Called Power Behind Presidency : Aquino’s Brother Breeds Prize Roosters, Intrigue

TARLAC, Philippines — When Jose Cojuangco talks about his 800 prize fighting cocks, he sounds like a political kingmaker describing his taste in presidential timber.

“I like them a little smart,” Cojuangco told a recent visitor at his sprawling family hacienda here. “But not too smart. If you make him too smart, he’ll know better. He’ll know it’s a fight to the death, and he’ll probably just run away.”

Cojuangco would know. He is one of the best at both occupations--an expert breeder of some of the finest killer roosters and fastest thoroughbred racehorses in Asia and, politically, one of the most powerful, yet mysterious, men in the Philippines today.

Known almost universally here by his nickname, “Peping,” Cojuangco, 52, is the younger brother of President Corazon Cojuangco Aquino. He has largely been a man in the shadows, a quiet shaper of policy and power brokers. He ranks among the president’s closest confidants, often meeting privately with her in her inner office long after her official day has ended.

Many have called him the true power behind the presidency, especially when it continues to be a presidency in crisis.

What is clear is that Cojuangco has done more than most people in creating and shaping his elder sister’s political essence. He has also played a key role in keeping her alive--politically and physically.

It is Cojuangco who recently helped to quietly avert a military coup by privately talking to key generals and colonels.

It is Cojuangco who created the internal presidential security group of soldiers that surrounds Aquino, a powerful safety net that helped her weather the recent plot within the Philippine military to force changes in her government.

But it is also Cojuangco who made that security cordon so tight that it has been criticized for cutting the president off from the people who helped put her in office.

Cojuangco’s power base increased even more in October. He was unanimously elected chairman of Philippine Democratic Party-Laban, the political party that formed the bedrock of Aquino’s grass-roots support when she ran against Ferdinand E. Marcos in the Feb. 7 presidential election.

Consulted on Every Appointee

In the months after Aquino assumed power, as she replaced thousands of elected governors, mayors and local officials in a nationwide purge of Marcos’ political machinery, Cojuangco is said to have been consulted on virtually every new appointee.

Indeed, Cojuangco, a shrewd businessman and politician who graduated from high school at Loyola Academy in New York City and holds a degree in economics from Holy Cross College in Massachusetts, is primarily responsible for his sister’s entry into politics in the first place.

Four months before the nation’s Roman Catholic leader, Cardinal Jaime Sin, persuaded the deeply religious but publicity-shy widow of assassinated opposition leader Benigno S. Aquino Jr. to challenge Marcos at the polls, her brother had secretly formed a circle of advisers who had mapped out a comprehensive campaign strategy for her.

In becoming a force in Philippine politics, Peping Cojuangco has come under increasing criticism. And lately he has been opening up, making himself not only a more willing target but, increasingly, a vocal presidential alter ego who can often say what his sister cannot.

Noting that most of the publicity he has received since his sister took up office in the Malacanang presidential palace eight months ago is “very unfair,” Cojuangco said in a recent interview that he sees himself as something of a punching bag, whose mission is to absorb the blows that otherwise might be aimed at his still enormously popular sister.

‘So They Hit Me’

“They can’t hit at Cory,” he said of Aquino’s critics. “She is still too popular. So they hit me. I see my role fairly clearly. I’m trying to fill up all the gaps that are there.”

In recent months, Cojuangco has been accused of following in the footsteps of his cousin, Eduardo (Danding) Cojuangco, who played a similar role as a close aide to Marcos. Eduardo is now living in involuntary exile in Los Angeles, accused by Aquino’s government of using his friendship with Marcos and his government positions to amass a fortune from coconuts and casinos. He has flatly denied these charges.

Similarly, Peping Cojuangco has been accused of masterminding and reaping personal benefits from two recently opened Manila casinos. The casinos have been publicly and loudly condemned as “sinful” by Cardinal Sin; yet, they are sanctioned by the devoutly religious president.

In a recent column in the Roman Catholic Church-supported magazine Veritas headlined, “Blood Is Thicker Than Water,” Felix Bautista, the cardinal’s personal adviser, wrote: “The question that inevitably arises is, what is the extent of Peping Cojuangco’s involvement with the casinos, and what is in it for him? The obvious answer, of course, is that he is raking in some very substantial financial benefits.”

Feudal Landlords

Further, critics have resurrected Cojuangco’s past, that period before Marcos declared martial law in 1972, when not only Cojuangco but many wealthy, feudal landlords maintained extra-legal, private armies, which they used with impunity against their enemies. The Cojuangco family actually owned an armored personnel carrier.

Cojuangco has flatly denied all the charges, as he has similar accusations that he has been recruiting, training and arming a private army at the family hacienda to protect the president against any possible coup d’etat by ultrarightists in the military.

“This is part of the plan to discredit me, to get me out of the way,” Cojuangco said. Conceding that he maintains his own private intelligence network, he added: “I know I’m a target. I’ve received certain papers that really are plans to hit me and destroy me.”

