Shedding the Liberal Mask

Climate of Fear

(from: equalizerpost.com

On September 21, 1972, Marcos signed Presidential Proclamation 1081 placing the entire country under martial rule. In less than 2 months, the government succeeded in incarcerating 8,261 political prisoners. The number would climb fast to more than 50,000 in the next few years making of the Philippine archipelago a veritable Gulag Archipelago, with 59 detention camps spread throughout the entire country.

In time, due to local church and international pressures, many would be released, to be detained again, and, if lucky, released again. After a while the pattern became chillingly familiar: arbitrary arrests at any time, detention at one of the camps without charges or at one of the “safe houses” used by various military and intelligence units, systematic torture, and for a few hundreds, who were not so “lucky”, the process of “salvaging,” a term used by the military for murdering those arrested and filing reports that those killed were the casualties of military engagements.

Apart from local church groups like the Association of Major Religious Superiors of the Philippines, other organizations like the Amnesty International, the International Commission of Jurists, and the International Committee of the Red Cross verified the systematic torture of detainees (as high as 90%) by the martial law regime. Some of the methods they reported were:

• Application of lighted cigarettes to various parts of the body, including the ear and the genital area;
• Electric shocks on different parts of the body, including the genital area;
• Stripping and sexual abuse, and rape of female detainees;
• Beating with fists and gun butts, sticks and rubber hoses;
• Forcing the face into feces-contaminated toilet bowls;
• Holding the victim’s head under water until he/she inhales water or lose consciousness;
• Squeezing the fingers with bullets inserted them;
• Using bright lights for long periods to cause damage to eyes;
• Keeping detainees from sleeping by long interrogations;
• Pressing hot irons against soles of feet;
• Making detainee lie down straight, suspended between two nbeds, and then pummeled in stomach and thighs 

Authoritarianism’s conveyor belts

With the climate of fear established, the regime proceeded to dismantle the republic’s political institutions and their supporting infrastructure: the Congress, the free press, elections, civil liberties, student groups, peasant and labor unions, political parties, the like. The right of free assembly was completely wiped out.

At the Constitutional Convention, with the incarceration of top oppositionists, a Macapagal-led majority reluctantly passed a “new constitution” that effectively made Marcos President and Prime Minister indefinitely.

The technocratic-military alliance then moved rapidly to replace the destroyed institutions with ones more geared to its needs. Existing planning agencies were expanded. Long-delayed blue prints for the rationalization of the nation’s administrative agencies were put into force. Government officials became “casual employees” from the barrio level to the Supreme Court. Police forces were “integrated” i.e. put under central command. The military began to participate in managing certain sectors of the economy.

Likewise, major professions were now urged to integrate competing groups into a peak body. Local Youth Councils (Kabataang Baranggay) were established for civic action and internal defense. Local Advisory Councils were formed at all levels.

Whereas, previously, organization signified a free people’s coming together for critical thinking and alternative-proposing, now under the authoritarian regime, organization simply meant the government’s capacity to convey more efficiently the rules and decrees they deemed best for the achievement of development goals.

The new government denounced “too much politics in the old society,” and then proceeded to monopolize all politics. The deed was done: a systematic transformation of the polity had been accomplished as a prerequisite for the more efficient development of the great wealth of the Philippines for the benefit of the larger neo-colonial system. To some it was now clear how the continued expansion of the Center countries demanded the more rapid dependent development of the resources of the Periphery – without the delaying actions of nationalist political opposition.

Between 1970 and 1976, according to the Central Bank, 70% of new foreign investment came in after March 15, 1973, the date when the extremely liberal package for foreign investors was circulated abroad.

Winners and Losers

The Winners 

The new system produced winners and losers. Even while loudly and officially under attack, the more deeply established oligarchic structure persisted (wealth for a few and poverty for the many) but with changing actors (new cronies and gang mates in, older ones out).

