As the largely imaginary internal threats used to justify martial law in 1972 evolved into a powerful Muslim secessionist challenge in the South and growing insurgency by the New People’s Army throughout the archipelago, Marcos’s coercive resources were stretched to the limit. In Korea, Park deployed a colossal number of KCIA agents against an opposition that faced major obstacles of organization and a complete lack of arms; in the Philippines, Marcos had about one-third of that number in the combined forces of his army, navy, air force, and constabulary to confront a Muslim insurgency that had at least 15,000 fighters by the mid-1970s and a communist insurgency that by the early 1980s numbered 5,000 to 7,000
guerrillas.78 Another way of highlighting the contrast in the two countries’
security apparatuses is to examine the number of civilians per soldier in 1975: 55 in Korea and 628 in the Philippines.79
What Marcos lacked in sheer numbers, however, he more than made up for in the brutal and public nature of his response to insurgency: under his dictatorship, 3,257 were killed, 35,000 tortured, and 70,000 imprisoned.
“Even at its peak,” explains Alfred W. McCoy, the Marcos regime “lacked the communication and information systems for a blanket repression . . .
[Despite growth in the size of the military,] it was still poorly financed and lacked efficient communications . . . Instead of a machinery that crushed all resistance, the Marcos regime used the spectacle of violence for civil control, becoming a theater state of terror. In the first three years, the military incarcerated some fifty thousand people. But faced with rising insurgency, the regime soon abandoned this costly enterprise. . . . Arrests declined, but ‘salvagings’ [extrajudicial executions] climbed.” The roughly 2,500 “salvagings” committed by Marcos’s security forces had a purposefully public character: victims’ corpses—mutilated from torture—
were commonly displayed as an example for others not to follow. Conversely, the far fewer number of political prisoners and far fewer deaths from domestic political conflict in Korea as compared with the Philippines, notes Byeongil Rho, are associated with the “more institutionalized repressive capacity of the Korean state.”80
Ironically, despite its smaller size, the Philippine military seems to have had far greater influence on the political dynamics of the Marcos regime
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than did the Korean military on the political dynamics of the Park regime.
Two major factors may account for this difference: the greater ability of the Philippine military to assume posts outside strictly defense functions (e.g., as diplomats, heads of government agencies, and regional development officers), and far greater opportunities to use their official positions for private enrichment. As Rigoberto Tiglao explains, “Military officers became managers and directors of government-owned corporations as well as private economic establishments” that had been seized from selected “oligarch” opponents of the regime. In addition to the enormous rents that could be extracted in these fields of endeavor, generals and their subordinates often engaged in “illegal activities such as gunrunning, protection rackets, narcotics trafficking, smuggling, carnapping, and illegal gambling. The biggest carnapping ring, it was widely known, had been managed all along by a leading general . . . The remunerative possibilities were endless so long as one’s loyalty to the Marcoses was not in question.”81
Government-Business Relations and
Development Strategies
As Park patterned yushin-era “revitalization” after the experience of late-nineteenth-century Japan, Chung-in Moon and Byung-joon Jun explain, he “envisioned himself as a modernizing Meiji samurai.” In the Philippines, meanwhile, some viewed Marcos’s development strategy as an attempt “to assign the country’s own version of zaibatsu leaders to the strategic economic sectors.” But Marcos proved not to be a modern-day samurai modernizer, as he and his so-called zaibatsu had strategies that did more to undermine than to promote the national economy. While in Korea the lasting achievement of the 1970s was rapid industrialization in the heavy and chemical industrial sectors, the same decade in the Philippines is remembered as a period of mere “debt-driven growth,” lacking in any clear development strategy.82
For Park, HCI not only furthered a long-term obsession but more immediately resolved what Byung-Kook Kim has called the “double crisis of military security and domestic instability.”83 In declaring martial law, Marcos pledged economic reforms that would usher in equality of opportunity and save the country from “an oligarchy that appropriated for itself all power and bounty.”84 But while Marcos did, indeed, tame selected oligarchs most threatening to his regime, a “new oligarchy” (of Marcos and his relatives and cronies) achieved dominance within many economic sectors. In exchange for the dismantling of democratic institutions, the Fil-
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ipino people enjoyed only fleeting economic gain. While foreign loans sustained growth in the 1970s, crony abuses brought economic disaster in the early 1980s. Most fundamentally, martial law perpetuated important shortcomings of Philippine capitalism, because Marcos was merely expanding earlier patterns of patrimonial plunder. Particularistic demands continued to prevail, with the difference that one ruler was now appropriating a much larger proportion of the state apparatus toward the service of his own private ends. The cronyism of the Marcos regime in this period is more obvious than that of the pre-1972 period, since the regime had more centralized control over the state apparatus and enjoyed a much longer tenure in office. But amid important changes in the political economy was a remarkable continuity in the nature of business-government relations; as Emmanuel de Dios explains, “the crony phenomenon was no more than a logical extension and culmination of the premartial law process of using the political machinery to accumulate wealth.”85
