Marcos’ Legacy and the Philippine Military
/Lorenzana’s action was a time warp, accusing UP as the ground for “clandestine recruitment” of the youths to the outlawed Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), which was labeled a “terrorist organization.” The military raised the red-tagging ante by releasing on social media 27 names wrongly identified as communists. Some were in fact student leaders in their younger days, precisely in defiance of the Marcos dictatorship that lasted until the mid-1980s. Lorenzana had to apologize for the “unpardonable gaffe.” If anyone should have known better, it should have been Lorenzana himself, who was a young graduate of the Philippine Military Academy in those days of rage.
To remind us of what the Marcos-era military was, I interviewed four key officers now retired but who have occupied important positions in their time: Efren Abu, chief of staff of the armed forces (2004-2005); Romeo Dominguez, commander of the Northern Luzon Command (2003-2005); Alejandro Flores, formerly with the intelligence group of the Philippine Constabulary; and Cesar Garcia, head of the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency (2001-2007) and National Security Adviser (2010-2016).
The Spur of Student Activism
PMA cadets of the early '70s were not spared the impact of student activism (Photo by Ariel Domingo, PMA '71. From the book Brothers: The Untold Story of the Philippine Military Academy "Matatag" Class of 1971 by Rolando C. Malinis)
At the Philippine Military Academy, the students of the early 1970s were not immune to the goings-on of the First Quarter Storm. They had seen the gathering speed of the events led by activists in the streets of Manila, students their age, infected by the worldwide movement against the Vietnam War and the rise of the Communist banner. At home, Marcos was nearing the end of his second term in office, and at that juncture, internal threats were looming: Jose Maria Sison launched his underground Communist Party powered by the youths, breaking away from the traditional Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas; and Nur Misuari was gathering Muslim support for a separatist movement in restive Mindanao. Marcos was besieged between forces in the north and in the south.
In Baguio, the cadets were in the cool comfort of the mountaintop academy, but that didn’t insulate them from the political temperature of events. In classrooms there was a professor, Dante Simbulan, who lectured on Philippine history in the context of nationalism and imperial America making Filipinos the “Little Brown Brothers.” There was also the shocking defection of tactical officer Victor Corpus, who joined the CPP and was involved in the smuggling of weapons from China. From their fortress, the cadets went down to the city on the invitation of so-called “discussion groups,” where they were likely to hear more about radical ideas whirling about than what they had in their classrooms. For some, their intention was to date girls, the discussions a decoy; yet they met the firebrands of the Left in the country’s political spectrum, big-name personalities whose minds were explosive and dangerous.
The cadets, however, were called “mga tuta ni Marcos.” The puppets of Marcos. They weren’t thrilled about that; not all saw Marcos as their ideal leader. In fact, many voted for a nuisance candidate (Pascual Racuyal) in the 1969 presidential elections – Marcos winning the second term – as a show of mockery to the sitting president who was becoming unpopular. One of them, Cesar Garcia, was the son of a senior officer steeped in military tradition. His mother was a pure Kaydet Girl, but several of his sisters taunted him for being a tuta (lapdog), a label that reverberated as the years went on and martial law turned the military into monsters.
Gen. (Ret.) Cesar Garcia, PMA ’70, was head of the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency (2001-2007) and National Security Adviser (2010-2016). (Photo by Gemma Nemenzo, 2020)
Garcia graduated from the Class of 1970, more than two years before Marcos declared martial law. His first deployment was in the province of Samar, which had not yet the kind of insurgency it would grow in the years to follow. Still, it was the “hot spot” for wanted pirates and criminals; and for Garcia, choosing to be in the Constabulary (a paramilitary branch that was influential at that time, as opposed to the Army), Samar was considered a challenging assignment, next only to the anti-Huk campaign in Central Luzon. In one of his furloughs in Manila, a slow burn of occurrences was beginning to mark the rebellious temperament of his younger class. Some cadets of the Class of 1971, they came out of their graduation with moustache and long hair, not what is expected of newly commissioned officers. They joked about it in Camp Crame, headquarters of the Constabulary. They said you could tell what a PMAyer was by the length of his hair. They were no different from the hippies of the era.
