Forty
seven years ago former President Ferdinand Marcos declared Martial Law.
Recently
a new subject will be introduced in the University of the Philippines (UP), a
national state university will create a subject that mainly tackles the martial
law.
Senator
Imee Marcos, when asked to comment on the planned subject in UP as no plans of
questioning and as a matter of fact very enthusiastic about it and even
suggested that for it to be complete should include statements from them,
Marcos family and from other known Marcos loyalist.
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| the intercepted arms landing—a haul that included automatic rifles, ammunition, bazookas, mortars, and anti-aircraft guns from MV Karagatan (photo credit fromFrancis karem Elazegui) |
The
current history books in our public school system tells about this part of our history
from the point of view of the so-called victors – the Yellows and their allies,
which basically in favor of the Aquino family, that is why senator Imee wants
the UP subject be open to hear their side of the story.
The
article written by former Ambassador Rigoberto Tiglao in his The Manila Ties
column is a direct account from the perspective of one who was actually their
at the moment when everything happened.
For the
sake of truthfulness, clarity and understanding below if the full article of
Mr. Tiglao titled : A brief, true history of
the rise and fall of the Marcos dictatorship: An eyewitness account.
A brief, true history of the rise and
fall of the Marcos dictatorship: An eyewitness account
WHEN Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in September 1972, I was a
19-year-old Ateneo college dropout heading the Manila and Rizal organization of
the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP).
For all its fearful reputation even at that time, the party was merely a
ragtag band of hubristic fantasists who thought replicating the Chinese
revolution was a cinch. Founder Jose Sison, who saw himself as the Filipino Mao
Zedong, was then 33 years old, and the legendary Kumander Dante, 29.
The fledgling party was giddy over the revolutionary flow of the student
demonstrations in 1970, and thought it could artificially create such
revolutionary fervor again. At the same time, it thought it could provoke
internecine strife among the ruling class that would implode its rule.
Two teams of mostly converted-to-the-revolution toughies from the urban
poor slums of Tondo and Caloocan — specially recruited for the operation by
Sison and his five closest cadres — hurled three grenades at the stage of the
Liberal Party’s miting de avance in Plaza Miranda in Aug. 21
1971, injuring nearly all of the party’s Senate candidates and killing nine
people.
Sison tasked a New People’s Army (NPA) commander, a veteran Huk from
Tarlac, to delay by whatever means his sympathizer, the Liberal Party’s
superstar Benigno Aquino Jr.’s arrival at the Plaza. What he told Aquino that
made him do so, I haven’t been able to determine. Aquino, though, would have
been stupid if he had not concluded after the bombing what group was
responsible.
Demonization
Still, Aquino, and the Liberal Party, went to town blaming it on Marcos, who had become unpopular not just because of the massive student demonstrations against him, but the opposition’s unrelenting demonization of him through their powerful media outlets the The Manila Chronicle and the ABS-CBN radio-television network.
The party’s calculation at the time was that the Plaza Miranda bombing
would intensify what in Leninist jargon is called “the split within the ruling
class,” so much so that Marcos would soon declare a hated martial law — and
create a revolutionary situation chaotic enough for the communists to take over
power.
Instead, the bombing finally convinced Marcos
to impose martial law, the legality of which he had asked his then-Justice secretary
Juan Ponce Enrile to study as early as 1969. After all, there were two nations
intent on destabilizing the Republic at that time. (And of course, under the
old Constitution, he had to step down in 1973 — a nightmare for Marcos, given
that he was accused by the Liberal Party of attempting their assassination in
Plaza Miranda.)
In the South, Malaysia had already trained the first Moro National
Liberation Front commanders and had been arming that Muslim insurgency, and
sending arms and finances through our very porous borders in Sulu. China had
started to undertake its plan to arm the NPA with as many rifles as it could
use, and had even built a gun factory in Fujian to replicate the American M-14.
The factory ironically formed the nucleus of China’s world-renowned Norinco in
the 1980s that would flood the world with cheap but quality versions of US and
Western arms.
Split the ruling class
The CPP was caught flat-footed when martial law was imposed in 1972. Many of its top leaders were arrested or killed in a few months’ time. By 1977 the communist boss Jose Sison, its top military head Kumander Dante, and most of its core leadership were twiddling their thumbs in army stockades.
The expectation that the “split within the ruling class” would intensify
turned out to be monumentally wrong.
Marcos suppressed only a small faction of it that was his avowed enemy
years before, consisting mainly of the powerful Lopez, Osmeña and
Roxas-Araneta political and economic elite.
Few among the elite sympathized with the Lopezes, which owned the
Meralco monopoly, and arrogantly wielded its deadly media weapons as well its
political power (Fernando Lopez was Marcos’ vice president).
