Early Promise Faded : 20 Years of Marcos: Few Gains Seen

Deep inside this town named Marcos, 20 bone-jarring minutes by jeep off the main road on a dirt track called Ferdinand Marcos Avenue, there is a village that stands as a legacy to President Ferdinand E. Marcos’ 20 years in power in the Philippines.

The village, named Ferdinand, is one of 10 subdivisions of the town of Marcos, which Marcos created in 1963 as a 46th-birthday present to himself when he was just a senator. It was to have been a model of Marcos’ “New Society,” and today, the mayor of Marcos proudly notes that every village in Marcos has electricity and that new roads are under construction.

But now there’s trouble in Ferdinand--trouble that embodies many of the deep economic and social problems now afflicting much of the Philippines.

Communist-led guerrillas have arrived in this village of 800 peasant farmers. So has a heavily armed detachment of counterinsurgency forces of the Philippine military. And, in the last year, several Ferdinand residents have been killed in the cross-fire--some by the military as suspected Communist sympathizers, others by the Communists as suspected government informants.

The skirmishes here are just part of a battle that is raging in many parts of the Philippines’ 73 island provinces, where an estimated 15,000 armed insurgents have been growing rapidly in power and influence by exploiting the nation’s devastated economy.

No Better Off

Even here, in the town named after the president, many of the still-impoverished farmers privately say they are, at best, no better off now than they were when Marcos first assumed the presidency in 1965 despite local government claims of large-scale development.

The question of whether Filipinos are better off now than they were 20 years ago cuts to the heart of Friday’s special presidential election. It is very much on the minds of the voters and is recognized as the central issue by both candidates for the presidency.

When he announced last November that he was calling the election, Marcos said the major issue in the campaign would be “Marcos alone.”

“I think it should be only me because . . . the issues involve me,” he said.

And Marcos’ opponent, Corazon Aquino, only 10 days ago reminded voters, “The real issue is Marcos himself, the performance of Mr. Marcos.”

When Marcos first took office, he was a dynamic and politically gifted young senator who subsequently modeled himself after President John F. Kennedy. Marcos pledged to create a New Society in the Philippines, a nation then deeply beset by poverty, corruption, violence and despair.

“When I first assumed the presidency, we found a government at the brink of disaster and collapse, a government that prompted fear before it inspired hope, plagued by indecision, scorned by self-doubt, its economy despoiled, its treasury plundered,” Marcos said in his inauguration speech when he was reelected in 1969.

But, according to all the opposition leaders as well as many clergymen, businessmen, doctors, lawyers, laborers and even some of Marcos’ supporters throughout the Philippines, little has changed for the 55 million Filipinos since Marcos delivered that speech.

In many regions of the country where the opposition has gained a foothold, that sentiment is likely to be translated into votes in Friday’s election. But here, in the president’s home province of Ilocos del Norte, even the opposition concedes that the overwhelming majority of voters will vote for Marcos as they have in every election since he first took office; regional loyalties run deep and Marcos’ family control here is nearly complete.

Margin May Be Smaller

But this year, his winning margin may well be smaller than ever before, local politicians say, simply because of the economic hardships the people are enduring.

Even in Marcos, a town just 30 miles from the president’s hometown of Sarrat, in the heart of Ilocos del Norte, the local parish priest said that for the first time ever Marcos may not win 100% of the vote. “I just don’t think people are better off now than they were 20 years ago,” said the priest, Father Peter Acoba. “Almost everybody is crying for assistance.”

Acoba noted that the government has, in recent years, paved the main highway through the town of Marcos and that even the most distant barrios and villages have been electrified during the president’s rule.

“But it’s like putting in a concrete toilet and having nothing in the stomach to put in there,” Acoba added. “It is putting the cart before the horse.”

In Marcos today, the farmers still till their soil with ancient hand plows pulled by buffalo. They still bring their produce to market in wooden horse carts, as they have done for centuries. The women still wash clothes by hand in the river and, despite recent government irrigation projects, there is often enough water for the crops only when there is enough rain. All too often, the crop itself is barely enough to feed the farmers and their families.

Throughout the president’s home province--indeed, throughout the nation--more than 55% of the major towns and villages have been given electricity, as Marcos’ current campaign ads say. But few Filipinos can afford appliances powered by electricity; most villagers still cook over wood fires and preserve food on blocks of ice.