One night, as some of them were taking a break from their basic Constabulary course, they decided to have a drinking spree in Barrio Fiesta, a restaurant so popular then, on the corner of the EDSA highway a few blocks from the headquarters. That drinking binge turned into a brawl. Some were arrested and interviewed in jail by tabloid reporters. “Mabuti pa mag NPA na lang kami,” one of them said out of the blue, and it reached the ears of the president. NPA: The New People’s Army, the communist armed wing. The NPA was the new enemy. Why did these officers say, it would be better if we join the NPA? Were they serious or were they just venting some unknown frustration?
This prompted the president’s executive secretary Alejandro Melchor to call for a meeting with the newly-graduated second lieutenants, both from the classes of 1970 and 1971, at Camp Aguinaldo, the general headquarters. They were in uniform, yet those from Class 1971 neither cut their hair nor shaved their moustaches. Some even had goatees, and their graduation guest speaker, Marcos himself could not help remark, “I don’t know if you look better now than last I saw you.” The president had given his usual speech without any incident, perhaps if only to make his presence felt to the officers. Colonel Jose Almonte, who was a special assistant to Secretary Melchor, would not let it go, reminding them about their academy training, which was an overarching pledge to the country. A hippie look was not the way to show it.
They put the rebellious spell behind them, and they carried on with their respective careers in the Armed Forces of the Philippines. Class of 1971 was going to make history years on, but before that, they and the other classes of that decade found themselves in a storm of changes, with martial law turning the status quo upside down – the closure of Congress, the arrest of the opposition, radicals fleeing to the mountains. A dark curtain fell on the country. Marcos was going to be a one-man rule, and the military was going to be his bulwark.
In recollecting those years, what strikes Garcia most is that the “suppression of student activism was a bad idea.” The massive round-up of those opposing the government forced the students to go underground and assumed the role of Sison’s cadres. The crackdown, so severe, had the staggering result of bloating the support for the Communist Party, which, in the next decade, was going to be the biggest threat to Marcos’s rule.
A student protest during the First Quarter Storm of 1970 (Source: ABS-CBN)
The students were mostly from UP Diliman, the iconic center of the First Quarter Storm. The repression had cut them down, thus nearly obliterating a generation of the country’s future leaders. In parallel, the brutality expanded the cause for the communists. The killings and tortures hardened the resolve of the young ones to overthrow the government. Did the officers understand what was at play? Did they realize it was going to haunt them in due time? Garcia remembered a gathering during which UP President Salvador Lopez spoke about activism in numbers. It was said that for every 1,000 students that demonstrated in the streets, only ten percent were likely to be hardcore activists, and out of that another ten percent were likely to become communists. The military, then, must be careful about lumping all the student activists into one big basket. The military’s mistake was “giving Sison some of the brightest and idealistic people at that time.”
By the mid-1970s, the tide had begun to turn, slowly. Marcos made the wrong move of provoking the ire of the mighty Church when the military raided a Jesuit novitiate suspected of harboring Sison. The Metrocom (the dreaded Metropolitan Command under the Constabulary) had got their information wrong. Rather than letting it go, the troops inflicted harm on the priest who was helping organize social democrats as the antithesis to the communists. The result had Manila’s archbishop Cardinal Jaime Sin denouncing martial law and, in his ministry, encouraging Catholic followers to start pushing back. It was the emergence of the so-called “middle force,” another spectrum of the opposition that may not be communist but would be willing to attain the goal of putting Marcos out of power. By 1978 up to 1981, when Marcos called for an election of a national assembly and lifted martial law only on paper, the sign was clear: the military was losing the war.
Garcia by then was the head of research of the production branch of the Constabulary Intelligence, C2 as it was called. There was a command conference the night before the assembly elections in 1978, and in their office, they could hear a protest noise barrage. Fidel Ramos, who was chief of the Philippine Constabulary (PC), reported to Marcos by phone during the command conference. He then dangled the phone out of the window to let Marcos hear the angry noise in the streets. The other officers in the room were silent, braced by the realization that things were not going right. For one thing, the outcome of their intelligence gathering was not in accord with their superiors at Camp Aguinaldo, the J2, which reported that the counter-insurgency campaign was fine and dandy. With the top commanders unwilling to listen to the truth, the junior officers in the production branch began their Friday night sessions of informally talking to field commanders in the provinces who happened to be in Manila for visits. These commanders gave the picture of larger NPA formations and rebels overrunning towns. It was happening well throughout the country.
