HOW THE U.S. MANEUVERED TO PUT CORY IN POWER
W HAT WAS AMAZING in the assassination of Ninoy Aquino on August 21, 1983 was its precision. Just five seconds after he stepped off the plane, the gunman fired a single bullet to his head that killed him even before he touched ground.
Can any Filipino hitman execute such a perfect assassination? I have never heard of any other killing of a public figure done with such precision, one that circumvented what Aquino thought would be his human shields and witnesses.
Aquino’s murder in 1983 did fire up outrage against the Marcos dictatorship, with his funeral procession estimated to have been attended by at least a million people. However, it didn’t actually trigger the events that led to EDSA 1 in 1986. That it did is a myth.
It was the brilliant maneuverings by the US that toppled Marcos, which the Yellow Narrative, propagated by the two Aquino presidents and President Fidel V. Ramos, had cloaked.
Perhaps, if anything else, President Rodrigo Duterte’s anti-US stance would bring to light America’s role in bringing the Yellow Cult to power while we remained a nation without control of our destiny.
Marcos weathered the political storm of the Aquino assassination. The findings of the “Agrava Commission,” the independent body that was created to investigate it, cleared Armed Forces Chief of Staff General Fabian Ver of complicity in the assassination. With Ver portrayed as the villain, the elite had an excuse to continue its support for Marcos, and “move on.”
More importantly, Marcos bought the Philippine elite’s support at that time by giving them the means not only to survive the severe 19841985 economic crisis, but also to grow richer.
But that economic conflagration was the worst ever in our history, in part due to the global debt crisis triggered by the Mexican default on its foreign loans on March 1982. With the ensuing rise of global interest rates, the Philippines defaulted on its own loans on October 1983. This in effect barred the country from receiving any foreign exchange for its exports of goods and services.
The Philippines was effectively isolated from the world business economy.As a result, the economy shrank by 20 percent from 1983 to 1985 percent, the deepest such contraction in the post-war period.