The Marcos' Return to Power in the Philippines

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. If you lived long enough or if you have ties to the Philippines, you know that one of the great stories of democracy breaking out from a generation or so ago was the dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, being replaced by the popularly-elected Corazon Aquino back in 1986. Now, in global context, more countries were democratizing in those days.

Today, the trend sadly is in the other direction. One of those countries has been the Philippines with the strongman, Rodrigo Duterte, as a polarizing figure in the harsh ways he fought the drug war in that country especially. He and Donald Trump were part of that strongman access, if I can call it that, that Trump was trying to develop. Well, now, there's been another election in the Philippines and the winner is the son of Ferdinand Marcos.

Oh, and his vice president, she's Sara Duterte, the daughter of Rodrigo Duterte. It's one of the most interesting stories in the world right now and, of course, for the 110 million or so people of the Philippines, the most important. We'll open up the phones in a minute to anyone with ties to the Philippines. Joining us now is Adrian De Leon, professor of American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Professor De Leon, thanks for some time today. Welcome to WNYC.

Professor Adrian De Leon: Thank you so much for having me. I wish I could be as optimistic as the previous guest, but I'm looking forward to the discussion today.

Brian: [laughs] You're talking about the United States, not the Philippines with that remark, right?

Professor De Leon: That's right. [chuckles]

Brian: For a generation of listeners who don't remember Ferdinand Marcos or Corazon Aquino or the People Power Movement, can you remind us first what happened in 1986?

Professor De Leon: Yes, so for, I think, people of my generation-- For full disclosure, I'm one of those rotten Millennials that come to global politics a little bit more recently. For, I think, younger generations, what we don't realize is that Ferdinand Marcos ruled the Philippines for over 20 years and ruled the Philippines in very much, I guess, what scholars and I think political analysts would call a very kleptocratic matter, but the thing about him was that he and his wife, Imelda, were incredible performers.

Everything from numbers to national culture campaigns, to the way that they would present themselves to American and global audiences as new-- and they called it a new society in the Philippines, right? One of the ways that they justified martial law in 1972 was to enforce this thing they called a new society by promoting law and order and cleanliness and social hygiene and other kinds of hygiene.

What happened in 1986 was the culmination of 20 or so years of underground organizing in which, I think, the Filipino people, especially in Manila but definitely across the Archipelago, said, "Enough is enough." After several failed campaigns to overthrow Marcos, after the assassination of his political opponent, Ninoy Aquino, Filipinos, especially in Manila, took to the streets, and so this was called the EDSA Revolution or the People Power Revolution.

EDSA is named after one of the major highways, which citizens of Manila occupied and really took to the streets over the course of several days in 1986. One of the things that happened is the United States actually was not only complicit in the removal and the continuity of the Marcos regime, but they were the ones who actually removed Marcos from the Philippines and the Marcos family from the Philippines and sent them to Hawaii and gave them asylum for three years.

What ended up happening is that the People Power Revolution as much as it wanted to instate a more democratic, post-revolutionary government, in a lot of ways, it was continuing what scholars called cacique or dynastic rule because the Aquinos themselves too were part of that ruling class, those political elite families in the Philippines that had vested interests in maintaining their power in the Philippines. I think what we're seeing today is, number one, not just the forgetting like we talk a lot about the forgetting of 1986.

I think what we're seeing is something akin to not just a restoration of old rule but something new. For all intents and purposes, historical and political education in the Philippines is not only at an all-time low but propaganda, especially media and internet propaganda is at an all-time high. The Filipino voters themselves were never fully enfranchised, especially the poor and the working class. This restoration points to the fact that as much as we celebrate 1986 and the People Power Revolution, the revolution never actually got what it wanted, which is a more popular democratic government.

Brian: I want to take you back even before 1986 and then we'll cycle back to the present. I'll ask you if you think that this new Marcos-Duterte administration was elected in a free and fair election and if there's some kind of not just lack of education and not just media disinformation. That's an interesting part of the article that you wrote. We have our media disinformation. Apparently, they have theirs in the Philippines, but also if there's some longing for a strongman that seems to be present around the world in ways that are shocking to a lot of people in this country.

At least, a lot of people listen to the show. To go even further back because it's going to be so interesting and new to a lot of listeners, you trace a rule by dynasty tradition that you just referenced to the days of US colonial rule in the Philippines. This is not something most American kids learn about in school. "What? US colonial rule in the Philippines?" We did what?" What kind of colonial rule did the US have there and when?

