PHILIPPINES: No to Marcos

His foes turn to bombs

To most of the 5,000 people in Manila's plush International Convention Center, the explosion at first seemed to be a sound effect: they had been watching a noisy slide show depicting U.S. Admiral George Dewey's 1898 defeat of the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay. But the blast was a real one: 18 stunned and bleeding delegates to a convention of the American Society of Travel Agents (ASTA) emerged from the hall after a bomb exploded only 50 ft. from their host, President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines.

The bombing was a profound embarrassment for Marcos, who only minutes earlier had assured the ASIA delegates that political terrorism in his troubled country was "a nightmare that we hope is past and gone." A terrorist group calling itself the April 6 Liberation Movement, after a massive 1978 anti-Marcos demonstration in Manila, had warned the travel agents to boycott the convention. Even though terrorists had set off some 20 bombs since August, killing one person and injuring scores, American embassy officials in Manila and the FBI assured ASTA that the chances of an incident were small. To make them even smaller, Marcos had assigned 3,000 security personnel to protect the convention-center complex. The terrorists circumvented the precautions by smuggling their small bomb into the auditorium in the official briefcase of an ASTA delegate.

The April 6 Movement is the most visible, and most violence-prone, member of a new constellation of radical opposition groups that is sometimes called the Third Force, because it is both anti-Marcos and antiCommunist. The Third Force is composed mainly of middle-class Filipinos, many of them devout Catholics, who believe that the violent overthrow of Marcos' eight-year-old martial law regime is morally justified. Their reasoning: corruption and rigged elections have made peaceful opposition futile.

Marcos denounced the bombing as "a crime against humanity" and issued orders for the arrest of 30 well-known opponents of his regime. Most of those on the President's list, however, were already in exile. One of the most prominent, former Senator Benigno Aquino, has been in the U.S. since May, when he was released after nearly eight years of detention in a military camp to seek medical treatment abroad. Marcos has so far produced no evidence directly linking the exiles to the April 6 organization's bombing campaign; the arrest orders seemed largely intended to put pressure on his most vocal opponents abroad. Another target may have been the Carter Administration, which has persistently urged Marcos to end martial law, but needs to maintain good relations with him because of U.S. military bases in the Philippines. Meanwhile, U.S. officials regard leaders like Aquino as the most promising successors to Marcos.