About this time last year, President Corazon Aquino told a most instructive

lie. Addressing the Filipino-Chinese Federated Chambers of Commerce on 9

March 1987, she described her appearance before them as a ‘homecoming,’

since her great-grandfather had been a poor immigrant from southeast

China’s Fukien province. [1] Doubtless her desperate need—given the

Philippines’ near-bankrupt economy and $28 billion external debt [2]—to inspire

feelings of solidarity and confidence among a powerful segment of Manila’s

business class made some embroidery understandable. But the truth is that

the President, born Corazon Cojuangco, is a member of one of the wealthiest

and most powerful dynasties within the Filipino oligarchy. Her grandfather,

putative son of the penniless immigrant, was Don Melecio Cojuangco, born

in Malolos, Central Luzon in 1871. A graduate of the Dominicans’ Colegio

de San Juan de Letran and the Escuela Normal, and a prominent agricultor

(i.e. hacendado) in the province of Tarlac, he was, in 1907, at the age of 36,

elected to the Philippine Assembly, the quasi-legislature established by the

American imperialists in that year. [3] One of his sons (Corazon’s uncle)

became Governor of Tarlac in 1941, another (her father, Don José) its

most prominent Congressman. In 1967, one of his grandsons (her

cousin), Eduardo ‘Danding’ Cojuangco, became Governor of Tarlac

with Ferdinand Marcos’s backing, and went on to count among the

most notorious of the Marcos cronies. Another grandson (her younger

brother), José ‘Peping’ Cojuangco, was in those days one of Tarlac’s

Congressmen, and is today again a Congressman—and one of the halfdozen

most powerful politicians in the country. Her marriage to Benigno

Aquino, Jr., at various periods Governor of Tarlac and Senator, linked

her to another key dynasty of Central Luzon. Benigno Aquino, Sr., had

been a Senator in the late American era and won lasting notoriety for

his active collaboration with the Japanese Occupation regime. At the

present time, one of her brothers-in-law, Agapito ‘Butz’ Aquino, is a

Senator, and another, Paul, the head of Lakas ng Bansa (one of the

three main ‘parties’ in her electoral coalition); an uncle-in-law, Herminio

Aquino, is a Congressman, as are Emigdio ‘Ding’ Tanjuatco (cousin),

and Teresita Aquino-Oreta (sister-in-law). [4] A maternal uncle, Francisco

‘Komong’ Sumulong, is majority floor-leader of the House of Representatives.

Nor was Corazon herself, on becoming President, quite the

simple housewife of her election broadsheets. For thirteen years she had

served as treasurer of the Cojuangco family holding company, which

controls a vast financial, agricultural, and urban real estate empire. [5]

Yet there is a core of truth in President Aquino’s claims of 9 March

1987 and this core offers a useful guide to understanding the peculiarities

of modern Philippine politics. The ‘-co’ suffix to her maiden name is

shared by a significant number of other dynasties within the national

oligarchy: Cuenco, Tanjuatco, Tiangco, Chioco, etc. It originates from

the Hokkienese k’o, a term of respect for older males; and it shows

that her family originated among the Chinese mestizos who bloomed

economically under the Spanish colonial regime and consolidated their

wealth with political power under the Americans. [6] It is the dominance

of this group which decisively marks off the Philippines from Spanish

America (mestizos frequently in power, but not Chinese mestizos) and

the rest of Southeast Asia (Chinese mestizos, indeed any mestizos,

removed from political power, with the ambiguous exception of Siam).

How did this happen?

Spanish Colonialism, the Church and the Mestizo Elite

By the time the Spanish arrived to conquer, in the 1560s, the empire

of Felipe II had reached its peak, and the islands, named after him,

were the last major imperial acquisition. Iberian energies were absorbed

in Europe and the Americas. The few Spaniards who did travel on to

the Philippines found little on the spot to satiate their avarice. The one

substantial source of rapid wealth lay not in mines but in commerce

with Imperial China. Manila quickly became the entrepôt for the ‘galleon

trade’, by which Chinese silks and porcelains were exchanged for

Mexican silver, to be resold, at colossal profit, across the Pacific and

eventually in Europe. It was not a business that required much acumen

or industry; one needed merely to be in Manila, to have the right

political connections, and to work out relationships with the Chinese

traders and artisans who flocked to the entrepôt. [7]

The absence of mines, and, until much later, of hacienda-based commercial

agriculture, meant not only a concentration of the Spanish in the

Manila area, but the lack of any sustained interest in massive exploitation

of the indigenous (or imported) populations as a labour force. At the

same time, the fact that the pre-Hispanic Philippines (in contrast to

Burma, Siam, Cambodia, Vietnam or Java) lacked any states with

substantial military or bureaucratic power meant that relatively little

force was required for the initial conquest and for its subsequent

consolidation. Small garrisons, scattered here and there, generally

sufficed. [8] Hence, in the provinces, to a degree unparalleled anywhere in

the Americas except Paraguay, Spanish power in the Philippines was

mediated through the Church.

The ardently Counter-Reformation clerics were fortunate in finding the

great bulk of the indigenous population to be ‘animists’. Buddhism and

Hinduism had not reached so far. And though Islam was sweeping in

from what today is Indonesia, it had consolidated itself only in parts of

Mindanao and adjacent southern islands. There it could be contained,

if never subdued. [9] Meanwhile a vast proselytization was launched

which has resulted in the contemporary Philippines being 90 per cent

Christian. [10] (Only in twentieth-century Korea has Christianization in

Asia been comparably successful.) The most noteworthy feature of this

campaign was that it was conducted, most arduously, not through the

medium of Spanish, but through the dozens of local languages. Till the

very end of the Spanish regime no more than 5 per cent of the local

population had any facility with the colonial language. Spanish never

became a pervasive lingua franca, as it did in the Americas, with the

result that, certainly in 1900, and to a lesser extent even today, the

peasants and fishermen in different parts of the archipelago could

not communicate with one another: only their rulers had a common

archipelago-wide speech.

Two other features of clerical dominion had lasting consequences for

the evolution of Philippine social structure. On the one hand, the

quarrelling Orders, parcelled among out the various islands by Felipe

II in the sixteenth century, pioneered commercial agriculture in the later

eighteenth century, at the prodding of Carlos III’s last, enlightened

governor, José Basco y Vargas (1777–87). It was they who built what,

in effect, were the first great haciendas. But these ‘conglomerates’

remained institutional, rather than family (dynastic) property. The friars

might liberally father children on local women, but they could not

marry the women, or bequeath property to the progeny. In due course,

the conquering Americans would dispossess the friars of their lands, as

the eighteenth-century Bourbons had dispossessed the Jesuits; and these

lands would fall like ripe mangoes into the hands of the likes of President

Aquino’s immediate ancestors. [11]1 The Philippines thus never had a

substantial criollo hacendado class.

On the other hand, the Church, at least in its early days, had serious

dreams of Christianizing the Celestial Empire. From the start it set

eagerly to converting those whom the Spanish generally referred to

as sangleys. [12] Usually unlucky with the itinerant fathers, they were

spectacularly successful with the children fathered on local mothers.

Spanish colonial law helped by assigning these children a distinct

juridical status as mestizos (in due course the word meant, typically,

not the offspring of Spaniards and ‘natives’, but of Chinese and local

women). Christianized through their mothers, organized in their own

guilds (gremios), compelled to avoid political transvestitism by wearing

a distinctive costume and coiffure, these children, and their in-marrying

further descendants, came to form a distinct stratum of colonial society.

