The Roots of the Filipino People : The Epilogue

THE ROOTS OF THE FILIPINO PEOPLE by Onofre D. Corpuz © 1989

EPILOGUE

In order to bring this to a happy conclusion......let us display unimpeachable honor in social relations and refined manners toward our fellow men, in every way striving for our redemption and common liberty; and finally, I repeat that you should promise and engrave upon your breast, thus making it known to all, that in case any foreign power should attempt to deprive us of any part of this Archipelago, we would exhaust all our energies and resources, and struggle as long as the breath of life remains, in defense of our national integrity. Aguinaldo's message to town presidentes, Kawit. Cavite (3 August 1898)

The fading away of nationalism as the guiding spirit and paramount value in Filipino politics might be said to have begun with the founding of the Nacionalista Party of 1907. Its leaders were untrue to their party's proud name. In Quezon's autobiography, in his own words, we find that in early 1942 he had decided to place his loyalty to America no matter what would happen to his people:

I swore to myself and to the God of my ancestors that as long as I lived I would stand by America regardless of the consequences to my people or to myself.

The Nacionalista campaign for independencewithoutnationalism ended with the inauguration of a republic in the Luneta on 4 July 1946. A special bloc of seats in the grandstand was occupied by a group of aging veterans of the Revolution, many dressed in their old rayadillo (thin striped cotton duck) uniforms. The sun broke through the morning drizzle as the Filipino tricolor was hoisted up the flagpole.

The proteges and successors of the OsmeñaQuezon tandem took over after the war. One of their first measures was to authorize “backpay,” and so they collected salaries for all the war years during which they did not serve. A lively issue for some time was that of collaboration with the Japanese

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occupation regime. In the verdicts of the tribunals that tried the collaboration cases, the men who were declared to have collaborated with the Japanese were called traitors, as if those who were loyal to the United States, and fought the guerrilla war so that the Americans would return, were any less betrayers of their nation's integrity. The meaning of the nation had been lost; the Filipinos could only view themselves in terms of other countries. Madre Espana was gone, but it was now replaced by Mother America.

On 4 July 1946 the Philippine President entered into an agreement binding the government to have the Constitution amended, for the purpose of negating those provisions that reserved the right to exploit natural resources to Filipino nationals, and extending this right on a “parity” basis to Americans. Early the next year the President signed an executive agreement granting lands in the public domain, rent free, to the United States as military bases. The agreement stated that on the American side it was pursuant to a 1944 resolution of the US Congress to acquire military bases in the Philippines. It was to have a life until 2046 A.D. From here on through the 1960s, presidents or presidential candidates would strive to enhance their political stock by seeking Washington's blessing or favor. An invitation to make a pilgrimage to the American capital was ideal.

The abandonment of nationalism by Filipino governments, specifically visávis the United States, had the inevitable result. Since all the governments were controlled by the center or right, the nationalistic role fell by default to the political left. The situation remained unchanged into the late 1980s. The jerrybuilt coalition that deposed Marcos in 1986 included no nationalistic parties. It was simply antiMarcos. Thus, if the political center and right would persist in shunning nationalism, the left, either legal and noncommunist or illegal and communist, would continue to be the voice of Filipino nationalism.

Moreover, because of the establishment's weakness or servility relative to the United States, the nationalism of the left had to be essentially defined by antiAmericanism. Although unavoidable, this narrow definition of nationalism almost exclusively in terms of pro or antiUnited States policies or measures distracted the Filipinos from a positive or holistic

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understanding and practice of nationalism.

The absence of a nationalistic commitment at the top levels of leadership had a subtle and unappreciated result. It allowed the deterioration of a vital national institution: the civil service. The civil service or bureaucracy is the only instrument through which government can execute the laws, manage the public affairs, and serve the people. The colonial civil service was efficient, partly by design and partly because its task was simple: to administer a colony. The occupation regime was concerned neither with transforming nor democratizing Filipino society. It merely set up an elitist system of government and politics.

When the old colonial bureaucracy became the civil service of a republic, the tasks of government not only expanded but became more diverse and complex. The leaders talked of democracy, social justice, and development through modernization and industrialization. The bureaucracy therefore had to perform an expanded array of functions. But then the first thing that the political parties did was to destroy the neutrality of the service.

