Having known the Filipino photojournalist Alex Baluyut, who died yesterday aged 69, for nearly half a century, I feel that looking at his photos — how he documented the events that unfurled during his lifetime — reveals his own lifelong search for himself.

By documenting the rawest parts of human existence, including war, poverty, and the shifting tides of our history, he was reconciling his own place within those same struggles.

Whether on the frontlines of conflict in Mindanao or the troubled streets of Metro Manila, he wasn’t just looking for a story; he was searching for a sense of truth.

• READ MORE: Award-winning veteran photojournalist Alex Baluyut dies at 69

​I first knew Alex when he was a photographer for the Associated Press. In those days, film was expensive, but it was not a constraint for him.

Having the resources of a major agency gave him a distinct advantage over his colleagues. I noticed how he loved documenting every movement of a subject, while others were often content with a single “good shot” for the day’s coverage.

It surprised me when, after we were dismissed from the Times Journal for union work and were organising a new daily with the late Joe Burgos, Alex approached me and Chuchay Fernandez. He asked if he can join Pahayagang Malaya.

He didn’t focus on the economic difficulties of a struggling paper, but instead embraced the challenge of being part of the “Mosquito Press” during the darkest days of the Marcos martial law era, especially during the surge of outrage following the death of opposition leader Benigno Aquino.

​Risky coverage
Alex was not just focused on protest rallies, his main assignments then. Together, we planned risky coverage of the underground movement, which took us to dangerous locations, including Mindanao to cover the Moro secessionist rebellion.

During the 76-day war in Lanao del Sur, Alex was hesitant to leave even after we received reports of napalm bombing; he stayed until it became clear the site was impossible to reach.

On one occasion, we braved a torturous hike to reach a MILF (Moro Islamic Liberation Front) camp on the border of Lanao and Maguindanao to take the first-ever photos of their forces in formation at their own campsite.

Even then, I noticed a shift in Alex’s mood. His adrenaline was fueled by a drive to expose the plight of the aggrieved, a mission that eventually brought us to the countryside to cover the communist insurgency.

His photos were not always meant for the newspapers; they were documenting the struggle so that people might understand it. Eventually, the pressure of witnessing the stark truths of an armed struggle took its toll on him.

​Interestingly, the photos Alex provided me from his documentation of the underground movement did not show the stark reality of a rebellion, but rather the communities where he was immersed.

He was the best man at my wedding, and my only lament was that he failed to document the ceremony. Instead, he handed me and Merci a photo of a smiling Mangyan — a rare subject given his usual themes.

He told me it was his way of wishing us a happy life.

Mobile kitchen project
Alex also sought to chart a life beyond photojournalism. Driven by his love for cooking, he and some friends set up a small beer garden on the sidewalks of Ermita, which sparked his adventures in the restaurant business.

It was no surprise then that he eventually devoted his remaining years to serving the needy during calamities, co-founding the Art Relief Mobile Kitchen with his wife, Precious.

The news of Alex’s passing from cirrhosis of the liver stunned me, especially knowing the impact our late colleague Tony Nieva had on both of us. Tony also succumbed to the dreaded illness.He was our mentor in the struggle for press freedom and in documenting the lives of the downtrodden.

After Tony passed away, I rarely saw and worked with Alex, except for a few commissioned book projects.

Although I monitored his journey through social media and felt a sense of guilt for not joining his new advocacy, I am grateful to have been part of the life of a man who sought the truth in our ailing society and worked, in his own way, to lift the spirits of the marginalised.

Joel C. Paredes is a Filipino journalist and author who has contributed to BusinessMirror and other Philippine media outlets. He has written about local politics and Philippine history, including a 2010 collection of columns about the Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo administration.

Upon assuming the Philippines presidency on 30 June 2022, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr — the only son and namesake of the former dictator Ferdinand Marcos — delivered an inaugural address that did not mention press freedom.

Press freedom also went unmentioned when he delivered his first State of the Nation Address before the joint Senate and House of Representatives on 25 July 2022.

His silence on the issue was notable given that the former press secretary Trixie Cruz-Angeles, who stepped down on 4 October 2022 due to health reasons, had stressed that press freedom would be guaranteed under the Marcos Jr administration and that the administration would “work closely” with news media.

• READ MORE: Other Philippine media freedom reports

But as he pledged to protect press freedom on the campaign trail, certain journalists were pushed for getting too physically close to Marcos Jr.

It also remains to be seen whether his representatives will continue to evade critical questions during press briefings or if Marcos Jr will be more accommodating of interview requests. The normalisation of these practices would be a death knell for press freedom in the Philippines.

Media restrictions and abuse under Marcos Jr evoke memories of the Philippine media’s dark history under former Philippines president and dictator Ferdinand Marcos’ martial law from 1972–86.

The Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility identifies five similarities between the Marcos regime in the 1970s and the current Marcos Jr administration.

Distribution of propaganda
These are the distribution of propaganda through government agencies and social media, the ABS–CBN shutdown, attacks and threats against journalists, crony press and media selectivity and propaganda films.

There are chilling similarities between the two administrations despite Marcos Jr’s promise that he would not declare martial law.

For the current administration, “working closely” with journalists means putting them in touch with pro-Marcos Jr vloggers, content creators and influencers. Cruz-Angeles is prioritising the accreditation of pro-regime reporters to cover official functions.

But her claim that accreditation is open to those of all political beliefs rings untrue as pro-Marcos Jr vloggers recently established a new group (upon the suggestion of Cruz-Angeles herself) to help gain government accreditation.

Celebrity vlogger Toni Gonzaga was granted a one-on-one interview with Marcos Jr at the Malacañang Palace in September 2022, showing how the administration accommodates those who ask soft questions. That reminds many Filipinos of Marcos Jr’s non-participation in most presidential debates and interviews during the campaign, opting to accommodate events organised by his supporters.

During the 2022 election campaign, there were times when his handlers did not invite critical journalists, asking those invited to submit questions in advance to control the flow of press briefings.

By accrediting pro-administration, hyper-partisan non-journalists, the Marcos Jr administration gives them legitimacy as “truth seekers” even if there is evidence they proliferate disinformation. It is also a strategy to discredit critical journalists for peddling “fake news”.

Critical journalists harassed
Critical journalists and media organisations are harassed and intimidated under the Marcos Jr administration, just as they were under the 2016–2020 Duterte administration. Disinformation remains rampant even after the 2022 elections.

Red-tagging — the blacklisting of journalists and media outlets critical of the government — has continued.

Shortly after Marcos Jr assumed the presidency, the Court of Appeals upheld the “cyber libel” convictions of Nobel Prize laureate Maria Ressa and former Rappler writer Reynaldo Santos Jr.

While these convictions appeared to carry over the selective harassment and intimidation of the vengeful Duterte administration, the chilling effect on the media is real. Those targeted become grim reminders of what can happen if journalists and news media organisations incur the ire of the powers that be.

The date 21 September 2022 marked the 50 years since martial law was imposed. Marcos Jr repeatedly claims martial law was necessary to tackle communist and separatist threats, dismissing accusations that his father was a dictator.

Even the funding for the planned memorial for Martial Law victims was cut by 75 percent in the 2023 National Expenditure Programme.

Marcos Jr intends to rewrite history textbooks to include his family’s version of the truth. By silencing his critics, he can further engage in historical denialism. This is important not just to erase his father’s dictator image but to escape his family’s legal problems like the unpaid estate tax and his mother’s conviction for seven counts of graft.

Media repression ‘normalised’
Media repression continues to be normalised under the Marcos Jr regime. One of his allies in the House of Representatives blocked the return of ABS–CBN, whose franchise bid was denied in 2020. Rappler and its editorial staff, including Ressa, continue to face legal problems as well as the threat of closure.

The National Telecommunications Commission blocked 27 websites accused of having communist links in June 2022. It took a court order for the online publication Bulatlat Multimedia to be unblocked, while journalist Frenchie Mae Cumpio remains in detention on questionable charges after being red-tagged and subjected to death threats.

The murder of broadcaster Percy Lapid on 3 October 2022 — the second journalist to be killed under the new administration — also reflects the dire state of press freedom in the Philippines.

That Marcos Jr did not mention press freedom in his inaugural speech and first State of the Nation Address reflects his disregard for critical journalism.

Although it is still early days, his efforts to whitewash the dictatorship’s dark past and continue his predecessor’s media repression indicate that his pre-election promise of a “free press” is long abandoned.

Danilo Arana Arao is associate professor at the Department of Journalism, the University of the Philippines Diliman, special lecturer at the Department of Journalism, the Polytechnic University of the Philippines Santa Mesa, associate editor at Bulatlat Multimedia and editor at Media Asia. This article was first published in East Asia Forum.

Karl Patrick Suyat, 19, has no personal experience of the tyrannical rule of late dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos. But memories of the atrocities and human rights violations committed during those dark moments have transcended time.

The year 2022 marks the 50th anniversary of Marcos’ declaration of Martial Law. But this year also saw the return of the Marcoses to power — Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is now the President of the republic and spoke yesterday at the UN General Assembly.

Despite efforts of Martial Law survivors, human rights groups, and even academics to remind the Filipino people of the abuses of the Marcos family, Marcos Jr was still able to clinch the country’s top post.

• READ MORE: Networked propaganda: How the Marcoses are using social media to reclaim Malacañang
• Networked Propaganda: How the Marcoses are rewriting history
• Martial law brutality in ‘educational’ musical drama Katips touches raw nerve in NZ – David Robie
• Martial Law Day in the Philippines

Fueled by outrage and anguish, Suyat thought of a way to channel his energy and still fight back despite the Marcoses’ victory — he founded “Project Gunita” (remember) along with Josiah Quising and Sarah Gomez.

Project Gunita is a network of volunteers and members of various civil society organisations that aim to defend historical truth. They particularly push back against historical denialism and protect truths about the Martial Law years.

Through the project, the three founders and their members created a digital archive of all materials that contain information about Marcos’ Martial Law to preserve them.

Archiving is not new since other government offices and groups like the Bantayog ng mga Bayani Foundation and the Human Rights Violations Victims’ Memorial Commission, under the Commission on Human Rights, have made efforts to preserve Martial Law materials.

But Project Gunita is born out of the spirit of volunteerism and nationalism among young Filipinos.

From old newspapers, magazines, and books — Project Gunita members seek and buy materials, and then scan them to be preserved in the archives. The project’s archiving started right after Marcos Jr’s victory.

“Having read through the history of dictatorships, from Benito Mussolini to Adolf Hitler to Ferdinand Marcos himself, lagi’t-laging ang unang hinahabol, ang unang-unang tinatarget ng mga diktador ay ‘yong mga silid-aklatan, libraries, at ‘yong mga arkibo – the archives (always, the ones being targeted first by dictators are libraries and archives),” Suyat told Rappler.

Suyat believes that the Marcoses won’t be content with just distorting and whitewashing the atrocities of the Marcos administration. They would eventually go after the archives to erase the truth, Suyat added.

“The only question is when, it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when. And I don’t want to wait until that time happens before we start to scramble around to save the archives.

“Habang may panahon pa (while we still have time), while we can still do it, ‘di ba? (right?) Bakit hindi natin gagawin? (Why don’t we do it?).”

Even before Marcos Jr’s victory, journalists have pointed out that his family not only revises history, but also introduces an alternative history that favours them. The Marcoses also rode on various disinformation networks to disseminate falsehoods.

A two-part investigative story by Rappler showed how the Marcoses used social media to reclaim power and rewrite history to hide their wrongdoings.

Passing the torch
The personal experiences of Project Gunita founders fanned their desire to continue the fight of the generation who came before them. Suyat, who grew up in a family of Martial Law survivors, feels it is his responsibility to protect their stories.

“I cannot allow their stories, as well as the stories of people I had gotten acquainted with later in life who are Martial Law survivors to be erased by historical denialism, that we all know is being perpetrated by the Marcos family,” Suyat told Rappler in a mix of English and Filipino.

Josiah Quising, a co-founder of Project Gunita and a lawyer, believes that these stories should be preserved because true justice for Martial Law victims has yet to be attained.

“It’s very frustrating ‘yong justice system sa Pilipinas and how, for decades, ay wala pa ring totoong hustisya sa mga nangyari during the Martial Law era,” Quising told Rappler. (It’s very frustrating, the justice system in the Philippines, and how, for decades, there has been no true justice for everything that happened during the Martial Law era.)

On the inauguration of Marcos Jr, Martial Law survivors led by playwright Boni Ilagan pledged to continue guarding against tyranny.

In the same event, they had a ceremonial passing of the torch, which symbolized the passing of hope and responsibility from Martial Law survivors to the younger generation.

Suyat and Quising believe that their generation is equally responsible for guarding the country’s freedom — at least in their own way. They strongly believe that since the government is now being led by the dictator’s son, they cannot expect it to preserve the memories of Martial Law, so they have to step in.

Preserving truths from generation to generation

“Wala ka namang naririnig.
‘Di ka naman nakikinig
Parang kuliling sa pandinig
Kayong nagtataka
Ha? Inosente lang ang nagtataka,”
Inosente lang ang nagtataka by Bobby Balingit

(You hear nothing. But you are not listening. Like a chime to the ear. You who wonder. What? Only the innocent wonder.)

This song comes to Kris Lanot Lacaba’s mind whenever he hears people deny the atrocities of Martial Law. His father, Pete Lacaba, a poet and journalist, was tortured and arrested under the Marcos regime.

As a son of a Martial Law survivor, Lacaba has heard stories of torture and violence straight from the victims themselves. He recalled that it was on the pavements of Camp Crame, where his father was imprisoned, that he learned how to walk.

Even though decades have passed since those dark periods, he still vividly remembers how his father became a victim of Marcos’ oppressive rule.

“Ang ginagawa ro’n, may dalawang kama tapos pinapahiga ‘yong tatay ko, ‘yong ulo niya sa isang kama, ‘yong paa niya sa isang kama. At ‘pag nahulog ‘yong kama niya ro’n eh gugulpihin pa siya lalo (What they did to my father was, there were two beds and they would tell my father to lie down, his head on one bed, and the other, on the other bed. If he fell, he would be beaten further),” Lacaba told Rappler.

Aside from his father, his uncles Eman Lacaba and Leo Alto were both killed during Martial Law. It is extremely hard for Lacaba to respond to people who deny that human rights violations happened under Martial Law.

Now that he has his own children, Lacaba passes on the stories of Martial Law to them so the memories would be preserved.

“Mahirap eh, bilang magulang. Paano ba natin ikukuwento ito? Pa’no ba natin ipapamahagi ‘yong karanasan ng magulang nila at ng mga lolo’t lola nila?” Lacaba said. (It’s hard as a parent. How do we tell this story to the kids? How do we tell the kids about the experiences of their parents and grandparents?)

He even thinks of ways to make the stories appropriate to his children.

“So kinukuwento namin sa mga bata, ‘no? Hinahanapan namin ng paraan na maging appropriate sa age din nila ‘yong mga kuwento.” (So we tell the stories to my children. We find ways to make the stories appropriate to their age.)

Aside from his kids, Lacaba says he would always accept invitations by schools and universities to share the Martial Law story of his family. He believes that in this way, he will not only share the truths he learned from his father, but get to listen to other stories, too.

After all, Lacaba believes, conversation about Martial Law should reach everyone.

Republished with permission.

Seven weeks ago the Philippines truth-telling martial law film Katips was basking in the limelight in the country’s national FAMAS academy movie awards, winning best picture and a total of six other awards.

Last week it began a four month “world tour” of 10 countries starting in the Middle East followed by Aotearoa New Zealand today – hosted simultaneously at AUT South campus and in Wellington and Christchurch.

The screening of Vincent Tañada’s harrowing – especially the graphic torture scenes – yet also joyful and poignant musical drama touched a raw nerve among many in the audience who shared tears and their experiences of living in fear, or in hiding, during the hate-filled Marcos dictatorship.

• READ MORE: Two films duel for last word on brutal Marcos dictatorship in Philippines

The martial law denunciations, arbitrary arrests, desaparecidos (“disappeared”), brutal tortures and murders by state assassins in the 1970s made the McCarthy era red-baiting witchhunts in the US seem like Sunday School picnics.

Amnesty International says more than 3200 people were killed, 35,000 tortured and 70,000 detained during the martial law period.