In some cases, perhaps only the ‘-co’ suffix to their names betrayed

distant celestial origins.

They might, however, have remained a marginal and stigmatized group,

had it not been for the services of British imperialism. When Madrid

joined in the Seven Years’ War, London responded, inter alia, by

occupying Manila in 1762 and holding it for the next two years. The

local sangleys, frequent victims of Iberian extortion and contempt, rallied

to the invaders, who, when they retired, insouciantly left these humble

allies to the vengeful mercies of their erstwhile oppressors. Most were

then expelled from the Philippines, and further immigration was legally

barred for almost a century. Into the vacuum created by the expulsions

came the mestizos, who took over much of local trade, and began,

following the friars’ example, to move into small-scale latifundism. [13]

But they were, world-historically, several generations behind their

ladino confrères in the Americas. Among them there were still no

great rural magnates, no lawyers, few priests or prominent exporting

merchants; above all there was no intelligentsia. The Church, characteristically

reactionary, controlled printing and what miserable travesty of

educational institutions existed. Hence the great nationalist upheaval

that rocked the Americas between 1810 and 1840 had no counterpart

in the archipelago until the 1880s.

The nineteenth century, nonetheless, was kind to the mestizos. One

might have expected Spaniards to flock there after the loss of the

Americas. But the last galleon had sailed in 1811. Spain itself was racked

with ceaseless conflict. And Cuba was so much closer, so infinitely

richer. New people arrived, but the ones who mattered were not

Spaniards but Anglo-Saxons (British and Americans) and, once again,

sangleys, by now of course ‘Chinese’. In 1834 Manila was fully opened

to international trade, and Cebu City and other smaller ports followed

in due course; the ban on Chinese immigration was abolished. Chinese

discipline, austerity, and energy quickly drove the mestizos out of interisland

trade and small-scale urban business. On the other hand, the

internationalization of the economy after 1834 offered the mestizos—

now a quarter of a million strong in a four million population—new

opportunities in the countryside, in combination with British and

American trading houses. These businesses saw the possibilities in fullscale

commercialization of Philippine agriculture, and thus provided

the necessary capital and commercial outlets to permit the mestizos to

become, for the first time, real hacendados.

Nothing better illustrates this interplay between Anglo-Saxons, mestizos

and Chinese than the modern history of the island of Negros, today the

‘sugar island’ par excellence of the Philippines. Almost uninhabited

when British interests set up the first sugar mill there in 1857, the

island’s population had increased almost tenfold by the end of the

century, and 274 steam mills were in operation. [14] If the British supplied

capital, transoceanic transport, and markets, it was mestizos from Panay

and Cebu, threatened by the Chinese influx into the port-cities of Cebu

City and Iloilo, who managed the transfer of the peasant labour needed

to grow and process cane. In no time at all, these frontier capitalists

turned themselves, on the Spanish model, into ‘feudal’ hacendados in

the nouveau riche grand style. Thus, in the summer of 1987, when talk

of land reform was in the Manila air, Congresswoman Hortensia Starke,

one of the great sugar planters of Western Negros, could tell the

newspapers: ‘Your land is like your most beautiful dress, the one that

gives you good luck. If someone takes it from you, he only wants to

destabilize you, to undress you.’ [15]

The Growth of National Sentiment

The next step was to get educated. A serious education was not easy

to acquire in the colony, where the Church was violently opposed to

any inroads of liberalism from Madrid and controlled most local schools.

But the mestizos’ growing wealth, the internationalization of the economy,

and the steamship combined to make it possible for a number of

young mestizo males to study in Europe. Quickly termed ilustrados

(enlightened ones), they created during the 1880s the colony’s first real

intelligentsia, and began a cultural assault on benighted clericalism and,

later, on Spanish political domination. [16] No less significant was the fact

that, going to the same schools, reading the same books, writing for

the same journals, and marrying each other’s sisters and cousins, they

inaugurated the self-conscious consolidation of a pan-Philippine (except

for the Moro areas) mestizo stratum, where their elders had formed

dispersed clusters of provincial caciques. It was these people who, at

the very end of the century, began calling themselves ‘Filipinos’, a term

which up till then had designated only Spanish creoles. [17]

Wealthy and educated they might now be, but they had no political

power. Late nineteenth-century Spain was too feeble economically and

too divided politically to cope intelligently with rising mestizo demands.

Repression was the order of the day, culminating in the execution in

1896 of the brilliant mestizo polymath José Rizal, whose two great,

banned novels, Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, mercilessly satiri-

zed, in Spanish, clerical reaction, secular misrule, and the frequent

opportunism and greed of his own class. [18]

Yet, not unsurprisingly, the inevitable insurrection did not originate

with the ilustrados. In 1892, Andrés Bonifacio, an impoverished autodidact

from the Manila artisanate, formed a secret revolutionary society

with the mellifluous Tagalog name of Kataastaasang Kagalanggalang na

Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan (The Highest and Most Respectable

Society of the Sons of the People—Katipunan for short), after the

Masonic model. [19] The Katipunan’s title already implied its reach and

limitations. The use of Tagalog, rather than a Spanish understood only

by a tiny elite, showed Bonifacio’s intention of appealing to, and

mobilizing, the indio masses. On the other hand, in those days Tagalog

was spoken only by the masses of Central and Southern Luzon, and

was incomprehensible in Mindanao, the Visayas, and even Ilocanospeaking

northwestern Luzon. [20] In August 1896, Bonifacio launched an

ill-prepared insurrection in Manila, which was quickly suppressed, but

the movement spread rapidly in the surrounding provinces, where

leadership was increasingly taken over by youthful mestizos. [21] Preoccupied

by the revolutionary movement that had broken out in Cuba in

February 1895, the Spanish fairly quickly gave up the struggle. In 1899,

a Republic of the Philippines was proclaimed under the leadership of

‘General’ Emilio Aguinaldo, a youthful caudillo from the province of

Cavite (who had had Bonifacio judicially murdered in 1897). [22]

It was, however, a fragile Republic, with more than a few similarities

to Bolívar’s abortive Gran Colombi´a. It had no purchase on the

Muslim southwest; parts of the Visayas seemed likely to go their own

independent way; and even in Luzon mestizo leadership was contested

by a variety of religious visionaries and peasant populists carrying on

the tradition of Bonifacio’s radicalism. [23] Moreover, the mestizo generals

themselves (who included the grandfathers of both Ferdinand Marcos

and Benigno Aquino, Jr.) began to follow the pattern of their American

forebears, by setting themselves up as independent caudillos. Had it not

been for William McKinley, one might almost say, the Philippines in

the early twentieth century could have fractured into three weak,

caudillo-ridden states with the internal politics of nineteenth-century

Venezuela or Ecuador.

But the McKinley Administration, egged on by William Randolph

Hearst, went to war with Spain in April 1898, claiming sympathy with

Filipino (and Cuban) revolutionaries. A week later Admiral Dewey

destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay; and by the Treaty of Paris

signed in December, the Philippines was ceded to the Americans. From

that point, ‘pacification’ replaced ‘sympathy’. By 1901 Aguinaldo had

surrendered, with most other caciques following suit, though peasant

resistance continued in some areas until 1910.

