5. Formal Democracy and Descent to Dictatorship

THE PHILIPPINES was the first Oriental country to establish, albeit short-lived, a republican form of government. But the great American Republic deemed us still unfit for self-rule then and started "preparing" us with bloody pacification and colonial education. Half a century later, a foreign-dominated republic was proclaimed by the United States. A hallmark of this has been the establishment of three co-equal branches of government with public officials elected by the direct vote of the citizenry. If we were to go by the formalities, we could say that our country had indeed entered "upon the life of law and civilization… (Where) the rights of the (people) are respected, (and) the other rights due them are granted." That would have been fulfillment of your own dreams, Senior Rizal, to quote from you again "if the liberal policy of the government is carried out without trickery or meanness, without subterfuges or false interpretations." Unfortunately, there was, indeed, much trickery wedded into the formal exercises of democratic life, there were indeed subterfuges and false interpretations.

When the Americans established colonial rule upon these Islands at the turn of the century, they reestablished and strengthened landlord rule. This has persisted to the present times, coupled with the power of local big capitalists who are partners and agents of American businesses here. Bowing only to effective foreign domination, the landed gentry and these local big capitalists have jointly held all political power in the country. The populace has actually possessed no real power.

The ballot has been overprojected as the symbol of the common man’s empowerment, but in each election he has been made to choose among candidates of the moneyed elite, of identical political parties that recycle issues and promises, in pollings attended by much goon violence and rampant cheating. Fault not the voter who sells his politically inconsequential vote for some very consequential pesos, for elections in our country have been mere pintakasis complete with all the blood and the bettings!

Representative democracy has therefore been a farce. Save for a handful of honorable exceptions, elected officials have been faithful only to their commitments to their foreign patrons and to the narrow interest of the elite, never to their constituents. Thus, a succession of parliaments composed of geographical district representatives who stand first and foremost for their landlord interests, could not be expected to legislate real agrarian reform. Emancipation from feudal bondage would undoubtedly be on top of the agenda of the peasantry who comprise the majority of the citizenry, but "their representatives" in the legislature would never grant them this.

Freedom of the press has been enjoyed only by the elite. Warring factions and cliques slander one another through their politicians who enjoy wide publicity in pages of the press and in the airlanes of broadcast. The media, after all are invariably in the hands of the powerful. The common people have been given some access to the media, but only to air very specific requests over public service programs," and never to criticize the systemic social injustice underpinning their extreme poverty, for the latter has been proscribed as a seditious topic. They have landed in the news only if they met freak accidents or were blottered by the police as suspects or victims in larceny.

I would be the last to diminish the value of advocating and upholding press freedom even in this context.²⁴ This freedom, indeed has to be upheld by assertion and by vigilant defense of whatever measure of it the people are allowed to have – the people’s right to adequate accurate information on all matters of public consequence, as well as their right to freely express their views on such matters. But the enjoyment of this basic right, this basic freedom, has been and will continue to be circumscribed by the structures inherent in the elite dominance over the existing social order.

Representation in legislation, and freedom of the press – these are "two fundamental reforms" you had fought for, and argued for at length in that essay you wrote one full century ago.²⁵ Your people have come to enjoy them but only in the formal sense. These have not only been generally useless to the people, they have lulled them to a false sense of empowerment and, in the face of mounting problems, have pushed them occasionally to self-flagellation.

A succession of constitutions has invariably enshrined the basic human, democratic and civil rights to be enjoyed by each and every citizen. But impoverished litigants face in the country’s counts of justice the scales of consistent injustice; impoverished defendants are unfairly thrown behind bars where they languish for years, even decades, on end. Countless innocent commoners have been deprived of their very lives this way.

Alas, our people’s literacy gives them merely the ability to read and write; they have yet to know their rights. And even for those who do know and assert these rights, the scales of justice have been heavily tilted against them, in favor of parties who can hire top-caliber lawyers and bribe the wielders of the gravel.

The citizen began to grow tired of seeing one discredited administration replacing another, as the people’s conditions of poverty worsened each time. And his call for changes in the fundamental law was aired loud enough to compel the convening of an elected constituent assembly.²⁶ Formal rights and structures had lost their appeal after being proven over the decades to be hollow and deceptive. The youth, whom you had called the Hope of the Fatherland, clenched their fists and, with banners unfurled, overflowed the streets in mammoth marches to protest the prevailing social order. "Down with imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism!" they chanted in demonstrations, emblazoned these slogans as the proverbial handwriting on the wall, and held discussion sessions to study what these meant in specific terms.

