The Heart of the Matter

By Pico Iyer

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 Seven weeks after its initial deadline, the report remained unpublished.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."

The Agrava board's legal staff based its argument in large part on the startling discrepancies between shards of evidence-mostly photographs, audio recordings and videotapes made on the fateful afternoon-and the well-rehearsed military account, recited by a parade of soldiers both on and off the witness stand. Last November, for example, a military sharpshooter named Rolando De Guzman testified that while sitting with a SWAT team in a parked van on the tarmac, he saw Galman shoot Aquino near by. Instantly, said De Guzman, he pumped seven bullets into the alleged assassin. Then his colleagues began firing too. Tapes, however, revealed that De Guzman's testimony took no account at all of an opening flurry of five shots, which was followed, after 17 sec. of silence, by a second fusillade. Meanwhile, photographs showed "positively, unerringly and incontrovertibly" that there was no movement whatsoever in or around the van during the opening five-shot salvo. In short, the memo concluded, De Guzman's account, which was corroborated by 13 other soldiers under oath, was "nothing but a tall tale, a fabrication from beginning to end."

The holes in the military version were further exposed by the testimony of nine civilian witnesses. Especially telling was the account secretly relayed to the board last July by Celso Loterina, a Philippine Airlines ground engineer who had been standing near the nose of the China Airlines jet. During the 5 critical seconds, said Loterina, he heard the sound of running feet the metal stairway and looked up to see Aquino about four steps from the bottom. At that moment, he saw a hand appear behind the opposition leader and fire a bullet into the back of his head.

Although Loterina was unable to see the rest of the assassin, his account agreed with the testimony of eight other civilians who placed Aquino and Galman in the wrong places at the wrong times for Galman to have shot the former Senator. "These witnesses had no reason to lie," said the memo. "If at all, they should normally have testified for the military version. After all, they could expect some form of retaliation if they wronged the soldiers with whom they were in daily contact."

The central and most sensitive point for the board is the involvement of General Ver in the conspiracy. When he took the witness stand in April, Ver admitted under questioning by General Counsel Narvasa that the intelligence community was kept regularly informed of Aquino's activities in the U.S. Did that mean, Narvasa asked, that as soon as Aquino left his home in Boston on Aug. 13 en route for the Philippines, the authorities made every effort to keep track of his movements? No, said the general. But what of the cables from Philippine officials abroad describing Aquino's stops in Singapore and Taipei? Those, said Ver, were received by the intelligence authorities but were never requested. At least the general knew when the former Senator was due to arrive in Manila? No, replied Ver, his only information was a letter from Opposition Leader Salvador Laurel requesting special security for a Japan Air Lines flight from Tokyo on Aug. 21.

That the Chief of Staff should have no intelligence of his own and, what is more, that he should depend on information from one of the government's most distrusted opponents sorely strained the board's credulity. Concluded the memo categorically: "Ver certainly knew Aquino was coming on board China Airlines."

Such hard-hitting argumentation did not endear the so-called Agravatars to the government. A few days before Narvasa's polite but penetrating cross-examination of Ver, the President tried to strip the general counsel of his responsibilities. The board refused to go along. Twice Judge Manuel Lazaro, Marcos' chief counsel, indirectly contacted one of the investigators, presumably hoping to coax, cajole or coerce him into becoming more agreeable to the government position. In recent weeks, several people close to the inquiry were approached by high-ranking friends who suggested, with elaborate indirectness, that the Marcos administration would be most grateful if the board delayed publication of its report until November. By then, it was assumed, the International Monetary Fund would have okayed (as, indeed, it apparently did late last week) a $630 million credit package that the government desperately needs. "I hate it when they think they can put something over on us," said a member of the legal panel at one point. "We wanted to be able to say after the report that we did not miss a trick."

The exact substance of the final Agrava report remains unclear. The divided board may succeed in thrashing out a compromise conclusion that satisfies all members. The board may present a report along the lines of the legal panel's memo, to which Agrava, if she continues to disagree, I could append a minority opinion. The commission may simply decide to issue two documents that present conflicting views on how high up in the military hierarchy the conspiracy reaches.

The response that counts, however, will be the one that comes from the President. Marcos publicly declared last month that he would honor the commission's findings. But many of his 54.5 million people, familiar with his skills as a political quick-change artist, fear that Marcos may yet think up some way of defusing or deflecting the report. On the eve of his death, Aquino acknowledged of his archrival, "Marcos is the only man who can return democracy peacefully." The Agrava board's explosive findings may succeed in putting the late Senator's hope to the test.

-By Pico Iyer. Reported by Sandra Burton/Manila

With reporting by Sandra Burton