Category: Lies

Originally published by Vera Files on June 23, 2020.

Often, as internal oppression intensifies, the closer and more scathing external scrutiny becomes. In response, the authority being made accountable calibrates its response as the crisis deepens: from outright denial to obfuscation to censorship and to an eventual crackdown on its critics.

On June 4, 2020, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) released its comprehensive report on the Philippines. “The long-standing overemphasis on public order and national security at the expense of human rights has become more acute in recent years, and there are concerns that the vilification of dissent is being increasingly institutionalized and normalized in ways that will be very difficult to reverse,” it said.

The report added that “in just the first four months of 2020, including during the COVID-19 pandemic, OHCHR documented killings of drug suspects and human rights defenders. Charges were filed against political opponents and NGO workers, including for sedition and perjury. A major media network was forced to stop broadcasting after being singled out by the authorities. Red-tagging and incitement to violence have been rife, online and offline.” It said while measures were taken to mitigate the pandemic’s economic impact on vulnerable communities, “threats of martial law, the use of force by security forces in enforcing quarantines, and the use of laws to stifle criticism have also marked the Government’s response.”

The Office of the Presidential Spokesperson, in a statement on June 6, 2020, took note of the UN agency’s recommendations but rejected its “faulty conclusions.” It said the government will continue to respect its international legal obligations, including human rights.

How or why the OHCHR’s conclusions are faulty, the government offered no explanation. Just an outright denial. A refusal to be made accountable — reminiscent of another time in our history when government’s denial came with both threat and censorship.

Almost forty years ago today, on July 4 to 6, 1980 the New York Times published a three-part story by John B. Oakes entitled, “The House of Marcos.”

In the local press, the Oakes article appeared only in We Forum, with a significant portion excised. In running the story We Forum heeded then President Marcos’s dire warning to them: “Not to press your luck too far.”

We Forum ran the excerpts from the Oakes story in its July 19, July 26, and August 2, 1980 issues. Side by side with it was the rebuttal from then Minister of Foreign Affairs Carlos P. Romulo, which was carried by all the major newspapers in Metro Manila.

Oakes started his story with these questions: “How much longer will President Marcos be able to retain his grip in Malacanan? How has he managed to do it thus far?”

In July 1980, Marcos was in his fifteenth year in office as president. He was twice elected to the post, totaling eight years. He would have been president only until 1973. Before his second term expired in 1972, he declared martial law and by then, for almost eight years, ruled as a dictator. There seemed to be no end in sight to the martial law that he imposed. And only he could end it.

“The Marcoses have kept their tenancy of Malacanan by subverting the Constitution, suborning the army, corrupting the elections, trampling on civil rights, muzzling the press, squandering the country’s resources, plunging into heavy foreign debt and enriching their family and friends,” Oakes wrote. To be able to pursue all these with impunity, Marcos had to have the United States firmly in his corner.

Here Oakes switched to Marcos’s reputation as a skillful politician. “There is no doubt that Marcos has been skillfully playing ‘the American card.’ He publicly inveighs against possible ‘intervention by the United States in the affairs of the Philippines.’ Yet he managed last year to obtain from the Carter administration a $500 million, five-year commitment in military and economic aid as ‘compensation’ for American use of the huge air and naval bases at Clark Field and Subic Bay.”

The second installment in the Oakes series made a grim portrait of the impoverished Filipinos suffering under the Marcos regime. “Three out of five Filipino children, according to the government’s own figures, are malnourished—partly because their parents are ignorant of proper nutrition but also because they are ‘economically restrained’ from buying nutritious foods.’”.

The latter third in the second installment of Oakes’s piece was not published by the We Forum. It was on the First Lady Imelda Romualdez Marcos, who on July 2 that year, just celebrated her 54th birthday. Birthdays then of the conjugal dictator were celebrated as days of public thanksgiving. Oakes excoriating Imelda during her birthday week would not have suited her well.

In addition to the “Bliss” projects, the first lady has instituted a system of subsidized food shops, where some basic necessities can be purchased at heavily discounted prices. But such socially useful innovations tend to be obscured in the public mind by the enrichment of her family and friends, and also by her style of extravagant spending and display, which she is convinced the Filipino people need, admire and want to emulate. “I think of myself as the star and the flame,” she says, “to inspire the people and move them to progress.”

Once, when asked why so many of her entourage had become so wealthy and powerful since Marcos’s imposition of martial law, the first lady was reported to have replied: “Some are smarter than others.”

That’s the sardonic title of an impressively documented underground pamphlet now circulating in Manila. It was written by “a group of concerned businessmen and professional managers.” It lists, with names and details, some of the principal beneficiaries of the “new society” along with the scores of major corporations and business institutions in which they have an important voice or outright control.

At least half a dozen members of the Marcos family, several high officials, including a general, and more than a dozen newly rich friends and close associates are among those “smarter than others”, with wealth and influence to show for it.

The last of the installments asked whether Marcos will go the way of the deposed Shah of Iran. “Like the shah, he and his consort pursue an ostentatiously luxurious style of life, as do their families and friends—while an estimated 40 percent of their people live in extreme poverty, some approaching the starvation level.”

For Oakes, Marcos was then sitting atop a rumbling social volcano. Marcos only managed to keep himself on top and contain the opposition through “cases of arrest without warrant, imprisonment without charge, torture without mercy, murder without cause.”

Oakes’s story for the New York Times was syndicated in various newspapers outside of the Philippines.

On July 12, 1980, then Minister of Foreign Affairs, Carlos P. Romulo held a press conference in his Waldorf Astoria Hotel suite in New York to refute Oakes’ assertions. He turned the transcript of his question-and-answer session into a six-question primer distributed to the media. As mentioned, all newspapers of note in the country published it.

Is the Marcos regime repressive?

“Authoritarian, yes; repressive, no.” Romulo denied that there was widespread trampling of civil rights. If civil rights were “in varying degrees regulated and limits set to their free exercise,” it was “in accordance with the imperatives of public order, community welfare, and the values of society.” Romulo continued, “The government is ‘authoritarian’ in the sense that the President exercises the strongest executive powers. There is greater central planning especially of social economic development. But there is also greater participation of people in the political process, and more regional and local autonomy. In effect, a balance has been achieved between individual rights and the demands of law or of authority. Where before there was license and even anarchy: to this extent it is ‘authoritarian’.”

Is there rising opposition to the Marcos regime?

The notion of a rising opposition, Romulo said, was merely “based on the superficial observations of hurried visitors to Manila, or on armchair speculations in some New York office.” In turn, this amusing observation came from elements who were at “the fringes of Philippine society”: “long-term opponents of President Marcos, habitual critics of government, impractical idealists, or the disaffected.”

How has President Marcos maintained his position of leadership?

“Contrary to gossip, speculation, and highly biased judgment of some foreign observers, President Marcos remains as titular, factual, and effective head of the Philippine government and leader of the Filipino people, by legislative fiat, by direct expression of the will of the people through various referendums, and by the undeniable fact that he is best suited to lead his people out of their age-old problems and into new life of greater opportunity and prosperity for all…,” Romulo said. “As President Marcos himself says, ‘It is simply inconceivable that a people who have gone through a hundred years of struggle for their rights and liberties would tolerate, let alone support, a repressive government’.”

Is American aid serving to prop up the Marcos regime? Is President Marcos “skillfully playing ‘The American Card’”?

Romulo’s retort was if there was an “American Card” and if Marcos was playing it, then he was not doing so skillfully since “the current levels of American economic aid average $75 million per year. For 1980, American military security support assistance will amount to $20 million. . . It is a hyperbole—and perhaps ironic—to say that they represent a ‘skillful’ playing of the American card.”Proceeds from the military bases agreement, Romulo contended, cannot be considered as propping up Marcos since they will be in the form of military assistance from 1980-85, regardless of who was president. What it props up is “the American security arrangements for the entire region as a part of the US global security system.”

Much has been said about endemic poverty in the Philippines, the gap between the rich and the poor is said to be widening, and there is widespread privation, and even starvation. Are these reports true? What are the effects of President Marcos’ policies on the situation?

Romulo conceded that, “There is no starvation, but malnutrition.” But that was only expected because, for Romulo, during those times everybody’s poor and suffering: “Poverty is endemic in most societies today, be they developed or developing, the Philippines is no exception.” The current situation is not Marcos’s fault. “In the case of developing societies, disparities in wealth, property, status and power can be traced to their colonial past.” And how could anyone speak of widening gap between rich and poor and there was hardly any wealth to speak of? “There can be no equalization of wealth if in the first place that wealth does not yet exist, there can be no creation of national wealth if that nation does not enjoy the opportunity to share the world’s production of goods.” But Marcos was doing his best to make things better.

Is it true that President Marcos has plunged the Philippines into heavy foreign debt, and that he squanders Philippine resources?

Romulo claimed that the Philippines’s external public debt until then was much less than that of similarly situated countries, like Mexico or Indonesia. All other economic indicators like the debt service ratio, the in-flow of foreign investments, the country’s international reserves, and the export receipts all point to “a picture of progress, not of stagnation or squandering.”

When the Philippines plunged into a deep political and economic crisis after the assassination of Ninoy Aquino in 1983, all the untruths in Romulo’s response were laid bare.

Besides Romulo, Teodoro Valencia and Gerardo Sicat also took to the Marcos controlled press to impugn the Oakes story. Valencia, known then as the dean of Marcos apologists, wrote in his Daily Express column that Oakes’s article was biased, unfair, and malicious. Sicat, then Marcos’s economic planning minister, quibbled with the statistics that Oakles cited in his piece. Like Romulo’s, his rebuttal was featured in all the metro dailies.

Ernesto Avila, in a letter to the We Forum, pointed out the absurdity of the situation. “Unfortunately, yet quite expectedly, these apologists wrote against an article that the supposed ‘free’ Philippine press never published. Not until your voice-in-the-wilderness of a paper printed the Oakes feature story. We were being asked to damn a foreign newspaperman whose article we were not even allowed to read.”

For all the defenses that the dictator’s men put up, they dare not mention one topic: the excesses of Imelda Marcos. The copy published in the We Forum was sanitized, so they may have thought it prudent not to call attention to the issue.

Forty years later, the Oakes story is available in online digital archives and all the extant We Forum issues at the Rizal Library of the Ateneo de Manila University is accessible online (http://rizal2.lib.admu.edu.ph/weforum/). This minor controversy reminds us that what is often suppressed amidst a threatened press bears the truth.

In April 21, 1980, a couple of months before the New York Times published the Oakes story, Marcos himself spoke before the American Newspaper Publishers Association in Hawaii, maintaining that he “remain[ed] convinced that the American tradition of fair play and giving the other guy a chance to talk still governs.”

But in his book In Search of Alternatives: The Third World in an Age of Crisis, published also in 1980 by his government’s main propaganda arm, the National Media Production Center, Marcos did not hide his annoyance of the foreign press, especially the American ones.

“Western press reports about government failures, tyranny, alleged denial of human rights, poverty, assassination and coup d’etat often stem from a pre-judgment of the societies in which these events occur . . . the Western press hardly reports, discusses or interprets Third World objectives, strategies and programs for development,” he wrote.

In the same April 21 speech in Hawaii, Marcos claimed that though his government was authoritarian, it was not tyrannical, “We have never driven out a correspondent.” But as the Honolulu Star Bulletin observed in the same news report on his speech, “his government refused reentry to Arnold Zeitlin, the Associated Press Manila bureau chief who had written a piece considered critical of the Philippine president.”

In the history of the Marcos regime, the Oakes story is a mere footnote. It was a front-page piece, above the fold story in the We Forum, but it was not the main headline.

Two years later, the dictator had had enough of the We Forum. Marcos’s animosity towards the paper escalated, promising at one point, the Los Angeles Times reported, “that he would make Burgos and his colleagues ‘eat’ the newspaper.”

On charges of “conspiracy to overthrow the government through black political propaganda, agitation and advocacy of violence” because the paper aimed to “discredit, insult and ridicule the president to such an extent that it would inspire his assassination,” the paper was raided and shuttered on December 7, 1982 and its editor-publisher, Jose Burgos Jr. and thirteen others were hauled to jail (there were two more but they were in the United States). Eventually, they were put under house arrest. The trigger for the arrest and closure was a story on the fake Marcos medals written by Bonifacio Gillego. As one Catholic cleric remarked in the Oakes story, “Oh, yes, we have freedom of speech. But what we don’t have is freedom after speech.”

When the We Forum was closed, the January 2, 1983 issue of the Los Angeles Times quoted Teodoro Valencia’s column in the Daily Express: “Newsmen know that constructive dissent and criticism against the government have never provoked such serious reaction from the government. Is freedom the right of any man to say or print whatever he pleases?”

After 774 days, on January 21, 1985, We Forum reopened. In its December 26, 1984 decision (G.R. No. L-64261), the Supreme Court found that the warrants were defective.

For the Supreme Court, “Such closure is in the nature of previous restraint or censorship abhorrent to the freedom of the press guaranteed under the fundamental law, and constitutes a virtual denial of petitioners’ freedom to express themselves in print.”

As authorities today again resort to semantics to mask the brute application of law, We Forum’s saga – from the Oakes story to the fake Marcos medals – is a reminder of machinations of those in power to silence the more critical voices in media.

The soon-to-be law Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020 is characterized by Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque as tough but not draconian. The conviction of Rappler CEO Maria Ressa and former writer/researcher Reynaldo Santos Jr. for cyberlibel is not an assault on press freedom but an issue of accountability. So says Chief Presidential Legal Counsel Salvador Panelo in his press release. So says Presidential Communications Secretary Martin Andanar in his response to a statement from the US State Department. As if Romulo is still speaking: authoritarian but not repressive. As if Marcos is still around: authoritarian but not tyrannical.

But as before, external scrutiny matters. It forces the administration to go on record. A fragment in our country’s long history of oppression gets written. We are able to relearn this history during these trying times because their struggle left an imprint of courage, however imperfect. And the writing of that history always starts with the likes of Burgos and the We Forum.

Jose Burgos Jr., in his publisher’s note in the resurrected We Forum wrote: “But here we are once again, alive and kicking, ready to continue with the struggle for truth, justice and freedom, to contribute to our modest share to the efforts of all freedom-loving people to dismantle all the devilish instruments of oppression and suppression under which the nation has long suffered.”

Here we are once again, indeed.

Originally published by Vera Files on November 2, 2021.

So how did Ferdinand “Bongbong” R. Marcos, Jr. end up in a graduate program in business administration at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania without an undergraduate degree?