Their method of assessing the problem was incompatible with Camp Aguinaldo’s, where officers, responsible for estimating enemy strength, read body counts only, and this alone was fundamentally wrong (although it is still done today). Because, for every enemy killed, another one or more rose to take his or her place. For these officers they were merely numbers crossed out in charts.
“We proposed to have a different set of parameters,” Garcia explained. “In assessing the problem, we looked into a barangay, not only gauging the size of the NPA, but also their influence in the community.” During one command conference in Camp Aguinaldo, Ramos, who gave the briefing before the general staff and major service commanders, reported that:
1) Government was not winning the war; and
2) Government was becoming increasingly isolated.
Current soldiers of The New People’s Army (Source: Intelligencefusion.co.uk)
The senior commanders accepted the report as it were, albeit reluctantly. The briefing, which was prepared by Garcia’s shop, was presented to the National Intelligence Board chaired by Gen. Fabian Ver, Marcos’ most loyal officer who was head of the National Intelligence and Security Authority (NISA), which became a powerful office that drew loyalty and promotion for a clique in the military. Ver disagreed with the conclusion and scolded the PC officers who gave the briefing. Garcia suspected that it was perhaps as consolation that, shortly after, he was nominated to study at the British Army Staff College in London, a slot previously given exclusively to officers from the Presidential Security Command (PSC) or NISA. To this day, Garcia believes that it was his classmate, Irwin Ver, one of Gen. Ver’s sons, who had quietly arranged for his schooling.
The officer who took over the production branch was from Class 1971, his name Victor Batac, an officer who was close to PC chief Lt. Gen. Ramos. He continued what Garcia left behind; furthermore, he widened the informal discussions with the field commanders. He turned them into “griping sessions,” where any officers of any rank were free to air their views in their private space.
When Garcia returned from London, Irwin Ver asked him if he would be interested in joining NISA or the PSC – these two units amassing influence within the military. But in the Constabulary, officers were drawn toward Ramos, who was Gen. Ver’s rival. To avoid any problems that would be misconstrued by the father (because no one wanted to get on his bad side), Garcia was deployed to Negros island, another province that would prove to be in the clutch of the communists, the situation made worse by the poverty wrought by the slump in sugar production whose cartel was in the hands of a Marcos crony.
But he was not too far away from knowing what was happening in the production branch, how it had expanded to other officers that would also, in due time, include Jose Almonte himself and the loyal aides to the Minister of National Defense Juan Ponce Enrile, officers who mainly belonged to Class of 1971 – Batac’s classmates.
The griping sessions amplified the disillusionment in a service that was meant to be the bedrock of the republic. In the eyes of the people, they were nothing but an extension of a dictator who was holding on to power and ruining the country. And in the eyes of these officers, their commander in chief was nothing but a “recruiter” for the NPA, his repression yielding a counterproductive effect. How could they even expect to win the trust of the common people who were already on the side of the communists? They were the tuta. The military was Marcos. How could they even possibly reverse the situation?
In Garcia’s assessment of that era, what the country needed was “a healthy dose of democracy,” but with Marcos having gone too far, “the damage was done.” The middle forces were antagonistic, clearing away that middle ground of compromise that Marcos could have held still by the second decade of his rule. He was seriously ill by then, giving his wife Imelda the power play in a faction with Gen. Ver, whom he would appoint the chief of staff of the armed forces. The other faction belonged to Enrile, whose boys of the defense ministry were fueling the resentments. It was becoming a hopeless case. By 1985, at the PMA graduation ceremony, a large banner was unfurled for Marcos to see: Reform the Armed Forces Movement, or RAM. It took a decade and a half to have reached that point.
Some of the leaders of the Reform the Armed Forces Movement (RAM) in 1986 (Source: the Presidential Museum and Library)
The Communist Insurgency
The Central Luzon countryside was the starting point of the communist movement. There, there was an intense battle between government paramilitary forces called the Monkees, and the insurgents who were the Beatles. Soldiers had to be trained fast. From a module that normally took six months to complete, they had to compress theoretical and practical courses in 45 days. The military focused on Special Forces doctrines to organize multiplier forces, i.e., the militias to augment the troops. They were fighting against the hardened NPA whose own commanders had made their reputation in the underground, whose battle tactics threatened the military. The rebels had the popular support of farmers in the vast rice plains of this region.
