When his second term was ending, Marcos imposed martial law in 1972 and the intention there was to rule without any election but also to get rid of other landlord families, the other parts of the oligarchy because Marcos was (in his self-interpretation) not a part of the old landlord system. And in fact, his intention in the beginning was rather admirable. Some observers thought that Marcos wanted to “improve” the whole country in terms of a little bit of industrialization. And he tried very hard under crony capitalism to establish industries but that did not work out because first of all the World Bank and all other sources of financing and investments dried up and the whole machinery of corruption and subservience to U.S. dictates prevented any real change. So the Marcos dictatorship was forced to shift strategy, employing more violence than persuasion (through bribery, rewards, etc.) In the beginning people approved it. I mean, there was a kind of sentiment that Marcos was doing good, in a way – he abolished many of the private war lords, and people felt that there was peace and order – recall that the New People’s Army (NPA) established in 1969 was no threat at all. So, I think there was this attempt to show that the dictatorship was going to improve the lives of people – well, it didn’t turn out that way. It was foolish then to believe that it would. Incredibly a whole stable of intellectuals hired by Marcos and who are still somehow publicly esteemed is nostalgic about “the good old days.” By 1986, after Ninoy Aquino was killed in 1983, there was a whole popular sentiment to get rid of Marcos because of the economic failure, and the elite and middle strata, including the left, joined the February “People Power” revolt in 1986.

The Marcos period was no doubt a harsh period. Thousands of people were tortured, detained, killed, and disappeared. Accounts of the crimes by Marcos’ henchmen and the military have not been settled up to now, indemnities ordered by the court have not been carried out. Not a single torturer has been punished. Injustice still reigns. The Moro people suffered hundreds of thousands of dead, countless more maimed and orphaned – civilians now treated as “collateral damage.” But now we are in the Arroyo… (mic problems)

OK, we may continue…

After February 1986, Marcos was rescued by the Reagan administration. Cory Aquino, the widow of the slain politician Benigno Aquino, took over and during her rule, there was a moment in which she could have begun reforming the system in a radical direction because in effect she administered an extra-constitutional government. But it was never revolutionary in intent or direction. How could it be when the U.S. was its patron? The old politicians came back and we had a restoration of what is called ‘elite democracy.” So from the Aquino government to the successive regimes of Fidel Ramos, who was the general under Marcos, and then Estrada, and up to Arroyo, the Philippine economy became more and more…what I am trying to say is that the change from the time of Marcos to Arroyo is the time in which the Philippine economy worsened, deteriorated actually. Because, among other things, the semi-feudal system (not just the economic but chiefly the political instrumentalities) continued, there was more and more impoverishment in the countryside, and no real land reform program was carried out.

All that the successive neo-colonial regimes could do was to continue the old system of producing goods for export, only benefiting the propertied few, and also this time with assembly plants coming from the investment of trans-national corporations. The international labor market changed. When China opened up its economy to trans-national corporations in the 80s and 90s, most of the investments dried up in the Philippines and they went to China and to other countries. And today, the system survives with the help of the remittance (amounting to 12 billion dollars annually) sent by 10 million Filipinos abroad—the OFWs (Overseas Filipino Workers) today constitute a new sector of the economy—who are the most reliable earner of foreign exchange. Which means that the unjust and backward system in the Philippines can continue supporting a minority with its obscene outlandish “lifestyle” by the sacrifices and sweat of 10 million Filipinos abroad who send a large part of their earnings to help their families. The economy has deteriorated because land that was used to grow staple crops like rice and corn are no longer producing them so the country has to import food – the Philippines is no longer sufficient in food and this is a symptom of an unequivocally grave crisis.

Now what happened is that while the Arroyo regime was ushered in by a kind of parody of the February 1986 revolt, the previous government was very corrupt and there was a whole popular sentiment to replace him. Arroyo assumed power in 2001 but in the 2004 election, she cheated flagrantly; she was exposed by a reformist section of the military in the “Hello Garci” episode –Arroyo’s phone call to her officials to fabricate a million votes in her favor. The majority of Filipinos recognize that Arroyo has no legitimacy, she has aroused a lot of protests due to rampant corruption by her officials, relatives and cronies, aside from being subservient to the policies of the Bush administration and its “war on terror.” Arroyo now depends on the support of the military, especially on a clique of officials implicated in the election scandals.

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