Ferdinand Marcos (1917-1989), president-dictator of the Republic of the Philippines from 1965 to 1986. Marcos was twice elected to the presidency before he declared martial law and seized dictatorial powers in 1972. A massive nonviolent protest known as the People Power Movement forced him from office in 1986. His authoritarian regime is remembered for its rampant corruption at the highest levels of government and its suppression of political dissent and the democratic process.

Marcos was born in Sarrat, in the province of Ilocos Norte in northwestern Luzon Island. He was the first son of Mariano Marcos, a politician, and Josefa Edralin, a teacher. In the 1935 election year his father’s political adversary, Julio Nalundasan, was murdered after winning the Ilocos Norte seat in the national legislature. In 1938 Marcos was arrested in connection with the murder, but he successfully petitioned the Philippine Supreme Court for release on bail, allowing him to complete his education. In 1939 Marcos received a bachelor’s degree in law from the University of the Philippines and subsequently passed the bar exam with high scores. Later that year he was found guilty of murder and sentenced to a minimum of ten years in prison. While in prison he wrote his own appeal, and in 1940 he argued his own case in front of Supreme Court justice José P. Laurel, who overturned his murder conviction.

Marcos served in the Philippine armed forces during World War II (1939-1945). Marcos later claimed to have been a leader of the guerrilla resistance against the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, a claim that he capitalized on throughout his political career. The United States government never challenged Marcos’s account of his wartime activities while he was in power; however, U.S. Army documents made public in 1986 revealed that Marcos had fabricated his claim of being a highly decorated guerrilla leader.

After the war the Philippines gained full independence from the United States. (It had been a commonwealth of the United States since 1935, with autonomy in all matters except foreign policy.) From 1946 to 1947 Marcos worked as an assistant to the first president of the newly independent republic, Manuel Roxas. Roxas had split from the Nationalist Party—up until then the dominant political party in the Philippines—to form the Liberal Party. Marcos, as a Liberal Party candidate, won the Ilocos Norte seat in the Philippine House of Representatives in 1949; he held the post for three terms, until 1959. In 1954, meanwhile, he married Imelda Romualdez, a former beauty-pageant queen from Leyte Island, and they quickly became glamorous members of the Philippine elite.

In 1959 Marcos won a seat in the Senate; he served as Senate president from 1963 to 1965. Marcos then jumped political parties to enter the 1965 presidential campaign as the Nationalist Party candidate against incumbent president Diosdado Macapagal. Marcos presented himself as the individual who could break a long pattern of corruption and inadequate leadership. He also had enthusiastic support from American president Lyndon B. Johnson and the international business community. Marcos easily won the election and was inaugurated as president on December 30.

A.  MARCOS AS PRESIDENT

From the start of Marcos’s presidency, escalating United States involvement in the Vietnam War (1959-1975) made the U.S. military bases in the Philippines—Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base—critical staging areas for American forces. Consequently, the war funneled billions of dollars into the Philippine economy. Many public-works projects, financed by foreign loans, also helped the economy to develop rapidly. In addition, Imelda Marcos launched a series of prestige projects in Manila, including the building of museums and grand hotels.

In 1969, after campaigning on the slogan “Rice and Roads,” Marcos was reelected president with 74 percent of the vote. He was the first president of the Philippines to win a second term, which was the most allowed under the country’s constitution. The races for both houses of the Philippine Congress also went highly in favor of Marcos’s supporters and his Nationalist Party.

During his second term Marcos faced a host of domestic problems. Many university students and other Filipinos actively opposed the continued U.S. military presence in the Philippines and Marcos’s support for U.S. policy in Vietnam. The Communist Party of the Philippines also became more active, organizing widespread unrest among the urban and rural poor. In the southern Philippine islands, a Muslim separatist movement was building momentum. And as Marcos approached the end of his second term in office, it became increasingly clear that a constitutional convention charged with drafting a new, postindependence constitution did not intend to abolish the two-term limit for the presidency. Thus, Marcos faced the prospect of having to leave office after 1973.

B.   MARCOS AS DICTATOR

The convention never completed its work, however. Claiming anarchy was near, Marcos declared martial law in 1972, thereby suspending the 1935 constitution, dissolving Congress, and assuming total power. Marcos suppressed the political opposition, arresting leaders such as Benigno ("Ninoy") Aquino, Jr., and ended a long tradition of a free press. A new constitution promulgated in January 1973 gave Marcos absolute power, and elections were indefinitely postponed. Marcos ruled by decree, cloaking his dictatorial decisions in the rhetoric of law.

