The Philippines: The Heart of the Matter

A report accuses the military in Aquino's murder

For more than 400 of days, the Philippines had been on edge, waiting for what could be a major turning point in its political history. The Agrava board, a fact-finding body set up by President Ferdinand Marcos to investigate the Aug. 21, 1983, assassination of Opposition Leader Benigno Aquino within moments of his return from exile, had promised to publish the results of its hearings by the anniversary of the murder. But that day passed, and so did that week. Another week went by, then a month. Questions snowballed. Tensions mounted. A steady trickle of leaks— some careless, some calculated— punctured the official silence. Eager not to appear perfunctory or precipitate, the board delayed still further. Seven weeks after its initial deadline, the report remained unpublished.

Last week the biggest leak of all emerged. The 479-page memorandum of the board's legal staff, on which the final report will be based, was shown to several foreign news organizations, including TIME. The memo's conclusion was devastating: Aquino was not killed by Rolando Galman, the lone hit man whom the military accused of shooting Aquino and who was himself killed just seconds after the opposition leader. Instead, the murderer was one of two unnamed soldiers who escorted Aquino off China Airlines Flight 811 and down a metal stairway to the tarmac at Manila International Airport. The legal panel's report recommended that one civilian and as many as 22 officers, three of them generals, be put on trial for conspiring, or acting as accessories to a conspiracy, to murder Aquino. In all, the memo highlighted "at least 40 circumstances which prove beyond doubt" the existence of a plot.

According to sources on the board and among its legal staff, all five members of the Agrava board have accepted the memorandum's main conclusion, but they remain passionately divided over one critical point. Four of the members, along with the board's general counsel, Andres Narvasa, were said to maintain that Chief of Staff General Fabian Ver was involved in at least the coverup. For that reason, they apparently believe that Ver should be charged as an accessory in a report that should raise serious questions about his deeper participation. But Corazon Agrava, the board's chairman, reportedly refused to accept that the second most powerful man in the Philippines was implicated.

In impugning the military, the mainstay of Marcos' power for more than a decade, the memorandum deals a powerful blow to a regime that is already embattled. Indeed, the shot that killed Aquino badly wounded the Marcos government. Hundreds of thousands of Filipinos, silent during twelve years of martial law, began taking to the streets last year to call for an end to the President's autocratic rule. Around the country, meanwhile, the 10,000 guerrillas of the Communist New People's Army have continued to gain momentum in their 16-year struggle against the central government. That political instability has compounded economic uncertainty, and vice versa. Already the nation is burdened with a foreign debt of at least $26 billion. Last month a U.S. Senate staff report declared that many Filipinos take it as a "foregone conclusion that the Marcos era is in its terminal stage."