Few Can Afford Cars

The number of paved roads in the Philippines has more than tripled under President Marcos, from 35,000 miles to more than 100,000. But few Filipinos can afford cars or jeeps, and still fewer could afford the gasoline if they owned vehicles.

Although there has been little improvement in the standard of living here, tens of millions of dollars in government funds have been spent on government-owned luxury hotels, casinos, golf courses, private palaces and mansions for Marcos and his family, monuments, murals and statues of Marcos and his wife, Imelda, and ultramodern convention and cultural centers throughout the Philippines.

Even Father Manuel Aspiras, parish priest of the town adjacent to Marcos, who proudly describes himself as “the only priest in Ilocos del Norte who is campaigning openly for the president,” concluded last week: “There was no need to put those things up. The government had the wrong priorities.”

In the president’s home province, Marcos personally ordered the construction of an estimated $2-million, 250-room luxury hotel that is often empty, a rarely used multimillion-dollar sports complex that includes a championship 18-hole golf course, and a “Palace of the North” complete with an Olympic-size swimming pool, tennis courts, motorboats and a permanent military detachment that he visits, at most, once a month.

Millions for Wedding

In Sarrat, the government spent millions of dollars just preparing for the June, 1983, wedding of Marcos’ daughter, Irene. Local officials confirm that government funds were used to build mansions for her, for Marcos’ top military aide, Gen. Fabian C. Ver, and for several Cabinet ministers. More was spent to renovate the town church, which was destroyed two months later in a deadly earthquake that many superstitious Filipinos believe was divine retribution for such government lavishness.

“Here, we know the president was poor when he first entered politics,” said local opposition leader Castor Raval, 67, a former Marcos supporter in the provincial capital of Laoag. “Now he’s a billionaire. Well, something must have happened there.

“He had good intentions when he became president in ‘65, but somewhere along the line somebody must have corrupted him,” Raval said.

In Marcos’ 1969 inauguration speech, he declared to the nation, “In government, any act of extravagance shall be treated not only as an offense against good morals but as an act punishable with dismissal.”

Today, the great disparity of wealth within the Philippines is hardly confined to the president’s home province.

Living in Garbage Dumps

In Manila, the capital, hundreds of thousands of Filipinos live as squatters in shantytowns--some of them inside garbage dumps, discarded shipping containers and unused sewer pipes. Many of them work as scavengers or day laborers for $15 a month because there are not enough factories to provide jobs and not enough day work near the costly government resettlement camps built for them far outside the city.

At the same time, many of the nation’s wealthiest families spend their days in chauffeured limousines or on the manicured fields of the posh 80-year-old Manila Polo Club, where polo horses change hands for $5,000 and memberships cost $10,000--an amount it would take one of Manila’s shanty dwellers more than 50 years to earn.

Similarly, in the central island of Negros, where a crisis in the monopoly sugar industry has thrown 300,000 laborers out of work, palatial haciendas coexist with villages of bamboo and straw, where the children of unemployed cane workers are beginning to die of malnutrition.

On the southernmost island of Mindanao, which Marcos once dubbed “The Land of Promise,” the communist insurgency has found its strongest support among the 4 million residents. The insurgents have taken virtual control of vast regions by preying on the lingering poverty in villages where many believe the president’s promises have been broken.

Meanwhile, multinational mining and agricultural corporations and their local officers continue to reap profits, maintain expensive homes and cars and spend lavishly in the island’s few luxury hotels and restaurants.

Clearly, though, Marcos alone is not to blame for all the problems now facing the Philippines, according to independent Filipino analysts. And, even opposition economists and politicians agree, there is also a strong, positive side to Marcos’ legacy. The first half of the president’s tenure, they said, was marked by unprecedented development and achievement throughout the nation.

“It is almost as if there have been two Marcoses,” said Bernardo Villegas, a Harvard-educated economist who now heads a think tank in Manila called the Center for Research and Communication.

Number of Good Things

In Marcos’ first 10 years in office, Villegas said, “he did accomplish a number of good things.” Between 1966 and 1976, he said, Marcos spent hundreds of millions of dollars on new roads and power-development projects.

