The numbers—70,000 detained, 35,000 tortured, 3,200 killed—represent the victims of President Ferdinand E. Marcos Sr.’s era of martial law, from 1972 to 1986. They serve as a reminder of one of the darkest periods in the Philippines’ history.

That darkness is enveloping the nation and its diaspora once again. In May 2022, 38 years after his family was exiled from the Philippines in the People Power Revolution, Bongbong Marcos Jr. was elected to a six-year presidential term alongside vice president Sara Duterte, daughter of former president and authoritarian Rodrigo Duterte.

Marcos and Duterte supporters romanticize martial law as a “golden age,” but many Filipinos—including diasporic Filipino Americans like us—question or outright reject this distortion of history. This past year’s developments in the Philippines urge Filipinos and non-Filipinos alike to preserve and reinforce our historical memories of dictatorship. Indeed, the fight to preserve our historical memory goes hand in hand with the fight against fascism. Many Filipino activists reference the popular aphorism, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Only through a transnational movement of truth-based remembering and community organizing can we confront the present-day threat of the Marcos-Duterte administration.

When Marcos Sr. rose to power democratically in 1965, he posed as a populist—but made unpopular decisions. He supported the U.S. war in Vietnam, which allowed for the increased use of U.S. military bases in the Philippines; he devalued the peso relative to the U.S. dollar, increasing prices of basic goods and services for working Filipinos; and he violently put down student protesters who opposed his plans to run for a third term.

In 1972, under a questionable interpretation of the Philippine Constitution (ratified when the Philippines was still a U.S. colony), Marcos declared martial law to bypass the two-term presidential limit. Alongside the growing communist movement, opposition grew from multiple sectors of Philippine society exercising their right to political dissent: workers and peasants, youth and students, women, and Indigenous peoples.

Because martial law outlawed protests, activists organized underground to fight for social and political change. Their demands ranged from the restoration of civil liberties to winning a socialist revolution, but they all wanted to end the Marcos dictatorship, and they worked to end human rights abuses, such as political detention and torture, and to halt economic plunder, some of which came in the form of public works projects that violated Indigenous sovereignty.

Mass arrests, especially in the first years of martial law, caused many activists to flee the country and settle in major cities like Los Angeles. There they met like-minded Filipino Americans who were politicized by the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, and the labor activism of Filipino farm workers who migrated as U.S. colonial subjects in the 1920s and ’30s.

In the 1970s and ’80s, Filipinos in the U.S. and their allies formed organizations such as the Katipunan ng mga Demokratikong Pilipino, National Committee for the Restoration of Civil Liberties in Philippines, Movement for a Free Philippines, and Friends of the Filipino People. They educated the broader U.S. public on the atrocities of the Marcos dictatorship, lobbied Congress to cut military assistance to Marcos, and raised funds to free political prisoners. Our activism grows out of this tradition.

U.S. presidents Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan supported Marcos; as part of the Mutual Defense Treaty, Marcos helped the U.S. maintain its security interests in Southeast Asia, and in return, Marcos received military aid. But eventually he became too great a liability. In 1986 hundreds of thousands of Filipinos joined the People Power Revolution, flooding the streets of EDSA Boulevard in Manila to protest Marcos’ attempt to steal the election from Corazon Aquino. Outflanked, the Marcoses fled to Hawai‘i via a U.S. Air Force transport plane.  

Now, in a blatant act of historical revisionism, President Bongbong Marcos Jr. claims that the Philippines made economic and social progress under his father. But the data shows that Marcos Sr. left the Philippine economy in shambles. Over the years since, through subsequent presidents and large-scale land and agrarian reforms, widespread distrust in government combined with widening class divisions created the perfect conditions for the return of a fascist government via Rodrigo Duterte in 2016.

Duterte took pleasure in using violence to consolidate power. During his presidency, from 2016 to 2022, he urged civilians, law enforcement, and military alike to kill an estimated 30,000 Filipinos as part of a so-called Drug War, which he alarmingly likened to the Holocaust. Victims of the Drug War are still waiting for the Philippine government to cooperate with the International Criminal Court and hold Duterte accountable, while current president Marcos has promised to continue his predecessor’s campaign of terror.

