Minister ambitious but loyal

Press, 24 February 1986, Page 6

Minister ambitious but loyal

NZPA-Reuter Manila The Philippines’ Defence Minister, Juan Ponce Enrile, has never masked his ambition to be President of the country.

But on the surface he has remained loyal to Mr Marcos as a top Cabinet Minister for all but five years of the President’s rule.

Mr Enrile rallied the then 200,000 strong Armed Forces behind Mr Marcos when the President declared martial law in September, 1972. He stayed loyal to Mr Marcos even when the President appointed General Fabian Ver as Armed Forces Chief of Staff and Mr Enrile began to lose his grip on the military chain of command.

A successful lawyer before joining the Government 16 years ago, Mr Enrile first nursed Presidential ambitions after the killing of Benigno Aquino in 1983 after reports that Mr Marcos would not run again.

Until the President announced he would stand for another term, Imelda Marcos was Mr Enrile’s main opponent for the Presidency — and the two are said to have mistrusted each other since, leading rival camps in the Cabinet.

His political stronghold has been the rugged mountains of Cagayan, in the northern Philippines. Opponents say he fought political campaigns as though he were waging a war.

But he never seemed to be in the public debate over whether General Ver should be succeeded as Chief of Staff by General Ramos.

“He is a capable lawyer, politician and

member of Parliament, and probably very loyal, but he seems to be left out of a lot of decisionmaking,” said one diplomat

Mr Enrile said last year that he considered his job to be temporary, on a day-to-day basis.

“That’s because I’ve always considered my position with the Government to be at the pleasure of the appointing power, not at my pleasure... I think my hopes of getting out (of the Government) are quite dim,” he said. In November, 1984, he said that those who talked of a military coup in the Philippines “must be reading too many James Bond stories.”

“You must have a leader to carry out a coup. You must have the preparations... and you must make an irreversible act,” he said. Mr Enrile was reported to have volunteered to help Corazon Aquino, if she became President, in dealing with communist insurgency. He also supported “Mr and Ms,” a weekly supplement to the daily opposition newspaper, the “Philippine Inquirer,” which carried full verbatim accounts of the official inquiry into the killing of Mr Aquino and of the trial that ended in the acquittal of General Ver and 25 others over the killing.

Mr Enrile was never touched by the Aquino scandal, even though all but one of the accused were servicemen. He was born on February 14, 1924. Mr Enrile is married to Cristina Castenar, an actress, and has one son and a daughter, both in their mid-twenties.