Word: aquinos
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President Corazon Aquino receives visitors in the second-floor bedroom of a guesthouse at Malacaang Palace. Last week, when the new leader welcomed TIME's Hong Kong bureau chief Sandra Burton, a close observer of Aquino's career since their first meeting more than two years ago, the President was in her office with her daughter and personal secretary nearby. Discussing her first twelve weeks in power, Aquino was as animated and forthright as ever. Excerpts from their talk...
...beginning, good fortune seemed to take her by the hand. Almost overnight, she in turn promised her countrymen a new world of integrity, democracy and grace. In the twelve weeks since she toppled Ferdinand Marcos, Philippine President Corazon Aquino has disbanded the discredited Marcos- controlled National Assembly and replaced the deposed dictator's self- serving 1973 constitution with a provisional "Freedom Constitution" of her own. She has converted the presidential Malacanang Palace into a public museum of her predecessor's egregious extravagance, and last week, in her first press conference with foreign reporters, the new leader displayed a characteristic blend...
...single most important feature of Aquino's new government, however, may be the one thing it shares with the Marcos regime: a staggering agenda of problems that include a $26.2 billion foreign debt, the military threat posed by 16,000 Communist insurgents and a political system crippled by two decades of corruption. Though Aquino has committed no major blunders, she has yet to answer the questions that will arise once her honeymoon ends. "Her credibility is high in terms of popular support," says Edgardo Angara, president of the University of the Philippines. "What may be a little unsettling to some...
...most fundamental issue before Aquino is how to undertake a thoroughgoing purge of Marcos' corrupt legacy without seeming authoritarian. On the local level, for example, the new government has already removed 71 of the 74 governors and 52 of the 60 city mayors who belong to Marcos' party. But in discharging them so peremptorily, the President has sparked complaints that she is indulging a Marcos-like self-interest. "I thought she was going to be a nonpartisan President," grumbles Richard Gordon, the dynamic young mayor of Olangapo, who was replaced by an Aquino appointee. "But it's still personality politics...
When Corazon Aquino emerged from practically nowhere as a political Joan of Arc and replaced Marcos, most Americans rightly cheered this as a success for democracy. Yet she soon found it necessary to dissolve the National Assembly and the existing constitution amid promises that new and improved models of both would be supplied within a year. If some right-wing general or politician had done this, there would have been screams of protest everywhere. As it is, Aquino's pledge of her democratic good intentions is taken at face value, and it should be. But her intentions...