US Colonization and the National Oligarchy

The American colonization changed everything. [24] In the first place, it

ensured the political unification of the archipelago by smashing, often

with great brutality, all opposition. [25] Even the Muslim areas, which

Spain had never wholly subdued, were fully subjected to Manila, thereby

probably losing their last chance at sovereign independence. Secondly,

it vastly improved the economic position of the mestizos. The American

regime decided to expropriate much (about 400,000 acres) of the rich

agricultural land hitherto held by the Orders, and to put it up for public

auction. The mestizos, well-off hacendados even in late Spanish times,

were the group with the money and the interest to take advantage of

this opportunity, and most of the former ecclesiastical property fell into

their hands. Still more important, after 1909, by the terms of the Payne-

Aldrich Act, the Philippines were enclosed within the American tariff

wall, so that their agricultural exports had easy, untaxed access to the

world’s largest national market—where, in addition, prices, especially

for sugar, were often well above world norms.

But it was above all the political innovations of the Americans that

created a solid, visible ‘national oligarchy’. The key institutional change

was the stage-by-stage creation of a Congress-style bicameral legislature,

based, in the lower house at least, on single-district, winner-take-all

elections. [26] The new representational system proved perfectly adapted

to the ambitions and social geography of the mestizo nouveaux riches.

Their economic base lay in hacienda agriculture, not in the capital city.

And their provincial fiefdoms were also protected by the country’s

immense linguistic diversity. They might all speak the elite, ‘national’

language (Spanish, later American), but they also spoke variously

Tagalog, Ilocano, Pampango, Cebuano, Ilongo, and a dozen other

tongues. In this way competition in any given electoral district was

effectively limited, in a pre-television age, to a handful of rival local

caciques. But Congress, which thus offered them guaranteed access to

national-level political power, also brought them together in the capital

on a regular basis. There, more than at any previous time, they got to

know one another well in a civilized ‘ring’ sternly refereed by the

Americans. They might dislike one another, but they went to the same

receptions, attended the same churches, lived in the same residential

areas, shopped in the same fashionable streets, had affairs with each

other’s wives, and arranged marriages between each other’s children.

They were for the first time forming a self-conscious ruling class. [27]

The timing of American colonization also had a profound formative

influence on the emerging oligarchy and its style of rule. The America

of 1900–1930 was the America of Woodrow Wilson’s lamented ‘congressional

government’. The metropole had no powerful centralized

professional bureaucracy; office was still heavily a matter of political

patronage; corrupt urban machines and venal court-house rural cliques

were still pervasive; and the authority of presidents, except in time of

war, was still restricted. Hence, unlike all the other modern colonial

regimes in twentieth-century Southeast Asia, which operated through

huge, autocratic, white-run bureaucracies, the American authorities in

Manila, once assured of the mestizos’ self-interested loyalty to the

motherland, created only a minimal civil service, and quickly turned

over most of its component positions to the natives. In 1903, Filipinos

held just under half of the 5,500 or so positions in this civil service. By

the end of the ‘Filipinizing’ governor-generalship of (Democrat) Francis

Harrison in 1921, the proportion had risen to 90 per cent (out of a mere

14,000 jobs); and by the mid-thirties Americans held only 1 per cent of

civilian bureaucratic posts, most of them in the educational field. [28]

(American power depended on military dominance and the tariff.) As

in the United States, civil servants frequently owed their employment

to legislator patrons, and up to the end of the American era the civilian

machinery of state remained weak and divided.

The new oligarchs quickly understood how the Congressional system

could serve to increase their power. As early as Harrison’s time, the

Americans acquiesced in the plundering of the Central Bank of the

Philippines. House Speaker Sergio Osmeña, Sr., and his friends helped

themselves to huge, virtually free loans for financing the construction

of sugar centrals, and cheerfully ignored the subsequent bankrupting

of the bank of issue. In a more general sense, Congressional control of

the purse, and of senior judicial appointments, taught the oligarchy that

the ‘rule of law’, provided it made and managed this law, was the

firmest general guarantee of its property and political hegemony. (As we

shall see, it was Marcos’s suspension of the ‘rule of law’ that aroused

the alarm and hostility of significant portions of the oligarchy in the

1970s and early 1980s.)

One final feature of the American political system is worth emphasizing:

the huge proliferation of provincial and local elective offices—in the

absence of an autocratic territorial bureaucracy. From very early on

mestizo caciques understood that these offices, in the right hands, could

consolidate their local political fiefdoms. Not unexpectedly, the right

hands were those of family and friends. Brothers, uncles, and cousins

for the senior posts, sons and nephews for the junior ones. [29] Here is

the origin of the ‘political dynasties’—among them the Aquinos and

Cojuangcos—which make Filipino politics so spectacularly different

from those of any other country in Southeast Asia.

Those were palmy days. But after 1930 the clouds began to gather. As

the Depression struck the United States, Washington came under

increasing pressure from trade unions and farm organizations (who

opposed the influx of Filipino labour and agricultural products) to

impose independence on the colony. Though the caciques could not

decently say so in public, independence was the last thing they desired,

precisely because it threatened the source of their huge wealth: access

to the American market. Besides, they had now switched from Spanish

to English, and their children were going to school in Manhattan and

Boston. And they lacked the monarchical residues which, suitably

transformed, underpinned the imagined ‘national traditions’ of Khmer,

Burmese, and Indonesians: the mestizos had no Angkor, Pagan, or

Borobudur at their service. It was thus with real reluctance that in 1935

they accepted Commonwealth status. The one evident plus was the

initiation of a Filipino chief executive. The urbane, rascally mestizo,

Manuel Quezon, became Commonwealth president. [30]

The Japanese Occupation and After

Six years later, in December 1941, the armies of Imperial Japan struck

south. In a matter of weeks most of the Americans were sent packing,

including General Douglas MacArthur, who carted President Quezon

and Vice-President Osmeña along with him. [31] The rest of the oligarchy

(one or two celebrated exceptions aside) bustled to collaborate with the

invaders. Among the most prominent of these collaborators were

Corazon Aquino’s father-in-law (who became Speaker of the Occupation

Assembly and Director-General of the pro-Japanese ‘mass organization’

Kalibapi) and the father of her Vice-President (Don José Laurel, Sr.,

who in 1943 became President of the puppet republic then inaugurated

by Tokyo). [32]

But collaboration could do nothing to save the hacienda-based export

economy. Japan would permit no exports to America, and American

bombers and warships ensured, after 1942, that few crops would reach

Japan. The treasured ‘rule of law’ began to break down as anti-Japanese

guerrilla bands, sometimes led by the small Socialist and Communist

parties, expanded in the remoter rural areas, as inflation soared, and as

Japanese exactions increased. Former tenants and landless labourers

were emboldened to squat on hacienda lands and grow, not sugar, but

crops needed for their everyday survival. Many refused now to pay the

old brutal rents, and had the insolence to threaten the bailiffs who

demanded them. Above all in the Central Luzon of the Cojuangcos and

Aquinos, where rural poverty and exploitation were most acute, such

peasants joined hands with the guerrillas in forming the Hukbalahap

armies which harassed the Japanese and assassinated such collaborators

as they could reach. [33] Unsurprisingly, many of the oligarchs abandoned

their haciendas to their unlucky bailiffs and retreated to Manila, where

they turned their experienced hands to war-profiteering. [34]

