Coming Soon! “The Marcos Era: A Reader”

Edited by Leia Castañeda Anastacio and Patricio N. Abinales, this book brings into conversation historians, journalists, political scientists, pundits, lawyers and economists across generations as they engage in a collective assessment of Ferdinand E. Marcos, Sr.’s regime. Extensive as well as incisive, the essays in this unprecedented anthology appraise different facets of this seminal period’s policies, programs, and personalities and reveal a complicated legacy whose full import and impact have yet to be thoroughly unpacked.

Contributors include Filomeno V. Aguilar, Jr., Leia Castañeda Anastacio, Lisandro E. Claudio, Christianne F. Collantes, Jayeel S. Cornelio, Sheila S. Coronel, Marites Dañguilan Vitug, Teresa E. Encarnacion Tadem, Glenda M. Gloria, Caroline S. Hau, Meynardo P. Mendoza, Thomas M. McKenna, Michael D. Pante, Jan Carlo B. Punongbayan, Manuel L. Quezon III, Vicente L. Rafael, Eduardo C. Tadem, Mark R. Thompson, Criselda D. Yabes

Forthcoming from Ateneo de Manila University Press

Coming Soon: “Siting Postcoloniality: Critical Perspectives from the East Asian Sinosphere”

Editors: Pheng Cheah and Caroline S. Hau

Read Pheng Cheah’s Introduction here

The contributors to Siting Postcoloniality reevaluate the notion of the postcolonial by focusing on the Sinosphere—the region of East and Southeast Asia that has been significantly shaped by relations with China throughout history. Pointing out that the history of imperialism in China and Southeast Asia is longer and more complex than Euro-American imperialism, the contributors complicate the traditional postcolonial binaries of center/periphery, colonizer/colonized, and developed/developing. Among other topics, they examine socialist China’s attempts to break with Soviet cultural hegemony, the postcoloniality of Taiwan as it negotiates the legacy of Japanese colonial rule, Southeast Asian and South Asian diasporic experiences of colonialism, and Hong Kong’s complex colonial experiences under the British, the Japanese, and mainland China. The contributors show how postcolonial theory’s central concepts cannot adequately explain colonialism in the Sinosphere. Challenging fundamental axioms of postcolonial studies, the volume forcefully suggests that postcolonial theory needs to be rethought.

Contributors: Pheng Cheah, Dai Jinhua, Caroline S. Hau, Elaine Yee Lin Ho, Wendy Larson, Liao Ping-hui, Lin Pei-yin, Lo Kwai-Cheung, Lui Tai-lok, Pang Laikwan, Lisa Rofel, David Wang, Erebus Wong, Robert J. C. Young

Forthcoming from Duke University Press

Read Pheng Cheah’s Introduction here

Addendum: Tiglao on Torture

In his previous and May 30 columns, Rigoberto Tiglao questions the statistics on torture, in particular the “34,000” figure that is often cited in discussions of Martial Law and traceable to the Task Force Detainees (on which Richard Kessler relies in his 1989 book). Tiglao goes through the list of human rights victims registered with the Human Rights Victims Claims Board and concludes that the “majority of these were CPP cadres as well as fighters of the Moro National Liberation Front and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.”

Questioning the empirical basis of the 34,000 claim is an important part of intellectual inquiry. The more accurate statistics we can come by, the better we can understand the history of what actually went on under Martial Law.

I hope that Tiglao can deepen the discussion further by explaining his own stance on torture.

Do oppressed groups deserve a fighting chance when they challenge an authoritarian regime? In situations of asymmetric conflict involving guerrilla warfare, how can humanitarian norms of conduct be applied when combatancy is not necessarily based on the uniform worn, but rather, on a person’s participation in the conflict?

The notorious and influential American counterinsurgency manuals identify at least four categories of participants: 1) leaders and combatants; 2) political cadres and militants of a party who “assess grievances in local areas and carry out activities to satisfy them”; 3) auxiliaries or active sympathizers who “run safe houses, provide passive intelligence, give rely warnings of attacks and provide funding”; and 4) the mass base and supporting population that “often leads clandestine lives for the insurgent movement” (Michael Gross, Moral Dilemmas of Modern War 2010).

The kind of treatment accorded these participants varies according to their degree of responsibility based on participation. Lethal force may be applied to those classified under 1) unless they are captured. Political cadres and auxiliaries who are considered direct participants but do not meet the definition of full-time armed combatants should be subject to non-lethal force (i.e., either arrested or “disabled”). There’s also the difficult question of how to deal with the involvement of direct and indirect civilian participants whose activities fall short of so-called combatancy.

Real life leaves plenty of room for disregarding the advice against the use of non-lethal force. Americans conveniently preferred to outsource torture of suspected “terrorists” to other territories or countries.

Which interrogation techniques are acceptable or not acceptable? In America, law enforcement techniques like psychological pressure, deception, good cop-bad cop and isolation are deemed acceptable to the police or army. “Torture lite” aka “enhanced interrogation techniques” (blindfolding, stress positions, loud music, sleep and sensory deprivation and waterboarding) are acceptable to intelligence services only. “Extreme, brutal, and severe techniques” such as severe beating, maiming or mutilation, and sexual abuse are unacceptable for any agency (Gross 2010). Are beatings, electrocutions, etc. that do not leave physical marks acceptable then?

Applying the Law of War to “non-international” (internal) armed conflict took time but the additional Protocol II of the Geneva Conventions in 1977 laid out the minimum obligations for protection that should be binding for states and insurgents alike. In 1986, the Philippine government ratified the 1984 United Nations Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment of Punishment (UNCAT). (See UNCAT’s 2016 review of the Philippines)

It would be good if Tiglao can go further in his research by analyzing the cases of torture involved rather than just counting the affiliation of those tortured. Readers should also be aware that the debate on torture is by no means settled, as scholars differ considerably in their assessments of the meaning, justifiability, efficacy, and consequences (human and political, short and long-term) of torture. Some scholars argue that torture in any form and for any reason is unacceptable.

Response to Rigoberto Tiglao’s “Incompetence, Indolence, and Unethical Behavior of Anti-Marcos Scholars”

As one of the initiators of the Manifesto in Defense of Historical Truth and Academic Freedom, I would like to personally respond to Rigoberto Tiglao’s three-part (May 23, 25, 27, 2022) column article in the Manila Times. 

From the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

MANIFESTO

• Tiglao declares that only those who have published on Martial Law are qualified to issue a manifesto.

In joining the Manifesto initiative, I personally drew inspiration from the Russell-Einstein manifesto against nuclear war. Neither Bertrand Russell, philosopher, nor Albert Einstein, theoretical physicist, was an expert on nuclear science and nuclear-weapon development, let alone nuclear policy, foreign policy, and international relations. Their manifesto relied upon the expertise of fellow scientists who had done the research; nonetheless, they called upon all scientists to come together and take a humanitarian (in an important sense, also a political) stand against the use of nuclear weapons.   

Dictatorship and Revolution, which includes Tiglao’s essay “Consolidation of the Dictatorship”

Another source of inspiration for me personally was one Rigoberto Dikit Tiglao. I came across his early publications when I was reading up on the Marcos era for my own research. His book on the Philippine coconut industry (1981) and his essay on the consolidation of the Marcos dictatorship in Dictatorship and Revolution: Roots of People’s Power (ed. Aurora Javate-De Dios, Petronilo Daroy and Lorna Kalaw-Tirol, 1988) are classic works of Philippine political economy.  

In the “Consolidation of the Dictatorship” essay, Tiglao argued that the “debt-driven growth path” of the Marcos regime offered a period of “relative economic prosperity,” but also “led to the worst Philippine recession and contributed eventually to the regime’s downfall.” He identified the “crony groups” that controlled the sugar and coconut industries, among others. He stated that the Marcos regime campaign for international recognition was “characterized more by form rather than substance, grandstanding rather than painstaking diplomacy.” He also argued that “Together, unhampered by any democratic process of accountability and fully aware of the climate of fear and intimidation that kept the Filipino people perpetually intimidated, Marcos and the military effectively maintained 14 years of plunder and terrorism.” He also stated that “Marcos unleashed one of the bloodiest eras in Philippine history.” He talked about the US role in “propping up the infrastructure of repression.”

Tiglao rails against the Left analyses that, he claims, have brainwashed academics. The irony is that Tiglao’s best publications are precisely those that were framed by a “leftist” perspective. His study of the coconut industry drew on Marx’s notion of ground rent to demonstrate that the industry was capitalist in nature. His analysis of transnational companies and “backward”/”peripheral” capitalism derived from his critical engagement with leftwing dependency theory from Latin America (see for example his “Non-Progress in the Periphery” [1979] and the essay on land reform in Feudalism and Capitalism in the Philippines [1982]). 

Tiglao would and should have been one of the best qualified people to work on a proper history of the martial-law (ML) period and more generally the Marcos era. He was already an adult when ML was declared, he used to be an activist, he had done pioneering work on this period. I for one had long been looking forward to a major book from him about this important period in our country’s history. 

The defunct, lamented Far Eastern Economic Review, for which Tiglao used to write

Alas, all we have, after more than thirty years, is Debunked (2019), a collection of mostly column essays where, here and there, we see flashes of Tiglao’s admirable investigative-reporting skills (further honed during his stint at the Far Eastern Economic Review). Unfortunately and disappointingly, these pieces are scattershot and unsystematic.  The acuity and breadth of perspective on ample display in his earlier publications are much less evident in Debunked. (Another book, Colossal Deception: How Foreigners Control our Telecoms [2016], is a good exposé of Manuel V. Pangilinan and the Salim group. If only Tiglao can investigate the foreign partners of the Arroyos and Dutertes! Not a squawk of protest, mind you, over the “Hello, Garci?” and National Broadband Network-ZTE scandals.)

To put it bluntly, Tiglao himself is an example of the failure of the country’s intellectuals (a category that includes not only academics, but also public intellectuals) to engage in sustained systematic study and analysis of the Marcos era. 

For readers who are not based in academia, I should also explain that most academics don’t have the wherewithal to get their essay collections published by vanity presses. 

• Tiglao doesn’t think that taking a stand against the damaging disinformation peddled by the Marcos propaganda and PR machines, troll farms, and supporters constitutes an “extreme need” (unlike climate change daw).

The signatories beg to differ.

• Tiglao compares the manifesto to “the internet version of a mob”.  

Tiglao appears to have a problem with scholars and academics (and Juan dela Cruz more generally) fact-checking, preserving archival materials, defending freedom of thought, speech, and expression, and holding individuals and institutions to account when they pronounce and act upon matters that affect the intellectual life and political affairs of the country. In a less polarized society and country, these would all have been part of one’s duties as a teacher, researcher and, most important, citizen. 

So rich of Tiglao to label this Manifesto “an internet version of a mob,” coming as his complaint does from a man who evidently has no problems with the vicious attacks and falsehoods leveled by disinformation networks against Marcos rivals and critics, and who has himself liberally indulged in ad hominem attacks against the people with whom he disagrees! An example of ad hominem is his fallacious argument that since the Manifesto’s signatories are “know-nothings,” then their statement and their arguments don’t need to be considered at all.  It is Tiglao, not the Manifesto signatories, who deploys argument from authority as a way to discredit the concerns and message of the Manifesto.

Vice Ganda rules!

As a fan of Vice Ganda, I would consider it a great honor if they were to pitch in to help raise public awareness of this issue.

HISTORICAL REVISIONISM

• Tiglao lectures scholars and academics on the truism that all historiography is revisionist.

This is one of several straw-man arguments that Tiglao fashions in this article. In the “History” section of Part One, he disingenuously ignores the actual wording of the manifesto, which isn’t against revising history per se, but rather, against “all attempts at historical revisionism that distort and falsify history to suit the dynastic interests of Marcos family and their allies”. In other words, Tiglao omits the all-important subordinate clause that explains which particular type of historical revisionism is being called out by the Manifesto. A Bongbong Marcos who claims to have graduated from Oxford University and an Imee Marcos who claims to have graduated from Princeton and UP are falsifying history. An economic history of martial law that selectively highlights the early years of economic growth but glosses over the financial and economic crises that beset the country in the later years of the Marcos era distorts history. 

Here’s a balanced assessment of the Marcos era: “As the Philippine elite supported the Marcos dictatorship during this period [1973-1975], with increased profits dulling their perception that the regime had struck deep into the country’s democratic roots, the working classes of the country reeled under the impoverishment under the Marcos-type of economic development.” Source of this quote?  Rigoberto D. Tiglao, “Consolidation of the Dictatorship,” 1988. 

• “The term ‘historical revisionism’ was given a pejorative meaning in fact by the Maoists, here and in China, when they termed as “revisionist” the Soviet Communist Party, led by Nikita Krushchev, condemning starting in 1956 its former head Joseph Stalin’s atrocities and reign of terror.”

Tiglao knows very well that the term “revisionist” was already circulating as a pejorative term by the end of the 19th century. Lenin famously used it to criticize Eduard Bernstein’s “revision” of Marxism.

You know what sounds like something from the 1950s? Part 3 of Tiglao’s column, which reads as if it were copied from the dossiers of the House Un-American Activities Committee at the height of the Red Scare hysteria. Here, Tiglao seems less concerned with historical revisionism than he is with McCarthyism, with him playing the starring role of Tail Gunner Joe.

DEBATING THE LEGACIES OF EDSA AND STRONGMAN RULE

• Writes Tiglao: “…[T]hat this manifesto was signed by a sizable number of academics underlines how deep the Yellow forces’ brainwashing for four decades has been.” Tiglao assumes that anyone who criticizes the myth of the Marcosian Golden Age must be brainwashed by the Yellows, the US or the Left.  “The Yellows, on the other hand, had to portray the EDSA uprising not as a restoration of elite rule by a faction of it but as a heroic toppling of a brutal dictatorship. The US has been the champion of liberal democracy — even if flawed — since it has had the expertise in manipulating representative republics, and will not allow a history of strongman rule to show any benefit to the Philippines.”

Faulty generalization, and reinventing the (academic) wheel to boot. As a matter of fact, there has long been a scholarly consensus on the fact that the system set up after the People’s Power forces toppled the Marcos dictatorship was essentially “restorationist,” ushering in yet another variant of the elite democracy dominated by dynastic political clans at the local, provincial and national levels. 

These powerful oligarchic clans include the Arroyos and Dutertes, of whom Tiglao has been a mouthpiece and fanboy. In other words, Tiglao should take responsibility for his complicity in propping up the post-EDSA system. Bongbong Marcos isn’t likely to restore the kind of regime his father installed, for the simple reason that Bongbong Marcos is very much a creature—indeed a beneficiary–of the “EDSA system” (to use Nicole Curato’s term).  

Scholars are also in agreement that the Americans had some involvement in aiding the Reform the Armed Forces Movement (RAM) rebels. Americans have a long record of intervening in the politics of other countries to advance their own interests and agenda. For those who are interested in the US history of regime-change operations during the Cold War period, I recommend Lindsey A. O’Rourke’s Covert Regime Change.

George P. Shultz’s memoir. Shultz was Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State. His memoir contains an account of the internal policy debate during the People’s Power Revolution that ultimately resulted in Reagan’s agreeing to withdraw US support for the Marcos administration.

Until the 1980s, however, at the level of policy-making, Americans largely accommodated authoritarian rule and its politics of productivity and repression in Free Asia (“Free” here meant free of communism, not democratic). The EDSA Revolution was the first big test case that provided the opportunity for some high-ranking officials (George Shultz, Paul Wolfowitz, among them) of the US government to successfully argue for a shift in US policy in favor of democracy promotion (which had hitherto been targeted at communist states, not US-friendly states and allies).  It took time, however, after People’s Power was already under way, to get President Ronald Reagan, a friend of the Marcoses, to agree to the withdrawal of support for the Marcos regime.

Moreover, strongman rule is not the panacea that Tiglao seems to think it is. The economist Emmanuel de Dios has shown in his Discussion Paper that GDP growth per capita was higher during the period of the post-EDSA democratic government than even the so-called Golden Age (1972-1980) of authoritarian rule.

South Korea’s strongman Park Chung Hee was assassinated in 1979 by his crony and head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency. His wife Yuk Young-soo was killed in 1974 during an assassination attempt on Park.

Scholars are wary of conflating the variable successes of very different economies and political systems (Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, and South Korea) and warier still of single-handedly attributing these successes to either single-person or single-party rule. In the literature on the developmental states of Asia, the Philippines is often viewed as an outlier. This is not because the other states (South Korea, for example) were less corrupt. People like Jomo Sundaram and Yuen Yuen Ang have argued that not all corruption impedes economic growth.

In the case of the Philippines, a combination of external events, timing, domestic politics (especially opposition mounted by Benigno Aquino, Jr. and others), the elite habit of squirreling away money abroad rather than re-investing in the country (the Marcos ill-gotten wealth safely “escrowed” abroad), policy choices made by technocrats and policy recommendations by multilateral institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, rampant plunder and crony capitalism that were not channeled into productive ends, the growing disillusionment of the business community and middle-class as the age of relative prosperity gave way to economic crisis in the early 1980s, Marcos’s failing health and the looming issue of succession that triggered a power struggle involving Juan Ponce Enrile, and many other factors–all of these interacted in different ways to plunge the country into crisis.