On November 25, 1978, Marcos swore in his 21-year-old son as special assistant to the president. In a press release on this, Malacañang stated that Bongbong held a special diploma in social studies from Oxford University.

Two months later, Malacañang announced that while undergoing a six-month basic officer’s course at the Philippine Marine Training Center, Bongbong had been commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Philippine Constabulary. But as the Honolulu Advertiser noted, Bongbong “[did] not have to wear a uniform because he was sworn in last [November] as one of the president’s special assistants and will be detailed to the presidential palace.” A US Department of State cable noted that Bongbong “[had] been elected president of his officers’ class” and that a columnist “noted tongue-in-cheek that this class is now sure to produce a high percentage of generals.”

The papers left behind when the Marcoses fled Malacañang in 1986 describe the extent of the family’s efforts to ensure that Bongbong was accommodated in one of the most prestigious business schools in the United States, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

On January 27, 1979, Marcos received a confidential personal letter from Francis Ablan, then an executive of Caltex (Philippines), Inc., conveying a cable from Frank Zingaro, a vice president of the multinational oil giant Caltex Petroleum Corp. and once president of the Philippine-American Chamber of Commerce of New York. Both had personal ties to the Marcoses.

Ablan wrote that Zingaro “[had] some good connections with people of Wharton School of Business and with some other graduate schools of business. He also offered that if it is your desire, we can send Bongbong’s application through him and he will personally handle the submission of same to the right offices/people. By the way, Frank reminded me that his assistance is purely a personal matter between you and him. He welcomes the opportunity of being of help in return for the many courtesies extended to him during his visits with you and the First Lady.”

In his cable dated January 25, 1979, Zingaro explained to Ablan the admission process at Wharton and Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. He wrote that “Arjay Miller currently dean of the Stanford Business School and formerly once president of Ford Motor Company has been advised of applicant’s impending application submission and we’re hopefully confident he will use his good offices to assist.”

But then he hedged: “I must remind you that admissions committees of graduate schools and more particularly Stanford and Wharton are an unusual breed and they take pride in their independence to make evaluations of candidates without outside pressures or without regard to the applicant’s social or political status.”

Photo 3 1979 01 25 Privatel… by VERA Files

After initially considering Stanford, a decision seemed to have been made by May 1979 that Bongbong would attend Wharton instead. On May 3 that year, Jose A. Syjuco Jr., deputy chief of mission of the Philippine embassy in London, sent a telex to Malacañang to inform Bongbong that he must “rush Wharton forms to Ernie Pineda [Ernesto C. Pineda, Philippine consul general in New York] soonest. He will make [a] strong attempt to push it through but he needs the basic application.”

Photo 4 1979 05 03 Syjuco t… by VERA Files

With all the diplomatic efforts and muscle-flexing of business executives, it remains unclear how Bongbong got into Wharton without an undergraduate degree, extensive work experience, or what persuasive arguments Marcos presented that the school gave credit to. Bongbong would later give various reasons for why he was unable to finish his studies at Wharton.

And then there was the lie, of course, that he did complete the program.

Bongbong started at Wharton on or about August 10, 1979, which means that he was accepted by the prestigious business school within three months after two Philippine diplomats offered to “push through” his application. This is based on a Department of State cable dated August 7, 1979 stating that the young Marcos was to arrive in Philadelphia “to begin a two-year course of study at the Wharton School of Business” and that the state department had known about his study plans “for some time.”

The cable also noted that Marcos’ son, “with appropriate bodyguards,” had been earlier “accredited by the Philippine Mission to the United Nations as its ‘military advisor’ with the rank of attaché, with an assistant who also carries the rank of attaché.” The people who drafted the communication for the undersigned, US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, noted that the ‘nominal U.N. assignment is presumably intended to give Bong Bong diplomatic immunity while he is in [the U.S.]’.”

Why he needed to have diplomatic immunity and bodyguards who stayed with him in a house in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, is unclear. Bongbong, as Ferdinand Marcos II, continued to be listed as an attaché of the Philippine U.N. Mission in 1980, based on that year’s edition of Permanent Missions to the United Nations: Officers Entitled to Diplomatic Privileges and Immunities.

How did the “military advisor”—fresh out of months-long training— perform in Wharton?

Bongbong himself has provided a means for evaluating this. On his official website, a copy of his Wharton MBA transcript issued on April 2, 2015 is posted showing that the presidential aspirant in next year’s elections enrolled for four terms between the fall 1979 and 1981. He did not enroll for the 1981 spring term.

Looking at a course description of Wharton MBA program in the mid-1980s and Bongbong’s transcript, it appears that in the fall term of 1979, he failed to earn credit for a core subject: administration. He performed a bit better during the spring 1980 term, passing all the courses taken by Wharton MBA students regardless of their major. Of the five courses he took during the fall 1980 term, he earned credit in only two.

Bongbong did not pass any of the courses during the fall 1981 term; he received two incompletes, suggesting that he attended classes but failed to submit all prerequisites to earn course credit. Overall, he earned eleven credit units before withdrawing from the program. He was far from finishing his MBA; he retook administration in the fall 1981 term, but received a mark of NR (not reported) for the course. The transcript states that his major is “undeclared.”

It would have been necessary for him to declare a major and complete major courses before he could write a thesis or do a capstone/advanced study project. Yet in several biographic notes and at least one interview, Bongbong claimed that he was already writing his MBA thesis or dissertation when he had to cut his studies short because he was elected vice governor of Ilocos Norte.

Marcos Jr. was elected vice governor of Ilocos Norte not in 1981, as many online profiles of him claim, but on January 30, 1980 at the age of 22. Batas Pambansa Blg. 52, enacted on December 22, 1979, lowered the minimum age for governors and vice governors from 23 to 21. In fact, based on an Agence France Presse article dated December 20, 1979, Bongbong was originally being pushed to run for governor. His aunt, Elizabeth Marcos Roca, who had held the Ilocos Norte governorship since 1967, even stated that she was willing to give way to her nephew. But the article noted that Bongbong was “not enthusiastic about making politics a career.”

According to an article published in the Honolulu Advertiser on January 4, 1980, Bongbong had “told a crowd of well-wishers (in the Philippines) that he planned to complete his studies leading to a master’s degree in business administration in the United States.” Even with his election assured, he maintained that his focus was on his studies.

Bongbong ran uncontested and became vice governor of Ilocos Norte after the January 30, 1980 elections while still a student at Wharton. The foreign media reported that so as not to interrupt his studies, Bongbong chose to be sworn into office at the Philippine embassy in Washington D.C. on February 28, 1980. Eduardo Z. Romualdez, Bongbong’s uncle and then Philippine ambassador to the U.S., administered his oath.

Indeed, it seems that throughout 1980, or several months after he was sworn in as vice governor, Bongbong remained in the U.S. His transcript reflects that he continued to take classes. As reported by international media, such as the Ohio-based New Herald and Kyodo News, in November 1980, Marcos asked the U.S. government to give Bongbong additional protection because of purported threats to his life. The New Herald article noted that Bongbong was “an attache to the Philippine delegation to the United Nations in New York.” Marcos himself eventually beefed up security for his son in the U.S.

There is ample written, photographic, and audiovisual evidence that Bongbong was in the Philippines during the April 7, 1981 constitutional plebiscite, the June 16, 1981 presidential election, and the third inauguration of his father as president on June 30, 1981. This period coincided with the time he did not enroll in Wharton.

There is evidence though that he returned to the US in the fall of 1981 to attend classes again. But it seemed that besides attending classes, Bongbong was attending to other business as well. A November 25, 1982 article in The Cincinnati Enquirer reported that in 1981, a state trooper stopped Bongbong for driving over the speed limit at the New Jersey Turnpike. The article said, “The state trooper who pulled over the young Marcos, a student at the University of Pennsylvania, was startled to see a semi-automatic rifle at the backseat and a revolver strapped to the leg of a young woman in the passenger seat.”

Bongbong flashed a diplomatic passport and was let go. “Except,” the article concluded, “the State Department said, that young Marcos was not registered as a diplomatic agent of his country.”

Thus, for Bongbong and his people to say that he discontinued his studies solely because he was elected vice governor—a position that, based on Batas Pambansa Blg. 51, practically only required him to serve as the governor’s substitute or spare tire, the latter function that he would fulfill in a few years—is, to put it charitably, inaccurate.

THE LIES

On March 24, 1983, Bongbong assumed the governorship of Ilocos Norte after his aunt resigned for health reasons. It was around this time that lies about his university education were carried by the local press. The Religious of the Good Shepherd, Philippines-Japan, in an October 27, 2021 Facebook page post, showed a March 25, 1983 news clipping from an unidentified newspaper announcing that Bongbong was the new Ilocos Norte governor. The news item claimed that Bongbong “is a graduate of Oxford University in London, where he earned B.A. and M.A. degrees in politics, philosophy, and economics. He later attended the Wharton School of Finance in Pennsylvania.”

On March 31, 1983, a member of the Religious of the Good Shepherd wrote Oxford about what she read in the news report. A month later, on April 20, the university wrote back to her with a definite answer.

“Ferdinand Martin Romualdez matriculated in 1975 at St. Edmund Hall, University of Oxford, to read Politics, Philosophy and Economics. He did not however complete his Preliminary examinations, and is not therefore a graduate of this University. It follows that he does not hold any degree. He was however awarded a Special Diploma in Social Studies in 1978.” The emphasis was in the original.

After getting exiled in Hawaii with his family in 1986 as a result of the People Power revolt, Bongbong returned to the Philippines in 1991 and was elected as representative of Ilocos Norte’s second congressional district from 1992 to 1995.

In the featured profile in the 1993 Congressional Highlights Quarterly Report, Bongbong’s educational background not only indicated that he obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in PPE, it also stated that he obtained a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Pennsylvania.

On February 24, 2015, Marites Danguilan Vitug writing for Rappler, once again raised the question of how truthful Bongbong was regarding his university education. A senator since 2010, Bongbong posted his resume in his official senate page indicating that he had a Bachelor of Arts degree in PPE political and a master’s degree in business administration from the Wharton School of Business. Vitug’s article belied Bongbong’s claims.

In a statement released in response to Vitug’s piece, Bongbong maintained that his academic records were “accurate,” that he “got a diploma” from Oxford but did not finish his studies in Wharton because he was elected vice governor of Ilocos Norte.

In an ambush interview on March 2, 2015, a reporter asked Bongbong if he had a degree. He replied, “I suppose. I got a diploma, kaya nga may diploma ako e.” This which is reminiscent of his sister Imee’s “sa pagkakaalam ko, nag graduate ako” (as far as I know, I graduated). Imee Marcos, now senator, also made false claims of having graduated from Princeton University, the University of the Philippines College of Law, and the Asian Institute of Management.

In the same interview, Bongbong admitted that he did not finish his MBA in Wharton, saying “I was writing my dissertation. I never got to. . . Pinauwi na ako e (I was asked to come home).” This was a reiteration of claims about his achievements at Wharton—which do not conform with his transcript—that can be found as early as the 2009 version of his official website and written profiles or recorded interviewee introductions that drew from such sources.

On October 28, 2015, he was asked once more about his academic degrees. In his interview with Julius Babao, Karen Davila, and Ces Drilon on ABS-CBN’s Bandila, he definitively claimed that he received a bachelor of arts degree from Oxford. Pressed by Davila that official records showed that what he got was a special diploma, Bongbong insisted that, “Yes, but it is still a bachelor of arts degree.”

In another interview on January 21, 2016, in a DZMM program, Marcos claimed that the certification he obtained from Oxford University in 2015 states, “This is to certify that Ferdinand Marcos has completed a BA degree in social sciences.” He further said that he transferred from PPE to politics, and that is the college degree he completed.

In response to the more recent questions about Bongbong’s education, his spokesperson Vic Rodriguez said on October 23, 2021 that Bongbong has “always been forthright” about his academic records.

This is akin to Imelda vouching for her son.

Cecilio T. Arillo, in his 2012 book Imelda: Mothering and Poetic and Creative Ideas in a Troubled World asked the former first lady, “Will Bongbong pursue the vision of his father?” Imelda replied, “He’s committed to that. Humbly speaking, his leadership qualities, his intellectual and managerial skills and moral and ethical upbringing, I am confident he will not fail. Bongbong was educated at Oxford University, England in 1978 with AB Political Science, Philosophy and Economics, and at Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania, USA with a Master’s in Business Administration.”

His father, the dictator, lied about his son’s degree. His mother, the undead half of the conjugal dictatorship, flaunted the same lie. And the son, who now wants to be president, continues the lie. For the past 43 years, the Filipino people have been lied to.

Originally published by Vera Files on July 3, 2016.

Second of three parts

What is striking about File No. 60 is the number of key Ang Mga Maharlika officers who were relatives of Marcos.

The most frequently mentioned among these relative-comrades is Simeon Marcos Valdez, Ferdinand’s first cousin. Valdez was allegedly the commanding officer of Maharlika’s Ilocos Norte regiment.

In a July 26, 1944 field report by Marcos, Valdez—listed as “Simmy”—is referred to as the head of both the Zambales and Manila regiment and the “provincial” intelligence units of Maharlika.

Another alleged Maharlika commander is Narciso Ramos, who was married to Simeon’s sister, Angela Marcos Valdez, making Narciso and Ferdinand “cousins by marriage.”

In an affidavit dated November 25, 1947, Ramos referred to himself as Maharlika’s Special Intelligence Section chief. In other documents in the Maharlika File, he signed or is described as “acting C.O.,” while in the July 1944 report, he is listed as commanding officer of Maharlika’s Pangasinan regiment, at one point heading 3,500 “active and inactive” troops.

Documents in the Maharlika File also describe Pacifico Edralin Marcos, Ferdinand’s younger brother, as commanding officer of Maharlika’s Manila unit since September 1944, and Pio Rubio Marcos, Ferdinand’s uncle, as an “assistant chief” of Maharlika during the organization’s early days.

Also among the documents is a typed-up identification card for Fidel V. Ramos, designated as one of Ang Mga Maharlika’s staff sergeants. Dated February 17, 1945, the document states that Fidel had been staff sergeant since November 1, 1943.

If true, Fidel—Narciso’s son and Ferdinand’s first cousin once removed—was commanding fellow guerrillas at the tender age of fifteen. Fidel would later become Ferdinand’s Armed Forces vice chief of staff and subsequently president himself.

