Park Chung Hee Era
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Park and Marcos before 1972: Rising to Power and Consolidating Presidential Authority
At the outset of Park’s rule in South Korea and Marcos’s in the Philippines, many elements of divergence between the social, institutional, political, political-economic, and geopolitical contexts stand out, most notably what can be broadly characterized as (1) the historical legacies of state centralization versus decentralization; (2) long-standing experiences with authoritarian rule versus democratic institutions; (3) the “equalizing”
impact of thorough postwar land reform versus mere land resettlement schemes and enduring inequalities; (4) a clear versus a thoroughly blurred distinction between political and economic elites; (5) economic elites dependent on and manipulated by the state versus political-economic elites able to pillage and manipulate the state; (6) a concerted postwar process of political centralization versus enduring patterns of decentralization; (7) nationalist assertion versus the endurance of colonial-era economic patterns; (8) a solidly anti-leftist state versus (what we know in hindsight was) a much more tentative defeat of a leftist challenge from below; and (9) external threat versus absence of threat. In this section, I will build on this
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analysis and trace the two leaders’ respective paths to power, their goals once in power, and their subsequent decisions to discard democratic institutions and declare martial law.
Personal Backgrounds
In the mid-1960s, as American troops were dispatched to Vietnam in ever greater numbers, two of the United States’ major allies in Asia were President Ferdinand Marcos and President Park Chung Hee. The two new leaders met each other at conferences of U.S.-backed regional organizations, proclaimed “free world” solidarity in treks to Lyndon Johnson’s Washington, and—in exchange for American assistance—supported U.S. counterinsurgency efforts in Vietnam: Korea with nearly 50,000 combat troops and the Philippines with a much smaller engineering battalion of 2,000
soldiers.34 Within this larger geopolitical context, we find both important similarities and important differences between the two presidents and their rise to power.
Park and Marcos were both men of provincial origins, born and raised under colonial rule. But while Park grew up in a peasant family, Marcos’s forebears enjoyed substantial landholdings in the hardscrabble Ilocos region of northwest Luzon and held such posts as judge, mayor, and village head. Ferdinand’s family moved to Manila when he was young, and his father, after finishing law school, was elected to Congress in 1924.
Ferdinand was preparing to follow in his father’s footsteps, but in the late 1930s was among those accused in the 1935 killing of an Ilocano politician who had defeated his father in a congressional race that year. In a nationally celebrated 1940 case, law student Ferdinand Marcos pled his innocence before the Philippine Supreme Court and had his earlier conviction for the murder overturned. In the same period in which Park found social mobility through a career in the Japanese colonial military establishment, therefore, Marcos became yet another of the “modern lawyer-politicians” bred under American colonial rule.
After his first election to Congress in 1949, Marcos displayed no strong political convictions but did show considerable political acumen. His electoral success was advanced at least in part by the mythology of his heroic role as a guerrilla fighter during the Japanese occupation; while falsely claiming to be the recipient of some thirty medals for battling the Japanese, Marcos may in fact have spent part of the war years collaborating with the Japanese. Also of considerable political value, particularly as he moved from a local congressional constituency to a national senatorial constituency in 1959, was his 1954 marriage to Imelda Romualdez, a for-
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mer beauty queen from the Visayas (a vote-rich region in the center of the archipelago).35 In 1963, Marcos was elected president of the Philippine Senate. After switching from the Liberal to the Nacionalista Party prior to the elections, Marcos defeated the incumbent (Liberal Party) president, Diosdado Macapagal, and took office at the end of 1965.
Prior to assuming the presidency, both Park and Marcos overcame major early adversities that nearly cut their careers short: Park’s conviction for involvement in the leftist Yôsu-Sunch’ôn rebellion, and Marcos’s trial for murder. But the terrain of their journeys was entirely distinct. Park was a military man who came to power via a coup d’état, and his transition to electoral politics in 1963 was in large part due to U.S. pressure. A di-minutive, introverted man, Park had an almost total lack of political charisma and “never hid his distaste for elections and contempt for legislators.”36 Marcos, in contrast, was in fact the grand master of the Philippine game of politics. His ascension to the presidency came not via a coup, but through many years of electoral ambition. A man of athletic prowess and extraordinary charisma, Marcos wooed large crowds not only through im-passioned speeches but also with love songs he sang in duet with Imelda.
International correspondents frequently compared the First Couple’s glam-our to that of the Kennedys, and upon his inauguration in 1965 Time magazine put Marcos on its cover and hailed his “dynamic, selfless leadership.”37
Goals
Even though both Park and Marcos were products of the social and political milieu from which they emerged, their personal preferences and leadership styles are of course essential to understanding the character of their respective presidencies. While the two men certainly shared the desire to concentrate and retain power to the fullest possible extent, their use of power was distinct. Park Chung Hee followed previous presidents of much higher social status and combined “a peasant[’s] suspicion of the wealthy”
with Japanese-style mercantilist goals of promoting “a rich nation and a strong army.”38 Scholars of Korean political economy rarely give any hint that Park used his position to build up a substantial personal fortune.39
Marcos, by contrast, was the classic provincial parvenu determined not only to emulate but to overtake the country’s most wealthy families. The objective of national economic development was decidedly secondary to the promotion of a rich family and a strong retinue.