One might have expected the returning Americans to punish the

oligarchs for their collaboration with the enemy. Senior officials in

Washington indeed made noises to this effect. But the on-the-spot

Liberator was, of course, MacArthur, who had close personal and

business ties with the prewar oligarchy, and who, like Lyautey in

Morocco, enjoyed playing lordly proconsul to native houseboys. [35]

Quezon having meanwhile met his incautious Maker, MacArthur in

1946 arranged the election of his old mestizo friend (and prominent

collaborator) Manuel Roxas as first president of the now sovereign

Republic of the Philippines. [36]

Roxas had only two years in power before he joined Quezon, but they

were exceptionally productive years. An amnesty was arranged for

all ‘political prisoners’ (mainly fellow-oligarchs held on charges of

collaboration). In 1947, an agreement was signed permitting the US to

retain control of its twenty-three (large and small) land, sea, and airbases

for a further ninety-nine years (this was what, as in 1900, most mattered

to Washington). [37] And the Constitution of 1935 was so amended as to

give American citizens ‘parity’ access to the resources of the newly

sovereign Republic (in return for which the oligarchy was granted

continuing access, for a defined period, to the protected American

market.) [38] There was an additional bonus in this move, since it guaranteed

activation for the Philippines of the Tydings Rehabilitation Act,

which offered $620,000,000 to those Americans and Filipinos who could

demonstrate that they had lost a minimum of $500 as a result of the

war. [39] (Since the average annual per capita income of Filipinos was then

a quarter of this sum, the major Filipino beneficiaries of Senator

Tydings’ generosity were the caciques.)

The next aim was to restore fully the pre-war agrarian and political

order. For three basic reasons this goal proved difficult to achieve. First

was the price of independence itself: removal of the American ringmaster

for domestic political competition, severe weakening of the state’s

capacity for centralized deployment of violence, [40] a fisc no longer

externally guaranteed, and a war-ravaged and near-bankrupt economy.

Second was the appearance, in Central Luzon at least, of an emboldened

peasantry backed by armed Hukbalahap forces, which, denied access to

constitutional participation by Roxas’s manœuvres, had little reason to

make accommodations. Third was a rapid expansion of the suffrage that

UN membership, in those innocent days, made it impossible to deny.

The Heyday of Cacique Democracy

Hence it was that in the last year of Roxas’s life the Philippines saw the

first conspicuous appearance of the country’s now notorious ‘private

armies’. Drawn from lumpen elements in both Manila and the countryside,

these armed gangs, financed by their hacendado masters, terrorized

illegal squatters, peasant unions, and left-wing political leaders, with

the aim of restoring uncontested cacique rule. [41] The term ‘warlord’

entered the contemporary Filipino political vocabulary. Unsurprisingly,

the new warlords found that their private armies were also highly

functional for a now unrefereed electoral politics. The presidential

elections of 1949, won by Roxas’s vice-presidential successor Elpidio

Quirino, [42] were not merely corrupt in the pre-war style, but also

extremely bloody and fraudulent: not so much because of central

management, as because of the discrepancy between state power and

cacique ambitions under conditions of popular suffrage and acute class

antagonism. [43] (Characteristic of the time was what Nick Joaqui´n, the

country’s best-known writer, called the ‘bloody fiefdom’ of the Lacson

dynasty in the sugar-planter paradise of Western Negros. Manila was

virtually impotent vis-à-vis Governor Rafael Lacson’s murderous ‘special

police’ and ‘civilian guards’.) [44]

This was not what the Americans had bargained for. Besides, China

had just been ‘lost’, Vietnam seemed likely to go the same way, and

major Communist insurrections had broken out in neighbouring Malaya

and Burma. Colonel Edward Lansdale was dispatched to restore order

through the agency of Quirino’s Secretary of Defence, Ramon Magsaysay,

one of the few prominent politicians of the era who did not have

cacique origins. Thanks to a mere million dollars in military and other

aid, the physical isolation of the Philippines, the restricted Luzon base

of the Hukbalahap, and the errors of the Huk leaders themselves, [45]

Lansdale prevailed. By 1954, the Huk rebellion had been crushed;

thousands of impoverished Luzon peasants transmigrated to ‘empty’

Mindanao [46] (where they soon came into violent conflict with the local

Muslims); and Magsaysay manœuvred into the presidency. [47]

The period 1954–1972 can be regarded as the full heyday of cacique

democracy in the Philippines. [48] The oligarchy faced no serious domestic

challenges. Access to the American market was declining as postindependence

tariff barriers slowly rose, but this setback was compensated

for by full access to the state’s financial instrumentalities. Under

the guise of promoting economic independence and import-substitution

industrialization, exchange rates were manipulated, monopolistic

licences parcelled out, huge, cheap, often unrepaid bank loans passed

around, and the national budget frittered away in pork barrel legislation.

[49] Some of the more enterprising dynasties diversified into urban

real estate, hotels, utilities, insurance, the mass media, and so forth.

The press, owned by rival cacique families, was famously free. [50] The

reconsolidated, but decentralized, power of the oligarchy is nicely

demonstrated by the fact that this press exposed every possible form of

corruption and abuse of power (except for those of each paper’s own

proprietors), but, in the words of historian and political scientist Onofre

Corpuz: ‘Nobody in the Philippines has ever heard of a successful

prosecution for graft.’ [51] It was in these golden times that Corazon

Aquino’s father, Don José Cojuangco, acquired 7,000 hectares of the

10,300 hectare Hacienda Luisita in Tarlac, and turned its management

over to his energetic son-in-law Benigno ‘Ninoy’ Aquino, Jr. [52]

But cacique democracy contained within itself the seeds of its own

decay, and these began visibly sprouting towards the end of the 1960s.

Uncontrolled and parasitic plundering of state and private resources

tilted the Philippines on its long plunge from being the most ‘advanced’

capitalist society in Southeast Asia in the 1950s to being the most

depressed and indigent in the 1980s. By the end of the golden era, 5

per cent of the country’s income earners received, probably, about 50

per cent of total income. At the same time, over 70 per cent of state

revenues came from regressive sales and excise taxes, and a mere 27.5

per cent from income taxes—largely paid by foreign corporations. [53]

Combined with a characteristically tropical-Catholic birth-rate of over

3 per cent (which since 1850 had increased the islands’ population

eightfold), the result was a massive pauperization of the unprivileged. [54]

Ferdinand Marcos: The Supreme Cacique

Cacique democracy in the independent Philippines also led to secular

changes in the operation of the political system. The oligarchs more

and more followed Chairman Mao’s advice to walk on two legs. Manila

was where the President resided and where Congress met, where pork

barrel funds were dealt out, where licences and loans were secured,

where educational institutions proliferated, and where imported entertainments

flourished. The dynasties began leaving their haciendas in the

hands of sons-in-law and bailiffs and moving into palatial new residential

complexes on the outskirts of the old capital. Forbes Park was the first,

and still the most celebrated, of these beaux quartiers, which remain

sociologically unique in Southeast Asia. Elsewhere in the region

luxurious houses are jumbled together with the dwellings of the poor. [55]

But the golden ghetto of Forbes Park was policed, as a complex, by

armed security guards; access even to its streets required the production

of identification papers.

