Fighting from a Distance: How Filipino Exiles Helped Topple a Dictator

Epilogue

Epilogue The fourteen-year agony of Marcos’s rule ended with his hasty escape from Manila on February 26, 1986. The situation in the country when he left was as bad as or even worse than it had been when he took over the presidency in 1965. At his inaugural address he had spoken of a “venal government . . . a barren treasury . . . a slothful civil service . . . a demoralized armed forces.” Fourteen years into his martial law presidency, the country had gone downhill. According to the Food and Nutrition Institute of the Philippines, 70 percent of the population was suffering from malnutrition, and a University of the Philippines study showed that 68 percent of all Filipino households lived below the poverty level.1 In the 1960s, Benigno Aquino looked at his country and saw both the good and the bad. “Here is a land in which a few are spectacularly rich while the masses remain abjectly poor,” he said. “Here is a land consecrated to democracy but run by an entrenched plutocracy. Here, too, are a people whose ambitions run high, but whose fulfillment is low and mainly restricted to the self-perpetuating élite.”2 His wife, President Corazon Aquino, inherited both worlds when she took over in 1986. She served for six years, followed by three presidents (one of whom was unseated peacefully by another People Power revolt). A new president was elected in May 2010, who happens to be her son, a senator who was propelled into the presidency by the mass mourning that marked her death during the election campaign period. Where does the Philippines now stand in the second decade of the twenty-first century, twenty-five years after the bloodless People Power 112 . Epilogue transition to democracy? There are bright spots: in school enrollment and life expectancy, the country compares favorably with its closest Asian neighbors, Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia. It lags behind them in per capita income, however, and indicators for income distribution and poverty are dismal. More than a third of Filipinos live below the poverty level; the top 10 percent of income earners hold 31 percent of the wealth, compared to only 2.4 percent for the bottom 10 percent.3 Benigno Aquino’s 1960 landscape of mass abject poverty among the few spectacularly rich has not been altered by the revolutions. Beyond these economic indicators , an observer claimed to have identified a distinct trait in the Filipino character that explained why it had not progressed as well as its “tiger” neighbors. James Fallows, an American magazine writer, asserted in 1987 that Filipinos suffered from a “damaged culture” that had led to a failed sense of nationhood: “Filipinos pride themselves on their lifelong loyalty to family, schoolmates, compadres, members of the same tribe, residents of the same barangay . . . Because the boundaries of decent treatment are limited to the family or tribe, they exclude at least 90 percent of the people in the country . . . When a country with extreme geographic, tribal and social class differences, like the Philippines, has only a weak offsetting sense of national unity, its public life does become the war of every man against every man.”4 Some Filipinos describe this characterization as still valid today, calling it the “crab mentality,” with people furiously clawing their way up and over each other in an attempt to get ahead. How, then, were a culturally “damaged” people able to harness the collective will to overthrow a dictator? Indeed, a number of equally influential historians of Asia questioned the validity of culture as a primary determinant of economic and political failure. It is a simplistic sociology of development that argues that a society can be considered developed if it possesses a different set of values and norms, preferably Western. Fallows should have considered that other cultural trait of Filipinos—the ability of strong kinship, family and community ties, famously known as the “bayanihan” spirit—to overcome adversity. The four-day peaceful revolt of February 1986 was a dramatic manifestation of this spirit. As a result, political freedom has flourished. The rebuilt institutions— the press, the legislature, the courts—are not perfect, but after a quarter of a century, they have taken root where before they had withered. Unlike other developing countries that suddenly transitioned to democracy but lacked the institutions to sustain it, the Philippines was fortunate that Epilogue · 113 before martial law, it possessed the institutional scaffolding needed to rebuild . Moreover...