Duterte also declared martial law for 60 days in Muslim-majority Mindanao, a historically resource-rich and war-torn region with the highest rates of poverty in the Philippines and a 400-year history of resisting colonial forces. Philippine presidents continue to receive support from foreign powers for these militaristic ventures. The U.S. gave the Philippines $600 million in military aid during Duterte’s presidency.

Activists at Unidad Park in Los Angeles’ Historic Filipinotown standing in front of the “Gintong Kasaysayan, Gintong Pamana (A Glorious History, A Golden Legacy)” mural by Eliseo Art Silva.

Faced with another era of fascist rule, activists with organizations such as Bayan USA and Malaya Movement USA channel the spirit of People Power. On September 20th (September 21st in the Philippines), we held a rally at L.A.’s Unidad Park in Historic Filipinotown to mark the 50th anniversary of the declaration of martial law—to remember the activists killed under Marcos and Duterte, to decry historical revisionism and Marcos Jr.’s visit to the United Nations that very day, and to encourage more people to join the movement. It is crucial at this time to remember accurately and to speak out against censorship and share fact-based news, since Marcos Jr., following his father’s example, has taken an aggressive stance against press freedom. And it is especially important for Filipinos and our allies in the U.S. to put pressure on the Biden administration to end support of the current Marcos administration through the Philippine Human Rights Act.

The fact that the Filipino masses, with support from progressive media and the U.S. Congress, could oust Marcos Sr. in 1986 suggests that we have the power today to prevent another period of dark and bloody history.

We have seen history repeat itself in a harrowing way with the return of the Marcoses to Malacañang, but we could see it repeat favorably with another mass movement of remembrance that can hold the Marcoses and Dutertes accountable for their crimes. In doing so, we can uplift the history of activism that brought an end to martial law and, drawing on that legacy of people power, build a genuinely democratic Philippines.

The post Using Memory to Fight Fascism in the Philippines appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Wherever you go in the Philippines, the sea is never too far away.

I spent summers as a child laying on sunny beaches and playing in the waves. Sometimes we would go to an island where the white sand, framed by coconut trees, was uninterrupted save for the bleached driftwood filled with tiny crustaceans popping in and out of their burrows. Getting there required a 90-minute journey on a tiny boat with outriggers.

With luck, during the trip you could peer into the aquamarine waters and see giant starfish and corals lurking just beneath the surface (or so it seemed, as they actually lay many fathoms deep). Sometimes a school of squid or flying fish would jump across the speeding boat and a few would land in your lap.

With such childhood memories, the sea always beckoned. But I never anticipated that such a big part of my professional life would be spent trying to understand why my country, the Philippines, and many of its neighbors would be quarreling over the reefs, waters, and resources of the South China Sea. China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, and Taiwan also make claims on the sea. Over the years some claimant states have set up armed garrisons and military bases, constructed concrete installations over hitherto unspoiled reefs, and have unilaterally enforced domestic jurisdictions over fishing grounds, fighting wars of words and filing legal suits over who should have jurisdiction over what and on what basis.

It seems that governments have let their primordial territorial instincts rule them. There is folly in this—they seek control of the waters, as if oceans could be tamed, claimed, and fenced off like the land. In truth, no one knows exactly what they are claiming. Much of the marine life in the depths of the South China Sea remains unexplored. The fish that traverse these seas migrate from one part to another, recognizing no boundaries other than those created by changes in the temperature of the water column. But whereas before the fishermen and gatherers of marine products shared the same privileges as the fish, coming and leaving as they pleased, today they do so in fear of being chased away by flag-carrying patrol boats, at times with grey-hulled warships watching from a distance.

The contest is not only over the waters. Here in the South China Sea, competition rages over even the tiniest land features. I have flown over the South China Sea countless times. And each time, if in the light of day, I crane my neck and look down from the plane in excited anticipation of spotting an atoll here, or an island there.

As I look down at the smallness of the land features, and the distances between them in proportion to the vast expanse of ocean, I cannot help but think of how presumptuous and foolish men are to think that this all belongs to certain countries because once upon a time some persons named or mapped or fished or navigated here before anyone else did. These reefs and shoals, these waters, were here long before today’s modern nation-states emerged, and they will be here long after many have passed from the scene.