This partial move to Manila combined with demographic increase and

the postwar expansion of the suffrage to monetarize political life. It was

less and less possible to win elections, even provincial elections, on a

forelock-tugging basis. The costs of campaigning increased exponen-

tially in the 1960s, not least because the period saw the renewed growth

of the private armies. In contrast to the late 1940s, these armed groups

were now deployed mainly in intra-oligarchy competition. [56] Corazon

Aquino’s husband was conforming to general practice in the late 1960s

when he campaigned for a senatorial seat in a black Mercedes ringed with

Armalite-toting bodyguards. [57] With splendid, grumbling insouciance,

Senator Sergio ‘Serging’ Osmeña, Jr., on losing the 1969 presidential

race to Ferdinand Marcos, complained: ‘We were outgunned, outgooned,

and outgold.’ [58] By then, at forty per hundred thousand head

of population, the Philippines had one of the highest murder rates in

the world.

So the stakes slowly grew, and American-era inhibitions slackened. The

crux was the presidency, which always had the potentiality of dislocating

cacique democracy. We noted earlier that the stability of the system,

and the solidarity of the oligarchy, depended on the Congress, which

offered roughly equal room at the top for all the competing provincial

dynasties. The one-man office of president was not, however, divisible,

and came to seem, in the era of independence, a unique prize. The

shrewder, older oligarchs had foreseen possible trouble and had borrowed

from the US the legal provision that no president could serve for

more than two terms—so that the office could sedately circulate within

the charmed circle. But it was only a matter of time before someone

would break the rules and try to set himself up as Supreme Cacique for

Life. The spread of military juntas and one-party dictatorial regimes

throughout the Third World in the 1960s made a break of this kind

seem more normal: indeed it could even be justified opportunistically

as a sign of liberation from ‘Western’ ideological shackles.

The final destabilizing factor was education. As noted earlier, in Spanish

times educational facilities were extremely limited, and the only ‘national’

language available was Spanish, to which, however, no more than

5 per cent of the indigenous population had access. Secular, twentiethcentury

American imperialism was a different sort of beast. Immensely

confident of Anglo-Saxon world hegemony and the place of English as

the language of capitalism and modernity, the colonial regime effortlessly

extruded Spanish [59] and so expanded an English-language school system

that by 1940 the Philippines had the highest literacy rate in Southeast

Asia. [60] After independence, the oligarchy, like other Third World

oligarchies, found that the simplest way of establishing its nationalist

credentials was to expand cheap schooling. By the early 1960s university

degrees were no longer a ruling class near-monopoly.

The huge expansion of English-language education produced three

distinct, politically significant, new social groups. Smallest was a radical

intelligentsia, largely of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois urban origins,

and typically graduates of the University of the Philippines. Among

them was Nur Misuari, who in the later 1960s formed the Moro National

Liberation Front in the Muslim southwest. Still better known was José

Maria Sison, who broke away from the decrepit post-Huk Communist

party to form his own, and, borrowing from the Great Helmsman,

founded the New People’s Army which is today a nation-wide presence

and the major antagonist of the oligarchy. [61] (The spread of English,

and, later, of ‘street Tagalog’, in nationalist response to American

hegemony, has made possible an archipelago-wide popular communication

—below the oligarchy—that was inconceivable in the era of

Bonifacio or the Hukbalahap.)

Next largest in size was a bien-pensant proto-technocracy, which also

included graduates from American universities. Drawn from much the

same social strata as the radical intelligentsia, it was enraged less by the

injustices of cacique democracy than by its dilettantism, venality, and

technological backwardness. This group also deeply resented its own

powerlessness. When Marcos eventually declared Martial Law in 1972

and proclaimed his New Democracy, it flocked to his standard, believing

its historic moment had come. It stayed loyal to him till the early 1980s,

and long remained crucial to his credibility with Washington planners,

the World Bank and the IMF, and foreign modernizers all and sundry.

Largest of all—if not that large—was a wider urban bourgeois and pettybourgeois

constituency: middle-level civil servants, doctors, nurses,

teachers, businessmen, shopkeepers, and so on. In its political and moral

outlook it can perhaps be compared with the Progressives (definitely

not the Populists) of the United States in the period 1890–1920. In the

1960s it made its political debut in campaigns for honesty-in-government,

urban renewal, crackdowns on machine and warlord politics, and

the legal emancipation of municipalities and the new suburbs. As might

be expected, this group was both anti-oligarchy and anti-popular in

orientation. Had it not been English-educated, and had not President

Kennedy secured a major change in the American immigration laws, it

might have played a major role in Philippine politics in the 1970s and

1980s. But these factors offered it enticing alternatives, such that, by

the mid-1980s, well over a million Filipinos (mainly from this stratum)

had emigrated across the Pacific, most of them for good. [62] This bourgeois

haemorrhage in the short run weakened a significant political

competitor for the oligarchy, but in the longer run cost it an important

political ally—one reason why the Aquino government has so little

room for manœuvre.

The Marcos regime, which began to entrench itself long before the

declaration of Martial Law in 1972, was an instructively complex

hybrid. [63] From one point of view, Don Ferdinand can be seen as the

Master Cacique or Master Warlord, in that he pushed the destructive

logic of the old order to its natural conclusion. In place of dozens of

privatized ‘security guards’, a single privatized National Constabulary;

in place of personal armies, a personal Army; instead of pliable local

judges, a client Supreme Court; instead of a myriad pocket and rotten

boroughs, a pocket or rotten country, managed by cronies, hitmen, and

flunkies.

But from another viewpoint, he was an original; partly because he was

highly intelligent, partly because, like his grotesque wife, he came from

the lower fringes of the oligarchy. In any case, he was the first elite

Filipino politician who saw the possibilities of reversing the traditional

flow of power. All his predecessors had lived out the genealogy of

mestizo supremacy—from private wealth to state power, from provincial

bossism to national hegemony. But almost from the beginning of his

presidency in 1965, Marcos had moved mentally out of the nineteenth

century, and understood that in our time wealth serves power, and that

the key card is the state. Manila’s Louis Napoleon.

Marcos Settles In

He started with the Army, which until then had been politically insignificant.

[64] The size of the armed forces was rapidly increased, the amplitude

of its budget multiplied, and its key posts allotted to officers from

the Ilocano-speaking northwestern Luzon from which Marcos himself

originated. The final decision to declare martial law, for which plans

had been prepared months in advance, was taken in concert with

the military high command—Corazon’s cousin Eduardo ‘Danding’

Cojuangco and Defence Secretary Juan ‘Johnny’ Ponce Enrile being

the only civilian co-conspirators. [65] The civil service followed, particularly

that ambitious sector identified earlier as candidate-technocrats.

The state would save the country from what Marcos identified as its

prime enemies—the Communists and the oligarchy.

Marcos exploited state, rather than hacienda, power in two other

instructive ways. The first was to deal with the Americans, the second

with his fellow-oligarchs.

He understood, more clearly than anyone else—including the Filipino

Left—that for Washington the Philippines were like Cyprus for London.

The huge bases at Subic and Clark Field had nothing to do with the

defence of the Philippines as such, and everything to do with maintaining

American imperial power along the Pacific Rim. It followed that Manila

should treat them as luxury properties, for the leasing of which ever

more exorbitant rentals could be charged. [66] So too the Philippine Army.