RED-TAGGING AND HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS

• Part 3 of the column is entitled “Our 4 Red, Anti-Marcos Academes vs. 2,392 sane institutions.”

Note that the list of Manifesto signatories includes critics of the Communist Party of the Philippines and the Liberal Party.  If Tiglao can’t be bothered to accurately figure out what the signatories have researched apart from a simple tabulation of their institutional affiliations and a simple Google search of their major publications, how can we trust the rigor of this man who supposedly is able to “debunk” popular wisdom? 

Moreover, this is an example of faulty generalization that red-tags four of the country’s top educational institutions, and an egregious case of argumentum ad populum (appeal to the people), a fallacious argument that claims that something must be right because the majority of the people believe it.

• Tiglao says that according to his research, the majority of human rights victims were cadres of the CPP or fighters of the MNLF and MILF.

Is Tiglao then implying that violating their human rights is somehow understandable or justified? Nowhere is it stated in the Manifesto that there were “widespread human rights violations.” The problem with single party/single person rule is precisely the absence or weakness of institutional checks and balances that prevent such kinds of abuses.  In any case, see Article 3(1), especially (a) and (c), of the 1949 Geneva Conventions.

In Debunked, Tiglao rightly reminds us that human rights abuses continued under the Aquino regime and in terms of the scale of the killed or disappeared, were comparable to the Marcos era. Whataboutism can only go so far, though, as two wrongs don’t make a right. The average human rights violations during the Corazon Aquino regime were indeed comparable to (arguably more intensified than) those under Marcos’ rule, but Tiglao ignores the fact that the same military officials-torturers-killers were in charge of the institutions in the post-EDSA period.

Alfred McCoy’s Closer Than Brothers: Manhood at the Philippine Military Academy tracks the career of members of the Class of ’71, some of whom were involved in torture of detainees

• Concedes Tiglao: “There were, of course, horrendous human rights abuses, and I personally know some of the victims.” But then he goes on to argue: “But these occurred mostly in the first years of martial law, and done by the usual rotten apples and rogues in any military organization.”    

As late as 1981, as documented by the Amnesty International Mission to the Republic of the Philippines, “the security forces and members of authorized paramilitary groups had systematically violated the rights of prisoners, including both civilians and captured armed opponents, and that irregular paramilitary forces operating with official sanction had committed gross violations of human rights, including political killings. They found that procedures for filing complaints against members of the security forces were deficient; that procedural safeguards regulating the treatment of people in custody had been systematically ignored with apparent impunity, that the independence of the judiciary had been severely compromised and that torture, evident in 1975, was still systematically being used” (underscoring added, summarized in Philippines: Unlawful Killings by Military and Paramilitary Forces, 1988).

As for the “usual rotten apples and rogues”, they include torturers like Panfilo Lacson and Rodolfo Aguinaldo, who would go on to have prominent careers in the post-EDSA period. “Mostly” doesn’t tell us anything about the long-term human and political cost of such human rights violations. As Alfred McCoy argues in his Closer than Brothers, the military experience in torture played a role in coloring the putschist mentality of those young officers who later joined the RAM and were involved in the attempted coup d’ etat that triggered the 1986 Revolution and the coup attempts thereafter. 

MARTIAL LAW: GOOD OR BAD?

•  “Martial law wasn’t all that good, but it wasn’t all that bad.”

For a judicious assessment of martial law and the Philippine economy, see the Discussion Paper by Emmanuel De Dios et al.

Read Tiglao 1988, not Tiglao 2022. 

Courtesy of Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia

OVERSEAS FILIPINO INTELLECTUALS

• Tiglao says that 200 of the 1,000 signatories are “based abroad” and “[m]any of them have become so detached from modern Philippine reality.” He says that “scholars live and work in ivory towers, many abroad” and then goes on to state, thus: “Any society needs a stratum of scholars concerned about their nation. We really hardly have any. What we have are brainwashed students who have become academics.”

Faulty generalization (did Tiglao sleep through his Logic class at the Ateneo?). Is Tiglao suggesting that Filipino intellectuals working abroad have no concern, right to be concerned, and right to voice their concerns, about their nation?  Tiglao should get off his high horse, as he doesn’t have a lien on patriotism. 

What does Tiglao know about these scholars’ hopes and dreams, feelings about Inangbayan/the homeland, and commitment to the Philippines? Maybe Tiglao would like a taste of his own argument-from-authority fallacy if we ask him to list his peer-reviewed publications on this cohort of academics. 

Tiglao can better serve his readers if he points out the root cause of the phenomenon of labor export.  Through its New Labor Code in 1974 and bilateral labor agreement with Iran in 1975, the Philippine state under Marcos played an active role in promoting and regulating the export of Filipino labor abroad. The government had originally viewed the labor export program as a “temporary measure” to ease underemployment (National Economic and Development Authority, Philippine Development Plan, 1978-1982).  But as the political and financial crises (triggered by the global debt crisis and the assassination of Benigno Aquino, Jr.) worsened in the early 1980s, the Central Bank turned to labor export as a stop-gap measure, tapping the remittances of Filipino workers to improve the balance-of-payments position. The globalization of Filipino labor and diaspora (as distinct from the earlier periods of migration mainly to the US) is a consequence of this development which had its roots in the Marcos era.

Tiglao might also do well to recall that his former boss Gloria Macapagal Arroyo elaborated on Corazon Aquino’s bagong-bayani discourse by calling migrant workers the country’s “greatest export” and hailing them as “investors, proprietors, stakeholders and philanthropists”. Some scholars even argue that the Arroyo government’s banner vision of a Strong Republic—a slogan that Tiglao helped formulate–is connected with the policy of labor-out-migration (see Oscar Tantoco Serquiña, Jr.’s article). Tiglao prefers to cherry-pick his targets (Yellows, Reds, Stars and Stripes) while remaining silent about GMA’s role in the long-term transformation of the Philippine state into a labor-brokerage state (to use Robin Magalit Rodriguez’s term). 

IN DEFENSE OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM

• “This new administration should undertake two approaches for dismantling our institutions of higher learning from becoming recruiters for the NPA and churning out Leftist media workers disseminating irrational anti-Marcosism.”

Tiglao’s best work was published by institutions like the Third World Studies Center and journals like the Diliman Review that people like Francisco Nemenzo, Jr. and Randy David helped nurture at the UP. In short, Tiglao was at his most productive as an intellectual working within the space of academic freedom that academics whom he would now not hesitate to tag as “Communist,” “leftwing,” and “liberal” had bravely tried to protect.  That he should call for “dismantling” (purging of “Red infection”) the very institutions that made his early work possible–the work on which his reputation as an intellectual rests–saddens me deeply.

Courtesy of Jason Gutierrez of BenarNews

Tiglao downplays his early thinking and activist past by chalking them up to youthful passion and limited knowledge. Well, then, I hope Tiglao will take some time away from his column-crunching to work on a “real history” of martial law. I await a more systematic account from him of what new material he has discovered to make him reassess what he had written before, as it seems pretty clear that the historical revisionism he wants to justify is his own.

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A Marcos-Era Glossary: A-C, D-K, L-P, Q-Z, Bibliography

A Glossary of the Marcos Era (1965-1986) of the Philippines (Q-Z)

Quintero, Eduardo T.  Delegate to the 1971 Constitutional Convention, representing the first district of the province of Leyte, Quintero—then seventy years old, one of the oldest delegates, a former ambassador to Japan—dropped a bomba before fellow Convention delegates on May 19, 1972, alleging that he had received envelopes containing some 11,000 pesos from Imelda Marcos for his vote. Quintero was accused of perjury and graft and corruption, his house raided by the National Bureau of Investigation (Bantayog.org 2016).  He died in penury in San Francisco, California in 1984.

Rolex 12   Also known as the “Twelve Apostles.” Collective moniker for twelve powerful advisers who “occupied the operational positions critical for seizing and maintaining power under martial law” (Greitens 2006, 128).  Supposedly rewarded for their loyalty by Ferdinand Marcos with gifts of Rolex (some say Omega) watches, they are: Juan Ponce Enrile (Secretary of National Defense), Romeo Espino (Armed Forces of the Philippines [AFP] Chief of Staff), Rafael Zagala (Chief, Philippine Army), Fidel Ramos (Chief, Philippine Constabulary), Jose Rancudo (Chief, Philippine Air Force), Hilario Ruiz (Chief, Philippine Navy), Fabian Ver (Head, Presidential Security Group), Ignacio Paz (Chief, Intelligence Services of the AFP Joint General Staff, Tomas Diaz (Commander, First PC Zone and Vice-Chief, Philippine Constabulary [PC]), Alfredo Montoya (Commander, PC-Metropolitan Command), Romeo Gatan (Provincial PC Commander, Special Projects Officer), Eduardo Cojuangco (“recalled to active duty in the Armed Forces for Special Projects”).  Five of them (Espino, Zagala, Rancudo, Ruiz and Ver) were Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) graduates; two (Ramos and Ver) were Marcos cousins, plus one other Ilocano (Diaz) (ibid., 130).  Two (Cojuangco and Espino) were Marcos buddies.  Six of them (Ver, Enrile, Gatan, Montoya, Cojuangco, and Diaz) were part of the “Magic Seven” group (also known as the Inner Seven, with Marcos as the seventh member) with whom Marcos had discussed plans for declaring martial law in July 1972 (ibid., 129; see Oplan Sagittarius).

Salvage  (from the French salvage, derived from salver, “to save”; also from the Tagalog salbahe, derived from the Spanish salvaje, “wild” or “savage” [McCoy 2006, 244])  A Marcos-era term for extra-judicial killing, “salvaging” often takes place in secret (for example, in “safehouses”—also called “production rooms”—that are not “safe” for the victims, but rather, “safe” for the perpetrators, who are shielded from public scrutiny, oversight, or accountability), but may follow interrogation and entail the dumping of corpses bearing signs of torture along roads or other public places.  Task Force Detainees of the Philippines documented 2,255 cases of extra-judicial killings between 1973 and 1985 and 334 disappearances from 1977 to 1983 (Schirmer and Shalom 1988, 319). Other estimates put the total number of people killed at 3,257, of which 2,520 (77%) were salvaged (Kessler 1989, 137).  Canadian author Margaret Atwood adopted this Filipino term in her feminist novel, The Handmaid’s Tale (1986, Chapter 14), set in a dystopian present and future where selected women are conscripted to serve as incubating machines for the ruling class of Commanders in charge of the totalitarian, fundamentalist-religious, patriarchal government of the Republic of Gilead.  There is a scene in the novel in which the women attend a district-level “Salvaging, for women only.” In this ritual of state-endorsed and -engineered public lynching, a clutch of women participates in beating to death and tearing apart with their own hands a male Guardian who may have been a member of the resistance movement but who is accused by the state, without due process, of having committed rape. See also Torture

Seven (number 7)   Ferdinand Marcos’ lucky number.  At the second balloting of the 1964 National Convention of the Nacionalista Party, Marcos secured 777 votes, beating Emmanuel Pelaez to become the party’s standard bearer at the 1965 presidential election.  The hull number of the presidential yacht, renamed RPS The President and later BRP Ang Pangulo during Marcos’ tenure, was TP-777 (Bueza 2017). Malacañang Palace was renovated to include a resin window above the main stairs featuring 7 lunettes (Quezon, Alcazaren, Barns, and Tysmans 2005, 105, 279).  Imelda Marcos’ Cadillac limousine bore an IRM-777 license plate (Torregrosa 1992, 92, 94), one of many vehicles.   A 777 Corporation was among the many companies (including Sadlemi, or “Imelda” spelled backwards) set up by the Marcos family and/or run by their cronies to launder the Marcos’ ill-gotten wealth (Gerth 1986). Marcos was known to schedule important events on dates that either included the number seven or were divisible by seven.   Proclamation 1081 declaring martial law was either postdated or backdated to September 21, 1972 (and publicly announced at 7:15 p.m. on September 23), more than three months before Marcos was to begin his seventh year in office as president, and lifted on January 17, 1981.   Cabinet Bill no. 7 proposing the “snap election,” originally scheduled on January 17, 1986 but moved to February 7, proposed a campaign period of fifty-seven days.  Asked about the preponderance of number 7s, Political Affairs Minister Leonardo Perez admitted: “We are superstitious” (Russell 2005).  On September 7, 1993, nearly four years after his death on September 28, 1989 and seven years after he began his exile in Hawai’i in the wake of the People’s Power Revolution, Marcos’ remains were flown back to the Philippines for burial.  Coincidentally, the Plaza Miranda Bombing occurred on August 21, 1971; Benigno Aquino, Jr. was jailed for more than seven years and seven months before Imelda Marcos arranged for him to go into exile in the United States on May 8, 1980; and Ninoy Aquino was assassinated on August 21, 1983 (see also the “Magic Seven” in Rolex 12).  The Marcoses’ good friends Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s schedules were similarly guided by Nancy’s personal astrologer.  For example, the astrologer stated that January was a “bad month” for the president to deliver the State of the Union Address (Regan 1988, 70) and that the president should not deliver his speech on the findings of the Iran–Contra report and hold a press conference on March 9, 1987, suggesting instead that March 4 and 5 (the dates of the Reagans’ wedding anniversary) were “good” (ibid., 367). Reagan delivered his speech on March 5.   See United States, Presidents of

Sex tour   Travel package arranged by foreign travel agents and Filipino tour operators for foreign (predominantly male) visitors to the Philippines (the following discussion is indebted to Neumann 1984, excerpted in Schirmer and Shalom 1987, 182-87). The sex tour involves a “night-life tour” of Manila and includes the cost of spending a night with a prostitute.  In the early 1980s, some 150,000 Filipino women worked in the tourism-related sex industry, receiving as little as US$5 out of the total charges of $60 dollars, the rest of the money being divided up among club owners, tour guides, tour operators, and police.  Hotels also collected US$10-dollar “joiner’s fees” for allowing women to spend the night in their guests’ hotel rooms (ibid., 182).  In 1981, sixty-six percent of foreign visitors to the Philippines were male; twenty percent were from Japan, and out of 200,000 Japanese visitors, eighty percent were male (ibid., 1983).  Sex-trafficking extended also to men and children, with as many as 5,000 children involved (ibid., 186).  Coordinated protests mounted by women’s groups from the Philippines, Japan, and other countries during and after Japanese prime minister Suzuki Zenko’s visit to Manila in 1981 spurred Japanese authorities to curtail sex tourism from Japan (ibid., 184-86). The region-wide coordinating body for the women’s movement against prostitution tourism, Third World Movement Against the Exploitation of Women, was founded on December 10, 1980 and is headquartered in Manila.  

Shoes   Some 1,220 pairs of women’s shoes—along with jewels, designer gowns and bags, and gold coins—were left behind in Malacañang Palace after the Marcoses fled the country on the night of February 25, 1986 at the climax of the People’s Power Revolution (Philippine Star 2005).  Often referred to by global popular media as “3,000 shoes” (also, mistakenly, as “3,000 pairs of shoes”), Imelda Marcos’ shoe collection became a symbol of her and the Marcos family’s ostentatious extravagance and ill-gotten wealth.  The Marcoses and their relatives and cronies were estimated to have pilfered between US$ 5 to 10 billion during the Marcos era, using part of the money to purchase costly paintings, jewelry, and real-estate and fund Imelda’s shopping sprees, parties, and lavish trips abroad, while stashing the rest in Swiss and other international bank accounts. As of 2017, the Presidential Commission on Good Government had recovered about 171 billion pesos of the Marcos family’s ill-gotten wealth (Bajo 2018).

Softdrink beauties   Umbrella term coined by manager Rey dela Cruz for “bold stars” Coca Nicolas, Pepsi Paloma, and Sarsi Emmanuelle, who starred in bomba/bold films like Celso Ad. Castillo’s Brown Emmanuelle (1981), Virgin People (1984), and Snake Sisters (1985), Boots Plata’s Naked Island (1984), Peque Gallaga’s Virgin Forest (1984), Efren C. Piñon’s Bomba Queen (1985), and Tikoy Aguiluz’s Boatman (1985).  Emmanuelle garnered critical acclaim and a Gawad Urian Awards Best Actress nomination for her role in Boatman.  Paloma accused comedians Vic Sotto (member of VST&Co., see Manila Sound), Joey de Leon, and Ricardo “Richie D’ Horsie” Reyes—stars of the popular sitcom Iskul Bukul (1978-1988) and T.V. variety show “Eat Bulaga!” (premiered 1979)—of rape; the three men publicly apologized on TV and in print in 1982.  Paloma committed suicide on May 31, 1985. Other bold stars adopted stage names based on streets (Aurora Boulevard, Brandy Ayala, Epifania delos Santos) and elite surnames (Brandy Ayala, Claudia Zobel, Lampel Cojuangco). 

