'Toy napigket nga daga
Pitpitenmi nga umuna
Danggayanmi't kankanta
Takkiagmi a napigsa
Kettang ken bannogmi
dikam igingina 

     Mannamili
     Ilokano Folk Song

Vincent Pollard

ABSTRACT

From the 1870s to the interrupted Philippine Revolution of 1896 and until today, the context and focus of Filipino nationalisms have been politically contested. Advocates of competing Filipino nationalisms have struggled for the moral high ground, that is, to assert the political correctness of their perspective. During June-October 1986, proceedings of the Constitutional Commission of the Philippines erupted as yet another a venue for this struggle.

Most of President Corazon Aquino’s appointed Constitutional Commissioners were self-respecting nationalists in some sense. However, a minority of commissioners—labeled the “Nationalist Bloc” in secret U.S. Embassy cablegrams and in the Manila-centric news media—set and successfully pursued an agenda for clarifying the notion of isang malayang patakarang panlabas, that is, an “independent foreign policy.”

Concerned about challenges to her legitimacy, the U.S.-friendly president hesitated to undercut future Nationalist Bloc enthusiasm to campaign for the hoped-for new Konstitusyon. (And in fact, the October 1986-February 1987 ratification campaign would partly be understood to be a proxy referendum on whether Aquino should continue as President of the Philippines.) Meanwhile, an intelligence failure led U.S. operatives to be caught off-balance by having underestimated the size of the Nationalist Bloc by half! The Americans’ failure emerges from a close reading of cablegrams they sent to Washington from the U.S. Embassy’s Political Section on Rojas Boulevard. These cablegrams were declassified in response to a Freedom-of-Information request by Pollard during his dissertation research.

Taking advantage of these opportunities, women’s organizations and anti-nuclear weapons coalitions in the Anti-Bases Movement, collaborated with Nationalist Bloc commissioners. Procedural and substantive language written into the draft Konstitusyon in 1986 gave substantive and procedural content to isang malayang patakarang panlabas. In the hands of elected Senators, these constitutional provisions ultimately prevented President Aquino and her pro-U.S. allies from having the Military Bases Agreement ratified on 16 September 1991.

Claims and inferences in this paper are documented with primary and secondary public, private and once-secret research journalistic, video, interview and scholarly sources in the Philippines and the United States.
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* Abstract of paper proposed for the Nakem "Imagination and Critical Consciousness" Centennial Conference in Ilokano Language, Culture and Politics, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, 9-12 November 2006.

** Vincent K. Pollard, Ph.D. is a student of social movements in Asia and elsewhere. As a Fulbright Scholar, he interviewed government practitioners and Filipino activists of all political colors, including former President Aquino, Alejandro Melchor, Jr., Estelito Mendoza, Teodoro “Teddy” Locsin, Jr., Roland Simbulan, Jovito Salonga, Jaime Tadeo and Satur Ocampo. That research experience was the basis of several chapters in his doctoral dissertation and also in Globalization, Democratization and Asian Leadership: Power Sharing, Foreign Policy and Society in the Philippines and Japan (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2004). Pollard has been teaching as a lecturer in the Asian Studies Program, and as an assistant professor (temporary) in the Undergraduate Honors Program, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. He is also a lecturer in the Department of Social Sciences, Kapi‘olani Community College. pollard@hawaii.edu is Pollard’s e-mail address

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