Marcos spoke frequently of promoting the goal of national economic development, and beginning with his first term as president sponsored ma-
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jor infrastructural projects throughout the archipelago. But these expenditures, supplemented with smaller “community development” grants at the barrio level, were “parceled out for maximum political advantage.”40
Amid the rhetoric of “nation building,” rumors of the First Couple’s overseas real estate investments, Swiss bank accounts, and crony privilege were already prominent in the Manila press in the late 1960s.41 Whereas Park manipulated external relations with the overarching goals of national security and national autonomy, Marcos’s considerable skills of diplomacy were oriented primarily toward personal gain. In exchange for sending an engineering battalion to Vietnam, Marcos received large, off-the-books payments from the United States; U.S. officials with knowledge of the arrangements, reports Raymond Bonner, “have no doubt that many of the millions . . . went into [Marcos’s] pockets or, more accurately, into his overseas bank accounts.”42 The reelection campaign of 1969 offers perhaps the greatest evidence of personal political goals trampling national welfare: after the treasury was raided and opponents were cowed by the administration’s extensive mobilization of official and private forces of coercion, the defeated candidate grumbled that he had been “out-gooned, out-gunned, and out-gold[ed].” In the wake of the election came the country’s worst balance-of-payments crisis since 1949.43 The personal aggran-dizement for which Marcos became famous can thus be traced to the earliest years of his presidency.
Institutional Context
As both men skillfully consolidated the political base of their regimes, they built on very distinct institutional foundations and very distinct visions for institutional reform. Unl
ike in the Philippines, Park worked in a “thoroughly bureaucratic” environment: he “knew where power and expertise lay and acted accordingly, showering Korea’s bureaucratic elite with privileges.”44 Benefitting from the earlier centralization of the political system under Rhee, Park proceeded to establish the Korea Central Intelligence Agency (given the extremely broad writ of guarding power and managing elections) and the Economic Planning Board (tasked with overseeing rapid industrialization).45 Within a system he dubbed “administrative democracy,” Park worked carefully and steadily to create a more meritocratic bureaucracy.46 Despite his own background in the military, and his own obsession with the tasks of economic coordination, Park generally insulated military officers from key agencies of the economic bureaucracy (including the Economic Planning Board and the Ministry of Finance).47 As the president nurtured the growth of strong and clearly delineated bureaucratic in-
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stitutions, he simultaneously made sure to retain his own personal control over them. Building on the country’s long tradition of meritocratic rule, Park centralized authority over the bureaucracy in the Blue House and achieved military-like discipline from his top bureaucrats.
Marcos inherited a bureaucracy that had long been poorly institutionalized and manipulated for particularistic purposes by a wide range of politicians and oligarchic families. Rather than seeking to strengthen bureaucratic institutions and insulate them from patronage networks, Marcos instead sought to centralize patronage networks under his own control.
There was no major new initiative of bureaucratic reform under his constitutional presidency; if anything, he further subverted the bureaucracy’s already minimal degree of institutional integrity. In addition to “harnessing”
the military to patronage projects beneficial to the regime, he blatantly used the regulatory authority of the Central Bank to bail out his friends and punish his enemies.48 Unlike Park, who was building up the Korean bureaucracy in order to promote his own developmental goals, Marcos was undermining the Philippine bureaucracy to bolster a far more thoroughly personalistic regime.
Government-Business Relations
Through a combination of clearer economic goals and stronger institutional instruments, the pre-1972 Park regime accomplished a far greater political-economic transformation than did its counterpart in the Philippines. Taking advantage of its superior power over the fledgling business class, the government forced the nationalization of all commercial banks.