Sugar   The sugar industry had been largely dependent on privileged access to a protected U.S. market during the American colonial and post-independence period, an arrangement that benefited a small clique of planters (such as the Lopez family) whose wealth translated into political power (Dohner and Intal 1989, 461; McCoy 2009b).  In the early 1960s, devaluation and import decontrol, along with the suspension and reassignment to other countries of Cuba’s sugar quota following the Cuban Revolution, largely favored the export sector, leading to an expansion of land acreage planted with sugar and the operation of sugar mills (ibid., 461-62).  Following the 1970 devaluation of the peso, in an effort to stabilize sugar prices and prevent hoarding, the Philippine government took control of sugar trading (ibid., 462). The Philippine National Bank, which financed the industry, was responsible for purchasing the sugar crop, while its subsidiary, the Philippine Exchange Company (PHILEX) was in charge of exporting the crop. Although the expiration of the Laurel-Langley Agreement and its sugar quota arrangements in 1974 exposed the sugar industry to the volatility of the world market, the American decision to reinstate the sugar quota in 1981 shielded the industry for a time from slumping sugar prices.  Sugar prices, which had experienced major spikes in 1974 (owing to the commodities boom triggered by the 1973 oil crisis) and in 1980 (owing to the energy crisis triggered by the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the decline in global production of sugar), fell in 1982. The National Sugar Trading Corporation, of which Marcos crony Roberto Benedicto served as president, had taken over from PHILEX in 1977 and was able to secure contracts to deliver half of the Philippine sugar exports at 23.5 cents a pound between 1981 and 1984, at precisely the time when sugar prices were already falling (to as low as 5 cents a pound in 1982 and 1984).  The shrinkage of the U.S. sugar quota and expiration of NASUTRA’s favorable long-term contracts in 1984, however, coupled with the continuing decline in the world price of sugar, meant that NASUTRA was unable to maintain the domestic support price for sugar (at 14-15 cents per pound, well above the world price) and pay the producers for the 1985 crop year (ibid., 465).  The collapse of the sugar industry caused widescale famine and malnutrition: nearly three-quarters of the population of the Western Visayas were living below the poverty line in 1986 (Riedinger 1993, 191).  See Oligarchy

Tadhana: History of the Filipino People   Ambitious history-writing project bearing Ferdinand Marcos’ byline, ghostwritten by a group of noted scholars (mainly from the University of the Philippines, the leading members of the group of editors and authors included Serafin Quiason, Samuel Tan, Zeus Salazar, Rodolfo Paras-Perez, Benjamin S. Austria, Alex Hufana, and Cesar Hidalgo), and projected to run to nineteen volumes, Tadhana: History of the Filipino People purported to “show the evolution of the Filipino people from a glorious beginning in precolonial times, moving towards progress but passing through a period of colonial trial and travail, before finally achieving a triumphal blend of the old culture and new civilization” (Tan 1993, 86; Marcos 1976b; see the account in Curaming 2020, chapters 2 and 3) under the New Society (see Kilusang Bagong Lipunan).  The project offered a new periodization of Philippine history by stressing the important role of pre-history in creating a common base indigenous culture that linked Filipinos to each other and to the larger Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian world, even as its account of the Philippine Revolution tended to stress the “convergence of all the classes in Philippine society” while glossing over class, regional, and factional differences, contradictions, and conflicts  (Curaming 2020, 73, 84).  Four volumes (Vol. 1, pt. 1 “Archipelagic Genesis,” 1980; Vol. 2, pt. 1 “Encounter,” 1976;  Vol. 2, pt. 2 “Reaction,” 1978;  Vol. 2, pt. 3 “Transition,” 1979) were published by 1980.  The first volume of a two-volume abridged version was published in 1982; the second volume was completed before 1986 but not published. 

Tasaday     The existence of the a “food-gathering and stone tool using” Manobo group of “forest people” in South Cotabato, Mindanao, was first publicized in 1971 by Manuel Elizalde, Jr., head of the Presidential Assistant on National Minorities (PANAMIN) through a data paper (Elizalde 1971) published under his name by the Smithsonian Institution Center for Short-Lived Phenomena.  The group consisted of only twenty-six men, women, and children (the following discussion is indebted to Hyndman and Duhaylungsod 1990, 41).  Elizalde’s main informant was a Manobo man named Dafal who had supposedly encountered the Tasaday in 1967 while on a hunting trip and introduced them to the use of metal implements and hunting techniques (ibid.). The Tasaday became an international sensation and were featured in newspaper articles and documentaries, including a National Geographic cover story and documentary in 1972.  Elizalde played up his status as the “white” god of the “gentle [Stone Age] Tasaday” (Nance 1975), the Momo Dakal Diwita Tasaday whose coming was supposedly foretold in their lore (ibid., 42).  University of the Philippines professor Zeus Salazar (1971, 1972) questioned the claim that the group had “originally” lived in “effective isolation”, citing Tasaday vocabulary (“grain”, “grind” [Salazar 1972, 105]) that indicated knowledge of farming or borrowing and (in the case of “diwata” [ibid., 99]) contact with neighboring tribes.   Proclamation no. 995 (Official Gazette 1972e) reserved 19,000 hectares of public-domain land in the municipalities of Surallah and Kiamba for a PANAMIN-administered Tasaday protected zone, followed two years later by a Presidential Decree no. 407 creating a 130,000-hectare T’Boli municipality (Official Gazette 1974).  Critics charged the PANAMIN office and Elizalde (who by 1979 had mining claims in the municipality and mining operations in Bukidnon) with exploiting the laws to gain control over the land and resources of the area (Hyndman and Duhaylongsod 1990, 43).  A South Cotabato Commission for National Integration inspector reported that the Tasaday were Manobo whose ancestral home was Kulaman. Most residents of South Cotabato did not believe in the authenticity of the Tasaday (ibid.). When Elizalde fled the country in 1983, PANAMIN staff reported that he had stolen between US$35-45 million and had “attempted to take twenty-five indigenous young women with him” (ibid., 45).  Swiss journalist Oswald Iten visited the Tasaday in 1986 and found them wearing T-shirts and using metal knives and wooden beds (Bower 1990).  A member of the Tasaday later said that the group had been forced to “sit in the caves almost naked” (quoted in ibid., 46).  The Tasaday had always had contact with the T’Boli and Manobo communities, and were allegedly paid by Elizalde to pose as cave dwellers and armed to ward off outsiders and participate in counter-insurgency programs (ibid., 48).  On October 14, 1987, the House of Representatives began an inquiry into the issue of the manipulation of the Tasaday. Jerome Bailen, chair of the U.P. Department of Anthropology, testified that the issue was not just “a matter of proving the group’s authenticity as a separate ethnolinguistic group. What is more vital is to establish if public funds were used to project an image of a ‘benevolent’ dictatorship protecting the interests of ‘gentle primitives’” (quoted in ibid., 50).  Two T’Boli recanted their earlier statements, claiming instead that they had been promised money and land and timber concessions and forced at gunpoint to say that the Tasaday were a hoax (ibid., 51).  While academic conferences organized by U.P. in 1976 and by the American Anthropological Association in 1988 concluded that the Tasaday were T’Boli and Manobo but not a living paleolithic people, the congressional committee’s 1988 report confirmed the authenticity of the Tasaday (ibid., 52).  In 1988, a group of Tasaday, with the aid of Elizalde, filed and won a lawsuit against the two U.P. scholars for claiming the Tasaday were a hoax. Corazon Aquino confirmed the congressional committee’s report that they were a “legitimate Stone Age tribe” (Deseret News 1988).  “Tasaday consciousness” was more likely created (Hyndman and Duhaylungsod 1990, 38) rather than “discovered”.  

Theology of struggle  Term coined by Edicio dela Torre as a refinement of the concept of liberation theology. Liberation theology had been formulated by the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez as a means by which “theology should strive to reflect on and speak to the context of the poor and the marginalized” (Humphrey 2011, 4). Liberation theology influenced many progressive Filipino priests and lay people, sparking the Base Ecclesial Communities (also known as Basic Christian Communities, first introduced in Brazil) movement in the 1960s and forming one base of opposition against the Marcos dictatorship. The BEC movement sought to bridge faith and community by affirming and amplifying the Church’s commitment to securing justice, a commitment that entailed the immersion of faith-based workers in villages or small communities and “the defense of human rights, and the liberation of its peoples in the perspective of evangelization” (Segundo Galilea and Mary Rose Battung, cited in Asedillo 2021, 68-69). Dela Torre further distinguished the theology of struggle from liberation theology by highlighting the importance of thinking through the process (“on the way”), rather than just the ultimate goal, of struggle by which liberation theology could be achieved (ibid., 69).

Thrilla in Manila   The third and final heavyweight-championship bout, promoted by boxing impresario Don King, between two undefeated legends, Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, was held at the Araneta Coliseum on the morning of October 1, 1975.  Frazier had beaten Ali in the “Fight of the Century” in Madison Square Garden, New York City, U.S.A., on March 8, 1971. That match had political overtones as Ali’s statements against the Vietnam War and refusal of army induction (“I ain’t got nothing against them Vietcong”) made him an anti-establishment symbol (George 2011). Frazier was taken up by pro-establishment conservatives, even though Frazier had vocally and financially supported Ali when the conscientious objector was stripped of his title and barred from boxing for three years (Ozanian 2016; Burnton 2011).  Ali beat Frazier in their “Super Fight II”, also held at the Madison Square Garden, New York City, on January 28, 1974.  With a guaranteed US$ 4.5-million purse for Ali and $2 million for Frazier (Ozanian 2016), “Thrilla in Manila” was “the most brutal confrontation of their five-year rivalry” (Anderson 2016), compounded by Ali’s pre-bout trash-talking, during which he rapped “It’ll be a killa and a thrilla and a chilla when I get the Gorilla in Manila” (Boxing Hall of Fame Las Vegas 2018).  On a five-point scoring system, Ali won the match, 66-60 (referee Carlos Padilla, Jr.), 67-62 (judge Alfredo Quiazon), 66-62 (judge Larry Nadayag).  On a rounds basis, Ali was ahead 8-3, with three even (Quiazon) and 8-4-2 (Padilla and Nadayag) (Anderson 2016). Trainer Eddie Futch stopped the match before the fifteenth round because an exhausted Frazier could no longer see out of his right eye (ibid.).  Ali won by a technical knock-out.  Ali later said that “We went to Manila as champions, Joe and me, and we came back as old men,” and apologized for insulting Frazier (Burnton 2011).  Sportscaster Ronnie Nathanielz, the government-appointed liaison officer for the event, commented on the publicity value of the match for the Martial-Law regime: “It was a big deal for the Philippines, especially for Marcos, who had said ‘we’re doing this fight because we want to show the whole world there is law and order, the people are happy’” (quoted in McKirdy 2013). See Miss Universe Pageant

Toning   Alternative healing method performed live over DZBB radio by popular host Johnny Midnight (Hegina 2014).  Bacolod-born John William Xerez Burgos Joseph, Jr. had worked for ABS-CBN’s “Radyo Patrol” in the 1960s. For his fund-raising efforts on behalf of the victims of the August 2, 1968, 7.3-magnitude Casiguran earthquake that saw the collapse of the six-storey Ruby Tower in Binondo and the loss of 270 lives, Johnny Midnight received the Presidential Humanitarian Award of the First Order.  When martial law was declared, he lost his job at ABS-CBN and worked as dishwasher, waiter, and later manager, of Alba restaurant in Makati.  He returned to the airwaves in November 1980 with “Midnight Connection,” a program that ran from midnight to 5 A.M. Mondays through Saturdays and was responsible for introducing the “pyramiding” techniques of meditation and self-healing through “toning.” At exactly twelve midnight, Johnny Midnight would recite Arabic-sounding incantations for fifteen minutes. Listeners were encouraged beforehand to do breathing and stretching exercises; wear loose clothes; eschew metallic ornaments; purge negative emotions; and visualize health, wealth, and happiness. They would then drink a glass of water that had been “energized” by the incantations and turned into “toning water” with healing powers. Adopting “Bulaklak” (lyrics by George Canseco) as his theme song, Midnight released a “Toning” album (Dyna Records, 1981) where he explained that toning is the “art of tuning in to the harmonious vibrations ng kalawakan ng universe” as a way of connecting, through “genetic recall,” to one’s “divine self” (Midnight 1981).  On September 28, 1981, Midnight organized the “First Connector’s Live Toning Session” at the Araneta Coliseum, an event attended by an estimated 30,000 people (Marquez 1981). The toning phenomenon inspired Mike Relon Makiling’s paranormal-mystery spoof “Mag-Toning Muna Tayo” (1981), starring comedians Tito Sotto, Vic Sotto, and Joey de Leon (see Manila Sound and Softdrink Beauties). Following protests by the Catholic Church and Born-Again groups, “Midnight Connection” was taken off the air.  Midnight went on to establish the “Temple of Man.”  A shooting incident involving a patient resulted in his wounding in 2005 (Hegina 2014).

Torture   Some 35,000 Filipinos were allegedly tortured during the Marcos regime (Kessler 1989, 137).  Scholars debate whether the torturers may have been trained by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and were conversant with the techniques laid out in CIA interrogation manuals (McCoy 2006, 77; McCoy 1999, 190).  The rise in torture cases dates back to the imposition of martial law (McCoy 1999, 207). Some of the torturers drew from their own experience of hazing as cadets in the Philippine Military Academy and waging brutal campaigns against Muslim insurgents in Mindanao (ibid., 203); an Armed Forces of the Philippines officer charged with torture argued thus: “But, sir, I did no more to this NPA [New People’s Army] suspect than had been done to me as a plebe” (quoted in ibid., 202).  Including rape, sexual molestation, mutilation, binding, beating, freezing, burning, and psychological torture, torture techniques were coded in doublespeak.  Torture involving the use of water was called a “NAWASA [National Waterworks and Sewerage System Authority] session” while those applying electrical shocks were called the “MERALCO [Manila Electric Company] treatment” (ibid., 81).  A person subject to “water cure” had water poured onto the cloth covering his or her mouth and nose to simulate the sensation of drowning.  A “wet submarine” meant the victim’s head would be submerged into a bowl of excrement, a “dry” one meant suffocation using a plastic bag over the head.  Clapping the ears simultaneously to produce a ringing sound was called a “telephone” (Schirmer and Shalom 1987, 319). Notorious torturers—a number of whom would become members of the Reform the Armed Forces Movement—included Rolando Abadilla, Robert Ortega, and Panfilo Lacson of the Metrocom Intelligence and Security Group and Rodolfo Aguinaldo, Billy Bibit, and Vic Batac of the Fifth Constabulary Security Unit (McCoy 1999, 135, 206, 211-17).  See People’s Power Revolution and Assassinations and massacres

Tuta   Filipino word for “puppy,” translation of the Chinese “running dog” (zougou, 走狗).  “Running dog”—meaning hunting dog—appears in the Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji, 史記, completed c. 94 BCE) by Han-Dynasty official Sima Qian (司馬遷, c. 145- c. 86 BCE), Chapter 41, “Genealogies” section 24, “The House of King Goujian of Yue”: “When the birds are gone, the bows will be put away; when the hares are dead, the hounds will be stewed and eaten” (Fei niao jin, liang gong cang; jiao tu si, zougou peng, 蜚鳥盡，良弓藏；狡兔死，走狗烹), i.e., people who outlive their usefulness will be kicked out or killed.  The term occurs in several of Mao Tse-tung’s speeches and writings, notably “Revolutionary Forces of the World Unite, Fight Against Imperialist Aggression!” (November 1948): “If there is to be revolution, there must be a revolutionary party. Without a revolutionary party, without a party built on the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory and in the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary style, it is impossible to lead the working class and the broad masses of the people in defeating imperialism and its running dogs.”  This passage commemorating the thirty-first anniversary of the October 1917 Russian Revolution was reprinted in The Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung (Mao 1948, vol. 4) and included in the Little Red Book of Quotations from Mao Tse-tung (Mao 1966).  The Little Red Book circulated in intellectual, literary, and activist circles in the Philippines and other countries. Events in China, particularly the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), attracted the interest of Filipino student-activists, several of whom visited China in the mid-1960s. Jose Maria Sison brought back four volumes of Mao’s Selected Works and arranged for their Tagalog translation (Jones 1989, 24).  Among the most memorable activist slogans was “Marcos Hitler Diktador Tuta,” plastered by demonstrators on bulletin boards and building walls in the University of the Philippines-Diliman campus (notably the Student Center, Wenceslao Q. Vinzons Hall).  Under martial law, poet, journalist, and union-organizer Jose Maria “Pete” Flores Lacaba, then a fugitive, published the poem “Prometheus Unbound” under the pseudonym Ruben Cuevas in the July 14, 1973 issue of FOCUS Magazine.  Inspired by similar literary stratagems in Tagalog poetry (Lacaba, quoted in Melendez 2018), and paying homage to Greek tragedian Aeschylus and British Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s classic works about “a god who dared to resist” (Lacaba 2008), “Prometheus Unbound” is an acrostic poem, the first letter of each line of which spells out “Marcos Hitler Diktador Tuta.” 

