The untold story of the 1986 EDSA Revolution
Credit to Author: CECILIO T. ARILLO| Date: Mon, 02 Mar 2020 16:20:23 +0000
First of a series
If there is anything to learn from the so-called EDSA Revolution 34 years ago last Tuesday, it is that it has not only become a long avenue of questions, regrets and flawed political, social and economic policies but a source of continuing hatred, vengeance and disunity that continue to imperil the country.
Historians Salvador Escalante and J. Augustus Y. de la Paz, of the Truth and Justice Foundation, asked:
If it was a genuine revolution, where are the radical changes that it should have set in place?
If it was popular, why were the beneficiaries so few?
If it was all-Filipino, why was there American intervention?
If it was for Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. (the slain senator), how valid a cause was he?
If it was meant to install his wife, [Corazon] “Cory” Aquino, to the presidency, was it worth it?
And why has life become much harder and politics even more corrupt after the so-called EDSA People Power put to flight the Marcos dictatorship and supposedly restored democracy?
The late Harvard-trained lawyer-economist Alejandro Lichauco, in his riveting book Hunger, Corruption and Betrayal, provided a plausible answer to the questions. (Lichauco passed away on May 24, 2015 at 87).
The so-called EDSA Revolution, he said, didn’t really restore democracy.
What it did was to replace Marcos with the economic dictatorship of the International Monetary Fund-World Bank (IMF-WB). These agencies dictated policies to a succession of what passed for as democratically elected governments but which in fact were essentially agents that functioned as their virtual proxies or agents.
He said governments that came after Marcos made it a policy to cave in or surrender to everything that the IMF and the WB demanded. And what those two agencies demanded was the total liberalization and privatization of the economy. That’s what has caused the troubles and the misery, among other things.
Elaborating, Lichauco said: The IMF-WB wanted “(1) total lifting of all government control over transactions involving the use of foreign currency — such as for imports, travel, transfer of capital abroad, investment overseas and the like; (2) elimination of the government presence in the economy, except as tax collector — and even that role might be dismantled and the function of tax collection given over to private enterprise; (3) elimination of all restrictions on foreign investments so as to empower foreign investors, for example, to own land, operate public utilities and exploit natural resources, and otherwise do everything that Filipinos are allowed to do; and (4) the devaluation of the peso.”
Lichauco posited that one of the reasons for the US government support of the declaration of martial law was that Marcos pledged to save US interests from a rising tide of nationalism. The constitutional convention was moving towards a Constitution that would be radically nationalistic and even anti-American. Marcos pandered to US interest in order to get the latter’s support and save American business from an emerging nationalist, socialist-oriented new Constitution.
In the latter part of his term, Marcos, however, realized that the country had to industrialize along the path taken by new Asian industrial tigers South Korea and Taiwan.
The Philippine economy then was growing at an annual average rate of 6 percent, but that clearly wasn’t enough to lift the nation from underdevelopment and poverty. Marcos knew then that the country had to industrialize if it was to catch up with the neighbors.
Throughout martial law, Marcos maintained a system of selective import controls that contradicted the free market ideology being propagated by the IMF in which all tariff restrictions on imports are reduced if not eliminated. To compound matters, Marcos started to increasingly involve the government in the economy.
He established a national oil company, which was Petron, and government entered into the business of oil exploration, which had never been done before.
He nationalized the largest producer of steel products in the country, which was National Steel Corp., and was moving to establish an integrated steel mill to produce steel products out of raw ore. By the end of the ‘70s, Marcos announced a program of heavy industrialization.
American author Raymond Bonner cited the type of economics that Marcos plans to lead the country that eventually made him detestable to the US government, making him a target of destabilization and, eventually, political decapitation.
“Marcos was not just corrupt; he was anti-capitalist, anti-free market. He had created more government monopolies than the most dedicated of socialists,” Bonner said in his book “Waltzing with a Dictator.” (Times Books, 326)
Reading Bonner between the line, it wasn’t so much the corruption that riled some Americans but the fact that Marcos had turned “anti-capitalist” and “anti-free market.”
At the height of the Cold War, Marcos, on the initiative of his beautiful wife and First Lady, Imelda, extended the Filipino hand of friendship with ease and sincerity as the Philippines parted the Iron Curtain and the Bamboo Curtain where other Western leaders feared to tread and lifted the veil that shrouded the Islamic World.
To be continued