Tañada has brushed off claims that the film has a political objective in an attempt to sabotage the leadership of the dictator’s son, Ferdinand Bongbong Marcos Jr, who won the presidency in a landslide victory in the May elections to return the Marcos family to the Malacañang.

He has insisted in many interviews — and he repeated this in a live exchange with the audiences in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch — that the film is educational and his intention is to counter disinformation and to ensure history is remembered.

Telling youth about atrocities
Tañada, from one of the Philippines’ great political and legal families and grandson of former Senator Lorenzo Tañada, a celebrated human rights lawyer, says he wanted to tell the youth about the atrocities that happened during the imposition of martial law under Marcos.

He wanted to tell history to those who had forgotten and those who aren’t yet aware.

The Katips movie trailer.

“You know, as an artist it is also our objective not just to entertain people but more important than that, we are here to educate,” he says.

“We also want to educate the young people about the atrocities – the reality of martial law.

“History is slowly being forgotten. We have forgotten it during the last elections and I guess we also have the responsibility to educate and let the youth know what happened during those times.”

It is rare that such brutal torture scenes are seen on the big screen, and before the main screening at AUT the organisers — Banyuhay Aotearoa, Migrante Aotearoa and Auckland Philippine Solidarity — showed two shorts made by the University of the Philippines and Santo Tomas University of Manila featuring martial law survivors describing their horrifying treatment  during the Marcos years to contemporary students.

Some of the students broke down in tears while others, surprisingly, remained impassive, sometimes with an air of disbelief.

The film evolved from the 2016 stage musical Katips: Mga Bagong Katipunero – Katips: The New Freedom Fighters, which won Aliw Awards for best musical performance that year.

Freedom fighter love story
In a nutshell, Katips tells the love story of Greg, a medical student and leader of the National Unions of Students in the Philippines (NUSP), who with other freedom fighting protesters stage a demonstration against martial law on a mountainside called Mendiola.

His professor is abducted by the state Metropol police, murdered and his body dumped in a remote location.

The protesters begin a vigil and the police brutally suppress the protest and arrest and kidnap other freedom fighters. They are subjected to atrocious torture and their bodies dumped.

A safehouse branded “Katips House” takes in Lara, a New York actress and the daughter of the murdered professor who is visiting Manila but doesn’t yet know about the fate of her father. Lara and Greg form an unlikely relationship and their lives are thrown into upheaval when the safehouse “mother” Alet is abducted and tortured to death.

Greg and another protester, Ka Panyong, a writer for the underground newspaper Ang Bayan, are forced to flee into the jungle for the safety and become rebels. Both get shot while on the run, but manage to survive.

When Greg returns to Lara at the “Katips House” during the Edsa Revolution in 1986, he finds he has a son.

The film has a stirring end featuring the Bantayog ng mga Bayani, a memorial wall to the fallen heroes struggling against martial law– a fitting antidote to the Marcoses and their crass attempts to rewrite Philippine history.

Ironically, the same month that Katips was released in public cinemas, another film, the self-serving Maid of Malaçanang, was launched in a bid to perpetuate the Marcos myths.

• Katips – The Movie, director Vincent Tañada (2022)

The Philippine media described him as “Steady Eddie,” a warrior and survivor, and an accidental hero of the world-renowned People Power revolution who later became probably the country’s best president.

But Fidel V. Ramos, or FVR, was also a study of contradictions.

Also called Eddie by his friends, Ramos died on the last day of July, a month after the namesake son of dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who was ousted in the popular uprising in 1986 that Ramos led, took his oath as the new president in what observers believed was an election that was far from fair due to voting and election irregularities.

• READ MORE: Other reports on the Philippine elections

The former armed forces chief died at 94 from a heart condition and dementia, unimaginable to his admirers who saw him as “cool,” “steady,” athletic, maintaining his military bearing until his old age.

He was also a multi-tasking workaholic who played golf and jogged regularly while briefing journalists or preparing for his next travel to the communities under a rigorous schedule.

He succeeded Corazon “Cory” Aquino as president of the Philippines from 1992 to 1998 and was instrumental in boosting the Southeast Asian developing country’s growth through economic policies of deregulation, liberalisation and foreign investment, his Social Reform Agenda that reduced poverty and an anti-oligarch and anti-monopoly stance.

The only Protestant president of the predominantly Roman Catholic country was also known for his transition from a military general who fought leftist and right-wing dissidents and entering into peace agreements with Islamic separatist groups and Communist insurgents.

Contrast to ruthless military chief
His commendable turn as president after Aquino was a contrast to his past as a hardline, ruthless Marcos military commander who led a security force that rounded up dissidents and violated human rights.

His leadership also saw the harassment, incarceration and exile of Aquino’s husband Benigno, who was assassinated on his return to the country in 1983.

The confluence of events in the years that followed, until the 1986 uprising, was marked by Ramos’ decision to break away from Marcos and to support Aquino, who was cheated massively in the elections.

He and his military comrades, along with Catholic bishops, called on Filipinos to mount a peaceful revolution, making him a people power hero.

Pulitzer Prize-winning Filipino journalist Manny Mogato, who covered Ramos when he headed the Defence Department and the military, said in a social media post that the late president was “a man of action… he even (did) push-ups with 300 soldiers who took part in an attempt to overthrow Cory Aquino”.

Ramos neutralised rogue soldiers who attempted multiple coups against Aquino during her presidency.

Ramos attended the US military academy at West Point, fought in the Korean War in the 1950s as a platoon leader and led the Philippine contingent in the late 1960s in the Vietnam War.

‘Best president ever’
“Ramos was the best president the country ever had, guarded democracy, broke monopolies and made peace, ending right-wing rebellion, half finishing the Muslim secessionist war and almost reaching a peace deal with Maoist-led rebels,” Mogato said.

“FVR left behind a legacy of peace, stability and prosperity Filipinos now enjoy.”

Anastacio Corpuz, an 80-year-old war veteran, said he was saddened by Ramos’ passing, saying that he should have continued as a vocal authority and statesman.

“Through the years, he was always vocal against corruption in government and abuses by the political elite — including the new government under the dictator’s son,” he lamented.

“He will be greatly missed.”

Diana G. Mendoza filed this report for Pacific Island Times in Guam. Republished with permission.

Frontline investigative articles on Aotearoa New Zealand’s 23-day Parliament protester siege, social media disinformation and Asia-Pacific media changes and adaptations are featured in the latest Pacific Journalism Review.

The assault on “truth telling” reportage is led by The Disinformation Project, which warns that “conspiratorial thought continues to impact on the lives and actions of our communities”, and alt-right video researcher Byron C Clark.

Several articles focus on the Philippines general election with the return of the Marcos dynasty following the elevation of the late dictator’s son Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr and the crackdown on independent media, including Nobel Peace Prize co-laureate Maria Ressa’s Rappler.

• READ MORE: Pacific Journalism Review archives

Columbia Journalism School’s Centre for Investigative Journalism director Sheila Coronel writes of her experiences under the Marcos dictatorship: “Marcos is a hungry ghost. He torments our dreams, lays claim to our memories, and feeds our hopes.”

But with Marcos Jr’s landslide victory in May, she warns: “You will be in La-La Land, a country without memory, without justice, without accountability. Only the endless loop of one family, the soundtrack provided by Imelda.”

The themed section draws on research papers from a recent Asian Congress for Media and Communication conference (ACMC) hosted by Auckland University of Technology (AUT) introduced by convenor Khairiah A Rahman with keynotes by Asia Pacific Report editor David Robie and Rappler executive editor Glenda Gloria.

In the editorial titled “Fighting self-delusion and lies”, Philip Cass writes of the surreal crises in the Ukraine War and the United States and the challenges for journalists in the Asia-Pacific region:

“Similarly, there are national leaders in the Pacific who seem to truly want to believe that China really is their friend instead of being an aggressive imperialist power acting the same way the European powers did in the 19th century.”

With the Photoessay in this edition, visual storyteller and researcher Todd Henry explores how kava consumption has spread through the Pacific and into the diasporic community in Aotearoa New Zealand.

His “Visual peregrinations in the realm of kava” article and images also examine the way Pasifika women are carving their own space in kava ceremonies.

Unthemed topics include Afghanistan, the Taliban and the “liberation narrative” in New Zealand, industrial inertia among Queensland journalists, and Chinese media consumption and political engagement in Aotearoa.

Pacific Journalism Review, founded at the University of Papua New Guinea, is now in its 28th year and is New Zealand’s oldest journalism research publication and the highest ranked communication journal in the country.

The latest edition is published this weekend.

• Pacific Journalism Review fulltext articles at the Informit database

A day before the first State of the Nation Address (SONA) of President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr in Quezon City, a shooting incident inside the Ateneo de Manila University claimed the lives of at least three individuals, including the former mayor of Lamitan, Basilan, Rose Furigay.

Furigay was supposed to attend the graduation of her daughter, Hannah, when she was shot about 3.30 pm yesterday. Furigay suffered gunshot wounds in her head and chest.

Graduation rites of the Ateneo Law School were cancelled by the university.

• READ MORE: Human rights wishes for Marcos’ first SONA: Where will he stand?
• Other reports on President Marcos

Aside from Furigay, her long-time aide, Victor George Capistrano was also shot and died on the scene.

Ateneo security guard Jeneven Bandiala also died, Quezon City Police District (QCPD) director Brigadier-General Remus Medina said during his briefing on Sunday.

Hannah was also wounded in the incident and was immediately taken to the Quirino Memorial Medical Center. Medina said she was currently in stable condition.

Suspect Dr Chao Tiao Yumol was also wounded and suffered a gunshot wound. The police said they were still determining who shot the suspect.

The police recovered bullets and two guns — one with a silencer. Medina said Yumol used the gun with a silencer in killing the victims.

Yumol and his motive
Yumol, 38, is a general practitioner doctor and a native of Lamitan City. The police said the doctor had personal motives for killing Furigay.

“Initially, sa pagtatanong namin sa kanya, meron na silang long history ng away sa Lamitan, Basilan. So according to them, eh nagpapalitan na sila ng kaso. Itong si doktor naman ay laging nape-pressure sa pamilya ng Furigay. So lumalabas, personal ang away nila,” Medina said during his briefing.

(Initially, based on our interrogation of the suspect, they have a long history of conflict in Lamitan, Basilan. According to them, they filed cases against each other. The doctor was always pressured by the Furigay family. So it turned out that they had a personal conflict.)

Medina said Furigay filed 76 counts of cyber libel against Yumol, which temporarily prevented the suspect from practising medicine, according to the police. The suspect was detained for his libel cases, but was able to post bail, Medina added.

According to the QCPD director, Yumol also alleged that Furigay had a history of corruption:

“May ina-allege din si Doctor Yumol na katiwalian ng mayor. According to him, iyon po ang mga ina–allege niya, that is now subject for verification (Doctor Yumol is also alleging that the slain mayor was involved in corruption. According to him, that is what he is alleging, that is now subject for verification).”

The suspect was currently in the custody of the QCPD and undergoing custodial investigation.

No mention of human rights
Meanwhile, Rappler reports that was zero mention of human rights when Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr delivered his inaugural speech as president of the Philippines on June 30, and he went on to serve his first month in Malacañang without appointing anyone to the board vacancy of the Commission on Human Rights (CHR).

For his first State of the Nation Address (SONA) today, there is a mix of optimism and pessimism from the human rights community.

Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director of international group Human Rights Watch, urged Marcos to seize the “chance to distance himself from the rampant rights violations and deep-seated impunity of the Rodrigo Duterte administration”.

“President Marcos has a golden opportunity to get the Philippines on the right track by setting out clear priorities and policies to improve human rights in the country,” Robertson said in a statement.

The progressive Filipino lawyer Edre Olalia, president of the National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers (NUPL), in a forum that the human rights prospects under Marcos “quite candidly [do] not look good.”

Jairo Bolledo is a Rappler reporter. Republished with permission.

On social media, Ferdinand Marcos Jr needed to have all pieces in place to stage a Malacañang comeback: he had a network of propagandist assets, popular myths that justified his family’s obscene wealth, and narratives that distorted the horrors of his father’s rule.

He had even asked Cambridge Analytica to rebrand his family’s image.

The living component among these pieces was Rodrigo Duterte — an ally who, when elected president, normalised Marcos’ machinery, painting over a picture of murders and plunder to show glory and heroism instead.

• READ MORE: New war: How the propaganda network shifted from targeting ‘addicts’ to activists
• Pro-Marcos, Duterte accounts step up attacks on journalists as 2022 polls near
• Networked propaganda: How the Marcoses are rewriting history
• Other Rodrigo Duterte reports

“I think that really, if we are to make a metaphor [to] describe the role of Duterte to Marcos’ win, it’s really Duterte being the sponsor or a ninong to Marcos Jr…. I think Duterte ultimately is the godfather of this all,” said Fatima Gaw, assistant professor at the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman.

The alliance
Marcos’ disinformation machinery that was years in the making was complemented by his longtime ties to the Duterte family. Before “Uniteam,” there was “AlDub” or Alyansang Duterte-Bongbong.

Marcos courted Rodrigo Duterte in 2015, but Duterte chose Alan Peter Cayetano to be his running mate. Even then, calls for a Duterte-Marcos tandem persisted.

Gaw said Duterte played a part in driving interest for Marcos-related social media content and making it profitable. The first milestone for this interest, according to Gaw, was when Marcos filed his certificate of candidacy for vice-president in 2015.

They saw an influx of search demand for Marcos history on Google.

“There’s interest already back then but it was amplified and magnified by the alliance with Duterte. So every time there’s a pronouncement from Duterte about, for example, the burial of Marcos Sr. in the Libingan ng mga Bayani, that also spiked interest, and that interest is actually cumulative, it’s not like it’s a one-off thing,” Gaw said in a June interview with Rappler.

Using CrowdTangle, Rappler scanned posts in 2016 with the keyword “Marcos,” yielding over 62,000 results from pages with admins based in the Philippines. Spikes can be seen during key events like the EDSA anniversary, the Pilipinas 2016 debate, election day, and instances after Duterte’s moves to bury the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos at the Libingan ng mga Bayani.

On February 19, 2016, Duterte said that if elected president, he would allow the burial of the late dictator at the Libingan ng mga Bayani. On August 7, 2016, Duterte said that Marcos deserved to be buried at the Libingan ng mga Bayani for being a soldier and a former president.

The burial pushed through on November 18, 2016 and became a major event that allowed the massive whitewashing of the Martial Law period.

Made with flourish
Related content would then gain views, prompting platforms to recommend them and make them more visible, Gaw said. In a research she conducted in 2021 with De La Salle University (DLSU) communication professor Cheryll Soriano, they found that when searching “Marcos history” on YouTube, videos made by amateur content creators or people unaffiliated with professional groups were recommended more than news, institutional, and academic sources.

“A big part of Marcos’ success online and spreading his message and propaganda is because he leveraged both his political alliances with [the] Dutertes, as the front-facing tandem and political partnership. And on the backend, whatever ecosystem that the Duterte administration has established, is something that Marcos already can tap,” Gaw said.

In an upcoming study on social media and disinformation narratives authored by Aries Arugay and Justin Baquisal, they identified four thematic disinformation narratives in the last election campaign — authoritarian nostalgia/fantasy, conspiracy theories (Tallano gold, Yamashita treasure), “strongman”, and democratic disillusionment.

Arugay, a political science professor at UP Diliman, said these four narratives were the “raw materials” for further polarisation in the country.

“Para sa mga kabataan, ’yung mga 18-24, fantasy siya. Kasi naririnig natin ‘yun, ah kaya ko binoto si Bongbong Marcos kasi gusto kong maexperience ‘yung Martial Law,” Arugay said in an interview with Rappler in June.

(For the youth, those aged 18-24, it’s a fantasy. We hear that reasoning, that they voted for Bongbong Marcos because they want to experience Martial Law.)

Arugay described this as “unthinkable,” but pervasive false narratives that the Martial Law era was the golden age of Philippine economy, that no Filipino was poor during that time, that the Philippines was the richest country next to Japan, among many other claims, allowed for such a fantasy to thrive.

Institutionalising disinformation
While traditional propaganda required money and machinery, usually from a top-down system, Gaw said Duterte co-opted and hijacked the existing systems to manipulate the news cycle and online discourse to make a name for himself.

“I think what Duterte has done…is to institutionalise disinformation at the state level,” she said.

