A cautionary tale

When Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in 1972, there was no condemnation or even a hint of disapproval from Washington.

In fact what Marcos received were letters of congratulations. Among the first to send one was the American Chamber of Commerce in the Philippines, whose telegram included a pledge of cooperation with the Marcos regime.

The World Bank, heavily influenced by the US, lauded the proclamation of martial law and Marcos’ abolition of Congress, saying the measures “provided the government with almost absolute power in the field of economic development.”

These are all recounted by former Senate president Jovito Salonga in his book, “The Life and Times of Gerry Roxas and Ninoy Aquino,” which will soon be launched.

Salonga belongs to that age when Filipinos sent men of probity and exceptional intellect, not those with the best entertainment value, to Congress. He writes with the keen eye of a participant in historic events.

The book is not just about two great Filipinos, Gerry Roxas (Senator Mar’s father) and Ninoy Aquino, but also about Jovito Salonga. He traces the nation’s path from the days leading up to martial law through the collapse of the dictatorship.

It is a timely cautionary tale about the evil that men can do when only a few stand up to oppose it, and the tortuous path to vanquishing that evil. Especially when Washington stands foursquare behind (or, in today’s favored phrase, shoulder to shoulder with) the evildoer.

Wives and mothers (and the bishops, though Salonga did not mention this) were happy when Marcos imposed a curfew. Overnight, the bombings in the capital stopped, recalls Salonga, who still bears shrapnel and permanent injuries from the bombing of a Liberal Party rally in Manila’s Plaza Miranda on Aug. 21, 1971.

Salonga concedes that Marcos’ land reform, which limited owners of farms planted to rice and corn to just seven hectares each, was “unprecedented.” It “pleased Marcos’s American friends and apologists in Washington and disarmed many of his ‘progressive’ critics at home,” Salonga writes.

He also notes that Marcos cited the Muslim insurgency in Mindanao and the communist rebellion in Luzon as justifications for declaring martial law. The Plaza Miranda bombing was in fact carried out by communist rebels.

But Salonga also observes that the creation of the Moro National Liberation Front was the immediate offshoot of a military massacre of Muslim trainees in Corregidor, which Marcos reportedly authorized in secret in 1967-68. The Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army, meanwhile, came into being and gained strength during Marcos’ watch.

Yet Marcos successfully played the communist card to ensure American support throughout martial law. He said he was not declaring a military takeover and that he did what must be done “to protect the Philippines and our democracy.”

“I have had to use this constitutional power in order that we may not completely lose the freedom which we cherish,” Marcos proclaimed, sounding very much like another president delivering a State of the Nation Address.

He needed “to save the Republic and reform society,” he said — and the Americans went along with him.

Even after Marcos abolished Congress, emasculated the Supreme Court, threw his political enemies in jail without formal charges, rewrote the Constitution and then ratified it through so-called Citizens’ Assemblies that in fact never assembled and finished their work in a matter of days, there was not a peep of official protest from Washington.

Salonga recalls a Honolulu Star-Bulletin report in its April 24, 1980 edition, quoting Marcos as telling US publishers, supposedly including the Washington Post’s Katherine Graham and The New York Times’ Arthur Ochs Sulzberger: “The press in the Philippines is free and it criticizes me. Nobody in the Philippines has been imprisoned for his beliefs. Nobody was arrested for what they wrote.”

On June 16, 1981, Marcos finally held the first presidential election since martial law was imposed. The opposition boycotted the exercise, and Marcos won by a landslide against his lone opponent, his ally Alejo Santos.

Shortly after the sham, Salonga, who was in Hawaii, watched the news from Manila. “I couldn’t believe what I saw. There was Vice President George Bush, a Yale man, who had been sent by President Reagan to represent him in the Marcos inauguration in Manila, toasting Marcos in words that shocked me: ‘We stand with the Philippines. We stand with you, sir. We love your adherence to democratic principles and to democratic processes.”

Ronald Reagan would support Marcos up to the very end, deploying his men to tell the dictator to “cut cleanly” only at the height of the 1986 people power revolt, when it became clear that the multitudes that had gathered at EDSA had no intention of leaving unless Marcos left the presidency.

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Salonga writes based on his diaries, his first-hand experience, documents, news reports, and the recollections of his friends.

US President Barack Obama, who issued a warning at his inaugural against corrupt foreign leaders, now reportedly wants the US to play a greater role in Southeast Asia. He should be reminded of the days when his government won a staunch ally in America’s wars but contributed to the loss of a nation’s freedom.

Salonga’s book should also remind Filipinos of American abolitionist Wendell Phillips’ admonition about eternal vigilance being the price of liberty.

Marcos imposed martial law not just to perpetuate himself in power, Salonga writes. When he headed efforts to recover ill-gotten wealth after EDSA I, Salonga learned that the so-called conjugal dictatorship started salting away wealth under pseudonyms and code names in Swiss banks as early as March 1968 — just two years after Marcos became president.

The nation should learn from its mistakes.