By the 1950s political influence through letters of recommendation and similar pressures from party leaders had become common and then decisive in appointments to key career positions. Technical and professional qualifications became secondary and often as not ignored. By the 1970s the assault by the parties had virtually destroyed the competitive examinations system. Most of the political proteges at the lower levels were dead beats, repelling the public by their uselessness; they spent office time peddling items of clothing and jewelry or food to office mates. The more privileged were "1530s"; they reported on the 15th and 30th each month only to collect their salaries. Meantime, the civil service commission lost control over entry into the service. By the 1980s politics had reduced the commission to an ineffectual personnel records office.

The destruction of neutrality went hand in hand with erosion of efficiency. Even if the majority of civil servants did their jobs when treated as professionals, the politicalization of most positions was demoralizing. Civil servants lost public regard and their once high social status, with the added result that their bargaining power for proper salaries was weakened.

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Every president allowed his party to inflict more politics on the service. The latter was “strengthened” over and over by reorganization. This meant harassment or reorganizing out of the misfits appointed in the past administration and replacing them with new misfits, who would in turn leave or be separated during each new administration. No president called for a return to the tried and true systems of recruitment on the basis of proper qualifications, merit selection via competitive examinations, probationary training and career development, incentives, job ratings, and so forth. These were too humdrum measures for presidents who thought they were statesmen; they did not bother to protect the organization that delivered services to the people.

The long neglect of social justice during the elitist politics of the American regime, the deterioration of the civilian bureaucracy since 1946, and the attendant and galloping corruption that was eroding government itself into the late 1980s, meant omission or failure to provide basic services to the lower classes, especially the rural masses. These services were simple: roads, good seed, schooling, medical attention, and judicial redress. Their denial to the rural folk, institutionalized as social injustice, was the foundation of the agrarian unrest since the 1920s; of its growth into a communistoriented movement on the eve of World War II; and then of its emergence as a fullblown revolutionary movement in the 1950s.

The communists/socialists were the only “unproAmerican” and antiJapanese fighting group during the Japanese occupation. They fought as the HUKBALAHAP (People's Army Against Japan). They were rural based, and the movement gathered strength during the early postwar confusion. They were contained during the Ramon Magsaysay presidency (19531957). Their regroupment and buildup after 1957 prefaced the more vigorous revolutionary challenge during Marcos' second term (19691973). In the meantime, their new New People's Army (NPA) had succeeded in gaining some support in urban centers as well, including Metro Manila.

The Marcos administration thought to undercut rural support of the insurgency through “countryside development” and civic action programs. These were palliatives that could never make up for the generations of political neglect or civilian government failure, but there was little choice.

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But instead of renewing the civilian government to enable it to deliver services to the barrio folk on a continuing basis, Marcos assigned what were basically civilian programs to the least suitable arm of government: the military. The rural folk had to muse: "When the soldiers leave, what then? Back to the old neglect, the same inefficient and corrupt system? Or will the soldiers be with us always?" The problem would therefore grow. So long as the civil service was not revitalized, the governments would fail to serve the barrios, and assigning civilian work to the military would only confuse it, without adding to the efficiency of the civilian government.

The cancer in Filipino politics was the party system. Academic writing about the parties viewed them as sociological phenomena. We learn that the Filipino political party has no organizational members, and therefore no membership lists. We learn that it has no party funds, and therefore no honest financial and accounting records, but that millions and millions of pesos are spent in the course of an election campaign. We learn that campaign expenditures normally cover the cost of private armies, printing of fake and sample ballots, vote buying, and preparing election protests before the votes are in. The parties are said to have no philosophies of government or politics, and the system breeds “political butterflies” or turncoats who always defect toward the party with the spoils. Among others, finally, it is said that the system has a democratic byproduct because the treasure spent by the parties is redistributed among the poor.

The party system was all these, but the proper measure of it is ethics. The system was, as it had been since 1907, almost destitute of nationalism; it was, since 1946, guided by no shred of social ethics except opportunism. It almost invariably corrupted honorable men and women, making the honest dishonest. It twisted civic values; it miseducated the youth; it was a dark and impenetrable screen that concealed every longterm national interest from the electorate.

Worst of all, the party system was a consistent failure at its societal function: to instruct the community on political issues and structure public opinion so as to produce electoral decisions about the direction of the national life, as a guide for government. The system allowed the people only the knowledge, after the elections were over, that this candidate won and

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that one lost. The Filipinos never knew what the new gang in government meant to do. After the dead in “electionrelated incidents” were buried, the winning candidates would confess that their victory meant the triumph of nationalism and democracy, which enlightened nobody.