Seemingly absent from this family affair was Mariano Marcos, Ferdinand’s father. The historian Alfred McCoy, who had written of Marcos’ war record in 1986, pointed out that the only time Mariano Marcos was mentioned as being connected to Ang Mga Maharlika was in Ferdinand’s July 26, 1944 field report.

Described there as Ang Mga Maharlika’s commanding officer for Northern Luzon is a certain “M.M., Ex-representative and ex-governor…a federalized officer in World War No. 1 holding the rank of Captain, Reserve, U.S.A.” Mariano was indeed a former assemblyman, ex-governor of Ilocos Norte, and a lieutenant of the Philippine National Guard.

In the same report, “M.M.” is listed as the commanding officer of Maharlika’s Baguio intelligence unit.  However, nowhere in the other documents of File No. 60 does Ferdinand mention Mariano.

Ferdinand Marcos’ Letter Se… by VERA Files

In the Malacanang-issued “Official Week in Review” dated October 30-November 5, 1970, Ferdinand is described as going to San Fernando, La Union on November 1, 1970 to visit a memorial to Mariano, who is described as having been “killed by Japanese soldiers during the war.”

This description of Mariano’s death is contradicted by reports that he actually died at the hands of guerrillas as he was known to have been a Japanese collaborator.

Journalist John Sharkey, in a January 24,1986 article in Washington Post, describes the following as appearing in a 1948 affidavit of an American colonel stationed in Northern Luzon: “When questioned [Mariano Marcos] readily admitted his activities, and stated that he had been recommended to the Japanese area propagandist by his son.” Sharkey takes “son” to refer to Ferdinand (the other son was Pacifico).

American guerrilla leader Robert Lapham, in the book Lapham’s Raiders: Guerrillas in the Philippines 1942-1945, maintains that “Ferdinand Marcos’s father…was unquestionably a collaborator with the Japanese, for which bad judgment he paid a ghastly price.”

In April 1945, Mariano, Lapham states, was drawn and quartered with the use of carabaos. What was left of him were then hung on a tree. Lapham mentioned that several of the guerillas who carried out the execution of Mariano Marcos were friends and relatives of Julio Nalundasan, the man Ferdinand Marcos had been accused of killing before the war.

It was the same Robert Lapham, then Major of the Fifth Cavalry, who in a May 31, 1945 communication stated that Ang Manga Maharlika, with a total of twenty-four men, including Ferdinand Marcos and Narciso Ramos, were “employed by [his] organization to guard the Regimental Supply Dump and perform warehousing details.”

“[Ang Manga Maharlika] are not recommended for recognition because of the limited military value of their duties,” Lapham added.

Despite all of the affidavits, photostatic copies of reports, and other supporting documents that Marcos produced, the U.S. Army remained unconvinced of the existence of an 8,000-man outfit called Ang Mga Maharlika. On March 31, 1948, it informed Marcos that it stood by its previous findings and that its decision was final and not subject to any further appeal.

Ferdinand Marcos’ Letter Se… by VERA Files

“When Marcos was turned down for the last time in March 1948, he switched his tactics” Charles McDougald noted in his book The Marcos File, “and put in a claim for $594,900 claiming the Army commandeered 2,366 head of cattle on the Marcos ranch in Mindanao. This claim was also rejected.”

Not someone to stand down at the first sign of rejection, Marcos made another claim. In the 1960s, according to Primitivo Mijares in his book The Conjugal Dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, when he was already a senator, Marcos tucked in in “an omnibus bill which would have granted the Philippines additional war payments to the tune of $78 million…a personal claim…for $8 million to compensate for food and war material he allegedly supplied the American guerillas in Mindanao during the Japanese Occupation of the Philippines.” In 1962, the US Congress rejected the bill.

Originally published by Vera Files on May 24, 2020.

The recent exchange between Sen. Imee Marcos and Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III over Masagana 99 reminded us of the late president’s claim of “success” of his banner program to achieve rice self-sufficiency.

Masagana 99 aimed to increase rice production among Filipino farmers. The program that began in 1973 derived its title from the term “masagana” which means bountiful and 99, referring to the number of sacks (cavans) of rice yielded per hectare of land in every harvest season.

During the May 20 Senate hearing on the government’s response to the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic, Dominguez cut short Marcos, chair of the Senate committee on economic affairs, when she started batting for the adoption of a Masagana 99 (M-99) scheme in helping raise farmers’ production.

“I was the Secretary of Agriculture that cleaned up the mess of Masagana 99… that was left by Masagana 99. There were about 800 rural banks that were bankrupted by that program and we had to rescue them. So whether it was a total success or not has to be measured against that,” Dominguez said.

Marcos was caught off guard by the remark. She tried to parry it by insisting that Masagana 99 was a success since it allowed the country to export rice, a claim refuted by Dominguez, saying: “Ah, no. We never exported rice. We never exported rice, Ma’am.”

On May 21, Marcos issued a press release castigating Dominguez: “Shame on you, Secretary Dominguez, give the Filipino farmer some credit! When supported by sound government policy and defended against rampant importation, we can feed ourselves. Give the Filipino farmer a chance!”

A thorough look at the much-hyped Masagana 99 showed that for a brief time after it was launched, the Philippines did become a rice-exporting country—or barely that. But data and studies show that this point of pride for the Marcoses and their supporters was not solely attributable to the Masagana 99 credit program.

Moreover, echoing Dominguez, this “success” came at a significant cost, not only to the government, but also to the farmers that the program supposedly helped. Masagana 99 also had an adverse impact on the environment brought about by its dependence on chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

MASAGANA 99

After a series of natural disasters and pest infestations in 1972, the Philippines faced a nationwide rice shortage. This prompted the government to intensify rice production with the Masagana 99 Rice Program. Launched on May 21, 1973, Masagana 99 was a crash program primarily intended to raise the yield of palay crop lands per hectare to 99 cavans, from the then national average of 40 cavans per hectare. Not only did it seek recovery from losses incurred from the previous years of low productivity, it also aimed to scale down importation and eventually achieve rice self-sufficiency in record time.

At the core of Masagana 99 was a package of technology offered to farmers in the form of high-yielding variety (HYV) seeds, herbicides, low-cost fertilizer, and other modern agricultural inputs. The supervised credit scheme, on the other hand, was designed to make sure that the farmers can actually use the recommended technology package provided for by the program. The Central Bank extended subsidized rediscounting facilities to both public and private credit institutions to act as stimuli for banks to channel their loans to the agricultural sector. With reduced cost of borrowing made possible by highly subsidized interest rates, in theory, the farmers could avail themselves of the credit program even without collateral and other standard borrowing requirements.

Masagana 99 had peculiar beginnings. After several futile attempts to ramp up rice production in 1972-1973, a group composed of Peter Smith of Shell Chemical Company, Inocencio Bolo of UP College of Agriculture, and Vernon Eugene Ross of International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) presented a proposal to then Secretary of Agriculture Arturo Tanco Jr. consisting of an “integrated package of technology” which, they claimed, could produce the coveted 99 cavans of rice per hectare, “even on non-irrigated land.” Despite broad skepticism over the soundness of the technology (which was drastically different from traditional methods) and the feasibility of its wide-scale deployment, Tanco went ahead with it as a last-ditch effort. Marcos immediately approved the proposal.

The National Management Committee (NMC) consisting of various government and private agencies was created to implement the program, with the Ministry of Agriculture and the National Food and Agriculture Council coordinating it. The NMC worked alongside technical and information committees, and working under them were coordinators ranging from the regional level down to the level of farmer-cooperators. Provincial governors and municipal mayors were tasked to deliver the required number of beneficiaries from their areas.

The crash program was initially envisioned to run only for a single planting season, from May to October 1973. It initially targeted to benefit 400,000 farmers from 43 selected provinces, and to cover about 600,000 hectares of land. Marcos soon expanded its scope and targets and turned it into a high-priority national program that ran longer than expected, even by the project proponents.

Initial funding for the rice credit program came from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which provided a P 77.5-million loan. The World Bank was also part of the financing scheme. As explained by Mahar Mangahas in a 1974 discussion paper:

“The Central Bank passed the funds on initially through a loan to the (government-owned) Philippine National Bank (PNB) and increased government deposits at the (privately-owned) rural banks. It then provided extensive support through rediscounts of loan papers obtained by the PNB branch banks and the rural banks. Funds flowed at a very fast rate indeed. The banks were apparently under strict orders to fulfill loan quotas and not to worry too much about collateral or documentary requirements. Masagana 99 was launched in May 1973. By July 18 it was reported that P192 million had been lent; three weeks later the figure had become P249 million. Finally, by April 1974, P503 million was reported to have been lent, covering a total of 676,000 hectares, or an average of P745 per hectare.”

The targeted borrowers were farmers of small landholdings (more or less two hectares), of which, according to estimates then, numbered around 1.4 million. Less than half of this number would benefit from Masagana 99. Statistics collated by Emmanuel F. Esguerra in his 1981 paper on Masagana 99 that came out in the Philippine Sociological Review offers a clear picture on how the program played out from 1973 to 1980.

During the very first phase of Masagana 99 (May to October 1973), 402,757 borrowers accounted for a loan total of P 369.5 million. The third phase of Masagana 99 (May to October 1974) had the most number of borrowers at 531,249 for a total loan of P716.1 million. This was not improved upon for the duration of the program. Starting 1975 there was a marked decline in the number of farmers who availed of Masagana 99 loans; by then it was just a little over 100,000. In Masagana 99’s 14th phase (November 1979 to April 1980), the number of borrowers sunk to 54,250. There was also a steady decline in the repayment rate. When Masagana 99 started in 1973, 93.3 percent of the loans were repaid. By 1979, the repayment rate fell to 45.8 percent.

WHAT WENT WRONG

Various sources have highlighted how Masagana 99 was simply unsustainable. One key problem, as alluded to by Dominguez, was rural bank insolvency, a consequence of non-payment by farmer-borrowers of their loans. According to a report of the World Bank, dated May 12, 1983, titled Philippines – Agricultural Credit Sector Review:

“The rice area financed by institutional credit decreased from 920,000 ha (hectares) in 1973/74 to 330,000 ha in 1979/80 or from 79% to about 18% of the total rice area in the respective years. The decline in institutional credit was the result of arrearages under past [Masagana]-99 and other supervised credit subloans which were due to several factors including: natural calamities, inadequate post-harvest storage facilities, marketing problems, unremunerative cost-price relationships, the low priority given by farmers to repaying the Government-backed loans, poor selection of credit risks and the provision of excessive loan amounts. The arrearages disqualified a large number of small farmers from receiving fresh credit and also disqualified many rural banks from receiving rediscounting support from the Central Bank. The accumulated nonrepayments under M-99 amount to about P180 million in PNB and P300 million in rural banks.”

In short, farmer-borrowers were defaulting not only because of production shortfalls caused by the various natural disasters affecting Philippine agriculture in the 1970s and the 1980s, but also because the government was not prudently regulating the loans and providing sufficient mechanisms and inducements for repayment. M-99 became, more or less, a massive dole-out program.

That many were defaulting on M-99 loans was no secret. An article in The Straits Times in Singapore, dated August 25, 1981, noted that Masagana 99 and a similar program for fisherfolk, Biyayang Dagat, were both lacking in funds, with a Philippine government official claiming that the repayment rate for Masagana 99 loans was at 60 percent. Kenneth Smith of the USAID, in his article titled Palay, Policy and Public Administration: The ‘Masagana 99’ Program Revisited, noted that even such repayment rates were distorted, given that whenever a loan was restructured/extended, for “book-keeping purposes. . .the outstanding loan was fully paid up and a new loan agreement was initiated.” Smith also noted that many “uncollectable” M-99 loans were “written off” by lenders, further distorting the actual repayment rate.

A 1978 study by V. Cordova, P. Masicat, and R.W. Herdt for the IRRI found that availing loans from Masagana 99 made no difference in the net returns of farmers.

Overall, according to the May 30, 1991 Staff Appraisal Report of a World Bank-funded Philippine rural finance project, “about 80% of the [Masagana]-99 loans have never been recovered.” Randolph Barker of Cornell University tried to give it a positive twist by saying that it became “income transfer.”

What did all that money do? In his technical assessment of Masagana 99, Smith concluded that the program “was indeed successful in attaining national self-sufficiency in rice production” but “the program’s actual achievements were much more mundane than anticipated, and even this degree of success was more fortuitous than finessed.” Smith further noted that the program’s achievements were due “neither [to] the intensity of technical supervision nor the provision of non-collateral credit.” Instead, it could be attributed to the “expansion of hectarage planted to rice,” not increasing yields to 99 cavans per hectare using new technology.

For Emmanuel F. Esguerra, Masagana 99’s importance during the Marcos dictatorship was more political than economic. “[T]he mere existence of a credit program offering low-cost loans to farmers conveniently provides its sponsoring government the means of gaining political and ideological support by publicizing its concern for the rural poor, without necessarily altering the prevailing structure of asset ownership which is the main source of inequality.” There was even a strain of counter-insurgency effort in Masagana 99 as pointed out by Mangahas. “Areas where there is subversion or dissidence are pointedly included, a policy which appears specific to the [Marcos regime, or the so-called] New Society,” he noted.

As it was also a political project, the corruption that it entailed was the cost of doing business for the Marcos dictatorship. National Scientist Gelia Castillo, in a chapter on Masagana 99 in her book How Participatory Is Participatory Development? cited studies and news stories detailing how rural bank officials concocted “fake farmers” and “ghost borrowers” to siphon off millions of pesos intended for Masagana 99. Benedict Kerkvliet, in a 1974 Pacific Affairs article underscored that the “banks remain in the hands of the local elites.” The loss of public funds in Masagana 99 grist the mill of Marcos’s political patronage.

Another poisoned legacy of Masagana 99 that was often overlooked was its deleterious effect on the environment and on traditional agricultural methods. The heavy reliance on pesticides ironically led to pest outbreaks, the absence of one set of predators led to the prevalence of another. Indigenous local flora and fauna were devastated by the use of synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, and other chemical components of Masagana 99’s “technological package.”

Reliance on chemical input, in synthetic fertilizer in particular, puts into doubt the claim of Masagana 99 rice self-sufficiency. The dollar supposedly saved from not importing rice just went out another door in importing fertilizer.

