by Peter Church
Between the achievement of independence in 1946 and the Marcos coup in 1972, the Philippines was a constitutional democracy with all the trappings of an American‐style political system. In practice, it was a system of intra‐elite struggle based on powerful patron–client relations, at the apex of which were the landed families. The most serious opposition came from the Huk movement, based on support from impoverished tenant farmers and landless labourers in central Luzon. The Huks were in open rebellion against the Philippines state between 1946 and 1953. They were crushed by a combination of coordinated military activity and rural reforms introduced by President Magsaysay. However, rural discontent and unrest has remained a serious problem in the Philippines down to the present day. Local military and police forces are used by the local elites to contain rural resistance and, where they fail, extensive private armies owned by the landlords are brought into play.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the underlying rural problems were masked by the apparent success of the industrialisation policies of the Philippines government. The state promoted import‐substitution manufacturing by imposing high tariffs and import controls and by managing the exchange rate. A new industrialist class emerged. Some were from the wealthy landed elite, diversifying their capital away from its rural origins. Others emerged from professionals and traders, who created joint ventures with foreign, predominantly American, companies or with wealthy local Chinese. By the 1960s, the Philippines was the most successful manufacturing country in South‐East Asia and appeared to be the most prosperous. Urbanisation occurred apace. From the manufacturing companies built up behind tariff walls and state subsidies emerged a number of conglomerates with interests in agribusiness, real estate, and banks as well as manufacturing. Some became multinationals.
THE MARCOS ERA
Ferdinand Marcos was elected president in 1965 and reelected in 1969. He was a career politician. Neither he nor his wife, Imelda, came from the powerful landed oligarchy and thus he was dependent on powerful and wealthy patrons for financing his electoral machine. Marcos was openly unimpressed with the democratic system, arguing that it should be replaced by what he called “constitutional authoritarianism,” a system he saw as being more in keeping with Filipino political culture.
In 1972, Marcos proclaimed martial law. Many explanations have been advanced for this decisive break with Philippines political history. First, Marcos was constitutionally barred from standing for a third term as president. In his determination to hold onto power, he was prepared to destroy the Constitution. Second, the halcyon days of the 1950s and 1960s had turned sour. The Philippines economy was stagnant, per‐capita income was falling, foreign debt had grown to serious levels, and there was growing middle‐class discontent about political corruption and the inability of the political system to solve the country's social and economic problems. Third, the military leadership was willing to become more directly involved in running the country. Military leaders welcomed the suspension of democratic processes and the increased power that flowed to them as a consequence.
Many Filipinos initially welcomed Marcos' move. The New Society promoted by Marcos was attractive to many of the urban middle class and intellectuals. It promised law and order in a hitherto insecure society; it promised to provide the infrastructure and stability needed to attract the foreign investment essential if the economy was to revive; and it promised land reform and an end to the corruption that had bedevilled the Philippines since independence. Martial law was also welcomed by outsiders, including foreign investors, the United States government, and other South‐East Asian governments, most of which were themselves, in various degrees, military‐dominated regimes.
Initially, the Marcos dictatorship did stimulate increased foreign investment and a return to economic growth. However, by the early 1980s new economic and political weaknesses had become obvious. Under the guise of creating a New Society, Marcos systematically undercut the political power of the landed elite at both national and local levels. Businesses belonging to his political opponents were confiscated, licenses were withdrawn, and state enterprises became part of the president's personal fiefdom. He was able to do all of this because he had the support of the military leadership. The beneficiaries, apart from the Marcoses themselves and favoured military leaders, were a small group of friends and relatives who were provided with lucrative monopolies, government contracts, and cheap finance. “Crony capitalism” was taken to spectacular heights by the late 1970s. Through all of this, Marcos and his family acquired enormous personal wealth, with the removal of the boundary between state finances and personal income. Corruption and nepotism were practiced on an unprecedented scale. While the landed oligarchy lost their political power, Marcos ensured that their economic interests were protected. Any notion of land reform and an end to rural poverty remained mere rhetoric.
Marcos centralised state power but did not create an institutionally strong state. The power of the state depended on personal loyalties, primarily from army commanders to Marcos. By the 1980s the Philippines was a society in danger of falling apart. The Moro Nationalist Liberation Front (MNLF) in the south had 50–60,000 guerrillas fighting for an independent Muslim state. More than half of the Philippines army was engaged in fighting it. The remainder was engaged against the New People's Army (NPA), the communist‐controlled front organisation, which by the mid‐1980s had about 15,000 guerrillas and was able to launch commando‐style raids in towns and cities, including Manila. Opposition to Marcos became more public and more strident. In August 1983, Benigno Aquino, Marcos' most prominent and popular political opponent, returned to the Philippines from his exile in the United States, but failed to set foot on Philippines soil. As he descended the aircraft steps at Manila airport, he was assassinated by one of the accompanying soldiers. The military leadership denied involvement, as did Marcos. The death of Aquino began a process of open resistance to Marcos, a resistance led by the Manila middle class.