Filipino politics was unique that way. Maybe cultural factors rather than the party system per se would explain why candidates in local elections always strove to get 100 per cent of the votes with a big fat ZERO for their opponents, in as many precincts as possible. This meant a prodigious, total, noholdsbarred and noquartersgiven effort. It was not politics; it was war. But the presidential candidates were driven by the same atavistic urges. Their goal was no less than to destroy, extinguish, or annihilate the “enemy.” Filipino politics was quite unlike politics in most mature and stable democracies where the majority parties win the mandate by slim electoral pluralities. Hence it may be said that in every Filipino president beats the heart of a tribal chief.

Nevertheless, the seeming intensity of politics characterized only a subsector of the nation. It was the hallmark of electoral politics in the urban centers, especially in Metro Manila where provincial governors, city mayors, and even town mayors from all over the country had second homes. In the provinces politics was feuds among the combative families and fiestas for the folk.

That the politics of the metropolis seemed to be the politics of the country was because the media, especially the print media, was almost totally a Manila affair; it was modern, ebullient, and sensationoriented, enlivened by hundreds of columnists. Filipino journalism had not produced a great reporter for years. That the languages of public affairs were historically foreign languages Spanish and English since 1900, English after World War II, with Tagalog picking up later – added to the divide between Manila and the rural areas. But the media's concept of politics was limited to electoral politics. It regarded the permanent poverty of rural life and neglect of the rural areas by government in moral terms, not as pragmatic political issues – that is, matters basic to the operation of the political community.

The media could not register the rural masses' indifference to national

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politicians. For centuries alien governorsgeneral had ruled and then departed, and Filipino presidents and legislators had come and gone through generations, without government having had real impact on rural life. The masses were not given the vote during the American occupation, although the Filipino legislature had authority to expand the small electorate.

The people in the pueblos during the nineteenth century had a saying: “The governorgeneral is in Manila, far away; the king is in Spain, farther still; and God is in Heaven, farthest of all.” The distance between the rural folk and their rulers was not only geographical; it was political distance, and this distance became deeply embedded in the memory of the folk.

This distance continued into the 1980s. The rural folk's relationships with the communists were different. The NPA insurgents spoke and dressed like the barrio folk, showed sympathy for them and gave them hope and at times promised to avenge their abusers. The barrio people reciprocated, because the governments in Manila and the tenant in Malacañang were remote and inaccessible. To the barriofolk the presidents were much like the governorsgeneral. To them a tenant in Malacañang was little more than a celebrity of the season, with the exception; perhaps, of Magsaysay. Between them there was no political bond.

For instance, in 1988 the President declared that her family's hacienda was to be subject to land reform. But there was silence, no news of jubilation or gratitude from the tenants. This silence was their response to Malacañang's historic neglect.

The rural folk's indifference was in fact a primary factor for the stability of the political and governmental system. Had they become direct participants or activists in politics, had they had their own organizations and candidates in elections (not spurious “farmers federations” headed by urban lawyers in Manila offices staffed by their relatives and financed by foreign foundations), the political system would have been subjected to radical change long before the 1980s.

It might be said that “the discipline of the oath of loyalty to the United

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States” governed the politicians from 1907 to 1946. Thereafter they were free of any checks except what each fancied. The resulting deterioration in administrative institutions and in politics in turn led to unmet needs, frustrations, and injustice. The lack of one recognized unifying or guiding value in politics and society had to lead to crisis.

The escalation of violence in the vocabulary of politics was a reflection of the violence in the streets of Manila, in the countryside, and in Marcos' relations with his political enemies when he staged his coup d' etat of 1972. It was an antidemocratic but constitutional coup.

Many Filipinos would recall that the martial law regime began well. But it was strained by the oil crisis of 1973, the growing insurgency, and economic crises that massive foreign debts could only partly relieve. Its antiinflation measures during the early 1980s only mopped up the “excess liquidity of the poor.”

The Benigno Aguino assassination in 1983 united all the people that Marcos had hurt and hounded since 1972 in a vast antiMarcos front. When this front began to move, it was against an isolated Marcos. The general perception was that he was an aging, ailing man, with a bad case of megalomania, prone to play loose with the constitution, quick to violate his own decrees, unwilling to rein in the outlandish and acquisitive instincts of his wife, and with no sure loyalty from the restive military.