Again, despite all of the above, Sen. Marcos insists that Masagana 99 should still be seen as a success because it led to Philippine rice exportation. As detailed by Eduardo Tadem in Grains and Radicalism: The Political Economy of the Rice Industry in the Philippines, 1965-1985, between 1977 and 1983, some 502,000 metric tons of rice were exported by the Philippines. However, citing a previous study by Flordeliza Lantican and Laurian Unnevehr, Tadem gave the following breakdown of that amount, which shows that the volume of rice exported then was not consistent nor particularly high, save between 1979 to1981:

Crop Year	Metric Tons(1,000)
1967/68	40.3
1968/69	0.5
1977/78	13.4
1978/79	38.0
1979/80	236.0
1980/81	175.0
1981/82	11.0
1982/83	29.0

The country resumed rice importation in 1984, and ceased to export rice completely in 1985. According to Tadem, by July 1984, the reserve stocks of the country was down to 150,000 tons—sufficient for only 10 days. Thus, the country contracted to import rice from Thailand and China and, later in the year, from Indonesia, which had previously imported rice from the Philippines. In 1985, the Philippines imported a total of 389,654 tons of rice from the United States, Thailand, China, and Indonesia—in what Tadem described as “the highest import level since the ‘miracle rice’ era of IRRI began.”

Moreover, even when the country was still exporting rice, citing data from the National Grains Authority, Tadem said that “because of the corresponding increase in the costs of production brought about by the IRRI technology, Philippine rice had to be sold in the world at a loss. . . from 1977 to 1979, the total value of [the Philippines’s] rice exports reached P590.8 million while the export cost was P665.47 million for a net loss of P74.67 million.” True, the country exported rice, but who benefited?

Farmers bore the brunt of the increasing production costs. According to Tadem, “the irony that most of them bitterly felt was that higher production and yields per hectare did not result in improved real incomes as the increased costs cancelled whatever gains in production was achieved.” Tadem also noted that lower net incomes meant that it became impossible for farmers to repay their Masagana 99 loans. Furthermore, data cited by Tadem from Lantican and Unnevehr shows that real farm wages (farm wage/consumer price index) actually started to decrease within the period when Masagana 99 was being implemented: “From 1972 to 1977, real wages rose from P3.78 to P5.24. However, from 1977 to 1984, real farm wages have declined by 46% [from P5.24 to P2.82].”

The Marcos regime started to lessen reliance on the expensive Masagana 99 program in 1984. In one of his ghostwritten books, The Filipino Ideology, Ferdinand Marcos claimed that a new government initiative, the Intensified Rice Production Program, “was implemented in December 1984 to complement Masagana 99.”

It is perhaps more accurate to call it a last-ditch successor program to address the shortage that Masagana 99 could not. However, IRPP was similar to Masagana 99 in the sense that it did briefly increase rice production, but led to more indebtedness without increasing profits of farmers. According to a 1985 paper by IRRI scientists Bienvenido Juliano and Leonardo Gonzales: “Although the IRPP was launched to provide cheaper credit to rice farmers, the volume of credit it provided and the numbers of farmers covered were less than before.” It meant that “most rice farmers had to pay very high interest rates.” Tadem also explained that since the country had resumed importing rice at the time, the market had become flooded, which kept the price of locally produced rice artificially low, significantly affecting the earnings of the local farmers who were already heavily in debt.

But Marcos continued to tout his administration’s credit programs for rice production during the dying days of his regime. Based on a transcript of a campaign speech he gave in Naga City on January 14, 1986, Marcos told his supporters that in 1967 “we began to export rice to other countries”—failing to mention that the country stopped exporting rice from 1970 to 1977, and again between 1984 and1985. He emphasized that through Masagana 99, “we established a credit system which tries to give capital or operational funds to small tenants and farmers who were allowed to enter banks for the first time in the entire history of the Philippines and without collateral”—masking the fact that many banks and farmers later on found themselves in a worse financial position than before they contracted Masagana 99 loans.

WHY MASAGANA 99 REMAINS A POTENT MARCOS PROPAGANDA

Based on her Facebook page and press releases from her office for her Masagana 99 propaganda in recent years, Imee Marcos consistently relied on the Manila Bulletin column, dated November 5, 2016, titled Masagana 99 Redux, by National Scientist Emil Q. Javier.

An agronomist and plant geneticist, Javier was prompted to write the column after President Rodrigo Duterte said that he wanted to emulate the Marcos-era Masagana 99 and Biyayang Dagat programs. Imee highlights the short sections of Javier’s column where the brief (and qualified) success of Masagana 99 was described. She fails to include the sections where Javier criticizes the program, corroborating much of what was detailed above.

According to Javier: “Sadly, Masagana 99 proved to be short-lived and unsustainable mainly due to the costly subsidies and failure of many farmers-borrowers to repay the loans . . . . By [1980], Masagana 99 ceased to be of consequence as only 3.7 percent of the small rice farmers were able to borrow.”

Javier ultimately does not recommend resurrecting Masagana 99, saying that it will likely result in farmers defaulting on loans again. “Giving away seeds, fertilizers, pesticides and dryers, while politically attractive, is temporary, wasteful and prone to graft,” Javier emphasized. “We have been doing that all these years with little to show for the expense and the effort.”

Ferdinand Marcos himself, in the last of the books he purportedly authored, A Trilogy on the Transformation of Philippine Society, discussed only the establishment and initial implementation of Masagana 99, staying silent about its decline and demise in the 1980s, despite the book being published in 1988 and referencing the rice crisis at the time. If this is the kind of “data” Sen. Marcos is relying on, small wonder that she has the audacity to claim that Masagana 99 was an unqualified success.

According to Marcos aide Arturo Aruiza in the book Ferdinand Marcos: Malacanang to Makiki, the late dictator considered the Trilogy to be an unfinished book, hoping that Imee would finish it. Considering how she continues to propagate disinformation about the Marcos regime even during a pandemic—to the point that she is suggesting the revival of a failed program to address our current and upcoming coronavirus-caused economic woes—it seems that she is on track to fulfill her father’s wish.

Masagana 99 shows that the propaganda that comes with doling out patronage proved to be one of the most resilient ways to instill untruth. The lie becomes part of the residual gratitude of those who benefitted from the largesse. Today’s patrons have learned that lesson to perfection. As she ascends greater political heights, Sen.Marcos seems to want to keep on giving away the people’s money the same way her dictator of a father once did.

Originally published by Vera Files on December 24, 2020.

Without fail every December, siblings Imee and Bongbong remind us on social media that were it not for their father, the late Ferdinand Marcos Sr, Filipino workers would not be enjoying their 13th month pay.

Marcos loyalists thus go to the extent of stating that those who are against the Marcoses should refuse to receive that holiday season benefit.

The ease of making that claim leaves out the dire context of why and how Ferdinand Marcos implemented the 13th month pay. And it erases the effort of organized labor to secure such a benefit for themselves.

PRESIDENTIAL DECREE 851

Marcos, ruling by decree since he padlocked Congress when he assumed dictatorial powers in 1972, issued Presidential Decree (PD) 851 on December 16, 1975 “requiring all employers to pay their employees a 13th month pay.” Marcos’s misrepresentation started with that first line of the decree.

Marcos’s decree, and the propaganda that Imee and Bongbong wrapped around it, gives the impression that PD 851 started the practice of giving 13th month pay. It was not. Even before it was issued, some employers were already granting this benefit, that’s why Section 2 of Marcos’s decree states: “Employers already paying their employees a 13th-month pay or its equivalent are not covered by this Decree.” This exclusion states the obvious. However, while PD 851 did not apply to “all employers,” it also did not apply to all employees.

PD 851 was specifically for employees “receiving a basic salary of not more than P1, 000 a month, regardless of the nature of their employment.” They were to receive a 13th month pay “not later than Dec. 24 of every year.”

When the “Rules and Regulations Implementing Presidential Decree 851” came out a week after the edict was issued, Marcos kept whittling down those who will be covered by the law. Those who are not entitled to receive 13th month pay are the following: government employees, “household helpers and persons in the personal service of another in relation to such workers,” and “those who are paid on purely commission, boundary, or task basis, and those who are paid a fixed amount for performing a specific work” (meaning, most of the drivers in the public transport sector).

The implementing rules and regulations (IRR) of PD 851 provided an exemption for distressed employers, “such as (1) those which are currently incurring substantial losses or (2) in the case of non-profit institutions and organizations, where their income, whether from donations, contributions, grants and other earnings from any source, has consistently declined by more than 40% of their normal income for the last two years.” Their exemption must be approved by the Secretary of Labor.

The IRR also tried to correct a possible misconception by stating that nothing in PD 851 “shall prevent employers from giving the benefits provided in the Decree to their employees who are receiving more than P1,000 a month or benefits higher than those provided by the Decree.” It was an encouragement but not a binding mandate.

A month after issuing PD 851, Marcos was still tinkering with the law as he issued on Jan.16, 1976 the “Supplementary Rules and Regulations Implementing Presidential Decree 851.” The excuse given was “lack of sufficient time for the dissemination of the provisions of P.D. No. 851 and its Rules and the unavailability of adequate cash flow due to the long holiday season.”

What became obvious was that even among those select groups of employees that should have received 13th month pay, a significant number seemed to have not received it since the supplementary IRR ended up extending the due date for giving their 13th month pay for 1975 until March 31, 1976. The deadline, specifically for private schools, was even extended until June 30, 1976, a full half year since PD 851 had been in effect.

The supplementary IRR to PD 851 also excluded security guards or those employed by “Security and Watchman Agencies,” as well as contractors and subcontractors, at least for the year 1975. The supplementary IRR reasoned that their contracts for 1975 may not have a provision for a 13th month pay.

In the succeeding years, the implementation of PD 851 was challenged both by those it excluded and the employers that tried to exploit the ambiguity and omissions that inhere in the Marcos decree.

In the succeeding years, firms besides those enumerated in the implementation guidelines also applied for exemption to the Department of Labor from giving 13th month pay to their employees. Marcos issued a decree on May 1, 1978, Labor Day, to stop such exemptions, but expressly stated that the decree “did not apply to employers who are expressly exempted by law.”

A federation of government employees ran to the Supreme Court and contested their exclusion from receiving a 13th month pay but lost on Aug. 3, 1983 in Alliance of Government Workers et al. v The Honorable Minister of Labor and Employment et al. (G.R. No. L-60403).

As controversies arose regarding the implementation of PD 851, Marcos and his executive department became the arbiter on who may receive it and how. One particular voice was largely muted, if not missing from 1975 to 1981: labor unions independent of the regime, in particular those of the left.

Ordering employers to give 13th month pay should have been one of the carrots to the stick that Marcos lashed the organized labor with, with his decrees banning strikes, pickets, and lockouts.

WHOSE IDEA WAS THE 13TH MONTH PAY?

On May 1, 1974, Marcos issued PD 442, or the Philippine Labor Code. A team led by then Labor secretary Blas Ople was credited for developing the code. In his 1974 Labor Day address, Marcos said he had ordered Ople to “accelerate the codification of all labor laws” during the first Cabinet meeting after he placed the country under martial law.

In at least one interview after the fall of the Marcos regime, Ople described being “the author of the Labor Code of the Philippines” as among his greatest achievements. This issue of authorship, however, must be qualified by the fact that what Marcos (or Ople) did, as Ople himself wrote in the 1981-82 Fookien Times Philippines Yearbook, was to revise and consolidate “the country’s labor and social legislations.” They did not write it from scratch.

As quoted by Cherry-Lynn Ricafrente in a 1974 Philippine Law Journal article, Ople said that the Labor Code was “designed to be a dynamic and growing body of laws which will reflect continually the lessons of practical application and experience.”

Thus, through the martial law-era version of tripartism — involving the government and government-preferred representatives of employers’ groups and trade unions (only those with imprimatur of the Marcos regime), the last eventually forming what would become the Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (TUCP) — opportunities were given to selected members of the labor sector to suggest amendments to the Labor Code.

The Labor Code enshrined tripartism, stating that national, regional, or industrial tripartite conferences could be called by the secretary of labor “from time to time.” On Oct. 24-26, 1975, a National Tripartite Conference on the Labor Code was held at the Development Academy of the Philippines in Tagaytay City. The conference resulted in two of the three labor-related decrees issued by Marcos on Dec.16, 1975 — or at least that was how Marcos made it appear.

The first was PD 849. It amended PD 823, or the law banning strikes, picketing, and lockouts. PD 823 was issued on Nov. 5, 1975, in reaction to the infamous La Tondeña strike, which took place within the same time as the October 1975 tripartite conference. PD 849 allowed strikes and lockouts, but only under limited circumstances, and allowed the president to force compulsory arbitration when “in the public interest,” effectively putting a stop to an employee strike or an employer lockout.

The second edict, PD 850, was a lengthy piece of legislation amending dozens of sections of the Labor Code. The first “whereas” clause of the law adopted in toto what Ople said about the Code being “a dynamic and growing body of laws.”

Both PD 849 and 850, in the whereas clauses, acknowledged that those were products of tripartite discussions. The text of PD 851 did not. Yet a 1978 article in the Philippine Labor Review by Leonardo Q. Montemayor stated it plainly: “It is also from the discussions in this Conference that Presidential Decree No. 851 was considered.”

One of PD 851’s whereas clauses states that “the Christmas season is an opportune time for society to show its concern for the plight of the working masses so they may properly celebrate Christmas and New Year”— that is, giving another month’s salary is a social responsibility mandated by a benevolent dictator.

But given that PD 851 resulted from a tripartite conference, and that neither Ople nor Marcos seemed to have thought of legislating such a benefit prior to 1975, who can be credited with pushing for its enactment?

In recent years, the most well-known claimant to the title of “Father of 13th Month Pay” is Negrense lawyer/legislator Zoilo de la Cruz Jr. In 1975, he was president of the National Congress of Unions in the Sugar Industry in the Philippines, or NACUSIP. NACUSIP became a member of the government-recognized Philippine Labor Coordinating Center that eventually became TUCP in April 1975, ensuring that De la Cruz and the sugar workers represented by NACUSIP had a seat in tripartite discussions.

In an obituary written by Marchel Espina and published in The Freeman on Dec. 17, 2014, it stated that De la Cruz “conceptualized the 13th month pay, the Social Amelioration Program in the sugar industry and payment of cost of living allowance to workers in the private sector.”

In an article by Espina published in the Visayan Daily Star on Dec. 14, 2019, Zoilo’s son Ronaldo de la Cruz — who is now president of NACUSIP —, said that his father actually drafted the 13th month pay proposal, taking advantage of “his closeness to Marcos” and Marcos’s legislative powers. Such claims have also been repeatedly made in NACUSIP’s Facebook page.