As a direct result of such development, the Philippines, which imported 95% of its energy just 15 years ago, is now 50% energy self-sufficient.

“Marcos also initiated the first real effort toward land reform,” Villegas added, confirming the Marcos administration’s claim that, during the president’s tenure, more than 2 million acres of land have been handed over to one-time tenant farmers.

The president also broke up longtime, private monopolies in the Philippines’ production of corn and rice. As a result, the Philippines now grows enough rice to feed its own people.

Even after Marcos’ controversial declaration of martial law on Sept. 21, 1972--which began a nine-year period of direct presidential rule, of military control that ultimately led to human rights abuses and strict press censorship and of harsh, nationwide curfews--analysts give Marcos high marks for the initial years.

“During the first four years of martial law, 95% of the businessmen supported the president,” Villegas said, noting that the street crime, the bloody infighting among provincial warlords and the general lawlessness in the nation had made life almost unbearable.

“He did need the clout of martial law in order to dethrone the oligarchs and warlords, break up some of the monopolies and implement some land reform.

“But that was the problem,” Villegas said. “He just brought in a whole new set of oligarchs, close friends and cronies who were loyal to him, and he failed to break up monopolies in our two major industries--coconuts and sugar. Those, he left entirely in the hands of his cronies.”

And from 1976 onward, according to Villegas, Marcos “ran the entire Philippine economy as though it was his own personal property--he did not know how to distinguish between political control and allowing the economy to function freely.”

Rampant Smuggling

The military, too, became corrupted during the nine years its officers and enlisted men were vested with such vast powers of administration. The rampant smuggling Marcos had vowed to “stamp out” during his first two presidential campaigns flourished anew, this time under the direct control of high-ranking military officers.

With the power in the hands of so few, many Filipinos lost the incentive to achieve beyond subsistence levels. Thousands of Filipinos fled for America, an exodus that reached its peak after the 1983 assassination of opposition leader Benigno S. Aquino Jr., when many middle- and upper-class Filipinos migrated, taking not just their families but millions of dollars in foreign exchange that could have been used as capital for much-needed industrial development.

But the assassination, according to a study written last year by Villegas and fellow economist Jose Romero Jr., was “merely the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

At the heart of the failed Philippine economy, they and others have concluded, is the fundamental failure of Marcos and the five men who preceded him as president since the Philippines gained its independence from the United States in 1946 to create an industrial base and modern agriculture.

Challenge From Press

As long ago as 1966, in an editorial in the then-authoritative national daily, the Philippine Free Press, the editors challenged newly elected President Marcos to bring about the reforms needed for an economically viable Philippines--reforms Marcos had promised during his campaign.

“The people will not have--cannot have--enough food, clothing and shelter without industrialization and modernization of agriculture,” the 1966 New Year’s Day editorial stated.

“Is the Marcos administration prepared to pay the price--which is to antagonize powerful vested interests? Can Marcos put the smugglers out of business? Dare he to try to make this nation great again by stopping corruption in government?”

Twenty years later, the research study concluded, the answer is no.

In 15 years alone, it stated, the Philippine foreign debt has increased tenfold--from $2 billion to more than $26 billion.

Even before Aquino’s killing, which sent shock waves through an international lending community always sensitive to the country’s internal stability, foreign banks were “concerned about the (Philippines’) precarious situation, as the country found it difficult to raise additional loans,” the report stated.

No Industrial Base

Mostly, though, the report concluded that in all the billions of dollars the Marcos administration had spent on development projects, little of it was geared to developing an export- and labor-oriented industrial base or improving crop yields through high technology.

And, as the presidential election approaches, Villegas said, the country is in its worst shape in decades, with hardly a single peso of private or government funds being spent on capital development and production in the factories that do exist reduced to just 30% of capacity, on the average.

In the community of 300 or so Filipino families living inside a Manila garbage dump, though, neither the failed national economy nor the 20 years of Marcos are assessed in such technical terms.

For Ernesto Cabantang, who moved into the dump with his family more than 20 years ago, the big issue is jobs. There are none for him or for the other families, who say they prefer to live in the garbage dump in shanties made of scrap wood and tin rather than in resettlement camps the government built for them 50 miles outside the city. Outside Manila, there are even fewer job opportunities.

