41 years after

Today marks the 41st year when then President Ferdinand E. Marcos declared martial law and imposed a dictatorship to perpetuate himself in power. In 1986 a peaceful popular uprising ended his despotic rule. 

Marcos’ 14-year dictatorship ruthlessly repressed or tried to repress all those it perceived as opposition. It exploited and impoverished the masses, enriched the favored few, plundered the public till, and ruined the economy.

This is a day for recollecting and reckoning, but not — never! — for commemorating that anti-democratic, anti-people act.

And it’s appropriate that organizers of the sustained protest actions demanding the abolition of the pork-barrel system directly link today’s protest march-rallies and noise barrage to recollecting and reckoning martial-law brutalities, abuses of power and excesses.

It was the Marcos dictatorship that started and craftily manipulated the pork-barrel system. Then (with the rubber-stamp Batasang Pambansa) as now (with the Senate and the House of Representatives) the pork barrel has been used to render the legislators subservient to the President.

But reckoning must go beyond the pork-barrel system.  Marcos inflicted other deleterious changes on the budget process that have been carried on to this day.

Thanks to veteran journalist-lawyer and anti-dictatorship fighter Manuel F. Almario for reminding us about these, through a commentary last week.  The changes are:

• Through Presidential Decree 1177 (Budget Reform Act of 1977), Marcos revoked the budgetary system established since 1938 by Commonwealth Act No. 246, which provided for a line-item framework in national budgeting. That meant that every proposed government expense (for public works projects, for salaries, supplies, etc.) had to be listed down in the budget. And implementation was subjected to strict pre-auditing rules.

• Marcos replaced line-item budgeting with lump-sum appropriations, hiding from public scrutiny the specific project expenditures.  He also replaced the pre-auditing rules with post-auditing, which meant that it was only after the projects were supposedly completed that the Commission on Audit would know how the money — including pork barrel — was spent.  That has become the practice since then.

• Worse, PD 1177 removed from Congress the power to review and pass upon the amount of annual repayment of national obligations, mainly foreign debts. (Meanwhile, through PD 1967, Marcos incurred $24-billion foreign loans.) PD 1177 mandates the automatic appropriation for debt servicing, which has eaten up substantial portions of the national income every year — P796 billion for 2014.

In the late 1980s the 8th Congress passed a bill repealing PD 1177, but Cory Aquino vetoed it. Earlier, many of its provisions were included in the Administrative Code of 1987 which she signed into law. Subsequent efforts to repeal the decree (as my colleagues and I tried in the House from 2001 to 2010) were frustrated.

Beyond these pork-barrel and budgetary issues, it’s important to review certain conditions or issues during and after the Marcos dictatorship in order to gauge how far the nation has, or hasn’t, moved forward.  For instance:

• Just one aspect of human rights violations – enforced disappearances:  Under the Marcos dictatorship at least 759 “desaparecidos” were documented.  Such violations continued under all successive administrations, with these corresponding numbers: under Mrs. Aquino, 821; Ramos, 39; Estrada, 26; Arroyo, 206; and P-Noy, 16.

The families of these 1,867 victims of enforced disappearances still cry out for justice. Meantime, other serious human rights violations — primarily extrajudicial killings, with 142 victims recorded under P-Noy’s watch — have continued with impunity.

• Among the Marcos dictatorship’s tens of thousands human-rights violation victims, 9,539 won a class suit in a US court in 1992. They were awarded $2-billion compensation to be taken from the Marcos ill-gotten wealth that may be recovered. So far only $100 million was distributed to 7,500 of them.

• Last February, President Aquino signed into law a legislation recognizing the 9,539 victims and granting P10-billion compensation to them and other victims who may also qualify under certain criteria. Until now P-Noy has not appointed the members of the compensation board who would implement the law.

• Through PD 27, Marcos declared all the country’s agricultural lands subjected to agrarian reform.  That would have been a truly revolutionary program, but it never got implemented.

• In 1987 the Cory government enacted and began implementing a weak 10-year “comprehensive agrarian reform program” as its “centerpiece” program -- but exempting huge private landholdings from coverage. It underwent further amendments adding more exemptions while implementation dragged.

Thus even if fully implemented, the CARP would fail to achieve its avowed goal.

Today farmers and agricultural workers across the nation continue to rally for genuine agrarian reform.

• Marcos flaunted a plan to develop 11 industrial projects that would propel the Philippines towards full industrialization. But like his agrarian reform program the plan never took off.  Today, after five successive administrations, we still don’t have any basic industry to speak of.

• In the final year of the Marcos dictatorship (1985), income inequality was configured this way: 20% of the population held 52.1% of total family income, while 80% of the other Filipinos shared the remaining 47.9%.

After 24 years (in 2009) this condition hardly changed: the top 20%  held 51.9% of income, the bottom 80% made do with 48.1%.

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