The Aquino Papers

Now, after three decades, the story of how the subversive articles of then Sen. Benigno Aquino Jr. saw print in the Bangkok Post can be told

By: Miriam Grace A. Go

BANGKOK -- For five months now, the Bangkok Post has been running daily on its front-page left ear the text of “Article 39.” The editors apparently thought that with their prime minister’s tussles with the media becoming more frequent, it wouldn’t harm to remind him and the public that “freedom of thought and expression is guaranteed” under the Thai Constitution.

The Bangkok Post, of all newspapers in the region, should know. Twenty-nine years ago, when Ferdinand Marcos clamped down on Philippine media, Thailand’s only English-language newspaper became the Philippines’ free press.

In February 1973, five months after Marcos declared martial law in the Philippines, the Bangkok Post ran a series of papers that gave the international community a different account of what was happening in the Philippines.

The papers, written by opposition Sen. Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. from his prison cell, were smuggled to Thailand to become The Bangkok Post’s “world-exclusive.”

For three decades, the story behind the big story remained untold. We pieced together this account on how the “subversive” material landed on the lap of then Bangkok Post editor in chief Theh Chongkhadikij.

Peter Finucane, then chief subeditor of the paper, recalls that “Theh handled everything” and did not discuss the planned series with the other editors. “He made everything confidential—received the papers himself, wrote the page-one blurb himself—to protect his sources.”

During the three days that the Bangkok Post ran “The Aquino Papers,” the leading oppositionist had been in detention in a maximum security cell at the military’s Camp Bonifacio for five months already. Proclamation 1081, the decree imposing martial law was signed on Sept. 17, 1972, and announced on September 22. It was dated September 21. On September 23 Aquino was arrested—by the police officer who served as the provincial commander when Aquino was still governor of Tarlac.

The Bangkok Post had run stories about martial law in the Philippines, but these were bits and pieces from wire agencies, and the treatment depended on which agency the articles came from.

When from the Associated Press, they were always favorable to the Marcos administration, quoting official government reports—like how most Filipinos were “pleased with the sharp improvement in the peace and order situation,” among other “martial law reforms.” They therefore supposedly favored postponing the 1973 presidential elections so Marcos could continue in power for seven more years.

When from the Agence France Presse, where some of Aquino’s allies had connections, the stories usually had a negative slant—like how Marcos was blocking attempts to annul a Constitution drafted by a rubber-stamp commission, or how troops were sent out to areas where anti-government forces were expected to gather.

The Marcos government had closed down independent newspapers in the Philippines. Television news had to go through prior censorship. Conscientious journalists, with the collaboration of the political opposition, had to resort to “mimeograph journalism” to keep the public informed about the excesses of the dictatorship. Many “subversive” journalists, as Marcos would call them, were arrested and detained. Those who were later released were kept under surveillance and prevented from giving interviews.

Obviously, the only way to get the word out was to have Aquino’s writings published outside the country. Alfonso Policarpio Jr., or “Poli,” senior executive assistant to the senator, approached journalist Juan L. Mercado and asked: “Can you get the papers out of the country?”

Mercado, released by the military two months earlier, had resumed work with the Press Foundation for Asia (PFA), and Policarpio was counting on the PFA’s extensive network in the regional media.

Bangkok Post editor in chief Theh had visited the Philippines earlier to write about the country’s underground press. “I had known Senator Benigno Aquino Jr. for many years, as a journalist, a politician and a governor,” Theh would later say in his introduction to “The Aquino Papers.”

Mercado recalls: “It was Poli’s job to get the paper out from Camp Bonifacio. My job was to get it from Manila to Bangkok.”

It was, actually, Aquino’s oldest daughter, Ballsy, who smuggled the papers out from Fort Bonifacio. “During our visiting hour, Ninoy had been able to communicate with Ballsy through sign language for her to go to the rest room after he had come from there,” recalls Corazon Aquino, the wife who would later become president. In the rest room, Ballsy got the folded pieces of paper containing her father’s writings and put them in her pocket.

Cory says Ninoy had instructed her to give a copy of the papers to Policarpio and to American journalist Robert Chaplen of The New Yorker who was then in Manila. Policarpio, in his book, says Aquino had addressed copies of the papers to Stanley Karnow of The Baltimore Sun, T.J.S. George of the Far Eastern Economic Review, Carl Zimmerman of the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, and Theh Chongkhadikij of The Bangkok Post.