Even the big guns of the Cojuangco clan, Ramon and Eduardo, cousins of
Corazon Aquino, were among Marcos’ loyal supporters. Ramon Cojuangco even
allegedly dummied for Marcos’ controlling shares in the telephone monopoly
PLDT, which Marcos acquired when the American owners sold the firm to Filipinos
in 1967.
Much of the Philippine elite embraced and supported Marcos’
“constitutional authoritarianism,” a drastic departure from the US-imposed
system of electoral democracy that had largely failed the nation. After all,
strongman or single-party rule was the norm in Asia in the 1960s and 1970s,
which was seen as necessary to enable these countries to develop swiftly, as in
fact the so-called East Asian tiger economies did.
Economy surged
As such, Marcos’ strongman rule was not so strange, and certainly not abhorrent to the ruling elite that preferred peace and order rather than democratic rituals.
Marcos’ “Green Revolution” was based on the production of then
revolutionary high-yielding Masagana 99 rice hybrid, which led to low rice
prices — to this day the key to the acquiescence of the masses.
Most Filipinos also supported martial law for the “peace and order” it
achieved so quickly in its first years, as the economy surged from 1972 to 1980
at an average annual growth rate of 6 percent. The growth rate for 1973, the
first full year of martial law, as well as for 1976, was 9 percent, an
astounding pace never beaten to this day.
Marcos plucked from the University of the Philippines academe Finance
Secretary Cesar Virata and Budget Secretary Jaime Laya, who would lead a corps
of technocrats in the bureaucracy. They were given almost full authority and
autonomy in running the economy. Philippine business’ revered “Yoda,” Washington
SyCip, recommended to Marcos his protégé, Roberto V. Ongpin, who would be the
strongman’s very effective trade and industry head. It was during martial law that
SyCip’s brainchild, the Asian Institute of Management, established in 1968,
grew as a center for Philippine technocrats and big business executives.
Quite ironically, it was Marcos’ technocrats — whom the business
community had praised to high heavens — who were responsible for kowtowing to
the International Monetary Fund-World Bank economic policies that led to the
economy’s collapse many years later. There was, of course, cronyism but the
magnitude of this phenomenon didn’t account for the recession that broke out in
1983.
The spark of the eventual economic conflagration actually began in the
1970s, and halfway around the world from the Philippines: In the 1970s, the
Arabs took back their oil fields from the Western “imperialists” and found
themselves awash in what would be dubbed “petrodollars.”
Western bankers recycled this new money into quick and cheap loans to
Third World countries. For the first time, poor countries such as those in
Latin America and in Asia were deluged with easy loans purportedly needed to
finance their development.
But then, the Iranian Revolution broke out in 1979 and the Iran- Iraq
War in 1980. These triggered an oil crisis that pushed up interest rates
worldwide. The second global oil crisis broke out at roughly the same time and
in 1982, Mexico and several other Latin American countries defaulted on their
loans, creating the global debt crisis. US and European banks panicked, jacked
up their interest rates, which eventually led to the Philippines’ 1983 debt
default.
Global debt crisis
Aquino’s return to the Philippines in August 1983 couldn’t have been made at a worse time — and he was keenly aware of this. Interest rates were going through the roof, eating into the country’s dollar reserves so fast that the Central Bank falsified data to conceal their low levels.
The political instability in the wake of the Aquino assassination accelerated
the economy’s collapse. In October 1983, the country ran out of dollars to
service its loans and defaulted on its debts, financially isolating it from the
world. Our trade with the world would become on a cash-basis only.
The GDP collapsed by an unprecedented 7 percent in 1984, and in 1985,
the peso’s value crumbled from P9 to P20 to the dollar, and inflation surged by
a riot-in-the-streets rate of 50 percent in 1984. No president could have
survived such an economic catastrophe.
The elite suddenly became freedom-lovers, even joining street protests
to demand that Marcos step down. People power was based on a bad economy’s
propensity to convince people to overthrow their government.
The US junked its support for the strongman and undertook clandestine
moves to put Cory Aquino into power. It feared that the internecine fight
between the pro-Marcos and the anti-Marcos factions would give the communists
an opportunity to grab power.
The Americans calculated (wrongly as it would turn out) that its support
for the revolt against Marcos would create so much goodwill for it that the
Philippines would allow its military bases (deemed crucial in the Cold War with
Russia and in the wake of China’s rise) to remain in the country past the
Military Bases Agreement’s expiration in 1992.
Just like the US government, the Philippine ruling class cleverly, and
rather swiftly, abandoned its support for Marcos just as the Cojuangcos were
set to capture political power in 1986.
The narrative of the House Cojuangco and House Lopez, with the Yellow
Cult they created, is that of a Dark Lord imposing his will on a hapless
people, with a Messiah sacrificing his life to embolden Filipinos to topple
that regime in 1986.
That’s an utter fairy tale. It is an old, overused Manichean storyline
of the “Lord of the Rings” kind of movies, believed by small or lazy minds to
explain the past. But reality is always, and in all ways, more complicated.
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Report from Manila Times
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