Under pressure from the United States, and still supremely confident of his ability to fix elections, Marcos called a snap presidential election for early 1986. Despite the vote rigging he lost. In a few chaotic months in Manila, Cory Aquino, the widow of Benigno Aquino, claimed victory and prepared for an inauguration organized by her supporters. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Marcos continued to claim victory and moved toward his own inauguration. The imminent danger of serious bloodshed, if not outright civil war, was averted when a number of significant army leaders deserted Marcos and moved over to support Aquino. Marcos fled the Philippines. Cory Aquino became president. “People power” had won.
THE RESTORATION OF DEMOCRACY
With the end of martial law, the exile of Marcos and the inauguration of Cory Aquino, Philippines politics returned to its pre‐1972 constitutional form. The landed gentry retained their wealth and restored their political power. Many of those who lost out under Marcos had their fortunes restored. The great families still dominate the Philippines. Despite all the promises of the post‐Marcos era, land reform has been negligible and the interests of the landed elite have prevailed. Political loyalties remain personal rather than institutional. The state remains weak, especially compared to the counterparts in neighbouring ASEAN countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
There have been major achievements since 1986. Not least of these were the peaceful and constitutionally correct elections in 1992 which brought Fidel Ramos to power as president. On the economic front, the first four or five years of the Aquino government saw an impressive economic turnaround from the negative growth of the last years of Marcos to a positive growth which peaked at 6.7 percent in 1988. The growth fell away after 1990, in part because of the deteriorating world economy and the economic dislocation caused by the Gulf War of 1991, but also because of the failure of basic infrastructure, such as power, to keep up with demand. By the mid‐1990s, the Philippines had been restored to economic growth levels approaching those achieved elsewhere in ASEAN.
President Ramos proved to be a popular leader, even though he took a number of tough economic decisions which won the praise of the finance sector and ensured the continuation of foreign investment, but understandably alienated some sections of the community which suffered as a result of reductions in state subsidies of key commodities. However, these reforms did to a large extent cushion the economy from the full impact of the Asian economic crisis which swept the region in 1997 and 1998. Ramos also moved to force the police to act against a spate of kidnappings that targeted the wealthier business class. It emerged that the kidnapping gangs were aided by corrupt police and bank workers who passed on details of potential victims' worth. But law and order still remains a key concern for most Filipinos.
Since the Constitution expressly forbids an incumbent president from standing twice, in 1998 Ramos stood aside—somewhat reluctantly it seems—and a former film star, Joseph Estrada, was elected on a populist platform in a landslide result. Initial fears by the finance sector that Estrada's playboy image, insupportable populist election promises, and lack of experience in dealing with economic fundamentals—all in the midst of a regional financial crisis—would spell an end to the reform process initially proved unfounded. The new president proved willing to follow the advice of his experts and not engage in free‐spending policies which might have unsettled investors and led to a flight of foreign capital. However, by the turn of the century, rumours were circulating that Estrada had taken bribes from illegal gambling syndicates. In late 2000, the House of Representatives began moves to impeach him amid claims of massive corruption. Estrada attempted to block the subsequent investigation, triggering large‐scale protests that forced him to stand aside in January 2001. Vice President Gloria Macapagal‐Arroyo became president with strong support from the military, the business community, and the Roman Catholic Church, although many poorer Filipinos refused to believe—and probably continue to do so—that their erstwhile hero was guilty of the corruption and mismanagement charges leveled against him.
Arroyo, a former economist, immediately set out to reassure foreign investors by focusing on the economy. In particular, she accelerated plans to deregulate the power industry, state mismanagement of which had led to the country being subject to repeated brownouts in the 1990s. She also committed her government to enacting other liberalisation measures, such as simplifying the tax code, and pledged to reinvigorate stalled efforts on land reform and poverty‐reduction programmes (though these promises have been made by Filipino leaders many times in the past). In June 2004, she was elected president, with 40 percent of the vote. Her nearest rival received 37 percent. Despite the narrow result, it was an important boost to her authority as she had been appointed, not elected, as leader in 2001 following Estrada's impeachment and could thus not hitherto claim a popular mandate.
In its present form, the constitution forbade Arroyo from seeking a second term in the 2010 presidential elections. Arroyo was jailed in 2011 for corruption charges and released in mid‐2016 after the Supreme Court cleared her of these charges. Though in jail and suffering from an illness, she managed to win a seat in Parliament and served as a congresswoman in the last three elections while being detained.
During the May 2010 presidential elections, Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III, son of Benigno and Corazon Aquino, won a landslide victory against his closest rival and former president, Joseph Estrada. With the death of his mother, Corazon Aquino, in 2009, he swept into power on the back of huge public sympathy. Adored for his parentage and what his name symbolises, he faced an uphill task in governing a country plagued with corruption, poverty, and poor infrastructure. Abroad, Aquino also had to deal with clashes with China over disputed territory in the South China Sea. Yet at the end of his six‐year term, Aquino was credited for his contribution to Philippines' strong economic growth at 6 percent annually for the past few years—one of the highest amongst Asia.