Raymond Bonner’s book, Waltzing with a Dictator, amply documents

how Marcos, at considerable personal profit, rented a (noncombatant)

army engineering battalion to Lyndon Johnson, who in 1965 was busy

hiring Asian mercenaries to bolster the ‘international crusade’ image

desired for the American intervention in Vietnam. Next to the South

Koreans, he got, mercenary for mercenary, the best price in Asia. (In

this effort he had considerable help from his egregious wife, who

splashed her way into high-level Washington circles in a way that no

Dragon Lady had done since the shimmering days of Madame Chiang

Kai-shek. [67]) But he also had the imaginative insolence to try to do to

the Americans what they had so long been accustomed to doing to the

Filipinos. According to Bonner, Marcos contributed a million dollars

to each of Richard Nixon’s presidential election campaigns—with, of

course, ‘state money’—thereby joining that select group of Third World

tyrants (Chiang Kai-shek, Pak Chung Hee, Reza Pahlavi, Rafael Trujillo,

and Anastasio Somoza) who played an active role in the politics of the

metropole. [68]

As far as the oligarchy was concerned, Marcos went straight for its

jugular—the ‘rule of law’. From the very earliest days, Marcos used his

plenary Martial Law powers to advise all oligarchs who dreamt of

opposing or supplanting him that property was not power, since at a

stroke of the martial pen it ceased to be property. [69] The Lopez dynasty

(based in Iloilo) was abruptly deprived of its mass media empire and

its control of Manila’s main supplier of electricity. [70] The 500 hectare

Hacienda Osmeña was put up for ‘land-reform’ somewhat later on. [71]

There was no recourse, since the judiciary was fully cowed and the

legislature packed with allies and hangers-on. But Marcos had no

interest in upsetting the established social order. Those oligarchs who

bent with the wind and eschewed politics for the pursuit of gain were

mostly left undisturbed. The notorious ‘cronies’ were, sociologically, a

mixed bag, including not only relatives of Ferdinand and Imelda, but

favoured oligarchs and quite a few ‘new men’.

At its outset, the Martial Law regime had a substantial, if restricted,

social base. Its anti-Communist, ‘reformist’, ‘modernizing’, and ‘law and

order’ rhetoric attracted the support of frustrated would-be technocrats,

much of the underempowered urban middle class, and even sectors of

the peasantry and urban poor. Shortly after winning absolute power he

announced that the state had seized no less than 500,000 guns from

private hands, raising hopes of a less visibly dangerous public life. [72] A

limited land-reform succeeded in creating, in the old Huk stampinggrounds

of Central Luzon, a new stratum of peasant-owners [73] But as

time passed, and the greed and violence of the regime became ever

more evident, much of this support dried up. By the later 1970s the

technocrats were a spent force, and the urban middle class became

increasingly aware of the decay of Manila, the devastation of the

university system, the abject and ridiculous character of the monopolized

mass media, and the country’s economic decline.

The real beneficiaries of the regime—aside from the Marcos mafia

itself [74] —were two military forces: the National Army and the New

People’s Army. Martial Law in itself gave the former unprecedented

power. But Marcos also used favoured officers to manage properties

confiscated from his enemies, public corporations, townships, and so

forth. The upper-echelon officers came to live in a style to which only

the oligarchy had hitherto been accustomed. [75] Military intelligence

became the regime’s beady eyes and hidden ears. Legal restraints on

military abuses simply disappeared. And there was only one master now

to determine postings and promotions. To be sure, the Old Cacique

packed the leadership with pliant placemen from his Ilocano-speaking

homeland, but there was still plenty to go round.

On the other hand, the dictatorship encouraged a rapid growth, and

slower geographic spread, of the Communist guerrilla forces. No less

significant than their expanding rural support was their organized reach

into urban areas. One of the most striking features of the last years of

the regime was the gradual adoption of a nationalist-Marxist vocabulary

by notable sections of the bourgeois intelligentsia, the lower echelons

of the Church hierarchy, and the middle class more generally. [76] Only

the militant Left appeared to offer some way out.

The story of the unravelling of the regime following the brazen assassination

of Benigno Aquino, Jr., at Manila’s airport on 21 August 1983 is

too well known to need detailing here. More important is an understanding

of the regime that has replaced it.

Riding the ‘People Power Revolution’

The initial coalition behind the dead man’s widow was wide and

(variably) deep: she was then above all Corazon Aquino rather than

Corazon Cojuangco. It was based on a huge groundswell of revulsion

against the Old Cacique and his manileña Miss Piggy. It included, from

the right, ambitious middle-ranking and junior officers of the National

Army, frustrated finally by the old regime’s visible decay and the ethnic

nepotism of its premier danseur; the ever-hopeful technocracy and the

non-crony segments of Manila’s business community; almost all factions

of the Church; the middle class; the non-NPA sectors of the intelligentsia;

sundry self-described ‘cause-oriented groups’ which regarded themselves

as the vanguard of a newly-legal Left; and the oligarchs.

The coalition was far too diverse and incoherent to last very long. Two

years after the ‘People Power Revolution’, it has become far narrower

and, as it were, more densely packed. First to go were its right and left

wings. For the cowboy activists of the Reform the Armed Forces

Movement (RAM), who had played a pivotal role in February 1986 by

betraying Marcos, the only genuinely tolerable successor to the old

regime was a military junta, or a military-dominated government under

their leadership. But this course had no serious domestic support, and

was, for a Washington basking in Port au Prince TV glory, in any

case out of the question. Besides, cold-eyed realists in the Reagan

Administration perfectly understood that the Philippine military was

far too factionalized, incompetent, corrupt, vainglorious, and ill-trained

to be given any blank cheques. [77] A series of risible brouhahas, culminating

in the Gregorio (‘Gringo’) Honasan coup de force of 28 August 1987,

only confirmed the soundness of this judgment. On the left, the situation

was more complex. Far the most powerful component within it was

the NPA, which had greatly benefited from the Martial Law regime, and

had now to decide how to respond to the new constellation of forces.

The issue of whether frontally to oppose the Aquino regime, or try

substantially to alter its internal equilibrium, was seriously debated in

1986–87. For a complex of reasons, too intricate to detain us here, and

the wisdom of which is yet to be determined, the die was cast, early in

1987, for confrontation. [78] The immediate consequence was the collapse

of the legal Left, and the manifest enfeeblement of the ‘cause-oriented

groups’, which, by the time of the Honasan comedy, had lost almost

everything but their causes. Out of these developments emerged the

real, unbalanced, and uneasy partners of the contemporary Aquino

coalition: the oligarchy, the urban middle class, and the Church.

During the new regime’s first year, when the elan of the ‘People Power

Revolution’ remained quite strong, the coalition’s junior partners were

optimistic. The restoration of an open-market press, greatly expanded

freedom for assembly and organization, and the crumbling of the crony

monopolies and monopsonies, filled the various sectors of the middle

class with giddy exhilaration. They could be fully themselves once again.

Business confidence would be restored and the Philippines rerouted onto

the path of progress. Good Americans were on their side. Honest

technocratic expertise would at last be properly appreciated and

rewarded. The intelligentsia (or at least major parts of it) now felt free

to detach itself from the radical Left; it had a new home on television

and radio, and in the press.

