4 - Organizing coercion in the Philippines

Summary

A Spanish colony since the mid-1500s, the Philippine Islands became an American colony after a period of warfare at the turn of the twentieth century, and achieved Commonwealth status and limited domestic autonomy in 1935. The archipelago saw brutal fighting after its occupation by Japan in 1941; granted independence in 1946, it was then governed by a series of democratically elected presidents. From the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, the government sought to suppress a rebellion by the Communist Hukbalahap insurgency. The sixth president, Ferdinand Marcos, was elected in 1965 and re-elected in 1969. Unable to run for a third term, Marcos declared martial law in September 1972, and remained in office until deposed by a combination of military coup-defection and mass uprising – the so-called People's Power revolution – in 1986.

This chapter examines the origins of Marcos’ internal security apparatus, particularly the coercive institutions that operated from the declaration of martial law in September 1972 to his fall from power in 1986. Like Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan, Marcos had the opportunity to reorganize the Philippines’ coercive apparatus and did so. However, Marcos chose the opposite kind of coercive institutional design to that of Chiang: one that was fragmented and socially exclusive. This chapter examines why. It shows that fragmentation and exclusivity were not dictated either by external American influence or by the social factors and institutions that Marcos inherited. If either American assistance or preferences were decisive, the Philippines should have emphasized unitary internal security forces, especially police, to handle the popular threat of communist subversion. If institutional inheritance were determinative, then the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) should have remained socially inclusive, and Marcos would not have been able to pursue unitary internal security institutions as a democratically elected leader but then create fragmented ones as he moved toward dictatorial rule.

For a complete explanation of why Marcos chose to pursue fragmentation and exclusivity in the coercive apparatus after 1972, then, we must look to his own perceptions of threat. This chapter shows that Marcos created this apparatus primarily to deal with the threat of a coup by the military and security forces, which he feared would pave the way for one of the other elite families in the Philippines to replace him as President.