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Volume 3,  Number 32              September 14 - 20, 2003            Quezon City, Philippines


 





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Martial Law in Retrospect

Will martial law rear its ugly, fascist head once more? Indications are that new variants of martial law without the declaration are being hatched in the form of anti-terrorism bills, as those championed then by Estrada and Panfilo Lacson and now by President Macapagal-Arroyo. They are meant to again defuse any new explosion of anti-imperialist protest.

By Ricco Alejandro M. Santos
Bulatlat.com

Martial law remains one of the darkest episodes in the country's recent past, although it registers in the
minds of most of today’s Filipino youth as just a blur in history books and newspapers. The martial law era – from 1972-1986 - also saw a massive outpouring of heroism, courage and resistance that led to its dramatic end. Powerful lessons must be distilled and drawn from this dark period so that if martial law
reemerges the entire Filipino nation would know how best to respond to it.

On Sept. 21, 1972, then President Marcos declared martial law, shutting down Congress and media outfits belonging to fellow members of the oligarchic upper class, and arrested and detained rival politicians. This meant a complete collapse of the old comprador politics, in which the most well-funded and most effective pretenders as public servants bought and media-packaged their way to profitable government posts.

But the greatest and central target of the iron hand of martial law was the radical, national democratic
movement. In the course of the 14-year dictatorship, the Marcos military and police arrested and jailed
more than 30,000 suspected activists, based on reports by church-based human rights groups. Drum-beating the crackdown was a rabid anti-Communist hysteria, labeling militants and critics as "subversives."  Brutal torture of political detainees became standard operating procedure for the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Philippine Constabulary, now called the Philippine National Police (see box). The reign of terror was directed toward instilling total feudal submission to the supreme warlord in the person of Marcos, then at the head of a clique of generals and cronies.



Seeds of martial law

The seeds of martial law were lain by no less than the father of the present Philippine president, Gloria
Macapagal-Arroyo -- Diosdado Macapagal -- and the International Monetary Fund. Instructed by the IMF, the elder Macapagal in 1961 instituted decontrol -- the free inflow of imports through tariff reductions, and the free repatriation of dollar profits by foreign investors. This first policy measure of Macapagal set the Philippine economy into a tailspin, wiping out more than 10,000 businesses, and creating even greater poverty. Decontrol tightened the neo-colonization of the economy, and whatever small gains were achieved in Filipino industrialization during the period of import and exchange controls.

At the same time, a group of young nationalists led by university professor Jose Maria Sison was quickly reviving the country's anti-imperialist mass movement that had already died down during the 1950s. From its initial base in the University of the Philippines, the ferment grew nationwide, with the formation of the Kabataang Makabayan in 1964. The momentum reached fever pitch in 1968, as the Communist Party of the Philippines emerged, in 1969, with the birth of the New People's Army, and in 1970, with the surge of the legendary First Quarter Storm and its fiery expose of imperialism and feudalism as the country's chief evils.

What was doubly alarming to the foreign corporate powers and their local partner oligarchy was that not
only did this groundswell against imperialism and feudalism augur the weakening of the rule of the old
system, but nationalist changes were finding their way into the very fabric of the ruling power structure.
Three nationalist developments in the country's policy appeared from 1969 to 1972. In 1969, Congress under pressure from a growing anti-imperialist public opinion, passed a Magna Carta that calling for
national industrialization against the dictates of the IMF. Then from 1971 to 1972, nationalists were gaining ground in gathering support for an anti-imperialist agenda in the Constitutional Convention. In 1972, the Supreme Court (SC) issued two decisions unfavorable to the foreign monopolist corporations: one, in the Quasha case, which nullified all sales of private lands to American citizens after 1945, and other rolled back oil price hikes by the oil cartel.

With the nationalist trend on a roll, perpetuating colonial privileges for foreign interests as the
Laurel-Langley Agreement and Military Bases Agreement soon to expire were in dire peril. For the
powers-that-be, it was time to cut short the growth of the anti-imperialist movement responsible for the
nationalist mood in the streets as well as in the halls of government. Hence, martial law.