The big winners were of course the global corporations from the trilateral countries of North America, Japan and Western Europe. A month after the coup, Marcos said in an interview: “We’re interested in all forms of foreign capital, and I would like to emphasize two things: we will offer as much incentive as possible and foreign capital will be protected. There will be no confiscation while I am President. Such things as the amortization of investment, retirement of capital and transmittal of profits are guaranteed.” Half a year later he issued the decree that new foreign investments were “guaranteed complete freedom of repatriation, covering both the invested principal and gains, and without any time restriction.”

Caltex Vice-President Frank Zingaro summed up the global corporate attitude when he said in May 1973 that he surveyed “the Asian countries but found the best prospects for development and further expansion in the Philippines.”

Incentives were varied: exemption from certain taxes and tariffs, priority in the allocation of cheap credit resources, the establishment of export processing zones in Bataan and Cebu, sites for heavy polluting industries like Kawasaki’s in Misamis Oriental, permission for dangerous projects like the insane multi-billion-dollar Westinghouse nuclear reactor located at the foot of an active volcano in an earthquake zone, etc.etc.

Some tendencies to divest would come only much later, when the bombs literally and physically started exploding in Manila – actions taken credit for by noncommunist radicals.

Big Winners equally were the Marcoses and their roughly 80 families of top collaborators. One study documented the ways the new gang (dubbed “Octopus Gang,” by the April 6^th Liberation Movement) confiscated the wealth of that part of the old oligarchy that would not cooperate with the regime, and how from about Sept. 1972 onwards they registered corporations with controlling hands in all sectors of the economy – acting as secure bridges of transnational capital (“Some Are Smarter Than Others”).

Finally, included among the winners is the technostructure of military officers and civilian planners and performers, and the upper “middle” class. Relative to the total population, this group was a tiny minority. But they accounted for the fact that, according to NEDA (National Economic Development Authority), if one excludes petroleum, the largest import bill in the Philippines then went to perfumes, jewelry and luxury leather goods.

The Losers

The nationalist and social-oriented politicians and activists were losers. They were jailed, driven into exile, placed under house arrest, or harassed into silence.

The anti-Marcos section of the old oligarchy lost to the new Octopus Gang among whom were the Lopezes, and those Cojuangcos identified with Ninoy Aquino.

Energetic and dynamic business entrepreneurs likewise lost because in the new society success was relative, i.e. one could not succeed if one was not a relative.

The urban workers and residents were losers – forced to take a cut in real wages of at least 45% at the very time when consumerism and ostentation for the elites was being greatly expanded; before long 70% of the urban population hovered at the poverty level, with the bottom 40% absolutely worse-off.

For the rural population, there was the grand deception of “agrarian reform and rural development”. As of April 1979 only 1,500 farmers had received emancipation patents (titles) covering 1,400 hectares of land (out of 11, 252, 000 hectares of agrarian lands). At that pace, the gardener calculated then that it would take 1,838 years merely to lay the “cornerstone of land reform” – a program which on closer look even on paper was supposed to touch no more than 13 percent of all tenants in the country. Millions of other tenants and landless peasants did not exist as far as the program was concerned. The quick pace of mechanization was displacing scores of thousands more of rural folk yearly with the traditional tiller ratio of 1:2 changing fast to 1:13 after mechanization, and 1: 0 after conversion to residential, factory or any other non-agricultural uses.

Meanwhile, agrarian reform “beneficiaries” found that they were merely being herded into debt traps by the integrated program of credit, technology transfer, and unequal marketing structures. Even the much-vaunted showcase farms of Nueva Ecija showed a rise in productivity of only 0.1 ton per hectare (from 1.7 to 1.8 tons) at the cost of doubling fertilizer usage (from 9.2 to 20.5 kilos per hectare)  – a cost-benefit ratio that clearly was negative compared to the use of traditional agricultural practices in other areas.