Reselling the Garbage

“We are garbage pickers,” Cabantang explained through a translator recently. He and the others, he said, gather discarded plastic bags, bottles, tin cans and cardboard boxes and resell them for a few cents per pound.

“There are no factory jobs for us. There is only this. And, living here at the dump site, we are at least near our work.”

Although the crush of Manila’s population of 8 million magnifies the problem, there are similar communities of garbage pickers, many of them also living inside dumps, in almost every major city and town of the Philippines.

Even in the remote, rural villages and barrios, there are many signs of the economic decline in the Philippines, where the average income has actually decreased over the last several years to the present level of about $620 a year--the second-lowest in the Asia-Pacific region. Many families eat meat just once a week. More and more crops are failing because small farmers cannot afford the soaring prices of fertilizer, and many fields are going unplanted because the price of seed has skyrocketed.

Again, the problem can be seen in sharp focus in Marcos’ home province of Ilocos del Norte--indeed, even in the town of Marcos.

“When you look at the amount of money the government has spent here in Marcos and throughout Ilocos, there’s no question it could have been far better used--economically, politically and in all aspects. The people should be far better off than they are,” said Father Acoba at the main Catholic church in Marcos.

Hardest Hit by Rebels

“Whatever is happening in the nation is happening in Marcos, although, in all the towns of Ilocos del Norte province, I would say Marcos has been the hardest hit by the NPA,” he added, referring to the New People’s Army, the military wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines.

According to Acoba and other priests in the region, at least one of whom Marcos personally ordered jailed for eight months last year as a suspected communist sympathizer, the NPA’s appeal in remote villages like Ferdinand is a sign of the failure of the government’s economic policies.

“Most of the people here are poor--only the top government officials are rich--and the people are just as poor as they were 20 years ago,” said Father Mariano Saraos, the priest of the Catholic Church in President Marcos’ birthplace of Sarrat. There, as a 60th-birthday present to the president, First Lady Imelda Marcos reconstructed the house where Marcos was born and dedicated it as the Ferdinand E. Marcos National Museum.

Poor Getting Poorer

Like most of the priests in the Philippines, Saraos has daily contact with the farmers in the town’s remote barrios and villages where the communists have found their strongest support. “The biggest problem is that the poor are getting poorer,” he said last week.

“The government’s limited irrigation projects have improved their crops somewhat, but they are also paying more taxes,” Saraos added. “They spend more for fertilizers and for gasoline to run their pumps, and, really, there are still no jobs outside of the fields.”

Two years ago, the government finally did take a step toward industrialization in Sarrat. It opened a state-of-the-art tomato paste factory just outside town--the first modern, agriculture-based industry in the province.

The factory managers encouraged local farmers to begin planting tomatoes instead of the province’s traditional crops of garlic and tobacco. The government provided the fertilizer and seed free and agreed to purchase the entire crop after the harvest.

Reneged on Deal

Dozens of farmers made the switch, but, when harvest time came, the factory purchased only a small portion of their crop, forcing them to throw away hundreds of pounds of spoiled tomatoes, and the government paid so small a price for what it did buy that most of the farmers lost money, according to several farmers who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution from the local government.

“Here in Ilocos del Norte, people don’t talk too much. They want to say something, but they don’t want to be quoted,” said Saraos, who was born and reared in Ilocos. “They’re afraid.”

Indeed, much of the province is run by relatives and friends of President Marcos--a modern-day political extension of the Philippines’ ancient, tribal clan culture.

The governor of the province is Marcos’ only son, Ferdinand (Bong-Bong) Marcos Jr., 28, who succeeded Marcos’ sister, Elizabeth, two years ago. The province’s sole representative in the National Assembly is Marcos’ elder daughter, Imee. The mayors of many of the towns in the province are cousins of Marcos or sons or daughters of his principal ruling party advisers, many of whom also come from the Ilocos region.

‘Hardly a Problem’

Marcos’ son, who has spent most of the last several weeks out of the province campaigning with his father, declined to discuss the situation in Ilocos del Norte. But the mayor of the provincial capital of Laoag, Rudolfo Farinas, who also has been campaigning frequently with the president, said the communist insurgency in Ilocos is “hardly a problem at all.”