Furthermore, President Aquino’s inner circle included not only Cardinal

Sin but a number of idealistic human-rights lawyers and left-liberal

journalists and academics. And Corazon herself, perhaps taking a leaf

out of the Book of Modern Kings, made every effort to appear in public

en bonne bourgeoise. Tita (‘Auntie’), as she was now called, was a brave,

pious, unpretentious housewife who wanted only what was best for her

nephews and nieces. The treasurer of Don José Cojuangco’s holding

company and the coheiress of Hacienda Luisita remained mostly invisible.

There was a touching confidence that the country’s problems were

on their way to sensible solution. She had opened talks with the NPA

and with the Muslim insurrectionaries. A major land-reform—which

would not affect the middle class, but which promised to undermine

the NPA’s expanding rural base—would be enacted. The Americans

would provide substantial sums in support of restored constitutional

democracy. And People Power would, through free and honest elections,

create a progressive legislative partner for the President, giving

the middle class its long-dreamed-of chance to lead the country. In

substantial measure the ecclesiastical leadership shared these hopes,

trusting that the new situation would permit the Church to become

once again ideologically united and organizationally disciplined. [79] The

catchword of the era was ‘democratic space’, which is perhaps most

aptly translated as ‘middle class room for manœuvre between the

military, the oligarchy, and the Communists’.

The second year of the new regime dashed most of these illusions. The

talks with Muslim and Communist leaders broke down for essentially

the same reason: the Aquino regime found itself in no position to make

any attractive concessions. Haunted by nationalist dreams, even those

Muslim leaders who seemed prepared to accept ‘autonomy’, rather than

independence, still demanded a Muslim autonomous zone remembered

from the American colonial era. Yet ever since the Lansdale-Magsaysay

regime had begun transmigrating potential and actual Hukbalahap

peasant supporters to ‘empty’ lands in Mindanao, the island had been

rapidly ‘Christianized’, by spontaneous migrants, land speculators, logging

and mining conglomerates, large-scale commercial agribusinesses,

and so on. Even had it wished—which it did not—to accede to Muslim

dreams, this would have required the Aquino government either forcibly

to relocate these tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of ‘Christians’ (but

where to?) or to leave them to the political mercies of justifiably

angry Muslims. It lived by its own American-era dreams—a United

Philippines—and besides, the Army, which had suffered far more severe

casualties fighting the Muslims than combatting the Communists, would

not have stood for ‘weakness’. With the NPA the same was true. There

was nothing President Aquino could offer the Communists which they

did not already have or which the Army would be likely to permit. [80]

Nor were the Americans much help. The Reagan Administration was

preoccupied with its own survival, and a dozen ‘more important’ foreign

policy tar-babies. Its own financial recklessness meant that it had now

very little to offer the Philippines even in military aid (which remained

a pittance, more or less what it wished to give the Nicaraguan ‘contras’).

Talk of a ‘Marshall Plan’ for the Philippines vanished with the noise of

escaping steam. And the overseas middle class stayed put. Its members

might periodically return home with armfuls of presents for the relatives,

but they had decided that the future of the bourgeoisie in the Philippines

was too uncertain to be worth any substantial investments. [81] In the first

year of the regime there had been much bold talk of liquidating the

American bases, but by the second it was already clear that they would

stay put: the Aquino government felt it could not afford seriously to

antagonize Washington, and besides, it could not contemplate the loss

in income and jobs that closure would imply. (In the 1980s, the US

military was still the second largest employer—after the Filipino state—

in the country.) The one important service the Americans did provide

was explicit political support in the face of the various buffa coup

attempts that anticlimaxed in the ‘Gringo’ ringer of August 1987.

The pivotal issue for the regime coalition was, however, the ‘restoration

of democracy’, signalled by the 11 May 1987 elections for a reanimated

Senate and House of the Representatives, and the 18 January 1988

elections for provincial governors, mayors and other local powerholders.

The middle-class hope was that these elections would not only

set the provisional Aquino government on a firm constitutional base,

but would forcefully demonstrate to the Army and the Communists

where the popular will lay. Moreover, it would translate People’s Power

into sufficient institutional power to carry out the domestic reforms

deemed essential to the future leadership prospects of the middle class.

The Caciques Claim Their Own

It was now and here that the senior partners in the ruling coalition

finally made themselves felt. During the first year the oligarchy had had

its uneasy moments. Corazon herself might be sound enough, but some

of her closest advisers were not; the mass media, for the moment still

dominated ideologically by middle-class urban reformists, kept up a

constant drumfire in favour of a land-reform that hopefully would

destroy the basis of NPA rural power. Even the World Bank, along with

senior Japanese and American officials, were arguing the same logic.

And, pending the elections, the President held plenary powers. Who

could be sure that in a moment of frailty she might not do something

fatal?

The alarm was real, if probably ill-founded. COLOR (Council of Landowners

for Orderly Reform—500 magnate members) was hastily established;

it sent Corazon resolutions signed with (happily, its own) blood,

threatening civil disobedience in the event of serious land-reform. A

Movement for an Independent (Sugar) Negros appeared, claiming to

be ready to offer armed resistance to impending Manilan injustice. [82]

Lawyers were said, by the press, to be ‘going crazy’, reclassifying

agricultural lands as ‘commercial-industrial’, signing off surplus plots

to infant relatives, fraudulently antedating mortgages, etc. [83]

What was needed in 1986, as in 1916 and 1946, was cacique democracy.

If elections could be promptly and freely held, the oligarchy could hope

to return to its pre-1972 control of ‘the rule of law’, and put everyone—

the middle class, the military, their tenants, and the ‘rabble’—in their

respective places.

On 11 May 1987, national-level elections were held for twenty-four

senatorial, and two hundred congressional seats. The outcome turned

out to be eminently satisfactory. To quote a well-informed Filipino

study: ‘Out of 200 House Representatives, 130 belong to the so-called

“traditional political families”, while another 39 are relatives of these

families. Only 31 Congressmen have no electoral record prior to 1971 and are

not related to these old dominant families. . . . Of the 24 elected

senators, there are a few non-traditional figures but the cast is largely

made up of members of prominent pre-1972 political families.’ [84] Newlyelected

Senator John Osmeña—grandson of Commonwealth Vice-President

Sergio Osmeña, Sr., and nephew of defeated 1969 presidential

candidate Sergio Osmeña, Jr.—told the press: ‘One member of the

family who does not do good is one too many, but ten members in the

family doing good are not even enough.’ [85]

The results were widely interpreted as a triumph for Corazon Aquino

in so far as twenty-three of the twenty-four victorious senatorial candidates

ran as her supporters and as members of various nominal parties

in her electoral coalition. [86] Something comparable occurred in the

Lower House. [87] But probably the outcome is better designated as a

triumph for Corazon Cojuangco. The study quoted above notes that:

‘Of the 169 Representatives who belong to the dominant families or

are related to them, 102 are identified with the pre-1986 anti-Marcos

forces, while 67 are from pro-Marcos parties or families.’ A shake in the

kaleidoscope of oligarchic power.

Not that the shrewder caciques failed to recognize certain new realities,

including the genuine popular appeal of the President herself. (A

significant number of Marcos collaborators swung over to her bandwagon.)