This meant that the amplification of Duterte’s messaging became incorporated in activities of the government, perpetuated by the Presidential Communications Operations Office, the Philippine National Police, and the government’s anti-communist task force or the NTF-ELCAC, among others.

Early on, Duterte’s administration legitimized partisan vloggers by hiring some of them in government. Other vloggers served as crisis managers for the PCOO, monitoring social media, alerting the agency about sentiments that were critical of the administration, and spreading positive news about the government.

Bloggers were organized by Pebbles Duque, niece of Health Secretary Francisco Duque III, who himself was criticised over the government’s pandemic response.

Mocha Uson, one of the most infamous pro-Duterte disinformation peddlers, was appointed PCOO assistant secretary earlier in his term. (She ended up campaigning for Isko Moreno in the last election.)

Now, we’re seeing a similar turn of events — Marcos appointed pro-Duterte vlogger Trixie Cruz-Angeles as his press secretary. Under Duterte’s administration, Angeles had been a social media strategist of the PCOO.

Following the Duterte administration’s lead, they are again eyeing the accreditation of vloggers to let them cover Malacañang briefings or press conferences.

“So in the Duterte campaign, of course there were donors, supporters paying for the disinformation actors and workers. Now it’s actually us, the Filipino people, funding disinformation, because it’s now part of the state. So I think that’s the legacy of the Duterte administration and what Marcos has done, is actually to just leverage on that,” Gaw said.

Targeting critics
What pieces of disinformation are Filipinos inadvertently funding? Gaw said that police pages are some of the most popular pages to spread disinformation on Facebook, and that they don’t necessarily talk about police work but instead the various agenda of the state, such as demonising communist groups, activist groups, and other progressive movements.

Emboldened by their chief Duterte, who would launch tirades against his critics during his speeches and insult, curse, and red-tag them, police pages and accounts spread false or misleading content that target activists and critics. They do this by posting them directly or by sharing them from dubious, anonymously-managed pages, a Rappler investigation found.

Facebook later took down a Philippine network that was linked to the military or police, for violating policies on coordinated inauthentic behavior.

The platform has also previously suspended Communications Undersecretary and NTF-ELCAC spokesperson Lorraine Badoy who has long been targeting and brazenly red-tagging individuals and organizations that are critical of the government. She faces several complaints before the Office of the Ombudsman accusing her of violating the Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Act and the Code of Conduct for public officials.

“PCOO as an office before wasn’t really a big office, they’re not popular, but all of a sudden they become so salient and so visible in media because they’re able to understand that half of the battle of governance is not just doing the operations of it but also the PR side of it,” Gaw said.

Facebook users recirculated a post Badoy made in January 2016, wherein she talked about the murders of Boyet and Primitivo Mijares under Martial Law. In that post, just six years ago, Badoy called Bongbong an “idiot, talentless son of the dead dickhead dictator.”

Badoy has since disowned such views. In a post on May 2022, Badoy said she only “believed all those lies I was taught in UP” and quoted Joseph Meynard Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my mind.”

Angeles also said the same in June 2022 when netizens surfaced her old tweets criticising the Marcos family. She said, “I changed my mind about it, aren’t we entitled to change our minds?”

But the facts haven’t changed. A 2003 Supreme Court decision declared $658 million worth of Marcos Swiss deposits as ill-gotten. Imelda Marcos’ motion for reconsideration was “denied with finality”.

According to Amnesty International, 70,000 were imprisoned, 34,000 were tortured, and 3,240 were killed under Martial Law.

The rise of alternative news sources
Outside government channels, Badoy co-hosts an SMNI programme named “Laban Kasama ng Bayan” with Jeffrey “Ka Eric” Celiz — who is supposedly a former rebel — where they talk about the communist movement. SMNI is the broadcasting arm of embattled preacher Apollo Quiboloy’s Kingdom of Jesus Christ church.

SMNI has been found to be at the core of the network of online assets who red-tag government critics and attack the media. The content that vloggers and influencers produce to defend Duterte’s administration now bleeds into newscasts by organisations with franchises granted by the government.

The first report of the Digital Public Pulse, a project co-led by Gaw, found that on YouTube, leading politician and government channels, including that of Marcos, directly reach their audiences without the mediation of the media.

“This shift to subscribing to influencers and vloggers as sources of news and information, and now subscribing to nontraditional or non-mainstream sources of information that are [still considered institutional] because they have franchises and they have licences to operate, it’s part of the trend of the growing distrust in mainstream media,” Gaw said.

She said that given the patronage relationship that religious organisations have with politicians, alternative news sources like SMNI and NET25 don’t necessarily practice objective, accountable, or responsible journalism because their interest is different from the usual journalistic organisation.

“I think that in general these two are politically tied and economically incentivised to perform the role that the administration and the incoming presidency of Marcos want them to play, and exactly, serving as an alternative source of information,” she said.

A day after he was proclaimed, Marcos held a press conference with only three reporters, who belonged to SMNI, GMA News, and NET25.

Rappler reviewed NET25’s Facebook posts and found that it has a history of attacking the press, Vice-President Leni Robredo, and her supporters. The network had also released inaccurate reports that put Robredo in a bad light.

Gaw said because these alternative news channels owned by religious institutions have a mutually-benefiting relationship with the government, they are given access to government officials and to stories that other journalists might not have access to. There is thus no incentive for them to report critically and perform the role of providing checks and balances.

“They would essentially be an extension of state propaganda,” Gaw said.

For Arugay, the Marcos campaign was able to take advantage of how the state influenced the standards of journalism.

“Part [of their strategy] is least exposure to unfriendlies, particularly media that’s critical. I think at the end they saw the power of critical media. And once they were able to get an opportunity, they wanted to turn things around. And this is where democracy suffers,” Arugay said.

Under Duterte, journalists and news organisations faced a slew of attacks that threatened their livelihood and freedom. Rappler was banned from covering Malacañang, faced trumped-up charges, then witnessed its CEO Maria Ressa being convicted of cyber libel.

Broadcasting giant ABS-CBN was shut down. Journalist Frenchie Mae Cumpio is in her second year in jail.

While the international community lauds the courageous and critical reporting of Philippine journalists, Filipinos are shutting them out.

All bases covered
While Duterte mostly used a Facebook strategy to win the election, Marcos went all out in 2022 — and it paid off.

“[The] strategy of the Marcos Jr. campaign became very complicated [compared with] the Duterte campaign because back then they were really, they just invested on Facebook. [That’s not the case here]…. No social media tech or platform was disregarded,” Arugay said.

At one point in 2021, YouTube became the most popular social media platform in the Philippines, beating Facebook. Whereas Facebook at least has a third-party fact-checking programme, YouTube barely has any strong policies against disinformation.

“I think with the Marcos campaign, they knew Facebook was a battleground, they deployed all their efforts there as well, but they knew they had to win YouTube. Because that’s where we can build more sophisticated lies and convoluted narratives than on Facebook,” Gaw said.

YouTube’s unclear policies allow lies to thrive
A study by FEU technical consultant Justin Muyot found that Marcos had the highest number of estimated “alternative videos” — those produced by content creators — on YouTube. These videos aimed to shame candidates critical of Marcos and his supporters, endear Marcos to the public, and sow discord between the other presidential candidates.

YouTube is also where hyperpartisan channels thrive by posing as news channels. These were found to be in one major community that includes SMNI and the People’s Television Network.

This legitimises them as a “surrogate to journalistic reporting”.

“That’s why you’re able to sell historical disinformation, you’re able to [have] false narratives about the achievements of the Marcoses, or Bongbong Marcos in particular. You’re able to launch counterattacks to criticisms of Marcos in a very coherent and coordinated way because you’re able to have that space, time, and the immersion required to buy into these narratives,” Gaw said.

Apart from YouTube, Gaw said that Marcos had a “more clear understanding of a cross-platform strategy” across social media.

On Twitter, freshly-made accounts were set up to trend pro-Marcos hashtags. The platform later suspended over 300 accounts from the Marcos supporter base for violating its platform manipulation and spam policy.

Ruining Robredo was a ‘coordinated effort’
Duterte and Marcos had a common target over the years: Robredo. She is another female who was constantly undermined by Duterte, along with Leila de Lima, a victim of character assassination who continues to suffer jail time because of it.

“It has been a coordinated effort of Duterte and Marcos to really undermine her, reap or cultivate hatred against her for whatever reason and to actually attach her to people and parties or groups who have political baggage, for example LP (Liberal Party) even if she’s not running for LP,” Gaw said.

The meta-partisan “news” ecosystem on YouTube, studied by researchers of the Philippine Media Monitoring Laboratory, was found to deliver propaganda using audio-visual and textual cues traditionally associated with broadcast news media.

They revealed patterns of “extreme bias and fabricated information,” repeating falsehoods that, among others, enforce negative views on Robredo’s ties with the Liberal Party and those that make her seem stupid.

Rappler found that the top misogynistic attack words used against Robredo on Facebook posts are “bobo,” “tanga,” “boba,” and “madumb,” all labeling her as stupid.

Fact-checking initiative Tsek.PH also found Robredo to be the top victim of disinformation based on their fact checks done in January 2022.

“By building years and years of lies and basically giving her, manufacturing her political baggage along the way, that made her campaign in [2022] very hard to win, very hard to convert new people because there’s already ambivalence against her,” Gaw said.

Arugay and Gaw both said that the media, academe, and civil society failed to act until it was too late. “The election result and [and where the] political landscape is at now is a product of that neglect,” Gaw said.

There is still a lack of a systemic approach on how to engage with disinformation, said Gaw, since much of it is still untraceable and underground. To add, Arugay said tech companies are to blame for their nature of prioritising profit.

“Just like in 2016, the disinformation network and architecture responsible for the 2022 electoral victory of Marcos Jr. will not die down. They will not fade.

“They will not wither away. They will just transition because the point is no longer to get him elected, the point is for him to govern or make sure that he is protected while in power,” Arugay said.

When the new administration comes in, it will be the public’s responsibility to hold elected officials accountable. But if this strategy — instilled by Duterte’s administration and continued by Marcos — continues, crucifying critics on social media and in real life, blaming past administrations and the opposition for the poor state of the country, and concocting narratives to fool Filipinos, what will reality in the Philippines look like down the line?

Loreben Tuquero is a journalist for Rappler. Republished with permission.

Migrants and overseas Filipinos in Aotearoa New Zealand today called on the governments of both Australia and New Zealand to halt all military and security aid to the Philippines in protest over last month’s “fraudulent” general election.

At simultaneous meetings in Auckland and Wellington, a new broad coalition of social justice and community campaigners endorsed a statement pledging: “Never forget, never again martial law!”

“Bongbong” Marcos Jr, the son of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr, was elected President in a landslide ballot on May 9 and will take office at the end of this month.

• READ MORE: How Marcos could control hunt for his family’s wealth as president
• Marcos Jr’s camp still evades issue of unpaid estate tax
• Robredo is number one victim of red-tagging, says ex-AFP spokesperson
• Other Philippine election reports

His father ruled the Philippines with draconian leadership — including 14 years of martial law — between 1965 and 1986 until he was ousted by a People Power uprising.

Marcos Jr – along with his mother Imelda – has long tried to thwart efforts to recover billions of dollars plundered during his father’s autocratic rule.

“Police and military forces should be investigated for their participation in red-tagging, illegal arrests on trumped up charges, extrajudicial killings, and all forms of human rights abuses,” the statement said.

“We call on the International Criminal Court to pursue investigation and trial of outgoing President Rodrigo Duterte for massive human rights breaches in its drug war and systematic attacks against political activists, human rights advocates and anti-corruption crusaders.”

Call for ‘transparent government’
The statement called for “transparent government” and for all public funds to be accounted for.

“We specifically call for realignment of the national budget in favour of covid aid, public health and social services instead of wasting billions for the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) and other government machineries that aim to suppress critics of its corruption and human rights abuses.”

The statement urged the “dismantling” of NTF-ELCAC.

The Supreme Court of the Philippines was called on to “act on the petitions lodged by various persons and groups regarding the disqualification of Ferdinand Marcos Jr to run for office due to his conviction” for tax evasion.

The Bureau of Internal Revenue has confirmed that the court-ordered Marcos family’s tax bill remains unpaid and news reports say this is estimated to now total about 23 billion pesos (NZ$670 million).

The statement called on the Department of Justice and Supreme Court to provide for immediate and unconditional release of the unjustly jailed Senator Leila de Lima — an outspoken critic of Duterte — “following the recantation of the testimonies of three key witnesses”, and also freedom for more than 700 political prisoners “languishing in jail on trumped-up charges”.

The gathered Filipino community also sought an official Day of Remembrance and Tribute for all the victims of Marcos dictatorship to mark the 50th year commemoration of the declaration of martial law on 21 September 2022.

‘Truth army’ to monitor social media
“We call on all Filipinos to remain vigilant as a truth army, to tirelessly monitor and report social media platforms in serious breach of community standards, and to push for stronger laws in place for disinformation to be punished,” the statement said.

Filipinos in the two cities — Auckland and Wellington — pledged support for the Angat Buhay cause of defending Philippines “history, truth and democracy”.

Speakers included Filipino trade unionist Dennis Maga; Mikee Santos of Migrante Aotearoa; 1Sambayan Aotearoa convenor Romy Udanga; and speaking by Zoom from Manila, Senate candidate Luke Espiritu, who said the new Marcos regime would be able to achieve virtual “martial law” without declaring it.

“All Marcos needs to do is suppress dissent, and he has all the sophisticated technology available to do this that his father never had,” Espiritu said.

Northland Kakampink coordinator Faye Bañares said the new Angat Buhay NGO should not take over the responsibility of providing for the poor in the community, although the aim is to help them.

“The NGO should push the Philippine government to face their responsibility and be transparent about what they do,” she said.

Many speakers told how shocked they were in the general election over a “massive breakdown of vote counting machines and voter disenfranchisement” and the “incredibly rapid count of COMELEC transparency servers” to award the “unbelievable final tally” of 31 million votes in favour of Ferdinand Marcos Jr as president and Rodrigo Duterte’s daughter Sara as vice-president.

Social media troll farms
Denouncing the social media troll farms, the meeting critics said “all the worst lies, disinformation and red-tagging were committed against [outgoing vice-president] Leni Robredo, opposition candidates and parties who stood up against [Rodrigo] Duterte and the Marcos-Duterte tandem.”

In November 2021, the Philippines and New Zealand agreed to boost maritime security cooperation during the 6th Philippines-New Zealand Foreign Ministry Consultations hosted by the Philippines.

Both sides acknowledged the growing breadth and depth of Philippines-New Zealand bilateral cooperation, particularly in the areas of defence and security, health, trade and investments, development cooperation, people-to-people and cultural engagements.

Trade between both countries is worth about trade in goods and services is worth about NZ$1.15 billion.

Sadly, the Philippines has sold its soul. Thirty six years ago a People Power revolution ousted the dictator Ferdinand Marcos after two decades of harsh authoritarian rule.

Yesterday, in spite of a rousing and inspiring Pink Power would-be revolution, the dictator’s only son and namesake “Bongbong” Marcos Jr seems headed to be elected 17th president of the Philippines.

And protests have broken out after the provisional tallies that give Marcos a “lead of millions” with more than 97 percent of the vote counted. Official results could still take some days.

• READ MORE: 36 years after ousting dictator Marcos, Filipinos elect son as president
• Other Philippine election reports

Along with Bongbong, his running mate Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte, daughter of strongman Rodrigo Duterte, president for the past six years and who has been accused of human rights violations over the killings of thousands of alleged suspects in a so-called “war on drugs”, is decisively in the lead as vice-president.

On the eve of the republic’s most “consequential election” in decades, Filipina journalism professor Sheila Coronel, director of practice at the Columbia University’s Toni Stabile School of Investigative Journalism in New York, said the choice was really simple.

“The election is a battle between remembering and forgetting, a choice between the future and the past.”

Significantly more than half of the 67.5 million voters have apparently chosen to forget – including a generation that never experienced the brutal crackdowns under martial law in 1972-1981, and doesn’t want to know about it. Yet 70,000 people were jailed, 35,000 were tortured, 4000 were killed and free speech was gagged.

Duterte’s erosion of democracy
After six years of steady erosion of democracy under Duterte, is the country now about to face a fatal blow to accountability and transparency with a kleptomaniac family at the helm?

Dictator Marcos is believed to have accumulated $10 billion while in power and while Philippine authorities have only been able to recover about a third of this through ongoing lawsuits, the family refuses to pay a tax bill totalling $3.9 billion, including penalties.

