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Over television the other day I saw a newsbar report in which Senator Joker Arroyo was quoted as saying that the United States did not have anything to do with the “regime change” in 1986 that overthrew Ferdinand Marcos and put Corazon Aquino in Malacanang.

As newsbars go, no details were provided, and in neither the early nor late evening news was there any story. The day before, however, an Associated Press reporter had mentioned to me that the United States Ambassador to the Philippines, Francis Ricciardone, had complained that while Filipinos oppose regime change in Iraq now, they had welcomed US assistance in regime change in 1986.

I may be mistaken, but I suppose that Senator Arroyo was reacting to that claim—on which, I’m almost sure, an interviewer might have asked him to comment, or about which he has otherwise heard.

To those Filipinos who were on Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (EDSA) between Camp Crame and Camp Aguinaldo from February 22 to 25, 1986, the overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos and Corazon Aquino’s installation as president was a purely Filipino undertaking. They had massed at EDSA to support a military mutiny against a regime for which hatred and contempt had been simmering for years. By sheer numbers and no small amount of courage boosted by sandwiches and thermos jugs of coffee, they had succeeded in forcing Marcos to step down and to flee to Hawaii.

It is not entirely correct that the United States had nothing to do with it, however. In his most desperate moment, when the millions at EDSA had shown no signs of giving up, Marcos had contemplated a military assault to disperse them, but had relented because of US “advice” against it.

The US advice was not prompted by humanitarian concerns. The US feared that the bloodshed that would ensue in front of the world’s cameras (hundreds of foreign journalists were covering the event) would taint it as well, by showing the world how brutal a tyrant they had been supporting.

The United States had after all supported Marcos for decades, with George F. Bush, George W’s father, proclaiming in Manila while visiting here as US Vice President that the US “loved [Marcos’] adherence to democratic processes.”

Then US President Ronald Reagan was also a personal friend of Marcos, who had contributed to his campaign coffers, some say handsomely. The names of “Ronald” and “Nancy” (Reagan’s First Lady) in fact fell from the lips of Imelda Marcos so often it was as if the Reagans and the Marcoses were blood kin constantly on the phone with each other.

Reagan initially balked at withdrawing support from Marcos. He was convinced to do so only when it became clear that Marcos’ downfall was inevitable and it was necessary for US interests in the Philippines to be identified as supportive of the new government.

In certain US government circles, Marcos was also being blamed for the rapid growth of the New People’s Army—and therefore, for the country’s possible “loss” to the Left. The 1980s were also a time of US foreign policy re-assessment. For decades the United States had installed and supported dictators in Asia, Africa and Latin America so long as they were anti-communist. In many countries the result had been the opposite: resistance to dictatorship had widened support for communist armed groups instead.

Within those circles in the US State Department that were convinced that the US policy needed to depart from its tradition of supporting dictators, the EDSA uprising was an opportunity to prove US commitment to democratic change, to take the wind out of the sails of the NPA, and to preserve the Philippine political and economic system in which the US had such preeminence.

Reagan’s personal emissary, Republican Senator John Lugar, thus gave Marcos the now oft-quoted advice to “cut and cut cleanly.” Publicly the US Embassy in Manila kept its silence, but worked feverishly in the background to establish and maintain its links with the leading personalities of the emerging government.

While Marcos was in power and seemed invincible, however, four US Presidents (Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan; even Jimmy Carter) supported him with economic and military aid. Arrested without warrants, detained without charges, and in many cases tortured, the surviving political prisoners of the regime still remember today that the blankets, aluminum drinking cups, meal trays and spoons and forks the military had issued them were all stamped “USA”.

No one, least of all the United States, had ever believed that Marcos was a democrat. The international human rights organizations, and the US State Department’s own human rights report, proved the opposite every year that Marcos was in power.
The US supported his murderous regime nevertheless. The reason was more than obvious. Marcos might have been a torturer and a mass murderer, and a corrupt power-mad son of a bitch, but he was the US’ own son of a bitch.

Marcos was (for his own convenience), an anti-communist besides, eager to preserve the Philippines as an enclave of American investments and power. The support that the US eventually gave regime change, which came in the last days of EDSA 1986, and with much reluctance because of Marcos’ ties to Reagan, was too little and came too late to make any difference in the outcome of the EDSA uprising.

Whether that support came late or early, mattered or not, or even came at all, it was support of a kind for an undertaking sovereign citizens had decided for themselves. It did not involve a decision by another country to change regimes in another country whose people—the democratic principles the US says it is exporting to Iraq dictate—have the sole prerogative to change their government.

Certainly it did not entail the massive bombing on the scale of the 3,000 bombs and cruise missiles that the Iraqi capital Baghdad is being subjected to, which one US Congressman, Pete Stark, has characterized as “extreme terrorism.” It did not involve the assassinations, both realized and attempted, of government leaders. It did not involve a three-pronged assault by 250,000 troops with tanks, artillery, rockets, missiles, helicopter gunships, B-52 bombers, jet fighter-bombers, and 2,000 pound bombs that are the main ingredients of the campaign of “shock and awe” the US is waging in Iraq.
US involvement in regime change in the Philippines in 1986 certainly did not involve the use of these weapons—the most awesome in the non-nuclear arsenal of the United States—on a city half of whose population are women and children.

Regime change in Baghdad is thus an entirely different case, one in which the aftermath is likely to be “the worst humanitarian disaster in history” as UN relief agencies predict. It is also likely not to make much of a difference to the suffering people of Iraq, US plans for a post-war Iraq being first of all premised on what could be prolonged US military rule.

In the Philippine case regime change did make a difference, at least by restoring the institutions of liberal democracy Marcos had dismantled. No foreign overlord took control of the government either, and Filipinos can at least be proud of the fact that if the government screwed up it was Filipinos and not some stranger with a Texas twang who did it.

The argument for regime change was convincing in the Philippines in 1986. It is becoming more and more convincing at this time. But regime change is a prerogative only Filipinos have. It is a prerogative equally that of the Iraqi people. “Regime change” imposed by another country through the use of its overwhelming capacity for violence, and decided by that country at a time and in terms of its own choosing for the sake of its own economic and strategic interests, and that’s likely to result in its occupation of that country either directly or through a puppet government, is better known by another name. That name is imperialism.

(Today, March 25, 2003)

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