When Policarpio gave the papers to Mercado, the latter was still under “city arrest.” How then would he get the papers out?

“A carrier pigeon,” recounts Mercado. “One of my friends then was the Air India manager who flew out of Manila regularly. I asked, ‘Would you carry an envelope to Theh as part of ‘company mail’? He suspected, I knew, that this was ‘subversive’ stuff. But he didn’t flinch. Neither did he ask questions. He brought it out of Manila.”

Mercado later learned from Theh that his friend even hand-carried the envelope to the Post. “‘God bless Air India,’ I’ve always said since then,” Mercado says.

On Feb. 20, 1973, Bangkok Post ran on its front page, just above the banner headline, an article titled “Aquino: I’m prepared to rot in prison.” It quoted much from Aquino’s letter “to all my co-workers in the journalistic field.” Aquino, who was a reporter before entering politics, said he would not accept President Marcos’s offer of an amnesty “because I do not believe I’ve committed any crime. And I cannot support his New Society because I believe firmly that he has violated our Constitution and broken our laws.”

In the same issue, the Post announced that it would, starting the following day, publish in full Aquino’s “situationer-memo.” Of the media outfits that the Aquino camp targeted for the papers’ publication, it was only the Post that ran the papers in full.

Considering that he is known by journalists of his time to be Aquino’s close friend, Theh was remarkably balanced in handling the story. “The Aquino Papers,” he wrote, “are probably like the Pentagon Papers, giving only one part of the story a documented part but still only one part.” Although the senator was obviously giving “an honest account of what he knows or thinks he knows,” the editor cautioned his readers that Aquino’s “astonishing revelation, sensational charges and extraordinary claims...must not be taken for gospel truth.”

“In his clandestine writings, the Senator has been helped by his journalistic training and his accounts of various important events have a professional precision but the reader must keep in mind that he is a politician with great rhetorical skill,” Theh wrote.

“The Aquino Papers-Day One” talked about how the Philippine peso devalued by 58 percent and the economy plunged after Marcos spent an estimated P900 million in public funds—“20% of the total money in circulation then”—to ensure his reelection. University students were getting restless, and anti-government demonstrations were being mounted despite risks of arrest.

“Day Two” of the series cited the worsening rebellion, by communist guerrillas in Luzon and by Muslims in the South seeking to avenge the execution of 25 of their “brothers.” The slain men had been recruited and trained by the Marcos military allegedly to invade Sabah, the object of a territorial dispute between the Philippines and Malaysia. The mass killing would later be known as the Jabidah massacre.

“Day Three” revealed the details of a “martial law master plan,” prepared by a Marcos think-thank, that landed in the hands of “opposition intelligence operatives.” The master plan gave Marcos seven options to remain in power indefinitely, the last option being the declaration of martial law.

Who wouldn’t give credence to that document, Aquino asked, when weeks before September 22 Marcos sent the biggest batch of army colonels (300) to the Commission on Appointments for confirmation, insisted on a huge increase in the military budget that ate up almost one-fourth of the national budget, and wanted a pay increase for soldiers and a five-year modernization budget for the military?

In March the Bangkok Post ran in full Marcos’s reply to the Aquino articles. Cabled by Press Secretary Francisco Tatad, it said: “The account raises personal and other false issues which were the subject of much political discussions some years ago. Nothing in that account has not been said, or published at least once, by the man who had sent it to the Post. It seeks an exchange—a polemic—on a number of concluded and closed issues, without ever taking up what is happening in the Philippines today.”

In his 8,000-word reply, Marcos mentioned Aquino’s name only once, at the beginning, and subsequently referred to him only either as “the man” or “the detainee.” To downplay the significance of the Post exclusive and to cast doubts on Aquino’s integrity, Marcos concluded: “Perhaps some of our detainees will write memoirs, others, articles for the newspapers.… They will seek an outside audience, having no one to listen among their own people.… Our only wish is that those who speak and listen to them at this time will bear in their hearts the truth that he who has not the innocence of Socrates is least likely to have his wisdom.”