The military had to approach this landscape like a “milkman,” a euphemism for developing its own network of informants that would tell them how the guerrillas operated. Some of these spies were elements in the PKP turned NPA nemesis. When a soldier entered Central Luzon, it became a battlefield; the immediate focus was how to fight. What the military knew was that the NPAs had their training camps in different parts of the region. It was a mess. Not to mention that America, the Philippines’ closest foreign ally, had two of their largest overseas bases there: the Clark air field in Pampanga and the Subic naval base in Zambales. Their smaller installations had to be protected too, one of which had the radio station Voice of America booming out of Camp O’Donnell in Tarlac province.
The Constabulary formation had zones covering the entire country: The first was in Luzon, the second in the Southern Tagalog and Bicol, the third in the Visayas, and fourth in Mindanao, and the fifth in Manila. It appeared simple then, with Constabulary wielding more influence than the other branches of service. But soon, the PC’s territorial units under the provincial commands were to be dominated by a Regional Unified Command (RUC) – which created a parallel chain of command that reported directly to the Presidential Security Command in the Palace, straight to Gen. Ver. Officers wound up spying on each other, elbowing each other out for promotion and influence peddling. It soured the principle of professionalism and meritocracy when misplaced loyalty was the scorecard to be earned. No doubt demoralization dug deeper into the pyramid of the military hierarchy.
When Alejandro Flores graduated from the academy in 1972, the NPA arms landing in Digoyo Point off Isabela province was big news in July. He was within knowledge of what went on, being a newbie lieutenant who found himself attached to senior officers who discovered and intercepted the smuggling of arms from China into the hands of the NPAs. It was the most shocking news since the defection of Victor Corpus from the PMA in 1970. The rebels were getting weapons much more sophisticated than the standard issue of the military, which had the carbines against the M-14s of the NPAs. “The government was beset by a lot of armed enemies,” Flores said of that time.
Col. Alejandro Flores, PMA ’72, was with the Philippine Constabulary intelligence unit (Source: Alejandro Flores)
When soldiers entered a village to patrol or keep an eye on the communities, rebels immediately presumed that information regarding their presence came from any suspected villagers. And the rebels would kill these suspects a few days later. The military’s response was to pour a bulk of the Constabulary forces there, though they were thinly stretched out. Missions were carried out in a multitasking mode, mixing combat, logistics, holding communities post-operations, undertaking civilian liaisons. The supervision of the RUC that was added later on took away resources that were already scarce to start with.
The disrupted arms smuggling “gave us opportunities to determine what was happening,” said Flores. The clandestine operation revealed the guerillas’ capabilities. There were other attempts, he said, those that took place off the coast of Zambales and Pangasinan, and also in Quezon province. In short, the rebels were everywhere and ready for the objective of their struggle, which was to surround the cities from the countrysides. Flores himself was caught in the thick of action when, in 1977, his constabulary unit was ambushed in Bataan province. The NPA rebels were too close, firing from a hill, hitting his Toyota Land Cruiser. Previously his troops were also ambushed at a site just one kilometer away. The rebels had thrown a bunch of grenades to cripple the troops.
Flores crawled down a bridge. Seeking cover there, he was struck by the bucolic setting of Central Luzon, as though nothing of the firefight above him was happening. He saw a farmer that went on plowing the fields and it occurred to him that in reports he had read, this village was supposed to be one of the most peaceful. They had been so mistaken: the NPA had deeply penetrated the countryside. “We were not getting the right feedback,” he said. Later, the communists referred to this particular ambush as the signal to the NPA’s buildup of its regular mobile forces to be called “pwersang makilos,” the step toward a strategic offensive.
As to be expected, the Constabulary resorted to its brand of atrocities. The rules of engagement had blurred the lines in a guerrilla warfare. While in Manila, the Constabulary formed an anti-subversion force, the Metrocom, which utilized its intelligence service to carry out extrajudicial killings, to spread state terror. PMAyers found their way into this web of impunity, answering to a cohort of privileged commanders who led the Marcos regime’s human rights abuses.
Paradoxically, the communists might have precipitated Marcos’s grand design of a martial rule: it was revealed, more than a decade later, that the August 1972 bombing of a political rally in Plaza Miranda was Sison’s alleged brainchild. He pushed Marcos into declaring martial law in September 1972, and from there the dictatorship which, in turn, forced numbers of activists to join the communist underground. But ultimately, it was Marcos who had to square himself off with the military he had created, when it was already too late.
