Banking on Cory’s legacy
On the first day of his visit to the United States, President Aquino lost no time in basking in the waning glow of the magic of his mother’s Joan of Arc role in the 1986 People Power Revolution and used it as the key to unlock the gates of foreign investments to reinvigorate the flagging growth of the national economy in the first year of his administration.
Within hours of setting foot on American soil on Monday, the President spoke at Fordham University which conferred on him an honorary doctorate of laws. After accepting the honors, he promptly fired a broadside against the Marcos dictatorship.
He recalled the 14 years of martial law under Ferdinand Marcos endured by the Filipinos and reminded his audience how Filipinos had discovered (through the peaceful People Power Revolution) that they had the “power” not only to reclaim but also to pursue economic progress. “We had our periods of darkness but now we are living in the light,” he said.
He said that his “own ambition” was that by the time he stepped down in 2016, his successor would not be able to “roll back the tide of progress and good governance” initiated by his government.
In his speech, the President narrated the circumstances that brought him to power and said he was now representing “people who were not given but rather who gave themselves, a fresh start.”
In recalling the role of his mother as the acclaimed leader of the People Power Revolution that toppled the Marcos dictatorship, it was obvious that he was banking on the capital of goodwill left by his mother to pave his way to the vaults of American investment resources to help boost the growth of the lagging Philippine economy. But the President needs more than “Cory magic” to achieve the economic objective of his US visit. He cannot depend all the time on his mother’s political legacy.
The President said the 1987 Constitution framed by his mother’s government endured because the people made good on their vow, “Never again,” after the fall of the dictatorship. “It is that determination not to surrender to apathy, and not to allow ourselves to become atomized prisoners of despair and intimidation that led me to where I am now,” he said.
The President could not help exporting to an internal platform his domestic campaign to expose the corruption scandals during the predecessor government of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. The opportunity to excoriate his predecessor on a foreign platform was too good for him to miss. He lambasted Arroyo by pointing out that she faced down questions on the legitimacy of her election in 2004, arising from her intervention through phone calls with an official of the Commission on Elections purportedly to rig the election results in certain provinces in her favor to ensure her election in 2004. He said the former president “focused on keeping herself in power, to the exclusion of all other considerations.”
Throwing all decorum and good taste to the winds and washing domestic dirty linen before foreign audience, the President denounced “those who had grown fat on corruption and funded and supported efforts to subvert democracy.” He said, despite all these, “the Filipinos renewed their social contract with each other and stood firm in their democratic ideals.”
Unable to resist extolling himself, the President said that when he took office last year his first act was to stop using sirens in presidential vehicles and prohibit other officials from doing so. He said he was happy to note that his decision “has been accompanied by fierce insistence on the part of my countrymen not to tolerate any violations of this policy.”
He claimed that after “a decade of political turbulence,” the Philippines has entered “an era of renewed stability and confidence.”
He then went back to People Power, which seems to have become the signature flagship legacy of the Aquino dynasty to Philippine democracy.
He didn’t get tired recalling the events of the People Power Revolution. He said Filipinos had discovered that “the People Power that faced down tanks and artillery, truncheons and tear gas can be the dynamo for progress and the lasting mortar for a government that applies its laws fairly.”
He described himself as “the instrument of the people’s will,” and said he hoped that by the end of his term, Filipinos would have “grown accustomed to genuine public service and so intolerant of corruption that whether a saint or sinner succeeds me, no one will be able to roll back the tide of progress and good governance.”
The assessment of the economic results of the visit has to await the meetings of the President with various economic and investment groups. As of this writing he has had no chance to have lengthy discussions with US President Barack Obama. They had only brief meetings on the side of conferences they both attended.
It should be noted that the President’s visit coincided with the 39th anniversary of the declaration of martial law in the Philippines by Marcos on Sept. 21, 1972. That event brackets two of the most wrenching political changes in the country in the post-war years: the advent of the dictatorship and the overthrow of the Marcos dictatorship.
The commemoration of the end of the dictatorship helps to highlight the theme of the visit, which is the contrast of the dictatorship and the ambience of Philippine democracy restored by the People Power Revolution led by Cory Aquino.