Finucane, the Post’s chief subeditor at the time, says the series did not create much stir in Thailand, the country being preoccupied then with stories closer to home, such as the Vietnam war and its own student uprising that led to the ouster of the military government in October that year. But it created a tempest in the Philippines.

Not content with having the last word on the debate, Marcos sought to teach the usual suspects a lesson.

Cory says their visiting privileges were suddenly suspended. When she asked Deputy Defense Minister Carmelo Barbero for the reason, that was the only time she learned about the series in the Post.

“My children and I were not allowed to visit Ninoy for 43 days as punishment for the Bangkok Post publication of Ninoy’s article. The New Yorker magazine also came out with Robert Shaplen’s article on Ninoy, but luckily we were not punished for that,” Cory says.

Policarpio was arrested and detained in Camp Crame.

Aquino and his cellmate, then opposition Sen. Jose Diokno, who didn’t know anything about the papers, were transferred to solitary confinement—and almost starved to death—in Fort Magsaysay in Nueva Ecija.

“Before Ninoy was sent to Fort Magsaysay… he was told [by the commander of the detention center] to just say that he never wrote the article and that it was done by his speech writer. This way, the camp authorities would not be blamed for being lax in their security measures. But Ninoy insisted that he and he alone wrote that article,” Cory says.

Aquino was found guilty by a military court of charges of subversion, went on hunger strike, and was allowed to seek treatment for a heart ailment in the United States on condition he would not speak against the Marcos government. He broke that promise.

In 1983 Aquino, coming home from his US exile, was shot and killed at the airport by soldiers believed acting under the direction of Marcos’s generals.

Three years later, in a popular revolt, Marcos was toppled and Aquino’s widow was installed as president. Last year, Cory took part in another people’s revolt to topple another undesirable president.

Policarpio has passed away, leaving behind a book called Ninoy Aquino: The Willing Martyr and manuscripts for another book. Mercado, still with the Press Foundation for Asia, says this is the first time his grown-up children will be hearing about his role in the “smuggling” of the Aquino papers. The Air India executive has retired in New Delhi but wants to remain anonymous.

Theh passed away in 1995. Three names in the Post’s 1973 staffbox—reporters Veera Prateepchaikul and Anuraj Manibhandu and chief sub-editor Peter Finucane—are very much around as the newspaper’s editors.

Judging from the space that the newspaper has devoted to that long-running reminder on press freedom, and its coverage of regional issues that remains strong, the Bangkok Post appears ready as ever not just to lend a hand to a besieged press, but to herald an international scoop when it has one.

Fixing R.P.'s Party List Mess
Doing It the Thai Way

By Miriam Grace A. Go

BANGKOK—In a country like the Philippines, where the P50-billion-a-year illegal drug trade had been destroying the lives of some 1.7 million persons and, consequently, their families and communities, what impression would it create if an anti-drug foundation wins big in the party-list election? It means the public, especially the youth sector that delivered the vote, somehow understood that the ballot could get them started in addressing a national program.

Yet more than a year after MAD or Mamamayan Ayaw sa Droga (The People Hate Drugs) garnered the second highest number of votes in the party-list poll of 2001, it is still awaiting proclamation by the Commission on Elections (Comelec), the hopes of its 1.52 million believers—10 percent of the total votes cast in the exercise—frustrated. MAD and most of the winning groups were retroactively disqualified due to an unnecessary legal debate on what the party list was all about.

If MAD ran that same year in the first party-list election of Thailand—where illegal drugs is also a big national concern—it would not have been visited by such a nightmare. In Thailand, in fact, the party that landed on the number two spot captured six million votes that translated to 31 seats in the parliament.

Why Thailand? Because its four-year-old party-list concept shares basic features with the Philippines’ 15-year-old system. (See table.) Its newly established poll body that carried out the first party-list elections was largely modeled after the Philippines’ 1940-formed Comelec. In both countries, this new manner of electing some members of the House of Representatives was introduced after a long tradition of personality-based and mudslinging campaigns and fraud-marred elections. Thailand succeeded on first try; the Philippines has failed in two elections so far.

In 1998, the Philippine failure only meant being able to fill only a fourth of the 52 party-list seats in the House of Representatives. In 2001, the results were more tragic: only seven of the 52 seats have been filled so far. Eight of the 11 winning groups were belatedly disqualified by the Supreme Court in a case that tells a lot of where the Philippine model went wrong.

