Diosdado P. Macapagal; Former President of the Philippines

Diosdado P. Macapagal, 86, former president of the Philippines who introduced tentative land reform. Macapagal, the nation’s fifth president, was defeated in 1965 by the late Ferdinand Marcos, whose subsequent authoritarian rule lasted 20 years. Macapagal won election in 1949 to the House of Representatives from his home province of Pampanga, the area north of Manila devastated by the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo. In 1957, he became vice president in the administration of Carlos P. Garcia, whom he defeated in 1961 for the presidency, purportedly with the help of American money. In 1963, Macapagal’s government passed a land reform act that said that having landless peasants was “contrary to public policy and shall be abolished.” But inadequate appropriations and opposition from landlords resulted in little change. As president, Macapagal changed the Philippine independence day from July 4, the date of the country’s independence from the United States in 1946, to June 12, when Filipino patriots in 1898 had futilely declared independence from nearly four centuries of Spanish colonial rule. Originally a poor boy from a farming family, Macapagal earned a law degree at Manila’s University of Santo Tomas. On Monday in Manila of a heart attack.