Ferdinand Marcos

• 1. Introduction

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  Ferdinand Marcos arrived in Hawaii in February 1986 with 22 crates of cash valued at $717 million, 300 crates of jewelry, and a 12 by 4 foot box full of pearls. He had just fled the Philippines after two decades in power. He served as the tenth president of the country from 1965 to 1986, and for nine of those years he ruled under martial law. Born in Ilocos Norte in 1917, he trained as a lawyer and called his system of rule constitutional authoritarianism. He died in exile in Honolulu in 1989. Behind that flight lie a string of unanswered questions. How did a man convicted of murder as a law student rise to the presidency? Why did the United States keep funding a leader its own intelligence services were investigating? And what did his wife mean when she coined the phrase conjugal dictatorship? The answers reach from a single rifle shot in 1935 to a palace that, when its owners fled, held more than 2,700 pairs of shoes.

• 2. The Nalundasan Rifle

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  On the 21st of September 1935, the day after an election, Julio Nalundasan was killed by a single rifle shot at his home in Batac. Nalundasan had twice defeated Mariano Marcos, Ferdinand's father, for a seat in the House of Representatives. In December 1938, two witnesses accused Ferdinand, his father, and his uncles Pio Marcos and Quirino Lizardo of conspiring in the killing. At the time Ferdinand was still studying law and was a national champion on the university rifle team. On the night of the killing, his own rifle sat in its rack in the ROTC armory. The weapon of team captain Teodoro Kalaw was missing, and Marcos had access to the armory. The National Bureau of Investigation concluded that Kalaw's rifle was the murder weapon. Ferdinand and his uncle Quirino were convicted of murder, and Ferdinand was sentenced to 10 to 17 years in prison. On the 22nd of October 1940, the Supreme Court of the Philippines overturned the lower court and acquitted both men of everything but contempt of court. Justice Jose P. Laurel wrote the majority decision and persuaded his colleagues to acquit. Laurel had himself been convicted of frustrated murder as a young man, after nearly killing a rival in a brawl, then won acquittal on his own appeal to the same court.

• 3. The War Record

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  Near the end of Marcos's presidency, researchers found that most stories about his military service were inaccurate or untrue. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Marcos was called into the United States Army and fought the Japanese until April 1942, when he was taken prisoner at the Battle of Bataan. Official Army records assigned him to the intelligence service in the 21st Infantry Division under Mateo M. Capinpin. There are no contemporaneous records of any awards or decorations he received, and his commander and fellow officers did not corroborate his claims of heroism. By his own account, the Japanese released him on the 4th of August 1942, a claim later cited as evidence that his father had collaborated with Japan, since the Japanese only freed prisoners with severe health problems or cooperative families. In 1945, Filipino guerillas executed his father by drawing and quartering using carabaos, then left the remains hanging on a tree. Marcos claimed he had led a guerrilla force of nine thousand in northern Luzon, claims United States Army investigators contradicted and ruled criminal. During his 1962 Senate campaign he called himself the most decorated Filipino veteran of World War II, listing the Distinguished Service Cross and the Medal of Honor. The Liberal Party later confirmed that many of those medals were awarded to him in 1962 to aid that campaign.

• 4. The Edifice Complex

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  From 1966 to 1970, Marcos increased infrastructure spending in the Philippines by 70 percent, funded by foreign loans. As of 2011 he had spent more annually on infrastructure than any other Philippine president. Critics named this strategy of building to win public support the edifice complex. Major projects included the Cultural Center of the Philippines complex, leading centers for heart, lung, and kidney care, the Marcos Bridge between Leyte and Samar, the Pan-Philippine Highway, and the Manila Light Rail Transit. Forty-seven colleges and universities were established during his time in office. These projects were typically rushed, often compromising their structural safety. Spending in his first term outpaced tax revenue, yet Marcos kept promising rice, roads, and school buildings as the cornerstone of his 1969 re-election. He covered the gap with foreign lending, producing a 72 percent rise in the budget deficit over Macapagal's term. He also used construction to raise the profile of his wife Imelda, naming her chair of the Cultural Center complex in 1966 and later head of the Metro Manila Commission. By 1977 to 1980, projects in the conspicuous capital outlays category had grown to account for 20 percent of the country's capital outlays. The most infamous case came at the Manila Film Center. Its lobby was built in 72 hours by 1,000 workers, and on the 17th of November 1981, a scaffolding collapse killed multiple workers while rescuers and ambulances were kept away for nine hours.

