World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [81]
12 Less festive were the hundreds of charred corpses lying in the rubble that had been commercial Jakarta.
Along with the Suharto regime, the most notorious case of crony capitalism in recent history is that of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos in the Philippines. “He was head of government; she was head of state. It was a conjugal dictatorship,” Raymond Bonner once put it.
13 In this instance, however, the backlash against democracy was even starker.
In the initial years following independence in 1946, the Philippines had relatively robust democratic elections, at least by developing-world standards. (Because of the country’s extreme income disparities, vote-buying has always been common in the Philippines.) The Philippines also had relatively liberal free market policies. As a result, by the 1950s the market dominance of the Chinese was glaring: Every nook and cranny of the retail industry was owned and controlled by ethnic Chinese, many of whom had just arrived from mainland China.
Predictably, democracy in the face of pervasive Filipino poverty and disproportionate Chinese prosperity led to powerful anti-market, anti-Chinese movements, of precisely the kind described in chapter 5. In 1953, Ramon Magsaysay swept to landslide victory in the country’s first presidential elections, championing “Filipinization” and promising to “wrest” the country’s retail sector from Chinese hands. During this period, anti-Chinese sentiment was a constant theme of Filipino politics, and the entire Chinese-dominated food-grain industry was nationalized in the name of the “true” Filipino people. Moreover, exclusionary laws made it difficult and extremely costly for ethnic Chinese to acquire Filipino citizenship. As a result, because of their “foreigner” status, most Chinese were prohibited from participating in the professions and subjected to onerous economic restrictions.
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Ferdinand Marcos radically changed all this. Reliable sources report that Marcos was the illegitimate son of a Chinese lawyer, who mysteriously funded his education and political career. Among other puzzles, this would explain why Marcos throughout his life insisted that he was the direct descendant of the famous Chinese pirate Li Ma-hong.
15 In any event, Marcos during his presidency shifted the Philippines from majority-supported, anti-Chinese policies to pro-Chinese but autocratic policies.
Democratically elected in 1965, Marcos placed the entire Philippines under martial law in 1972 on the pretext of protecting the Philippines from the threat of a Communist takeover—a threat now widely acknowledged to have been a Marcos fabrication. A series of terrorist attacks, including the bombing of department stores, private companies, waterworks, even government buildings, all turned out to have been masterminded by Marcos himself, part of an elaborate plan to justify his imposition of one-man rule.
16 After declaring martial law, Marcos liberalized the economy and kicked into high-gear autocratic crony capitalism.
Using funds from the World Bank, IMF, and U.S. government, Marcos suppressed all political opposition, shutting down the Manila Chronicle and other major newspapers, jailing rival politicians like Eugenio Lopez and Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, and terminating the Philippines Congress altogether. At the same time, Marcos granted a tiny handful of cronies—some Filipino, some Chinese—massive coconut, sugar, and tobacco monopolies, attacking in the process the wealth and power of the country’s agrarian elite who had for generations dominated Philippine politics. Those who suffered most from Marcos’s crony capitalism were the 95 percent impoverished ethnic Filipino majority.