Professor De Leon: Yes, that's a great question, I think, too because what happens in the Philippines with systematized political forgetting is also what happens in the United States, right? American students of history from K to 12 and even to college, the students that I teach at USC, I have to walk them back to first principles, which is the United States saw an opportunity with the falling of the Spanish empire in the late 19th century and entered the various wars of revolution that were happening in places like Cuba, in the Philippines, sort of dissent in Puerto Rico as well.

They engaged in 1898 in what we called the Spanish-American War, which was I think a short four months. One of the things that happened was, in the Philippines specifically, the United States promised to be allies of local native leaders, insurgents, promised to align themselves with the revolutionaries who formed what we call the First Philippine Republic, the Malolos Republic. Yet by the time the Spanish-American War was finished, what the United States did behind Filipino leaders' back is go to Paris and sign what was called the Treaty of Paris and purchased the Philippines and other overseas colonies of Spain for, what was 1898, $20 million, which is a lot today, but still a cheap price compared to current colonial regimes--

Brian: Yes, it's not Manhattan for $24, but still.

Professor De Leon: [laughs]

Brian: Even that, people are going to hear that who knows how many years as Americans born here and say, "What? We purchased the Philippines for cash?"

Professor De Leon: That's right. There are a couple of reasons why the US purchased the Philippines. Number one, it was a broader movement to expand American economic influence abroad and try to compete for it and stop, this is familiar to you, the China market, right? The United States saw the Philippines as a stepping stone for military, political, economic rule, and economic supremacy in the Pacific when other competing empires were also trying to scramble for shipping and for trade in places like Hong Kong and Shanghai and Samoa and things like that and Hawaii, of course.

One of the effects that American rule had was that, unlike Latin America, the Philippines as a Spanish colony, number one, we never learned Spanish. Number two, our colonial governments were never as centralized before 1898 in the Philippines. It was local native rulers or, otherwise, Catholic Church or piecemeal industries were ruling the Philippines. One of the things the US did was centralized government.

They seized about 400,000 acres owned by the Catholic Church, which is still the largest landowner in the Philippines. They auctioned it all off to local leaders, who already had money as people who owned sugar plantations or rice or trade and things like that. Number one, they consolidated political families and specific local dynasties by giving them more land, propping up their coffers but, number two, giving them a political center, which was Manila, which was modeled after the United States system with a bicameral regime and things like that.

All these elites all over the archipelago can now meet with each other, speak a common language, and discuss with each other how to continue the colonialism that the United States instated in the Philippines as local political dynasties. A lot of the political dynasties today in the Philippines find themselves rooted to those early families whose wealth was brokered by American occupation.

Brian: Now, listeners, if you have any ties to the Philippines, help us report the story of this recent election, 212-433-WNYC, as we hear all this history from Professor Adrian De Leon from USC. What just happened in this election? Did you support Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., or why do you think the country went back to a Ferdinand Marcos after what the last one did in his time? 212-433-WNYC. Anyone with ties to the Philippines, 212-433-9692.

What do you think this dynastic rule means for the country and does it mean anything for the US or anyone else in the rest of the world? You could answer that too if you want, but help us report this story. If you have ties to the Philippines, if anyone with ties to the Philippines happens to be listening right now, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or you can tweet @BrianLehrer with Professor De Leon, who teaches American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California.

All right, let's come up to the present. Oh, let me do my legal ID here since we're near the top of the hour. This is WNYC-FM HD and AM New York, WNJT-FM 88.1 Trenton, WNJP 88.5 Sussex, WNJY 89.3 Netcom, and WNJO 90.3 Toms River. We are New York and New Jersey Public Radio and live streaming at wnyc.org at two minutes before eleven o'clock. Now, the FCC won't take away our license to operate.

Professor De Leon: [laughs]

Brian: Coming to the present after that bracing, little history lesson for a lot of folks, Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., has been elected president of the Philippines. Was it at least what you would call a free and fair democratic election?

Professor De Leon: With the rise of evidence that I think a lot of citizen journalists and journalist activists have been collecting underground and even poll clerks themselves, I would lean towards no. On one hand, I don't think it's as neat and as tidy as one side of the dominant narrative about these elections, which is the altogether brainwashing of the Filipino people. I think people from colonized nations and post-colonial nations have a lot more agency than that.