Pag-asa Island is one such disputed island, occupied by the Philippines since the early 1970s. It now has a civilian population trying to eke out a livelihood; because while the island is beautiful, such beauty does not guarantee one’s survival. During my first visit nearly 20 years ago, the only settlement was a platoon of soldiers, among them battle-scarred marines, that had been deployed to defend the Philippine claim. At that time, they spoke (without complaining) of what, to them, must have been an enemy worse than a foreign armed force: boredom, isolation, and not knowing what was happening at sea and beyond. Pitch-dark nights were often the loneliest, they said, save for the occasional whirring of low hovering aircraft most likely sent by a rival claimant state to spy on them.

There is bound to be less loneliness and isolation now, because many of these erstwhile uninhabitable places have been enlarged and a few transformed into veritable bases with new harbors, airstrips, and hangars. China has been singled out for the scale and speed and seeming impudence of its island construction activities, but other countries have built as well. The Philippines has refrained from following suit—and opted to promote its maritime rights on the stage of international law and international public opinion.

The contest in the South China Sea has, however, changed. While previous decades saw disputes over valuable rights to natural resources, the area now looks more squarely like a playground for big powers’ competition. The stakes include control over vital sealanes of navigation for commercial as well as military vessels, and over airspace considered critical by certain countries to their defense. The geopolitical situation has only complicated what were already complex territorial and maritime jurisdiction disagreements. Indeed, the disputes are so complicated that no solutions are near at hand.

Recently, I was on a six-day cruise in the East China Sea that started in Shanghai and docked in Okinawa, Nagasaki, and Fukuoka. We were a group of about 20 international relations experts from 15 countries, jointly hosted by Peace Boat, a Japanese NGO engaged in peace advocacy, and the China Foreign Affairs University. The outlook of these two organizations could not have been more different, which made their effort at cooperating to host this conversation about China’s relations with its neighbors all the more impressive.

When not conferencing on the boat, I spent some time on deck watching the sun rise from the sea and set into the sea day after day. Looking out into the seemingly limitless ocean, one could not help but have a sense of being free from territorial boundaries. I thought of how being creatures of the land has taught most of us to think in terms of the state and its narrow interests.

Just exactly at such a moment, another passenger standing beside me—also looking out at sea—nodded his head in one direction and said, “That is where the Senkakus are, not too far from here. That is where Japan and China might yet end up having a war over their contested islands.”

I envy the free creatures of the sea, for we creatures of the land have become captive of our own illusions of conquest and control.

The post Can Anyone Really Rule the South China Sea? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But the country’s actual national sport may be the political election.

The Philippines has just gone through a campaign season that engaged the whole country to a degree I have not seen before—and made news all over the world. It culminated in electing our new president Rodrigo “Rody” Roa Duterte, a lawyer and former mayor known for outrageous populist rhetoric that has drawn comparisons to what Americans are currently hearing from U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Duterte’s elevation has occasioned worries about the future of the Philippines. But it has also produced great hopes for the future. As a veteran human rights and democracy activist for more than 40 years, I have felt both emotions in these elections and their aftermath.

Elections demonstrate the best and worst of this country. The best is the enthusiasm, the excitement, and the energy of voters who insist on interacting directly with candidates and take seriously the right and responsibility to vote. Media coverage is enormous, with all candidates receiving dedicated TV and radio coverage, befitting the stakes and the intense national interest. The Commission on Elections (Comelec) estimated that 81 percent of the 55.6 million registered voters cast ballots in the most recent elections.

In fact, it’s common to see voters wait four or five hours in a queue before casting a ballot. That wait, though, is part of a problem. For all our affection for elections, the process itself can feel bastardized. Vote buying remains far too accepted a tactic. And our candidates lean on showbiz antics and even political violence. Too many of our politicians are unprepared and unqualified members of elite political families.

Widespread election deception is not only part of the story of the Philippines, but part of my own history working for democracy. In 1969, the controversial re-election of Ferdinand Marcos, in votes marred by massive election cheating, made clear that his presidency was sliding into dictatorship. In 1972, martial law was declared.