The Muslim Rebellion
Mindanao was a sore point in the south: a religious wedge driven by the Christians of the north who saw the Muslims as the outsiders with a culture so alien from the Spanish colonial epoch. Just as Sison was building up the CPP, Mindanao too had its leader in the figure of Nur Misuari of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF). (Both were professors at the UP Diliman). And for the PMAyers of the 1970s, these were the ideologues that haunted their consciousness -- the republic must be saved from men like them. The promise of restoring order and discipline under Marcos’ own “Filipino Ideology” was a better fit. Mukhang maganda sa umpisa, Romeo Dominguez described the state justifying the curbs to freedom. It was good at the start, he said, but later … the armed forces, the backbone of the president’s power became such a privileged class of its own, and within it, self-interests and destructive rivalries would tear it apart.
Gen. (Ret.) Romeo Dominguez, PMA ’71, former commander of the Northern Luzon Command (2003-2005). (Source: Romeo Dominguez)
A graduate of 1971, Dominguez was among a batch of lieutenants who were flown into the pit of fire. Belonging to the Special Forces, he saw Mindanao as a world apart from his experience in Isabela province in Luzon, where there was hardly air mobility, where they would go on patrol for days in the jungle and not come across the enemy. In Mindanao, it was a full-blown conventional warfare. It was going to be an experience of the unknown, yet one that would give them a badge of honor in their career. Mindanao was the place to prove their mettle, collecting battle scars that would assure their reputation as warriors. Having served in Mindanao was the stepping stone to higher ranks, higher positions.
When Dominguez landed in Cotabato City in 1973, he saw what a war zone was for the first time in his life. There was chaos in the deployment of troops, ferrying soldiers in C-130s round-the-clock when the war machine was not enough to contain the ferocity of the Muslim fighters. The stretch of kilometers from the airport in Awang, crossing the Tamontaka river, all the way up to PC Hill by the center of town was littered with troops, checkpoints, sandbags. The generals were gung-ho to stop the rebellion at all cost, their stories becoming legendary later on. The ratio of the fight had one soldier to ten Muslim rebels. The Army had only a strength of 16,000 men spread out in deployments, combat support, desk jobs, medical units.
The Muslim rebels were gaining footholds in Central Mindanao so fast that the government was in danger of losing the entire island. In March 1973, Marcos called on the commander of the 3rd Infantry Brigade out of Cebu, Fortunato Abat, who was then a one-star general and would later become Army chief (1976-1981), to recover lost territories and confront the separatist movement. Abat’s command organized the Central Mindanao Command, under which Dominguez’s Alpha Team of the Special Forces was attached. “There was gunfire at almost every corner,” he said.
Fighting raged from as far as Sulu in the late 1972, when Marcos had ordered the surrender of firearms in Misuari’s bailiwick. Rebels also attacked a bridge in Marawi that linked the two Lanao provinces in northwest Mindanao. The conflagration shifted to Cotabato on the mainland where Misuari’s MNLF was numerically superior to the military, which had only in place one Army infantry battalion and another Constabulary battalion under two provincial commands in the vast plains, mountains and marshes of Mindanao – before Abat brought his men. It forced Marcos to unleash more than what it would take to keep the south. Within two years, the number of troops ballooned to a massive force of 60,000 – a rapid recruitment of foot soldiers that Dominguez says would not have been possible without martial law.
Nur Misuari headed the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) (Source: Al-Jazeera)
“Four days in February 1986 ushered the end of the Marcos dictatorship. Marcos could not believe the betrayal from the men in uniform, men he had nurtured and spoiled”
At the time, the Army had only one infantry division, the renowned 1st ID called Tabak. (Today it has 11 divisions, about half of it in Mindanao). At the outset, the military had to draft young men from the Visayas into a swiftly organized Kamagong Battalion. Apart from these trainees, the battalion pooled non-commissioned officers and reserve officers called to active duty, but it was not as well equipped as the regular Army units, and it suffered huge losses. The draftees were limited to a duty of six months, and their experience was not the best for the Army.
The Army’s standard weapon was upgraded from an M-1 Garand rifle to an automatic M-16. It was Dominguez’s first time to see an M-16 rifle, as if the sight of it alone would spell the difference in their fight. In his tour of duty, there would be an ambush in Pigkawayan in northern Cotabato despite the additional men from the local home self-defense force (the equivalent of today’s CAFGU, or Citizen Armed Force Geographical Unit, a militia-type unit hired and trained by the military) that he and two of his classmates had organized. He almost lost a leg. He was flown back to Manila and confined at the V. Luna military hospital for seven months. It would be years later before he would find himself back in Mindanao, as a general and commander of the pioneering Tabak division.