Two of the disqualified groups, tapping political connections, managed to wangle exceptions from court decision. The rest, including MAD, have been left to appeal their cases without help from the Comelec that allowed them to run and validated their votes to begin with. And at the rate the questions raised by this cases about the real intent of the party-list system is being addressed by the government, the next party-list election, which is just two years away, is likely to fail, too.

“It’s another sad case of the Philippines having a headstart and Thailand overtaking us,” says lawyer Chito Gascon, one of the framers of the Philippine Constitution that introduced the party-list system. Now executive director of the National Institute of Policy Studies, he was the first to point out the many similarities of the two countries’ party-list systems. “It was a matter of Thai voters being more mature than Filipinos in the sense that they understood what the party list was—that it is a system of proportional representation.”

Platforms vs personalities

Both the Philippines and Thailand have a mixed House of Representative, composed of those elected through party list and those elected in localities. In the Philippines, the latter are called congressmen, from geo-political districts of four to five towns each. In Thailand, they are called MPs (members of parliament), from every population of at least 150,000 each. A voter therefore has to cast two votes: one for a representative of his locality, one for a party that is seeking nationwide mandate.

Thailand has limited party-list participants to political parties, while the Philippines has opened the contest to just about any kind of organization—political parties, cause-oriented and advocacy groups, foundations, cooperatives—except those that are religious in nature, getting foreign funding for their campaigns, and espousing violence.

What helped Thailand succeed was an extensive and innovative information campaign initiated by the government. The Philippines missed out on this very basic element, thus allowing partisan groups to frustrate the system laid out by law.

The party-list system was introduced in both countries to provide a balance for locality-based lawmakers, who are almost always elected based on their personalities and the doleouts they can afford. The party-list system is to encourage people to vote for parties based on their program of government and track record. It is also meant to open doors to more qualified individuals, enlisted by the parties, who do not have the money and the personal connections to make him win in locality-based elections, but whose platform may appeal to voters nationwide.

Along with this clear idea of the intent of the party list, the Election Commission of Thailand also made sure the people understood the first step in the party-list poll: vote for a party, not its nominees. To further ensure this, the names and logos of the parties were pre-printed on the ballots, so the voters would just cross out the boxes corresponding to their parties of choice.

“The most effective strategy was face-to-face communication,” says Dr. Gothom Arya, a former election commissioner of Thailand whose job was to design a program that would familiarize voters with the new electoral processes put in place by the 1997 Constitution. The party-list system was just one of them.

Worth the money

With a 1-billion-baht (P1.66 billion) appropriation, the Election Commission of Thailand (ECT) recruited 20,000 new college graduates in April 1999, one and a half years before the first party-list election. The volunteers went around in the 76 provinces and in Bangkok to explain to families the new election procedures.

The commission also sent to registered households posters and sample ballots explaining the new manner of casting votes. The layout and design of the samples were the same as the ones put up at polling precincts on election day, so as not to confuse the voters. Some 5 million baht (P8.3 million) were spent on this.

The ECT also enlisted the help of NGOs in the provinces. The People’s Network for Elections in Thailand (P-Net) produced cassette tapes containing election songs. P-Net secretary Somchai Srisutthiyakorn says that to create impact, they set the lyrics on the traditional music of individual regions—for instance, the moa rum in the northeast provinces, and the manorah in south. Every morning, these songs roared from their village towers, the equivalent of barangay halls in the Philippines. Copies of the tapes had been distributed in schools, too, to prepare students who will vote in the future.

Usually in cooperation with the private sector, demonstrations on the new polling procedures were organized for the public to try out, and for the media to cover.

Although he acknowledges the power of the media, Gothom says he avoided the traditional promotion by way of placing paid newspaper or broadcast advertisement because these were not just expensive, but were also easily forgotten by the public. Anyway, radio and TV, the media with the widest audience reach, were mostly government owned and were only too willing to air information on the party-list system for free.

In contrast, the Philippines’ Comelec, with a budget of P110 million, relied merely on paid advertisements, placed only several weeks before the first party-list election in 1998. The pamphlets it produced explaining proportional representation were not widely disseminated despite the fact that it had a department exclusively tasked to do that.