A militaryled mutiny won civilian support and exploded into a democratic but unconstitutional coup in 1986. The resulting revolutionary government transformed itself into a constitutional regime in 1987 and had to cope with aborted coups.

The Filipinos thought that these were their very first coups. In fact they had repeatedly watched their elections progressively deteriorate into institutionalized seizures of political power by violence: the violence of money, murder, and deceit. The Marcos coup altered the old balance in Filipino politics. The new postMarcos alignment was precarious, featured by the entry of “causeoriented groups” cheek by jowl with anachronistic parties and new coalitions, an activist clergy, as well as by an openly

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political role for the military. Filipino politics would never be the same again, and an obvious relapse into old habits that were surfacing anew during the eve of the 1990s could only mean that the Filipinos had not seen their last coups.

Mrs. Corazon Aquino, Marcos' successor, was faced with awesome problems. She seemed to be meeting them with nerve into 1988, but nerve and calm would not solve them. Most of the problems were by nature tests of nationalism.

The US military bases issue was the archetypal test. Needless to say, the existence of the bases not only had a divisive effect on the people. The bases issue was a distorting and contaminating factor in Filipino politics. The persons did not matter. The outs would assail either the presence of the bases or the terms of the agreement, while the tenants in Malacañang would defend them. But once in office, the erstwhile critics became the champions of the bases. This was because of the “realities”: their weakness under American pressure, their imagined need for American aid dollars, so that the bases metamorphosed from “magnets for nuclear attack” into “vital defenses of democracy against the communist threat.”

There was the case in December 1984 when Mrs. Aquino and some men who later became leading figures in her administration signed a brave declaration stating, among others, that “foreign military bases on Philippine territory must be removed.” And predictably, soon after she was in the presidency, Mrs. Aquino executed a neat volteface, declaring that she would keep her options open until 1991. The presence of the bases by virtue of an utterly obsolete agreement would continue to be a pollutant in Filipino politics.

Most Filipinos failed to realize that the American position on the bases issue was in firm pursuit of the national interests of one of the most nationalistic countries in the world. Filipinos, a charming people, clung to righteousness and emotion. They would not devote months of intensive studies to their policy problems. They knew that they had something that the United States wanted, but their own understanding of nationalism was limited from want of its practice, and so they always ended up pleading in

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vain for rentals, and the Americans would never pay.

In advance of the 1988 review sessions, Mrs. Aquino's declaration of “open options” undercut the Philippine position. In fact the government did not have to participate in the review at all. The quinquennial review merely divided public opinion needlessly, serving to alert the Americans to the Filipino mood, and allowing them to gauge the latter's weak and strong points in preparation for the subsequent negotiations.

The Filipinos inexplicably treated the bases agreement just as if it were a treaty, not an executive agreement between two chief executives. After the 1983 review, for instance, the US President wrote to Manila that he intended, on a besteffort basis, to seek the approval of the US Congress to appropriate the funds agreed upon during the review. The Filipinos could have moved for termination of the agreement during the 1988 US presidential election period, on the perfectly valid ground that the US President was a lame duck president, and that it was desirable to deal with his successor. After the 1988 review agreement Mrs. Aquino received a letter from the outgoing US president that was similarly worded to the latter's 1983 letter to President Marcos.

Filipino negotiators invariably tended to become prisoners of the documents, chipping and whittling away at clauses in order to win marginal improvements. For decades they missed the impact of scientific and technological developments on the nature of the US bases: dazzling sophistication in weaponry, delivery systems, and global electronic and satellite communications. Their preoccupation with the paper of the agreement also kept them from noticing the erosion of the “mutual security” principle of the 1947 agreement as a result of the worldwide expansion of American political and strategic military concerns and commitments.

They did not realize that the United States global “projection of force” visávis the USSR meant that the use and deployment of the Clark and Subic capabilities covered the vast Western Pacific Region (from Vladivostok down) and all the way again around until the Indian Ocean Region and Persian Gulf area. Such missions and deployment in such far regions of Philippinebased United States weapons and equipment and support

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facilities completely destroyed the mutuality of interest with the Philippines that was a basic principle of the 1947 agreement.

The 1979 amendments were pointless. They stated that each base was under the command of a Filipino base commander, but that the US military facilities within the base area were to be under the “effective command and control” of the US, through its facilities commander. The 1983 review also provided that the base commander had no access to “cryptographic areas and areas where classified equipment or information is located.” The Filipino base commander was only a nohear, nosee, fixture.