Similar claims have also been made about another TUCP-affiliated labor leader who was a lawyer/legislator: Eulogio R. Lerum. According his profile in the Official Directory of the Constitutional Commission (1986), “Heading the labor delegation to the 1975 National Tripartite Conference, he sponsored the 13th month’s pay, 10 percent night work premium, 5 days annual paid incentive leave and payment by the employer of the 10 percent attorney’s fees in case of illegal withholding of wages. . . . Thru his efforts, the minimum wage was raised to P37.00 and the cost of living allowance to P17.00 daily.”

At the time of the tripartite conference, Lerum was known as a leader/president of the National Labor Union. He went on to become the representative of the labor sector in the Interim and Regular Batasang Pambansa and, with Ople, a member of the 1986 Constitutional Commission.

Marcos usually presented the 13th month pay decree without crediting anyone else for coming up with it. In Five Years of the New Society (1978), he claimed that minimum wages have in fact been increased by more than 100% [because] the actual minimum wage consists of the present basic minimum wages [and] additional compulsory compensations,” including the 13th month pay, which supposedly “represented an actual increase in basic pay of 8.3%.”

In a pamphlet titled “Gains of the Reformist Government (A Further Precis),” released in 1985, he said, “I have mandated reasonable wage increases to restore the purchasing power of our workers,” stating that wages had increased from “P6.00 a day” in 1965 to “P8.00 a day in 1972” to P57.08 per day for nonagricultural workers in 1984,” adding that such wages “have been boosted through a guaranteed 13th month pay and cost of living allowances.”

On Nov. 3, 1975 Marcos issued PD 823 stating that “it is the policy of the State to encourage trade unionism and free collective bargaining within the framework of compulsory and voluntary arbitration and therefore all forms of strikes, picketing and lockouts are hereby strictly prohibited.”

PD 849 went through the motion of somewhat loosening this draconian measure by creating stringent conditions when “any legitimate labor union may strike and any employer may lockout in establishments.” But the fact remained that Marcos wanted to buy industrial peace at any cost to shore up his so-called New Society.

The issuance of PDs 849, 850, and 851 was not only timed for the Christmas season so that Marcos made it appear that he was handing out “gifts” to the workers. It was also on Dec.16, 1975 that Marcos sworn in the officers of the just-founded Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (TUCP) at Malacanang.

Marcos’s grant of 13th month pay to a select group of workers through PD 851 must thus be read in this context. While it helped alleviate the workers’ economic difficulties, it was also a propaganda tool for the New Society.

IMELDA MARCOS’ 13TH MONTH PAY AMID ECONOMIC CRISIS

By the 1980s, the economic value of Marcos’s supposed benevolence became negligible with the recurring rise in inflation and peso devaluation. In a chapter on Labor Standards and Economic Development (1996), Rene Ofreneo, a scholar on labor issues, noted that “from 1970 to 1979, the national income per worker in 1972 prices increased by about 23 % or roughly 2% a year, while real wages for the same period went down by 38% for skilled workers and 46% for unskilled workers.”

By 1983, the Marcos regime was in crisis mode triggered by the assassination of Ninoy Aquino. Ople, writing again for the Fookien Times Philippines Yearbook, conceded that “the past year was particularly difficult as worsening unemployment characterized the domestic scene. Mainly, as a result of contracting consumer markets in the developed economies, retrenchment measures adopted by local firms increased layoffs and labor turnover in all industry sector.”

As the workers kept on tightening their belt, the Marcoses were emptying the coffers of the republic to finance their frivolities.

Some of them, like Imelda, also enjoyed her share of the 13th month pay as head of various government agencies and government-owned and -controlled corporations. In 1985, for example, Imelda, as head of the Home Financing Corp., received a 13^th month pay of P33,097, based on records of the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG). Anything beyond Imelda’s legal income — including 13th month pay — has been juridically determined to be ill-gotten wealth.

Marcos managed to skirt his own prohibition against government employees receiving 13th month pay via annual presidential decrees that granted the release of the same benefit but only for that particular year. An effective way to shore up his image as the workers’ unrivalled patron.

When Cory Aquino succeeded Marcos to the presidency, she introduced some changes that broadened the scope of PD 851, specifically on who are entitled to a 13th month pay. During her 1986 Labor Day address, Cory Aquino announced that she would remove the pay ceiling for the 13th month pay for all rank-and-file employees. On Aug. 13, 1986, she issued Memorandum Order 28, which fulfilled her Labor Day promise. However, the amended PD 851 still did not grant a 13th month pay to government employees.

This was finally remedied by Republic Act 6686, enacted on Dec. 14, 1988 which states: ”All officials and employees of the National Government who have rendered at least four months of service from Jan. 1 to Oct. 31 of each year and who are employed in the government service as of Oct. 31 of the same year shall each receive a Christmas bonus equivalent to one month basic salary and additional cash gift of P1,000.

Originally published by Vera Files on November 1, 2021.

(This two-part article on the ongoing controversy surrounding the educational attainment of Ferdinand “Bongbong” R. Marcos, Jr. is based on pertinent documents and records that shine a light on the facts surrounding the issue. It traces events from 1974 when Bongbong was accepted to Oxford University to 1981 when he dropped out of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania to become vice governor of Ilocos Norte.)

Speaking at the 25th commencement exercises of the Philippine College of Commerce (now Polytechnic University of the Philippines) on April 1, 1978,the dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos mentioned that his only son and namesake Ferdinand “Bongbong” R. Marcos, Jr. was “still a senior at Oxford.”

“He is graduating this June,” the father said. “He is so busy he could not stay here, he came here and stayed only two days and said: ‘I better go back to Oxford, Father, at ngayon ay naghahanda kami sa final examinations ng June’.”

This was a lie.

The exams that Bongbong was preparing for were not for a college degree in which he had a senior standing. It was for a “Special Diploma in Social Studies.” This, his father knew by late 1976.

Documents left behind in Malacañang when the Marcos patriarch was toppled and the whole family fled the country in February 1986 tell the story of what Bongbong, who is running for president in the 2022 elections, was able to achieve in his university studies—or what amounted to it—and the Marcoses’ persistent efforts to lie about it.

Bongbong was accepted into Oxford University in October 1975 for a Bachelor of Arts degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE), a three-year course. He had passed Oxford and Cambridge’s Schools Examination for summer of 1974 with the following grades in three subjects at advanced level: English literature, C; mathematics, C; physics, C; and the general paper, E. The highest grade in this examination was A.

On November 5, 1974, then Philippine Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Jaime Zobel de Ayala, sent a cable to Marcos. He reported that based on his telephone conversation with Dr. Ernest Ronald Oxburgh, Oxford’s tutor of admissions, “the faculty who interviewed Ferdinand were quite impressed by his personality although they felt that he was a little shy.”

During that interview, Ayala wrote that Bongbong “expressed desire to get degrees in either PPE… or engineering and economics,” and that Oxford was ready to accept the young Marcos for a degree in PPE in October 1975, but not in engineering and economics.

“They do not think that he is ready to embark in such a strong course without getting further instruction in pure and applied mathematics before entering Oxford,” the ambassador reported.

Marcos, in a November 25, 1974 letter to Oxburgh, expressed his gratitude to Oxford for accepting Bongbong into its PPE program, calling it the start of a “momentous experience of our young man.”

One year and eight months later, that momentous experience that Marcos had hoped for his son was shattered by Bongbong’s dismal academic performance.

Photo 2 General Certificate… by VERA Files

Photo 3 1974 11 05 Zobel to… by VERA Files

Photo 4,1974 11 25 PFM to O… by VERA Files

In a confidential cable on July 27, 1976, Ambassador Pablo A. Araque, then chargé d’affaires in London, informed Marcos that “Bongbong passed in only one of three subjects he took in the preliminary examination. He passed philosophy but failed in economics and politics.” The diplomat explained that under the Oxford system, “a student who fails whole or part of preliminary examination has opportunity of re-sitting it in September.”

Bongbong had to retake the two exams on September 30, 1976. Tutors were hired to help him prepare.

But Araque continued to be the bearer of bad news. In another confidential cable to Marcos on October 9, 1976, he reported that Dr. John Norman Davidson Kelly, principal of Oxford’s St. Edmund Hall, had informed him that Bongbong “passed in economics but failed in politics. Dr. Kelly expressed deep disappointment at the way things have worked out despite all the efforts and regrets that the firm rule of the college that an undergraduate who fails to clear his preliminary examination at the end of the first year must go out of residence for good now applies.”

Still, the principal threw them a life line.

“Dr. Kelly ended his letter to me quote [‘] if Ferdinand Jr. or you can think of any special circumstances which would warrant the college departing from its normal rule I should be grateful if you would advise me of these as quickly as possible[’] unquote,” Araque noted.

In an October 11, 1976 urgent and confidential cable addressed to Marcos and his wife, Imelda, the embassy official reported on the appeal he and Capt. Artemio Tadiar, Armed Forces attaché to London, made in person to Kelly on behalf of Bongbong, citing the “special mitigating circumstances” that might convince Oxford to relax its rule.

Araque crafted these mitigating circumstances as “(1) Bong’s asthma complicated by flu weeks before his first examination and a similar ailment before the second, exacerbated by the long and exhausting trip back to London from Manila and the abrupt change in temperature [;] and (2) the adverse psychological effects on him after his visit with you (Marcos) to the devastated areas in Mindanao after the earthquake and tidal wave which killed 8000 people and rendered many thousands more homeless.”

Kelly said that he would present the appeal to the 35-member college committee, but cautioned Araque “against over-optimism as favorable decisions in cases similar” to those of Bongbong were ‘very rare’.”

The diplomat told Marcos that according to Kelly, “the rule governing an undergraduate who fails to pass his preliminary examination as a whole after two attempts is not only a college rule but Oxford University rule. In the event that Bong’s case is reconsidered favorably, and Dr. Kelly emphasized that this can only be known after the committee meets, Bong will have to wait until next June [1977] to re-sit his examination in politics. In the meantime, Dr. Kelly is afraid there is nothing for Bong to do in Oxford.”

The committee should have decided the case by the end of October 1976. Whatever the final verdict of the committee, it was clear by then that Bongbong had failed to finish his bachelor’s degree in PPE.

Photo 5 1976 07 27 Araque t… by VERA Files

Photo 6 1976 10 09 Araque t… by VERA Files

Photo 7 1976 10 11 Araque t… by VERA Files

Photo 8 1978 07 24 Kelly to… by VERA Files

But the young Marcos remained in Oxford until at least July 1978, no longer to pursue a college degree but a special diploma in social studies. Instituted in 1968, this special diploma was “an award to be taken mainly by non-graduates,” according to Norman Chester in Economics, Politics and Social Studies in Oxford, 1900-85,

Under Oxford’s Examination Decrees and Regulations for academic year 1974-75, even non-members of the university “may be admitted as students for the diploma under such conditions as the Board of the Faculty of Social Studies shall prescribe, provided always that, before admission to a course of study approved by the board, candidates, if not members of the University, shall have satisfied the board that they have received a good general education and are well qualified to enter the proposed course of study.” Now discontinued, the special diploma in social studies was one of the qualifications that could be received from Oxford up to the mid-1990s although by then clearly listed under “other qualifications (non-graduate).”

On July 24, 1978, Kelly informed Tadiar of the results of the examinations that Bongbong took for the special diploma. In all five examination papers—one each for political institutions, economic principles, general sociology, economic development, and industrial sociology— Marcos’ son had “obtained a reasonable Class II level.”

“Altogether, his performance in the examination was quite a creditable one, especially having regard to the various distractions to which a young man in his position is inevitably exposed. I think he can go back to his own country with the confidence that, from the academic point of view, his time at Oxford was useful,” Kelly wrote in his letter to Tadiar.

A special diploma, as the Oxford University has made categorically clear recently, “was not a full graduate diploma.” Bongbong has no college degree.

Originally published by Vera Files on April 25, 2020.

On April 23, 2020, the office of Senator Imee Marcos issued a press release commemorating the 39th anniversary of the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine (RITM) and to highlight Senate Bill (SB) 1407, her bill that is supposed to expand RITM. The press release was posted on the senator’s Facebook page and the Senate website. The Manila Bulletin, GMA News, and Remate reported on it. The Facebook post, as of this writing, has received over 3,900 reactions and 500 shares.

SB 1407, filed by the senator on March 9, 2020, is entitled “An Act Expanding the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine, and for Other Purposes.” It was also meant to portray her and her late father as the only politicians who have shown support for RITM, though looking through the bills she filed when she was in the House of Representatives from 1998 to 2004 via the House’s website, this was the first bill she ever filed specifically about RITM. The press release states in part:

“The long neglect of RITM dates back more than 30 years ago when the Cory administration started treating it like a leper, just because it was built by my father, then President Ferdinand Edralin Marcos, through Executive Order No. 674 in 1981,” Marcos said.

“The technical cooperation with the Japanese government that helped build and equip the RITM as the country’s prime biomedical research center was pushed aside, erasing its importance in the public mind, and squandering the momentum which could have benefitted us today,” Marcos added.

Marcos has filed Senate Bill 1407 to rescue what is arguably the DOH’s most neglected agency from its decrepit state, increase its qualified personnel and their salaries, expand its presence to key population centers outside Metro Manila, and revive its ability to effectively handle the magnitude of future pandemics.

“The RITM’s mother agency, the Department of Health (DOH), has failed to learn the lessons of history,” Marcos said, citing the slew of pandemics that have already hit the country: acute immunodefficiency syndrome (AIDS), severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), and now the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).

These are lies. The statement “Built. . .through Executive Order No. 674 in 1981” is inaccurate, as the RITM was already under construction well before the order was issued by President Marcos. As we have discussed in a previous article, RITM was heavily dependent on money from the Japanese government for its capital and equipment outlay, and would not have functioned well during the Marcos regime with government funding alone.

In 1985, the original five-year RITM Technical Cooperation Project (TCP) between the Japanese and Philippine governments was scheduled to conclude. In October 1985, the project was extended up to early 1988. The Corazon Aquino administration did not pre-terminate the agreement. In fact, even if the TCP ended in 1988, according to RITM’s annual report for that year, the Institute received “a grant-in-aid from the Japanese government for the improvement and expansion of the institute,” which entailed “a training center and a dormitory facility, construction of which commenced in April 1988.”