Marcos claimed that martial law was the prelude to the creation of a “new society” in which self-sacrifice was necessary for the national welfare. But Marcos, his wife, and their closest associates practiced corruption with

impunity. They plundered the Philippine economy through their system of “crony capitalism,” in which they controlled monopolies in industry, communications, and banking. The Marcoses amassed a huge personal fortune, much of which they hid in foreign bank accounts and investments. Their lavish lifestyle stood in stark contrast to the lives of ordinary Filipinos.

Marcos’s sense of invincibility eventually prompted him to lift some of the oppressive rules that stifled political dissent and press freedom. In 1980 Marcos permitted Aquino, the Liberal Party opposition leader, to go into exile in the United States. He also permitted Radio Veritas, a Catholic-run radio network, to make broadcasts critical of his regime. The Catholic hierarchy, led by Jaime Cardinal Sin, the archbishop of Manila, became vocal in its opposition to Marcos. In the Philippines, where the majority of the population is Catholic, the church was traditionally looked to for guidance in political matters.

In 1981 Marcos officially lifted martial law, but retained sweeping emergency powers, in order to validate his power through a sham presidential election. Predictably, he won an easy victory and another term as president. Then his health began to fail. He had a degenerative illness, lupus erythematosus, which led to kidney failure. He was on dialysis and had a kidney transplant. He seemed to be dying.

In 1983 Aquino decided to return to the Philippines, even though he anticipated being rearrested. Aquino was shot in the back of the head and killed minutes after his arrival at Manila International Airport (now Ninoy Aquino International Airport). The government claimed the assassination was the work of a lone gunman, who had been killed by security police at the airport. A special commission subsequently concluded the murder was the result of a military conspiracy, but in 1985 a high court acquitted all of the officers charged with the crime. (In 1990 16 military officers were convicted of Aquino’s assassination, but the mastermind of the murder was never determined.)

Aquino’s death proved to be the galvanizing force in Marcos’s downfall. Aquino’s widow, Corazon Aquino, put the ailing Marcos on the defensive by depicting him as a brutal dictator. In a gamble to regain some political legitimacy, and secure continued U.S. support for his regime, Marcos announced that a “snap,” or unscheduled, presidential election would be held in February 1986, a year before his term was to expire. Marcos fully expected to win the election, considering his well-oiled political machine and the divided nature of the opposition. But Cardinal Sin arranged an opposition alliance, convincing Corazon Aquino to run for president and Salvador Laurel to run for vice president.

During the voting, American observers witnessed many irregularities. Afterward, the two monitoring bodies, one sponsored by a U.S.-based group and the other an official government commission, reported contradictory election results. Both candidates claimed victory, but the national assembly recognized Marcos as the winner. The Catholic Church in Manila issued a statement claiming the election had been “a fraud unparalleled in history.” Marcos’s claim of victory rang hollow.

C.  PEOPLE POWER MOVEMENT

On February 22 two of Marcos’s key military supporters publicly turned against him. Secretary of Defense Juan Ponce Enrile and Deputy Chief of Staff Fidel Ramos staged a military mutiny, seizing two vital military installations in suburban Manila. This mutiny presented Marcos with an immediate challenge that his cousin General Fabian Ver, the armed forces chief of staff, wanted to meet with decisive force. Cardinal Sin, using Radio Veritas, summoned the Philippine people into the streets to block General Ver’s tanks. Thousands of civilians flocked into the streets and formed a human barricade on Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (EDSA), the main boulevard between the two military bases. Marcos’s troops lacked either the brutality or the political will to attack unarmed civilians, and they were effectively immobilized by the strong show of what Filipinos called “people power.”

Despite these events, Marcos insisted on being inaugurated president in a private but purely symbolic ceremony on February 25. The next day the Marcoses and their family and close associates fled the Philippines for Hawaii on two aircraft supplied by the U.S. Air Force. Aquino became president.

When the Marcoses left the Philippines, the country was burdened with $27 billion in external debt and was in a deep economic recession. In 1988 Marcos was indicted by a U.S. grand jury in New York on federal racketeering charges relating to his years in office. Before he could stand trial, however, Marcos died in Honolulu in 1989. The Philippine government allowed Imelda Marcos to return to the Philippines and bury Marcos’s remains in his home province in 1991.

IV.   EVALUATION

Ferdinand Marcos had the intellect, the leadership skills, and the opportunity to be the greatest president of the Philippines in the 20th century. Instead, his impact was ruinous for the economy, the society, and the political institutions of his country. The lost opportunity of economic growth and social prosperity stunted an entire generation and left the Philippines far less competitive than many of its neighbors in Southeast Asia, where economic growth during the same period was spectacular.


Contributed By:
David Joel Steinberg