Arrested development
The late journalist Juan Mercado used to quote an old Malay proverb to describe the ultimate futility of the Marcos dictatorship: “Nothing grows under a banyan tree.”
It took Ferdinand Marcos Sr. from September 1972 to October 1976 to fully entrench his dictatorship. But his moment of triumph was also the point of exhaustion for his regime.
In the political and bureaucratic, even policy spheres, modernity and innovation had already ceased the year before, in 1975, marked by the removal of then Executive Secretary Alejandro Melchor Jr. (and, indeed, the abolition of the position of Executive Secretary). Technical competence, in the end, was at best an inconvenience, and worse, represented an alternative political vision to one-man rule. For all the veneer of modernity (you can identify the martial law genesis of so many of our current bureaucratic entities by the use of “Development” in their names: National Economic and Development Authority, Department of Social Welfare and Development, etc.), the New Society was at its heart, a premodern project: its ultimate aim was the creation of a hereditary monarchy.
No coincidence that in 1976, to ensure the primacy of his name, the Great Dictator “restored” Manila as the capital, while actually denying it any primacy through legal ambiguity. The “capital” is actually part of a larger ectoplasm called Metro Manila, which is also a region called the National Capital Region, and the fact is the historically politically contrarian Manila was systematically punished between 1976 and 1986 by Marcos, never actually completing a real capital, only a series of real estate schemes to justify overpriced, disconnected prestige projects.
By 1976, the armed forces had become exhausted from fighting both Moro rebels in Mindanao and capturing the leadership of the communist rebellion, while failing to stamp out its resurgence in the field. By 1980, Romeo Espino had retired: the military, capable of a self-coup, had lost its vigor fighting the Moros and was enfeebled in fighting the New People’s Army. We often see the height of Marcos’ powers through the prism of his self-congratulatory proclamation of a “New Republic” in 1981. By then, what was coming was firmly in place.
Sugar and copra had been mismanaged, and what had emerged was less an absolute monarchy and more a loose coalition of mafias on the verge of anarchy. This was the ultimate meaning of Emmanuel Pelaez, former veep, and one of the many who had abandoned the dignity of political independence in exchange for somewhat comfortable survival, when he exclaimed, “What is happening to our country?” after an assassination attempt, when he’d proven himself a thorn in Marcos’ side for giving voice to the devastation of the copra industry.
That is why I have taken to labeling the period 1976 to 1986 as a period of ”arrested development.” Nothing could develop when the dictator decided everything, and everything, in turn, was devoted to ensuring the dictator’s crown prince would succeed him. The problem, as it turned out, was that the dictator’s authority didn’t extend to his own body, and all his power couldn’t speed up the development of his heir apparent to ensure a smooth succession.
Yet, the show had to go on: out of ideas, but not out of appetite. But the players were now substandard. Fabian Ver’s true mettle would be revealed by the assassination of Ninoy Aquino and the ultimate demonstration of his generalship in 1986: when Marcos finally ordered Ver to crack down on the rebels in Camp Aguinaldo and Camp Crame, the military tightly wound around the Palace got snarled in an epic traffic jam.
Under the 1935 Constitution, Marcos would have been succeeded by another president in 1973, and there would have been presidential elections in 1977, 1981, and 1985: the potential for anywhere from two to four presidencies in that period. Within one extra term—1973 to 1977—Marcos had proven he’d run out of answers to address the country’s problems. Thereafter, crises stacked up as a catalog of lost opportunities as Marcos’ health failed, and everyone else was left with nothing else to do but plot. They plotted on the inside, whether it was Imelda and Ver to ensure the throne remained within the family, or Juan Ponce Enrile and officers who felt a junta was the answer; they plotted on the outside, whether through communist armed struggle in the hills or middle-class terrorism. Only slowly would Light-a-Fire give way to what Cory Aquino called restoring democracy by the ways of democracy, however rigged Marcos wanted to keep it.
Fundamental to this trend of thought was the realization that the country needed to get back to where things were when democracy, such as it was, had been abruptly terminated. Hence, Ninoy Aquino’s insistence that the Bill of Rights under the 1935 Constitution was “the most sacred legacy of the founding fathers.” The earliest definition of a revolution, after all, is in the word itself: the completion of a cycle, the return to a point of origin. The tension to come, after 1986, was that you can never go back to what once was.
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Email: mlquezon3@gmail.com; Twitter: @mlq3
