It would be 42 years this Sunday since the formal declaration of Martial Law by Pres. Ferdinand Marcos. And once again we who lived our early years in that dark period reminisce and ask all kinds of what if’s.
These past few nights, I often doze off even before I can make up scenarios in my head at what life would have been now if Marcos’ authoritarian rule succeeded.
That I can sleep off faster than I could conjure in my mind all kinds of megastructures and high technology inventions by Filipinos either means I am too tired or, and this I believe, there is nothing much to imagine anyway.
But what indeed would the Philippines be today had Marcos succeeded in his so-called New Society Movement?
I have yet to read Gerardo Sicat’s 830-page biography of Cesar Emilio Aguinaldo Virata, which was launched by UP Press last month, but I certainly hope Sicat, Marcos’ economic minister during those years, makes an honest-to-goodness analysis at why the Philippine industrial development projects Marcos touted failed miserably, while those of our neighbors Malaysia, Singapore and even South Korea grew and made those countries rich.
It was Virata, Marcos’ finance minister, who oversaw a team of Filipino economic experts who were trained in the best engineering and business schools in the United States immediately after World War II.
Men like Vicente Paterno, the earlier-mentioned Sicat, Manuel Alba, Armand Fabella, and Jaime Laya, to cite a few. Paterno, Marcos’ trade and industry minister, later bolted the Marcos regime and remolded himself as staunch anti-Marcos activist who became a senator.
The rest stuck with him till the end but were able to redeem their social standings, even sitting in various bank management boards after Marcos was booted from power.
Laya, Central Bank governor then education minister in the waning years of the Marcos dictatorship, remolded himself into a well-respected culture and heritage advocate aside from his prowess at banking. Armand Fabella even became education secretary under Pres. Fidel V. Ramos.
That they were able to live out their lives in relative ease way after the dark years of Martial Law is testament to the forgiving spirit of the Filipinos and also to the levels of expertise and clout these men held that were important even after the so-called restoration of democracy.
Their survival and return to the folds of a forgiving and understanding society also gives reason for pause. What if the ideas these men had for the nation’s future had not been derailed by dictatorial politics and corruption?
It may be good to remember that Marcos and his Martial Law was a kind of trend in the 1960 and 1970s for a handful of countries barely 20 to 30 years after being decolonized or had emerged from bitter civil war.
Singaporeans, thrown out of the Malay Federation in 1964 for its overwhelmingly Chinese population in a sea of Malays, placed their fate in Lee Kuan Yew who ruled for over three decades and whose son now runs the extremely wealthy city-state.
South Korea, where your Samsung phones and Hyundai cars come from, underwent a coup d’etat in 1961 led by Gen. Park Chung Hee who reigned with a tight fist until his assassination in 1979. Indonesia voted Sukarno as president in the early 1960s only to be toppled before the end of that decade by Col. Suharto who ruled from 1967 until he was eventually thrown out in 1998.
Malaysia, on the other hand, continuously voted in Matahir Mohamad until, like Lee Kuan Yew, he decided to retire in 2003.
Of all these countries, two stand out because of their level of poverty and corruption: the Philippines and Indonesia. All the rest, especially for Singapore and South Korea, are now economic giants. Malaysia, with its massive oil reserves, still falters somewhat from political strife but its economy is stable.
Was Marcos serious when he unveiled in 1977 the seven great industrial projects or did he just decide on that because he believed anything with a seven or is divisible by seven would bring him luck?
These projects, among them the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant, the Philippine Sinter Corporation, the Philippine Associated Smelting and Refinery Corporation, were supposed to turn the Philippines into a vibrant industrialized country in just a decade, able to produce its own goods and not end up like what it is today: we buy cell phones and cars from foreign companies which in turn drain precious dollars that should have otherwise been used to help nurture a distinctly Filipino manufacturing sector.
In the end, corruption won and the technocrats led by Virata are left today to explain why we eagerly buy Samsung and Apple iPhones and not ask whether we should have been selling cellphones that could be aptly called Chico or Santol.
Still, we can grant to Marcos the vision of what this nation should have been. Yet, forty years down the road, we still have not reached that goal.
Sadly, it was those dark Martial Law years that nurtured two more generations of corruption and self-interested politics that, like Indonesia, continues to hound the vision of a new and better society for all Filipinos.
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