United States, Presidents of the   [1] U.S. President Lyndon Johnson arrived in Manila on October 23, 1966 (and stayed in the hotel suite recently occupied by the Beatles) to attend the seven-nation Manila Summit Conference on October 24 to discuss the conflict in Vietnam. Attendees included Park Chung Hee of Korea, Harold Holt of Australia, Keith Holyoake of New Zealand, Thanom Kittikachorn of Thailand, Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, Premier Nguyen Cao Ky and Chief of State Nguyen Van Thieu of the Republic of Vietnam (Berman 1979, 17). The leaders signed a joint communiqué stating their “determination that the freedom of South Vietnam be secured” (Manila Summit Conference 1966, 1) and demanding that the leaders of North Vietnam “abandon their aggression” (ibid., 2).  The communiqué also stated that the allies would withdraw their troops within six months if Hanoi withdrew its troops to the north.  Johnson’s “Manila formula,” which was supposed to enable the U.S. to disengage from Vietnam, ended up committing the U.S. to an open-ended war (Johns 2020, 64).  Ferdinand Marcos sent army troops and civilian workers to Vietnam—charging an average of US$26,000 for each of the 2,200 noncombatant troops of the Philippine Civic Action Group (the Filipino casualties include five soldiers killed by Viet Cong action, a dozen suicides and others by booby traps [Almonte and Vitug 2015, 62])—as part of Lyndon Johnson’s Many Flags Program, initiated in 1965 to support South Vietnam (Schaller 1997, 200).  [2]  In his visit to Manila on July 26, 1969, Richard Nixon announced his intention to “initiate a new era in Philippine-American relations, not returning to the old special relationship, because the winds of change have swept away those factors, but building a new relationship, a new relationship which will be based on mutual trust, on mutual respect, on mutual confidence, on mutual cooperation” (Official Gazette 1969). This recalibration of the Philippines-U.S. relations away from the rhetoric of “special relationship” to one of “mutual” trust, respect, confidence and cooperation (without special preferences) was intended to deal with the rising tide of Filipino nationalism (Kissinger 1969, 407).  Aside from anti-American demonstrations and protests against Philippine participation in the Vietnam War, killings by U.S. servicemen of Filipinos (an estimated 36 to 40 cases in the period 1947-1969 [cited in Enrile 2012, 263]), including the killing of a farmer, Glicerio Amor, by American naval petty officer Michael D. Moomey on June 10, 1969, inflamed public opinion against the military bases.  The presidents discussed the broadening of the Philippines’ economic relationships beyond America, the review of the military bases agreement, and U.S. material help to deal with internal subversion in the Philippines. [3] Gerald Ford visited Manila on December 6-7, 1975 to discuss the status of the American military bases in the Philippines in the wake of American withdrawal from Vietnam. The December 7 joint communiqué stated that “negotiations on the subject of United States use of the Philippine military bases should be conducted in the clear recognition of Philippine sovereignty” (Joint Communiqué of President Marcos and President Ford 1975, 866-67).  The Philippine flag would be flown singly at the bases, and, to lessen contact between Filipino civilians and American servicemen on official duty involving security (which had led to incidents of shootings), the Philippine government would be responsible for perimeter security (ibid., 884).  [4] The Jimmy Carter administration endorsed the April 1978 Batasang Pambansa elections, even as Vice-President Walter Mondale met with members of the anti-Marcos opposition and discussed with Marcos the Carter administration’s concerns over human rights abuses (Steinmetz 1994, 169).  [5] A good friend of the Marcoses, Ronald Reagan was convinced that the only alternative to Marcos was communism, and publicly stated so. U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz persuaded the president to distance himself from that original remark (Bonner 1987, 361, 368).  On February 11, 1986, publicly commenting on fraud committed during the February 7 snap election, Reagan declared that “both sides” (Marcos and Aquino) could have committed fraud and violence. On February 15, Reagan finally pinned the blame for electoral fraud and violence on Marcos, but said nothing about the action America would take in response to the situation (New York Times 1986).  Shultz had to persuade Reagan to issue a February 15 statement acknowledging this time that the widespread fraud and violence was largely perpetrated by Marcos and his supporters (Solomon 2007, 38).  Shultz, who had been photographed kissing Imelda Marcos on the lips during his 1983 visit to the Philippines and who would boast (1993, 623), after the People’s Power Revolution, that “the President and I were given credit for [applying] critical pressure on a dictator,” was a late convert to the cause.  Noting Reagan’s “instinctive loyalty” to Marcos (ibid., 615) and the fact that Reagan wanted “Marcos to change, not leave”, Shultz felt that “[w]e have to wait for events to happen; we cannot move the president under present circumstances. The Filipino people will have to throw Marcos out. Ronald Reagan will not push out a friend” (ibid., 629).  Foremost in the minds of the high officials in Reagan’s administration was the bad experience that the U.S. had had in its handling of revolutions elsewhere in the world. According to Shultz, “the U.S. has, historically, been badly damaged by the way we have been involved in tidal shifts like this [People’s Power Revolution]—most recently the fall of the shah [of Iran]. We paid a heavy price for our past handling of these affairs. We have gotten the worst of both worlds: we have gotten on the wrong side, and we have appeared disloyal to our friends. So we have a big stake in decent treatment of Marcos the person” (ibid., 633-34).  Shultz apparently sought the advice of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, who had already concluded that Marcos had to go (ibid., 634).  While it is true that Washington had knowledge of the existence of the Reform the Armed Forces Movement and its coup plans (McCoy 1999, 240) and allegedly even secretly funded RAM (Bonner 1987, 368) and provided advice and intelligence to the rebel troops during EDSA, Ronald Reagan himself had to be persuaded to support the People’s Power Revolution. When the People’s Power Revolution broke out, Shultz called an emergency meeting in his Bethesda (Maryland) home, where he was joined by Caspar Weinberger, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral William James Crowe, Jr., Central Intelligence Agency deputy director Robert M. Gates, National Security Advisor John Poindexter, and State Department Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Paul Wolfowitz (Bonner 1987, 437).  Shultz finally succeeded in persuading the White House—the last holdouts were Weinberger and Reagan–to release a statement on February 24 (Day Three of the Revolution) saying that the solution to the crisis can only be achieved through peaceful transition to a new government” (Shultz 1993, 636).  See People’s Power Revolution

Voltes V  The Japanese robot animation series, “Super Electromagnetic Machine Voltes V” (Chōdenji Mashīn Borutesu Faibu, 超電磁マシーン ボルテスV, 1977-1978), dubbed into English, premiered on Friday, May 5, 1978, at 6 p.m. on GMA Channel 7 (Dancel 2014). Ushering in the first wave of Japanese animation in the Philippines, “Voltes V” tells the story of the invasion of Earth by the Boazanian empire, from a planet in which a horned aristocracy enslaves its unhorned people, and the successful resistance led by the unhorned Boazanian prince-turned-slave-turned-rebel-exile Dr. Ned Armstrong, with the help of the volt-in robot built by him on Earth and operated by a team composed of his three mestizo (earthling-Boazanian) sons Steve, Big Bert, and Little John, along with Mark Gordon and Jaime Robinson.  “Voltes V” was part of a weekly lineup of robot cartoons that included Mekanda (Mechander) Robot (Mondays), Daimos (Tuesdays), Mazinger Z (Wednesdays), and Grendizer (Thursdays). “Voltes V” and other robot series were abruptly taken off the air in April 1979 by Marcos, citing their “excessive violence” (Sison 2015). Years later, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr. sought to justify his father’s decision by citing parental concerns that such “violence…would influence their children in a negative way” (ABS-CBN News 2012). The ban was reportedly motivated by the high TV ratings of the “mecha” (mechanical) animé, which trounced those of a children’s show then airing on a rival channel owned by Marcos crony Roberto Benedicto.  There has been speculation as well that the ban was motivated by the “Voltes V”’s depiction of dictatorship and revolution, a depiction that drew uncomfortable parallels and associations with martial-law Philippines (Bravo 2012, 48). For fans, the banning of “Voltes V” became a “symbol” of the Marcos regime’s “oppression of freedom” (ibid., 48).   Aside from “Martial Law Babies” born during the martial law period (1972-1981), the people who grew up during the Marcos era have been called the “Voltes V Generation” (Mendoza 2014).

War medals   Ferdinand Marcos had built his political career and reputation in part on his wartime accomplishments as the “Audie Murphy of the Philippines”, the Philippines’ most decorated war hero. Two of his record-breaking thirty-two medals were for his guerrilla activities, the rest for his activities before the American surrender to the Japanese in 1942 and after the American return to the Philippine islands in 1944 (Gerth 1986, A1).   Marcos, who had been a lieutenant in the armed forces and had been part of the Bataan campaign, claimed that he was leader of Ang Mga Maharlika, a guerrilla force active between 1942 and 1944 (the strength of that unit varied between 300 and 8,300 men, according to Marcos). The U.S. Army had recognized the claims of 111 men listed as members of the unit for their services alongside the Americans during the invasion of Luzon in 1945, but dismissed Marcos’ and twenty-three other members’ services as being “of limited military value” (ibid., A8). Marcos’ two requests for official recognition of his unit were rejected by the U.S. Army (the last ruling was made in 1948), which concluded that the unit was fictitious. The United States Veterans’ Administration, with the help of the Philippine Army, found in 1950 that men claiming to be members of the Maharlika unit were responsible for “‘atrocities’ against Filipino civilians” (ibid.)  Former military intelligence officer Bonifacio Gillego [see Bombings], the opposition journal We Forum, and American researcher Alfred W. McCoy were among those who helped expose Marcos’ fake war medals (McCoy 1999, 174).

Writ of habeas corpus   Dating back to the twelfth century, the phrase habeas corpus (“produce the body”) was originally used in judicial writs (court directions issued in the name of the English king) to get a person into court to give evidence or respond to a claim (Endicott 2018, 5). In the fourteenth century, the writ developed into an order issued by a judge to an official to explain why a person was being detained; failure to provide a lawful reason for detention could result in a court order to release the detainee (ibid.).  Ferdinand Marcos suspended the privilege of the writ thrice (counting the 1983 amendment to Proclamation 2045). Marcos issued Proclamation no. 889 (amended nine days later to 889-A) on August 21, 1971, in the immediate aftermath of the Plaza Miranda bombing. The writ was restored on January 11, 1972 (see Bombings). Citing the 1971 Supreme Court decision upholding the legality of the suspension, he suspended the privilege of the writ again through Proclamation no. 1081 (dated September 21, 1972), which imposed martial law.  Although the writ was technically restored after the lifting of martial law on January 17, 1981 through Proclamation no. 2045, the suspension of the writ remained in effect in “the two autonomous regions in Mindanao” then facing Muslim insurgency (created through a 1979 referendum plebiscite, these two regions covered ten of the original thirteen provinces and nine cities in Mindanao, Sulu and Palawan to which the government had initially pledged autonomy as part of the  Tripoli Agreement with the Moro National Liberation Front) and “in all other places…with respect to persons at present detained as well as others who may hereafter be similarly detained for the crimes of insurrection or rebellion, subversion, conspiracy or proposal to commit such crimes, and for all other crimes and offenses committed by them in furtherance or on the occasion thereof, or incident thereto, or in connection therewith” (Official Gazette 1981). The amended Proclamation no. 2045-A (Official Gazette 1983), signed on July 23, 1983, expanded the scope to “all other places with respect to persons at present detained as well as others who may hereafter be similarly detained for all cases involving the crimes of insurrection, rebellion, subversion, conspiracy or proposal to commit such crimes, sedition, conspiracy to commit sedition, inciting to sedition, and for all other crimes or offenses committed by them in furtherance or on the occasion thereof, or incident thereto, are in connection therewith, such as but not limited to offenses involving economic sabotage, illegal assemblies, illegal associations, tumults and other disturbances of public orders, unlawful use of means of publication and unlawful utterances, and alarms and scandals, or with respect to any person whose arrest or detention is, in the judgment of the President, required by public safety as a means to repel or quell the existing rebellion in the country” (italics added). The suspension was lifted by Proclamation no. 2, signed by Corazon Aquino on March 2, 1986.

X, Y, Z    Pseudonym bestowed upon three Marcos cronies (Honorio Poblador, Potenciano Ilusorio, and Jose Yao Campos [Salonga 2001, 136]) who served as front men for the Benguet-Bahamas Deal, which involved a US$ 150-million swap deal in which American businessmen Wallace Groves, owner of the Grand Bahama Island (operated by mobster Meyer Lasky), and Herbert Allen, who owned substantial shares in Benguet Mines, converted 92.5% of the Grand Bahama Port Authority to that of Benguet Consolidated. On paper, Benguet Consolidated acquired the Port Authority in 1969.  The Americans who owned 97.5% of Benguet Consolidated then extracted their holdings, so that the Benguet mines ended up under the control of presidential brother-in-law Benjamin Romualdez. See Beams, Dovie; Cronies and crony capitalism; and Conjugal dictatorship   

Yamashita’s treasure   Fabled treasure, consisting of gold bullions, platinum, precious gems, and other luxury items, looted by the Japanese Imperial Army from twelve countries and allegedly hidden by General Yamashita Tomoyuki in the tunnels, caves, and mountains of Luzon.  Over decades, various attempts have been made by treasure hunters—mainly Filipino and American—to locate the so-called hidden wealth in the Philippines.  Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos sought to explain away their unaccounted, hidden wealth and the systematic looting and shipment overseas of the gold and silver reserves of the Philippine national treasury during the Marcos era by claiming that Ferdinand had found Yamashita’s gold (Seagrave and Seagrave 2003, 1, 155; Manapat 1991, 444-54).  

Yoling, Super Typhoon   International name Patsy, one of seven super typhoons of the 1970 Pacific typhoon season, and one of the deadliest to hit Manila, Yoling made landfall in Luzon with sustained winds of 210 km/hr. on November 19, claiming 141 lives in the Philippines (including lives lost at sea) (Daly 2016, 33).  Yoling was one of four major typhoons—Oyang (Severe Tropical Storm Fran, Luzon and Visayas, forty-two killed), Sening (Super Typhoon Joan, second only to 2013’s Super Typhoon Haiyan [Yolanda] in terms of strength, Cagayan, Central Luzon, Visayas, 575 killed, thousands displaced), and Titang (Super Typhoon Kate, Western Visayas, 631 killed, 230 missing)—to devastate the Philippines that year, wreaking extensive loss of lives, displacement, damage, and destruction (ibid.). Other major natural disasters to hit the Philippines during the Marcos era include: the July 1972 flood (Luzon, 775 dead, more than 350,000 displaced); the August 17, 1976 magnitude 7.9 earthquake and tsunami (Moro Gulf, 8,000 dead, more than 10,000 injured, up to 100,000 displaced); 1984 season’s Typhoon Maring (June, Northern Luzon and Pangasinan, more than 100 killed) and Typhoon Nitang (Ike, Visayas and Mindanao, 1,400 killed, more than 300,000 displaced) (ibid., 33-34). See El Niño of 1982-1983

A Marcos-Era Glossary: A-C, D-K, L-P, Q-Z, Bibliography

A Glossary of the Marcos Era (1965-1986) in the Philippines (L-P)

La Tondeña strike   Some 400 permanent workers and 100 temporary workers belonging to the Kaisahang Malayang Manggagawa ng La Tondeña staged a strike on October 24, 1975 to protest working conditions and employment criteria and procedures at La Tondeña Incorporated, the country’s largest distillery.  Both skilled and unskilled workers’ real wages had been declining from 1962 to 1986, with urban workers’ wages falling more sharply to converge with agricultural workers’ wages (Boyce 1993, 27). The Labor Code of 1974, promulgated to align labor laws with the martial-law government’s developmentalist program of promoting export-oriented and labor-intensive industries, allowed employers to pay 75% of the basic minimum wage to new employees during their six-month probationary period; companies exploited this provision by firing their workers after this period (Bello, Kinley, and Ellinson 1982, 143). General Order no. 5, which originally banned all strikes and other forms of public assembly, was amended to ban strikes in “vital industries” (Villegas 1988, 61).  The Tondeña workers took advantage of the loophole that allowed them to organize a strike in a “non-vital” industry. Their demands included the promotion of casual workers to permanent positions, granting of maternity leave to women workers, payment of workers’ compensation, and ending of illegal firings (Hess 2013, 136). The strike was the unang putok (first explosion), the “first open protest action to break through the authoritarian wall of silence under martial law, provoking a chain reaction of open protest in its wake” (Franco 2001, 142).  The Communist Party of the Philippines, initially hesitant over the possible negative effects of an open strike, endorsed the strike and offered behind-the-scenes tactical advice and logistical support (ibid.).  The strikers also obtained the support of students, members of the Church, and other sectors (ibid.).  The strike was broken up, the workers arrested, but were released a day later. Company owner Antonio Palanca met with union leaders on October 27 (ibid.) and agreed to grant permanent status to 300 casual workers, cancel a number of employment requirements, and review the cases of workers who had been laid off (Hess 2013, 137).   A week later, Ferdinand Marcos signed Presidential Decree no. 823 banning all strikes in vital and non-vital (under which the distillery business had been classified) industries.  The workers’ slogan “Tama Na! Sobra Na! Welga Na!” would be taken up by protestors during U.S. President Gerald Ford’s visit to Manila (Franco 2001, 143; see United States, Presidents of the) and adopted by the anti-Marcos opposition.  Within a year of the strike, labor protest actions took place in 150 factories involving 130,000 workers (ibid.).  