In addition, Marcos brought no fundamental shift in development policy—there was continued promotion of exports, but at the same time continued protection of ISI firms. Manufactured exports did, indeed, post major gains in the late 1970s and the 1980s, but its major supporters, the technocrats and the multilateral agencies, were unable to do much more than create one more avenue of diversification for the major family conglomerates to pursue. As long as external funds were readily available, it was most expedient simply to let debt drive growth. Throughout the Marcos years, de Dios concludes, “the issue of the development strategy could be essentially avoided.”86
Unlike his counterpart in Korea, Marcos quite clearly had no “obsession” to promote the rapid industrialization of the economy. The increased prominence of talented technocrats and strong ties with the United States ensured a flood of loans from the multilateral agencies and foreign banks, and improved ties with Japan simultaneously yielded a harvest of increased aid, loans, and investment. Yet while Park used Japanese assistance to build his own steel plant in the early 1970s, Marcos allowed the Kawasaki Steel Corporation to move the most pollution-intensive phase of steel production from Japan to Mindanao in the mid-1970s. The sinter-ing plant, wholly owned by Kawasaki and the biggest single Japanese investment in the Philippines at the time, was built on land that had been acquired (through the eviction of small farmers and fisherfolk) by the Marcos-controlled Philippine Veterans Investment and Development Corporation and then leased to Kawasaki. And while Park promoted “policy loans” to promote HCI, one finds in Marcos’s Philippines a host of “behest loans”—that is, loans from the two major government-owned banks
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made at the behest of the Palace—to promote crony enrichment. Recipients commonly squandered their loot: when rehabilitation of the failed state banks was undertaken in 1986, the vast bulk of their loans were declared non-performing. In all sectors of the economy, there are countless tales of the First Couple and their relatives and friends gaining access to officially granted privileges and producing little or no positive benefit for larger developmental objectives. It is not surprising tha
t the term “crony capitalism”—now used worldwide—was first coined to describe the political economic system of Ferdinand Marcos. If analysts of Park’s Korea note “private agency with a public purpose,” the common pattern under Marcos was public agency with a private purpose.87
Mounting Societal Opposition: Civil and Political Contrary to the objectives of the Park regime, the strategy of HCI and rapid economic growth did not resolve the problem of legitimacy. Rather, it “broadened the structural base of the opposition through the rapid expansion of the working and middle class population, and . . . eroded the legitimacy of . . . authoritarian rule.”88 In 1979, after the harsh repression of workers in the YH incident and the emergence of more assertive leadership within the opposition New Democratic Party, the forces of civil society developed closer ties with political society.89 The new coalition between the NDP and the “triple solidarity” (of students, workers, and the churches) made possible a determined, vigorous, and broad-based movement to topple the yushin regime. Because the political system was so thoroughly
“anti-leftist,” there was no strong radical component within the opposition. The absence of radicals no doubt facilitated the emergence of a broad-based coalition, the demands of which centered on the quite moderate demand of “restoration of democracy.” Faced with such a conservative opposition, it was difficult for the dictatorship to legitimize its brutal repression.90 Disagreement within the regime on how to respond to this democratic discontent led to the shocking assassination of Park by his KCIA chief in October 1979, after which the democratic movement itself was temporarily subdued by murderous rampages unleashed against it.
In the Philippines, one can observe far greater ideological variance among the opponents of the regime. As explained above, elites generally accepted martial rule in the early years. The Liberals, the major pre–martial law opposition party, “virtually disintegrated” after 1972. The party’s leading figure, Senator Benigno Aquino, Jr., was imprisoned, and the rest of the party was deprived of the usual sustenance of electoral mobilization and the subsequent spoils for those who emerged victorious at the polls.
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During early martial law, the only serious resistance to the regime was the rebellion of the Moro National Liberation Front in Mindanao and the Sulu archipelago. Although the uprising tied down a large proportion of Marcos’s troops, the threat was limited to a region of the country far from Manila.91
Pressures for both domestic and international legitimation encouraged Marcos to call elections in 1978 for the long-promised Interim National Assembly of his “New Society” faux-parliamentary democracy. With electoral rules wildly skewed in favor of the regime, many opposition politicians urged a boycott; Aquino, however, declared that the prospect of
“half a parliament” was better than none, and campaigned for a seat from jail. He worked out a temporary alliance with the Manila branch of the Communist Party of the Philippines to overcome his major logistical disadvantages, and relied on his wife, Corazon, and youngest daughter, Kris, to woo the crowds. A massive “noise barrage” the night before the elections demonstrated the depth of opposition to the regime, but the next day Marcos’s newly formed KBL won an overwhelming victory—albeit marred by massive electoral fraud. Even unknown candidates of the ruling party outpolled Aquino in Manila.