His other classmates were sent elsewhere in Mindanao, ratcheting up combat experiences that would define the making of an Army officer. While recovering in the hospital, Dominguez saw their class baron Gregorio Honasan, who was also wounded in an attack in June 1973 by the Tran River 90 kilometers southwest of Cotabato. He had been ordered to take an enemy’s logistical base, run by a Muslim datu that had control of more than 5,000 fighters. This incident, during which Honasan was rescued in true combat fashion by a Huey piloted by a classmate, sealed his legend. By the time he became the face of the military’s reform movement defying Marcos in the mid-1980s, he made it known that he was not one to give up a fight. His hair was long and he had a moustache, and they called him Gringo.
Libya stepped in to quell the Mindanao rebellion, which had reached its peak by 1975 at the cost of more than 100,000 lives. Marcos was more worried about the importation of oil; he could not antagonize Arab countries on whom the Philippines was dependent for oil. The Tripoli Agreement signed in late 1976 called for an autonomous region of 13 Muslim provinces and 10 cities in Mindanao, an agreement that would traverse decades and evolve into changes under succeeding presidents. Misuari went to exile in Libya, later resurrecting himself once again as a revolutionary, returning to Sulu after the 1986 revolt backed by the military, spearheaded by RAM.
The People Power Revolt
The 1986 People Power Revolt (Source: The Eggie Apostol Foundation)
Four days in February 1986 ushered the end of the Marcos dictatorship. Marcos could not believe the betrayal from the men in uniform, men he had nurtured and spoiled, though many officers would say in the aftermath that it was inevitable. It had been borne out of the intense rivalry between his Imelda and Ver, and one hand, and Enrile, on the other. And within the armed forces, the struggle between professionalism and favoritism heightened the tension. The RAM plotted a coup, which had never been done before. Its palace mole, an aide to Imelda, was caught just before it was to start. The public didn’t quite believe Marcos when he announced on national television that a coup was hatched against him; and on the fourth day since the uprising began on 22 February, he would find himself fleeing the country.
Enrile’s officers in Camp Aguinaldo and the Constabulary officers in Camp Crame had come out in the open seeking support from the public, fearful that Marcos would strike back for disobeying their commander-in-chief for the first time in Philippine history. The so-called “middle forces” boosted the defectors, with thousands of civilians literally protecting them by filling up the highway between the two camps. The communists made a momentous tactical error in withdrawing from a spontaneous upheaval, a historical turning point, when it first refused to participate in the January presidential elections that saw Marcos running against Corazon Aquino, widow of his archrival Benigno Aquino, who was assassinated in 1983 in broad daylight at the airport under the military’s watch. Events had begun rolling since then, the military’s impunity fully exposed. Everyone knew the Marcos regime was behind it. Unknown to many, the griping sessions in the camps were taking a life of its own, Enrile’s men finding succor in the production branch of the Constabulary.
““When you do something like that,” said Abu, referring to Secretary Lorenzana’s move against the state university, “do you have a plan after that?””
The private griping sessions that had sparked both restiveness and resentment ultimately triggered a miraculously bloodless revolt with civilians protecting the renegade officers. Marcos no longer had the strength to beat the potent combination. He was spent and ill. The people around him were out of control. Those four days changed the face of the military. Marcos was destroyed by what he had created.
Marcos talking to his Chief of Staff, Gen. Fabian Ver, with other loyalist generals in the background, February 1986. (Photo by Christopher Morris, from the book Bayan Ko)
In the waning years of Marcos, the country was becoming as good as a banana republic, if not for the support of the United States. The economy was falling, the coffers were empty, the cronies were calling the shots. What would Marcos have done to the coup plotters had he not been ill? Could he still have hardened the nature of his once brilliant Machiavellian mind? Why did he not listen to his Gen. Ver who was prodding him to counterattack against the mutineers? Ver’s son, Irwin, who was then the de facto chief of the presidential guards, said of those imminent days that Marcos wanted to avoid bloodshed, that in the end he had just given up without a fight for the sake of bygones. Mainly it was because the United States had also abandoned him. Without America, the ground beneath him would have crumbled just the same. He died in exile in Hawaii, in September 1989.
