The Philippines Midsummer Night's Dream

By Pico Iyer

In Shakespearean drama, both tragic and comic, the storms and calamities that shake the sublunary globe are reflections of turmoil in the hearts of men. So too, when the state of nature is disordered, do they often portend the same upset in the nature of the state. It therefore seemed a distinctly Shakespearean augury when Typhoon Gading drowned Manila in torrential rains last week, sending coconut trees swaying wildly in the wind and plunging much of the city deep into darkness. For in recent weeks, tremors and uncertainties have had all of Philippine politics listing between tragedy and comedy, swept up in a whirlwind of coups rumored, imagined and aborted.

At the heart of much of the confusion is the strange and shifting alliance between President Corazon Aquino and her wily longtime antagonist and current Defense Minister, Juan Ponce Enrile. Throughout the 7 1/2 years that her husband Benigno was in jail, Aquino had to negotiate on his behalf with Enrile, who was then Defense Minister under former President Ferdinand Marcos, even for conjugal visits. In February, it was Enrile's startling volte-face that helped topple Marcos and bring Aquino to power. Ever since, the former architect of Marcos' martial law, who has never concealed his own presidential ambitions, has remained a great unknown within Aquino's Cabinet. Enrile, 62, still commands the loyalty of the 230,000-man military, and all sides are well aware that what the army giveth, the army can also take away. Shakespeare might have been addressing Aquino when he wrote, "That Power that made you king/ Hath power to keep you king in spite of all."

The most recent of the Manila disturbances was a 40-hour comedy of errors that seemed to parody the February revolution. The charade began when about 8,000 Marcos loyalists gathered in the capital's Rizal Park, as they have done every Sunday since mid-March, to champion their exiled leader, now reigning over a seaside villa in Honolulu. Then, as is their custom, more than 1,000 members of the ragtag group drifted into the nearby Manila Hotel, the onetime playground of Imelda Marcos, for drinks. This time, however, they were joined by two truckloads of armed soldiers. The next thing they knew, Arturo Tolentino, Marcos' vice-presidential running mate in last February's elections, was reading out a letter from Marcos asking him to take over as the country's "Acting President," and was having himself sworn in.

As at least three more truckloads of soldiers pulled up, thousands of loyalists formed a barricade around the hotel, waving and chanting in the afternoon's sweltering summer heat. Inside the hotel, the leaders of the siege kept dropping dark hints about the intentions of the military. "We expect more troops to join us," said their spokesman Gerry Espina.

At 7 p.m., the escapade entered an even more surreal phase. Holding a decidedly impromptu press conference on the steps in the lobby, Tolentino began naming the members of his Cabinet, among them, none other than Juan Ponce Enrile, who would remain as Defense Minister. Meanwhile, the gate- crashers continued to make free use of the facilities of the historic hotel, ordering drinks from the bar, lounging by the pool and stretching out on the floor of the chandeliered lobby.

As word of the curious debauch reached President Aquino, who was visiting the southern island of Mindanao, she calmly replied that Enrile and his men had not deserted her government. A little later, Enrile appeared on TV to support that claim. He also pre-empted his President by assuring the renegade soldiers that they would be treated with leniency. At 4:30 a.m. on Monday, 200 of the almost 400 armed soldiers who had rushed to the hotel to assist Enrile, realizing that he in fact had nothing to do with the takeover, sheepishly withdrew.

Throughout the night, however, the besiegers continued holding press conferences in the hotel corridors. The following day, Tolentino and some others slipped out by a fire escape for negotiations with the government in the nearby Army-Navy Club. While Tolentino headed home that evening, his followers, unaware of his departure, quixotically remained posted in the hotel. Finally, in the early hours of Tuesday morning, the last of the loyalists were persuaded to depart, taking with them as they left such souvenirs of their stay as hotel sheets, knives and even telephones. The midsummer night's dream concluded with the errant soldiers being sentenced by the government to a "severe punishment of 30 push-ups."

The next day, the Cabinet convened to discuss Enrile's promise of leniency toward the soldiers. In an unusually cantankerous session, according to reliable sources, Local Government Minister Aquilino Pimentel told Enrile that the soldiers should have been arrested, even shot. Information Minister Teodoro Locsin added, "The trouble is, we have a military we can't trust." Afterward, a shaken Enrile warned Agriculture Minister Ramon Mitra: "We helped you in February, and we helped you this week. I don't know what we'll do if there is a next time." That same day, Aquino took the extraordinary measure of calling Enrile to apologize for the uproar.

Certainly, the weird episode so spotlighted the ambiguous power of Enrile that some people maintained he might have had an inkling of the maneuver. A veteran politician like Tolentino, they argued, would never have taken such a gamble unless he really had believed that the military would support him. "Let them think what they want," Enrile told TIME in response to the charges. "If I was foolish enough to do anything, I wouldn't need Tolentino and Marcos. They needed me; I didn't need them." That is exactly what skeptics of the power broker fear.

The role of Marcos was another mystery in the bizarre tale. The deposed dictator admitted that he had sent Tolentino a letter a "long time ago" telling him to take over, but insisted that he had played no part in the bungled coup. Still, his top aide, Arturo Aruiza, capitalized on the occasion by asserting that Aquino "must be sitting on a volcano." Nor could he forbear a sly aside: "If President Marcos had been behind the coup, it would have been executed properly."

That kind of meddlesome posturing has driven State Department officials to a kind of impatient fury with Marcos. The hotel brouhaha, said State Department Spokesman Bernard Kalb, underscored the fact that "Mr. Marcos' political influence and effectiveness is at an end. He may not have realized it yet, but everyone else certainly has. He may continue to talk, but no one is listening."

Distaste for Marcos aside, however, the U.S. has yet to deliver as much aid as a disappointed Aquino government had initially hoped would be forthcoming. ( The money is sorely needed. In the four months since the new President came to office, the economy has not revived as expected, and some economists predict the country will be lucky to register a 1% growth this year. When Aquino announced her first official trip to the U.S. this September, she specifically said she was coming "to appeal to the private sector."

For the moment, though, her top priority is clearly to keep the military in line. The armed forces have already chafed at Aquino's attempts to reform the army by replacing veterans with her own choices. They have voiced their displeasure at her offer of amnesty to the Communist guerrillas of the New People's Army even as she pledges to punish human-rights abuses within her own forces.

If the ill-executed coup last week revealed some of the uncertainties still surrounding the new leadership, its failure underscored the continuing popularity of Aquino. Yet the wild card Enrile was the person on whom both sides found themselves staking their hopes. As the Shakespearean tempest raged on, it appeared that Enrile's own hopes might only increase. After all, as the poet wrote, "the soldier's virtue" is ambition.

With reporting by Nelly Sindayen and William Stewart/Manila