45 years later
TWICE in the first six months of the Duterte administration, Pulse Asia interviewed 1,200 Filipinos to try to find out how many saw a need to declare martial law “to solve the many crises of the nation.” The results showed how quickly public opinion can shift, sometimes. In September 2016, 64 percent of the respondents said they disagreed that martial law was necessary.
Three months later, the percentage of respondents who saw no need for martial law went up to 74. What changed? The survey did not examine what had persuaded more people to disagree with the idea of martial law.
The second survey took place less than a month after the Marcos family transferred the remains of Ferdinand E. Marcos to the Libingan ng mga Bayani, after the Supreme Court ruled there was no valid reason to stop them. Had this survey been conducted 45 years ago, when Marcos declared martial law, how different would the results have been? Most Filipinos seemed “willing to give Marcos and martial law a chance,” Robert Dohner and Ponciano Intal Jr. observed in their paper “The Marcos Legacy: Economic Policy and Foreign Debt in the Philippines.”Disorder and the growing threat of the New People’s Army formed part of the context at the time.
“There was also the feeling shared by many that the political system in the Philippines had not served the country well,” Dohner and Intal wrote. “Few mourned the passing of Congress.”
These observations date back to September 1987. But put together our short memories, the crisis in Marawi, and the Duterte administration’s sustained effort to keep illegal drugs at the top of our national priorities, and I would not be surprised if support for martial law turns out to have risen since December 2016, when Pulse Asia did that second survey. Consider the cacophony that surrounded last Monday’s celebration of the dictator’s 100th birth anniversary. On social media, Marcos’s supporters used the hashtag #SalamatApo to sing his praises, by now familiar from so much repetition. Some said that those who had lived through the Marcos dictatorship knew how good they had it, and that those who dared criticize him had been fed lies by power-grabbers, the Liberal Party, and biased media. Also repeated was the challenge to confront former defense minister Juan Ponce Enrile and former Philippine Constabulary chief (and former president) Fidel Ramos over their roles as martial law’s enforcers. Ferdinand Edralin Marcos was, some of his loyalists insisted, the outsider who upset the interlocking circles of the political and business elites, pursued land reform, and radically increased public spending, especially on infrastructure. He was “the greatest Filipino who ever lived.” Using the same hashtag, some added to the conversation
several inconvenient notes: how public investments, such as construction projects, paid for the loyalty of Marcos’s cronies; how he silenced dissent by shutting down radio, TV, and newspaper companies; or how his regime had borrowed so much, so fast that the debt and financial crises of the early 1980s crippled the economy.
At the time of their ouster in 1986, the Marcoses were believed to have amassed as much as US$10 billion: far beyond what Ferdinand and Imelda legally earned in their two decades in power. 3
What’s $10 billion adjusted for inflation? About $22.4 billion. I couldn’t be sure how old were these citizens who enriched that virtual Marcos loyalists’lovefest with facts. They seemed young, and that made me glad.
In that December 2016 survey by Pulse Asia, 7 out of 10 respondents who were 45 to 54 years old— my generation, who lived our first decade under martial law— disagreed that martial law was needed to fix our various problems. How many of us now think differently? I can only hope our memories will not fail us soon.
— Isolde D. Amante