THE REAL PHILIPPINE ELECTION STORY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000807220003-3
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 5, 2012
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: July 3, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/01/05: CIA-RDP90-00965R000807220003-3
WALL OIALLi JUUKIVAL
A R T I C L Ai + "1RLD 7 March 1986
'ON PAGE
The Real Philippine Election Story
By BEN J. WArretvsssc
It is by now the received wisdom that
Corazon Aquino became president of the
Philippines because corrupt dictator Ferdi-
nand Marcos and his thieving henchmen
held a massively fraudulent election in a
near-totalitarian thug state, and the out-
raged Filipino people rose up in righteous
wrath and threw Mr. Marcos out. It must
be so: Americans saw it with their own
eyes on television.
I didn't. During election week I was a
member of the presidential election team
headed by Sen. Richard Lugar (R., Ind.).
My sense is that something quite different
went on in the Philippines, a country that,
as our State Department briefer had told
us, was one of the freest in Southeast Asia.
I believe there was an open and remarka-
bly public election, in some large measure
set in motion by U.S. policy pushing for re-
form. There was, by Filipino standards, a
normal quotient of fraud, which is plenty.
The election was mildly close. In a truly
fair contest, I believe Mrs. Aquino would
have clearly won. It is precisely because
the election was so public that it was
close; it's harder to cheat in daylight. It
was because the election was public, close
and somewhat fraudulent that the charge
of swindle-in the sense that the real loser
(Marcos) was declared victor-was very
credible, and why the Aquino forces were
outraged. Then the people threw the cor-
rupt thug out.
While there are some points where
these two versions are similar (namely the
justification of the ultimate outcome, and
who the thieving villains were), the ver-
sions are rather different in essence. Be-
cause they are different, they may hold
different policy lessons for the future.
* * *
In the Philippines, our 19-member dele-
gation split into eight separate teams-
each headed by a member of Congress-
and fanned out across the archipelago.
U.S. military helicopters, planes and vehi-
cles were at our disposal. Although our del-
egation was invited to come by the Marcos
government, we went to places chosen by
the U.S. Embassy and often changed our
itinerary as we traveled.
What we observed firsthand was the
casting and counting of votes at the grass-
roots retail level only at certain places,
but probably representative ones. After the
election we were also able to spot-check
some canvassing points in some cities.
It has been noted that any election-ob-
servation team can't see everything going
on in a huge country. That is correct. It is
also true that we had more people, in more
places, with far more logistical support
than any news organization present. (The
Newsweek bureau was composed of four
reporters; the New York Times had two;
the Washington Post three; ABC had six;
NBC had five.)
When our teams returned to Manila the
day after the election, we compared notes.
This may be hard to believe, but the gen-
eral impression of most of the teams was
that they had seen an imperfect but truly
remarkable electoral scene. Brace your-
self: Some of us felt that in some impor-
tant respects the process was more open,
more participatory, and, most critically,
more public than U.S. elections.
The dominant image, to me, was the
count itself. In most places, after the polls
closed, voters jammed back into the poll-
ing places. After the ballot boxes were
opened, the result of each ballot was called
out by a school teacher. Each vote was
then marked on an official tally sheet and
on a blackboard. Those who voted (a pro-
cess that involved affixing four thumb-
prints, signing five registry books, and the
application of indelible ink on the cuticle of
the voter's index finger) actually saw their
votes posted and tallied. That doesn't hap-
pen in the U.S. When the retail process is
so public it becomes much more difficult
for a corrupt government to cheat whole-
sale. The voters know the count, and can
compare it with the count in the newspaper
the next day.
An excerpt from the only public state-
ment of the Lugar delegation, issued as we
left the Philippines:
"We have observed the passionate com-
mitment of Filipinos to democracy, and we
applaud that commitment.... The people
of the Philippines have been involved in a
vigorous campaign characterized by lively
debate, active campaigning throughout the
country, and the mobilization of the Na-
tional Citizens Movement for Free Elec-
tions (NAMFREL) to monitor the election.
The enormous crowds drawn by the candi-
dates and the zeal displayed by the Fili-
pino electorate would be the envy of politi-
cians in our own country. (my italics).
"We have observed dedicated people in-
spired and motivated by their faith in de-
mocracy ... we have seen concrete exam-
ples, both in voting and counting ballots, of
success in the administration of the elec-
toral process."
Our delegation also reported fraud:
"Sadly, however, we have witnessed
and heard disturbing reports of efforts to
undermine the integrity of that process,
both during the voting and vote counting
process which is still under way.... Seri-
ous charges have been made in regard to
the tabulation system...."