In many countries the tax violations would have disqualified Marcos Jr from even standing for the presidency.

“A handful of other autocrats were also busy stealing from their people in that era – in Haiti, Nicaragua, Iran – but Marcos stole more and he stole better,” according to The Guardian’s Nick Davies.

“Ultimately, he emerges as a laboratory specimen from the early stages of a contemporary epidemic: the global contagion of corruption that has since spread through Africa and South America, the Middle East and parts of Asia. Marcos was a model of the politician as thief.”

Tensions were running high outside the main office of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) in Intramuros, Manila, today as protests erupted over the “unjust” election process and the expected return of the Marcoses to the Malacañang Palace.

The Comelec today affirmed its dismissal of two sets of cases – or a total four appeals – seeking to bar Marcos Jr. from the elections due to his tax conviction in the 1990s.

Ruling after the elections
The ruling was released a day after the elections, when the partial, unofficial tally showed that the former senator was on the brink of winning the presidency.

It wasn’t entirely surprising, as five of the seven-member Comelec bench had earlier voted in favour of the former senator in at least one of the four anti-Marcos petitions that had already been dismissed

One further appeal can be made before the Supreme Court.

As mounting allegations of election fraud and cheating greeted the provisional ballot trends, groups began filing formal complaints.

One watchdog, Bakla Bantay Boto, said it had received “numerous reports of illegal campaigning, militarised polling precincts, and an absurd [number] of broken vote counting machines (VCMs)” throughout the Philippines.

STATEMENT ON THE MAY 9, 2022 PHILIPPINE ELECTIONS – Fraud, violence, electioneering, and unreliable voting machines have stained the 2022 Philippine national elections#BaklaBantayBoto2022 pic.twitter.com/vWqhmVgwii

— Bakla Bantay Boto (@baklabantayboto) May 9, 2022

“Intensified violence has also marked today’s election. Poll watchers have been tragically killed in Buluan, Maguindanao and Binidayan, Lanao del Sur, while an explosive was detonated in a voting centre in Kobacan, Cotabato.

“The violent red-tagging of several candidates and party lists [was] also in full force, with text blasts to constituents and posters posted within polling precincts, insinuating that they are linked to the CPP-NPA-NDFP [Communist Party of the Philippines and allies].”

Social media disinformation
Explaining the polling in the face of a massive social media disinformation campaign by Marcos supporters, Rappler’s livestream anchor Bea Cupin noted how the Duterte administration had denied a renewal of a franchise for ABS-CBN, the largest and most influential free-to-air television station two years ago.

This act denied millions of Filipinos access to accurate and unbiased news coverage. Rappler itself and its Nobel Peace laureate chief executive Maria Ressa, were also under constant legal attack and the target of social media trolls.

A BBC report interviewed a typical professional troll who managed hundreds of Facebook pages and fake profiles for his clients, saying his customers for fake stories “included governors, congressmen and mayors.”

Meta — owners of Facebook — reported that its Philippines subsidiary had removed many networks that were attempting to manipulate people and media. They were believed to have included a cluster of more than 400 accounts, pages, and groups that were violated the platform’s codes of conduct.

Pink Power candidate human rights lawyer Leni Robredo, who defeated Marcos for the vice-presidency in the last election in 2016, and who was a target for many of the troll attacks, said: “Lies repeated again and again become the truth.”

Academics have warned the risks that the country is taking in not heeding warnings of the past about the Marcos family. An associate professor of the University of Philippines, Dr Aries Arugay, reflects: “We just don’t jail our politicians or make them accountable … we don’t punish them, unlike South Korean presidents.”

As Winston Churchill famously said in 1948: “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

It is a historic win nearly four decades after Filipinos booted his family out of power, ending a well-oiled campaign that sought to bury the past, rally for unity, and evade scrutiny.

As of 4:41 am today, partial and unofficial results from the Commission on Elections’ transparency server showed Marcos Jr. with 30,015,540 votes so far, representing 58.86 percent of total votes reported for all presidential candidates.

• READ MORE: Other Philippine elections reports

The 64-year-old Marcos Jr is set to become the 17th president of the Philippines, as he has received more than double the votes of his closest opponent, Vice-President Leni Robredo, who has garnered 14,309,524 votes or 28.06 percent as of the latest update.

He will succeed the strongman Rodrigo Duterte, winning without his outright support. The President’s daughter, Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte, was Marcos Jr’s running mate, getting 30,310,743 votes or 61.08 percent.

It’s the first presidential elections since the rebirth of democracy in 1986 where the outgoing president did not endorse a candidate.

‘Spoiled child’
“He is a spoiled child…. He’s a weak leader at may bagahe siya (and he has baggage),” the outgoing president Duterte had said of Marcos.

Marcos will lead the Philippines for the next six years, and will have to steer the country into economic recovery after a global pandemic. He is now the country’s chief diplomat, who flip-flopped on standing with Ukraine amid a Russian invasion that threatens security in the whole of Europe.

“This is bad for the country. There would be no good governance as we know it. Cronyism and dynasty will thrive,” said jailed opposition leader Leila De Lima.

Marcos has promised to continue Duterte’s warm ties to superpower China, and will keep at bay the International Criminal Court investigating the President and his men for alleged crimes against humanity for the thousands of killings during the drug war.

As president, Marcos will have power over executive agencies involved in recovering his family’s ill-gotten wealth, such as the Presidential Commission on Good Government and the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG). The PCGG was still trying to recover P125 billion (NZ$3.7 billion) more in stolen wealth.

Marcos also has a standing contempt order in the United States — among other cases that he and his mother Imelda are facing. The business community fears that investors will steer clear of the Philippines under a Marcos presidency.

“Well, we’ll just have to prove them wrong if we get the opportunity and we will,” said Marcos in an interview with One PH on March 21.

Lian Buan is a Rappler reporter. Republished with permission.

With 84.39 percent of precincts already accounted for, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., the heir and only son of the late Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, was leading in the presidential race early today.

Based on partial, unofficial results, Marcos has surged past his rivals in the presidential race with 27,052,601 votes as of 12:39 am.

Vice-President Leni Robredo ranked second with 12,913,773 votes, followed by Senator Manny Pacquiao (2,853,032), Manila Mayor Isko Moreno (1,682,508), Senator Ping Lacson (796,471), Faisal Mangondato (160,192), Ernesto Abella (93,368), Leody de Guzman (78,231), Norberto Gonzales (73,951), and Jose Montemayor Jr. (50,621).

• READ MORE: Earlier articles and Rappler livestream

His running mate Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte was also leading the vice-presidential race with 27,098,199 votes.

Marcos, who consistently topped preelection surveys, is poised to succeed the strongman Rodrigo Duterte and lead the Philippines for the next six years.

He will have to steer the country into economic recovery after a global pandemic.

Earlier on Monday, Marcos voted in his father’s hometown Batac City, Ilocos Norte.

He was with his son Sandro, who is running for 1st District representative of the province, and nephew Matthew Marcos Manotoc, who is seeking reelection as Ilocos Norte governor.

Republished with permission.

Children should not pay for the sins of their parents. But in some cases, a healthy suspicion of the offspring is needed, notably when it comes to profiting off ill-gotten gains.

It is certainly needed in the case of Filipino politician and presidential candidate Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr, who stands to win today if opinion polls are to be believed.

Bongbong’s father was the notorious martial law strongman Ferdinand Marcos; his mother, the avaricious, shoe-crazed Imelda.

• READ MORE:  ‘Our blood is boiling’ – victims angry as dictator’s son edges closer to Philippine presidency
• Robredo’s plea to 412,000 in Pasay – 200 in Auckland: Fight fake news
• Other Philippine presidential elections
• Today’s Rappler livestream coverage

Elected president in 1965, Ferdinand Marcos indulged in murder, torture and looting. He thrived on the terrain of violent, corrupt oligarchic politics, characterised by a telling remark from the dejected Sergio Osmenã Jr, whom he defeated in 1969: “We were outgunned, outgooned, and outgold.”

In 1972, martial law was imposed on the pretext of a failed assassination attempt against the defence secretary, an attack which saw no injuries nor apprehension of suspects. It was only formally lifted in 1981.

Under the blood-soaked stewardship of the Marcos regime, 70,000 warrantless arrests were made, and 4000 people killed.

The Philippines duly declined in the face of monstrous cronyism, institutional unaccountability and graft, becoming one of the poorest in Southeast Asia. While Marcos Sr’s own official salary never rose above US$13,500 a year, he and his cronies made off with $10 billion. (Estimates vary.)

Garish portraits, designer shoes
When revolutionaries took over the Presidential palace, they found garishly ornate portraits, 15 mink coats, 508 couture gowns and more than 3000 pairs of Imelda’s designer shoes.

Fleeing the Philippines in the wake of the “people power” popular insurrection of 1986 led by supporters of Corazon “Cory” Aquino, the Marcoses found sanctuary in the bosom of US protection, taking up residence in Hawai’i.

Opinion polls show that Bongbong is breezing his way to office, a phenomenon that has little to do with his personality, sense of mind, or presence.

A Pulse Asia survey conducted in February showed voter approval at an enviable 60 percent. This would suggest that the various petitions seeking to disqualify him have had little effect on perceptions lost in the miasma of myth and speculation.

All this points to a dark combination of factors that have served to rehabilitate his family’s legacy.

For the student aware of the country’s oligarchic politics, this is unlikely to come as shocking. For one, the Marcoses have inexorably found their way back into politics, making their way through the dynastic jungle.

Imelda, for all her thieving ways, found herself serving in the House of Representatives four times and unsuccessfully ran for the presidency in 1992. Daughter Imee became governor of the province of Ilocos Norte in 2010, and has been serving as a senator since 2019.

Contested the vice-presidency – and lost
Marcos Jr followed a similar trajectory, becoming a member of congress and senator and doing so with little distinction. In 2016, he contested the vice-presidency and lost.

Bongbong has already done his father proud at various levels, not least exhibiting a tendency to fabricate his past. On the touchy issue of education, Oxford University has stated at various points that Marcos Jr, while matriculating at St Edmund Hall in 1975, never took a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics — as he claims.

According to the institution’s records, “he did not complete his degree, but was awarded a special diploma in Social Studies in 1978″.

A statement from the Oxford Philippines Society remarks that, “Marcos failed his degree’s preliminary examinations at the first attempt. Passing the preliminary examinations is a prerequisite for continuing one’s studies and completing a degree at Oxford University”.

The issue was known as far back as 1983, when a disturbed sister from the Religious of the Good Shepherd wrote to the university inquiring about the politician’s credentials and received a letter confirming that fact.

Outgoing President Rodrigo Duterte, whose own rule has been characterised by populist violence and impunity, has played his role in the rehabilitative process. In 2016, almost three decades after the former dictator died in Hawai’i, Duterte gave permission for Ferdinand Marcos to be buried with full military honours in Manila’s National Heroes’ Cemetery.

The timing of the burial was kept secret, prompting Vice-President Leni Robredo to describe the ceremony as “a thief in the night”.

‘Legitimising’ massive violations of human rights
A coalition of Jesuit groups claimed that the interring of Marcos in Manila “buries human dignity by legitimising the massive violations of human and civil rights… that took place under his regime.” Duterte would have appreciated the mirror-effect of the move, a respectful nod from one human rights abuser to another.

Under his direction, thousands of drug suspects have been summarily butchered.

Bongbong has also taken the cue, rehabilitating his parents using a polished, digital campaign of re-invention that trucks in “golden age” nostalgia and delusion.

Political raw material has presented itself. The gap between the wealthy and impoverished, which his father did everything to widen, has not been closed by successive governments. According to 2021 figures from the Philippine Statistics Authority, 24 percent of Filipinos — some 26 million people — live below the poverty line.

Videos abound claiming that his parents were philanthropists rather than figures of predation. The issue of martial law brutality has all but vanished in the narrative.

Social media and online influencers have managed the growth of this image through a coordinated campaign of disinformation waged across multiple platforms.

Gemma B. Mendoza of the Philippine news platform Rappler has noted the more sinister element of these efforts. Even as the legacy of a family dictatorship is being burnished, the press and critics are being hounded.

Robredo the only challenge
The only movement standing in the way of the Marcos family is Vice-President Robredo, who triumphed over Marcos Jr in 2016. Her hope is a brand of politics nourished by grassroots participation rather than shameless patronage.

The same cannot be said of the political classes who operate on the central principle of Philippine politics: impunity.

This, at least, is how political scientist Dr Aries Arugay, an associate professor of the University of Philippines, sees it: “We just don’t jail our politicians or make them accountable … we don’t punish them, unlike South Korean presidents.”

The opposite is the case, and as the voters make it to the ballot today, the country, if polls are to be believed, will see another Marcos in the presidential palace.

Dr Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. 

Former political prisoner Cristina Bawagan still has the dress she wore the day she was arrested, tortured and sexually abused by soldiers during the late Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos’s brutal era of martial law.

Bawagan fears the horrors of Marcos’s rule would be diminished if his namesake son wins the presidency in Monday’s election, a victory that would cap a three-decade political fightback for a family driven out in a 1986 “people power” uprising.

Also known as “Bongbong”, Marcos Jr has benefited from what some political analysts describe as a decades-long public relations effort to alter perceptions of his family, accused of living lavishly at the helm of one of Asia’s most notorious kleptocracies.

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As Philippine president, Marcos could control hunt for his family’s wealth

Rivals of the family say the presidential run is an attempt to rewrite history, and change a narrative of corruption and authoritarianism associated with his father’s era.

“This election is not just a fight for elected positions. It is also a fight against disinformation, fake news, and historical revisionism,” Vice-President Leni Robredo, Marcos’s main rival in the presidential race, told supporters in March.

TSEK.PH, a fact-checking initiative for the May 9 vote, reported that it had debunked scores of martial law-related disinformation it said was used to rehabilitate, erase or burnish the discreditable record of Marcos Sr.

No reply to questions
Marcos Jr.’s camp did not reply to written requests for comment on Bawagan’s story.

Marcos Jr., who last week called his late father a “political genius”, has previously denied claims of spreading misinformation and his spokesperson has said Marcos does not engage in negative campaigning.

Bawagan, 67, said martial law victims like her needed to share their stories to counter the portrayal of the elder Marcos’s regime as a peaceful, golden age for the Southeast Asian country.

“It is very important they see primary evidence that it really happened,” said Bawagan while showing the printed dress which had a tear below the neckline where her torturer passed a blade across her chest and fondled her breasts.

The elder Marcos ruled for two decades from 1965, almost half of it under martial law.

During that time, 70,000 people were imprisoned, 34,000 were tortured, and 3240 were killed, according to figures from Amnesty International — figures which Marcos Jr. questioned in a January interview.

Bawagan, an activist, was arrested on 27 May 1981 by soldiers in the province of Nueva Ecija for alleged subversion and brought to a “safehouse” where she was beaten as they tried to extract a confession from her.

“I would receive slaps on my face every time they were not satisfied with my answers and that was all the time,” Bawagan said. “They hit strongly at my thighs and clapped my ears. They tore my duster (dress) and fondled my breasts.”

“The hardest thing was when they put an object in my vagina. That was the worst part of it and all throughout I was screaming. No one seemed to hear,” said Bawagan, a mother of two.

‘No arrests’
In a conversation with Marcos Jr. that appeared on YouTube in 2018, Juan Ponce Enrile, who served as the late dictator’s defence minister, said not one person was arrested for their political and religious views, or for criticising the elder Marcos.

However, more than 11,000 victims of state brutality during Martial Law later received reparations using millions from Marcos’s Swiss bank deposits, part of the billions the family siphoned off from the country’s coffers that were recovered by the Philippine government.

Among them was Felix Dalisay, who was detained for 17 months from August 1973 after he was beaten and tortured by soldiers trying to force him to inform on other activists, causing him to suffer hearing loss.

“They kicked me even before I boarded the military jeep so I fell and hit my face on the ground,” Dalisay said, showing a scar on his right eye as he recounted the day he was arrested.

When they reached the military headquarters, Dalisay said he was brought to an interrogation room, where soldiers repeatedly clapped his ears, kicked and hit him, sometimes with a butt of a rifle, during questioning.

“They started by inserting bullets used in a .45 calibre gun between my fingers and they would squeeze my hand. That really hurt. If they were not satisfied with my answers, they would hit me,” Dalisay pointing to different parts of his body.