When elections were held in 2016, the former mayor of Davao, Rodrigo “Digong” Duterte, who is known for his maverick anticrime stance, won convincingly. He has scaled up the country's “war on drugs” with devastating consequences. It has led to a staggering number of vigilante killings and the mass incarceration of people associated with drug use and its trade. Twelve years ago, Thailand launched a similar bloody (and ultimately futile) war on drugs. Former Thai prime minister (and before that a former police officer) Thaksin Shinawatra spearheaded Thailand's 2003 war on drugs using inflammatory phrases such as “shoot to kill” and “eye for an eye” to legitimise and incite violence. In three months, Thai police killed more than 2,275 people with impunity and 320,000 people surrendered themselves to the police. And throughout the campaign, public opinion polls showed widespread support—up to 90 percent. In the Philippines, Duterte has parroted Thaksin's violent rhetoric, even calling on ordinary citizens to take up arms and participate in what is effectively state‐sponsored cleansing. The Philippines' media has reported that in two months in mid‐2016 nearly 2,000 Filipinos had been killed and close to 700,000 people had surrendered to authorities. And yet a recent public opinion poll showed that 91 percent of Filipinos support Duterte. Indeed Indonesia experienced a much smaller version between 1983 and 1985 in what became known as the “Petrus killings.” The term petrus was derived from the Indonesian acronym containing the words “mysterious shooters” (penembak misterius). Without undergoing a trial, approximately 10,000 criminals were shot dead. Their bodies were then placed in public places. The executions were part of a President Suharto government effort to reduce crime in an extra‐judicial way due to criminals corruptly manipulating the system. All three examples demonstrate a lack of faith in the administration of justice in these countries and an acceptance by many of the actions of an autocratic leader taking the law into his own hands.
While progress has been made by the government in accommodating the demands of various insurgent groups in the restive southern provinces, sporadic incidents still flare up. The MNLF have mostly abided by a peace agreement struck in 1996 under which they enjoy limited administrative autonomy on the island of Mindanao. The NPA's support declined sharply in the 1990s as a result of the restoration of democracy, more effective army operations, and internal division. It reemerged as a force in June 2003, when 200 insurgents raided an army camp, killing 17 soldiers. Arroyo initially ordered a military crackdown but agreed to peace talks in Norway in 2003, though these were cut short by the NPA after a few months because they claimed that their capacity to negotiate had been hamstrung by the NPA's listing on US and European proscribed terrorist lists. A low‐level insurgency continues.
The Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), an Islamic separatist group which originally split from the MNLF, began negotiations with the government to end nearly four decades of fighting in 2001. In spite of a truce in 2003, intermittent fighting continued. Hopes were high that a comprehensive peace agreement brokered by Malaysia in 2008 would at last see an end to the fighting. The deal was designed to provide an expanded autonomous homeland for about four million Muslims in the southern Philippines. Indeed it did appear both sides would abide by the terms of the treaty, but at the 11th‐hour, talks collapsed amid acrimony and counterclaim on both sides. The MILF had previously admitted allowing the Indonesia‐based Jemaah Islamiah (JI) terrorist organisation to maintain training camps on territory it controls, though it vehemently denies doing so now—such denial being accepted by most observers. At present, MILF has little to gain by cooperating with international terrorist groups such as JI, though informal links may continue. Such links are unlikely to include JI operatives participating in MILF training camps (as in the past), though it is possible that JI members being pursued by Indonesia and Malaysia may be receiving sanctuary in the southern Philippines.
Another Islamic insurgency organisation, the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG), has violently pressed its claims for the establishment of an Islamic state in the south by using kidnappings to extract large ransoms. In February 2
004, the group masterminded the bombing of a new super‐ferry, resulting in 116 deaths. The MILF and ASG officially denied any links but informal contact was believed to occur. In 2015, the Abu Sayyaf group took a few hostages—Malaysian and Indonesian workers, Western tourists, and one Filipino among them. The Indonesian and Malaysian groups were released in early 2016, but two Canadians, Robert Hall and John Ridsdel, were killed after the Canadian government refused to pay the ransom demanded for them. The Filipino was released in mid‐2016 while a Norwegian remains a hostage in spite of repeated negotiations. Some of the rebels have also pledged allegiance to the deadly Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which has struck terror in the region and globally.
One unresolved international issue of extreme historical and modern‐day importance, not just to the Philippines, but to the whole of South‐East Asia and potentially the world, is the current dispute over China's claims to the South China Sea. The Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Brunei all have competing claims. China claims by far the largest portion of territory—an area defined by the “nine‐dash line” which stretches hundreds of miles south and east from its most southerly province of Hainan. China claims its right to the area goes back centuries to when the Paracel and Spratly island chains were regarded as integral parts of the Chinese nation, and in 1947 it issued a map detailing its claims.