In the roar of victory – ending a one-man rule since 1972 – there was also going to be a painful consequence. The officer corps knew this was a dangerous precedent in an unfamiliar terrain for a military that bore no similarities to that of Thailand or Burma. What were they to do after a popular coup? Return to the barracks just like that? PMAyers that formed a bulk of the elite officer corps and those who lived through the martial law years had a good grasp of the power bestowed upon them. Enrile’s officers, led by Col. Honasan, could not keep still watching power being removed from their hands when the dust had settled.
When Honasan told his classmate Dominguez, “walang talo, panalo dito bayan (the people were the victors here),” he was as ecstatic as the people overthrowing Marcos. But it was a temporary elation for in the next seven years when the nation was trying to get back on its feet, Honasan led several coup attempts against President Corazaon Aquino, the deadliest one in December 1989 when it came close to tilting the balance in favor of the mutineers. Those coup attempts came in waves, receding as the years followed, as if, eventually, it was a fad gone out of style. Did the 1986 revolt politicize the military, or did the Marcos years politicize officers who had experienced first-hand the frustrating battle for hearts and minds in Central Luzon and the search-and-destroy operations in Mindanao?
In due time, such attempts to overthrow the government were called “destabilization.” None of was successful, owing still to the fact that a majority of the officer corps held on to the principle, however frayed, of keeping the military under the severe restraint of professionalism. They were expected by the Constitution to follow civilian supremacy and respect the sanctity of a democracy.
Gen. Efren Abu PMA ’72 was AFP chief of staff (2004-2005) (Source: Armed Forces of the Philippines Museum)
Efren Abu of Class ’72, who had to stop junior officers from joining what was called the Oakwood Mutiny in July 2003, knew that any path to adventurism had to be blocked. As the appointed chief of staff later on, it was clear in his mind that “the military cannot afford to be divided.” The revolt of 1986 could only happen once, and even though a similar event of lesser magnitude took place in 2001 (called the EDSA Dos), the military could only unbuckle if it were the “final option,” if the country were on the precipice of an irreversible crisis.
Marcos instigated the makings of the 1986 revolt without possibly realizing it. His officers were the cream of the crop. Whatever vision he had, they followed, until their commander-in-chief lost his way. Even during Marcos’ term, officers believed that loyalty was part of their professionalism and that the president, though he tolerated abuses and unmerited promotions, had kept the army at bay when it came to the domain of the executive office. No active military man was appointed to any political posts in the cabinet, no one could run the apparatus of civilian governance. The military stayed within itself and used the uniform to make their rules. Officers had their diskarte, one of which was to slime their way to senior officers of influence, if they wanted to climb fast on their career ladder. “Marcos tried to make the military apolitical” in that sense, said Abu, who was then also involved in intelligence work. “But in reality, Marcos was able to survive because of the military.”
Abu described the military as “the workhorse of the nation.” It could be as simple as that. It could also depend on the role an officer envisions for himself under the tutelage of a commander-in-chief. Marcos, clearly, was a leader who could not be forgotten. He wanted the best, no doubt, but he also played a game he was clever at: divide and rule. He might have forgotten that he could have made the military stronger by keeping it united, not divided.
So today, it is often said that President Duterte styles himself as authoritarian similar to Marcos. He doubled the military’s pay and dangled the power to red-bait that surely some officers could not resist. “When you do something like that,” said Abu, referring to Secretary Lorenzana’s move against the state university, “do you have a plan after that?” There was none, and the issue petered out although it certainly revived dark memories of the past. Never Again was the hashtag commonly seen in social media in the pushback against any form of tyranny.
Marcos’ martial rule lasted for as long as it could. He forgot how to keep the loyalty of the true soldiers at heart. Men like Abu who say, “My love was the military,” were the men Marcos should have listened to. Instead he bribed others with money and positions. His 20 years in power corrupted minds, altered lives, diverted men from love of country. If the military were to look for a silver lining in its relationship to the dictatorship, it would be the mutiny of 1986, when its tainted image was given a fresh chance.
Criselda Yabes is a writer and journalist based in Manila. Her most recent books include Crying Mountain (Penguin SEA) on the 1970s rebellion in Mindanao and Broken Islands (Ateneo de Manila University Press) set in the Visayas in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan.
More articles from Criselda Yabes