Land reform   Just four days after declaring martial law, Ferdinand Marcos signed Presidential Decree no. 2 (September 26, 1972) proclaiming the “whole country” as “a land reform area” (Official Gazette 1972a) to prepare for agrarian reform.  Presidential Decree no. 27 (signed on October 21, 1972) launched the most ambitious land reform program ever attempted in the country at the time.  The presidential decree identified the “old concept of landownership by a few” as a source of “valid and legitimate grievances that gave rise to violent conflict and social tension,” and stated that redressing such grievances was one of the “fundamental objectives of the New Society” (Official Gazette 1972b).  Ferdinand Marcos staked the fortunes of the New Society under martial law on the viability of the land reform program: “If land reform fails, there is no New Society” (Philippine Daily Express, September 22, 1973, quoted in Wurfel 1988, 166).  Only rice and corn lands—which had the highest rate of tenancy (at 46% and 50% respectively, according to the 1960 census [Wurfel 1988, ibid.])—were subject to transfer and to conversion to leasehold. In 1970, more than two-thirds of all tenants in the country were share tenants, and most of them had to surrender half of their annual crops to their landlords, in violation of the 1954 Agricultural Tenancy Act that set the tenants’ share at 70% (ibid., 166, 167).  (Sugar and coconut farms were exempted from land reform. Cronies like Roberto Benedicto, Eduardo Cojuangco, Juan Ponce Enrile, and Maria Clara Lobregat and other clans acquired substantial tracts of land and gained control over the sugar and coconut sectors through their control over government monopolies [Putzel 1992, 150; see Coconut levy fund and Sugar]). Modeled on land reform in Taiwan and also inspired by similar programs in Japan and South Korea, Operation Land Transfer was conceived as a redistributive program that allowed landowners to keep seven hectares on condition that these lands were self-cultivated. Landowners were compensated for the rest of their holdings at two-and-a-half times the average value of the three normal crop years preceding the decree, rather than at market value. Tenants acquired five hectares of non-irrigated land or three hectares of irrigated land by paying fifteen annual amortization payments at six percent per annum; they were required to join agricultural cooperatives that would be responsible for any defaults in amortization payments (ibid., 127, 124).  Operation Leasehold sought to provide a measure of tenure security by converting share-tenants to leasehold.  Land transfer (which was also done under the old Resettlement and Landed Estates program) and leasehold were complemented by an agricultural productivity program that included cooperative, credit and irrigation projects (ibid., 138, 125-126).  Samahang Nayon (Barrio Associations) were established as “pre-cooperatives” in April 1973 to introduce tenants and small owner-cultivators to the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) technology, prior to the launching in May 1973 of the Masagana 99 program.  Savings collected from members of these associations were used as capitalization for Cooperative Rural Banks and Area Marketing Cooperatives, which would assume responsibility for defaults in amortization payments. The OLT was meant to transfer some 759,000 hectares of land to 394,000 tenants, but at the end of the Marcos era in 1986, the National Economic Development Authority found that only three percent of the targeted tenants had received official titles to land that represented a mere 1.3% of the total area covered by land reform (ibid., 125, 138). In 1985, the Department of Agrarian Reform reported that 645,808 tenants had leasehold contracts for 690,207 hectares (representing a 122% success rate in terms of tenants), but on-the-ground surveys in the late 1970s and early 1980s showed that landlessness and share-tenancy remained widespread (ibid., 138; Wurfel 1988, 174-75).  Land reform was most fully implemented in Central Luzon, where Marcos was able to secure grassroots support (Timberman 1991, 110).  A total of 62,209 hectares of land were purchased from 264 owners who had more than 100 hectares, leaving some 1.8 million hectares belonging to 3,200 owners of farms over 100 hectares untouched (Putzel 1992, 147). In 1975, researchers found that 57% of tenants farmed the land of people who owned less than seven hectares (Wurfel 1988, 168).  Marcos’ initial hesitance on reform and his own record of increasing his landholding (as well as that of his relatives) bolstered the resistance of medium-sized landowners (Putzel 1992, 147).  Agricultural growth during the Marcos era proved to be uneven: between 1973 and 1979, the country’s total gain in agricultural production surpassed that of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, but between 1980 and 1985, the Philippines fell behind these three countries, plus Burma and Vietnam (National Economic and Development Authority, cited in Timberman 1991, 111). 

Letter of Instruction no. 270   On April 11, 1975, Ferdinand Marcos issued LOI 270, “Naturalization of Deserving Aliens by Decree,” paving the way for the mass naturalization by administrative fiat of qualified foreigners, chiefly Chinese. Presidential Decree 836, signed on December 8, 1975, subsequently expanded the coverage of mass naturalization to include spouses and children of the principal petitioners.  Until then, the process of acquiring citizenship had been protracted, difficult, and expensive (legal and extralegal expenses ranged from 20,000 to 50,000 pesos); because it depended on judicial interpretation (i.e., judges deciding on individual applications), it was also susceptible to bribery and corruption. The 1973 Constitution had revised some of the articles of citizenship, allowing Filipinas married to Chinese to keep their Philippine citizenship and enabling offspring of Filipino-Chinese intermarriages to elect Philippine citizenship. (The 1987 Constitution would automatically grant Filipino citizenship to children with at least one Filipino parent.)  The demographic profile of the ethnic Chinese had undergone changes in the postwar era: those who came of age in the 1960s constituted the largest group, the majority of them Philippine-born, and also the first group to lack direct contact with mainland China and the first to receive a university education and have wide social contacts with the non-Chinese Filipinos (Hau 2014, 97).  LOI 270 (Official Gazette 1975) stated that aliens “permanently residing in the country who, having developed and demonstrated love for and loyalty to the Philippines and affinity to the customs, traditions and ideals of the Filipino people, as well as contributed to the economic, social and cultural development of our country, may be integrated into the national fabric by grant of Philippine citizenship.”  The oil shock of 1973, coupled with the internationalization of the Bangsa Moro conflict, had stoked fears that Philippine access to oil would be blocked by members of the Organization of Islamic Conference and Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries that were sympathetic to the plight of the Filipino Muslims (the following discussion is indebted to Benito Lim, interviewed by Aguilar 2012a; see also Jabidah Massacre and, for the impact of the energy crises of the 1970s on the Philippines, Bataan Nuclear Power Plant). Ferdinand Marcos looked for alternatives, including entering into negotiations with Western oil-exploration companies to drill for oil and gas in the South China Sea, and importing oil from Communist or Socialist countries. Moreover, Marcos worried over mainland China’s claim over the entire South China Sea, which included portions claimed by the Philippines and which were not covered by the Mutual Defense Treaty between the Philippines and the United States. He also wanted to put a stop to China’s support for the armed struggle of the Communist Party of the Philippines-New People’s Army (evident in the interception of a shipload of arms aboard the MV Karagatan in July 1972 and the sinking of the Andrea on its way to China in July 1974). The problem of “overstaying Chinese” (refugees granted political asylum after 1949) and the challenges of Filipinizing “Chinese schools” also figured in the calculations, as did the anticipated decline of Philippine trade with the United States following the expiration of the Laurel-Langley agreement in 1974 and the need to gain access to markets other than the American one (see Oligarchy). Marcos opted for a diplomatic solution, establishing relations with China in 1975.  There are allegations that Marcos received US$ 12 million (with Ralph Nubla, former president [1966-1970] of the Federation of Filipino Chinese Chambers of Commerce, serving as conduit) for his services in enabling mass naturalization (Tiglao 1990, 7-71).  Mass naturalization had a largely positive impact on Chinese Filipinos, improving their legal and social standing, enabling them to become licensed professionals such as doctors, lawyers, architects, and engineers, and affording them greater participation in Philippine political, cultural, and social life. 

Liberation Theology  See Theology of struggle

Love Bus    One of the first air-conditioned buses to operate in the capital.  A brainchild of Imelda Marcos, the blue-and-white buses had heart-shaped “Love Bus” and “Save Gas” signs and a no-standing policy. They plied the routes between Escolta and Rustan’s Makati and between Escolta and Ali Mall (via Quezon Boulevard and Quezon Memorial Circle).

Manila Sound   Coined by supergroup Hotdog’s bassist and songwriter Dennis Garcia to characterize the “new sound” of Philippine pop music, comparable to Motown’s “The Sound of Philadelphia” (Gil 2013).  In 1975, the Hotdog band (Dennis and Rene Garcia and Ella del Rosario) had the number-one-selling 45RPM single, “Pers Lab,” and the New Minstrels released “Buhat.”  Garcia’s “Manila Sound” would be appropriated by Vicor Music executive Vic del Rosario, Jr. to brand the musical style—colloquial-Tagalog and Taglish lyrics, catchy melodies, and young, urban (mainly Manila-based), cool performers—of Vicor’s Sunshine label, with which Hotdog, as well as The Juan dela Cruz Band, the Apolinario Mabini (Apo) Hiking Society, Rico J. Puno, VST&Co, Cinderella, Circus Band, Rey Valera, Sharon Cuneta, and other music acts, signed on (ibid.).  The broader (not necessarily Sunshine label or Manila-based) musical phenomenon and movement include songs like Hotdog’s “Manila,” “Bongga Ka Day,” “Panaginip,” “O, Lumapit Ka,” “B.A.D.A.F. Forever,” “Ikaw ang Miss Universe ng Buhay Ko”; Cinderella’s “T.L. [True Love] Ako Sa Yo,” “Bato sa Buhangin,” “Ang Boyfriend Kong Baduy”; Hagibis’ “Legs,” “Babae,” “Katawan”; VST&Co.’s “Awitin Mo at Isasayaw Ko,” “Rock Baby Rock,” “Disco Fever,” “Magsayawan”; The Boyfriends’ “Sumayaw, Sumunod,” “Araw-Araw”; Rey Valera’s “Ako si Superman,” “Kumusta Ka”; Apo Hiking Society’s “Pumapatak ang Ulan,” “Batang-Bata Ka Pa,” “Kabilugan ng Buwan,” “Panalangin”; Rico J. Puno’s “The Way We Were (Alaala sa Luneta),” “Macho Guwapito,” “Sorry Na, Pwede Ba,” ; Freddie Aguilar’s “Anak”;  Mike Hanopol’s “Laki sa Layaw-Jeproks”, “Mr. Kenkoy,” “Awiting Pilipino”; Wadab’s “Pag Tumatagal Lalong Tumitibay,” “Iniibig Kita”; Yoyoy Villame’s “Mag-Exercise Tayo,” “Butse Kik”; Celeste Legaspi’s “Ako’s Bakyang-Bakya,” “Mamang Sorbetero,” “Saranggola ni Pepe”; Geraldine’s “Pangako”; Leah Navarro’s “Ang Pag-Ibig Kong Ito”; Sharon Cuneta’s “Mr. DJ” and “Kahit Maputi na ang Buhok Ko.” A cousin of Manila Sound, Gapô Funk (for example, The Advisors’ “Yugyugan Na”) was inspired by music brought by African-American GIs to the Subic Bay Naval Complex in Zambales (where Olongapo [known colloquially as Gapô] City is located).    See also Jingle Songbook/Chordbook Magazine

Martial Law  Ferdinand Marcos publicly announced the proclamation of martial law over the crony(Roberto Benedicto)-owned television-and-radio station at 7:15 p.m. on September 23, 1972.  Accounts differ on whether Proclamation no. 1081 was actually signed on September 17 or 23 and was either postdated or backdated to September 21 (Official Gazette n.d.).   Marcos had instructed Secretary of Justice Juan Ponce Enrile and Executive Secretary Alexander Melchor to initiate a feasibility study of the declaration of martial law as early as December 1969 (Enrile 2012, 275; Almonte and Vitug 2015, 77). Lifted on January 17, 1981, in time for Pope John Paul II’s visit to Manila, martial law lasted nearly eight years and four months. Marcos exploited the following provision in the 1935 Constitution of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, Section 11, 1(1), to declare martial law: “The President shall be commander-in-chief of all armed forces of the Philippines and, whenever it becomes necessary, he may call out such armed forces to prevent or suppress lawless violence, invasion, insurrection, or rebellion, or imminent danger thereof, when the public safety requires it, he may suspend the privileges of the writ of habeas corpus, or place the Philippines or any part thereof under martial law.”  Declaring martial law enabled Marcos to concentrate power in his own hands. A January 10-15, 1973 plebiscite held under the strict supervision of the authoritarian government ratified a new Constitution. Promulgated on January 17, 1973 (on the 1971-1972 Constitutional Convention, see Quintero, Eduardo), the new Constitution introduced a parliamentary system of government, with six-year terms for members of a unicameral National Assembly who elected a President and a Prime Minister from among their peers.  Among the provisions of the Constitution were the ones that allowed a person, under specified circumstances, to claim Filipino citizenship if either parent (rather than just the father) is a Filipino citizen; mandated the Batasang Pambansa “to take steps towards the development and formal adoption of a common national language to be known as Filipino” while adopting Pilipino and English as “official languages.”  Amendments to the Constitution included extending martial law and creating an Interim Batasang Pambansa with the president as president of the legislative and allowing the President to exercise legislative powers “when there exists a grave emergency, or a threat or imminence thereof” in 1976; extending the retirement ages of judges and justices in the judiciary to seventy years of age in 1980; modifying the parliamentary form to a semi-presidential system that restored executive power to the President (instead of the Prime Minister), reforming the election process, and granting former natural-born Filipino citizens permission to be transferees of private lands for residential purposes in 1981; and creating the Office of the Vice-President in 1984.   See also Kilusang Bagong Lipunan

Masagana 99   From the Filipino term for “bountiful,” this rice production program was introduced in 1973 in response to the decline in rice production on the heels of the initially successful introduction of Green Revolution technologies in the late 1960s and early 1970s (owing in part to a series of devastating typhoons [see Yoling, Typhoon]). The “Green Revolution” was a package of modern farming practices that combined the use of high-yielding varieties of rice with modern inputs like fertilizer and improved irrigation. In 1966, Ferdinand Marcos created the Rice and Corn Production Council as the coordinating body linking government agencies and the private sector in the project to increase rice and maize production. The International Rice Research Institute, established in 1960 and headquartered in Los Baños, spearheaded in 1966 the development of the IR8 “miracle rice,” a cross between the tall tropical Indonesian strain and the Taiwanese short variety that bore heavy grains and was resistant to tropical disease. The Masagana program, which aimed to increase rice yields to ninety-nine cavans per hectare (or 4 tons per hectare), had four elements: credit, technology transfer, price support, and provision of low-cost fertilizer (the following discussion is indebted to Chandler 1979, 125-27, Tadem 1986, and Davidson 2016). The government created a credit system of 420 rural banks, 102 branches of the Philippine National Bank, and twenty-five offices of the Agricultural Credit Administration. The government guaranteed eighty-five percent of loans (maximum US$100 per hectare) extended to farmers enrolled in the program. About 900,000 farmers joined the program. Some 3,200 technicians were sent to the villages to offer technical advice. The government increased its price support for paddy from $97 per ton in 1972 to $170 per ton in 1976 and subsidized urea (fertilizer) by twenty-one percent (increased to twenty-five percent in 1976).  By 1979-1980, some three-fourths of the country’s rice acreage had been planted with high-yield varieties (Boyce 1993, 62, cited in Davidson 2016, 107).  Masagana rice yields, however, remained at the same level, while national average rice yields continued to increase in the years 1975-1980. Another problem was the declining rate of repayment of loans, from ninety-one percent in 1973-1974 to seventy-six percent in 1974-1975 to thirty-five percent in 1975-1976, with some 800 rural banks going bankrupt (Chandler 1979, 126-27; Carlos Dominguez, quoted in Reyes, Ariate and Del Mundo 2020). Rice production increased from 109.3 million sacks of unmilled palay in 1970 to 162.43 million sacks in 1982 (Tadem 1986, 2).  Between 1977 and 1983 (with some exceptions made for the negative impact of bad weather on the harvest), Philippines exported rice, mainly to Indonesia and Malaysia.  A bad drought (see El Niño of 1982-1983) and typhoons, complicated by “low usage of fertilizer…low palay prices,…and NFA [National Food Authority] inefficiency” (S. J. Rundt and Associates report, quoted in Tadem 1986, 52), forced the government to import rice from Thailand and China in 1984 and 1985.  In response, Marcos introduced the Intensified Rice Production Program, which, during the 1985 bumper-crop year, yielded a harvest of 5.4 million metric tons of milled rice, though the figure fell short by 100,000 tons of the annual national consumption of rice (Tadem 1986, 59). In 1986, there were reportedly900,000 tons of rice in government warehouses (World Bank Report cited in Bello 2009, 56).   