An astute politician who enjoyed the support of the United States government and big business was able to utilize a specific provision of the earlier Constitution (1935) and this constitution-framing exercise to prolong his stay in power. He did so by imposing a dictatorial regime, consistent with the American "Let Asians Fight Asians Policy" of 1970,²⁷ and dispensed with the formal structures of democracy and civil rights. Martial law was a veritable declaration of civil war against the citizenry.

This act of calling out the troops from the barracks to engage in clearly political functions was irreversible, for the military would thenceforth be playing a consistently increasing role in the nation’s political life. The genie could never be pushed back into the bottle after it had been let out. Past that rubicon, the military could no longer forget the taste of political power and the urge to impose its will Philippine political configurations could only grow from then on.

For 14 years this tyrant, Ferdinand Marcos, ruled by decree, had his political opponents jailed and killed, and unleashed the military’s force upon the people. Throughout this same period, he faithfully implemented economic policies and programs dictated by the American-dominated international financial institutions while letting loose his relatives and agents to plunder the national coffers. With every passing day, and despite earnest education efforts by nationalists like the leftist organizations and such legal luminaries as Jose W. Diokno, Marcos came to be hated by the people much more for his tyranny, greed and profligacy than for his subservience to foreign dictation. It was, and still is, largely unknown that this subservience, nay high treason, has been the biggest single factor for the level of poverty and destitution we now find our national economy in.

The logic of semi- or indirect colonialism was clearly working for Uncle Sam! A local tyrant was getting all the blame for the people’s woes which were worsened mainly by the White Man’s devious economic programs the local tyrant was obediently pursuing. In the end, it was projected that the country stood much poorer but only by the amount this tyrant had stolen.

The American policymakers supported Marcos in power for as long as he was still effective and useful. And because the people and also certain sections of the elite had been so cruelly deprived of even just their formal rights and powers, thresholds of satisfaction were drastically lowered – the clamor was raised for the restoration of the same structures and trappings that had already been largely discredited as unjust and farcical shortly before the advent of open dictatorial dispensation.

By the time of the last years of Marcos, and especially after the assassination by his soldiers of a prominent political opposition leader, the chasm between factions of the elite had cracked the politicized military.²⁸ This led to the first offensive coup d’etat that irreversibly deepened the divisions in the military and started a series of coup attempts expected to become, much later, a series of successful coups and countercoups.²⁹

The civilian-protected coup of February 1986 was celebrated as a peaceful revolution. Actually it was peaceful only because of a delicate configuration of four armed forces: AFP officers and men loyal to Marcos, AFP officers and men defecting to the side of the mutineers, the United States armed forces, and the leftist New People’s Army. Marcos was overthrown because he had lost his grip on a substantial portion of his military and he was being restrained by US "gunboat politics" from attacking the mutineers and their human sandbags (labeled "People Power"). The US stilled the hand of Marcos because any spilling of blood in those dramatic days would have been to the advantage of the armed revolutionary movement – with the civilians marching en masse to the waiting arms of the National Democratic Front, and with the AFP more devastatedly divided than ever before.

Neither was this change a real revolution. With the dictator eventually deposed by a civilian-protected military rebellion that installed an American-favored successor, the discredited structures of show-window democracy were officially restored, and, alas, our people, at least initially, were euphoric. After having been made to believe that the country’s problem was Marcos himself, many of our people went along with the assertion that the anti-Marcos rebellion was a real revolution.³⁰ They also went along with the story that it was the peaceful defiance of the throngs that stopped the tyrant’s tanks, and refused to perceive the role played by American officials and troops in the four-day drama and its sudden pluck-out end.

The successor, Corazon Aquino, had promised to be the opposite of Marcos but has not yet proven herself as such especially in terms of the tyrant’s subservience to American diktat. Aquino even sought to limit the people’s concept of freedom to their emancipation from Marcos, instead of asserting in real terms the people’s aspiration for genuine national independence.³¹ She has proclaimed 1988 to 1998 as a "Decade of nationalism" in preparation for the centennial of our victory against Spanish colonial rule, but hastened to add that this nationalism had to "go beyond" (read: ignore) the manifestations of continuing foreign domination such as the American military bases.³² She has also abetted violations of the new Constitution just so she could keep an "open" policy for these bases to remain in our territory^.33

Slowly but surely, the people are getting to realize that they can never enjoy real democracy and empowerment, not even their basic and civil rights, for as long as foreign domination remains in our country. In the face of pressure from these foreign overlords, even the fundamental law of this supposedly-independent country has been repeatedly breached.³⁴

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