The Nixon administration – speaking through the American Chamber of Commerce in Manila – hailed the
proclamation of martial law and, in particular, expected the growth of foreign investment in the country. The very first act of Marcos after issuing martial law decrees was to reverse the SC decision on the Quasha case to the cheers of his foreign corporate patrons as martial law's chief beneficiaries. And as an U.S. Congress report admitted, the martial law period was a time for extending imperialist privileges for foreign investment even further. In addition, for the masterminds of martial law, the fascist clampdown on civil liberties "took care" of the nationalist movement -- or so, they thought. Meanwhile, supported by its foreign corporate and U.S. government patrons, the Marcos clique exploited the situation to enrich itself at the expense of its political and business rivals.

Even before martial law was declared, the CIA was already aware that the Marcoses were extremely
corrupt, pocketing huge amounts of military aid dollars. But Marcos’s foreign patrons were only too
happy that the president’s greed was also matched by his puppetry to foreign interests. During martial
law, Swiss banks collaborated with the Marcoses in money-laundering and stashing away the loot, estimated to reach $10 billion by the fall of the dictatorship.

Both U.S. imperialist spin-doctors and the Marcos regime attempted to peddle the fiction that martial
law was aimed at, and was succeeding in, modernizing the country. This deception was popularly packaged as "new society" and "democratic revolution." Advertised as the regime's antifeudal centerpiece, Marcos' land reform preserved the landholdings of the richest hacienderos, while forcing amortizing heavily indebted peasants to forfeit their landlords to merchant-usurers. Philippine society remained as semicolonial and semifeudal as ever.

Underground movement

While martial law dislocated the revolutionary movement in the short-term, it boosted the revolution
in the long-term. Thousands of activists went underground and led the construction of nationwide
resistance among the peasant and urban poor masses.  Against tremendous odds and at the cost of steep sacrifices at the outset, guerrilla war eventually surged. By the early 1980s, the ruling establishment was already greatly alarmed at the growth of the New People's Army and the National Democratic Front.

Released by Marcos under U.S. pressure, Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino, Marcos's chief rival in the feudal
oligarchy, flew back to the Philippines in 1983, in a bid, as he himself described it, to help contain the
revolutionary upsurge. His assassination in the hands of the Marcos regime only fuelled the fires of
protest from all quarters--including sections of the U.S. imperialist establishment. While U.S. President
Reagan and the Pentagon opted to hang on to Marcos as long as possible, the U.S. State Department decided much earlier to cast their lot with a more marketable puppet in the person of a feudal hacienda owner, Corazon Cojuangco Aquino, the widow of Marcos's rival.
 
Even as the rise of U.S. sponsored Marcos replacement rapidly shunted aside and marginalized the open urban national-democratic forces responsible for largely sustaining the protest from 1983 to 1986, it was the fear among U.S. imperialist policy-makers of the growth of the national-democratic revolution that
impelled them to "cut and cut clean" its patronage over Marcos. So ended martial law.

Anti-U.S. bases struggle

Although the rise of Cory Aquino did somewhat dampen the anti-imperialist fever, as Marcos and his foreign  patrons hoped to do with martial law, post-Marcosanti-imperialist consciousness in the form of
opposition to the U.S. military bases remained high.  In 1991, amid nationalist stirrings, the effort to
extend the U.S. military bases agreement was defeated.
 
However, anti-imperialism did not find equal success in confronting new forms of imperialism, which were more deceptive and even more disastrous for the Filipino people. In 1995, Decontrol Diosdado's daughter, then Sen. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, led the pro-globalization drive in the Senate to foist the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs of 1994, or the World Trade Organization, on the country. The Macapagal plague had come full circle.

New variants of martial law

Will martial law rear its ugly, fascist head once more? Indications are that new variants of martial
law without the declaration are being hatched in the form of anti-terrorism bills, as those championed then by Estrada and Panfilo Lacson and now by Arroyo. They are meant to again defuse any new explosion of anti-imperialist protest. This trend has received a massive boost with the high-gear imperialist campaign of U.S. President Bush launched on the pretext of anti-terrorism. The Bush forces have already occupied and imposed martial law in Iraq, but the results are extremely disastrous both for the American forces and the Iraqi people.

But in the case of the Filipino people, they do not have to search for examples of martial law beyond
their shores with which to gauge their impact and prospects. The lessons of the Philippines' own martial law history are clear: martial law will face certain resistance and even, to the utter disappointment of its architects, certain defeat. Bulatlat.com

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