In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

372 11 Philippine Republic B 7: 00 ..   ,    A , every square inch of Manila’s Plaza Miranda, from Quiapo Church to Mercury Drug, was packed with a partisan crowd. For two hours senatorial candidates from the opposition Liberal Party slammed President Ferdinand Marcos’s corruption and incompetence. As emotions peaked and a fireworks display erupted above the church spires at 9:00 p.m., two fragmentation grenades rolled across the stage. Shrapnel ripped through the tightly packed crowd, killing nine and wounding a hundred more, including four of the opposition’s senate slate. As a local columnist later recalled, “something else had died there”that night amid the bleeding bodies at the symbolic heart of Philippine democracy, “the last shred of decency in politics , the thing that had allowed the nation to survive the killing and the stealing.”1 Indeed, the Plaza Miranda bombing heralded a time of terror that prepared the country’s citizens for martial law and delivered the fatal blow to a fragile Philippine democracy. Between March and August 1972, twenty more bombs exploded across Manila, most of them planted by Marcos’s own military to provide a pretext for strongman rule.2 In declaring martial law that September, the president would ask the Filipino people to trade their democracy for stability. By their silence and compliance, the majority would tacitly accept his Faustian bargain. While these bombings no doubt set the political stage for Marcos’s declaration of martial law, broader political conditions that enabled his seizure of power were decades in the making. The Philippines had won its independence in 1946 under challenging circumstances . At the outset of World War II, the invading Japanese had swept the archipelago , defeating the country’s fledgling army and imposing a harsh occupation that soon inspired armed resistance by a quarter million Filipino guerrillas. In the battles of liberation at the end of the war in 1944 –45, the U.S. Army returned to the islands, destroying cities with massive bombardments and scattering nearly a million infantry weapons—breaking the state’s monopoly on the means of coercion . Although the new Republic had recovered several hundred thousand firearms by 1950, officials still estimated that four hundred thousand more were “loose in irresponsible hands,” a floating arsenal that armed peasant guerrillas, provincial warlords, and street thugs. The prewar constabulary, traumatized by its defeat at the start of the war and tainted by its role as a police for the Japanese occupation, could not be readily reconstituted, weakening the new state’s coercive capacities.3 At the national, provincial, and municipal levels, the Republic failed to reestablish its monopoly on physical force. Over its brief, quarter-century lifespan , this struggling democracy would suffer iconic incidents of armed violence that weakened its legitimacy.4 With little time and even less revenue to respond to these challenges, the newly independent Philippine state defaulted to the three-tiered policing system left by a century of colonial rule: the Metropolitan Police for the capital; a thousand separate forces in the municipalities; and a national paramilitary police, the Philippines Constabulary, for the provinces. To reinforce this tripartite structure, the Republic revived the Commonwealth’s National Bureau of Investigation in 1947 to serve as a central detective agency that grew by 1964 to some twelve hundred personnel.5 Among these four police forces, the constabulary, once the legitimating symbol of the U.S. colonial state, would prove the most problematic. Starting in the late 1940s, the PC lost its hard-won reputation for self-restraint and reduced the Republic’s esteem in the eyes of rural Filipinos. In the mid-1960s the constabulary would also establish itself, for the first time since the 1920s, as a visible presence in the capital where its new Metropolitan Command, or Metrocom, was charged with crowd control. With training from U.S. police advisers, Metrocom would field helmeted riot troopers who bloodied student demonstrators, further degrading the Republic’s legitimacy in the eyes of the urban middle class. Despite these tumultuous changes, the postwar Republic still featured many of the same actors who had been so prominent in the prewar Commonwealth: powerful American officials, Filipino presidents, provincial politicians, criminals, the press, and the police. But now their status changed slightly yet significantly. The once-powerful American governor-general had been replaced by a U.S. ambassador, who now played a less visible though still influential advisory role. American armed forces remained at Clark Field and Subic Bay, but...

Share