Following the leader
October 5th, 2002
The rest of the world may attach a different significance to it nowadays. But September 11 has been a significant date for Filipinos since 1972.
The year marked the declaration of martial law, the first open attempt to place the country under a dictatorship. That declaration also happened in September—on the 21st, or 10 days after the 55th birthday of the one man in Philippine history whose name is indissolubly linked with it, Ferdinand Edralin Marcos.
Before martial law and Marcos, no one save the immediate family and the organization he or she ruled over paid much attention to the birth anniversaries of politicians, government officials and big bureaucrats.
Marcos changed all that, establishing both through the slavish media’s coverage of the sacred date and through the special significance of September the distasteful precedent of celebrating the birthday of any government functionary who thinks that his having been born was God’s gift to the nation.
Marcos certainly thought his own birth to be precisely that. He was, if anything, a man of tremendous self-confidence, and convinced of his own wisdom as well as right to rule. Thousands—make that several millions—disagree and believe that event to have been a disaster.
Certainly the Marcos period was on the whole a disaster for the country and the Filipino people. It was a catastrophe worse than a combination of natural disasters and economic decline, which in any case came later as the foreign loans dried up, and the economy, which not even Marcos’s legion of UP economists could manage, reeled from the impact of widespread social unrest.
One-man rule also set democratization back by at least 20 years, reversing a process in which political participation was visibly widening in the early 1970s. Because it had no legitimacy and relied solely on force, the Marcos dictatorship made the military and police the critical factor in the survival of governments, creating a long-term problem that’s still with us.
Perhaps as bad, if not worse, was its impact on an entire generation of the then young men and women of the Philippine elite from whose memories and loyalty the Bill of Rights was erased, in the place of which a stubborn faith in the virtues of authoritarianism has taken root.
The members of that generation are now of age. Whether in government and business, in academia or in the mass media, many are the firm supporters—some constitute the brain trust—of the Arroyo government’s cry for a strong Republic, which in practice amounts to the slow curtailment of the right to free assembly and free expression, and even to the presumption of innocence.
Still others of that same generation have inherited from their fathers, some of them Marcos functionaries, the same authoritarian mindset.
It is certainly no surprise that a Marcos daughter has introduced an antiterrorism bill that not only defines terrorism so broadly almost any political act can qualify, but which also penalizes even acts of omission.
The mindset is not hers alone, however, but shared by those congressmen and women, as well as senators who have introduced bills restrictive of press freedom, who have applauded police dispersal of street protests, and who believe with Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in the armed suppression of social movements.
If in business, the members of the same generation lament in their boardrooms and during cocktail parties how too free-wheeling and too liberal is “Philippine democracy,” how pesky the press is, how undisciplined Filipinos are and how urgently they need a strongman who will be good for business.
In the Philippine countryside the inheritors of authoritarianism, whose fathers served Marcos as police and military officers, as local functionaries, or as semicriminal elements supportive of his campaigns of suppression against Moros and leftist rebels, are in a time warp in which martial law is still in place.
In those places where insurgency has taken deep root, military officers arrest civilians, hold them indefinitely, torture and even execute them. In others, local tyrants have their rivals as well as reporters assassinated in busy streets and broad daylight.
Such crimes go unpunished, virtually guaranteeing their repetition. Thirty-four community journalists have thus been killed since 1986, when democracy was supposed to have been restored.
The two latest killings of journalists took place in May and August this year in the cities of Pagadian (Zamboanga del Sur) and San Pablo (Laguna). The efforts by relatives and the mass media to bring the likely perpetrators to trial have mostly failed. At least one witness in the May killing has been killed, and others threatened.
The relatives of the dead journalists, instead of being assured that their kin will get justice, are instead in fear of their lives, a fact which moved a representative of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists to observe that today as during martial law, there is no working justice system in the Philippine countryside.
In several places all over the country, the leaders of militant organizations have not only been under threat. Over two dozen have been killed among Bayan Muna leaders, and several from the women’s group Gabriela, in addition to numerous cases of harassment.
This is occurring even as the government, through its military and civilian officials, piously argues that leftists need not take up arms, because they can legally campaign for public support of their programs, and the President of the Philippines has classified leftists into bad (those engaged in armed struggle) and good (those who’re not).
Though dead these 13 years (he died in Hawaii in 1989), Marcos has thus left the Philippines an authoritarian legacy that, because lodged in the brains of the living, refuses to die with him.
The persistence of that legacy and its basis in state violence—the constant threat and creeping reality of authoritarian restoration—suggest that the Marcos tyranny was far from an aberration.
It has been argued that Marcos perverted an essentially democratic system of checks and balances and popular participation. Indeed the legal bases of that democracy were in the Constitution and lesser Philippine laws. And yet Marcos used the same laws—specifically those that gave him as president command over the armed forces and the power to declare martial law for an indefinite period—to keep himself in power and the country under his heel for 14 years.
Those same laws, though now restored, have not prevented the suppression of citizens’ rights, and even the murder of journalists and activists. Indeed the chilling possibility today, on the eve of the 85th birth anniversary of Ferdinand Marcos, is that the political and military centers of power in the Philippines, rather than departing from his example, have discovered something eminently worse than that the law can be used to suppress the Bill of Rights.
It is that they can ignore the law, with few being either the wiser or being overly concerned. In this they have not departed from Marcos’s authoritarian example, however, but are only following the leader.
(ABS-CBNNEWS.COM/TODAY, September 10, 2002)