At the grass-roots level, all of the teams
heard rumors about harassment, intimida-
tion and bribery. I have never been in a
more conspiratorial environment. How-
ever, it usually was very hard to find much
skulduggery that could be documented.
To the best of my knowledge, none of
the observers saw any actual violence.
However, my colleague at the -American
Enterprise Institute, the election expert
Howard Penniman, has analyzed data
from previous elections and found that the
60 election-related deaths-believe it or
not-fall into the "moderate" range for
Philippine elections. That which did occur
was surely tragic and repugnant. Of the 60
dead, 10 were Aquino supporters; the oth-
ers were about evenly split between
Marcos soldiers and communist guerrillas
killing each other.
Back in Manila, many delegation mem-
bers spoke with their families back in the
U.S., and we began to understand how the
election had been covered. Our relatives
were petrified: Did the goons get you? Did
you see gunfire? It's so terrible that those
thugs stole the election!
It is said disparagingly of some public
figures that they cannot walk and chew
gum at the same time. The same must be
said of a hungry international press pack,
particularly those from television: They
cannot cover two stories at once. There
was only one story in the air in Manila,
and it was being pumped out from every
corner: fraud, corruption and violence.
The reporting we got at home was surely
not a lie; it was only unrepresentative of
the total reality on the ground.
A word should be said about NAM-
FREL. To its everlasting credit, there
could not have been even a mildly free
election without it. It put 500,000
citizen-volunteers into the field! Even
though the volunteers were pushed out of
some places, they still had a presence in
75% to 85% of the election districts (as
compared with about 50% in the 1984 elec-
tion).
It should be noted that, by their own es-
timates, at least 90% of the NAMFREL
people were pro-Aquino. And it is a govern-
ment-deputized official organization. And
NAMFREL leaders were masterfully mar-
keting the, stories of fraud even before the
election took place. The political thrust of
their pitch was elemental: If Aquino lost,
the fix was in. That is not the way an un-
free country usually operates.
Now the interesting thing about a politi-
cal pitch is that it may even be true, or at
least partially true. The Philippines does
have a history of vote fraud. It did not all
disappear one fine morning. There was
plenty of hanky-panky going on, some of it
structural, some of it shameless-particu-
larly after the election itself. Votes were
bought, there was intimidation. There were
areas where Mrs. Aquino got zero votes. It
is surely true that the vast bulk of the
Continue,
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fraud was by Marcos backers, and, in my
judgment and those of others, that was
more than sufficient to tip the election.
How close was the election? Well, until
it stopped counting, NAMFREL had Mrs.
Aquino ahead with about 54% of the vote.
Until it stopped counting, the government
counting agency COMELEC had Mr.
Marcos ahead with 52%. The National As-
sembly (dominated by Mr. Marcos's
party) was able to cheat Mr. Marcos only
up to 53.8%. The most interesting count
was the CBS News sample precinct survey,
supervised by the CBS election experts
who do the network's surveys in America.
CBS News projected the election as "too
close to call."
Of course, all these counts would not in-
clude the "structural fraud"-particularly
the alleged systematic disenfranchisement
of voters in Metro Manila, an Aquino
stronghold. Even there, however, the turn-
out rate fell only from 89% in the 1984
elections to 77%. And there had been a le-
gitimate change of the registration system,
requested by the opposition. Such a switch
usually results in some disenfranchised
voters, even under honest circumstances.
But there was surely substantial fraud
in Metro Manila. The area contains about
20% of the national vote. The "missing"
voters (89% less. 77%) amount to 2.4% of
the national total. If in a true count Mrs.
Aquino would have carried, say, 75% of the
missing vote (she only got 53% of the ac-
tual count in Metro Manila), it would have
added about 1.2% to her national total.
That is a substantial amount. It is also
less than an electoral tidal wave, even if
extrapolated nationally.
Why is all of this important? After all,
the good lady won and the bad dictator
lost. (I confess, after some early wavering,
I was an Aquino supporter, even as I
boarded the plane to become an impartial
election observer.) Why don't we just re-
joice in it and forget the grubby details?
Because there are some lessons here.
The rules of foreign policy are not precise.
We don't understand how the world spins;
any additional information we can glean
can only help us.
First: In free countries like the U.S.,
the press-particularly television-can't be
trusted to give a full-bodied portrait of
what is going on. In the Philippines they
got half the story-fraud. They missed the
other half: a free culture, a mildly free
election.
The portrayal of the election in this one-
sided manner convinced the American
public that the election was nothing more
than goons run amok. That image added
power to the congressional feeding frenzy
about who could be more-democratic-than-
thou. It was claimed, variously, that a fair i
election would have yielded a 60% or 70%
or 80% victory for Mrs. Aquino. All of that
pushed the administration to an even more
anti-Marcos posture than it had previously
held and allowed it to play a classic good-
cop, bad-cop game with Mr. Marcos.