This is ironic because years earlier, surveys were already done by the Social Weather Stations (SWS), the leading poll firm in the Philippines, showing that there had been “public demand for more information” on the elections through more personal means.

In a speech in February 1998, while enumerating possible ways to educate the voters, SWS director Mahar Mangahas seemed to be reading what Dr. Gothom was thinking in Thailand: “The most popular mass medium for communications… is television… [but] they are too easy for the public to forget. It is much easier to remember messages transmitted in the form of stories. Most effective of all, is experimental learning, which in this case would be learning from participation in electoral exercises, either actual or simulated.”

Valid ballots say it

The high voter turnout (69.9 percent of the 42 million qualified voters) in 2001 is not the gauge for the electorate’s level of awareness of the party list; in Thailand, voting is semi-compulsory. What is significant was that all those 29.91 million voters who went out to vote for constituency-based MPs also cast votes for the party list.

More significantly, says ECT deputy secretary Piroon Chatwanichkul, only 2.5 percent of the party-list ballots were invalidated, indicating that most voters understood how the new system of voting worked.

Also, an ECT volunteer interviewed by the Bangkok Post during the campaign recalled that people initially thought that voting for a party was impersonal compared to choosing their local MPs. Voters thought, too, that there was no way of telling which political party would be better, that they were all the same.

But came election day, Thai Rak Thai (TRT), a newly formed party, got an overwhelming 38.87 percent of the party-list votes because of its pro-poor platform. Although there is a debate now on whether the populist promises made during the campaign were sincere, political observers of various stripes acknowledge that TRT’s experience showed that Thai voters were capable of judging parties based on platforms, on “qualifications.”

In the 2001 campaign in the Philippines, MAD ran on a relevant cause, catchy acronym and logo, determined information campaign, and, not to mention, the popularity of its top nominee Richard Gomez as an actor and sportsman. Such strategies could have worked among Thais as well, if we are to go by how most of them subscribed to the TRT platform. Interestingly, Thais also regard illegal drugs as a big national problem. In fact, being a drug addict is the first ground for the disqualification of a lawmaker which the Thai Constitution lays down.

Piroon says that the party-list exercise in Thailand still had traces of the traditional personality-based campaign—enlisting celebrities who had qualifications to boost the party’s popularity, and telling people how many lawyers or doctors were on its list. He accepts them, however, as “campaign strategies” that parties had the right to employ. The important thing, he says, is that the procedure was understood by the public and carried out smoothly by government.

Gothom says the purpose of an information campaign is to help voters make an informed choice when election comes, regardless of whether their choice, such as TRT or MAD, would be acceptable to the so-called progressive NGOs or the discriminating media.

NGOs take over

Failing an honest-to-goodness information campaign by the Comelec, partisan NGOs in the Philippines took it upon themselves to explain to communities what the party list was. But since many of these NGOs were also running in the party-list election, and were threatened by stronger rivals, some of them gave voters a twisted interpretation of the system.

These NGOs said that the party-list seats are reserved for groups like them that “genuinely” represented the “marginalized” sectors. The other organizations accredited by the Comelec were “bogus,” they said.

In this convoluted line of argument, the “genuine” NGOs’ weapon was a sentence in the Constitution and the party-list law that, for the purpose of clarity, enumerates which sectors are referred to as “marginalized.” What those documents actually say is that there are many types of organizations that can compete in the party-list election, and that NGOs, such as those representing the basic sectors, can join, too.

To that misinterpreted provision, professor Wilfrido Villacorta, one of the framers of the Philippine Constitution, says, “I plead guilty.” He has realized that having those sectors enumerated apparently gave the NGOs the impression that they had to be accorded “special treatment,” an attitude that could cause to them to “remain mendicants.”

During the campaigns of 1998 and 2001 then, what was “marginalized” and “genuine” was determined by the NGOs that called press conferences and issued press releases most often, and beat the rest in accusing other groups as “bogus.” They were the groups with communist leanings.

Unfortunately, a media that obviously did not read up on its law never pointed out that the NGOs’ claims were contrary to what the Constitution and the party-list law say, further confusing the voters. Not a single report in the past two party-list campaigns pointed out that the party list, to begin with, was not about “marginalized” and “big” NGOs, but about proportional representation.