Looking at the Philippine government appropriations for RITM from 1983 to 1987 is also instructive. Based on the 1983 General Appropriations Act, in 1983, RITM was given PHP 8,635,000. Based on the 1984 RITM annual report, the institute received PHP 6,655,000 from the national government; and in 1985, based on the RITM annual report for that year, PHP 9,503,656. On the other hand, the 1986 RITM annual report states that throughout 1986, the allotment for RITM was PHP 14,473,000 (a PHP 4.9 million increase). In 1987, based on the budget enacted by Corazon Aquino via Executive Order No. 87, RITM received PHP 14,641,000—over PHP 5 million more than it received during the last full year that Marcos was president.

What was jettisoned from RITM after the EDSA Revolution was a foundation called the Research Foundation for Tropical Medicine, Inc. or RFTM, which was established on November 5, 1984. As noted by Ricardo Manapat in his book Some are Smarter than Others, RFTM’s incorporators included “Ambassador Eduardo Cojuangco, businessman Lucio Tan, [and] Presidential Legal Adviser Manuel Lazaro, all of whom were close associates of Marcos.” On April 24, 1985, Marcos retroactively authorized the RFTM to conduct a “national fund campaign” from December 16, 1984 to December 15, 1985 via Proclamation No. 2416. He called on “all citizens and residents of the country” to “assist in the endeavor by giving generously of their means and to actively support the campaign,” and called upon all government agencies “to donate generously from their funds to the Foundation.” The financial statement in the 1985 RITM annual report did not indicate the amounts the foundation received, if any, as a result of this donation drive.

RFTM was superseded by the New Tropical Medicine Foundation, Inc. in 1987, which fulfilled RFTM’s grant reception and administration functions.

Instead of being treated as a “leper,” RITM in fact continued to thrive under the Corazon Aquino administration. This was the time when RITM’s Office of Public Information and Research Dissemination—to help make RITM’s findings more publicly accessible—and the Tropical Medicine Research Center (TMRC) were established. According to Dr. Mediadora Saniel, former director of RITM, in the institute’s 1990 annual report, that year was RITM’s “most productive year,” getting “the largest total research funding the Institute has ever obtained in any single year.” Among the grants received by RITM was a five-year grant from the U.S. National Institutes of Health for the TMRC.

The 1992 RITM Research and Training Division report opens with the line, “Research and Training activities conducted by the different study groups of the Division were both greater in scale and more diverse than in previous years.” The 1992 RITM annual report also shows that the institute, through the New Tropical Medicine Foundation, Inc., continued to receive millions in research funding, including considerable amounts from the Japanese government.

To highlight RITM’s 25th anniversary, Dr. Fe Esperanza J. Espino, in a 2006 article in the Philippine Star, enumerated the pioneering and robust research that the institute had undertaken on acute respiratory infections (ARI), dengue, diarrheal diseases, Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)/AIDS, leprosy, malaria, rabies, schistosomiasis, tuberculosis, and viral hepatitis.

A book celebrating RITM’s thirtieth anniversary was released in 2011. Its pages show a highly active and accomplished research institution, at the forefront of the country’s battles against diseases such as tuberculosis, rabies, and AIDS, receiving institutional awards from the Philippine government and the World Health Organization between 1997 and 2011. The book also gives a glimpse of how ably RITM faced the SARS and H1N1 pandemics during the Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo administration.

A side note: the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases, from whom we have been hearing from almost daily, was first established by then President Benigno Aquino III via Executive Order No. 168 in 2014 to prepare for and deal with various infectious diseases, including other coronavirus-caused conditions such as SARS and MERS.

Senator Marcos’s use of the words “neglected” and “decrepit” to describe RITM is inaccurate. The 2011 thirtieth anniversary book shows RITM as a well-equipped research institution, with its own vaccine production facilities. As an expression of the government’s confidence in RITM, in 2012 it received the biggest increase in its annual budget, from PHP 148,215,000 the previous year, to PHP 236,408,000, a 63 percent increase.

In 2014, RITM, with Japanese funding, commenced a project to construct a new Biological Safety Laboratory Level 3, capable of processing, detecting, and storing highly lethal viruses such as the Ebola Virus. In June 2018, the laboratory was certified as compliant with World Health Organization standards. It was inaugurated in August 2018. In 2019, it was reported that a Japanese company was going to give RITM advanced equipment for tuberculosis diagnosis. In the same year, RITM’s parasitology department received the Newton Prize Award for a project that, according to RITM’s press release, “resulted in a novel approach to improve malaria surveillance for elimination of the disease.” Finally, in 2017, RITM was ISO 9001:2015 certified—one of the first government organizations given such certification, according to RITM’s press release. The Provincial Government of Ilocos Norte was given the same certification during the same year; Imee Marcos has repeatedly cited this as evidence of how progressive Ilocos Norte became during her tenure as the province’s governor.

In short, Imee Marcos’s claim that the current difficulties of RITM are due to decades of neglect is not only disinformation, it also downplays the numerous achievements of RITM and its dedicated staff over the years and the support it has continued to receive both from the Philippine government and foreign funding agencies even after the Marcoses were ousted from power. Moreover, her claims about RITM in the face of COVID-19 is passing the blame of perceived mishandling of the crisis by the current government to the so-called “yellows” while glorifying her father’s regime—a tactic taken straight out of the Marcos propaganda playbook.

Indeed, this sudden interest in RITM seems to be mostly linked to another classic propaganda strategy—brandish your name, be a savior, especially during a crisis. Just like what her parents did with Kadiwa and nutribun. Unfortunately, Senator Imee Marcos was missing in action during the marathon special session of Congress that led to the passage of the Bayanihan to Heal as One Act. According to news reports, she was in home quarantine after it was confirmed that Senator Miguel Zubiri had tested positive for COVID-19. Nevertheless, she was reported to have submitted her proposed amendments to the COVID-19 emergency bill that was tackled on the Senate floor.

In a series of Facebook videos, she said that she had kept herself busy revising three bills. SB 1416, an amendment to Mandatory Reporting of Notifiable Diseases and Health Events of Public Health Concern Act, specifically to contemplate COVID-19, may be superfluous because the law already gives the Epidemiology Bureau of the Department of Health the power to list “notifiable diseases and health events of public health concern.” The other two bills, SB 1414 and 1415, are related to funding economic and social distress alleviation efforts and coronavirus detection, treatment, and control activities. The short title of her SB 1414 is “Pag-ASA: Alaga, Sustento, at Angat sa Panahon ng COVID-19 Crisis,” which, according to a post on her Facebook page dated March 23, 2020, is a proposed PHP 750 billion COVID-19 “emergency response and recovery package.” These are the three bills in between SB 1413 and SB 1418, the Senate’s versions of the Bayanihan to Heal as One bills. Senator Marcos’s bills were not consolidated with the bill that eventually became the COVID-19 national emergency law, which already allows the president to realign certain funds precisely to mitigate the effects of the current pandemic. As of this writing, a search of these bills via the website of the Senate yields a “not found” result.

Nevertheless, her Facebook and Twitter posts regarding her activities under quarantine have garnered thousands of reactions and shares—hardly unusual for her page, which has over 1.2 million followers. Her page has posted digital posters describing where she wants her proposed Pag-ASA funds to go, but without clarifying that these are merely proposals, leading to inquiries from several of the page’s followers regarding availment of what they think is a form of amelioration fund.

Outside of this social media community, a press release from her office regarding her Pag-ASA bill has been published in several news outlets. She has also talked about the bill herself in radio interviews. In her cross-platform media blitz regarding her efforts to help address the current crisis, she has either explicitly stated that she does not think it is necessary to give the president emergency powers, or, by emphasizing her Pag-ASA bill, is implying that the power of the purse cannot be ceded to the president. With the passage of the Bayanihan Act, she has been roundly rebuffed by her colleagues in the senate and by those in the executive branch.

She has since filed another COVID-19-related bill: SB 1427, which seeks to amend the Bayanihan Act to explicitly designate members of the media as frontliners, granting them a form of hazard pay. Again, this seems superfluous, as the Bayanihan Act already gives the president the power to grant such allowances.

Indeed, if her SB 1414 andSB 1415 were the ones tackled on the Senate floor, Senator Marcos may have had the chance to make the claim that she single-handedly drew up the financial plan to save the country from possible economic and social collapse. If her other COVID-related bills are enacted, she can claim to have been an advocate of particular frontliners. She could have had a ready response to the trending question, “Ano’ng ambag mo?” Instead, she is left to claim falsified past glory and alternative plans as her main contribution. Perhaps, besides the donations that she has been making here and there, she and the rest of her family can give, with no conditions, their fabled wealth to help beat the viral menace?

Originally published by Vera Files on April 22, 2020.

Nutribun. Kadiwa. Research Institute for Tropical Medicine. These are “brands” associated with the ousted dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos that the COVID-19 crisis has brought to the forefront again.

On March 19, 2020 San Miguel Corporation announced it will start producing nutribun “for the hardest-hit families facing hunger as a result of the COVID-19 crisis.” The Department of Agriculture secured PHP 1 billion from the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases for the upscaling of its Kadiwa program. And Senator Imee Marcos reminded us that it was her dictator-father who built RITM, where almost all testing was done in the first weeks of the coronavirus outbreak in the country.

This is not to disparage these efforts and institutions, especially in this time of crisis. But as with all things Marcos, when history is brought to bear on nutribun, Kadiwa, and RITM, we are bound to learn of their flawed, if not failed execution during the dictatorship. This is what the current propaganda effort erases.

NUTRIBUN

It was also during a time of crisis that the Marcoses tried to make nutribun their own. Fifty years later, Imelda’s daughter, now Senator Imee Marcos continues to tout this piece of bread as Marcos manna.

On July 12, 1972, then President Ferdinand Marcos placed the entire island of Luzon under “a state of public calamity.” He immediately ordered a price freeze in response to the intense flooding that Typhoon Gloring (international name Rita) unleashed in the country from July 10–25, 1972. Up to 543 people were killed according to a report by the United Press International (UPI).

Nutribun as part of the relief efforts in the early 1970s. From the AID publication War on Hunger, October 1972.

It was during this period of calamity that Imelda made her move to turn foreign assistance into a branded Marcos largesse. A 2017 report in the newslab.philstar.com quoted Nancy Dammann’s memoir, My 17 Years With USAID, on what exactly Imelda did: “the nutribun bags were being stamped with the slogan ‘Courtesy of Imelda Marcos–Tulungan project’.” Lee Lescaze in an August 4, 1972 syndicated column, made a similar observation. “Plastic bags stamped with her name were being widely used at one time for relief grain distributed in central Luzon’s most-damaged villages.”

From these days of disaster, the one product that borrowed deep in the collective memory was nutribun. Not only was it present in relief packages during disasters since 1970, it was a staple in the AID’s fight against hunger and malnutrition in the Philippines.

AID described the bread as a “complete ready-to-eat meal” with more than 500 calories and over half an ounce of protein each. Major ingredients are wheat flour, nonfat dry milk and vegetable oil supplied under the Food for Peace program, combined with lesser amounts of sugar, salt and yeast. All principal nutrients, except VitaminC, are furnished in each bun.

Discussing the origin of nutribun, Paul E. Johnson, wrote in the July 1973 issue of War on Hunger that “the testing and development of soy fortified bread flour was undertaken primarily by Dr. C.C.Tsen and Dr. William J. Hoover of the Food and Feed Grain Institute of Kansas State University. Working under an AID contract, begun in 1967, to improve the nutritive value of cereal-based foods.” Their objective was to develop a bread “with 12 percent soy flour [that] is virtually indistinguishable from white flour bread–in texture, color, taste, loaf volume, or other traits. It is high in total protein, has well balanced protein, and it is relatively inexpensive to produce.”

The nutribun was first introduced in the Philippines in 1970. Mainly as part of relief efforts. The nutribuns that reached the schools as part of a nutrition program, were developed by Albert S. Fraleigh, an AID Food for Peace officer, and Dr. Ruben W. Engel, an AID contract officer and professor at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, who worked together in the field of child nutrition and the fostering of school and pre-school child-feeding programs.

In 1971, as reported by AID in the December 1977 issue of War on Hunger, the Philippine government launched a four-year Philippine Food and Nutrition Program.

Nutribun as part of the feeding program in public elementary schools. From The Marcos Revolution: A Progress Report on the New Society of the Philippines, 1980.

A central part of the government’s nutrition scheme was the school feeding program whose target was to reach 2.7 million underweight or malnourished children, particularly in public elementary schools.

But that goal seems to have been ambitious. AID reports from 1971 to 1982 (the last year when there was a formal assessment of the program) showed the top number reached was in 1973 with 1.7 million recipients. In 1982, recipients stalled at 1.25 million. From 1970 until the Marcoses were ousted in 1986, the number of public elementary school students rose from 6.9 to 8.8 million.

Also, the nutribun was not given free. At the start, an elementary school pupil paid PHP 0.10 for each nutribun; by the mid-1980s, PHP 0.25. The very poor students were provided sponsors.

It was not only the price of nutribun that changed over the years. From 500 calories, content was eventually halved to 250 calories (the same caloric count as today’s SMC nutribun).

There were also doubts on its impact in curbing malnutrition. Barry M. Popkin and Marisol Lim-Ybanez wrote in the journal Social Science and Medicine in 1982: “There is little evidence . . . that present school feeding programs have significantly enhanced the physiological capacity of students.” The 1982 national survey on nutrition also showed 40 percent of some four million households in the bottom half of the economic scale, or 1.6 million households, experienced hunger almost daily.

More than three decades later, on October 8, 2018, the siblings Bongbong and Imee Marcos started circulating in their various social media platforms a short video clip titled “Edukasyon at Palakasan” (Education and Sports) ostensibly to celebrate the 101st birth anniversary of Ferdinand Marcos. It made a straightforward claim: that nutribun solved the problem of malnutrition in schools.

KADIWA

On March 29, 2020, Senator Imee Marcos posted about Kadiwa on her Facebook page. The text was largely lifted from the history of the Food Terminal, Inc (FTI). The short history of FTI correctly attributed the emergence of Kadiwa stores to the oil crisis of 1973, when prices of many commodities soared and scarcity of food was felt. “It was during this time that the concept of retailing the seven basic commodities at government-controlled rates was systematized. On April 14, 1980, the first KADIWA Center was put up at the FTI Complex,” it said.

But even before the first Kadiwa store was put up, another oil price shock rippled through the country in 1979. Transport, water and power rates rose and commodity prices spiked.

