She was the widow of Marcos’ staunch critic and archrival, Senator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, who was assassinated on 21 August 1983 on the tarmac of the Manila International Airport. Politically, Corazon “Cory” Aquino became President. Practically, the four-day uprising led to the forced exile of Marcos, his family and their close allies to Hawaii, where he died in 1989. All these culminated in the momentous event now known as the “People Power Revolution”, which was a series of street protests that converged along EDSA (Epifanio De Los Santos Avenue), a major thoroughfare in Metro Manila, on 22–25 February 1986. The United States of America had also withdrawn its support for the Marcoses. Growing civil discontent and political opposition combined with a restive military to resist the repressive Marcos regime. Instead of its promised stability and prosperity, the imposition of Martial Law generated intense social conflicts and a worsening economic crisis. The Amnesty International has documented extensive extrajudicial killings, torture, and enforced disappearances of at least 11,000 victims, and they also noted the interview of their organization’s delegation in 1975 with Marcos, who told them that the “ over 50,000 people … arrested and detained under martial law from 1972-1975 … included church workers, human rights defenders, legal aid lawyers, labour leaders and journalists.” The Guinness World Records has given the Marcos spouses a title for the “greatest robbery of a government,” where national loss from graft and corruption amounted to 5–10 billion US dollars. The international community has come to know the infamous Martial Law years as a brutal, corrupt, and extravagant period in Philippine history. In regional comparative terms, the economic structure of the Philippines under Marcos had remained largely feudalistic and had not caught up with the industrialization process being undertaken by state leaders in its neighbouring economies in East and Southeast Asia (notably Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Malaysia). Data of the country’s economic performance from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s indicate that there had been significant decline in standard of living, including in the environmental aspect, as shown in: decreased real wages of workers and farmers increased levels of poverty, inflation, unemployment, and external debt and massive deforestation where forest cover in the whole archipelago got reduced into almost half. The political economy of the Martial Law regime had become known as a “conjugal dictatorship” of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos characterized by “crony capitalism” or a “kleptocracy” of the first family and their favored clique of oligarchs. This marked the beginning of a 14-year period of one-man rule that would effectively last until Marcos was exiled from the country on February 25, 1986. State power and resources were concentrated on Marcos as the de facto chief executive, chief legislator, chief justice, and chief commander of the armed forces all at the same time.Īt 7:17 pm on September 23, 1972, President Ferdinand Marcos announced on television that he had placed the entirety of the Philippines under martial law. Under conditions of Martial Law, Marcos had the monopoly to make decisions on government operations because there were hardly any democratic limits to his prerogatives. While ascertaining the real intention of Marcos for imposing military rule is a subject of endless debate between opposing views, the result is obvious: the Martial Law regime prolonged and centralized the far-reaching presidential powers and privileges of Marcos for a total of 21 years (i.e., from his first term starting in 1965 and re-election in 1969 until his deposition through a peaceful social uprising in 1986). The government’s official rationale for the order was to protect the authority of the republic and guarantee security of its citizens against lawless elements, particularly communist insurgency and other rebellious tendencies. Constitutional authoritarianism, or the use of constitutional law to justify authoritarian governance, was imposed on the entire country to build a “New Society”. 1081, establishing a state of Martial Law in the Philippines. On 23 September 1972, the late President Ferdinand Marcos went on television to announce Proclamation No.
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