The return of a Marcos to the country’s seat of power is unthinkable for Dalisay, who turned 70 this month.

“Our blood is boiling at that thought,” said Dalisay.

“Marcos Sr declared martial law then they will say nobody was arrested, and tortured? We are here speaking while we are still alive.”

Republished with permission from Rappler.

I remember that day — February 25, 1986. I was then a teenager. My family stood outside the iron gates of Malacañang Palace among a massive wave of people armed with yellow ribbons, flowers and rosaries.

After a four-day uprising, we heard on the radio that the dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his family had fled the country.

Ramming through the gates of the now forlorn presidential palace, people found signs of a hurtled retreat. Hundreds of pairs of shoes, gowns and other evidence of the Marcoses’ profligacy had been abandoned. Documents and bullets were scattered on the floor.

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They’re gone, the Marcoses!

People burst into song. The poignant “Bayan Ko” (My Country) — the metaphor of a caged bird that yearns to be free — was the anthem of the EDSA revolution: People Power.

The Marcoses had been obliterated from our lives.

Or so we thought.

My generation — we were called “The Martial Laws Babies” — is beginning to realise now that only the glorious part of Philippine history is being obliterated.

‘Bongbong’ Marcos the frontrunner
Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., only son and namesake of the late dictator, is the frontrunner in the Philippines’ upcoming presidential election in May. Polls in January and February show Marcos Jr. ahead in the race with 60 percent of the national vote.

He was 29 when the family was ousted and sent into exile in Hawai’i. He had since returned to the Philippines, where he served as governor of Ilocos Norte, as congressman and senator.

Now he is aiming to go back to his childhood playground — the Malacañang Palace.

His campaign has revived “Bagong Lipunan” (The New Society), the anthem of martial law. I shudder. It summoned the dark years.

Now as an adult, watching how North Koreans live now gives me a perspective of how we were brainwashed into subservience during the martial period when the media was controlled by the regime.

Political opinions had no place in the public sphere. Dissidents disappeared, plucked out of their homes by military men, never to be seen ever again. Those who had heard of these stories of desaparecidos had to zip their mouths. Or else.

The government slogan “Sa Ikakaunlad ng Bayan Displina Ang Kailangan” (For the Nation’s Progress Discipline is Necessary) was forever stuck in our heads.

Marcos family’s extravaganzas
My generation lived through different political eras. We grew up watching the Marcos family’s extravaganzas. They acted like royalty.

Imelda Marcos paraded in her made-for-the-queen gowns and glittering jewelry, suffocating Filipinos with her absolute vanity amid our dystopian society.

“People say I’m extravagant because I want to be surrounded by beauty. But tell me, who wants to be surrounded by garbage?” she said.

“Bagong Lipunan” was constantly played on the radio, on TV and in public places. It was inescapable. Its lyrics were planted into our consciousness: “Magbabago ang lahat tungo sa pag-unland” (Eveyone will change toward progress.)

Marcos created a fiction depicting his purported greatness that fuelled his tyranny.

During the two decades of media control, the brainwashing propaganda concealed what the regime represented — world-class kleptocrats, murderers and torturers.

Marcos Jr. gave no apology, showed no remorse and offered no restitution. And why would he? Maybe no one remembers after all. None of the Marcoses or their cronies ever went to jail for their transgressions.

Marcos rewarded many times
Marcos Jr. has been rewarded many times, repeatedly elected to various positions. And now as president?

It’s perplexing. It’s appalling. And for people who were tortured and the families of those killed, it’s revolting.

Marcos Jr. appeals to a fresh generation that doesn’t hear the shuddering beat of “Bagong Lipunan” the way my generation does.

The Philippines’ median age is 25. Their lack of a personal link to the martial law experience perhaps explains their historical oblivion.

But history is still being written. Pre-election polls are just polls. The May 9 ballot will decide a new chapter in history.

As Filipino journalist Sheila Coronel said, “A Marcos return is inevitable only if we believe it to be.”

Mar-Vic Cagurangan is editor-in-chief and publisher of the Pacific Island Times in Guam. This article is republished with permission.

Veteran journalist and former chairman of the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) Jose Jaime “Nonoy” Espina has died after battling liver cancer, his family has confirmed.

Espina was 59 years old, and died yesterday at their home in Bacolod.

“Nonoy passed on peacefully, quietly surrounded by family tonight, at 9:20 pm,” his sister, journalist Inday Espina-Varona, said on Facebook.

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Espina “survived a severe infection of covid-19 and was able to return to the bosom of the family. His death was due to liver cancer,” said Varona.

Press freedom champion
Espina had just turned over the NUJP to a new set of officers early this year, but even amid health problems he shepherded the union through challenging times for the Philippine press.

Under his chairmanship, the NUJP led rallies in support of media organisations which were harassed by the Duterte government – the closure order by the Securities and Exchange Comission of Rappler in 2018, and the franchise kill of ABS-CBN in 2020.

“Nonoy was among the loudest voices at rallies in support of the renewal of ABS-CBN’s franchise, leading a march in Quezon City in March 2020 and later joining similar activities in Bacolod City, where he was based,” the NUJP said in a statement.

“He was a tireless champion for the freedom of the press and the welfare of media workers,” said the NUJP.

Espina was among the founding members of the union, and a member of the directorate for multiple terms until his chairmanship from 2018 to 2021.

“He led the NUJP through waves of attacks and harassment by the government. For his defence of colleagues, he was red-tagged himself, and, alongside other members of the union, was made a target of government propagandists,” said the NUJP.

Espina “was also among the first responders at the Ampatuan Massacre in Maguindanao in 2009,” said the NUJP, referring to the worst attack on Philippine media in the country’s history, where 32 journalists were killed when a powerful political clan ambushed the convoy of its rival who was on his way to file a certificate of candidacy.

At the tail end of his chairmanship, the NUJP led the campaign for justice for the 58 victims of the massacre up to the historic conviction in December 2019 for the principal suspects.

Media welfare
Speaking to Rappler in 2019 about the Ampatuan case, Espina discussed the need for the Philippine media to galvanisxe and fight for workers’ rights, saying the situation “has worsened” since the massacre.

“Community media aside, even the mainstream especially broadcast, there are more and more contractual workers, there’s no security of tenure, no benefits – that’s harsh,” said Espina.

This is true to Espina’s character.

“A former senior editor for news website InterAksyon, he advocated for better working conditions for media despite himself being laid off from the website, a move that he and other former members of the staff questioned before the National Labor Relations Commission (NLRC),” said the NUJP.

“They won that fight and Nonoy has led many other journalists to join the bigger fight for a more independent and freer press,” said the NUJP.

Active in the ‘mosquito press’
Espina was a musician known to journalists for his signature singing voice, “but he was first and foremost a journalist,” said Varona.

Espina had been a journalist from high school to college, editing UP Visayas’ Pagbutlak. Espina was a recipient of the College Editors Guild of the Philippines or CEGP’s Marcelo H. Del Pilar Award, the highest honour of the guild.

“He was later part of community media group Correspondents, Broadcasters and Reporters Association—Action News Service, or COBRA-ANS, which was part of the “mosquito press” during the Marcos dictatorship,” said the NUJP.

He also served as editor for Inquirer.net.

“NUJP thanks him for his long years of service to the union and the profession and promises to honour him by protecting that prestige,” said the union.

“Nonoy leaves us with lessons and fond memories, as well as the words he often used in statements: That the press is not free because it is allowed to be. It is free because it insists on being free,” the NUJP said.

Republished with permission.

Textbooks should be changed to underscore the atrocities committed by the Philippines martial law regime of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos, rather than make light of these violations and rehabilitate the Marcos’ reputation as proposed by former Senator Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., says Vice-President Leni Robredo.
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“Medyo nakakatawa kasi [na] iyon [ang pinopropose niya] kasi kung may kailangang baguhin, kailangan siguraduhin na ma-inculcate sa bawat mamamayang Pilipino kung ano iyong kasamaan na dinala sa atin ng diktaturya,” she said.

“[Ngayon kasi] pinapayagan ulit natin iyong mga Marcos na mamayagpag… gustong sabihin, hindi tayo natuto. Kaya kung mayroong kailangang baguhin [sa textbooks], iyon yon,” Robredo added.

READ MORE: Move on, Leni Robredo camp tells Bongbong Marcos

Marcos Jr., the only son of the late dictator, said in his proposal that textbooks needed to mention that the Sandiganbayan had dismissed at least five ill-gotten wealth cases against the Marcos family.

However, while at least five corruption cases against the Marcoses were dismissed by the Sandiganbayan in 2019, the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG) had also recovered at least P171 billion worth of Marcos ill-gotten wealth since 1987.

There are also at least 12 ill-gotten wealth cases pending against the Marcos family before the Sandiganbayan.

Human rights violations, plunder
In 2012, then President Benigno Aquino III signed the Marcos Compensation Law which granted financial remuneration to victims of human rights violations during the Martial Law years (1972 to 1981) — violations that included summary executions, enforced disappearances and torture — using the late dictator’s and his family P10 billion in ill-gotten wealth, retrieved by the Philippine government from Swiss banks.

In 2003, the Supreme Court also ruled with finality that the 10,000 human rights victims during Marcos’ martial law regime were entitled to this compensation from Marcos’ $10 billion Swiss bank deposits, which the ruling also deemed to be ill-gotten.

Meanwhile, in mid-January 2020, Marcos human rights victims slammed the Cultural Centre of the Philippines (CCP) for hosting a dinner for former First Lady Imelda Marcos to mark the CCP’s 50th founding anniversary, pointing out that such a lavish dinner was tantamount to glorifying the Marcoses’ corruption.

“Her founding of the CCP had nothing noble in her heart for the Filipino people. We should not glorify the leaders of a brutal and bloody dictatorship under Martial law,” Etta Rosales, a torture victim during the dictatorship, told GMA News Online in a text message.

“CCP is after the stolen wealth too? [That apparently] it can’t survive without it? That tells you how low our society has sunk with the devil on top of you. If only people could see that the wealth of the evil will flow to the hands of the righteous someday soon not through human effort but through God, they wouldn’t have to taint themselves with vomit,” poet Mila Aguilar, who was detained during the dictatorship for opposing martial law, said in a separate statement.

In November 2018, the Sandiganbayan convicted Imelda of seven counts of graft for having pecuniary interests and for participating in the management of several non-government organizations in Switzerland from 1978 to 1984, a time when she was prohibited to be involved in such businesses since she was the incumbent Minister of Human Settlements, Metro Manila governor, and a member of the Interim Batasan Pambansa.

Imelda Marcos, who was sentenced to six to 11 years in prison for every count of the graft conviction, was never arrested.

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The Asia-Pacific Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines (APCHRP) has condemned a recent spate of killings in Negros and all extrajudicial killings in the Philippines – with the latest happening last week.

Duterte’s plan for Negros has been the subject of speculation in response to the killings in Negros Oriental, where a total of 21 people – many of them farmers – were killed in less than two weeks July 18-27, reports Rappler.

The deaths include a lawyer, a barangay captain, a city councillor, a former mayor, and a one-year-old child.

READ MORE: 15 shot dead in Negros Oriental in 1 week

“We can see the pattern of human rights abuses in the Philippines is similar to the days of martial law under Marcos,” said the coalition in a statement.

People criticising the Duterte government were being branded as supporters or members of the New People’s Army (NPA).

“The pattern of killings and other human rights abuses is prevalent across the whole of the Philippines,” the statement said.

The latest extrajudicial killing happened on August 2 in Antipas, Cotabato, on Mindanao island in the southern Philippines.

Pastor killed
The victim was a pastor of the United Church of Christ in the Philippines (UCCP), Ernesto Estrella, 51, married, a resident of Davao City.

Estrella was visiting his relatives when he was shot point blank by two suspects who were riding on motorcycle.

On August 1, Duterte increased to 5 million pesos  (NZ$400,000) a reward for information leading to people being accused of responsibility for the deaths of four policemen in Negros.

Duterte’s pronouncement “puts anyone at risk of being killed”, said the coalition.

“Anybody could kill several persons, put a gun in their house or property and then claim that the victims are the killers of the four policemen in Negros.

“This will also spark more killings and unrest, which Duterte could use as a basis for declaring martial law in Negros or the whole of the Philippines.

“The Filipinos’ experience of martial law is horrendous. Martial Law is not the answer to the root causes of the armed conflict in the Philippines.”

Reform ‘not bullets’
Filipino farmers were demanding genuine agrarian reform “and not bullets”, the coalition said.

Filipino workers were demanding an increase in wages and an end to contractualisation.

Overseas Filipino workers were demanding job creation so that they were not forced to seek jobs outside the Philippines and away from their families.

“These demands are the core issues being discussed at the Peace Talks between the government of the Philippines (GRP) and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP).

“But Duterte has killed the Peace Talks just when the substantive agenda on CASER (Comprehensive Agreement on Socio Economic Reforms) was on the negotiating table.

“It is clear that Duterte is on the side of those who refuse to address the root causes of armed conflict in the Philippines,” claimed the coalition.

Then coalition called on the Duterte government to:
• Stop extrajudicial killings
• End repression of human rights workers/defenders
• Lift martial law in Mindanao
• Resume peace talks between the government of the Philippines (GRP) and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP)

Defence Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said he had so far made no recommendation for martial law, reports Rappler.

“As of now, absent any recommendation from the AFP and PNP forces, intel reports and local government unit recommendation, I am not yet recommending martial law in Negros,” he said.

• President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law throughout the Philippines between 1972 and 1981 until he was forced into exile by the “people power” revolution in 1986.
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By Paterno Esmaquel II in Manila

Protesters have staged the most widespread barrage of protests yesterday against President Rodrigo Duterte, as Filipinos marked the 46th anniversary of the declaration of martial law under dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

A running list by Rappler shows rallies scheduled across 14 regions in the Philippines, including Metro Manila, and even overseas.

The protests come in the face of growing discontent under Duterte – prices of goods have been rising, thousands have died in a drug war that has failed to eradicate drugs, and critical voices such as Senator Antonio Trillanes IV and Australian nun Sister Patricia Fox face threats of either arrest or deportation.

READ MORE: Filipinos remember martial law: ‘Dictatorship is back’

Duterte’s public trust and satisfaction ratings also continue to fall.

Duterte – who earlier said the dictator’s daughter, Ilocos Norte Governor Imee Marcos, donated to his presidential campaign – wants the dictator’s son and namesake, former senator Ferdinand Marcos Jr, to be vice-president so that Marcos can succeed him.

Marcos has a pending protest against the election victory of Vice-President Leni Robredo, leader of the opposition.

Meanwhile, Marcos on Thursday evening, September 20, launched a new campaign to revise history through a “talk show” with former Senator Juan Ponce Enrile, architect and implementer of Martial Law as the elder Marcos’ defence minister.

‘No abuses’ claim
Marcos is selling the idea that no abuses happened under his father’s regime.

Protesters yesterday refused to take this sitting down.

Roads lead to Luneta
In Metro Manila, all roads lead to the iconic Rizal Park, also known as Luneta, for a protest mounted by various groups. Groups marching from San Agustin Church, De La Salle University, University of Santo Tomas, Polytechnic University of the Philippines, and University of the Philippines Diliman, among other assembly points, gathered at Rizal Park to fight the return of a dictatorship.

The Catholic Church, which was instrumental in toppling Marcos in 1986, is one of the groups that helped mount the September 21 rallies.

A Mass for Dignity and Peace was held at San Agustin Church in Intramuros, Manila, yesterday afternoon, followed by a march to Luneta with other religious denominations.

Protesters march from San Agustin Church to Luneta. Video: Rappler

Those who marched to Luneta included people of different political colours, from priests and nuns to leftist groups to Duterte critics such as former chief justice Maria Lourdes Sereno.

Different though they were, protesters had a similar cry: Resist a creeping dictatorship.

Ousted chief justice Sereno speaks at anti-Martial Law rally. Video: Rappler

Sereno was one of the loudest voices in Luneta on Friday.

‘Fighting for justice’
In a raised pitch and with impassioned gestures, Sereno said onstage: “Naghirap kami sa martial law, kaya’t nilalabanan namin, at itinataguyod ang katarungan at katuwiran para hindi na maulit ‘yan. Kaya mga mamamayan, lalong lalo na mga bata: Uulitin po ba natin? Papayagan ba natin ang martial law uli?”

