Category: Lies

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!”