Miss Universe Pageant   Eighteen-year-old St. Scholastica’s College business student Gloria Diaz was the first Filipina to be crowned Miss Universe on July 19, 1969 in Miami Beach, Florida, U.S.A. (Sorilla 2019). To pageant host Bob Barker’s final question, “In the next day or so, a man will land on the moon. If a man from the moon landed in your hometown, what would you do to entertain them?,” Diaz responded, “Oh, just the same things I do. I think if he’s been on the moon for so long, I think when he comes over he wants a change, I guess.”  Four years later, on July 21, 1973, eighteen-year-old Maryknoll (now Miriam) College student Margarita Moran took the crown at the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. Asked by Barker what she would buy if she had a million dollars, she responded: “A house and lot because it’s the most expensive thing and I can’t afford it. If I had a million bucks I’d buy a house and lot and live by myself and other people, of course.” In anticipation of the pageant and the global attention and tourism it would attract, the government rushed to build the venue, the 10,000-seat capacity Folk Arts Theater (now Tanghalang Francisco Balagtas), in a mere seventy-seven days, and inaugurated it on July 4, 1974 with a “Kasaysayan ng Lahi” ceremony that recruited 20,400 citizens and fifty tribal groups to stage a big parade along Roxas Boulevard of outdoor tableaux vivants showcasing the government-sanctioned version of history and local-color ethnic and cultural heritage (Espiritu 2017b, 217, 419; see PANAMIN and Edifice complex). The Miss Universe contest was held on July 14, 1974, with some sixty-five countries participating.  Amparo Muñoz of Spain took home the crown. Along with Thrilla in Manila, hosting the Miss Universe was part of the martial-law regime’s efforts to promote the Philippines as an international tourist attraction. 

National Artist Award (Gawad Pambansang Alagad ng Sining)   Proclamation no. 1001 (April 27, 1972) created the category of National Artist as a “national expression of gratitude and appreciation” and awarded the title posthumously to painter Fernando Amorsolo (died April 24, 1972), whose “years of creative activity have defined and perpetuated a distinct element of the Nation’s artistic and cultural heritage and won universal acclaim for our country and people” (Official Gazette 1972e).  At first, the power to decide who would be declared National Artist lay solely with Marcos, albeit “upon the recommendation of the Board of Trustees of the Cultural Center of the Philippines” (CCP).  On May 15, 1973, the power to select National Artists was transferred to the CCP.  Presidential Decree no. 208 (June 7, 1973) granted the following privileges to the National Artists: a cash award of 10,000 pesos, a life pension of 2,000 pesos per month, medicalization and hospitalization benefits, a lifetime insurance worth 50,000 pesos, “a place of honor in state functions, national commemoration ceremonies and all other cultural presentations,” and a state funeral arranged and paid for by the government (Official Gazette 1973a).  Seventeen other artists in fields ranging from the visual arts, dance, and literature to music, theater and film, and architecture—Amado V. Hernandez (posthumous), Jose Garcia Villa, Nick Joaquin (who accepted the award in order to secure the release from prison of writer Jose “Pete” Lacaba [Tabora 2017; on Lacaba, see Tuta]), and Carlos P. Romulo for Literature; Carlos V. Francisco (posthumous), Victorio C. Edades, and Vicente S. Manansala (posthumous) for Visual Arts-Painting; Lamberto V. Avellana and Gerardo de Leon (posthumous) for Film and Theater; Antonio J. Molina and Jovita Fuentes for Music; Guillermo E. Tolentino and Napoleon V. Abueva for Visual Arts-Sculpture; Francisca Reyes Aquino and Leonor Orosa-Goquingco for Dance; and Pablo Antonio (posthumous) and Juan Nakpil  for Architecture—were conferred the award during the Marcos era.  

Nayong Pilipino Cultural Park   Touted as a “miniature replica of the Philippines” (Official Gazette 1970), this 55-acre “Philippine Village” cultural theme park (nested in a 155-acre property) was completed in 1970, in time for the November 27 visit of Pope Paul VI, who was taken on a tour of the premises.  Presidential Decree no. 37 created the Nayong Pilipino Foundation on November 6, 1972 to manage the park and promote tourism, research, and related activities (Official Gazette 1972c).  Inaugurated on June 11, 1970, the park featured six “regions” (Ilocos, Cordillera, Tagalog, Bicol, the Visayas, and Mindanao/Sulu) and contained a miniature map of the Philippines, a man-made lagoon, “Datu” and Samal houses, a Spanish colonial plaza complex, a mosque, the Ifugao Rice Terraces of Banaue, Mayon Volcano of Bicol, the Chocolate Hills of Bohol, and Magellan’s Cross (Cabalfin 2014-2015, 27-28). A Museum of Philippine Traditional Culture displayed the indigenous artifacts collected by PANAMIN.  On December 7, 1972, Imelda Marcos was presiding over the awarding ceremonies of the National Beautification and Cleanliness contest at the Nayong Pilipino when she was attacked by bolo-wielding Carlito Dimailig (Durdin 1972).  The 27-year-old Dimailig, a geodetic engineer from Sinisian, Batangas, was shot dead; Marcos required 75 stitches on the wounds on her arms and hands (New York Times 1972).  The Nayong Pilipino was an inspiration for Indonesian First Lady Siti Hartinah “Bu Tien” Soeharto’s Taman Mini Indonesia Indah project (“Beautiful Indonesia” Miniature Park) (Jusuf 2012, 90)–opened on April 20, 1975—which provoked student-led protests and criticism for its ahistorical stereotyping of ethnicity for touristic and national myth-making purposes (for example, Pemberton 1994). Nayong Pilipino was closed down in 2002 to make way for the expansion of the Ninoy Aquino International Airport. A smaller cultural theme park, Nayong Pilipino sa Clark Expo, opened in Pampanga in 2007 and was rebooted as Nayong Pilipino Clark in 2014.  The new integrated resort city, Nayong Pilipino Cultural Park and Creative Hub, is located in Entertainment City, New Seaside Road, Parañaque.

Nutribun   Containing 500 calories and 17 grams of protein and described as looking and tasting like a “large, slightly sweet hamburger bun,” the nutritionally fortified, ready-to-eat snack was developed by experts connected with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to help malnourished and underweight Filipino children, as part of the five-year Operation Timbang (initiated in 1971). Made in local bakeries or on school premises, Nutribun used local ingredients (such as coconut flour) along with flour and dried milk supplied by USAID’s Food for Peace Program to the Department of Education’s Philippine School Nutrition Program. The bread was distributed among children as part of school feeding and, later, young children’s health programs (War on Hunger 1976, 14). By 1977, it served as the supplemental daily meal for some 1.5 million schoolchildren in 3,000 schools. Nutribun was also distributed among victims of natural disasters like typhoons and floods (ibid., 14-15).

Oligarchy   From the Greek oligarkhia (ὀλιγαρχία) (oligos  ὀλίγος “few” + arkhía ᾰρχῐ́ᾱ “to rule”), a form of government in which political power is wielded by a minority (Indridason 2008, 36).  There have been recent attempts to redefine “oligarchy” as a “politics of wealth defense by materially endowed actors” (Winters 2011, 7), but such a narrow definition cannot account for the fact that accumulating and preserving wealth may not be the only (or even the principal) motive for accruing political power, nor is economic clout automatically transmutable to political power.   The Philippine oligarchy (a term that is often used interchangeably with “the Filipino elite”) is defined by Alfred McCoy (2009a, xii) as “a cluster of families, knitted together by ties of blood and marriage, that combines political power and economic assets to direct the nation’s destiny.”  In the nineteenth century, as a result of the Philippines’ integration into the global economy through trade and cash-crop production, there arose an “entrenched elite”–not just native, but also mestizo (mainly Chinese) and creole–made up of traders, money-lenders, landowners, professionals, and lower-level colonial bureaucrats (Larkin 2001, 39). Literacy, access to higher education (particularly university education), and professional credentials were also important, as suggested by the term ilustrado.  Snobbery about higher education or the lack thereof had been a factor in the power struggle between the Magdalo and Magdiwang factions at the 1897 Tejeros Convention, when Daniel Tirona of the Magdalo group had questioned Andres Bonifacio’s election as Director of Interior on the grounds that the latter was not trained as a lawyer (Bonifacio walked out of the convention).  The expanded system of national, provincial, and local elections introduced during the American colonial period was instrumental in creating a national, networked elite with power bases in their respective local and provincial bailiwicks and in the nation’s capital.  In the post-independence period, the country engaged in import-substitution industrialization, which allowed elite families to diversify their economic activities by venturing into manufacturing and forming conglomerates. The Americans enacted the Rehabilitation Act, which provided US$620 million in war-damage payments but made the payments of claims exceeding $500 conditional on the passing of the Bell Trade Act of 1946. The Bell Trade Act effectively delimited Philippine sovereignty by extending the newly independent country’s economic and political dependence on its erstwhile colonizer. It set preferential tariffs on American imports to the Philippines; fixed the exchange rate at two Philippine pesos to one US dollar and ensured that the exchange rate could not be revised without the permission of the US president; set quotas and duty-free time limits for Philippine sugar and other export commodities such as rice, rope, cigars and tobacco, buttons of pearl and shell, and coconut oil; and granted parity rights to American citizens and corporations (the Philippine Constitution was amended to allow Americans the rights of 100-percent ownership of Philippine corporations, development of public utilities, and exploitation of natural resources). The 1955 Laurel Langley Agreement abrogated the US authority to control the exchange rate; expanded the sugar quota of the Philippines and extended the time limit for reducing other quotas and progressively applying tariffs on Philippine export goods to the US; and made parity rights reciprocal but granted Americans full parity rights in all areas of the Philippine economy.  Chinese citizens who had been shut out of the retail trade sector by the 1954 Retail Trade Nationalization Law and excluded from parity rights reserved for Americans shifted to light industry (see Letter of Instruction no. 270).  In the postwar period, Filipino politicians relied on their access to state power to extract “rents” (Tullock 1967 and Krueger 1974) by using laws and regulations, controls and allocations (funding, quotas, licenses or permits), and selective wielding of violence to advance their personal, familial, or business interests.   Ferdinand Marcos’ wealth and power derived initially from the perks and privileges of (as well as graft and corruption made possible by) being a politician rather than being a big landholder or businessman. As a congressman, he made millions from “commissions” he charged as head of Import Control Board to approve import licenses and support government deals (Chaikin and Sharman 2009, 157; Manapit 1991, 80-81 states that in the early 1960s, Marcos collected a US$ 5,000 commission from each businessman who needed an import license).  Marcos exploited the martial-law provision of the 1935 Constitution to gain monopoly over both state and political power.  He justified the imposition of martial law as a move against a reactionary, corrupt “native oligarchy” that controlled politics, mass media, state, and economy (Marcos 1977a, 90-93).  Marcos’ treatment of oligarchs was highly selective, however: “[t]hose who bent with the wind and eschewed politics for the pursuit of gain were mostly left undisturbed” (Anderson 1998, 215). Upon declaring martial law, Marcos had his political opponents (Senators Benigno Aquino, Jr., Ramon Mitra, Jose Diokno, Francisco Rodrigo, and publisher Joaquin Roces, among others) and members of the media critical of his administration (Joaquin Roces, Maximo Soliven, Teodoro Locsin, Sr., Amando Doronila) arrested.  Eugenio “Geny” Lopez, Jr. and Sergio “Serge” Osmeña III were imprisoned on charges of conspiracy to assassinate the president. Marcos put pressure on Corazon Cojuangco’s family branch to sell their stakes in the First United Bank and Manila Management Corporation to their estranged cousin Eduardo Cojuangco and to Imelda’s brother Benjamin Romualdez (Thompson 1995, 58-59). The Osmeña clan’s 500-hectare hacienda was subjected to land reform. The Lopezes’ media empire (Manila Chronicle and other sister newspapers and the ABS-CBN television and radio network) ended up in the hands of Marcos relatives. Marcos got Eugenio Lopez to sign over the Manila Electric Company on the false pretext of releasing son Geny. Geny Lopez and Serge Osmeña escaped from Fort Bonifacio in 1977.  At the same time that he was specifically targeting his oligarch enemies, Marcos sought to fob off criticism that his regime had merely replaced the old oligarchy with a “new oligarchy” of cronies and relatives (and technocrats) by declaring that the latter were risk-taking “managerial and entrepreneurial talents” (Marcos 1976a, 209; see Coconut levy fund; Cronies and crony capitalism; Dewey, Dee; Sugar; Voltes V; and X, Y, Z).   

Oplan Sagittarius    Top-secret military plan, exposed by Senator Benigno Aquino, Jr. in his September 13, 1972 privilege speech, to place Metro Manila and outlying areas under the control of the Philippine Constabulary as a prelude to the declaration of martial law (see Rolex 12).  Aquino’s informant was allegedly General Marcos Soliman, then head of the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency.  Copies of the plan—to enable tracking, the plan was code-named using different zodiac signs that corresponded to the initial letter of the intended recipients’ first or family names—had been distributed by Primitivo Mijares (1976, 143; see Conjugal dictatorship) to high-ranking military and intelligence officials. Soliman reportedly died of a heart attack in 1972, but he was believed to have been murdered (Rosenberg 1984, 26).

People’s Power Revolution   The “EDSA Revolution” (also known as “People Power Revolution” and “Yellow Revolution”) unfolded in Manila over three-and-a-half days in 1986.  The February 7, 1986 snap presidential election had been marred by large-scale fraud and violence. Juan Ponce Enrile met with Reform the Armed Forces Movement (RAM) members Gregorio Honasan, Navy Captain Felix Turingan, Navy Commander Rex Robles, and Constabulary Lt. Col. Victor Batac on February 16, 1986, to assess the political situation (ibid. 543). The RAM activated their plan to stage a coup d’état, to take place at 2 a.m. on February 23 (ibid. 544), but before this could happen, news reached the conspirators that General Fabian Ver had gotten wind of the plot and was preparing to move against them.  Enrile (2012, 558-559) reached out to Fidel V. Ramos, who was not a member of RAM but who was sympathetic to their calls for reform and agreed to join them. (Ferdinand Marcos’ promotion of Fabian Ver as Chief of Staff [over Fidel Ramos] and Ver’s partiality to Reserve Officers Training Corps officers were resented by Philippine Military Academy [PMA]-trained officers. At the PMA graduation exercises in 1985, members of PMA Class of 1969 in the Air Force boycotted the alumni parade to protest the promotion of an officer over more senior candidates. Three hundred alumni from the Class of ’72 to ’84 lined up behind Class of ’71 as the latter, wearing “We Belong” T-shirts, approached the reviewing stand and waved a banner proclaiming “Unity Through Reforms.”  Leading members of RAM, formed in the early 1980s, included PMA Class of 1971 graduates Gregorio Honasan, Enrile’s aide-de-camp, Eduardo “Red” Kapunan, and Zosimo Paredes, Jr.   Enrile, himself increasingly at odds with Ver, met with RAM members on April 24, 1985 and reported their concerns about the Aquino assassination and graft and corruption and favoritism in the upper ranks of the military to Marcos. Fidel Ramos accompanied the leaders of RAM, with Batasang Pambansa member Paredes serving as spokesperson, to a meeting with Marcos on June 1, 1985.  Marcos promised to look into the abuses [recounted in Enrile 2012, 530-33]).  At 6:30 p.m. of February 22, Minister of Defense Juan Ponce Enrile and Armed Forces of the Philippines Vice Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Fidel V. Ramos, supported by members of the Reform the Armed Forces Movement (RAM) and the Philippine Constabulary Special Action Force, called a press conference in Camp Aguinaldo to announce their resignation from their posts and their withdrawal of support for the government (see Rolex 12). Responding to appeals by Agapito “Butz” Aquino (Benigno Aquino, Jr.’s brother) and Jaime, Cardinal Sin (the latter aired over Radio Veritas) to help the rebels, nuns and priests as well as a large number of civilians—growing to an estimated 1.9 to 2.5 million people (Stuart-Santiago 1995, 132)—gathered along the Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (EDSA) near Camp Aguinaldo and Camp Crame, and also near Malacañang Palace. On February 25, both the incumbent president, Ferdinand E. Marcos, and opposition candidate Corazon Cojuangco Aquino, claiming victory in the presidential election, took their respective oaths of office, Aquino in Club Filipino and Marcos in Malacañang an hour later. At 3 p.m. on February 25, Marcos had a conversation with United States senator Paul Laxalt, who, relaying the message from the White House, advised Marcos to “cut, and cut cleanly” (Bonner 1987, 440). Around midnight, Marcos and his family boarded American helicopters and planes that flew them to Clark Air Base and then Guam and finally to exile in Hawaii. Despite a series of tense confrontations between rebel and government troops, the casualties were low: fifteen killed and sixteen injured (Joaquin 1986).  The People’s Power Revolution stands out for being relatively bloodless, for its dramatic resolution, for the pioneering, blow-by-blow, worldwide coverage of the event using the new format of 24-hour cable news, and for having effected regime change without depending on the initiative of the ruling authoritarian government (Thompson 1995; Hedman 2006, 157, citing Chinoy 1996, 28). Individuals such as Juan Ponce Enrile, Jaime Cardinal Sin, and Corazon Aquino, and organizations and institutions such as the Church, the military, and the business community, members of the so-called “middle classes,” and even the United States State Department, have claimed credit for the success of the revolution.  Up to now, there is no consensus on “what EDSA actually was and what it means” (Kerkvliet and Mojares 1991, 1). While civilians remember EDSA as a “potent and good” event, a “peaceful, democratic transition that succeeded because of the mass mobilization of civilians,” military leaders remember People Power as “weak and bad,” an “aborted coup that succeeded because of the military’s withdrawal of support from President Marcos” (Montiel 2010, 182).  The Left had a limited presence in EDSA, even though it was the Left against which most of the players who saw themselves as key actors in the drama—Marcos, the middle-class segments of the opposition, and the American State Department–defined EDSA. The Left—which had been gathering strength by the end of martial law, in part owing to abuses by the state and military that drove ordinary people into joining the radical movement—had been deeply divided over the issue of boycotting the 1986 election. The Communist Party elected to boycott the election, declining to officially endorse or campaign for the opposition candidates, even though they allowed the opposition candidates to campaign among their organized mass base (Joma Sison, quoted in Almendral 1988, 195). In later assessments, some members of the Left would argue that the boycott was an error that cost the Left dearly (Rosca 1988, 89). The EDSA Revolution had a “ demonstration effect” on neighboring countries such as South Korea (where “people’s power” was invoked by opposition leader Kim Dae Jung when he called for constitutional change and democratization in Korea [quoted in Huntington 1991, 103]), Taiwan (Roscoe 1986, 16), Indonesia, and Bangladesh, and less successfully in Burma and China, as well as on Eastern European countries such as the former Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania and Serbia (Huntington 1991, 101-103; Thompson 2004, 1). The term “people’s power” has been used in discussions of the Arab Spring (Inayatullah 2011, 44, 46).