Jürgen Rüland, in a 1986 article in the Asian Journal of Public Administration, pointed to a pre-Kadiwa effort of the Imelda Marcos-led Metropolitan Manila Commission (MMC) – the so-called “rolling stores” project in 1979 that sold food and essential items in depressed areas at subsidized prices.

The actual legal basis for the Kadiwa stores was the 1981 Presidential Decree (PD) 1770 which placed FTI, and with it the incipient Kadiwa, under the National Food Authority (NFA). PD 1770 also designated Imelda as the head of the council that ran the NFA.

Inauguration of a Kadiwa store with Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos in attendance. From The New Philippine Republic, 1982.

Ramon L. Clarete, in the 2008 book From Parastatals to Private Trade: Lessons from Asian Agriculture, described how NFA responded to this particular mandate by launching the Kadiwa program, operating mobile and retail stores in urban and depressed areas. The stores sold at subsidized prices basic food items like rice, sugar, cooking oil, coffee, milk, and noodles.

Imelda proved to be the controlling presence behind Kadiwa. As minister of human settlements and head of the MMC, she also led the NFA.

But the public money that went into subsidizing Kadiwa was not just for the commodities it sold. Gerardo P. Sicat, Marcos’ former minister of Economic Planning, explained in a December 1984 speech that to set up and support Kadiwa stores, the NFA, through FTI, had to invest in new buildings, transport equipment as well as raise its working capital to hold inventory and hire addition manpower.

Even during its heyday, reception to Kadiwa by Manila’s poor was not as enthusiastic as now recalled. A perception study on poverty and programs to redress it among Manila’s poor published by Leandro A. Viloria and Dolores A. Endriga in the October 1984 issue of Philippine Planning Journal found that people were discouraged by the queues, the distance of the stores and some irritable service personnel.

By 1983, in the face of ballooning foreign debt obligations, another peso devaluation, and a drought, the promise of cheap prime commodities from Kadiwa became as scant as the goods on its shelves. In June and July of that year, there was a sugar and rice shortage, and the price of cooking oil spiked. All these were before the economic and political tailspin that the assassination of Ninoy Aquino triggered in August that year.

Hoarding and overpricing became common. Raids on stores and warehouses became a news staple. By May 1984, the scarcity of consumer goods accompanied by rising prices, remained an unsolved problem for Marcos. The best he could do was to impose price control on basic commodities.

By November 1984, a kilo of rice cost PHP 5.35 in Kadiwa outlets; it was PHP 4.25 in May. The average minimum daily wage dipped from PHP 20.00 in 1983 to PHP 16.00.

On May 31, 1985 Marcos issued Executive Order (EO) 1028 instructing the NFA to transfer “all Kadiwa and other non-grain operations of the [NFA] to [FTI], and subsequently (b) the transfer or divestment of the operations of [FTI], including the Kadiwa operations, as a joint venture between the government and the private sector, without prejudice to the possibility of a full transfer to the private sector immediately or ultimately.”

Clarete argued that Marcos’s epiphany was more of buckling to pressure from the Asian Development Bank. “In 1985, in need of foreign exchange to manage its foreign debt, the government agreed . . . to end both the Kadiwa program and the wheat import monopoly of NFA. Political support for the program weakened as the Marcos government became increasingly isolated.”

For Sicat, it was a costly and losing operation from the start. And in the end, he said, Kadiwa lost to “the small sari-sari neighborhood store and the medium-sized grocery.” Viloria and Endriga’s study supported Sicat’s conclusion. Instead of going to Kadiwa, respondents went to nearby markets, spending less on transportation, it said.

Rüland also expressed skepticism that Kadiwa actually helped the poor. He pointed out that by government’s own claim, it spent within two years 18 million pesos for the rolling stores and the Kadiwa project, reaching some 247,000 families in 542 depressed and semi-depressed areas. “In actual fact, this means that the government spent 24,658 pesos per day for these prime commodities or 0.10 peso per family per day. It goes without saying that given these allocations the project’s effect on the living conditions of the poor was virtually nil.”

Kadiwa’s failure despite being backed by four government agencies—the MMC, the FTI, the MHS, and the NFA, all ruled by Imelda—points only to the bureaucratic drag that sunk it and the broader economic and political malaise then afflicting the nation.

THE RESEARCH INSTITUTE FOR TROPICAL MEDICINE

With RITM continuously in the news due to COVID-19, Imee Marcos’s Facebook page

showcased the medical facility on March 14, 2020. The text of the post was largely lifted from the Wikipedia entry on RITM, which cites Ricardo Manapat’s Some are Smarter than Others: The History of Marcos’s Crony Capitalism as a source. Imee’s page was careful, however, not to include criticism of RITM from Manapat’s book, which discusses the intricate web of Marcos plunder as it was understood back in 1991.

Imelda Marcos unveiling the RITM marker. From the RITM Annual Report, 1981.

Manapat described RITM as “[one] of the relatively unknown projects of Imelda Marcos.” He highlighted how it was organized in cooperation with the Japanese government and funded by the Japan International Cooperation Agency. He said Executive Order No. 674, dated 25 March 1981, defined it “as an institute for the development of basic and applied research [programs] for tropical medicine in the Philippines.” After such factual declarations, Manapat then casts doubt on the value of RITM during the Marcos regime:

[The] impression created by the RITM is that it was organized to benefit Japanese research rather than Philippine health. Of the 1030 admissions in the hospital, 815 or 79.1% were treated as research patients. It claimed that the institute’s research program was supervised by the Ministry of Health, but results of the five years of studies made by local scientists were never published. Instead, the research was merely turned over to the Japanese in return for aid grants. It is not certain that the indigent patients of this institution were ever informed that they were not receiving standard and tested treatment but were being subjected to experiments commissioned by the Japanese.

Most of Manapat’s claims can be checked against various sources. It is difficult to prove the Japanese did benefit more from RITM than Filipinos. However, based on a 1985 JICA report, the original name of the proposed institute was the Philippine Japan Research Institute for Tropical Diseases. This initial proposal made clear it was a joint Philippine-Japanese effort, with the proposed institute having a Japanese co-chairman.

The Technical Cooperation Agreement between the Philippines and Japan for the RITM project entailed an exchange of scientists. According the institute’s 1985 annual report, by that year, 15 Filipino scientists had been posted in various research centers in Japan for training, while 16 Japanese scientists had been sent to RITM as consultants.

The admissions figures cited by Manapat are from RITM’s 1985 annual report, which covers January 1 to December 31, 1985. RITM’s earlier annual reports did not indicate such data. In any case, that majority of admitted patients became research subjects should not be seen as unusual, given RITM’s mandate.

On the publication of research findings, annual reports of RITM from 1981 to 1985 show a lot of the outputs by the institute’s researchers were published in academic and professional journals and presented in conferences even if they were not popularized.

Finally, it seems likely, given the global standards of medical research ethics at the time that patients who participated in RITM research studies did so with their consent. From 1981 to 1985, RITM had Institutional Review and Ethical Review boards.

JICA officials at the RITM. From the RITM Annual Report, 1981.

Indeed, what Imee Marcos and Marcos supporters have failed to emphasize is how dependent RITM was on the Japanese government’s funding. Financial statements in the RITM’s annual reports from 1981 to 1985, showed hardly any capital or equipment outlay from the national government. Its allocation during that period, averaging about PHP 7 million annually, was mostly for personnel services and operating expenses.

RITM’s 1984 annual report indicated JICA had provided USD 1 million (about PHP 18 million) to the institute since 1981. In 1985, the year RITM’s experimental animal laboratory was inaugurated, JICA provided another PHP 3.2 million worth of equipment

Clearly, RITM thrived because of external support and excellent researchers. Without foreign funding, it seems unlikely that RITM would have become a performing asset.

Moreover, the country’s current crisis emphasizes the fact that RITM and other government hospitals with advanced capabilities are in Metro Manila.

Even Imee Marcos acknowledged the issue of Manila centralization when she filed Senate Bill No. 1407 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which sought to establish RITMs in regions outside the capital. The explanatory note in her bill mentions Ferdinand Marcos’ executive order establishing RITM, but nothing about Japan’s primary role in designing, building, and supporting it for eight years.

The Filipinos who remember with fondness nutribun and Kadiwa, or to have availed of RITM’s services were the very same ones whose lives were reduced to penury by the kleptocratic Marcos regime. Whatever small measure of service they have received from the conjugal dictatorship, they have treasured it as one of those rare instances then when the government appeared in their midst — like the perfumed and bejeweled Imelda sauntering in the slums of Tondo. Such uncritical sentimentalism is the fertile ground for the subsequent Marcos propaganda.

Originally published by Vera Files on September 19, 2021.

“Of course, Imelda and I denied it.”

That was what then president Ferdinand Marcos wrote in his diary for September 21, 1972. It was his response when asked by Jose Aspiras and Carmelo Barbero, two of the strongman’s most loyal political lieutenants from the “northern bloc,” if rumors were true that he would declare martial law within 48 hours.

While he denied it publicly, Marcos had secretly signed Proclamation 1081 imposing martial law in the entire country. The public would know about this only on the evening of September 23 when he announced it on live television, saying that martial law was the appropriate response to meet the growing threat from the armed Left and Muslim rebels.

Many had suspected this would happen, but only a dozen men knew for sure and not even all of them were aware of the timing. Within this clique, there were differences in what the “Seven Wise Men” or the “Group of Seven” knew beforehand to what the rest of the “Rolex 12” would eventually come to learn and implement. Close Marcos aides, including those tasked to prepare plans for or study the feasibility of martial law in the country, were surprised when it finally happened.

But one man already held a copy of Proclamation 1081: then US ambassador to the Philippines Henry Byroade.

Oplan Sagittarius by VERA Files

Oplan Sagittarius by VERA Files on Scribd

Various authors and sources have reasonably surmised that Marcos started to seriously plan for martial law when he won his second term in November 1969. While his stated rationale for imposing martial law changed and shifted in 34 months, what remained unchanged was his resolve to gain dictatorial powers. Marcos devised ways to keep secret his ambition to gain political dominance even as he started enlisting the help of a chosen few to justify martial law and how best to execute his plan given the expected opposition.

If the memoir of martial law administrator Juan Ponce Enrile would be believed, Marcos, then newly re-elected, began planning for martial law in early December 1969. Marcos had asked Enrile to “study his powers under the commander-in-chief provisions of the [1935] Constitution” as he “was foreseeing an escalation of violence and disorder in the country.” His commander-in-chief told Enrile he could ask for help in completing the study, but the project should be done “discreetly and confidentially.” Enrile enlisted two 1954 magna cum laude graduates from the University of the Philippines (UP) College of Law, Efren Plana and Minerva Gonzaga-Reyes.

As he was hatching plans for imposing martial law, Marcos was quoted as saying in a November 14, 1969 Manila Times article that he would never become a dictator because this would “invite a violent reaction from the people.”

Enrile made it appear in his memoir that he was Marcos’s sole brain trust, but this was not the case. Marcos liked to compartmentalize when farming out sensitive and crucial work for his martial law plans.

Gen. Rafael Ileto told author Conrado de Quiros in Dead Aim: How Marcos Ambushed Philippine Democracy that Marcos had asked him to look into the military strategy needed for martial law . Jose Almonte and his boss, then executive secretary Alejandro Melchor Jr. were assigned to study authoritarian regimes in Asia and Adrian Cristobal was tasked to envision a government without a Congress. Ronaldo Zamora had to study the early years of American occupation when the governors-general ruled by decree. Even as he was about to declare martial law, Marcos was still asking Blas Ople to look into the workings of totalitarianism in the Soviet Union.

At some point, Marcos even had Philippine embassies in authoritarian countries draw up reports on how their host governments worked.

But only Marcos knew how this surfeit of information fit together in his pursuit of a dictatorship. When some of these studies proved unsupportive of what he had in mind, Marcos treated the authors with suspicion — as in the case of Ileto, Almonte, and Melchor.

In late January 1970, Enrile submitted to Marcos a compendium of the results of the study. A week later, Marcos instructed him “to prepare the documents to install martial law in the country.” Enrile claimed that, working alone (save for Simplicio Taguiam, Marcos’s private and confidential secretary who did the typing), it took him six months to complete what would eventually become Proclamation 1081.

As the First Quarter Storm raged in 1970, Marcos intimated to the United States that he may resort to martial law. The attack on Malacañang mostly by student activists during the January 30 Battle of Mendiola almost prompted Marcos to declare martial law or at least, suspend the writ of habeas corpus right then and there. Ileto has claimed to have dissuaded Marcos from taking this course of action.

In a memorandum dated February 7, 1970 to US President Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, then assistant for national security affairs, quoted a report by Byroade describing “a rambling conversation with a very distraught and unnerved President Marcos.” Kissinger said Marcos wanted the ambassador’s ‘active help’ as he might have to impose martial law. Marcos wanted to know if Byroade would ‘stand behind him.’”

“Byroade reacted cautiously to keep us from being drawn into this situation. He tried discreetly to suggest the need for social programs and land reform, and to head off drastic actions such as martial law,” Kissenger wrote.

In a marginal note, Nixon wrote that he “doubts this line’s effectiveness.”

With US military bases still in the country then and the US war of aggression in Vietnam a hotspot in the Cold War, Washington was keen on constantly knowing what Marcos was up to as his actions would have bearing on its strategic interests. There were also substantial American economic interests in the country that must be protected.

Almost a year later, as related in a January 15, 1971 memorandum of conversation involving Nixon, Byroade, and John H. Holdridge, a member of Nixon’s National Security Council, Marcos asked the White House if the US would oppose or support his martial law plan.

“The President [Nixon] declared that he would “absolutely” back Marcos up, and “to the hilt” so long as what he was doing was to preserve the system against those who would destroy it in the name of liberty. The President [Nixon] indicated that he had telephoned Trudeau of Canada to express this same position. We would not support anyone who was trying to set himself up as a military dictator, but we would do everything we could to back a man who was trying to make the system work and to preserve order. Of course, we understood that Marcos would not be entirely motivated by national interests, but this was something which we had come to expect from Asian leaders. The important thing was to keep the Philippines from going down the tube, since we had a major interest in the success or failure of the Philippine system. Whatever happens, the Philippines was our baby,” the memo stated.

In late May 1972, Byroade had another conversation with Marcos that he reported to the US State Department. He wrote that again, Marcos “talked of the ‘great upsurge of communist insurgency threat in the country,” noting that the Philippine leader had warned that he “might have to reinstate martial law. He asked again if we would support him or at least not oppose him.” To this, Byroade said that he ‘mumbled that our position on that had not changed, but added the hope that he would not find such a move necessary as I thought it would clearly at this time tear the nation apart into opposing factions.’”

