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The most pressing problem before the government is the swift rise of the Communist insurgents, who have brought civil war to many regions of the country. Capitalizing on the government's tarnished reputation and the military's widespread corruption, the armed guerrillas now number some 12,000. Over the past nine months, Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile has been helping to organize a concerted counterinsurgency campaign. "I am happy the leadership accepted that we had a problem to address," Enrile said last week. Others disagree. Said a staff report prepared last year for the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations: "There is doubt that the Marcos regime either understands fully or can cope effectively with the Communist threat." Such claims do not deter the President. "I deny the premise that the insurgency is growing," he said last week. "I think we have hit the Communists in so many places so hard."
The correctness of that assessment will be the central issue next week when Reagan Administration officials appear before the Solarz committee in an effort to win approval for an increase in U.S. economic and military aid to the Philippines for fiscal 1986 from $225 million to $275 million. Much of the funding will come out of a five-year, $900 million package agreed to by Washington in 1983 in exchange for the maintenance of two vital U.S. installations in the Philippines, Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base. That commitment complicates Washington's difficulties in weighing its reservations about the Marcos regime against its worries about the insurgency. "I think the Americans have made up their minds that the incumbent government may have spent its moral force," says Marcos' Labor Minister Blas Ople, "but at the same time they are more fearful of the unpredictable consequences of a Marcos exit at this time. So American policy is in a kind of stalemate."
For the time being, the U.S. will continue supporting Marcos while urging him to resuscitate the democratic institutions that fell into neglect during almost a decade of martial law. The U.S. wishes to encourage as much reform as possible while Marcos is still strong enough to hold the fractious elements of his nation in check. As the moderate opposition continues to squabble, Filipinos find themselves caught in a dilemma: the man they hold responsible for many of their woes, Ferdinand Marcos, also looks to be the only man who is in a position to help solve some of those problems.