Cojuangco, a former Philippine congressman, also insists that he is not enjoying in the least his new role of behind-the-scenes political power.

‘I Like a Simple Life’

“I don’t like politics,” he said. “I don’t enjoy it at all. I like to lead a simple life. I’m not extravagant. It is with nature that I really find my enjoyment.

“It is just that I am forced into it now. I’ve been forced to do a lot of things I don’t want to do. But these people will not succeed in driving me out. I feel I’m needed now, and I am as dedicated as Cory.”

It was clear during a visit to the Cojuangco family’s 16,000-acre hacienda in the province of Tarlac, two hours north of Manila, that Cojuangco finds his greatest personal peace here.

Named Hacienda Luisita, the sprawling farm has been in Aquino’s family for decades. For her critics, the estate is a target, an example that she has done nothing concrete to reform the inequitable distribution of land in her impoverished nation. Several thousand tenant farmers still live and work the family fields, and dozens more work full-time helping Cojuangco breed his fighting cocks and his race horses.

‘The Act of Creation’

For Cojuangco, though, it is here, where the rolling hills are covered with tiny rooster houses--one for each prize cock--and the crowing is deafening day and night that he finds his greatest pleasure in what he calls “the act of creation.”

Sitting around one of several cockpits at the family farm, intently watching his latest experimental breeds as they sparred, Cojuangco spent hours talking about his philosophy of cock-breeding and horse-breeding, hobbies enjoyed with equal enthusiasm by his rival cousin, Danding.

“My cousin was different,” Cojuangco said, obviously relaxed in his jeans and puffing contemplatively on a cigarette. “For him it was the fight that mattered. He bred cocks to win.

“For me, it is the act of creation. This breed can hit well, but it can’t move, it can’t fly. So, I breed it with a good flyer that can’t hit.”

Cojuangco told the story of one breed he created that showed defensive tendencies early on in training. Afraid that they might breed with the rest, he killed all the hens that had given birth to them. Then, in adulthood, the offspring went on to be winners.

Breeding Hit and Miss

“Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But for me, it’s the act of trying, the creation, that I love.”

Asked whether it hurts him personally to see his creations thrown into combat and get pecked and slashed to bits in the most popular sport in the Philippines, Cojuangco said: “It did at first. Now, I just don’t get attached to them.”

Cojuangco is also deeply involved now in building a practical rehabilitation program for Communist rebels who choose to abandon their 17-year armed insurgency and come down from the mountains.

He is creating rebel-returnee centers throughout the country and hunting for unused government land on which he can help men and women who know only how to live as guerrilla fighters create new lives for themselves as farmers. In exchange for their M-16 rifles, he said, each will get four acres of prime farmland.

Proud of Achievements

Creation is all-pervasive in Cojuangco’s life. He is proud of his family’s achievement in building one of the nation’s most profitable sugar mills at the hacienda in a region where experts said sugar would never grow.

He is defensive about charges that the hacienda--which is shared equally among Cojuangco, Aquino and their four brothers and sisters--is living proof that his sister will never agree to the land-reform demands of the nation’s progressive left.

Cojuangco argued that the thousands of farmers, who now depend upon him for seed, fertilizer and other costly materials to grow their crops, “simply would not survive” if they were each given two-acre plots and told to fend for themselves.

Still, the hacienda is a haunting reminder of a time before Philippine independence when feudalism prevailed in the nation’s countryside.

Servants abound. The living quarters consist of five modest, separate homes--one for each of the brothers and sisters--grouped in a rectangular compound that connects each to a common hall used for family gatherings. The furniture and trappings are elegant, but old, and all Filipino.

Old Money vs. New Money

“Never forget, the Cojuangcos are Old Money,” said one friend of the family who asked not to be identified by name. “Marcos and (his wife) Imelda were New Money. And Cory is a Cojuangco.”

In fact, it was just 10 months ago that a weak and ailing Marcos tried to use Hacienda Luisita as a political weapon against Aquino in the presidential campaign.

“Let us not listen to their promises,” Marcos shouted during his last campaign speech attacking Aquino and her supporters. “Look at their own backyard first. They should look at their own household first.

“Their source of wealth is from the sweat of their tenants. And now they come and talk about God and sincerity and honesty when their own tenants are suffering from poverty and abuse.”

Although Aquino dodges such criticisms now, Cojuangco and other close supporters of the president concede that there must be reforms, but that it will take time to lay the economic foundations that will make them work.

They also point out that Marcos is no one to question anyone’s source of wealth. When he fled into exile during last February’s revolution, investigators of the Aquino government say Marcos and “cronies” such as Cojuangco’s cousin stole billions of dollars through corruption.

As he watched his prize cocks, each worth more than $100, peck and claw at each other last week, Cojuangco characteristically summed it up in just a few words.

“It is all just a question of approach,” he said.

U.S. officials praised President Corazon Aquino but saw reform problems ahead. Page 14.