(We suffered during martial law. That’s why we’re fighting for and upholding justice and righteousness to avoid a repeat of that. My fellow citizens, especially children, will we permit martial law to happen again?)

Sereno – who for years kept the “dignified silence” of the Supreme Court until Duterte had her ousted – found herself leading a chant before a crowd on Friday: “Never again to Martial Law!”

Below the stage where speakers like Sereno spoke, a tired Judy Taguiwalo, who marched from Mendiola to Luneta, was seated on a monobloc chair as she granted an interview.

Taguiwalo was an activist whom Duterte named social welfare secretary, only to be rejected by the Commission on Appointments in August 2017.

Taguiwalo, who suffered during the Martial Law years, also said “never again to Martial Law.”

“Nakulong ako sa panahon ng batas militar. Maraming namatay, na-torture,” she recalled. (I was imprisoned during the the period of military rule. Many people died and were tortured.)

Paterno Esmaquel II is a journalist with the online news website Rappler and these multimedia reports are drawn from the Rappler coverage.

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Bishops have called for vigilance in the face of a “creeping dictatorship,” as the Philippines marked the 32nd anniversary of the EDSA People Power Revolution yesterday – February 25.

Caloocan Bishop Pablo Virgilio David said Filipinos should “celebrate” and also “guard” the gift of democracy, which Filipinos gained after toppling dictator Ferdinand Marcos on 25 February 1986.

READ MORE: EDSA: ‘Hand of God’ seen from the House of Sin

“One of the gifts that we have received as a nation is freedom and democracy. And we tend to take that for granted,” Bishop David said in an interview after the Walk for Life staged by Catholics a day earlier on Saturday.

Asked if he agrees there is a “creeping dictatorship” in the Philippines, Bishop David said: “It will creep on if we are not vigilant.”

He added: “We must guard our democracy. We must guard our freedom as a people, our civil liberties. We must not take that for granted.”

Bishop David, one of the bishops most outspoken against drug war killings, is also vice-president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP).

Lingayen-Dagupan Archbishop Socrates Villegas, former president of the CBCP, challenged Filipinos to “regain” the mission of the EDSA People Power Revolution.

Story about people
“The EDSA story is about people, not personalities. It is about nationalism, not personal gain. It is about the power of prayer, not about strategies and plots. It is God guiding his people,” Villegas explained.

“It is glorious but it entrusted us with a mission. Unfortunately we basked in the glory too long. The mission was laid aside. We can still regain it if we want,” the former CBCP president said.

The CBCP, in a January 29 statement after its twice-a-year meeting, had already voiced its fears of a “creeping dictatorship” in the face of “self-serving” motives for Charter Change.

Days later, President Rodrigo Duterte said he needed to be a dictator so that he could change the country.

In a separate interview with reporters on Saturday, Manila Auxiliary Bishop Broderick Pabillo also called for vigilance among Filipinos.

Pabillo earlier said the Walk for Life, an event to oppose drug war killings, the death penalty, and other anti-life measures, can be linked to the 32nd anniversary of the People Power Revolution.

“Alam naman natin ano ang resulta ng dictatorship – pag-aabuso ng human rights, pag-aabuso ng buhay. Kaya nga ayaw din natin na maulit uli ‘yung dictatorship. Kaya dapat panindigan natin at maging vigilant tayo sa mga nangyayari ngayon,” Pabillo said.

(We know the results of dictatorship – abuses of human rights, abuses of life. That’s why we don’t want dictatorship to happen again. That’s why we need to stand up and remain vigilant about the things happening today.)

About 2000 Catholics attended the Walk for Life on Saturday, according to the Philippine National Police.

Tagle stresses ‘active non-violence’
In that event, Manila Archbishop Luis Antonio Cardinal Tagle presided over a mass and delivered a homily on treating people as gifts, not commodities.

Hours later, Tagle presided over another Mass at EDSA Shrine, this time to mark the feast of Our Lady of EDSA, or Mary, Queen of Peace.

“Peace is not only the absence of violence,” Tagle said in his mass at EDSA Shrine.

Citing Pope Saint John XXIII, Tagle said peace could only come from justice, truth, love, and respect. “Kapag ‘yan ay itinanim at lumago, ang aanihin natin, kapayapaan,” he said. (If that is planted and then it grows, we will sow peace.)

The cardinal also emphasised the need for “active non-violence,” a message he also made during the first Walk for Life held at Quirino Grandstand in February 2017.

“Kapag napoot ka, nainis ka, sa napopoot sa iyo, lumilinaw sa kanya, ‘Talagang kaaway ako. Pinatunayan niya na kami’y magkaaway.’ Eh ‘di tuloy ang away,” Tagle said.

(If you bear a grudge, if you get angry, at the person who bears a grudge against you, it becomes clear to him, “I am really an enemy. He proved that we are really enemies.” Then you will continue fighting.)

“Pero kapag siya, galit na galit sa iyo, poot na poot sa iyo, tapos pinakita mo, kaya mong mahalin, at pinagdarasal mo pa siya, nalilito na siya: ‘Ano ba ako? Kaaway ba ako o kaibigan?’ Sa kalituhan niya, hindi niya na alam kung lalaban siya o hindi.”

(But if he is really angry at you, really furious at you, then you show that you can love him, and you’re even praying for him, he becomes confused: “What am I? Am I an enemy or a friend?” In his confusion, he no longer knows if he will fight or not.)

“Unti-unti, siya ay nababago,” Tagle said. “Kasi paano siya lalaban, wala na siyang kaaway? Nabago siya ng pagmamahal.” (Slowly he is being changed. Because how will he fight when he no longer has an enemy? He is changed by love.)

Paterno Esmaquel II is a journalist with the independent website Rappler.

• Duterte vs Rappler: Declaration of war against Philippine media

Thousands of demonstrators have taken to the streets of the Philippine capital of Manila to denounce President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs, as they marked the death anniversary of one of the country’s pro-democracy heroes.

Human rights advocates, youth groups, and religious communities defied a tropical storm that brought steady rain to gather at the memorial of the 1986 People Power revolution to call for an end to the killings in Duterte’s war on drugs.

Amid public pressure, Duterte admitted on Monday there could have been abuses in his anti-drug war policy.

“There is a possibility that in some of police incidents there could be abuses. I admit that,” Duterte told reporters in Manila. “These abusive police officers are destroying the credibility of the government.”

READ MORE: Duterte says ‘bloodiest’ day of war on drugs ‘beautiful’

Al Jazeera’s Jamela Alindogan, reporting from Manila, said at least 4000 people joined in the rally, adding that a separate protest was also held in another part of the city.

Protesters are demanding an independent investigation into the summary executions and police operations that left thousands of people dead. They said the president should be held accountable for the deaths.

Demonstrators waved Philippine flags and carried banners that read: “Resist the Fascist!”, “Stop the Killings!”, and “We will fight” among others.

Monday marked the 34th anniversary of the assassination of democracy icon Benigno Aquino, who fought the 20-year dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. Marcos was overthrown in 1986 in a peaceful protest, which saw Aquino’s widow, Corazon, become president. Duterte is an avowed supporter of Marcos.

Leaders of Monday’s protest said the death toll in Duterte’s war on drugs had now reached 13,000 – surpassing the number of deaths of anti-government activists during dictator Marcos’ two decades in office.

Government figures show that since Duterte took office last year, an estimated 3451 “drug personalities” have been killed in gun battles with police up to July 26, 2017.

Another 2000 more died in drug-related homicides, including attacks by motorcycle-riding masked gunmen and other assaults, while 8200 homicide cases are “under investigation”.

17-year-old student killed
At the rally, demonstrators also expressed outrage over the death of 17-year-old student, Kian delos Santos, who witnesses said was falsely accused of being a drug dealer and summarily executed by police earlier this week.

In another part of Manila, hundreds of marching neighbours and activists lit candles near the spot where delos Santos was shot dead during a mass raid that left at least 80 people dead in three days.

“Please be fair,” the student’s father, Zaldy delos Santos, told police. “We are the victims here. We are the ones you should help.”

He made the appeal after authorities went on the offensive to defend the police action, saying there was information indicating the boy was a drug courier and addict.

But initial forensic evidence showed there was no gunfight, and the three bullet wounds indicated the student was shot at close range in the back of the head.

According to reports, there have been at least 30 minors killed in the drug war since June 2016, when Duterte took office.

Arrests ordered
On Monday, Duterte ordered the police to take custody of officers who were involved in the killing of delos Santos, saying he would not condone abuses, and that the police officers would have to face the consequences of their actions if that is the recommendation of a formal investigation.

The head of the Public Attorney’s Office, Persida Acosta, told reporters she was recommending murder charges against the officers involved based on the initial autopsy report.

“Murder charges will most likely be filed because of the location of the entry wounds,” Acosta said in a television interview.

Neighbours, teachers and classmates of the boy also vouched for his good character. The education ministry issued a statement condemning the police action.

• Duterte inspired by ‘Petrus’ shootings

By Walden Bello in Manila

Fascism, someone wrote, comes in different forms to different societies so that people expecting fascism to develop in the “classic way” fail to recognise it even when it is already upon them. In 2016, fascism came to the Philippines in the form of Rodrigo Duterte, but this event continues to elude a large part of the citizenry, some owing to fierce loyalty to the president, some out of fear of what the political and ethical consequences would be of admitting that naked force is now the ruling principle in Philippine politics.

Why Duterte fits the ‘F’ word
At a panel I was part of in last August, one month after Duterte ascended to the presidency, there was considerable hesitation in using what panelists euphemistically called the “F” word to characterise the new Executive. There is an understandable reluctance to use the term fascist, undoubtedly because the word has been applied very loosely to all kinds of movements and leaders that depart, in some fashion, from liberal democratic practices, such as their propensity to resort to the use of force to achieve their political objectives.

However, there would probably be considerably less objection to the use of the word to describe Duterte if we see as central to the definition of a fascist leader a) a charismatic individual with strong inclinations toward authoritarian rule who b) derives his or her strength from a heated multiclass mass base, c) is engaged in or supports the systematic and massive violation of basic human, civil, and political rights, and d) proposes a political project that contradicts the fundamental values and aims of liberal democracy or social democracy.

If one were to accept these elements provisionally as the key characteristics of a fascist leader, then Duterte would easily fit the bill.

A fascist original
Having said that, one must nevertheless acknowledge that Duterte is a fascist personality that is an original.

His charisma is not the demiurgic sort like Hitler’s, nor does it derive so much from an emotional personal identification with the people and nation as in the case with some populists. Duterte’s charisma would probably be best described as “carino brutal,” a volatile mix of will to power, a commanding personality, and gangster charm that fulfills his followers’ deep-seated yearning for a father figure who will finally end the national chaos.

Duterte is not a reactionary seeking to restore a mythical past. He is not a conservative dedicated to defending the status quo. His project is oriented towards an authoritarian future.

He is best described, using Arno Mayer’s term, as a counterrevolutionary. Unlike some of his predecessors, like Hitler and Mussolini, however, he is not waging a counterrevolution against the left or socialism.

In Duterte’s case, the target, one can infer from his discourse and his actions, is liberal democracy, the dominant ideology and political system of our time. In this sense, he is both a local expression as well as a pioneer of an ongoing global phenomenon: the rebellion against liberal democratic values and liberal democratic discourse that Francis Fukuyama had declared as the “end of history” in the early 1990s.

Counterrevolutionaries are not always clear about what their next moves are, but they often have an instinctive sense of what would bring them closer to power. Ideological purity is not high on their agenda, with them putting the premium on the emotional power of their message rather on its ideological coherence. The low priority accorded to ideological coherence is also extended to political alliances.

Duterte’s mobilisation of a multiclass base and his ruling with the support of virtually all of the elite is unexceptional. However, one of the things that makes him a fascist original is that he has brought the dominant section of the left into his ruling coalition, something that would have been unthinkable with most previous fascist leaders.

But perhaps Duterte’s distinctive contribution to fascism as a political phenomenon is in the area of political methodology. The stylised paradigm of fascism coming to power has the fascist leader or party begin with violations of civil rights, followed by the power grab, then indiscriminate repression.

Duterte turns this “Marcosian model” of “creeping fascism” around. He begins with impunity on a massive scale, that is, the extrajudicial killing of thousands of alleged drug users and pushers, and leaves the violations of civil liberties and the grab for absolute power as mopping up operations in a political landscape devoid of significant organized opposition.

A product of EDSA
Duterte’s ascendancy cannot be understood without taking into consideration the debacle of the EDSA liberal democratic republic that was born in the uprising of 1986. In fact, EDSA’s failure was a condition for Duterte’s success.

What destroyed the EDSA project and paved the way for Duterte was the deadly combination of elite monopoly of the electoral system and neoliberal economic policies and the priority placed on foreign debt repayment imposed by Washington. By 2016, there was a yawning gap between the EDSA Republic’s promise of popular empowerment and wealth redistribution and the reality of massive poverty, scandalous inequality, and pervasive corruption.

And the EDSA Republic’s discourse of democracy, human rights, and rule of law had become a suffocating straitjacket for a majority of Filipinos who simply could not relate to it owing to the overpowering reality of their powerlessness.

Duterte’s discourse – a mixture of outright death threats, basag-ulero language, and frenzied railing coupled with disdainful humor directed at the elite, whom he called “coños” – was a potent formula that proved exhilarating to his audience who felt themselves liberated from the stifling hypocrisy of the EDSA discourse.

Fascism in power
Probably no fascist personality since Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933 has used the mandate of a plurality at the polls to reshape the political arena more swiftly and decisively than Duterte in 2016. Even before he formally assumed office, the extrajudicial killings began; the elite opposition disintegrated, with some 98 percent of the so-called “Yellow Party,” the Liberals, joining the Duterte Coalition; and Duterte achieved total control of both houses of Congress.

The Supreme Court, shying away from a confrontation, chose not to challenge the President’s decision to have the former dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, buried in the Libingan ng mg Bayani.

A traditional bulwark of defence of human rights, the Catholic Church, exercised self-censorship, afraid that in a confrontation with a popular president who threatened to expose bishops and priests with mistresses and clerical child abusers, it was going to be a sure loser.

A novice in foreign policy, Duterte was able to combine personal resentment with acute political instinct to radically reshape the Philippines’ relationship with the big powers, notably the United States. What surprised many though was that there was very little protest in the Philippines at Duterte’s geopolitical reorientation given the stereotype of Filipinos being “little brown brothers.”

What protest there was came mainly from traditional anti-American quarters which evinced scepticism about the President’s avowed intentions.

Here, Duterte again showed himself to be a masterful instinctive politician. As many have observed, coexisting with admiration for the US and US institutions exhibited by ordinary Filipinos is a strong undercurrent of resentment at the colonial subjugation of the country by the US, the unequal treaties that Washington has foisted on the country, and the overwhelming impact of the “American way of life” on local culture.

One need not delve into the complex psychology of Hegel’s master-servant dialectic to understand that the undercurrent of the US-Philippine relationship has been the “struggle for recognition” of the dominated party.

Duterte has been able to tap into this emotional underside of Filipinos in a way that the left has never been able to with its anti-imperialist programme.

The anti-American comments from Duterte supporters that filled cyberspace were just as fierce as their attacks on critics of his war on drugs. Like many of his authoritarian predecessors elsewhere, Duterte has been able to splice nationalism and authoritarianism in a very effective fashion, though many progressives have seen this as mainly motivated by opportunism.

What surprises are in store for us?
So what other surprises should we expect from this fascist original?

Perhaps the best way to approach the question of what is likely to come is to ask the following: What are the chinks in Duterte’s armour? How would they affect the pursuit of Duterte’s programme? What are the prospects for the opposition?

There are chinks in the Duterte armour, and one of them is the health and age of the President. Duterte has been candid about his medical problems and his dependence on the drug fentanyl, reportedly a strongly addictive substance that is 50 to 100 times stronger than morphine and has the same effects as heroin. The age factor is not unimportant, considering that the President is turning 72. Hitler became chancellor at 44 and Mussolini became prime minister at 39. For the successful pursuit of an ambitious political project, one’s energy level is not unimportant.

More problematic is the issue of institutionalising the movement. The force driving Duterte’s electoral insurgency has not yet been converted into a mass movement. Duterte’s key advisers have recognised this, their analysis being that the reason Joseph Estrada was ousted in 2001 was because he was not able to fall back on an organised mass movement to protect him. Jun Evasco, the secretary of the cabinet and a long-time Duterte aide, is the key person the President is relying on to fill the breach by forming the Kilusang Pagbabago (Movement for Reform) that was launched in August 2016.

