Part Three
Evolution of Marcos Doctrine
THE late Constitutional Convention Delegate Antonio R. Tupaz said: “History and our long process of subjugation have developed in Philippine society a colonial structure: a semifeudal system, which resembles an inverted pyramid.”
“At the very bottom,” he said, “supporting the entire shaky pyramid is an extremely small oligarchy consisting of perhaps over a hundred key rich families. This then broadens wider to the top of the inverted pyramid where the impoverished masses—by the millions—lay dormant but slowly agitating for social reforms. Once galvanized into motion and violence, this sector will shake the entire pyramid and topple it over, splitting it asunder.”
Himself a noted constitutionalist and historian, Tupaz said Philippine society has undergone stress and strain since 1946.
President Manuel Roxas, besieged with herculean efforts at national rehabilitation following World War II, suffered and died from a fatal heart attack while in office. President Elpidio Quirino, resuming the rehabilitation efforts, was confronted with a communist conspiracy whose propagators were effectively located at all fronts—in the fields, in the mountains, in the halls of Congress, in government service, in the universities, factories, offices and in mass media. He was swept out of office by an overwhelming victory given to Ramon Magsaysay by the electorate.
With American help, Magsaysay successfully contained the insurgents with his “carrot and stick” strategy and brought back the people’s faith and confidence in government, but fate intervened and cut short his dynamic life while on his way back to Manila from Cebu in 1957, when his plane crashed into a mountainside.
Hurriedly summoned from Australia while on an official mission, Vice President Carlos Garcia assumed the presidency and embarked on a nationalist program of economic development in an environment of American neocolonialism that rapidly pervaded over the country.
With American support, President Diosdado Macapagal replaced Garcia and attempted to build a welfare state.
“There was much promise but time and the people’s patience ran out on him and in 1965, President Ferdinand E. Marcos was elected Chief Executive in one of the most hard-fought presidential elections in our history,” Tupaz said.
“Marked for significant events from the very start of his term, Marcos programmed and implemented an infrastructure network of roads, highways, bridges, dams, communication facilities, and sea and air transportation that, in their cumulative effects, surpassed all that was ever done by the Philippine-American government since 1900,” Tupaz pointed out.
Precise about his areas of concentration, he also sparked the massive production of rice and corn, with the former developing into near-miracle strains and production levels that had enthusiastic observers heralding the breaking of the “Green Revolution” in Philippine soil preparatory to its sweep of the entire Asian region.
A visionary, Marcos tackled the plight of schoolchildren who annually experienced severe shortages in physical space. Hundreds of thousands of schoolhouses, prefabricated, were built in every barrio of the archipelago.
To these priority areas of infrastructure, rice and schoolhouses, he added power and electricity. In one of the most imaginative and gigantic tasks of engineering, the government mobilized a corps of Filipino engineers and technologists to build the massive Pantabangan Dam in Northern Luzon to control the food problems and provide irrigation to hundreds of thousands of square miles of rice fields and fishponds, thus reflecting the nationwide campaign to install electrification facilities in each and every barrio and brought the benefits of science and industrialization to every citizen of the islands.
While successfully carrying out his infrastructure development with efficiency, President Marcos was also engaged in a battle to improve the quality of life of the people with the First Lady, Mrs. Imelda R. Marcos, leading the way by launching a cultural development program that saw some of the world’s best artists performing before Filipino audiences at subsidized prices. Indigenous musical and theatrical groups were also formed and artists’ associations organized to encourage the formation of the native arts.
“Together with this,” recalled Tupaz, “Mrs. Marcos drew up a nationwide family-planning program and implemented it to bring down the population growth to tolerable levels so as not to waste away gains made in the economy due to increasing demands of the exploding population.”
“But the old society, immersed in the feudal dislocations spawned by an oligarchic few and the impoverished millions, blocked every effort of Mrs. Marcos,” Tupaz said.
“Actually,” he said, “at the center of the problem is the political system itself that did not offer solutions to the elimination of the colonial structure. The electorate, long brainwashed into the adulation of populist and charismatic gestures, turned to elected officials for jobs, money, canned goods, schooling, medical bills and for concessions and favors. Politicians, responding to this selfish demand from voters, constituted themselves as patrons and dispensers of favors, totally neglecting their duty to become lawmakers and thereby fashion meaningful changes in our political, economic and social institutions.
“This was made worst by the entire educational system, which strongly adhered to the elitist European-style of education where the premium was on glamour courses such as law, medicine, liberal arts and philosophy. This led to the detriment of science, engineering, technology and other vocational courses whose actual contributions to the national developmental pattern would have been tremendous.”
To be continued
To reach the writer, e-mail cecilio.arillo@gmail.com.