In November 1965, Ferdinand E. Marcos was elected to the presidency. His administration faced grave economic problems that were exacerbated by corruption, tax evasion, and smuggling.
In 1969 Marcos became the first elected president of the Philippines to win reelection. His campaign platform included the renegotiation of major treaties with the United States and trade with communist countries. These promises reflected a change in the self-concept of the country during the 1960s. The idea of the Philippines as an Asian outpost of Christianity was increasingly supplanted by a desire to develop an Asian cultural identity. Artists, musicians, and writers began to look to pre-Spanish themes for inspiration. More important was the trend toward seeking cultural identity through the national language, Pilipino. English, however, remained the language of business, of most government documents, and of the greater part of higher education. Demands that the government meet the social and economic needs of its citizenry continued.
A short-lived sign that the Filipino political system was again attempting to respond constructively to those needs was the choosing in 1970 of a widely representative Constitutional Convention in one of the most honest and peaceful elections in Philippine history. Large student demonstrations urged the convention to undertake a fundamental restructuring of political power.
Marcos, who was approaching the end of his constitutionally delimited eight years in office, had narrower goals: he pressed for the adoption of a parliamentary style of government, which would allow him to remain in power. He feared that the new constitution would not come into force before he lost the advantages of incumbency. At the same time, foreign investors, predominantly American, felt increased pressure from economic nationalists in the legislature.
MARTIAL LAW
In September 1972 Marcos declared martial law, claiming that it was the last defense against the rising disorder caused by increasingly violent student demonstrations, the alleged threats of communist insurgency by the new Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), and the Muslim separatist movement of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF). One of his first actions was to arrest opposition politicians in Congress and the Constitutional Convention. Initial public reaction to martial law was mostly favourable except in Muslim areas of the south, where a separatist rebellion, led by the MNLF, broke out in 1973. Despite halfhearted attempts to negotiate a cease-fire, the rebellion continued to claim thousands of military and civilian casualties. Communist insurgency expanded with the creation of the National Democratic Front (NDF), an organization embracing the CPP and other communist groups.
Under martial law the regime was able to reduce violent urban crime, collect unregistered firearms, and suppress communist insurgency in some areas. At the same time, a series of important new concessions were given to foreign investors, including a prohibition on strikes by organized labour, and a land-reform program was launched. In January 1973 Marcos proclaimed the ratification of a new constitution based on the parliamentary system, with himself as both president and prime minister. He did not, however, convene the interim legislature that was called for in that document.
General disillusionment with martial law and with the consolidation of political and economic control by Marcos, his family, and close associates grew during the 1970s. Despite growth in the country’s gross national product, workers’ real income dropped, few farmers benefited from land reform, and the sugar industry was in confusion. The precipitous drop in sugar prices in the early 1980s coupled with lower prices and less demand for coconuts and coconut products—traditionally the most important export commodity—added to the country’s economic woes; the government was forced to borrow large sums from the international banking community. Also troubling to the regime, reports of widespread corruption began to surface with increasing frequency.
Elections for an interim National Assembly were finally held in 1978. The opposition—of which the primary group was led by the jailed former senator Benigno S. Aquino, Jr.—produced such a bold and popular campaign that the official results, which gave Marcos’s opposition virtually no seats, were widely believed to have been illegally altered. In 1980 Aquino was allowed to go into exile in the United States, and the following year, after announcing the suspension of martial law, Marcos won a virtually uncontested election for a new six-year term.
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