Evasco’s vision is apparently a mass organization along the lines of those of the National Democratic Front, where he cut his political teeth. This won’t be easy since, as some analysts have pointed out, he would have to contend with competing projects from Duterte’s political allies, like the Pimentels, the Marcoses, and the Arroyos, who would prefer an old-style political formation that brings together elite personalities. Needless to say, a political formation along the lines of the latter would be the kiss of death for Duterte’s electoral insurgency.

A bigger hurdle would be failure to deliver on political and social reforms. Practically all of the key political and economic elites have declared allegiance to Duterte, so that one finds it difficult to see how he can deliver on his political and economic reform agenda without alienating key supporters.

The Marcoses, who still have their ill-gotten wealth stashed abroad, the Arroyos, who have been implicated in so many shady deals, and so many other elites, many of whom have cases pending before the Ombudsman, are not likely to be disciplined for corruption, especially given their very close links to Duterte.

Nor will the Visayan Bloc, that has come in full force behind Duterte, agree to a law that will extend the very incomplete agrarian reform program. Nor will the big monopolists like Manuel Pangilinan and Ramon Ang, who have pledged fealty to him, submit without resistance to being divested of their corporate holdings.

This is not to say that Duterte is a puppet of the elites. Having a power base of his own that he can easily turn on friend or foe, he is beholden to no one. Indeed, one can argue that most of the elite have joined him mainly for their own protection, like small merchants paying protection money to the mafia.

The issue, rather, is how serious he is about social reform and how willing he is to alienate his supporters among the elite.

The same goes for economic reform. Ending contractualisation (or ENDO, for “End of Contract”), one of the President’s most prominent promises, is currently bogged down in efforts to arrive at a “win-win” solution for management and labor, and all the major labor federations are fast losing hope the administration will deliver on this.

As for macroeconomic policy, any departure from neoliberal principles on the part of orthodox technocrats like Budget Secretary Benjamin Diokno and National Economic and Development Authority Director General Ernesto Pernia is far-fetched.

Again, the question lies in how convinced Duterte is that neoliberalism is a dead end and how willing he is to incur the technocratic and bureaucratic displeasure and loss of confidence on the part of foreign investors that would be elicited by adopting a different economic paradigm.

Social and economic reform is Duterte’s Achilles heel, and the President himself is aware that popularity is a commodity that can disappear quickly in the absence of meaningful reforms. Dissatisfaction is fertile ground for the build-up of opposition. This spells danger for the country in the medium term.

Even if he is able to quickly create a mass-based party, Duterte, to stay securely in power, would find that he would need to resort to the repressive apparatuses of the state to quell discontent and opposition. This may not be too difficult a course to follow.

As noted earlier, having led a bloody campaign that has already claimed more than 7000 lives, the suspension of civil liberties and the imposition of permanent emergency rule would be in the nature of “mopping up” operations for Duterte. It would be a walk in the park.

The opposition
Does the opposition matter? The elite opposition is extremely weak at this point, with most of the Liberal Party having joined the Duterte bandwagon out of opportunism or fear. An opposition led by Vice-President Leni Robredo, who resigned from Duterte’s cabinet after being told not to attend meetings, is not likely to be viable.

While undoubtedly possessing integrity, Robredo has shown poor judgment, receptiveness to bad advice, and little demonstrated capacity for national leadership, and is, in the view even of some of her supporters, largely a political creation of Liberal Party operatives who wanted to convert the name of her deceased husband, former Department of the Interior and Local Government head Jesse Robredo, into political capital.

Moreover, her continuing strong ties to the double-faced Liberal Party and the former administration lend her to becoming easily discredited among both Duterte supporters and opponents.

The Left in crisis
This brings up the Left.

Duterte’s coming to power created a crisis for the Left. For one sector of the Left, Akbayan, the social democratic Left that had allied itself uncritically with the Aquino administration, Duterte’s ascendancy meant their marginalisation from power along with the Liberal Party, for which they had, with their leadership’s eyes wide open, become the grassroots organising arm.

For the traditional, or what some called the “extreme left,” Duterte posed a problem of another kind. While the National Democratic Front and Communist Party had not supported Duterte’s candidacy, they accepted Duterte’s offer of three cabinet or Cabinet-level positions, as secretaries of the Department of Agrarian Reform and the Department of Social Welfare and Development and chair of the National Anti-Poverty Commission.

They also accepted the president’s offer to initiate negotiations to arrive at a final peace agreement.

For Duterte, the entry of personalities associated with the Communist Party into his Cabinet provided a left gloss to his regime, a proof that he was progressive, “a socialist, but only up to my armpits,” as he put it colourfully during his victory speech in Davao City on 4 June 2016.

It soon became clear that Duterte had the better part of the bargain. As the regime’s central policy of killing drug users and pushers without due process escalated, the Left’s role in the Cabinet became increasingly difficult to justify.

This dilemma was compounded by the fact that no new land reform law was passed that would allow agrarian reform to continue, there was little movement in the administration’s promise to end contractualisation, and macroeconomic policy continued along neoliberal lines.

The Left, however, found it hard to shelve the peace negotiations, from which they had already made some gains, and to part from heading up government agencies that gave them unparalleled governmental resources to expand their mass base.

Duterte had again displayed his acute political instincts. Knowing that the traditional Left was at ebb in its fortunes, he gambled that they would accept his offer of Cabinet positions. And having accepted these and agreeing to open up peace negotiations from which it could get many more concessions than it would have gotten under previous administrations, the Left, he knew, would find it extremely difficult to part from the positions of power it had gained.

The price, the leaders of the Left realised, would be high, and this was their association with a bloodthirsty regime. The Communist Party and its mass organisations tried to alleviate the contradiction by issuing statements condemning Duterte’s bloody policies.

But this only made their dilemma keener, since people would ask, why then do you continue to provide legitimacy to this administration by staying on in the Cabinet? Unlike Hitler and Mussolini, Duterte brought the Left into his regime, but in doing so, he has been able to sandbag it and subordinate it as a political force.

So far, that is.

Whether he is fully conscious of it or not, Duterte’s ascendancy has severely shaken all significant political institutions and political players in the country, from right to left.

Civil society mobilises
Where opposition to Duterte has developed over the last six months has been from civil society. A leading force is I Defend, a broad grouping of over 50 people’s organisations and non-governmental organisations that has waged an unremitting struggle against the extra-judicial killings. Another is the coalition against the Marcos burial at the Libingan ng mga Bayani.

While Malacañang has painted these formations as “dilawan,” or yellow, the reality is that most of their partisans are progressives that are as opposed to a “yellow restoration” as they are to Duterte’s policies, as well as newer and younger forces drawn from the post-EDSA and millennial generations that have become alarmed at Duterte’s fascist turn.

This growing opposition does not seek a reprise of 1986, perhaps heeding Marx’s warning that “history first unfolds as tragedy, then repeats itself as comedy.” It is increasingly realising that the fight for human rights and due process must be joined to a revolutionary program of participatory politics and economic democracy – to socialism, in the view of many – if it is to turn the fascist tide. There is no going back to EDSA.

What the opposition still has to internalise though is that opposing fascism in power will not be, to borrow a saying from Mao, “a dinner party,” that it will indeed be exceedingly difficult and demand great sacrifices.

Moreover, there is no guarantee of success in the short or medium term. Fascism in power can be extraordinarily long-lived. The Franco regime in Spain lasted 39 years, while Salazar’s Estado Novo in neighbouring Portugal went on for 42 years.

Like the anti-Marcos resistance four decades back, the only certainty members of the anti-fascist front can count on is that they’re doing the right thing. And that, for some, is a certainty worth dying for.

• Walden Bello made the only recorded resignation out of principle in the history of the Congress of the Republic of the Philippines in 2015 owing to what he saw as the Aquino administration’s double standards in dealing with corruption, failure to deliver economic and social reform, and subservience to the United States. An anti-dictatorship activist, he was principal author of Development Debacle: The World Bank in the Philippines, which exposed the Marcos-World Bank alliance in forging the export-oriented capitalist development model. A retired professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines, he is currently senior research fellow at Kyoto University and professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton.

This article by Walden Bello is an abbreviated adaptation of a much longer piece to be published in the Philippine Sociological Review and is published by Asia Pacific Report with the permission of the author. Other Walden Bello articles on Rappler.

Communications professor Crispin C. Maslog has made a series of warnings about “Martial Law amnesia” in the Philippines in newspaper columns and now in a television programme, Balitanghali.

His latest criticisms in the programme titled “Deklarasyon ng Martial Law” (Declaration of Martial Law) are of the period 1972 to 1981 when many human rights violations were carried out after dictator Ferdinand Marcos declared Martial Law on 21 September 1972.

Marcos was ousted by a peaceful Filipino “People Power” mass revolution that began in 1983 and ended in 1986.

Some critics draw parallels with the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte, less than three months into a six-year term of office.

Balitanghali is the daily noontime newscast of GMA News TV anchored by Raffy Tima and Connie Sison.

Dr Maslog is a former journalist with Agence France-Presse and communication professor at Silliman University and University of the Philippines Los Baños.

He writes widely on media issues and contributes columns to Asia Pacific Report.

The interview is bilingual in Tagalog and English.

For more videos from Balitanghali, visit www.gmanetwork.com/balitanghali.

• A love-hate relationship with President Duterte
• Philippines president’s ‘hit man’ allegations
  

By a special correspondent in Manila

To mark the 44th anniversary of Martial Law in the Philippines today and to call to mind the atrocities it had inflicted on its victims, thousands of youth and students from across the country have joined street protests as part of the “Youth Action Day for Education, Peace, and Human Rights”.

In a news release, militant youth group Anakbayan said that thousands of university students walked out of their classes to join the protest actions.

Students from various universities in Metro Manila, Baguio City, Pampanga, Laguna, Cebu, Iloilo, Tacloban, Cagayan de Oro, Davao, and other major regional centers walk out of their classes to press their demands for free education, peace talks, and respect for human rights.

“We are here in the streets to urge President Rodrigo Duterte to bring his promised ‘change’ to the education sector by taking decisive actions against tuition hikes,” Anakbayan national chairperson Vencer Crisostomo said.

Among Metro Manila campuses that held walkouts were the Polytechnic University of the Philippines (PUP) main campus in Sta. Mesa, UP Diliman, UP Manila, as well as several private schools in the University Belt in Manila.

The protest action included a caravan, with the assembly point at the University of Santo Tomas area, which was set to proceed to historic Mendiola Bridge near the Malacañan Palace.

Anakbayan condemned the Marcos dictatorship not only for its corruption and human rights violations but also for initiating the deregulation of the education sector resulting in a 5,000-7,000 percent hike in tuition from P700-P2,600 (up to NZ$75) a semester in 1982 to P40,000-80,000 (NZ$1145 – $2290) this year.

Duterte encourages activities
Earlier in the day, Malacañang said that President Duterte encouraged activities to mark the event as long as the protesters won’t cause inconvenience to the public.

“We understand some groups would mark the anniversary through public assembly,” Presidential Communications Secretary Martin Andanar said in a statement.

“The President encourages various activities to commemorate the occasion as long as they are peaceful and no public inconvenience or destruction of properties may ensue,” he added.

Andanar, meanwhile, reminded that September 21 was a regular working day.

At the University of Santo Tomas at the weekend, veteran communications professor Crispin Maslog gave a compelling presentation on “Martial law for the millenials”, showing some highlights of the injustices and atrocities under the dictator Ferdinand Marcos under Martial Law between 1972 and 1981.

He noted that of more than 400 people present, mostly student journalists and faculty, only half a dozen had been alive at the time of Martial Law.

Visiting professor David Robie, director of New Zealand’s Pacific Media Centre, also gave a lecture on a “digital publishing strategy for human rights” featuring Asia Pacific Report.

GMA News Network

• Students urged never to forget Martial Law atrocities
• Crispin Maslog: A love-hate relationship with President Duterte
• Philippines president ‘hit man’s’ allegations

Victims of horrifying acts of torture during Martial Law in the Philippines have recounted their painful experiences before Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno.

Etta Rosales, former chairperson of the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) who experienced the atrocities of the dictatorship under Ferdinand Marcos, recounted: “They had a gun and they threatened me to answer the question, otherwise they [would] shoot [me].”

She was also raped, tortured, and went through electric shock and Russian roulette.

Rosales is among the petitioners asking the Supreme Court to stop the burial of the late dictator at the Libingan ng mga Bayani, which President Rodrigo Duterte had allowed supposedly for the country to be able to move on from that period of history 1972-1981.

Another petitioner in one of the cases, Trinidad Herrera, told the Chief Justice about her terrible experience under the dictatorship.

“‘Pinatanggal nila ang aking blusa at ‘nilagay ang linya ng kuryente sa suso ko. Pumasok pa ang kuryente sa katawan ko hanggang di ko na nakayanan,” Herrera tearfully recalled during oral arguments on the petition against a hero’s burial for the late president Ferdinand Marcos.

(They ordered me to remove my blouse and they applied electric shock on my breast. Electricity went through my body until I couldn’t take it anymore.)

“They even put water on the floor so that the electricity would enter my body,” she added in Filipino.

‘Touching me’
Another victim, Fe Mangahas, shared: “They would scare me again by touching me and breathing down my neck and then I felt something like naihi ako (I peed). I figured it was blood because at the time I did not realize I was two months pregnant.”

“When they found out I was pregnant I was released, but I was asked to report weekly about my whereabouts. I had to do this every Saturday for a year,” she added.

Other victims also detailed what they went through when they were captured by uniformed men.

Maria Christina Rodriguez said her captors burned her skin with cigarette. Her fingers were swollen because of bullet-pressing.

Maria Christina Bawagan said her thighs were hit until they looked like rotten vegetables. She was sexually abused, with her captors inserting objects into her vagina and touching her breasts while blindfolded. She said she may never know who exactly tortured her, but she clearly remembered their voice.

Each of these women remembered the exact date they were captured and went through the life-scarring experience.

Sereno asked the petitioners, who are claimants for compensation under Republic Act 10368 or the Human Rights Victims Reparations Act, to speak before the court. (What the gov’t still owes Martial Law victims)

She told them, “The Court is listening.”

Not about the money
During her interpellation of former Akbayan Representative Ibarra Gutierrez III, lawyer for one of the petitioning groups, Sereno asked if the monetary compensation for the victims was not sufficient.

Gutierrez responded: “No, your Honor, because the law explicitly acknowledges to recognize the [victims and their heroism and sacrifices].”

He also said that money is not equivalent to the restoration of dignity of the victims.

The late strongman’s state burial, he said, would “prolong and extend” the suffering of the victims.

Human Rights Victims Claims Board (HRVCB) Chairperson Lina Sarmiento, who was one of the resource persons invited, said that out of over 75,000 claims, they have only finished processing 17,000.

HCRVB can only start distributing the compensation after every case has been settled because the P10 billion funds allotted will be divided according to the intensity of human rights violations experienced by each victim.

Sarmiento said they are hoping to finish the work before May 12, 2018, when their office expires.

Non-repetition
Also appearing as a resource person, CHR Chairperson Chito Gascon said the state has an obligation for “non-repetition” of the trauma they experienced during Martial Law.

“There is a commitment on the part of the state [to] non-repetition, [that] the victims should not be exposed to re-traumatization,” he told Chief Justice Sereno.

Gascon stressed that local and international laws acknowledge reparations as a “positive act that the stake must undertake to [prevent] impunity.”

Patty Pasion writes for Rappler.

• Worse than death: Torture methods during Martial Law
• #NeverAgain: Martial Law stories young people need to hear
• LIVE: SC oral arguments on Marcos burial at the Libingan ng mga Bayan

Indonesia’s Golkar party wants former strongman General Suharto to be declared a national hero. In the Philippines, President-elect Rodrigo Duterte is in favor of burying the dictator Ferdinand Marcos in a heroes’ cemetery.

Supporters of Suharto and Marcos believe they deserve to be recognised as heroes in their respective countries but human rights groups insist the two leaders are dictators not worthy of emulation.

Suharto, known as the “Smiling General”, ruled the country for 32 years until a student-led uprising forced him to step down in 1998. He died ten years later.

In 2010, his name was floated as a possible nominee in the annual recognition of national heroes. It was not approved by the government but the proposal was revived again last year.

