Old Corruption

Benedict Anderson writes about the Philippines

She is today, as the widowed ‘Cory’ Aquino, Time’s widely admired Woman of the Year. But she started life as Corazon Cojuangco, daughter of the wealthy sugar magnate Don Jose Cojuangco, and cousin of that Eduardo Cojuangco who in the Marcos era became one of the most notorious plunderers of the Filipino economy. She owes her present eminence to both names, but it is the earlier one that is the more significant for assessing the situation in which the Philippines finds itself.

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[1] On this group the locus classicus is Edgar Wickberg’s The Chinese in Philippine Life, 1850-1898 (Yale, 1965).

[2] David Steinberg, ‘Tradition and Response’, in Crisis in the Philippines: The Marcos Era and Beyond, edited by John Bresnan (Princeton University Press, 1986). Along with essays on ‘The Social Situation’ by Wilfredo Arce and Ricardo Abad, and on ‘The Economic Crisis’ by Bernardo Villegas, Steinberg’s text is a valuable contribution to an otherwise conventional ‘How did things go so wrong?’ volume.

[3] Cited in Onofre Corpuz, The Philippines (Prentice-Hall, 1965).

[4] See John Larkin’s The Pampangans: Colonial Society in a Philippine Province (University of California Press, 1972), for a splendid account of this evolution, between 1765 and 1920, in the sugar-dominated province of Pampanga. Larkin notes that the mestizos also married into some of the petty indio cacique families, enriching and mestizo-ising them in the process.

[5] For the popular side of the revolutionary struggle, which continued, even against American might, until about 1910, see Reynaldo Ileto’s brilliant study, Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840-1910 (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila Press, 1979).

[6] The creation of a powerful ‘American’ presidency under the Commonwealth Constitution of 1935 (which grew still more powerful after independence in 1946) always had the potential of disrupting the intra-oligarchy equilibrium. But the oligarchy, recognising the problem, sensibly imposed a constitutional limit of two terms on any president – forcing Marcos effectively to abolish the constitution in 1973 in order to stay in power after the prospective end of his second term.

[7] For some amusing glimpses of these eminent ruffians at work, see Chapter Five of Renato and Letizia Constantino’s The Philippines: The Continuing Past (Quezon City: The Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1978).

[8] See Benedict Kerkvliet’s masterly The Huk Rebellion (University of California Press, 1977).

[9] See William Manchester’s American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964 (Hutchinson, 1979).

[10] The ‘war damage’ racket was compounded by the decision of MacArthur to turn over to Filipino leaders the huge stocks of military equipment and supplies prepared for a prolonged military campaign against the Japanese in the archipelago. ‘The disposition of these stocks was scandalous,’ wrote the usually unshockable Onofre Corpuz in his still useful The Philippines, p. 85.

[11] The best structural accounts of the decay of the political system in the 1960s remain Thomas Nowak and Kay Snyder’s ‘Clientelist Politics in the Philippines: Integration or Instability?’ (American Political Science Review, September 1974) and Thomas Nowak’s ‘The Philippines before Martial Law; A Study in Politics and Administration’ (American Political Science Review, June 1977).

[12] New York Times, 16 November 1969.

[13] New York Times, 6 December 1969.

[14] ‘Nobody in the Philippines has ever heard of a successful prosecution for graft’: Corpuz, The Philippines, p. 86.

[15] Time, 5 January 1987.

[16] Characteristically, about 72.5 per cent of state revenues in the 1960s came from regressive sales and excise taxes; a mere 27.5 per cent from income and property taxes; Corpuz, The Philippines, p. 105.

[17] The New York Times, 9 August 1967, gives an account of Cojuangco financing of Aquino’s political career, and of the heavily-guarded family compound (six California-style houses grouped round a huge swimming-pool), which is a useful antidote to the martyrology surrounding the assassinated senator.

[18] See Bernardo Villegas’s ‘The Economic Crisis’, in Crisis in the Philippines, pp. 168-75. He notes that Filipinos (excluding the Marcoses) probably hold at least $10,000 million in deposits and other assets overseas: no sign of confidence in their country’s future.