Presidential Assistant on National Minorities (PANAMIN)   A Commission on National Integration (CNI) had been established in 1957 to promote the “integration” of  non-Christian,  cultural minorities in business, agriculture, education and training, credit, and other areas, but the Commission, poorly funded, failed to improve the lives and livelihoods of non-Christian Filipinos (May 2003, 150). Instead, the philosophy of integration “provided cover for loggers, miners, agribusiness and migrant settlers to exploit tribal lands” (ibid.).  Manuel “Manda” Elizalde, Jr. (see Tasaday) was appointed head of the Office of the Presidential Assistant on National Minorities, with cabinet status, in 1967. The private, non-profit PANAMIN Foundation was established in 1968. With the abolition of the CNI in 1975, PANAMIN took over as the official agency in charge of dealing with non-Muslim “cultural minorities.”  Presidential Decree no. 1414 (1978) expanded the scope and mandate of PANAMIN by granting it “the exclusive authority to issue certifications attesting to bona fide membership in a tribal or ethno-linguistic group considered as National Minorities.” While the decree affirmed the State’s policy “to integrate into the mainstream of Philippine society certain ethnic groups who seek full integration,” it simultaneously sought to “protect the rights of those who wish to preserve their original life-ways beside that of the larger community” (ibid.)  PANAMIN stoked controversy because of the manipulative and repressive practices of its development programs, its role in the controversial Chico River Dam Project, and the displacement and forced relocation of indigenous people (including the Kalinga and Bontoc of the Cordillera region and the T’Boli and Manobo of South Cotabato) from their ancestral homelands, its deployment of National Minorities in the government’s anti-insurgency campaigns, and Elizalde’s financial malfeasance, sexual abuse of T’Boli and Manobo women, and abuse of PANAMIN powers to grant himself as well as loggers, miners and agribusiness access to tribal lands (Rocamora 1979; Thomas 2000, 77, 79; Baleva 2019, 138-140; May 2003, 150; Hyndman and Duhaylungsod 1990, 50).  Elizalde’s mining claims and operations led critics to nickname PANAMIN “PANAMINES” (Hyndman and Duhaylungsod 1990, 43).  Elizalde fled the country in 1983, following an alleged falling out with Imelda Marcos (Thomas 1997), returning in 1987. PANAMIN was dissolved in 1983, replaced a year later by the Office of Muslim and Cultural Communities, an agency whose objectives included being “actively involved in the counter-insurgency program within the framework of attraction and reconciliation” (Okamura 1987, 14). See Nayong Pilipino Cultural Park

A Marcos-Era Glossary: A-C, D-K, L-P, Q-Z, Bibliography

A Glossary of the Marcos Era (1965-1986) in the Philippines (D-K)

Dangerous Drugs Act of 1972   The April 2, 1972 Republic Act no. 6425 (Congress of the Philippines 1972, subsequently amended by Presidential Decree no. 44) mandated the creation of a Dangerous Drugs Board and laid out penalties of life imprisonment to death for the sale, administration, delivery, distribution, transportation, maintenance of drug dens, or manufacture of prohibited drugs that are found to be the “proximate cause of the death of a person”.  The same year, Presidential Proclamation no. 1192 declared every second week of November every year as Drug Abuse and Prevention Week. The newly established Constabulary Anti-Narcotic Unit obtained evidence of some three-million-pesos worth of heroin seized from the laboratories of businessman-druglord Lim Seng (also known as Gan Suo So) in a drug-raid operation codenamed Oplan Dama de Noche.  Lim was executed by firing squad at the KDR Range on Fort Bonifacio on January 15, 1973, before an estimated crowd of 5,000 (plus 10,000 outside the gates), the first and only public execution by musketry during the martial-law era. In 1973, action star Joseph Estrada’s JE Productions won the Filipino Academy of Movie Arts and Sciences (FAMAS) award for Best Picture for the film “Kill the Pushers” (1972), which chronicles the Marcos administration’s war on drugs leading up to the capture of the businessman-druglord. The other judicial executions under martial law were semi-private affairs involving a select group of witnesses and employing the electric chair in Muntinlupa (Ocampo 2016).  A notable case of capital punishment during the Marcos era was the electrocution on May 17, 1972 of Jaime Gomez Jose, Basilio Pineda, Jr., and Edgardo Payumo Aquino (the fourth defendant, Rogelio Sevilla Cañal, died of an overdose in prison in 1971), convicted of the June 26, 1967 forcible abduction and rape of actress Maggie de la Riva (Supreme Court 1971). 

Dee, Dewey   A Chinese-Filipino businessman and prominent player in the textile and apparel industry, Dewey Dee fled to Canada in January 1981, leaving behind some US$ 90 million (roughly 635 million pesos) in debts.  Dee’s flight triggered a domestic financial crisis, the “Crash of 1981” (Lopez 2002, 129). The Central Bank responded by extending emergency funding to bail out affected financial institutions, many of them crony-owned. The favoritism shown to cronies angered members of the business community.  In his letter the Asian Wall Street Journal, Jaime Ongpin (1981)—younger brother of Finance Minister Roberto Ongpin (see Binondo Central Bank) and later Minister of Finance under Corazon Aquino—pointed out that, rather than blaming the country’s financial problems on the “Dee caper,” “[a]ll that Dee can be ‘credited’ for is accelerating the day of reckoning for the ‘victims’ [crony-owned businesses] who have been ailing for sometime.” Ongpin blamed the “avarice and incompetence” of the “self-proclaimed victims” (as opposed to the “silent majority” who were the “true victims” of the crisis) and their “gross exploitation of political connections and unbridled access to government financial institutions” for deepening the economic crisis that hit the Philippines in the early 1980s.  While decreasing textile tariffs were the immediate reason for Dee’s financial problems (Broad 1988, 112), the larger debt crisis that would go on to swamp the country was triggered by the October 6, 1979 decision of Paul Volcker, chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, to raise the federal funds rates (the rate peaking at 21.5% in 1980, just after Ronald Reagan won the U.S. Presidential election) in an effort to fight inflation by tightening the money supply. From the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, inflation had been increasing rapidly, owing in part to the huge American spending on the Vietnam War.  Normally, when governments spend to stimulate demand in their economies, there would be more employment, as well as increases in prices (inflation). The oil shocks in the 1970s heightened inflation levels, but the rate of unemployment also rose.  This era is now known as the era of The Great Inflation, and the term “stagflation” was used to characterize the phenomenon of slow economic growth with persistently high rates inflation and unemployment.  The 1979 Federal Reserve Board decision, which raised interest rates and triggered a global economic recession, seriously affected developing countries like Mexico and the Philippines that faced declining commodity prices (see El Niño of 1982-1983) and falling exports, and were unable to make debt service payments. An example is the mining industry, where the price of copper dropped from US$ 0.93 per pound in 1974 to $0.67 in 1982 and $0.62 in 1986; in 1983, Philex Mining Corporation, the country’s oldest mining company, and other copper mining companies failed to generate enough revenue to pay their workers and meet their international loan obligations, and the share of mining exports fell from 21.33% to 12.3% in 1985 (see Camba, Tritto, Silaban 2020, 4-5).  Some of that debt had been taken on in an era of negative interest rates in the late 1970s, when the two major oil shocks (see Bataan Nuclear Power Plant) had brought huge profits to the Arab petroleum-exporting countries, which then deposited their petrodollars in European and American banks on short-term deposit. These banks then lent freely to developing countries. Facing the credit crunch, many of the developing countries turned to the International Monetary Fund and World Bank for help. The IMF and WB extended financial-rescue packages that came with “structural adjustment” conditionality clauses–cut government expenditure, impose inflation-control measures, liberalize trade and capital account, and restrict external debt–policies that in the long run arguably exacerbated income inequality in borrowing countries (Forster, Kentikelenis, Reinsberg, Stubbs and King 2019).

Edifice complex   Coined by Rafael Salas, former executive secretary to Ferdinand Marcos, to describe the state-sponsored, high-profile, high-budget building projects of the Marcos era (Sicat 2014, 417-18; Lico 2003).  These reclamation, building, and urban development projects include the Cultural Center of the Philippines, the Folk Arts Theater, the Philippine International Convention Center (where the International Monetary Fund-World Bank conference was held on October 4-8, 1976), the National Arts Center, luxury hotels, medical institutions, and the Tondo Foreshore and Dagat-Dagatan urban development project (see Miss Universe Pageant, Presidential Assistant on National Minorities, and Chico River Dam Project).  Between 1972 and 1977, the government invested some 19-billion pesos in infrastructure, with the view of making “Greater Manila” a regional hub of the headquarters of international companies and a tourist hub (Letter of Instruction no. 73, s. 1974, cited in Lico 2003, 52).  Imelda Marcos often spearheaded these projects and would eventually be appointed Governor of the Metro Manila Commission in 1976 and Minister of Human Settlements in 1978.  Imelda Marcos’ vision of “The Birth of the City of Man” entailed “development…aimed at the wholeness of the nation, the wholeness of the individual” (Metropolitan Manila: Towards the City of Man, Total Human Resource Development 1985, 35).   Technocrat (and, later, Prime Minister) Cesar Virata’s resistance to Imelda’s plans—which ate into the limited budget of the national development program—earned him the moniker of “Dr. No,” after the James Bond villain (Sicat 2014, 420).

Education Act of 1982   Batas Pambansa bilang 232 provided for the establishment and maintenance of an integrated system of education in the Philippines, applied to and governing the formal and informal systems of public and private education in all levels of the educational system. Recognizing the contribution of private higher education, the law removed legal barriers to providing state aid for private education. It also laid down measures for accreditation at various levels as the basis of privileges and freedom from supervision (Levels 1-4).  The Act allowed private schools to “determine [their] rate of tuition and other school fees and charges” and repealed Presidential Decree no. 451 mandating that sixty percent of the tuition fee hike be allocated to teachers’ salaries and benefits–a provision that, critics say, laid the groundwork for the commercialization of education (Kabataanpartylist.com 2012). Presidential Decree no. 285 (September 3, 1973) authorized the emergency measure of “compulsory licensing or reprinting of scientific, educational or cultural books and materials” (Official Gazette 1973b)—this reprint law made expensive and scarce, especially foreign-published, textbooks available for local purchase and use by Filipino students and scholars.  Presidential Decree no. 49 (November 12, 1972) had previously defined the scope and limitations of copyright, allowing libraries to reproduce out-of-stock published work for research purposes and photocopy unpublished work for preservation purposes (Official Gazette 1972d).

El Niño of 1982-1983   Derived from the Spanish term for “boy,” specifically “Christ child,” because of its advent in December, and classified as a “very strong” event (cf. similar events in 1997-1998 and 2016-2016), this was an unusual El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle in which the eastward movement of the inter-tropical convergence zone in the western Pacific region was not preceded by warm, wet conditions in the eastern equatorial Pacific.  As a result, the region covered by drought expanded beyond parts of the Indian Ocean and western Pacific to include the Philippines (and Hawai’i) (Philander 1990, 38-40). The drought conditions devastated the agricultural sector, particularly on Negros island. In the second half of the nineteenth century, eight of the nine famines that affected Negros and other parts of the Philippines had coincided with El Niño events (Davis 2001, 254).  The Philippines also experienced “strong” El Niño events in 1965-1966 and 1972-1973 (part of the world food crisis of 1973-1975) during the Marcos era.  “Strong” La Niña events, characterized by lower sea surface temperatures across the equatorial Eastern Central Pacific Ocean and bringing heavy rains and flooding, were recorded on 1973-1974 and 1975-1976.

Experimental Cinema of the Philippines   Agency established by Executive Order 770 (January 29, 1982), just after the Manila International Film Festival (see Film Center tragedy), to provide government support for the “promotion of the growth and development of the [local] film industry” (Official Gazette 1982).  Presidential daughter Imee Marcos, who served as Director-General, “half-jokingly” named the organization after the oldest film school in Europe, Sentro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, founded in Italy in 1935, during the fascist dictatorship of Benito “Il Duce” Mussolini (David 2008, 232, 242).  Films produced or imported by the ECP and shown in the Film Center were free from censorship.  A number of progressive filmmakers and artists—notably Lino Brocka—initially supported the ECP (ibid., 232).  Critically-acclaimed films produced by the ECP included Peque Gallaga’s Oro, Plata, Mata (1982) and Ishmael Bernal’s Himala (1982).  The ECP also produced Celso Ad. Castillo’s sexually explicit Isla (1985). On August 8, 1985, the ECP was abolished and replaced with the Film Development Foundation of the Philippines (Executive Order no. 1051). Noted filmmakers like Brocka (Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang, 1974; Maynila, Sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag, 1975; Insiang, 1976; Jaguar, 1977; Bayan Ko: Kapit sa Patalim, 1984), Bernal (Nunal sa Tubig, 1976; City After Dark/Manila By Night, 1980), Mario O’ Hara (Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos, 1976), Mike de Leon (Itim, 1976;Kakabakaba Ka Ba?, 1980; Kisapmata, 1981; Sister Stella L, 1984), Lupita Aquino-Kashiwara (Minsa’y Isang Gamu-Gamo, 1976) Marilou Diaz-Abaya (Brutal, 1980; Moral, 1982; Karnal, 1983), Kidlat Tahimik (Mababangong Bangungot/Perfumed Nightmare, 1977), and Eddie Romero (Ganito Kami Noon…Paano Kayo Ngayon?, 1976) produced some of their best work in the 1970s and 1980s, a period known as the Second Golden Age of Philippine Cinema. In the final years of the Marcos era, the Film Center exhibited privately produced, sexually explicit films like Tikoy Aguiluz’s “Boatman” (1984) and Peque Gallaga’s “Scorpio Nights” (1985), which were big box-office hits (Wilson 1986).  Director Tikoy Aguiluz argued that “The Film Center makes its money off the sex movies so it can show the good ones. It’s like the mother who sells her daughter on the street so the next child can go to the university. It is crazy–but it’s the Philippines” (quoted in Wilson 1986). See also Bomba and Softdrink beauties

Film Center tragedy    The Manila Film Center, then known as the Manila Film Palace, was intended to serve as the venue of the Manila International Film Festival (MIFF), scheduled for January 18-29, 1982.  On November 17, 1981, the collapse of a scaffolding on the fourth floor caused the death of about a dozen workers (Severino 2005). The tragedy gave rise to rumors of sabotage, bodies left buried in cement, and ghostly sightings. The MIFF lasted only two years and was abandoned in 1983.

First Quarter Storm    A series of rallies, demonstrations, and strikes that took place between January and March 1970, it represented the country’s “first urban movement to make national, integrated demands” (Boudreau 2004, 73).  Protestors burned effigies of a coffin (symbolizing the death of democracy), a crocodile (symbolizing the corrupt Congress), and the President himself as the First Couple emerged from the Congress building following the State of the Nation Address on January 26.  On January 30, the “Battle of Mendiola” broke out as protestors clashed with the police. Protestors commandeered a truck and rammed it through Gate 4 of Malacañang Palace and six people were killed as police tried to break up the demonstration. The Movement for a Democratic Philippines organized protests on February 12, 18, and 26 at the Plaza Miranda, drawing crowds of thousands. Jeepney drivers, with the support of students, organized a citywide strike and a “People’s March” on March 3.  Sympathetic coverage by the opposition-owned mass media (see, for example, the classic collection of essays by Lacaba 1982) helped disseminate the messages of the demonstrators and stoke a sense of political crisis. A year later, between February 1-9, 1971, a Republic of Diliman (also known as the “Diliman Commune,” see Tuta and Beams, Dovie) would be established by students, teachers, and residents of the University of the Philippines-Diliman, in solidarity with transport workers protesting the three-centavo increase in oil prices.  