This time the policy-by-media wave
worked out remarkably well. But suppose
Mr. Marcos, sensing that he still had some
real power, sensing that the Americans
were being misled, had chosen to wage
civil war to prove his point.
It is standard procedure for politicians
and diplomats to exaggerate or even dis-
tort facts and figures. What is troubling
is when they come to believe the distor-
tions, which I sense is what happened here.
You don't, as a rule, get wise policy from
faulty information. Next time the media
wave may come crashing in a direction
that is not to America's advantage. (Recall
the bang-bang coverage of the Israeli-Leb-
anon war.)
Second: Open, public elections, even
when somewhat fraudulent, are a mighty
and beneficent force-greater than we
probably imagine. I believe Marcos would
have been peacefully dumped even without
the military revolt-although it would have
taken months, not days. Because the folks
at the grass roots saw the votes counted
publicly, they knew who really won. Oper-
ating in a fairly open society they would
have banged on Marcos until he shared
power, and then kept banging on him until
he left. And, unlike what did happen, it
might well have happened without military
action. So: Elections, being such a power-
ful force for good, and generally leading to
pro-American governments (or at least
neutral ones), should be pushed harder
than ever by U.S. policy makers.
Third: Doctrines. Many liberals have
maintained that the elections prove that
the Jeane Kirkpatrick view of the world is
wrong. Her doctrine, say the liberals, is
that we ought to cozy up to our autocratic
friends and oppose only our totalitarian en-
emies. That we were able to dump authori-
tarian Marcos, using U.S. political muscle,
shows how wrong she was.
Of course, that is not what she said. The
Philippines story could come right out the
pages of Ms. Kirkpatrick. She said, recall,
that friendly authoritarian states should in-
deed be treated differently from adver-
sarial totalitarian ones. The authoritarian
friendly ones, she maintained, could be
CIA
moved gradually toward democracy be-
cause authoritarianism is less abusive of
human rights than totalitarianism, because
the societies are more open, because as a
friend the U.S. had leverage, and because
history has shown that it happens with or
without our help-witness Greece, Portu-
gal and Spain. To that list can be added
Brazil, Argentina. Peru, Guatemala, per-
haps Haiti-and now, the Philippines.
But what about totalitarian adversar-
ie$? Enter the Reagan Doctrine. Soviet
surrogate states don't evolve toward de-
mocracy; if they try, they are slapped
down by the Brezhnev Doctrine. (What's
mine is mine, what's yours is negotiable.)
The Reagan view is that we can help indig-
enous populations seeking to break the So-
viet/totalitarian yoke. In select circum-
stances, we can provide limited military
support for such enterprises.
What, then, about item A on the current
agenda: Nicaragua?
In the Philippines, U.S. liberals tasted
the heady wine of superpower intervention.
It works! It does good things for nice peo-
ple! It can even involve direct military
help to the insurgents! (The U.S. provided
the Aa ,ino forces with intelligence data
and fuel for their helicopters.)
The liberals had a tine rationale for ac-
tion in the Philippines: The Marcos gov-
ernment was illegitimate because of elec-
tion fraud, and disenchanted voters might
join the communist New People's Army. If
you don't want communism, the liberals
said, pull the plug on the thug.
The Nicaraguan election of 1984 makes
the Marcos election of 1986 look like it was
run by the Honest Ballot Association. The
Nicaraguan election had everything except
an opposition that was allowed to compete.
Unlike the Philippines, communism in Nic-
aragua is not a potential threat; it's al-
ready there, a Soviet and Cuban-backed
reality. It is not 8,000 miles from America;
it is close by. For Cory Aquino, read Ar-
turo Cruz, Alfonso Robelo and Adolfo Ca-
lero, democrats all, trying to bring plural-
ist democracy, Filipino-style, to Nicara-
gua. Alas, the Sandinistas will not flee the
country in the face of a media wave.
What will liberals do? Will they turn the
inaccurate liberal version of Ms. Kirkpat-
rick's thesis on its head and support beat-
ing up on our authoritarian friends, while
being tender with our totalitarian-spon-
sored adversaries?
That won't do. Liberals with intellectual
consistency should be heading back toward
their earlier, long-held, view that America
is an assertive superpower that can do
good in the world-in the Philippines, and
in Nicaragua. If they do that, they will
surely be welcomed home.
Mr. Wattenberg is a senior fellow at the
American Enterprise Institute.
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/01/05: CIA-RDP90-00965R000807220003-3