yet, the EDSA event would have been for naught had Reagan, warned that blood would be on his hands if he continued to stand by Marcos, not acceded to the pragmatists’ pressure.
To John Monjo, one of the State Department’s team that orchestrated things on the ground, “the coming to power of the Aquino government constitutes a setback for the insurgency because . . . [the] principal propaganda target of the communists, the Marcos regime, is gone.” Armacost, Monjo’s higher-up, for his part, boasted in a speech before a packed crowd of foreign service officers eager to listen to one of Washington’s major foreign policy successes in years: “Our objective was to capture . . . to encourage the democratic forces of the center, then consolidate control by the middle and also win away the soft support of the NPA (New People’s Army). So far, so good.” Armacost thought he was in a session that was supposed to be off- the-record. I had been mistakenly invited to the session and, bound by no such rules, I was happy to record all his damning remarks.