Marcos' Martial Law

Without warning, police squads late last week walked into Manila's newspaper offices and broadcast stations, ordered staffers to leave and posted announcements Stating THIS BUILDING IS CLOSED AND SEALED AND PLACED UNDER MILITARY CONTROL. Domestic air flights were grounded and overseas telephone operators refused to accept incoming calls. Finally, after several hours of mystifying silence, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos went on nationwide radio and TV to proclaim a state of martial law. Civil government would be continued, he said, but campuses would be closed. Restrictions on travel, the press and communications would remain in force until the government dealt with "a conspiracy to overthrow the government."

It was a drastic step; martial law had never before been imposed in the Philippines, despite the country's long history of social and political violence. And yet, though troops took up positions all over Manila, there were few other visible signs of emergency. Nightclubs, casinos and movie theaters remained open; shoppers were out in their usual numbers the next day. Filipinos accepted the measures calmly, even cynically, for they had been widely anticipated.

Only two weeks ago, in an atmosphere of rapidly increasing belligerence between the Marcos regime, its political opposition and a burgeoning Philippine revolutionary movement, the President warned that he would not hesitate to assume emergency powers if he deemed them necessary. He finally did so six hours after an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate one of Marcos' chief aides, Defense Secretary Juan Ponce Enrile. As the Secretary was heading home from his office in Manila, a carload of gunmen intercepted his car and riddled it with 30 shots; Enrile, who was riding with security men in a second car, was unhurt. The gunmen escaped unidentified.

As Brigadier General Alfredo Montoya, boss of Manila's tough metropolitan police, put the regime's case last week, Marcos' measures only reflected "a need to discipline our people." Ostensibly, the crackdown is aimed at a Maoist-inspired (and Peking-supported) guerrilla movement known as the New People's Army, which the government blamed for the attempt on Enrile's life and for bombings that have rocked the Manila area recently. With about 1,000 arms-carrying guerrillas, the N.P.A. is nowhere near as large as was the Communist Hukbalahap movement that terrorized Luzon in the 1940s and '50s; but it enjoys wide support, not only in the countryside but among disaffected urban workers and intellectuals.

Another target of the regime's "discipline," besides the N.P.A. guerrillas, was the President's vocal political opponents. The morning after martial law was declared, police arrested a number of Marcos' critics. Among them: the publisher of the Manila Times and Senator Benigno Aquino, a leader of the opposition Liberal Party.

Aquino, whom Marcos has accused of collaborating with the N.P.A., had backed a Manila rally--held the day before the crackdown--at which 30,000 Filipinos protested that the Marcos regime would use terrorist violence as an excuse to employ emergency powers to silence the opposition.

Seven years ago, Marcos came to power as an immensely popular reform President, but opposition to his regime has been growing rapidly in recent months. Large sectors of Philippine society are waiting for tangible relief from poverty, inflation and a political system that remains responsive mainly to a propertied oligarchy. Land-reform programs remain unfunded; more than 400,000 of the country's 1,000,000 university graduates are without meaningful jobs. The benefits of the country's gradual economic expansion have been slow to trickle down to most of its 38 million people. As a result of this summer's record floods, which devastated much of Luzon and set the economy back five years by some estimates, that trickle will be slowed even further --perhaps with explosive results.

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