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349 10 President Quezon’s Commonwealth O N 15, 1935, the U.S. secretary of war stood before a half-million Filipinos massed in Manila’s morning heat to inaugurate the Commonwealth of the Philippines. After four centuries of colonial rule, this autonomous government would control the country’s internal affairs while Washington directed its foreign relations for ten more years until full independence. After the secretary of war’s speech, “a thrill of expectancy, electric in its intensity, now swept through the vast audience” as the Commonwealth’s president-elect, Manuel Quezon, rose from his seat. After his oath, nineteen guns roared, two short of the twenty-one for the head of a sovereign state.1 “From the grandstand,” Quezon wrote in his memoirs, “I went through streets crowded with people acclaiming their first President, on to the Palace of Malacañang which had been the seat of power of foreign rulers for many decades past. I stepped out of the presidential car and walked over the marble floor of the entrance hall, and up the wide stairway.” As he walked Quezon fell into a reverie of historic events played out in these grand halls. Here Spanish governorgenerals had ruled the islands harshly, one spurning a mother who climbed these same stairs on her knees to beg for the life of her son, the national martyr Jose Rizal. Here back in 1901 the president of the defeated revolutionary republic, Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo, had sworn loyalty to America before a U.S. military governor. Abruptly, an aide interrupted Quezon’s ruminations. The chief of the Philippines Constabulary, “whom I had summoned to my first official conference ,” was waiting.2 Why was President Quezon’s first official act a closed-door meeting with the chief of the constabulary? Ever since he had defeated that same General Aguinaldo in the presidential elections two months before, Quezon had been living in “hourly, momentary terror of assassination” by the general’s partisans. To avert what seemed certain death, the president-elect had surrounded himself with constabulary security and relied on its agents to supply him with detailed intelligence about his rival’s maneuvers.3 As this anecdote indicates, the Philippines Constabulary was to play a critical role in the new Commonwealth, serving President Quezon as it had once served U.S. colonial governors. Whether Spanish, American, or Filipino, any executive who tried to rule this vast, disparate archipelago from Malacañang Palace would need a strong national police to reach remote islands and suppress any threats of revolt. Beginning with William Howard Taft, each U.S. governor-general had exercised control through the interweaving of law, police, and information. As the direct heir to this institutional legacy, Quezon, like his predecessors and successors , would reach reflexively for the constabulary as the strong arm of executive authority. Since this was a negotiated transition without a revolutionary rupture, the new Commonwealth president inherited fully intact the formidable police powers of the colonial governors. In fact the new president’s authority was even greater. Under U.S. rule, the governor-general’s police powers had been checked by political concessions that gave local politicians command of municipal police and Filipino legislators fiscal control over the constabulary. Without a firm constitutional grounding, however, this de facto separation of police powers evaporated with the Commonwealth’s inauguration in 1935. As Filipinos drafted and Americans approved a new constitution in 1934 –35, both sides failed to recognize this fundamental flaw and incorporate some postcolonial checks on the executive’s police powers. In the years that followed, this structural weakness embedded in the Philippine polity widened slowly to create serious, ultimately fatal fissures within the postwar Republic. Further complicating these years of transition, the colonial regime had bequeathed to the Commonwealth its code of rigid laws against opium, prostitution, and gambling, activities whose very illegality enmeshed them in electoral politics. Politicians financed their campaigns by operating or protecting these enterprises. Local police often turned a blind eye to blatant violations in exchange for cash or political backing. In this ambiguous context the constabulary often represented the best opportunity for effective local law enforcement. While by no means immune to political influence, constabulary troops, particularly those transferred from other provinces, were usually in a better position to resist local pressures that compromised municipal police and thwarted efforts at prosecution.4 With independence on the horizon, Quezon would, as the founder of the future Philippine Republic, turn to the...

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