In coconut lands the worst cases of poverty occurred and understandably, therefore, the highest rise in armed insurgency. The coconut farmer had become the most highly taxed citizen in Philippine history through a coconut levy program that taxed the first domestic sale of copra an average of 30% of gross. While the coconut levy funds were supposed to be beneficially owned by all the coconut farmers, in truth they were controlled by a very few (Martial Law administrator Enrile and his “law” firm ACCRA and even more so by Special Friend Danding Cojuangco and his group) for the benefit of a very few.

The students and youth sectors were also big losers in a polity that punished independent critical thinking and where informers lurched at every other classroom. The trilateralist Huntington had earlier written: “ Governmental action designed to restrict the development of universities may well reduce the influence of revolutionary groupings.”

The thousands of school teachers throughout the country also lost tremendously in personal dignity with a meager deceptive salary increase because of overwhelming government pressure to transmogrify their status of teachers to one of cheaters every time they had to act as “election inspectors”.

In the south, government planners boasted of the great potential Mindanao had for development, without reflecting how dependent development precisely constituted one basic root of Moro resistance.

Likewise, various other tribal communities in the mountains of northern Luzon knew that they had literally everything to lose unless they succeeded in resisting the development programs (large multi-purpose dams) that were being foisted on them at the cost of their way of life for the benefit of a few developers.

Finally, there were the American losers – the people of America – who didn’t quite realize how their tax money would foot the bill for the artificial stability that benefited only the global corporations and their authoritarian servants. In FY 1978 their total financial participation in propping up the regime came to $939.9-million or a billion dollars in one year.

Losers All 

The general populace were losers all in the total system of repression. There was a climate of fear, which no one could escape, and a breakdown in the sense of trust with the establishment of an informer society (“barangay-tanods”). With the rapid development of underdevelopment, wealth flowed out in abundance from the land that increasingly could not feed its own people, nor take care of their health and other basic needs.

Given an economy that was centered abroad and essentially oriented to exports, the money values that people’s production created were not compensated by commodities that entered the domestic market. Therefore local inflation was high. Moreover, to make exports competitive, government maintained a policy of keeping the peso cheap as an instrument of trade promotion. This unequal trade itself exported inflation into the country. In 1974, the high costs of imported raw materials were the most important source of increases in the prices of bread (78%), meat (40%), textiles (81%) and fuel (253%).

The Philippines had the highest inflation rate in Asia for 1979 (23.7%), and for 1980 the Far Eastern Economic Review cited 30% as the more likely rate in the City of Manila.

Alongside inflation and further buttressing it was the horrendously increased taxation of the general populace to fund the regime’s expenditures in propaganda and military repression. In 1976, direct taxes accounted for only 19% of total national revenues. The remaining 81% were extracted from the people indirectly by adding costs to the price of basic goods and services.

Salas

A former executive secretary, Rafael Salas, once remarked that Marcos’ genius consisted in his ability to know the people’s “political-survival limit” at any given time, i.e. the level of taxation and oppression that the populace would tolerate. But April 6, 1978 (massive noise barrage) showed that the genius was fast on the wane – not in best of health. The people were sick and tired of too much taxation, especially when they knew revenues hardly went to their welfare. And the April 6^th Liberation Movement of Ninoy Aquino’s inspiration had now begun to establish an atmosphere of daring among ordinary folk and not only among communist and non-communist radicals.

Government assistance, for instance, to alleviate the housing problem that affected more than one-third of Manila was so inadequate that it was almost nil. But when the International Monetary Fund (one of the government’s masters) held its conference in Manila, P1,700-million were forced out of the people’s social security funds and savings in order to finance the construction of 11 foreign-owned hotels: Sheraton, Holiday Inn, Hyatt, Ramada, etc.

The general populace then was the biggest loser in the authoritarian game. Their dignity was trampled on each time the regime needed to assure itself of “greater legitimacy” and the people had to be herded to the polls to say Yes to the many sham referenda, at the point of the gun or under duress of penalty running up to 6 months’ imprisonment. FINIS.

CHARLES AVILA – The Gardener