Worse, the Filipino flag flying over the bases was needlessly degraded. It became the symbol of some hollow sovereignty, mocked every time a foreign country's war craft were launched beneath it for destinations and missions unknown to the Filipinos. The negotiators of the 1979 sovereignty amendments imagined that they had scored legal points, when they had succeeded only in exposing the nation's flag to derisory mockery.

In any event, the new Philippine Constitution was explicit on “the expiration in 1991 of the Agreement between the Republic of the Philippines and the United States of America concerning Military Bases” (Article XVIII, Section 25). The requirements of this provision upon Philippine governments are clear. The latter have to do their homework. They have to prepare, in advance, detailed studies of the phase out of the military facilities and the turnover of the base lands; identify and mobilize needed task forces and other groups for planning; and see to the startup funds and investments for the development and operations of new projects in the vacated base lands.

Philippine governments have to study and prepare alternatives to the 1947 military assistance agreement and 1951 mutual defense treaty with the United States. They have to anticipate and design plans for possible American reactions, diplomatic and otherwise. And, because the Constitution included a provision governing the existence of foreign military bases on Philippine soil by treaty, the Philippine Government would have to weigh the wisdom of this treaty route in place of the expiring executive agreement. These tasks required a much stronger sense and understanding

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of nationalism than have been shown so far in the presidency.

That the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) rebellion broke out only in 1972 was clear evidence of the patience of the Muslim Filipinos. The nonMuslims called it “the Muslim problem” when in fact it was a Christian problem. It was a ghost from the Spanish era. The Christian lawyers in the Malolos Congress suffered from the mental baggage from their Spanish heritage and did not appreciate Aguinaldo's call for fraternity in a federal union with the Muslims. The Muslims were not part of the Revolution because they were not part of colonized Filipinas; moreover, they had been at war with the Spaniards since the sixteenth century. The rebellion of the MNLF was the inevitable fruit of neglect by the Christian governments, since 1914, of the worth and integrity of the Muslim Filipinos. Rizal saw the Muslims as part of the Filipino nation since 1892; Aguinaldo wanted them to be part of the Republic.

The MNLF separatist rebellion was a more serious problem than the challenge from the communist insurgency. This was because the country's territorial integrity would remain intact even after a communist victory, while an MNLF victory would mean impairment of the national territory. One possibility toward this outcome would be: if the Christian Filipinos played tough but were illprepared on the military bases issue, what would prevent the US CIA from turning to the MNLF and offering support toward the establishment of a breakaway Muslim state in the south in return for a US base in Zamboanga, Basilan, or Dadiangas, etc;? Some of the Filipinos' more difficult problems overlapped, because the problems were all results of the fading away of the nationalism of the Revolution.

Another major problem was the foreign debt. Foreign borrowings accelerated during the Marcos era. Then the debt service clock began to tick. The Marcos presidency and its immediate successor ignored the constitutional questions arising from their agreeing to submit the economic recovery programs of a sovereign republic to an assortment of some 480 foreign bankers who were unknown and unaccountable to the Filipino people. The bankers knew more about the programs than the people whose taxes funded both the costs of “economic recovery” and debt repayment. The act of submission was pusillanimous. The President of the Philippines was

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somewhat like a tribal chief making obeisance to some Great White Father.

The Filipinos took it in stride, perhaps because they did not sense the problem. Nonetheless, someone might some day raise the matter as an impeachable act, most seasonably during the period of jockeying before a presidential election.

The government dealt with the debt problem with cutanddried financial and economic approaches. Petulant cries of “unilateral repudiation” were heard briefly. But there was no suggestion that the President call upon the financiers, managers, and workers of a nation that had the thirteenth, fourteenth, largest population in the world to liquidate the foreign debt with honor. There was no suggestion, for instance, that the leadership excite and inspire the labor force in a crusade of pride, discipline, and effort to liberate the children from the burden of their elders' debts. If half the labor force were inspired to produce an incremental US$500 each annually, for example, the additional value would be US$6 billion. The pesodollar exchange rate would also improve in the process, and the US$28.5 billion foreign debt could be liquidated within a decade. But the leaders shunned the nationalistic solution. It was easier to seem to be working hard, planning, regulating, controlling the economy, imposing new taxes, and the like, instead of firing up the people and their resources of pride and energy. In the meantime, the government would turn to a well used repertoire of methods of mendicancy: outstretched hands for aid, appeals for moratoria, for grace periods, restructuring, etc.

