Ferdinand Marcos

I

Introduction

Ferdinand Marcos (1917-1989), president-dictator of the Republic of the Philippines from 1965 to 1986. Marcos was twice elected to the presidency before he declared martial law and seized dictatorial powers in 1972. A massive nonviolent protest known as the People Power Movement forced him from office in 1986. His authoritarian regime is remembered for its rampant corruption at the highest levels of government and its suppression of political dissent and the democratic process.

II

Early Years

Ferdinand Edralin Marcos was born in Sarrat, in the province of Ilocos Norte in northwestern Luzon Island. He was the first son of Mariano Marcos, a politician, and Josefa Edralin, a teacher. In the 1935 election year his father’s political adversary, Julio Nalundasan, was murdered after winning the Ilocos Norte seat in the national legislature. In 1938 Marcos was arrested in connection with the murder, but he successfully petitioned the Philippine Supreme Court for release on bail, allowing him to complete his education. In 1939 Marcos received a bachelor’s degree in law from the University of the Philippines and subsequently passed the bar exam with high scores. Later that year he was found guilty of murder and sentenced to a minimum of ten years in prison. While in prison he wrote his own appeal, and in 1940 he argued his own case in front of Supreme Court justice José P. Laurel, who overturned his murder conviction.

Marcos served in the Philippine armed forces during World War II (1939-1945). Marcos later claimed to have been a leader of the guerrilla resistance against the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, a claim that he capitalized on throughout his political career. The United States government never challenged Marcos’s account of his wartime activities while he was in power; however, U.S. Army documents made public in 1986 revealed that Marcos had fabricated his claim of being a highly decorated guerrilla leader.

III

Political Career

After the war the Philippines gained full independence from the United States. (It had been a commonwealth of the United States since 1935, with autonomy in all matters except foreign policy.) From 1946 to 1947 Marcos worked as an assistant to the first president of the newly independent republic, Manuel Roxas. Roxas had split from the Nationalist Party—up until then the dominant political party in the Philippines—to form the Liberal Party. Marcos, as a Liberal Party candidate, won the Ilocos Norte seat in the Philippine House of Representatives in 1949; he held the post for three terms, until 1959. In 1954, meanwhile, he married Imelda Romualdez, a former beauty-pageant queen from Leyte Island, and they quickly became glamorous members of the Philippine elite.

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In 1959 Marcos won a seat in the Senate; he served as Senate president from 1963 to 1965. Marcos then jumped political parties to enter the 1965 presidential campaign as the Nationalist Party candidate against incumbent president Diosdado Macapagal. Marcos presented himself as the individual who could break a long pattern of corruption and inadequate leadership. He also had enthusiastic support from American president Lyndon B. Johnson and the international business community. Marcos easily won the election and was inaugurated as president on December 30.

A

Marcos as President

From the start of Marcos’s presidency, escalating United States involvement in the Vietnam War (1959-1975) made the U.S. military bases in the Philippines—Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base—critical staging areas for American forces. Consequently, the war funneled billions of dollars into the Philippine economy. Many public-works projects, financed by foreign loans, also helped the economy to develop rapidly. In addition, Imelda Marcos launched a series of prestige projects in Manila, including the building of museums and grand hotels.

In 1969, after campaigning on the slogan “Rice and Roads,” Marcos was reelected president with 74 percent of the vote. He was the first president of the Philippines to win a second term, which was the most allowed under the country’s constitution. The races for both houses of the Philippine Congress also went highly in favor of Marcos’s supporters and his Nationalist Party.

During his second term Marcos faced a host of domestic problems. Many university students and other Filipinos actively opposed the continued U.S. military presence in the Philippines and Marcos’s support for U.S. policy in Vietnam. The Communist Party of the Philippines also became more active, organizing widespread unrest among the urban and rural poor. In the southern Philippine islands, a Muslim separatist movement was building momentum. And as Marcos approached the end of his second term in office, it became increasingly clear that a constitutional convention charged with drafting a new, postindependence constitution did not intend to abolish the two-term limit for the presidency. Thus, Marcos faced the prospect of having to leave office after 1973.

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