By that time, I was part of the anti-Marcos movement fighting the dictatorship. In 1974, I was jailed as a consequence. After being released eight months later from a military camp, I joined a larger movement that exposed Marcos’ violations of human rights to the world. When the dictatorship finally fell in 1986 in the face of a popular uprising, I helped file—and eventually win—a case in Hawaii requiring the exiled Marcos and his family to compensate victims of his human rights violations. The Institute for Political and Electoral Reform, where I’ve worked since the early 1990s, was established to help test and strengthen our country’s burgeoning democracy.

During this election season, as part of my work with the Institute, I traveled throughout the country to talk with people about the elections and the process of putting them on. I visited General Santos City (hometown of the new senator and famed boxer Manny Pacquiao), Cotabato City (where the rebel Moro Islamic Liberation Front has its headquarters in Camp Darapanan, on the city’s outskirts), Tacloban City (the epicenter of supertyphoon Haiyan destruction), Cebu City (home to the largest concentration of voters in any province), Kiangan in the province of Ifugao (where General Yamashita surrendered the Japanese forces during World War II), and San Fernando, Pampanga (the home province of former president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo).

Excited and enthusiastic, people I visited with frequently asked for whom they should vote, indicating how seriously they took their civic responsibility. But there was also deep concern about how the elections were conducted, and whether votes were being counted accurately. In places with armed conflict, local authorities drew up detailed plans to deal with the various rebel groups in different parts of the country or with local political warlords who use threats of violence to coerce people to vote for certain candidates.

During these particular campaigns, social media amplified other troubling election byproducts. Unsavory name-calling, uncouth comments, insults, and death threats—which can’t be taken lightly—were all too common as supporters of political opponents battled online.

And yet I’m heartened by the election results. This year, the Philippines’ automated election system allowed for quick counting and tracking of the results. Many voters made a day of the elections, staying at the polls until the transmission of the votes in the evening. The transparency of this system meant that this year’s results were quickly accepted both by losing candidates and by the public at large.

There were still reports of vote-buying, election violence, and cheating. However, these did not materially affect the national results—except in one race, for the tightly contested position of the vice president. In that election, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr., the son and namesake of the late dictator, lost to Congresswoman Leni Robredo, the widow of an interior secretary killed in a 2012 plane crash. In an ironic twist, he is crying that he was cheated.

I also view the election of Duterte as a watershed. For the first time, Filipinos have elected a local mayor from a far southern city, a man who was far outside of national political circles. This was part of a larger trend of voters favoring candidates who promise key governance reforms—including federalism and devolution of power to provinces. Elite candidates representing the Philippines’ old guard fared less well.

For all the international media’s fixation on his strongman bluster, Duterte has a genuine mandate from the people and there is no challenge to his victory. And that in itself represents an opportunity. Duterte has said his top priority will be changing the country’s charter so that it strengthens local governments and grassroots politics. This focus on local governance is a departure from the practice of national leaders augmenting their own power.

Whether Duterte will take on corruption—and fraudulent elections themselves—is harder to say. He has promised to advise and dialogue with political enemies. Perhaps the strengthening of local governments will strengthen democratic institutions, particularly if our new president fulfills his promise to include all people, including rebel forces, in his reforms.

And if he doesn’t? There will be elections again, and the people of the Philippines will be there, in very large numbers.

The post The Philippines Election was Corrupt—and a Victory for Democracy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The photo could have been torn straight from the pages of an ethnological journal, except for one detail: a group of men in suits and derby hats stand watching from behind a low wooden fence.

Who were these tribespeople? Why had they been brought to America? What had become of them? That chance discovery turned into a full-blown obsession that took over more than three years of my life. There was something about the faces of the men, women, and children in the photograph, and their vitality, which drew me in. I couldn’t stop thinking about them. The idea that human beings had been exhibited a few miles from downtown Manhattan horrified and fascinated me; I needed to know more.

I discovered that in 1905 an American showman named Truman Hunt persuaded 50 members of the Bontoc Igorrote tribe to leave their homes in the far north of the Philippines and travel with him to America. He took them to Coney Island and instructed them to put on a “tribal show.” In return, he promised to pay them $15 each a month.

The Igorrotes, as they were known, became the hit of the summer season. They were written about in newspapers coast to coast, and inspired poems, newspaper cartoons, children’s puzzles, and advertising jingles selling everything from soap to cooking oil. They were visited by millions of ordinary Americans, along with famous singers and actors, anthropologists, and even President Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice.

