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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, MAY 27, 1986
PAGE 15
When she was a presidential candidate, Corazon Cojuangco Aquino
told more than 1,000 of Manila's most powerful business leaders
how she would solve the nation's economic and political crises
during her first 100 days in office.
nwith the zeal of a
crusading housewife let loose in a den of world-class thieves,n
Aquino
vowed,
she
would
dismantle
piece-by-piece
the
dictatorship of President Ferdinand E. Marcos and replace it
with a human democracy that would serve all 54 million
Filipinos.
Now, as the exhilaration of liberation has begun to fade, and
as Aquino approaches the 100-day landmark, potential problems
are brewing in the government, most of them a result of that
policy of npurgation and purification.n
In the coffeehouses
and newspaper columns of Manila, there is grumbling from Aquino
supporters and enemies alike that many of her officials are
more interested in punishing Marcos than in running a
government.
Political crises continue in towns and provinces where Aquilino
Pimentel, Aquino's controversial minister of local governments,
has fired dozens of popularly elected, pro-Marcos mayors and
governors.
The Philippine economy remains stagnant,
as
Aquino's powerful Cormnission on Good Government has frozen tens
of millions of dollars worth of potential investment capital
and sequestered assets of major corporations. These steps were
taken as part of the campaign to ferret out and recover the
fortune that Marcos and his cronies are suspected of having
stolen from the national treasury during two decades in power.
Members of the powerful armed forees, who were the key to
Aquino's rise to power, are holding back in the battle to put
down a burgeoning conununist insurgency, out. of fear that
Aquino's Conunission on Human Rights will punish them for
violations under Marcos' rule.
And, in this political and
economic vacuum, the military continuesto'"'Iese ground in its
war against the insurgency, which has taken nearly
800
lives-in
the Philippi�countryside since Aquino assumed office--despite
a long-held belief that it was Marcos who fueled the conununist
rebellion••••
Aquino was asked to answer critics who charge that her Cabinet
ministers, among them more than a dozen millionaires, three
Harvard graduates and two with law degrees from Yale, were as
elitist and oligarchic as those of Marcos. They are elitist,
Aquino replied, only in the sense of being nthe best possible
people for the job.n
Asked for her assessment of her government based on its first
three months in power, Aquino•••listed as top achievements the
fulfilling of campaign promises to free the majority of
political prisoners•••and restoring "our basic freedoms." But
her greatest achievement, Aquino emphasized, was ngetting rid