• 5. Manufacturing The Enemy

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  In 1968, Senator Ninoy Aquino accused Marcos of trying to establish a garrison state. Marcos had made himself his own defense secretary, an unprecedented move that gave him direct control of the military, and he kept loyal generals in their posts past retirement age. He broadly labeled his opposition as communist, or more specifically Maoist, blurring any line between moderate reformers and student radicals. The scholar Richard J. Kessler wrote that Marcos mythologized the Communist Party of the Philippines, investing it with a revolutionary aura that only attracted more supporters. The First Quarter Storm of early 1970 brought waves of protests numbering 50 to 100 thousand participants, after students threw stones, a stuffed alligator, and a coffin at Marcos and Imelda outside Congress. On the 21st of August 1971, a fatal bombing struck a Liberal Party rally at Plaza Miranda in Quiapo. Marcos blamed the Communist Party and suspended the writ of habeas corpus. Some historians argue Marcos himself was responsible, noting his known use of false flag operations, and United States intelligence documents declassified in the 1990s contained evidence implicating him through a CIA mole inside the armed forces. A series of Metro Manila bombings followed in 1972, the last on September 11, twelve days before martial law was announced. Another alleged false flag came that year with a staged assassination attempt on defense minister Juan Ponce Enrile.

• 6. The New Society

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  On the evening of the 23rd of September 1972, shortly after the staged attempt on Enrile, Marcos declared martial law and extended his rule past the two-term constitutional limit. He ruled by decree, abrogated Congress, muzzled the press, and arrested opposition leaders including Aquino, Jovito Salonga, and Jose W. Diokno. A 1973 referendum, marred by controversy, recorded 90.77 percent support. Marcos cast martial law as the prelude to a bagong lipunan, or new society, guided by what he called a benevolent dictator. He wrote a book titled Notes on the New Society and produced speeches, lectures, slogans, and songs to promote it. The program reoriented civics and history teaching to entrench constitutional authoritarianism and aligned schooling with a strategy of labor exportation. It was intensely anti-Chinese: Presidential Decree No. 176 barred schools built exclusively for foreigners and capped Chinese language instruction at 100 minutes per day. Marcos installed a circle of military advisors known as the Rolex 12, with Enrile, Fidel Ramos, and Fabian Ver as chief administrators of martial law. Between 1972 and 1976 he grew the military from 65,000 to 270,000 personnel. By 1977 the armed forces had quadrupled in size and over 60,000 Filipinos had been arrested for political reasons. From 1972 until 1983 the United States provided $2.5 billion in bilateral military and economic aid, and multilateral institutions such as the World Bank added about $5.5 billion.

• 7. Immiserizing Growth

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  American economist James K. Boyce called the Philippine economy under Marcos an example of immiserizing growth, in which the rich grow absolutely richer while the poor grow absolutely poorer. From 1964 to 1982 the gross domestic product rose from $5.27 billion to $37.14 billion, but external debt climbed from $360 million in 1962 to $17.2 billion in 1980. This debt-driven growth left the nation exposed. When the United States raised interest rates from 1980 to 1982 to fight inflation, the Philippine economy declined from 1981 and reached its worst recession by 1985. The economy contracted 7.3 percent in both 1984 and 1985, and poverty rates reached 49 percent. The forestry industry collapsed in the early 1980s after the most accessible forests were depleted; of 12 million hectares of forest land, about 7 million had been harvested. Marcos's signature farm program, Masagana 99, launched on the 21st of May 1973, aimed to raise rice yields from 40 to 99 cavans per hectare using the miracle rice IR8. Rice production grew from 3.7 to 7.7 million tons over two decades and made the Philippines a rice exporter for the first time in the 20th century. The switch demanded more fertilizer and pesticide, mostly profiting multinational firms rather than the small peasant farmers, who often stayed poor. One energy project captured the era's risk: of six planned nuclear plants, only the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant was completed, with construction paused after the Three Mile Island accident and closed soon after its 1985 completion following Chernobyl. Safety reviews later revealed over 4,000 defects, and the construction loans were only paid off in April 2017.

• 8. The Tarmac And The Fall

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  On the 21st of August 1983, opposition leader Ninoy Aquino was assassinated on the tarmac at Manila International Airport, returning from three years of exile in the United States. The opposition primarily accused Marcos of ordering the killing through Fabian Ver. Ver and other officers were charged but acquitted in 1985, in trials widely seen as a miscarriage of justice; after Marcos fell, a reinvestigation convicted sixteen military personnel, with the Sandiganbayan ruling that escort Rogelio Moreno fired the fatal shot. Facing economic collapse and mounting reports of his family's overseas wealth, Marcos called a snap election held on the 7th of February 1986. The Commission on Elections declared him the winner with 10,807,197 votes to Corazon Aquino's 9,291,761, while the poll watcher NAMFREL had Aquino ahead in its partial tally. Thirty-five COMELEC computer technicians walked out, alleging the official results were manipulated. Enrile and Ramos then abandoned Marcos and sheltered behind the People Power Revolution. On the 25th of February 1986, rival inaugurations were held, and as Aquino supporters seized the state broadcaster PTV-4, Marcos fled. He sought advice from US senator Paul Laxalt, who told him to cut and cut cleanly. The family was flown by helicopter to Clark Air Base, then on to Guam and Hawaii, where Marcos arrived on February 26. He died at St. Francis Medical Center in Honolulu at 12:40 a.m. on the 28th of September 1989, of kidney, heart, and lung ailments, 17 days after his 72nd birthday. His remains were reburied at the Libingan ng mga Bayani on the 18th of November 2016, by order of President Rodrigo Duterte, a burial that the family flew to Manila by Armed Forces helicopter and that various groups protested.