In newspaper reports, the Igorrotes were portrayed as either guileless innocents or vicious savages. The press wrote at length about the Igorrotes’ lack of clothes and described the tribe’s views on sexuality, notably the fact that they customarily had sexual relations before marriage and treated pre-marital pregnancy as a blessing rather than a disgrace. Elsewhere the tribespeople were invoked in articles about hard work and the simple life versus the complexities of modern living.

The Igorrotes weren’t the only people brought from distant lands to join the curiosities at Coney Island’s “freak show” in 1905. There were Eskimos, Somalis, and Irish farmers, too. But the Filipinos were by far the most popular, perhaps because of their perceived exoticism. The tribespeople’s bodies were covered in tattoos; they ate dog; and at home in the Philippines, they hunted the heads of their enemies.

At Coney Island, the tribe’s customs were distorted and shorn of meaning. In the Philippines, they ate dog on special occasions like weddings and funerals. But the dog feasts were so popular with the Coney crowds that their manager, Hunt, brought the tribespeople dogs from the New York City pound to eat every day. Hunt instructed the Igorrotes to build a head hunters’ watch tower inside their mock tribal village and took every opportunity to tell reporters about this particular bloodthirsty aspect of their customs.

Though exhibiting people in this manner seems abhorrent to us today, human zoos were nothing new in 1905. Nor were they an exclusively American phenomenon. For more than 400 years, “exotic” humans from faraway territories had been paraded in front of royal courts and wealthy patrons and at world’s fairs and expositions in England, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, and Japan. Human zoos reached their peak in popularity during the age of imperialism as governments sought to gain popular support for their expansionist policies, and the public flocked to see their country’s new subjects up close. Far from being shameful hole-in-the-wall entertainment, people took their families to see human zoos, much as they would go to the movies today. In early-20th-century America, people were addicted to novelty and sensation, which provided a welcome escape from the daily grind.

Not only were the Igorrotes put on display at Coney Island to entertain people, they were also used to push the argument that America had a duty to protect, educate, and civilize “innocents” like them. Later, when the Igorrotes’ manager became embroiled in a national scandal, they were used to argue that America had no place in the Philippines at all.

The Igorrotes made Hunt a fortune in the summer of 1905, but the showman was spending the money as fast as they could earn it. Word reached the U.S. government that Hunt was mistreating the Igorrotes and withholding their wages. Fearing a scandal at a time when America’s presence in the Philippines was drawing criticism both abroad and at home, the government sent an agent to investigate. Hunt received a tip-off that the man was coming and took the tribespeople on the run, pursued by creditors, ex-wives, and Pinkerton detectives in addition to the government agent.

What surprised and intrigued me as I pieced this story together from declassified government documents, private and official correspondence, vital records, court transcripts, and thousands of newspaper articles, was that, 100 years after they first thrilled and scandalized America, the Igorrotes had been forgotten. They had simply disappeared from the public consciousness.

Why had America forgotten them? After thinking long and hard about this and discussing it with a wide range of people—scholars and anthropologists, Americans and Filipinos, including people descended from the Igorrotes—I believe there are two main reasons. First, popular culture is by nature ephemeral, and the Igorrotes were replaced by the next sensation. Second, the exhibition of these men, women, and children came to be seen as a shameful episode in U.S. history.

Human zoos fell out of fashion by the 1930s, replaced by other forms of entertainment like cinema and television. By the end of the World War II, classifying and displaying human beings as “civilized” or “primitive” was seen as a toxic form of ethnocentrism.

We no longer visit amusement parks and fairs today to ogle people who are different from us—though a knowing 21st-century version of the freak show still exists at Coney Island. But reality television continues to parade a stream of people deemed “freakish,” or “exotic” before fascinated audiences across the globe. The medium may have changed, and many people might not admit to watching these programs, but the human desire to look at people they see as “different” remains deeply ingrained.

More than a century after their show at Coney Island, a mere glimpse of the Igorrotes in a photograph charmed me. But their story is profoundly disturbing; lured to America to make a better life, they were widely betrayed—by their manager, by the U.S. government, and by the very society that fell in love with them. It is a story that makes us question who is civilized and who is savage.

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