The long self-coup

Novelist Ninotchka Rosca recently reminisced that she’d dropped by the Senate on Sept. 21, 1972, only to run into former Sen. Benigno ”Ninoy” Aquino Jr., who seems to have shared the common misconception that the public would overwhelmingly oppose martial law. He’d delivered his last privilege speech in the Senate, warning of its imminent proclamation that day. That afternoon, the last protest rally prior to the imposition of the dictatorship took place in Plaza Miranda: all the more, it must have seemed that the public was primed to resist it.

Veteran journalist Alan Robles recalled being told that the officer assigned to arrest Aquino had owed the senator a favor, and thus tipped him off that he was on his way up to the suite in the Manila Hilton on the night of Sept. 22, 1972, where a joint congressional committee on tariff reform was meeting, to arrest him. Aquino could have used that announcement as an opportunity to make himself scarce; instead, he stayed put rather than escape.

This explains Napoleon Rama’s recollection of an embittered Aquino pointing out to him, as they, the first group of prominent political prisoners, were suddenly separated from the rest of the prisoners in Camp Crame in the early hours of Sept. 23, 1972, put on a truck, and taken to an unknown destination, that the people, seeing them, seemed to shrug at the sight of them. It also explains, after Aquino had seen just how easily the dictatorship was established, how he started becoming receptive to the piety of his fellow prisoner, Soc Rodrigo.

Elaborating on the three points I raised on Monday: if, first of all, martial law was likely more popular than people want to admit, we have to try to be as precise as possible—with whom was it popular? I’d argue it was popular with Marcos’ own generation. He presented himself as acting on behalf of terrified parents, upset and alarmed over their hippie-generation children, besides his obvious posturing as the guarantor of order for the propertied and moneyed, prelates, and captains of industry, alarmed over the growing popularity of communism.

The second is that far too many were willing to help establish the dictatorship because they thought they’d benefit from its shortcut solutions to seemingly intractable problems. No more national elections, thanks to safer and cozier one-party parliamentarism, something for everyone, in fact, except the incorrigible few who’d gambled on opposing Marcos and lost.

The third, related to the first two, is how few stubbornly resisted it: which is not to say the public couldn’t have shown a kind of passive-aggressive resistance—for example, a free plebiscite on the new Constitution would likely have led to a rejection (so much for purging the colonialism of the document it claimed to replace! In a free election, the public would have voted to keep it, something perhaps echoed in Aquino’s never-delivered arrival statement, written with the help of Raul Manglapus and Doy Laurel, that they would settle for nothing less, than the restoration of the liberties guaranteed by the 1935 Constitution, the “most precious legacy of the founding fathers,” meaning the prewar generation)—while the radical left was more infiltrated and neutralized than it would later care to admit.

The truth is, the dictatorship took years to entrench: September 1972 to January 1973 was the first round against media and the opposition, and the showdown with the Supreme Court, which capitulated; but Marcos took three more years to tie up loose ends by systematically going back on the explicit or implied promises made to so many to go along with his plans.

Journalist Raissa Robles has a wonderful anecdote in her book on martial law about how former Speaker Cornelio Villareal dryly told Marcos, years after the fact, that he had them all fooled—they thought it would last a couple of years at most. To give a sense of how long Marcos was able to string along those hoping for a place in the New Society on the basis of their prominence in the Old Society: it was only in October, 1976, when Marcos held a plebiscite to approve the continuation of martial law and the replacement of the planned Interim National Assembly (the one members of the old, abolished Congress, and the Constitutional Convention delegates who had voted to approve the draft in 1973), that it became clear the deal was off. No one would sit in parliament unless firmly part of the new dispensation and not as an accommodation to those previously in power. To underscore things further, Marcos made himself both President and Prime Minister.

The New Society at its heart was a rehash of ideas from the Japanese Occupation—Kilusang Bagong Lipunan was modeled after Kalibapi, Kapisanan ng Paglilingkod sa Bagong Pilipinas; Metro Manila was the Greater Manila of the war; the 1973 Constitution was a cobbled-together caricature of Laurel’s 1943 charter; and even the barangay first came into political vogue in the so-called Second Republic. Shrewd observers pointed out that it lost steam as an experiment in modernization by 1975, when Alejandro Melchor was fired as executive secretary.