Cory Aquino nightmare

This week, relatives, allies and minions of the late ex-President Corazon Cojuangco Aquino, whose tenure was from 1986 to 1992, are marking her birth anniversary. Mrs. Aquino, they claim, restored democracy in the Philippines.

In the interest of historical accuracy, the public should also learn about Mrs. Aquino from another perspective, one different from the tale peddled by many of her misguided admirers.

Upon seizing power in February 1986, Mrs. Aquino established a “revolutionary government.” That meant the abolition of the 1973 Constitution and the Batasang Pambansa, the legislature which guarded her ballots during the election.

After that, Aquino vested in herself both Executive and Legislative powers. For a year, Aquino ruled the country like President Ferdinand Marcos did during the martial law years. Marcos ruled by issuing presidential decrees while Aquino issued “executive orders.” Ironically, Aquino promised to be everything opposite of Marcos before she seized power.

Next, Aquino dismissed all elected local government officials and replaced them with her allies.

Aquino fired all justices and judges, except those favored by her relatives and allies. Ignoring the security of tenure in the judiciary, Aquino created a judiciary beholden to her.

Instead of calling an election of delegates to a convention that will draft a new constitution, Aquino created a “constitutional commission” composed of her own appointees, including a nun, a clandestine Marcos ally and a grumpy lawyer who is not known for his law practice. To conceal the pro-Aquino bias of her commission, Aquino made sure that a few of the commissioners had ties with the previous dispensation.

The commission came out with the 1987 Constitution, the most anomalous charter in Philippine constitutional history because it copied foreign models without understanding them.

For example, the Aquino charter adopted a multi-party system for elections, but did not require a run-off election. As a result, a president can get elected even on a mere plurality vote which defies the concept of popular sovereignty.

The Aquino charter also created a partylist system currently exploited by traditional politicians and political dynasties.

Other defects include its reckless expectation that Congress will prohibit political dynasties and its silence on how both houses of Congress are to vote when proposing amendments to the charter.

Despite all those glaring defects, ex-Chief Justice Hilario Davide, Jr., a rabid but aging Aquino underling in that commission, insists the Aquino Constitution is the best charter in the world. That’s wishful thinking.

Aquino ordered a compulsory agrarian reform program, but exempted her family’s crown jewel, Hacienda Luisita, from the coverage of the law, through an intricate corporate scheme.

The scheme was disallowed by the Supreme Court about a quarter of a century later.

Protesting farmers who marched to Malacañang for a redress of their grievances were gassed and beaten up by cops at Mendiola. Many of the protesters were killed.

Aquino also filed criminal libel charges against veteran journalists Luis Beltran and Maximo Soliven. She is the first incumbent Philippine president to sue journalists for libel.

Likewise, Aquino abolished the Department of Energy which her allies identified as a pet project of Marcos. That move made the Philippines the power outage capital of the world.

The most heartbreaking chapter in the Aquino story is her betrayal of her vice president, Salvador “Doy” Laurel.

Towards the end of 1985, Laurel was the undisputed presidential candidate of the united political opposition. When Aquino announced her candidacy also for president, she asked Laurel, the bosom buddy of her late husband, to run for vice president instead. Laurel agreed inasmuch as Aquino promised to resign from the presidency after two years in office in order to give way to Laurel.

After declaring a revolutionary government in 1986, Aquino reneged on her promise and told Laurel that the revolution erased all her political pledges.

In the 1992 presidential election, Aquino supported Fidel Ramos, a Marcos relative and her husband’s jailer during the martial law regime, leaving Laurel to fend for himself.

As for her son, that’s a topic for another editorial.