CHAPTER 5
Martial Law and Beyond
How the Dictator Usurped Power
At his inaugural address as the sixth president of the Philippine Republic on
December 30, 1965, at Luneta Park in Manila, Ferdinand Marcos proclaimed: “We must rise from the depths of
ignominy and failure. Our government is gripped in the iron hand of venality, its treasury is barren, its
resources are wasted, its civil service is slothful and indifferent, its armed forces demoralized and its
councils sterile.” His election, he stated, “is a new mandate of leadership. It is…a mandate not merely for
change. It is a mandate for greatness…Come then, let us march together towards the dream of
greatness.”1
In the same speech, he invoked the nation's overthrow of three hundred years of Spanish colonial rule that
began in 1521, and the establishment of the first republic in Asia in 1898. Left unsaid was that the republic was
short-lived. Some months earlier, the United States had declared war on Spain, ostensibly for blowing up an
American ship in Cuba, a Spanish colony. Admiral George Dewey of the U.S. Navy steamed into Manila Bay and sank
the Spanish flotilla. Rather than surrender to the Filipinos, who had virtually vanquished them before Dewey
arrived, the Spaniards ceded the islands to the Americans in a simulated handover. In the same year, the United
States annexed Guam, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii, its first steps toward empire. Betrayed and unwilling to serve
another master, the Filipinos waged a five-year losing battle that killed 216,000 inhabitants (out of a
population of 7.4 million) and 4,234 American troops (out of 126,458 invading forces).2For fifty years, the islands were America's first overseas colony.
They fell to Japan in World War II and were liberated after great loss of lives and property. When the war ended,
only in Warsaw was the devastation greater than in Manila.
The Philippines gained its sovereignty from the United States in 1946. It was during the term of the
country's first president, Manuel Roxas (1946–48), that a series of trade and military agreements sealed a
long association of “mutual interests” between the two countries. Under one of those agreements, the Philippines
leased two military bases on the island of Luzon to the United States for a term of ninety-nine years. These ties
bound the two countries to an overarching relationship of economics and security that would span succeeding
administrations.
When Marcos was elected president in 1965, an insurgency by the leftist New People's Army (NPA) and a
secessionist Muslim movement in the south were brewing. The Communist leanings of the NPA worried the United
States, which was already mired in a war in Indochina. It viewed the Philippines as a vital defense line in the
Cold War with the Soviet Union. Keeping the islands within its sphere of influence at a time when Communism was
threatening the rest of Southeast Asia constituted a core national interest. The powerful linkages—of politics,
trade, and military and foreign aid—that it had forged during the colonial, commonwealth, and post-independence
eras were at stake.
Relationships were being nurtured at high levels. The U.S. vice president, Hubert Humphrey, attended Marcos's
inauguration. In September 1966, Marcos met with President Lyndon Johnson in Washington to sign a $45 million
economic aid package and to negotiate a new twenty-five-year lease term for the bases. The next month Johnson
visited Manila for a seven-nation conference to rally support among Asian allies for the United States’ war in
Vietnam. Despite a public outcry against the idea of getting involved, Marcos sent an engineering battalion to
South Vietnam. It was later revealed at a hearing on November 18 before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign
Relations that the United States had secretly paid $39 million to persuade Marcos to dispatch ten
battalions.3
Marcos's dream of a march to greatness started well. Expansive public works projects as well as intensified
tax collection led to a measure of prosperity in the 1970s. He was reelected in 1969, becoming the first
president to win a second term. President Richard Nixon visited that year, followed by the governor of
California, Ronald Reagan, beginning a friendship that would blossom during Reagan's subsequent
presidency.4
During Marcos's second term, militancy increased among student groups. Kabataang Makabayan (Nationalist
Youth), the most militant of all, allied itself with the new Communist Party of the Philippines, founded on
December 26, 1968. In February and March 1970, youths marched against the U.S. embassy in Manila. In April,
following three days of rioting, a general strike was launched to protest increased oil and transportation costs.
In one street demonstration after another, students demanded Marcos's resignation.