Having said that, the systematized forgetting and the recuperation of the Marcos regime and the Marcos family, which, for previous generations, were notorious for their kleptocracy, has really started since the mid-2010s, during which the Marcos family, Imelda and Bongbong himself eyeing for a return to national politics and a return to rule, really started to tap into the machinery of disinformation. In 2020, it was revealed that they contacted Cambridge Analytica in order to try to steer these elections their way, but CA has been dissolved now.

Brian: That firm that was involved in 2016 and I think Brexit too if I remember correctly, right?

Professor De Leon: No, that's right. Yes, that's right. For CA, it was big business to be able to tap into the Philippine elections, but also we can't ignore the role of our social media platforms as well. Zuckerberg and Facebook. Facebook very much turned a blind eye towards the propaganda Facebook groups that started popping up, number one, in support of Duterte and his war on drugs. Number two, in support of alternative histories and alternative narratives of the Marcos regime. What we've collected now is the image of Marcos that seems to be a gaslighting one and, quite frankly, a really shameful one compared to the narratives that survivors and their families and descendants know from the Philippines.

Brian: Right, because it wasn't just a kleptocracy use that word like taking things from people, but it was also a murderous human rights-violating dictatorship.

Professor De Leon: Absolutely.

Brian: Yet is this election to some degree from not just a forgetting but a popular nostalgia for the Marcos senior dictatorship and may be similar to why Duterte had a certain amount of popularity if people think things are out of control with the drug dealers or whatever, and they want a strongman government and they don't care as much about "democracy"?

Professor De Leon: That's a really great question. I think "nostalgia," number one, and "law and order," number two, are the operative words here. Having a Philippine passport as my family did for my early life does not provide you with the sort of socioeconomic as well as political and diplomatic benefits as having an American or Canadian passport might. The Philippines is one of, if not still, the largest exporter of labor migrants all over the world in places like the US, Canada, and Saudi Arabia and Hong Kong, Korea, Japan.

The Philippines actually has no teeth or very little teeth in terms of its ability or its political and disciplinary willingness to be able to hold those host countries accountable for whatever happens, human rights violations in places like Dubai and Saudi Arabia for Filipino workers. That, combined with just the increased precarity and economic and social inequality that's been happening in the Philippines and the rest of the Third World, what we started to see is a desire for not just law and order but for a sort of restoration towards, I guess, what people might imagine as an orderly society.

Enter Marcos and enter the Marcos family and the long systematized efforts they had to remind "the Filipino people" of Ferdinand Marcos, Sr.'s campaign to instate a new society when he declared martial law or even before he declared martial law. What ended up happening was the imagined past of martial law and the Marcos regime never mapped up to the material inequalities that too were taking place during the Marcos regime.

Marcos liked to promote himself as someone who was economically sustainable and could guarantee food security for the Filipino people with things like nutritionally-fortified buns of bread and things like that. That was a major campaign point of his or the fact that he promised the Philippines that they would be self-sustaining in rice. Meanwhile, the Philippines has never actually produced most of its own rice for consumption. It has imported most of it since the Spanish colonial period, right?

These promises of economic and food security and sustainability and a recuperated idea of what it means to be Filipino in a world that sees Filipinos as migrants for export, to use one of my colleagues' words, lead towards this desire for a nostalgia, a nostalgic past wherein they can feel like they have some sense of dignity, some sense of cultural pride. This is the sort of cultural market that the Marcos family really took advantage of in the last about 7 to 10 years as they rose back to power.

Brian: Yvette in Matawan, you're on WNYC. Hello, Yvette.

Yvette: Hi, good morning. My family actually was against the Marcos regime. We actually fought the Marcos regime and we were in danger during martial law. What I wanted to say is that social media definitely played a large part in the denial of facts. It made an already bad situation worse. The fact that the majority of the Philippines, almost 85%, lives in poverty. You're talking about a misinformed class that's easy to manipulate. I suspect there's a lot of mass voting in the local level where they bow to the landlords.

Also, lack of election integrity. That's ballot boxes are outdated and, of course, just the difference between the poor and the rich and the real lack of economic change that benefits the poor people. It's always just a change of hands. Also, corruption is a very big part of Filipino government and culture. These are the things, but the United States is quickly mirroring what's been happening in the Philippines.

Brian: Yvette, how does it feel to you as somebody whose family opposed the Marcos dictatorship back in a previous generation? How does it feel to you to see Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., elected and with all the dynamics that you've been describing and that our guest has been describing?