Galman, Rolando C.   Tricycle driver, military asset, professional hitman, and alleged assassin of Benigno Aquino, Jr., shot and killed on August 21, 1983.  The government tried to pin the blame for Aquino’s assassination on the Communist New People’s Army, stating that Galman was one Ka Bert Ramos, but this theory was rejected by the Agrava Fact-Finding Commission. Galman’s common-law wife Lina Lazaro and girlfriend Anna Oliva and her sister Catherine disappeared.  See Assassinations and massacres and salvage

Gawad Pambansang Alagad ng Sining   See National Artist Award

Human Rights Violations  See Torture and Salvage

Iginuhit ng Tadhana: The Ferdinand E. Marcos Story   Mythmaking 1965 bio-pic (English translation: Decreed by Destiny) detailing the life and career of Ferdinand Edralin Marcos and his courtship of, marriage to, and family and electoral-campaign life with Imelda Marcos. The film absolves Marcos of the Julio Nalundasan murder and paints Marcos as a war hero, devoted son, faithful husband, loving family man, and rising-star politician destined for greatness.   Released by Sampaguita Pictures and directed by Mar Torres, Jose de Villa and Conrado Conde, based on the screenplay by Luciano B. Carlos and Emmanuel G. Borlaza, the film starred Luis Gonzalez (Ferdinand Marcos), Gloria Romero (Imelda Romualdez Marcos), and Rosa Mia (Josefa Edralin Marcos).  Prior to the release of the film on September 7, 1965, as part of the lead-up to the November 9 presidential election, Marcos had commissioned an English-language biography, For Every Tear a Victory: The Ferdinand E. Marcos Story (1964), written by Hartzell Spence and published in America.  In 1969, a biography of Imelda Marcos by Kerima Polotan (1969) was published in America.  Government censors banned the showing of the movie on September 17, 1965.   Carmen Navarro Pedrosa’s unauthorized biography (1969) of Imelda caused a stir, with its revelation of the troubled marital history of Imelda’s parents, Imelda’s childhood spent living in a garage, and her relationship with (the then married) Ariston Nakpil.  Pedrosa, who once worked for the Lopez-owned Manila Chronicle and whose husband had been an executive of the Lopez-owned Meralco, later claimed that she had to fend off a US$125,000 bribe offer and several telephone threats (Ellison 2005, 100).  Biography as a publicity (and campaign) tool to burnish a politician’s image and popularity is not new.  Sol H. Gwekoh published biographies of Elpidio Quirino (1949) and Diosdado Macapagal (1962), while Ramon Magsaysay’s political adviser Marvin Gray co-authored The Magsaysay Story with Carlos P. Romulo (Romulo and Gray 1956).  A bio-film on Macapagal, “Hirap at Tagumpay,” was not released.

Jabidah Massacre  Also known as the Corregidor Incident or Corregidor Affair, alleged massacre of between 14 and 28 (McKenna 1998, 140) Muslim Tausug trainees who had been recruited for a covert commando unit, codenamed “Jabidah.” Undertaken by the Philippine Army and administered by the Civil Affairs Office, Oplan Merdeka aimed to infiltrate Sabah, conduct guerrilla warfare, incite an uprising, and prepare the way for Philippine occupation of the territory. On December 30, 1967, between 135 to 180 recruits left their training camp in Simunul, Tawi-Tawi (then part of Sulu) for Corregidor, arriving on the island on January 3. In February 1968, the recruits decided to secretly send a letter of petition to President Marcos bearing their complaints about the miserable conditions of their training. The recruits had not been paid their monthly allowance and were forced to endure bad food and sleeping quarters. The signatories of the letter received information that they would be considered “resigned” effective March 1.  On March 18, the recruits were taken to the airport in batches of twelve at different times.  They were shot at the airport; only one person, Jubin Arula, survived the shooting (Vitug and Gloria 2000, 2-25). The massacre, exposed by Benigno Aquino, Jr. in his March 28, 1968 speech (see Bomba), played a role in advancing the Bangsa Moro struggle. Datu Udtog Matalam cited the massacre as a rationale for establishing the Muslim (later changed to Mindanao) Independence Movement in 1968 (McKenna 1988, 144-46). The massacre inspired Nur Misuari to embark on a political career and rise through the leadership ranks of the secessionist movement before the student branch of the movement split off to form the Moro National Liberation Front in 1972 (Majul 1985, 45).  The Tripoli Agreement of 1976, which had provided for a ceasefire between the government and the MNLF and set the terms for granting political autonomy to thirteen provinces in Mindanao, Sulu and Palawan, was not fully implemented.  Instead, in 1977, Ferdinand Marcos unilaterally proclaimed an autonomous region and organized a referendum that offered only limited autonomy and devolution of power.  A faction of the MNLF, headed by Hashim Salamat, began operating separately under the name of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in 1981 to work for the establishment of an Islamic state in the Southern Philippines.     

Japayuki   Filipino version of “karayuki-san” (唐行きさん, kara= China or other overseas destinations+yuki=to go to+san=honorific title), which originally referred to Japanese women who worked abroad as prostitutes, querida, or geisha. Entering the popular lexicon circa 1982, “Japayuki” refers to women—Filipino and, more generally, Southeast Asian—in sexualized occupations in Japan (Mackie 2004, 59).  In 1978, some 7,455 Filipino “tourists” entered Japan, mostly as female “entertainers”; by 1982, the figure had risen to 24,712 (Cabilao 1978, 78). The number of Filipinos in Japan —the majority of whom were female and Overseas Performing Artists (OPAs)—continued to increase throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. In 1999, for example, out of 144,000 Filipinos, eighty-five percent were women, of whom 60,455 were OPAs and 54,004 were spouses and children of Japanese (Fuwa and Anderson 2006, 117). Only in 2005 was there a drastic decline in the number of Filipino entertainers as new and strict regulations were put in place in response to criticism of Japan by the U.S. State Department’s Fourth Trafficking in Persons Report (ibid.).  

Jeproks   Tadbalik (transposition of syllables) argot for person who lives in the housing projects of Quezon City, immortalized in the 1977 Mike Hanopol hit song “Laki sa Layaw-Jeproks.”   Other popular tadbalik words from the Marcos era include erpat (father) and ermat (mother), waswit or watot (asawa, spouse), dehins (hindi, not), goli (ligo, take a bath), golets (let’s go), astig (tigas, tough), tsekot (kotse, car), botak (takbo [run], shoes), enka (kain, eat), replaced by chibog (bo-chi, derived from subo, to take in food), syota or tasyo (“short time,” girlfriend), alaws (wala, none), tibak (aktib, from aktibista, activist), naspu (punas, wipe), and yosi (sigarilyo, cigarette). Sample sentence: Pogi pero dehin goli.  Slang popular during the Marcos era include: baduy (uncool, unfashionable), sputing (from “sporting,” well-dressed), walastik (walang plastic, genuine, awesome; often used alongside walandyo), makulit (maulit, pesky), burgis (bourgeois), silahis (bisexual), chimay (domestic helper), bagets (bagito, meaning young newbie, greenhorn; teenager). Other popular argots include “kolehiyala” (coed) Taglish (“Let’s make tusok-tusok the fish balls.”) and “swardspeak” (gayspeak, gay lingo, attributed by Jose Javier Reyes [1977] to columnist Nestor Torre; for example, bongga, awesome, stylish, flamboyant; Thunder Cats or wrangler, old person; Tom Jones, hungry; Carmi Martin, karma; fayatollah kumenis, thin; Julie Yap-Daza, huli, caught)  (Alba 2996; Francisco 2006; Reyes 1977; Hart and Hart 1990; De Guzman 2017).  See Manila Sound

Jingle Songbook/Chordbook Magazine   Edited by Far Eastern University graduate Gilbert Guillermo (and later by Ces Rodriguez), this iconic Filipino music magazine–briefly renamed Twinkle in 1973-1975–debuted in 1970 with a naked, impish, pissing (the Filipino slang for which is “jingle”) cherub designed by Emil Davocol as mascot, and went on to become the Bible of several generations of guitar-playing and music-loving Filipinos (Pardo 2013; Concepcion 2020; Escasa 2012). The cover of the maiden “chapter” of the bimonthly “songbook magazine” (later amended to “chordbook magazine”), which quickly sold out at 3 pesos a copy, originally featured popular actress and singer Nora Aunor, but was criticized for being “baduy” and replaced in the second printing with ex-Beatle Paul McCartney (De Jesus 2020).  Jingle provided not only the guitar chords and lyrics to popular (and protest) songs from the Philippines (see Manila Sound) and abroad, but also carried articles on musicians and the music scene in the Philippines, U.S., and United Kingdom (Rhythm and News), and on current events and human-interest stories. It also published poetry, fiction (including Lualhati Bautista’s now-classic novel Dekada ’70), and literary essays (This Page Tells a Story); comics and art work; columns; jokes, often risqué (or “green,” hence Grin Page); book and movie reviews; album reviews with a rating system consisting of the Chordian Angel “superior” rave, the three-bell “very good” to “mediocre,” and the bangaw/blowfly “forget it” pan; and letters from readers (Bongga at Boquilla). The success of Jingle spawned sister publications like the bestselling Jingle Songhits Magazine; The Best of Jingle “annual collection of the best hits, past and present”; Jingle Keys and Jingle Organ for keyboard playing; Jingle Bells featuring Christmas songs; Jingle Beatles and Bee Gees Songbook; Extra Hot! and Sensation for movie and entertainment celebrity fans; and Champcovering sports. The last chapter of Jingle Chordbook Magazine came out in 1997.

Kabataang Barangay   Created by Presidential Decree no. 684 on April 15, 1975, and modeled on the Soviet Komsomol (Landé 1986, 128), the Pambansang Katipunan ng Kabataang Barangay was intended to be the government-sanctioned and -subsidized version of the radical-nationalist Kabataang Makabayan. Its first chairperson was presidential daughter Imee Marcos and its membership was largely drawn from the ranks of the poor (between fifteen and eighteen years of age, later raised to twenty-one). This barangay-level youth organization was the principal agency responsible for promoting youth participation in the political life of the Bagong Lipunan.

Katas ng Saudi   Literally, “sap of Saudi,” meaning the fruit of one’s earnings in Saudi, phrase used by Overseas Contract Workers (OCW, forerunners of the Overseas Filipino Workers) based in Saudi Arabia and more generally the Middle East, often emblazoned on jeepneys, sari-sari stores, and other products of OCW investment.  The oil-price hikes of the 1970s (see Bataan Nuclear Power Plant) created an economic boom in the Middle East and fueled the demand for labor, particularly in the construction sector.  The Marcos government’s New Labor Code in 1974 and bilateral labor agreement with Iran in 1975 signaled a new era in which the state would come to play an active role in promoting and regulating the export of Filipino labor abroad. The government viewed the labor export program as a “temporary measure” to “ease underemployment” (National Economic and Development Authority, Philippine Development Plan, 1978-1982, quoted in The Labour Trade 1987, 18).  As the political and financial crises (triggered by the global debt crisis [see Dee, Dewey] and the assassination of Benigno Aquino, Jr.) worsened in the early 1980s, the Central Bank turned to labor export as a stop-gap measure: “Tapping the remittances of Filipino workers would be the most immediate and obvious means by which the country could improve the BOP [balance of payments] position which was estimated to be US$1.1 billion in the red last year” (ibid.).  While men constituted the majority (88%) of the OCWs deployed in 1975, the percentage of female workers would increase to 47% by 1987 and reach as high as 69% (73% of the newly hired) by 2002 (in 2019, the proportion of female workers was 56%) (Philippine Overseas Employment Administration 2003; Fast Facts on Filipino Labor Migration 1999).  The category of OCW also included Filipino seafarers, who used the phrase “Katas ng Barko” (ship). Over the next decades, they would go on to account for one-quarter of the 1.2 million seafarers who make it possible for nine-tenths of the global trade to be conducted by sea (The Economist 2019).  In addition to OCWs, there had been a substantial number of Filipinos who migrated to the United States and worked in plantations, canneries, mines, restaurants, hotels, and households from the first decade of the twentieth century to the 1930s, and as professionals and as spouses and minor children reunited with their families based in America in the wake of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.  Filipino workers have long been an integral part of the global trade system. In fact, historians date the birth of world trade to the establishment of the entrepôt city of Manila in 1571 (Flynn and Giráldez 1995, 201). Filipinos built and manned the galleon ships that linked Asia, the Americas, and Europe from the sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries; some one-third of the total silver produced in the Americas over 250 years passed through the Philippines (Legarda 1999, 44).  From the nineteenth century onward, Filipinos roamed the world’s sea lanes as marineros who were better known under the brand name “Manilamen,” working as manual and domestic workers in London and Hong Kong, settling in Marseilles, Barcelona, Singapore, and Capetown, diving for pearl in Australia, and hiring themselves out as mercenaries in the Boxer Rebellion (Aguilar 2012b).  “Manilla men” were not just a part of the crew of “seamen of all tribes” who operated Captain Ahab’s whaling ship Pequod in Herman Melville’s classic American novel Moby Dick (1851).  Possessed of “vivid, tiger-yellow complexion peculiar to some of the aboriginal natives of the Manillas;–a race notorious for a certain diabolism of subtility” (Chapter 48), they made up the secret crew members of Captain Ahab’s personal harpoon boat.  Chapter 50 of the novel has Captain Ahab “standing in the boat’s stern, and the Manilla men were springing to their oars” as they pursue the Great White (Sperm) Whale.  In the late twentieth century, the growing importance of Overseas Filipino Workers and their remittances for the Philippine economy and society would be confirmed by Corazon Aquino’s christening of these workers as “bagong bayani” (new heroes). The sheer amount of OFW remittances—representing eight to ten percent of the Gross Domestic Product between 2012 and 2019 (Dumlao 2014; Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas 2020)–has had enormous consequences for the Philippine economy, stabilizing the macroeconomy and boosting the current account, domestic consumption, and domestic investment. 

Kilusang Bagong Lipunan   A pro-government party created in February 1978, the KBL won landslide victories in the Interim Batasang Pambansa (1978), local (1980) and presidential (1981) election. (The opposition party Lakas ng Bayan [LABAN], founded by Benigno Aquino, Jr. in 1978, merged with the Partido Demokratiko Pilipino [PDP], led by Corzaon Aquino’s brother Jose Cojuangco, in 1983.  PDP-LABAN then formed an alliance with Salvador Laurel’s umbrella United Nationalist Democratic Organization [UNIDO] to field the Cory-Doy team for the snap presidential election in 1986.)  While not a monolithic entity, its political machine controlled sixty-nine out of seventy-three provincial governments and fifty-three out of fifty-nine city governments and a substantial majority of the municipal and barangay posts across the country (Timberman 1991, 144).  The “Bagong Lipunan” (New Society, cf. Suharto’s Orde Baru, “New Order” in Indonesia), coined specifically for the Philippines under martial law (“To save the Republic and form a new society”), came with PLEDGES (Peace and Order, Land Reform, Economic Development, Development of Moral Values, Government Reforms, Educational Reforms, Social Services) and slogans like “Support the New Society,” “Bagong buhay sa Bagong Lipunan” (which Marcos critics amended to “Bagong buhay sa bahong lipunan”) and “Sa ikaunlad ng bayan, disiplina ang kailangan.”  On Independence Day, 1978, Ferdinand Marcos signed Presidential Decree no. 1413 adopting “Isang Bansa, Isang Diwa” (One Nation, One Spirit) as the country’s official national motto.  Other keywords associated with the Marcos era include “democratic revolution” (“a revolution in the tradition of our democracy,” Marcos 1971),  “Filipino Ideology” (1979), “revolution from the center” (as opposed to revolution from above or below, with the government serving as a “faithful instrument of the people’s revolutionary hopes,” [Almonte and Vitug 2015, 81]), “smiling martial law” (Marcos 1977b, 132, citing foreign press coverage), and “constitutional authoritarianism” (defining the constitutional basis of martial law [see Ruiz 1993]).  The “Marcos”-authored books were ghostwritten by a team of writers (including Adrian Cristobal, Fred dela Rosa, and Yen Makabenta) working under the supervision of a propaganda group organized by Blas Ople in 1971 (Reyes 2018, 181, 192).  Almonte, who claimed that the book Revolution from the Center was based on his doctoral dissertation, even as the book drew on material from previous “Marcos”-authored books (Reyes 2018, 190), was then with the think-tank Philippine Center for Advanced Studies, attached to the University of the Philippines and active between 1973 and 1979.

A Marcos-Era Glossary: A-C, D-K, L-P, Q-Z, Bibliography