Byroade may have made a mistake by using the word “reinstate” in his report — unless, of course, he and Marcos were referring to the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus that was implemented in response to the August 21, 1971 Plaza Miranda bombing.

September 1972 was ushered in by a spate of bombings in Metro Manila, now more frequent than in previous months. For the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), “at least some of the bombs were set by pro-Soviet terrorist groups, that none can be definitely traced to the Maoists.”

1972 09 08 Letter of Enrile… by VERA Files

1972 09 08 Letter of Enrile to Marcos Re Urdaneta Village Meeting by VERA Files on Scribd

In hindsight, the CIA half failed in its intelligence effort here. Ever since Jose Ma. Sison founded the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) in December 1968 espousing Marxism–Leninism–Maoism as a breakaway faction from the old Partiko Komunista ng Pilipinas, a rivalry — sometimes lethal — had existed between the two groups. In his book, de Quiros wrote that a leader of the CPP’s Armed City Partisans admitted that the group “did carry out some bombing . . .but not during that period [August-September 1972] . . . we did not bomb without reason . . . and we made sure no innocent bystanders got hurt.”

But as later admissions and pieces evidence would prove, the bombings were, in fact, the work mostly of Marcos’s own military. Ironically, whatever the motives of the armed partisans from the Left, their violent actions combined with those of the military worked to sow fear and chaos among Filipinos. It was a near-perfect condition for Marcos to declare martial law.

As recorded in Marcos’s diary entries, it appears that after each passing week in September, critical elements in the declaration of martial law were agreed on and put in effect by the “Rolex 12.” The potent surprise of springing martial law on an anxious and terrified populace continued to be a well-guarded secret even after Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr., Marcos’s foremost political adversary, had almost exposed a crucial part of it.

In his September 7, 1972 diary entry, Marcos reveals he had finalized his martial law plans after one development: Enrile, then defense minister, informing him that Aquino had invited him to discuss “a matter of the highest urgency and of national importance,” and they were set to meet that evening.

In Enrile’s memoir, he narrated that the meeting happened almost around midnight at the residence of their common friend, Ramon Siy Lay, at Urdaneta Village in Makati where Enrile also lived. During the meeting that lasted for over an hour, Aquino disclosed information that he insisted Enrile keep confidential. Enrile wrote that he protested, but was “already tired and sleepy” and wanted to end their conversation. So he agreed.

But when he got home, Enrile immediately called Marcos and briefed him on what Aquino had revealed. Typing it himself, Enrile also wrote a report that he sent to his boss in the morning. Enrile wrote that he betrayed Aquino because he felt that Marcos needed to know for “the very obvious national security implication of the matter brought to [his] attention.”

Marcos and Enrile used what transpired in the Urdaneta meeting to counter what Aquino was about to publicly reveal.

On September 13, 1972, Ninoy, speaking in the Senate, exposed Oplan Sagittarius, the plan for the imposition of martial law leaked to him by sources from the Armed Forces. In his book, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines, Stanley Karnow wrote that Aquino had in fact brought the information to the US Embassy the day before but Byroade did not believe him.

Both Marcos and AFP Chief of Staff Romeo Espino denied that Oplan Sagittarius was a plan to place the Greater Manila Area under the control of the constabulary before imposing martial law in the entire nation. They said that it was merely a contingency plan to coordinate military and police response to violent acts by the communists.

In fact, Marcos would insist via his ghostwritten books such as Notes on the New Society that he had tricked the opposition with a fake version of Oplan Sagittarius. He said that Ninoy’s claim that the plan was for the imposition of martial law, including the takeover of certain industries, was indeed based on documents obtained from his intelligence network, but these papers were just part of the “dummy plans made to spot security leaks in [their] organization.”

Based on a copy of a document with the subject title “Letter of Instruction 6/72 (Sagittarius)” dated August 25, 1972, which was among those found in Malacañang after the February 1986 revolt, Sagittarius involved equipping all AFP units with “as many rifle (Inf) platoons, companies and battalions as possible with the capability of sustained employment for at least 48 hours without resupply in both conventional and unconventional warfare.” General Headquarters would announce daily one of four internal defense conditions (IDCs) in “each military zone; in each operational area of task forces under GHQ, and in the Greater Manila Area.” Each IDC level, from normal to IDC III, would entail increasing centralization of operational command and under IDC III, “GHQ assumes overall responsibility for the conduct of operations to restore normalcy or reduce internal threats,” while all camps, posts, and stations would maintain 100 percent “effective strength.”

According to a document attached to the LOI, the conditions warranting IDC III include “intensified and widespread insurgency” including, among others, “widespread offensive operations against government troops,” paralyzing “massive civil disturbance,” “imminent threat or confirmed indications of insurrection/rebellion/secession” and “large scale breakdown of peace and order or threat of civil war as a result of political upheaval.”

In short, if LOI 6/72 is the actual Oplan Sagittarius referred to by Marcos and Espino, it did not involve martial law. Before the nation discovered that martial law had been enforced, the national situation would not even merit an IDC III declaration, based on news accounts and various assessments of the offensive capabilities of the CPP-NPA which had no capability to seize power or incite a high-intensity civil war.

All these fine points, however, were lost in the media blitz that Aquino launched against the Philippine leader, who fought back. Writing in his diary on September 14, Marcos planned to “start another raging controversy,” using what he knew from the Urdaneta meeting.

On September 16, the Malacañang press office released a statement from Marcos timed for the Sunday edition of the major broadsheets. In the press release, Marcos accused Liberal Party (LP) leaders of meeting with Jose Maria Sison, CPP founder and chairman, where they talked about “a common plan…in the event of a revolutionary situation.”

This was not entirely correct, based on a September 8, 1972 letter from Enrile to Marcos marked top secret which was also recovered from Malacañang. In the letter, Enrile said that Aquino had told him that CPP leaders he met with in Dasmariñas Village earlier that night had broached the possibility of an alliance with the Liberals if Marcos declared martial law, which they viewed as a precondition for an actual CPP-LP coordination. According to Enrile, Aquino told Sison “something about his duties as a duly-elected senator of the Republic and so forth” when asked about the LP’s “post-martial law-plan.”

But Sison did not meet with Ninoy. In his book, de Quiros wrote that years later, Julius Fortuna of Kabataang Makabayan and a close Sison associate, admitted that it was he and a few that others who met with Aquino in Dasmariñas Village. It is unclear if it was Aquino or Enrile who dragged Sison into the story.

Marcos likewise said in his statement that the meeting vaguely involved a discussion on the landing of weapons by the M.V. Karagatan at Digoyo Point in Isabela, the bombings in Manila, and an increase in the strength of the CPP’s New People’s Army. Marcos did not mention that, as narrated by Enrile, Aquino said that the CPP had denied involvement in the bombings and was “non-commital” about the M.V. Karagatan incident, which was definitely an attempt to ship arms from China to the NPA.

Marcos’s pronouncements forced Aquino and the LP leadership to issue denials. To a certain degree, the Malacanang statement dampened the impact of Aquino’s Oplan Sagittarius exposé and these media distractions proved to be the perfect camouflage for what was really going on.

On September 13, as his only son, Bongbong, celebrated his 14th birthday in Malacañang and media attention was focused on Aquino, Marcos wrote in his diary: “We agreed to set the 21st of this month as the deadline” for declaring martial law. By “we” Marcos meant Enrile and some advisers that he did not name.

The following morning, Marcos met with Enrile, Espino, Army chief Maj. Gen. Rafael Zagala, Maj. Gen. Fidel Ramos, Police Constabulary chief Maj. Gen. Fidel Ramos, Air Force head Maj. Gen. Jose Rancudo, Adm. Hilario Ruiz who headed the Navy, Maj. Gen. Fabian Ver, chief security, Intelligence chief Col. Ignacio Paz, commander of the First PC Zone Gen. Tomas Diaz, Metrocom Chief Col. Alfredo Montoya, Rizal PC commander Col. Romeo Gatan, and Eduardo “Danding” Cojuanco. The so-called “Rolex 12,” supposedly because Marcos gifted each of them the expensive watch. (Espino, however, later told De Quiros that what Marcos actually gave them were fake Omega watches that broke easily.)

Alex Brillantes Jr., in Dictatorship and Martial Law: Philippine Authoritarianism in 1972, identified the “Seven Wise Men” within the Rolex 12 as Marcos, Enrile, Ver, Diaz, Montoya, Gatan, and Cojuangco. These were the men more deeply involved in the planning of martial law. Diaz, Montoya, and Gatan were relatively junior officers at the time were and as de Quiros said, “Not knowing that their superiors were included in the plan, they were not anxious to open their mouths, lest they pay dearly for it. Their superiors in turn were not anxious to ask questions, lest they be thought of as being disloyal. And neither group was anxious to leak the plan to the outside world, lest they be traced as the source.”

By September 14, they were all ready to turn their plans into specific missions. Marcos remained mum on when exactly he would start exercising his dictatorial powers but with daily meetings starting that day, they all knew it would be soon.

On the evening of that day, as if to signal the ominous turn that Marcos had made, a major spill of formaldehyde happened in Manila’s port area. “Manila had entered the last days of Philippine democracy,” William Rempel noted in Delusions of a Dictator, “smelling vaguely like a morgue.”

Strange omen that it was, Marcos had yet to murder Philippine democracy so the secrecy remained.

A mass rally organized by the Movement of Concerned Citizens for Civil Liberties (MCCCL) was held at Plaza Miranda in Quiapo. (Photo courtesy of Philippines Free Press Magazine) Photo downloaded from Official Gazette.

In a September 15, 1972 telegram to the US State Department, Byroade related that he had asked Marcos the day before “if he were about to surprise us with a declaration of martial law.” The response was, Byroade wrote, “no, not under present circumstances. (Marcos) said he would not hesitate at all in doing so if the terrorists stepped up their activities further, and to a new stage. He said that if a part of Manila were burned, a top official of his Government, or foreign ambassador, assassinated or kidnapped, then he would act very promptly. He said that he questioned Communist capability to move things to such a stage just now.”

The ambush of Enrile’s convoy in San Juan on the night of September 22 would satisfy one of the listed circumstances although by then, it seemed just a violent flourish, an orgasmic bang that Marcos just needed to have to become a full-pledged dictator.

So the ambush was staged. Or not staged. Enrile had flip flopped on the subject.

Witness accounts later tended to support the view that it was a contrived move. In the 1985-86 issue of the Fookien Times Philippines Yearbook, Doreen G. Yu asked Enrile, “What about the incident of your alleged ambush that triggered the declaration of martial law?”

Enrile’s replied, “That was not my idea. In fact, when I was fired upon I just came from headquarters. I had transmitted to them the orders of the President declaring martial law. I was on my way home; martial law was already ongoing at this time, the operations were already on. Pres. Marcos simply used that to dramatize this, but that was not really necessary. Because he already decided to declare martial law long before that, because of what was happening in the country.”

In his memoir, Enrile insisted that the ambush was real and perpetrated by his unknown enemies.

Excerpt from the diary of Ferdinand E. Marcos on September 22, 1972. From the Philippine Diary Project. Photo downloaded from Official Gazette.

Byroade’s effort to pierce Marcos’s secrecy yielded tangible result only on the evening of September 20, when he received a copy of Proclamation 1081. Raymond Bonner, in Waltzing with a Dictator, said that Marcos was betrayed by one of his “most trusted confidants.”

This was just two days after Marcos claimed in his diary on September 18 that they had finalized the plans for the proclamation of martial law, and that, after a four-hour meeting ending at 10 p.m. that day, the Rolex 12 minus Cojuangco and Gatan, settled on September 21 as the date of declaration “without any postponement.”

That an event that happened on September 18 made its way to a key legal document on martial law was proof that Marcos and his Rolex 12 would take advantage of any new developments to justify their move. The bombing at around 3:40 p.m. that day at the Quezon City Hall, where the Constitutional Convention did its work, was the latest event mentioned in Proclamation 1081. Writing in his diary around midnight, Marcos noted that the Quezon City Hall bombing was “the answer of the subversives to the raids on their headquarters in Manila, Quezon and Pasay…where about 48 were arrested.”

On the evening of September 20 and the day after, Byroade met with Marcos. In a September 21, 1972 telegram to the US State Department, the American diplomat said, “Marcos . . . had made no decision to move towards martial law, and he had never considered anything beyond that, such as military rule. He did admit, however, that planning for martial law was at an advanced state.” At the end of the telegram Byroade admitted that he was unsure if he “succeeded in at least postponing new developments.”

By September 21, the only seeming hindrance to Marcos’s plans was the fact that Congress was then in session. According to Enrile, “President Marcos was waiting for Congress to adjourn sine die . . . on Friday, September 22, 1972. It was for that reason that he had not acted on the declaration of martial law. President Marcos wanted Congress to adjourn first before he would proclaim martial law in the country. He wanted to avoid any resistance from Congress once he declared martial law in the country.”

But Congress did not adjourn. And Marcos was right in his sense that there could be resistance, but it was one that he managed to easily crush. “[A] few days after the declaration of martial law,” Petronilo Bn. Daroy wrote in a chapter of Dictatorship and Revolution: Roots of People’s Power, “a bipartisan caucus of congressmen and senators was held in the cell of Benigno Aquino, Jr., who had already been arrested and detained in Camp Crame. The caucus deliberated on convening a special session of Congress to declare Presidential Decree 1081, null and void. Aquino’s cell was, of course, bugged; the following day, soldiers secured the legislative building and dismantled the offices, carting away equipment, tables, and chairs. The legislative building was turned into the National Museum.”

The Sunday edition of the Philippine Daily Express on September 24, 1972, the only newspaper published after the announcement of Martial Law on September 21, the evening prior. Photo downloaded from Wikipedia.

Since the start of 1972, talks of martial law abounded in the chattering class of Manila. It finally descended and Marcos exacted vengeance with the mass arrest of his enemies on the evening of September 22 until the early morning of the next day.

With his critics in jail and the press silenced, Marcos addressed the nation on radio and TV in the early evening of 23 September to state what was, by then, a matter of fact: martial law was in effect.

In the CIA’s daily brief for Nixon on 23 September 1972, there was almost a hint of admiration for what Marcos had done, that “Marcos carefully orchestrated the move well in advance.”

As Imelda exclaimed to Enrile when things settled down on the morning of September 23, “Ang dali pala ng martial law!”