The gap between the moderate traditional opposition and the radical armed opposition was far more pronounced than the gap that existed at the same time between political and civil society in Korea. “While the radicals [in the Philippines] had long ago given up the idea of a peaceful transition,” explains de Dios, “the moderates and conservatives had participated in the elections, half-hoping that Marcos would voluntarily share meaningful power.” The moderates reacted with great frustration to the fraud of the 1978 elections, and some within their ranks desperately turned to violent tactics themselves as a means of “bargaining . . . for electoral opportunities.”92 The rest of the martial law period saw major tension in relations between the “traditional politicians” and the Left: the politicians were sometimes willing to work out short-term accommodation with the Left in order to bring down the regime, but at the same time had a strong motivation to bring down the regime as quickly as possible in order to defeat the long-term threat of the Left—and ensure the restoration of the institutions of pre–martial law democracy under which they had functioned so well before 1972.
Korea-style “triple solidarity” was not appropriate to Philippine conditions. The role of the Catholic and Protestant churches was broadly similar, as opposition groups in both countries received critical sanctuary and valuable support from activist clergy and laity and church organizations.
Examination of the roles of students and workers, however, reveals many
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more differences than similarities. Whereas activist students in Korea massed in the streets, many of their counterparts in the Philippines headed to the hills instead, devoting their lives to the revolutionary movement.
Organizing efforts in the Philippines focused far more attention on the countryside than on the cities, and it was among peasants rather than workers that the Left achieved its greatest strength.93 Enduring inequalities made the Philippine countryside far more conducive to organizing than the Korean countryside, and the strength of the Philippine working class could not rival that of its counterpart in a substantially more industrialized Korea.
By the end of the decade, the Communist Party was fast becoming the threat that Marcos had falsely claimed it to be in 1972. As the country’s sole ideologically driven party, the CPP was eventually able to adjust and even thrive in the new environment of political repression. As the New People’s Army built up strong bases of support throughout diverse regions of the archipelago, it came to be the hope of many Filipinos—across different social strata—who desperately sought the demise of the Marcos dictatorship. The traditional politicians, by comparison, looked liked impotent has-beens.94 The CPP steadily built support for itself and a range of affiliated organizations, not only in the countryside where its base was strongest but also in urban areas among workers and destitute squatters.95 In Korea, the establishment of a highly repressive “anti-leftist” political system had been accompanied by a sweeping process of land reform that served to ease radical demands for change. In the Philippines, communism had never been as thoroughly marginalized, and a combination of repression, military abuses, and unresolved social injustices brought forth a new leftist movement far stronger in both territorial scope and cross-class support than that which had been defeated in the 1950s.
For many years, the Philippine regime skillfully played on the deep divisions within opposition forces, using measures of liberalization to lure moderates back into its tightly circumscribed arena of political activity and punishing those who remained “outside the fold of the law.” In 1983, however, the assassination of Benigno Aquino brought forth a torrent of anger from throughout Philippine society and engendered countless new alliances among moderate and radical groups determined to bring down the dictatorship. An economic crisis and increasing outrage over crony abuses further undermined the legitimacy of the regime. Marcos responded with a limited degree of liberalization, but—as is the pattern with personalistic dictatorships—there were clear limits to the degree to which the regime was willing to share power.
Given this basic characteristic of the Marcos dictatorship, many ex-
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pected that only the radical opposition could succeed in toppling the regime. Marcos did indeed have to be “brought down because he would never step down,”96 in a massive 1986 “People Power” uprising that served as an inspiration to democrats the world over—including many in Korea. But the regime that replaced him was dominated not by leftists but by forces of the traditional elite. Upon taking power, President Corazon Aquino and her major allies concentrated first on restoring the p
re–martial law structures of Philippine democracy. The prevailing attitude within the Palace, a top aide explains, was “anything that the dictator built let us destroy.”97
Structure, Agency, and Divergent Outcomes
In truth, the Marcos dictatorship really didn’t do much building. His successor inherited a bureaucracy that remained weak and overwhelmed by patronage pressures, a highly factionalized military inclined to frequent coup attempts, and an economy that was in a shambles. The contrast between Korea and the Philippines is striking. Park survived eighteen years in power, but his regime endured in many ways long after his death. Marcos, in contrast, survived a bit more than twenty years in power, but his regime effectively collapsed immediately upon his downfall.
Along with reverse images in both the state-society relations of Korea and the Philippines as well as the personal goals of Park and Marcos, this analysis has further demonstrated a corresponding reverse image in political-economic outcomes: rapid economic development versus crony-capitalist economic decay. In explaining these highly divergent outcomes, what is the relative importance of structural versus agency-based variables? While such a question is probably impossible to answer with any degree of certainty, it is useful to speculate (by way of counterfactual fantasy) as to what would have been the outcome if a person of Park’s vision and goals had emerged as leader of the Philippines in 1965, and a person of Marcos’s vision and goals had emerged as leader of South Korea in 1961.98 It is my sense that a Filipino Park would have been continually frustrated by the failure of state institutions to respond to his commands, and would have faced major obstacles in nurturing stronger institutions and moving toward rapid industrialization. Like President Getúlio Vargas of Brazil in the 1930s, perhaps, much could have been accomplished but major compromises would have been necessary along the way. Marcos as leader of South Korea, on the other hand, could have enjoyed many opportunities to raid institutions for his own benefit and to build on the central-
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