The problems of the late 1980s were tough: the dead weight of the party system; a damaged civil service; the foreign debt; the intrusive shadow of the United States; social injustice and the communist insurgency; the MNLF separatist rebellion; the alienation and indifference of the masses.

The Filipino electorate of the 1980s was no longer the upperclass electorate of the American occupation. It suddenly expanded in the 1950s, a result of Ramon Magsaysay's then new grassroots campaign style. He brought into the electorate classes of people (mostly rural folk and the urban poor) that had not voted before. In the act of participation in politics they also brought with them their views of life, their values, their problems. But

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the traditional parties did not accommodate them; the politicians saw the masses simply as votes, not as the heart and rationale of a social democratic party program. The communists elected to be doctrinaire; they remained illegal when they could have mobilized the new voters and served as their voice in electoral politics. The masses remained unorganized, a floating vote and a sleeping force. By 1987 some 85 per cent of the Philippine population had been born after World War II, without any personal memory of the colonial period. A new political ethic was needed, perhaps also a new political system.

What the Filipinos needed during the drift of the earl postMarcos years was fresh animus, to be called upon and enrolled in worthy and noble tasks. What they awaited, while they were still in a waiting mood, was that their leaders inspire and rally them, to employ government to eliminate injustice, to unite them into the nation that their heroes envisioned when they believed that every Filipino was “a son of God in this land.”

A striking feature of the 1986 coup was the prominent role of a wide assortment of causeoriented groups. The fore runners of these groups were the youth activists of the late 1960s that were antiMarcos and tended to be leftist. Most went to ground during the early 1970s. During the latter year of the decade they began to include older people, even members of the clergy, and elements that could only be described as rightist. After the assassination of Benigno Aquino their articulateness and organization made them a vital political element, until the heterogeneous civilian antiMarcos group momentarily united behind the 1986 military mutiny to install Aquino's widow in power.

Beyond their role in 1986, the groups were early signs of new trend. They could not organize as parties during the martial law regime because the latter was inhospitable even to the traditional parties. But they did not form into parties even in 1987. This was important. Some of them had dissolved because they were merely antiMarcos and Marcos was gone. The diehard leftists went back underground because they could not coexist with the military element in the coalition that Aquino needed to stay in power. But there were others that could not join the traditional political parties that surfaced soon after. This was because they stood for an array of social and

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political values and aspirations, as well as discontent, that they felt so deeply and could not entrust to any of the old parties to symbolize or represent.

By 1988 many of the 1986 activists had retired, disillusioned, unwilling to join or ally with the majority LABAN (Fight) parties that wore new names but had oldpolitics leaders. It was the nonintegration of these elements that was significant. They needed a “new politics” in order to survive. When they decide to return to politics and use “people power” in their own behalf and not just to install some establishment personality in office, the process of their reentry will herald the presence of those populist blocs that were needed to expel or transform the anachronistic and dysfunctional party system. During the late 1980s the parties that were exhumed from the 1960s, as well as the new alliances made up of old faces and habits, were dinosaurs. They were unfit to guide the civic life of the young adults and citizens into the eve of the twentyfirst century.

In some three decades the Filipino population should be at the 100,000,000 level. That population will exert unimaginably heavy strains on the civil structures. These structures from the past, as they persisted into the late 1980s, will be replaced.

Inside of a generation, perhaps before the end of the century, Filipino politics will go through civil war or revolution or coup d'etat. The primary reason will be the proven incapacity of the political system – its leadership and institutions – to serve the basic needs of the masses and to win over the politicized youth. A civil war would be violent. A revolution or coup d' etat would be either violent or peaceful. The children of the 1980s who will discover that they would be paying off the graftridden foreign debts of their elders will be an obvious part of the disaffected. These extraconstitutional processes will create either the new democratic leaders or new dictators. It is too early to tell, but perhaps even the new authoritarian leaders would not be viewed as worse than their predecessors, who ignored the nationalism of the Filipinos' first and one true Revolution.

On the eve of the 1990s, time was running out on democracy in the Philippines. But the Filipinos might, against all odds, keep the nation

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intact. They were, after all, the first people in Asia to wage a nationalistic revolution against western colonialism; they did it all, they took their destiny into their hands, and triumphed, and founded the first Asian republic with a democratic constitution.

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Documents

The Roots of the Filipino People : The Epilogue