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CHECK the internet and you’ll read comments from the clueless extolling the martial law years as the “golden years” and dictator Ferdinand Marcos the “best president.” While some of these may have come from Marcos loyalists, some may likely be from exhausted and exasperated people looking for alternatives.
It has been 45 years since Marcos declared martial law. The current generation of young people, 30 years and younger, has no memory, nay experience, of what their elders experienced during those horrible years. Now under the Duterte administration, it is tempting to look at strongman rule as the solution to the country’s problems, especially when recalling the previous Aquino administration bungling in so many occasions such as the Mamasapano fiasco, the Luneta hostage crisis, the MRT and LRT breakdowns, illegal drugs, the worsening traffic and floods, deteriorating government infrastructures; corruption; the rising crimes.
But is martial law or strongman rule the real solution? Are the sacrifices of the people under martial law not commensurate to what the country supposedly achieved during the dictatorship?
Certainly, no amount of big-ticket infrastructure is worth the killings, forcible disappearance, imprisonment and torture of thousands of people.
Which is better, a failed democracy or prosperity under an autocracy? The question is based on the assumption that there was “prosperity” during Marcos’ martial law. But consider these few facts: Poverty incidence rose from 41 percent in 1965 to 58.9 percent in 1985. The US dollar to Philippine peso exchange rate in 1960 was $1:P2. It went up to $1:P6.67 by the time Marcos declared martial law. It was $1:P8.05 by the time Marcos supposedly lifted martial law in 1981 and $1:P20.29 in January 1986 before Marcos was ousted. The country’s foreign debt grew from $355 million in 1962 to $28.3 billion in 1986. The debt to gross domestic product ratio reached more than 90 percent under Marcos.
In an autocracy where a person or family has the power of life and death over the population and could take what he or she wants for self-aggrandizement, there could certainly be no genuine prosperity benefitting the majority.
Marcos gained personally from using the enormous martial law powers he claimed and wielded and contributed to the worsening of the political, economic, social, and cultural crisis enveloping the country. But even after the dictator was ousted, the crisis persists because the administrations after Marcos failed to implement genuine, fundamental reforms.
The simple truth is that people could not leave it up to a president, especially to one with dictatorial tendencies, to solve societal problems. These could only be solved through the collective efforts of all, and everybody must do their share.
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