Despite the Left’s propaganda offensive, some of their pet peeves made it to the winning circle. MAD, which they said was not marginalized because it rode on the government’s anti-drugs campaign (something which is not prohibited under the party-list law), finished second. The Veterans Federation Party, a 1998 party-list winner that got to serve in the past Congress but which they said now was not marginalized because it was backed by defense department, finished fourth. The political parties, which they said were not marginalized because their members already won in the district elections, finished fifth (Promdi or “Province First” Development Initiatives), sixth (Nationalist People’s Coalition), ninth (Lakas-NUCD), and eleventh (Laban ng Demokratikong Pilipino or Struggle of Democratic Filipinos).

The leftist groups in the party-list contest brought their case to the Supreme Court in 2001, asking that these groups they classified as non-marginalized be disqualified. The Supreme Court, in a display of what Gascon called “misguided judicial activism,” adopted the argument of the complainants. A national daily branded the ruling as “one of the most idiotic judicial decisions in the history of mankind.”

‘They will only create problems’

“Our system is less complicated because we do not allow NGOs to join the party list,” says Dr. Suchit Bunbongkarn, a member of the assembly that drafted the 1997 Thai Constitution. Although he also considers the NGOs’ electoral participation as a political breakthrough, they should be made to play fair, he says.

Suchit is now a justice of the Constitutional Court, an independent body whose task is to decide if any bill, law, government rule or policy is in accordance with the Charter. If there was such a court in the Philippines, it would have been the one to decide on the controversial party-list case of 2001. And Suchit says, “If they (NGOs) want that privilege [of participating in the party list], they have to transform themselves into political parties, and compete as the others do.”

He says that if NGOs want to push their cause, their leaders may run in other arena, such as the senatorial or the constituency-based polls. In their senatorial elections, where candidates are required to run as independents, 30 percent of the seats were captured by former NGO leaders.

Gothom, formerly the leader of an NGO called Poll Watch Foundation, says there is nothing wrong with NGO leaders entering politics. But “dragging the entire movement or NGO into the elections” is a different story. In a party-list contest, he points out, participants cannot claim moral distinction from the others—all of them are “after state power.” Which group gets represented should therefore be determined by nothing else but the number of votes it gathered, he says.

Besides, Suchit points out that, as the Thai system has shown, there is no guarantee that the party’s campaign platform will be realized when its nominees are already in the parliament. “Representing the people’s voice will always depend on individual politicians,” he says.

Political scientist Sida Sonskri of Thammasat University came to the Philippines in 1996 to study the structure of the Comelec and the country’s electoral processes, with the intention of recommending to Thailand’s Constitutional Drafting Assembly whatever good points she could pick up. The inclusion of NGOs in the party list appealed to her, but she claims that her government readily shot down the idea. “They didn’t trust NGOs and were so sure that they would only create problems,” she recalls.

Sida says that Thai NGOs may need 10 more years to develop that the political strength of their counterparts in the Philippines, such that they could network, form their political party, and compete in the party-list poll. Except for the fact that the NGOs in the Philippines had overdone their campaign, she says, the Philippines’ party-list system would be “useful because no one else will propose laws for the sectors except their own groups.”

Start from square one

Gothom and Sida say it is unfortunate that the Philippines would fail in aspects where it has always been assumed to be stronger than Thailand. First, the Comelec is in a position to smoothly run a continuing voters’ education program because its provincial officers are civil servants who do not get replaced so often, unlike in Thailand where they are appointed and may be replaced whimsically.

They say that the election watchdogs in the Philippines—such as the National Movement for Free Elections, the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting, Vote Care, and others—have established and more extensive networks than those in Thailand. They have also proven their ability to enlist volunteers on meager budgets, and have them work until the canvassing is through. If the Comelec could enlist their help, the government will accomplish the information drive without having to spend as much as Thailand did.

The Philippine party-list system clearly has to start from square one. Gothom suggests: “Before you do an information campaign, you will have to decide first whether to amend your Constitution’s provision on the party list, or accept the Supreme Court decision. Otherwise, people will be saying different things and the public will remain confused.”

Philippine Congress is talking about amending the Constitution, and it will be wise for it to fix up the party-list mess in the process before another obvious failure takes place in the 2004 elections. Otherwise, it may be better to save the government’s money, and spare the people’s time and aspirations, by scrapping this pretension about proportional representation altogether.