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The military will stay quiet only if the President deals decisively with the Communist threat, which has spread to 64 of the country's 74 provinces. Few expect the present 60-day cease-fire to hold, and many hard-liners on both sides cannot wait for it to collapse. Aquino's unswerving Catholicism and her calm distaste for radical reforms make her highly unsympathetic to the Communist cause. Yet she is convinced that most of the rebels were driven to the hills not out of ideology but out of desperation, and can therefore be won back by negotiation. As the second stage of talks concluded last week, however, the guerrillas were still demanding a coalition government and the removal of U.S. bases, while the government was offering only a package of social and economic reforms, including "amnesty with honor." If the talks break down, Aquino has already warned that she will not hesitate to "take up the sword of war."
Perhaps the best weapon she could wield against the growing Communist threat would be an improved economy. As it is, her presence and her free enterprise policies have already restored a little business confidence. As capital outflow has all but halted, hard-currency reserves, down to only $200 million in February, are now back to $2 billion. Yet the economy is still in desperate shape and dependent upon outside aid, especially from the U.S. In Manila, more than one in every two people does not have a full-time job, and in the countryside, four children in every five are suffering from malnutrition. Real wages are no higher than in 1972, and the economy will have to sustain a robust 6% annual growth rate for six straight years just to get back to where it was in 1981. -
As she contemplates the enormous challenges before her, Aquino can take heart, perhaps, from her rare gift for surprise. Stalin is said to have claimed that "you can't make a revolution with silk gloves." Edward Bulwer- Lytton, the British 19th century novelist, believed that "revolutions are not made with rose water." And Oliver Wendell Holmes pronounced that "revolutions are not made by men in spectacles." In coming to power on a wing and a prayer, Aquino has already disproved them all.
Aquino has also begun to disprove the predictions of her husband, who used to say that whoever succeeded Marcos was "doomed to fail" because of the troubles the person would inherit. His wife ended up with that chaos, and burdened too with all the impossible expectations she had awakened. In addition, she enjoyed no transition period and no advance planning. To make matters worse, she has had to manage a three-party government made up of moderates, leftists and the military. "Given the mess she's inherited," says a senior Washington official, "I think she has been very successful."
Most of those who know Aquino well are even more confident that her iron will and her driving sense of duty will not allow her to give up. In a poem he gave her for her 41st birthday, Ninoy described his wife as "unruffled by trouble, undeterred by the burden, though heavy the load. Nothing is impossible . . ." His sister Lupita, whose relations with the President have sometimes been frosty, now speaks with the fervor of the converted. "I believe that she was born and raised for this role," she says. "After she spoke before the U.S. Congress, I said to myself, 'Ninoy, you can rest in peace. She is the President now."'