Imperial September

There’s more gloomy, rainy weather coming up for much of the week, which led me to want to title my column “Dark September” because of the weather as well as two events in September, some 50 years back.

The better-known event, for Filipinos, was Proclamation No. 1081 announced by Ferdinand Marcos in 1972.

Almost a year after the declaration of martial law in the Philippines, the world woke up to read about a military coup halfway across the world involving a bombing attack on the Moneda, the Chilean presidential palace, resulting in the suicide of President Salvador Allende. The date was Sept. 11, 1973. Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who led the coup, was to rule for the next 17 years.

It has been an uphill battle fighting against the attempts to sanitize, if not erase, the dark years of the Marcos dictatorship, so unlike Chile where various sectors—the academe, families of the 3,000 murdered victims of Allende’s military, government agencies—have been more successful in keeping alive the memories of the Pinochet era and bringing justice to its many victims.

Note the active role of anti-dictatorship artists both in Chile and the Philippines in upholding historical truth. You might want to catch, on Netflix, “El Conde” (The Count), a satirical Chilean movie that depicts Pinochet as a vampire born in the 18th century and living into the 21st century, still lusting for power … and blood. Vampires and dictators do share much in common.

Back now to the fight against historical revisionism. I do worry that in our “never again” chanting, we might forget the bigger picture that’s involved in this never again. Just last week, I was approached by a young man questioning the “No to martial law” slogan, pointing out that the Philippine Constitution (actually constitutions) provides for martial law.

I was about to start a class so I didn’t have time to explain it was no to the wholesale violations of human rights that caused so much suffering, including some 3,200 deaths and disappearances, and the massive plunder of the country’s coffers. When I read Pinochet is estimated to have stolen some $28 million of funds, I thought, that was loose change compared to the $10 billion commonly cited for the conjugal Marcos dictatorship.

We’ve seen Filipinos becoming numbed by the numbers, quick to just shrug their shoulders and, at best, argue that what’s done is done and worse, to repeat the mantra that Marcos was already rich, what with Yamashita gold and all that, before he became president.

I feel our historians will need to write about the broader imperial context of martial law and cite at least Chile and the Philippines as prime examples of that context.

The 1970s were tumultuous in many parts of the world, with the postwar baby boom generation coming of age and questioning why, amid the growing prosperity that had emerged after World War II, social inequities and injustice were on the rise. This was also the era of the Cold War, the struggle between “communism” (represented mainly by the Soviet Union) and “democracy” (Mother America).

The US was determined to maintain its position as a global power, against “communists” and this meant installing and protecting compliant heads of state to protect American interests. The Philippines was one of the most loyal client states. Chile, on the other hand, had strayed under Allende, who was openly socialist. Pinochet not only safeguarded American interests but also allowed Chile’s DINA, its intelligence agency, to become a hub for covert operations involving kidnapping, torture, and assassination of politicians and activists throughout Latin America. Some 60,000 of these “left-wing” activists were killed during Pinochet’s time.

Filipinos were easier to control, given that many of us still looked up to Mother America. But Marcos and his cronies were getting too greedy, and sometimes “disobedient,” courting “communist China” for example. Civil unrest and the communist insurgency were growing and the dictator was seriously ill.

In the end, the US had to abandon the dictator. An analysis by Duncan Carrie in the Washington Examiner notes that advisers to then US President Ronald Reagan figured that Soviet power was waning and communists would not be able to take over after Marcos.

There’s much more that has to be written about imperial America and its role in setting up a number of dictatorships, especially in the 1970s. In a way, our Department of Education was right in ordering that the term “Marcos dictatorship” should be banished from textbooks, mainly because of the reference to “Marcos.”

I agree for different reasons. The more accurate term should be, as our activists chanted all through martial law and for years after, the “US-Marcos dictatorship.”

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