He said the tomato paste plant ultimately will be successful when it reaches full production this year, and he said the Ilocanos “did not feel too much the pinch” during the current economic crisis because they are more self-sufficient than most Filipinos.

Still, Saraos and others in the president’s birthplace said they think the factory ultimately could fail simply because the farmers are now reluctant to plant tomatoes, and others insisted the project is “too little, too late.”

Normally in the Philippines, one would not expect such criticism from Saraos. Two years ago, he was himself a recipient of what he estimates at millions of dollars in government funds. It was his Santa Monica Parish Church that the Marcos family renovated and modified for the wedding of their daughter Irene to a wealthy Manila businessman on June 11, 1983.

24 Flights Added

In preparation for the event, billed in the Manila newspapers as “the wedding of the year,” the first family built a large reception building, complete with altar and pews. For the wedding ceremony itself, the government-owned national airline put on 24 additional flights to Laoag at government expense to ferry the guests, as well as the entire 86-piece Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra, to the church.

Two months after the event, a major earthquake hit the Ilocos region. It killed more than 20 people, three of them in Sarrat, and demolished dozens of buildings--among them, much of Saraos’ Santa Monica church.

“When I go to bed and I think of the church, I cannot sleep the whole night,” Saraos said, adding that he has not received any government money to rebuild it and has had to rely entirely on parish donations and funds from the bishop.

Asked whether he connects the wedding and the earthquake, the priest said: “Many people, not just here but throughout the Philippines, think so. It’s just hearsay, but something mysterious did happen here.”

Despite such criticism from the clergy, opposition politicians and the handful of peasants who agreed to discuss the situation in Marcos’ home province, there is a fundamental reality in Ilocos del Norte: President Marcos will win here hands-down in this week’s election.

Sure of Landslide

In fact, Laoag Mayor Farinas predicts that Marcos will carry 96% of the vote in the provincial capital, and as much as 98% or 99% in the rural areas of the province.

Msgr. Manuel Aspiras in the town of Dingras predicted that Marcos’ margin will be even higher. “We will all vote for Marcos here,” said Aspiras, the first cousin of Marcos’ Cabinet minister for tourism. “Here, it will be 100% for Marcos.”

And in the neighboring town of Marcos?

“I think it will be even more there,” Aspiras added with a smile, though his views are disputed by other local authorities.

Although he was critical of the first family’s lavish projects in the province and he conceded that not enough has been done to help “the masses,” he added that such disenchantment does not translate into negative votes at election time.

“The Ilocanos are very loyal to their own,” he explained. “And they see the new paved roads and the electrical hook-ups the government gave them, and they know it was President Marcos who gave that to them.”

Acoba agreed. “I feel President Marcos is going to win here in Marcos,” the priest said. “He has been so long in power that he has been able to solidify the grass-roots of Marcos.”

Mayor Making Sure

Nonetheless, Marcos Mayor Maximino Tabucbuc was out last week making sure. “Here in Marcos, if possible, we would like that not a single vote will go to the opposition,” the mayor said during a small political meeting that was also attended by a dozen soldiers carrying M-16s in the village of Ferdinand.

Mayor Tabucbuc said he and the other town officials have spent the last several weeks telling the peasants in Marcos that it is Marcos who is responsible for their electricity and the new roads now being built throughout the town, and that the president has sent them military troops to protect them from communists who would come to power if the opposition were elected.

Then, Tabucbuc, who said he has known the president for decades, was reminded of the words in the Philippine Free Press editorial that was written a few weeks after Marcos first took office in 1965.

The editorial asked: “What will President Marcos leave his children? What kind of president will posterity adjudge him? What will he leave the Filipino people?”

“We will not know that,” the mayor said, “for another six years.”

Top Campaign Adviser

And it is perhaps that, more than anything, that was behind the comments of Marcos’ top campaign adviser, Labor Minister Blas Ople, when he was asked last week whether the Philippines as a nation is better off today than it was 20 years ago.

“President Marcos understands that this is his last real chance to (put in) order his legacy to the Filipino people--to make his next six years a watershed of reform,” said Ople, one of Marcos’ most loyal Cabinet members. “And, to him, that is singularly important.”