A government agency is studying the nomination but President Joko Widodo will have the final decision when he appoints new national heroes in November.

Supporters assert that Suharto’s leadership brought stability and prosperity in the country. When he was removed from power, Indonesia’s economy was already the biggest in Southeast Asia.

But critics accused Suharto of being an authoritarian leader who committed widespread atrocities to silence the opposition. He and his family are also known for plundering the nation’s wealth.

Misused state funds
Last year, the Supreme Court ordered Suharto’s family to pay $325 million after one of Suharto’s foundations was found guilty of misusing state funds to bankroll various business transactions.

During Suharto’s rise to power, more than half a million suspected communists and their sympathisers were allegedly killed and arrested by the military. There are various initiatives today which seek to determine the truth about this dark period in Indonesia’s modern history.

Meanwhile, in the Philippines, the proposal to bury Marcos in a heroes’ cemetery continues to be a divisive issue.

Like Suharto, Marcos ruled as a strongman for two decades until he was ousted by a peaceful “People Power” uprising in 1986. He declared Martial Law in 1972 to save the republic from the communist threat but his rivals think it was merely a ruse to extend his term.

Marcos is accused of using the military to intimidate the opposition. Thousands became victims of human rights violations such as torture, unlawful arrests, enforced disappearances, and extrajudicial killings.

Marcos is also known to have amassed ill-gotten properties which he entrusted to cronies and family members.

He died in 1989 in Hawaii. His body is interred in a private air conditioned mausoleum in his home province while his family continues to seek a hero’s burial in Manila.

‘Golden age’
Supporters of Marcos refer to the Martial Law years as the Philippines’ “golden age” because the country supposedly enjoyed peace and economic boom. They add that as a former World War II soldier and elected president, Marcos has the right to be buried in the heroes’ cemetery.

The newly-elected president endorses a hero’s burial for Marcos since it would lead to national healing and reconciliation. But outgoing President Benigno Aquino II rejects the proposal by emphasising that the heroes’ cemetery is “reserved for people worthy of praise and emulation”.

Suharto and Marcos died several years ago, but their legacy is still being debated. They were humiliated when they were ousted from power yet their names have undergone rehabilitation in recent years.

How did this happen? At least two factors are immediately apparent.

First, their subordinates and cronies are still influential in the bureaucracy. But second and equally importantly, those who succeeded them have failed to convincingly demonstrate to the people the effectiveness of a democratic system in delivering economic development and confronting remaining political and social challenges.

Things like poverty and political gridlock are still realities in both Indonesia and the Philippines, making many yearn for a time where decisive leadership can offer a quicker fix.

Meanwhile, supporters of Suharto and Marcos are happy to exploit public frustration to promote historical revisionism.

It is not simply enough to resist proposals recognising Suharto and Marcos as national heroes. The more important question that requires urgent answering is this: Why are an increasing number of Indonesians and Filipinos still open to naming both dictators as heroes?

Mong Palatino is a Diplomat columnist, regular blogger and Global Voices regional editor for Southeast Asia and Oceania. This is republished from The Diplomat with permission.

At the moment, he is trailing with less than 200,000 votes – 1 percent of the vote – separating him from establishment reformist Leni Robredo, who seized his early lead with a late surge of votes in rural areas.

Anti-establishment firebrand Rodrigo Duterte is set to have secured a huge presidential win after an incendiary campaign dominated by his profanity-laced vows to kill criminals.

Duterte, 71, the longtime mayor of the southern city of Davao, hypnotised millions with his vows of brutal but quick solutions to the nation’s twin plagues of crime and poverty.

Many believed the outgoing Aquino administration had failed to tackle these issues in spite off strong economic growth in recent years.

Duterte had a commanding lead over his four rivals with more than 38 percent of the vote.

He vowed that he would be a “dictator” against evil and that he would step down in six months if he failed to stamp out corruption.

“I will be strict. I will be a dictator, no doubt it. But only against forces of evil — criminality, drugs and corruption in government,” Duterte said in his hometown of Davao.

The unofficial tally late yesterday, was showing less than 93 percent of the total votes cast with Robredo, leading Senator Marcos by less than 200,000 votes

“It could easily shift… It’s less than one percentage point, which means we need 99-point-something [to see who is going to win],” Pulse Asia reasearch director Ana Tabunda said in an interview with Rappler.

Tight race
It’s higher than Tabunda’s earlier projection that a 97 percent transmission rate of the voting results will already show a winner in the tight race. Marcos previously led Robredo by 3 percentage points.

The camp of Marcos has warned of electoral cheating, noting that Robredo’s numbers rose late Monday night when people were supposedly not watching the results. They want the transmission of the results suspended, claiming that it is misleading people into thinking that Robredo is winning the race.

But Tabunda said she expected the late rise of Robredo’s numbers because of the demographics of her supporters.

Surveys showed that Marcos was stronger in urban areas, which were the first ones to transmit their results. Results from rural areas, where Robredo has more supporters, came in later because of slower internet connections.

• Earlier Duterte victory story
• Live election results

See #PHVote 2016 Live Results

At 9pm last night with 64.92 percent of precincts reporting, “The Punisher” Duterte, a pre-election survey front-runner, was topping the poll with 11,272,062 votes.

In an earlier phone interview with Rappler, amid the transmission of votes, Duterte said he was not yet confident that he would win.

“Hanggang the last vote na hindi pa nabilang, I am not there until I’m there,” the mayor said. “Hindi ko naman kontrolado kung talagang manalo ako. I just keep quiet.“

(Until the last vote has not been counted, I am not there until I’m there. The outcome of the presidential race is not in my hands. I just keep quiet.)

Duterte is followed by independent candidate Senator Grace Poe with 6,406,410 votes.

Administration standard-bearer Manuel Roxas II was closely behind Poe with 6,298,801.

United Nationalist Alliance (UNA)’s Vice-President Jejomar Binay (3,818,849 votes) and People’s Reform Party’s Miriam Defensor Santiago (1,164,571) were in 4th and 5th places, respectively.

• Elections live newsfeed via Rappler

While I was grappling with the horrible impositions of Martial Law when I was editor-in-chief of Philippine Panorama, I had to run to some safe, soul-restorative place on weekends outside the city. It was at the home of Cris and his wife scientist, Flor, on the University of the Philippines Los Baños (UPLB) campus that I found comfort and assurance that all will be well, that the tyrant Ferdinand Marcos and his family will be driven away from the land, and that democracy will be restored.

His article should remind us that Martial Law should never happen again – and the

perpetrators not be returned to seats of power. – Domini M. Torrevillas, The Philippine Star

By CRISPIN C. MASLOG in Manila

Somehow, today’s university student generation is not to blame for its Martial Law amnesia. These people were not yet born at the time Martial Law was proclaimed 44 years ago!

We, the older folks, are to blame. We did not teach them history properly – and I mean by we, mainly the Philippine government and the mass media who suffered the most under the Martial Law regime of Ferdinand Marcos.

Now that the surviving members of the Marcos family are active in politics again and pushing a revisionist version of Martial Law history, we are worried, to say the least.

So when I told students at Silliman’s College of Mass Communication recently about the abuses during Martial Law proclaimed by Marcos in 1972, they were aghast at what they heard. I told the group that before Martial Law was proclaimed in 1972, the Philippines went through hard times under Marcos’ two four-year terms from 1965 to 1973 – the years of discontent.

There was a dramatic increase in poverty during Marcos’ two elective terms, resulting in social unrest.

Yet Marcos wanted to extend his term, which he could not do legally because he was limited by the Constitution to two presidential terms ending in 1972. So he decided to suspend the Constitution and declare Martial Law on Sept. 21, 1972.

The first few years under Martial Law were peaceful and orderly. The average person liked that people were disciplined. But people were disciplined because they were afraid.

More corrupt
And soon after 1972, Marcos and his family became more corrupt because no one, especially the mass media, was free to criticise them. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The next 14 years witnessed corruption unparalleled in Philippine history.

Instead of improving, the Philippine economy took a nosedive during the 14 years of Martial Law because of cronyism and economic plunder. Cronyism was an “economic system” where every major economic activity was controlled by the First Family, their relatives, or cronies.

This phenomenon was documented meticulously by Ricardo Manapat in his 615-page book, Some Are Smarter Than Others: The History of Marcos’ Crony Capitalism (Aletheia Publications, NY, 1991). The New York Times has reviewed the book as “impressively documented”.

Answering criticisms about relatives who became millionaires overnight during Martial Law, Madame Imelda is quoted to have replied: “My dear, there are always people who are just a little faster, more brilliant, more aggressive.”

The Manapat book is based on 11 years of research and writing and is the authoritative source of information on the economic plunder of the Philippines under Marcos. The title of the book is based on a famous quote from Madame Imelda.

The major cronies, as documented in Manapat’s book, were: Roberto Benedicto who controlled the sugar industry, Danding Cojuangco who monopolised the coconut industry, Antonio Floirendo who cornered the banana industry, and Hans Menzi who lorded over the mining and paper industries.

Cronyism meant giving loans to friends that had little or no collateral, whose corporations were undercapitalised. Marcos, family and his cronies used the national coffers, the resources of private banks, and even international loans from multinational banks for their business. Aid money from the US and Japan were placed at the disposal of Marcos’ money-making network.

Squandered loans
Until today we are still paying for these loans squandered by the Marcos regime.

The corruption reached such a massive scale that it took its toll on the Philippine economy and the lives of the average Filipino. By 1986, just before People Power I, the number of Filipinos living below the poverty line doubled from 18 million in 1965 to 35 million.

The history of this economic plunder is one of the blind spots in the minds of the Filipino millenials today.  It worries me and my generation no end, that the son of Ferdinand Marcos is running for vice-president of the land, and be just a heartbeat away from the presidency.

If that happens, philosopher George Santayana may again be proven right when he said long ago that a people who do not remember their past are condemned to repeat it.

Domini M. Torrevillas is a columnist on The Philippine Star. One of her From The Stands columns this month was devoted to this article by Professor Maslog and is republished here with the permission of the author. The Philippines presidential election is due on Monday, May 9.

• Martial Law under Marcos at Rappler

On March 2, 1962, General Ne Win led a coup in Myanmar (then known as Burma) and established a military dictatorship which lasted until 2010.

Slightly more than a decade later, on September 21, 1972, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law which allowed him to remain in power until 1986.

And just a few years before that, on September 30, 1965, a mutiny led to the killing of some generals which provoked the Indonesian military to retaliate by arresting and killing communists and suspected sympathisers of communist groups across the country.

In Myanmar, the Philippines, and Indonesia, these were historic events which made a lasting political impact. For local scholars and activists, these were the days when democracy died in their countries.

The 1962 coup in Burma gave the military absolute power to rule over the whole country. While it didn’t end the ethnic civil wars which are still raging up to this day, it made the junta the most powerful political force in the country.

A student uprising in 1988 challenged the junta but it was violently suppressed. Elections were held in 1990 but the junta ignored the results and arrested leaders of the winning party, the National League for Democracy (NLD).

It was only in 2010 when significant political reforms were instituted which led to the release of political prisoners, the lifting of media censorship, and the holding of an and open and free election.

Major defeat
The military is still influential in the bureaucracy but its party experienced a major defeat in last year’s election, which saw the NLD win a supermajority. Some observers noted that after 54 years, democracy was restored in Myanmar when the NLD assumed control of the government.

While there are various reasons why Myanmar remained an underdeveloped nation in the past half century, many are blaming the “death of democracy” in 1962 as the crucial turning point in the country’s history.

Historian Thant Myint-U, who is also executive director of Yangon Heritage Trust, wrote a Facebook post which quickly became popular about the significance of the 1962 coup. The historian wrote:

“Burma was then one of the better off countries in the region, with a per capita income three times greater than Indonesia, twice that of Thailand and nearly equal to South Korea. Over the coming decades, the Burmese people would receive little in return for having to surrender their basic freedoms.”

This argument is also invoked by pro-democracy forces when they accuse the junta of subverting not only Myanmar’s democracy but also the country’s development.

Interestingly, Filipinos also attribute the country’s lack of development to the brutal reign of a military-backed government. Marcos placed the country under military administration in 1972, purportedly to thwart a communist takeover.

But his political rivals believed it was only a ruse to extend his term which was supposed to end in 1973. During martial law, opposition leaders were detained, media censorship was enforced, and the people’s civil liberties were taken away.

‘Sick man of Asia’
When Marcos was ousted by a peaceful uprising in 1986, the Philippines was already known as the “sick man of Asia” because of widespread poverty in the country. Marcos and his cronies were accused of plundering the nation’s coffers while the majority of Filipinos lived a life of penury.

Marcos declared September 21 as National Thanksgiving Day. But for most Filipinos, it was the day when democracy died in the Philippines. A presidential and legislative election is due this year on May 9.

The events that led to the communist purge in Indonesia are not widely known and discussed because the government is unwilling to determine what really happened during those critical months when almost a million people died across the country. What is clear is that it led to the rise of General Suharto, who went on to rule Indonesia until 1998 when he was ousted.

Suharto is often compared to Marcos because both relied on the military for political support, both were accused of taking part in unprecedented corruption and committing human rights abuses during their term; both were unseated by a mass uprising.

It was only after Suharto’s fall from power when survivors and other witnesses were able to testify about the 1965 mass killings. Indonesia’s democracy suffered during the reign of Suharto and the collapse began during the failed coup attempt on September 30, 1965.

Remembering the day when democracy died proved useful in mobilizing the people to take action in order to expel or challenge the anti-democratic elements in society. It is also an effective information campaign to keep the democratic struggle relevant.

In the case of Myanmar, it sustains the narrative to push the country’s transition to modern democracy. In the Philippines, it is once more a potent political issue because the son of Marcos is running for vice president in the May 2016 elections. In Indonesia, survivors and relatives of the 1965 anti-communist hysteria continue to seek justice and apology from the state.

Ruling parties accused
Elsewhere in the region, civil society groups are accusing the incumbent ruling parties of killing democracy as part of a campaign to build a strong political movement. Thai activists are calling for the restoration of civilian rule after the army grabbed power in May 2014.

In Malaysia, various groups formed a coalition to demand the resignation of Prime Minister Najib Razak who is battling corruption charges. Najib is also accused of stifling the people’s right to free speech.

Democracy has died several times in Southeast Asia and its death has often inspired many people to join forces in order to bring it back to life. At times, it has taken many years and decades before democracy has been restored. But what is important is that the democratic ideal has become the true, unifying goal in the region.

Mong Palatino is a regular blogger and Global Voices regional editor for Southeast Asia and Oceania. This article was first published in The Diplomat and is republished here with permission.

• The Philippines faces presidential and legislative elections on May 9.

ARCHIVE: Flashback to the declaration of Martial Law on September 21, 1972: InterAksyon.com posted a series of testimonies from human rights victims of the Marcos regime.

Thousands of Filipinos were murdered, tortured, or disappeared in the 14 years the country was under a dictatorship.

After the fall of the Marcos regime in 1986, close to 10,000 human rights victims – the survivors themselves or their families – filed a class suit against the Marcos estate.

Ill-gotten wealth
A US district court in Hawai’i ruled in January 1995 that the victims are entitled to a share of the ill-gotten wealth recovered from the Marcoses: a total of $2.7 billion for their torment and torture.

However, the legal victory remains only on paper. The Hawai’i ruling has to be enforced in the Philippines by a local court.

The Makati Regional Trial Court is currently hearing the case but the Marcoses have so far been successful in blocking compensation to the plaintiffs.

So far, only $10 million, or $1000 each, has been awarded to the victims and their kin. The money is not even part of the $2.7-billion compensatory and exemplary damages awarded by the Hawaii court but is from a settlement with Marcos crony, Jose Yao Campos, who has real estate properties in Texas and Colorado.

There was nothing safe about the “safehouse” in Pasig where during the early Martial Law years, then teacher Loretta Ann “Etta” Rosales and her five companions were brought to.

It was in this place where Rosales, who would later head the Commission on Human Rights, was interrogated and tortured for a month by her captors – military agents who turned out to be her students at the Jose Rizal College.

Rosales was electrocuted and sexually abused. Hot candle wax was also poured on her skin and a wet cloth was used to suffocate her.

Despite her anguish, Rosales says she never thought that it would already be her end. “I wasn’t thinking of dying, I was fighting for life.”

The 40 Years after Martial Law archive

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