When Congress finally opened in the late summer of 1987, it

proclaimed itself committed to land-reform, and appointed ‘outsiders’

to the chairmanships of the Senate and House committees in charge of

agrarian affairs. But within days the chairman of the House Committee

on Agrarian Reform, Representative Bonifacio Gillego, an ex-military

intelligence official converted to ‘social democracy’, was bemoaning the

fact that seventeen of the twenty-one members of his committee were

landlords—including presidential brother José Cojuangco, presidential

uncle-in-law Herminio Aquino, and the virago of Negros, Hortensia

Starke. [88]

A fuller revival of the ancien régime came with the provincial and local

elections which opened on 18 January 1988, and which found 150,000

candidates competing, à l’américaine, for close to 16,500 positions—an

average of nine aspirants per plum. [89] These elections were of such an

exemplary character that they deserve comment in their own right. In

some places they represented happy reconsolidations. On the island of

Cebu, for example, Emilio ‘Lito’ Osmeña, brother of Senator John,

won the island’s governorship, while his cousin Tomas (‘Tommy’), son

of Sergio ‘Serging’ Osmeña, Jr., defeated a candidate from the rival

mestizo Cuen-co dynasty to become Mayor of Cebu City. [90] A little to

the north, in the fiefdom of the Duranos, the eighty-two-year-old Ramon

Durano, Sr., ran successfully for mayor of Danao City, with the backing

of one violent son, Jesus ‘Don’ Durano, against the opposition of

another. The night after the election, losing candidate Thaddeus ‘Deo’

Durano, waylaid by intra-family assassins, ended up in critical condition

in a Cebu City emergency ward. [91] The old warlord, who for the duration

of Martial Law was a key Marcos henchman on Cebu, this time ran on

the ticket of the PDP-Laban, the machine of President Aquino’s brother

José Cojuangco—who successfully recruited many other Marcos

caciques under his sister’s banner. Similar victories occurred in Olongapo

—downtown from the Subic Naval Base—where Richard Gordon,

husband of Congresswoman Katharine Gordon, became mayor; in

Western Negros, where Congressman José Carlos Lacson was now

joined by governor-elect Daniel Lacson, Jr.; and so on. . . .

Not that the old dynasties had things entirely their own way by

any means. In some areas close to metropolitan Manila, middle-class

reformists mobilized popular elements as well as ‘minor’ dynasties to

break up old fiefdoms. The Laurel machine in Batangas collapsed, to

the embarrassment of the ineptly scheming Vice-President, Salvador

‘Doy’ Laurel. The Rizal empire of Corazon’s uncle, Congressman Juan

‘Komong’ Sumulong, was decimated. In Pampanga, out went the

Nepomucenos, Lazatins and Lingads. In the Iloilo fiefdom of the

Lopezes, Olive Lopez-Padilla, daughter of one-time Vice-President

Fernando Lopez and sister of Congressman Albertito Lopez, ran for

governor on the wonderful vulgarian-hacendado slogan of ‘Bring Iloilo

back to the Lopezes’, but was nonetheless soundly thrashed. [92] In

Mindanao’s Cagayan de Oro, the Fortich dynasty, described by The

Manila Bulletin as having run the place ‘since the beginning of the

century’, was humiliated. [93] No less interesting were certain military

participations. In the Cagayan valley of northeastern Luzon, ex-Lieutenant-

Colonel Rodolfo Aguinaldo, a key member of the Honasan rebel

group, out-intimidated the local caciques (Dupayas and Tuzons) to seize

the governorship. In Marcos’s old base in Northern Ilocos, the vicegovernorship

was won, from military prison, by ex-Colonel Rolando

Abadilla—once the dreaded chief of the Metropolitan Command Intelligence

Security Group under Marcos, a thug widely suspected of helping

to mastermind the assassination of Corazon’s husband, and a major

participant in the abortive coups of January and April 1987. [94]

Even the NPA was indirectly drawn in. It was widely, and credibly,

reported that in many areas where it had politico-military ascendancy,

the movement charged candidates substantial fees for permission to

campaign unmolested, and, here and there, lent unofficial support to

sympathetic local aspirants. [95] Not that the civil war seriously let up. A

day or two after the polls closed, Hortensia Starke’s Hacienda Bino was

burned to the ground, and the Hacienda La Purisima of Enrique Rojas,

a top official of the National Federation of Sugar Planters, barely escaped

the same fate. [96]

Politics in a Well-Run Casino

These variable outcomes need to be viewed in a larger framework for

their implications to be well understood. The key facts to be borne in

mind are these: No less than 81 per cent of the country’s 27,600,000

eligible voters voted. [97] One or other elective post was available for

every 1,400 voters. The average number of contestants per post was

roughly nine. In most places the contests were ‘serious’ in a rather new

way—forty-one candidates were assassinated by rivals (not the NPA) in

the course of the brief campaign. [98] In different ways, and to different

extents, almost all political leaderships, from right to left, participated

and could imagine that they had, up to a certain point, benefited.

Everywhere, local patronage machines were replacing the centralized

Marcos-era appointive apparat.

In any well-run casino, the tables are managed in the statistical favour

of the house. To keep drawing customers, the owners must provide

them with periodic, even spectacular, successes. A win is a splendid

confirmation of the player’s skill and heaven’s favour. A loss demonstrates

his/her misfortune or ineptitude. Either way, it’s back to the

tables as soon as possible. So with the blackjack of cacique democracy.

Each local triumph for reform promises a rentier future; each loss

signals miscalculations or ill luck. At the end of the week or the year,

however, the dealer is always in the black.

The truth is that American electoralism remains powerfully attractive,

even when, perhaps especially when, married to Spanish caciquism in

a geographically fragmented, ethnolinguistically divided, and economi-

cally bankrupt polity. It disperses power horizontally, while concentrating

it vertically; and the former draws a partial veil over the latter.

‘Anyone’ can get elected: look at the high, uncoerced turnout; look at

the number of competing candidates (you too can run); look at the

execrable colonels (better they campaign in the provinces than plot in

the capital); look at the (probably temporary) fall of the Laurels and

the Nepomucenos; look at the NPA’s electoral levies, which, from a

certain angle, can be aligned with the election-time exactions of the

warlords. [99] Precisely because the competition is violently real, it is easy

to be persuaded to cheer for, as it were, Arsenal or Chelsea, without

reflecting too hard on the fact that both are in the First Division, and

that one is watching the match from the outer stands, not playing in

it.

But, of course, by no means everyone enjoys spectator sports. Shortly

after the 18 January elections a curious reporter went to interview

employees at the Cojuangcos’ Hacienda Luisita, who had just voted

massively for Arsenal. What difference had it made to their lives that

Tita Cory had become President? ‘We used to get rice and sugar free,

now we must pay. We used to get free water from the pumps in our

yards. Now we must pay for pumped-in water because molasses from

the sugar mill has seeped into our wells.’ Daily wages? They had been

raised by 2.50 pesos ($0.12) for field-hands, and 8 pesos ($0.40) for millworkers.

Level of employment? Usually from two to four days a week,

in good times. One elderly man spoke of trying to survive by busing

to additional work in the neighbouring province of Pampanga: transportation

costs took 23 pesos from the daily wage of 40 pesos, leaving him

a net of 17 pesos ($0.85). It still made sense to go. The reporter was

told that a worker, who had been quoted in an international magazine

as saying that on the hacienda horses ate better than the hands, had

been ‘summoned’ by management. He had had to retract the slander.

But one of the interviewees concluded: ‘Of course it is true. The horses

get Australian grain and eggs, while we hardly have the meat.’ [100] All

those interviewed either refused to give their names, or asked not to

be identified.