Yvette: It's really painful. Social media has made the situation really bad and it's affecting the entire world. It's just making everything worse than it already was. It's very painful and it's as if we're starting from scratch, considering that we had the people revolution. That was being denied throughout all these years until now, I guess. They're back. The Marcoses are back.

Brian: Take me one step deeper, Yvette, on social media. Is it that it promotes polarization or is it that the powerful forces of disinformation get to control the flow of information to the people through it?

Yvette: That's exactly right. That, in combination with the local political forces, it's just a combination of all these factors that they succeeded in winning the hearts and minds of the Filipinos. Also crime, I find that that actually is a factor in the upper class supporting Duterte's lack of due process in the approach to crime. They feel that that's the better way and more effective way to control crime in the Philippines. We do have economic inequality. We have second-class citizens, not based on race but based on economic factors.

Brian: Yvette, thank you so much for your really informative call. I hope everything's good with you and your family. Let's see if we can get one more in here before we run out of time. Is Pauline on Line 6 ready to go? Can I put Pauline on the air? Okay, not quite? Well, then I'll ask you one more question, Professor De Leon. That is about if there's any US connection here.

For people who don't have ties to the Philippines, is this just something interesting and distressing that's going on halfway around the world or is there a relationship in any way to conditions in the United States or anything like that? I'm thinking of Trump's flirtation with Duterte and this access of strongman that Trump was trying to put together with him and Modi and Putin. I looked up this morning, some old articles on that.

In 2017, The New York Times had one when the two of them met. It said, "President Trump said on Monday that he had a great relationship with President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, making little mention of human rights at his first face-to-face meeting with an authoritarian leader accused of carrying out a campaign of extrajudicial killings in his nation's war on drugs." That was from The New York Times in 2017. I guess my question is, how much was Trump an aberration in that regard? How much, if at all, has Biden, who's a real foreign policy wonk, return to something that came before or to something better?

Professor De Leon: Again, I wish I could have been more optimistic about how Biden might approach the Philippines. Just yesterday, he sent those encouraging words of welcome to the election of Marcos when the election itself is still very much tentative, I think, as votes are being investigated and counted. Nevertheless, I think a lot of Filipino progressives saw that as an insult in which Biden, like Trump before him and very much in a more insidious way, is overlooking the human rights abuses, not just of Marcos, Sr., and, again, like a familiar narrative that Marcos, Jr., has been trying to put on is, "Don't judge the son for his father's actions."

Meanwhile, at 23 years old, Marcos, Jr., was already a governor and installed there by Marcos, Sr., himself, his father. I think for people of the United States, number one, I think the case of the Philippines is a way to reckon with the history of US colonialism and its aftermath and not just after 1946 when the Philippines gains its independence, but the way that like in the Philippines, like in Central and South America, like in regimes all over the world, the United States plays a very direct role in the installation of authoritarian regimes because it's economically and politically viable for them.

The United States were the ones who flew out the Marcos family. The United States nominally charged Imelda Marcos for evading, I think, one of their courts. I'm forgetting the case off the top of my head. I think the Philippines is one to watch for the United States. Number one, because, historically and, I think, for the future of what's going to happen in this country and it's a rising tide of the way that this country's politics has been steering to the right, the Philippines affords a looking glass.

Not just one that's a looking glass in a comparative way, but one that's particularly important for the US because the US was directly involved and continues to be directly involved. Number two, I think for Americans watching this, a lot of the ways that Trump was trying to court Duterte and a lot of the ways that I think China is still trying to court Duterte and Marcos is because the Philippines is at the heart and center of, I think, what we might call US and China geopolitical tensions, right?

Both countries now with economic and political dominance around the world see the Philippines as a place in which, does the US continue to hold its military bases in the Philippines? Does it continue to use the Philippines as a place to host war games and host rehearsals for future invasions or will China exert its economic and diplomatic power in the Philippines? So far, right now, it's a toss-up. I think what Americans especially have to pay attention to and, I think, can really empathize with is how these geopolitical games impact everyday Filipino people in the diaspora back in the Philippines.

Brian: Professor Adrian De Leon, American studies and ethnicity professor at the University of Southern California, really interesting conversation, and I think very illuminating for a lot of listeners who just haven't heard a lot of these things before. Let's find another reason to talk one time. Thank you very much for your time.

Professor De Leon: Absolutely, thanks so much for bringing me. This is great. Take care.

 

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