By controlling access to funds, the state encouraged a nascent and dependent business class to move into increasingly sophisticated industrial production organized around huge diversified family conglomerates. Businesspersons were no longer denounced as “illicit profiteers,” but for many years they continued to be marshaled to the rhythms and beats emanating from the major economic policymaking agencies. Even so, the Korean state’s power was by no means absolute; rather, its symbiotic relationship to business in these years has been described as “asymmetric political exchange.”49
One can similarly observe a huge power disparity in the Philippines in the early 1960s, but the balance of power was tilted in precisely the opposite direction. If money is indeed power, analysis of the financial sector is once again instructive. While businesspersons in Seoul were being arrested and subsequently lost control over their banks, nearly all major families in the Philippines were taking advantage of new incentives to establish pri-
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vate banks. In essence, government resources were made available to the banks and their owners could freely proceed to milk the loan portfolios for the benefit of diversified family conglomerates. If in Korea the government used the banks to execute “national macroeconomic goals, not profit-mongering through lucrative money lending,” the outcome in the Philippines was exactly the reverse. Nationalization of the private banks would have been unthinkable; quite the contrary, families were given new opportunities for private plunder at the public trough.50
Development Strategies
The 1960s were a time of transition for both the Korean and the Philippine political economies. In Korea, a reduction in U.S. aid encouraged greater attention to export promotion. American advisors argued against excessive investment in heavy and chemical industries, but Park and his advisors developed their own game plan as they pushed for goals that the Americans considered wildly ambitious. Reparations of $800 million from Japan, as well as roughly $1 billion in payment from the United States for Korean involvement in Vietnam, provided resources both for regime consolidation and for huge industrial projects. American markets provided an outlet for Korean exports. As the Japanese economy moved to higher-wage and higher-technology industries, South Korea began to take over lower-wage, labor-intensive production from Japan. The race to catch up with Japan and overcome competition with North Korea produced a national obsession with rapid economic growth. Through control of the financial sector that was in many ways reminiscent of the colonial-era industrialization of Korea under Japanese rule, Park employed a set of Gerschenkronian “institutional instruments” that enabled Korea to develop its economy and heighten its national power at the same time. In the 1970s, Park moved to heavy industry; in his own formulation, “Steel =
National Power.” “Essentially taking on a political task which transcended Korea’s national capacity,” writes Byung-Kook Kim, Park pursued “a strategy of unbalanced growth, with a few chaebol chosen as
‘national champions,’ enjoying a diverse array of politically provided economic privileges and benefits.” His regime pursued what Woo calls “impossible debt-equity ratios,” thus ensuring that the country was always on the precipice of crisis.51
In the Philippines, the United States also played a major role in trying to engineer a new economic strategy in the 1960s. Unlike in South Korea, however, American advice was not so much countered via alternative policy ideas as it was undermined by policy drift (unlike their Korean counter-
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parts, Filipino policymakers had little familiarity with Japanese-style state-led development). The process of decontrol in the early 1960s brought strikingly little sense of direction to the country’s economic policy. From the standpoint of a diversified Philippine family conglomerate, things probably didn’t look so grim—especially if favorable access to the political machinery provided opportunities for a range of particularistic privileges: loans from state banks, special government favors for their own banks, logging and mining concessions, preferential tax exemptions, advantageous treatment on tax assessment and payments, special tariff walls or exemptions, favorable arrangements from the Bureau of Customs, and so on. Precisely because the overall policy regime was so lacking in direction, families could move in many directions in pursuit of greater wealth.52 In Korea private talents were quite effectively marshaled to public goals; in the Philippines public resources were widely looted for the benefit of a powerful oligarchy. As Park threw caution to the winds in pursuit of his goal of rapid industrialization, Marcos moved the country toward crisis in order to ensure his reelection in 1969.
Overcoming Opposition and Centralizing Power Despite major contrasts in personal background, goals, institutional context, government-business relations, and development strategies, Park and Marcos shared a genius for centralizing political power in the office of the presidency and perpetuating their power despite numerous obstacles. In the face of opposition, both proved to be ruthless leaders ready to use any means—including the destruction of democratic institutions—in order to keep themselves in power.
In the 1971 elections, Park for the first time faced a political opponent articulating issues of substance; he managed to defeat Kim Dae-jung by a narrow margin, but in the process his Democratic Republican Party lost the two-thirds majority needed to amend the constitution. It became clear that Park’s political support base had weakened, especially in the urban areas but also in the ru
ral areas, where the government’s presence was highly intrusive. Kim Dae-jung, meanwhile, tapped a huge reservoir of anti-government resentment in the Chôlla region. With no further constitutional options for extending his rule, Park resorted to more extreme measures. He declared a national emergency at the end of 1971, and then martial law in October 1972. As David I. Steinberg explains, the timing
“was not unrelated to the fact that three weeks earlier, without public U.S.
objection, President Marcos in the Philippines had also declared martial law. It is said that President Park had his staff monitor the U.S. reaction to
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that move, and when Washington did not object, Park felt free to follow his own inclinations.”53
Marcos’s declaration of martial law followed years of economic problems and growing political turbulence. Throughout the 1960s, Philippine students became increasingly politicized and radicalized, provoked by campus issues, the presence of U.S. bases, the U.S. war in Vietnam and the deployment of Philippine troops there, inequitable social structures and the need for agrarian reform, and electoral fraud and demands for constitutional reform. The new Communist Party of the Philippines was officially launched in late 1968, proclaiming the virtues of guerrilla struggle in the countryside but finding its greatest success in the urban areas, especially among students. The reelection of Marcos was controversial, not least because all candidates (led by Marcos) reportedly spent the equivalent of nearly one-fourth of the national budget. Coming at a point in which the country’s exports remained sluggish, this huge binge of election spending brought on a balance-of-payments crisis, followed by a devaluation that fueled inflation. This situation, in turn, heightened mass demands for change. In early 1970, student protests in the now-legendary First Quarter Storm reached the gates of Malacañang Palace.54