It bears emphasizing that, to U.S. security strategists, the Philippines was an important outpost of the New Frontier. Indeed, it was here where the United States had first fought a counterinsurgency war in the name of defeating communism. In anticipation of the specular foreign policy inaugurated by the Kennedy era, Washington sent Edward G. Lansdale to crush the aforementioned Huks.59 Combining paramilitary operations, psychological warfare and the manipulation of electoral politics, Lansdale’s anti-Huk campaign would in fact serve as the blueprint for U.S. anticommunist counterinsurgency operations elsewhere—in Colombia, Venezuela, and Vietnam.
Because of his “pro-Western” stance, the CIA endorsed Marcos in the 1965 elections. He was touted as “Washington’s man in Asia,” not only because of his avowed anticommunist beliefs but also because he fit the mold of the “freedom fighter.” I return now to Marcos’s crisis management of the First Quarter Storm, which clearly echoed the crisis mongering and political demonology of Kennedy’s interventionist policies. But as we shall see in a moment, Marcos’s red-scare tactics were hardly subservient to Washington’s interests.
Marcos’s Countersubversive Performance
On his September 1966 state visit to the United States, Marcos spoke boldly about the need to stanch the communist threat in Vietnam. Ever mindful of the unpopularity of the war at home, however, he demurred when President Johnson requested more Filipino troops in Vietnam.60 A May 1969 report by the U.S. magazine New Republic cogently interpreted Marcos’s vacillation:
The president is judged by his own people according to the number of benefits and concessions he succeeds in wheedling from Washington, and by the extent to which he dares defy what may appear from time to time to be Washington’s wishes. On the first count, President Marcos got some favors from President Johnson by posing as LBJ’s “right hand in Asia.” . . . On the second count, President Marcos has sternly warned the United States that if it reduces its forces in Asia (meaning, if Washington cuts its military spending), he will feel compelled in prudence to seek a modus vivendi with Communist China. The warning can scarcely have frightened Washington and in any event was intended for domestic consumption.61
Marcos’s performance as Johnson’s “right hand in Asia” indeed had its compensations. In exchange for promising a two-thousand-man army engineering battalion to assist U.S. troops in 1966, he acquired $45 million in economic assistance, $31 million in settlement of Philippine veterans’ claims, and $3.5 million to assist the First Lady’s cultural projects.62 And yet, in subsequent negotiations for increased military aid, he repeatedly threatened to approach China should such assistance not be forthcoming. Simply put, Marcos was playing both sides. He used the Vietnam conflict to simultaneously curry favor with Washington and demonstrate to his critics at home that he was not a supplicant to U.S. interests. It was a foretaste of the opportunistic nature of the red-scare tactics that he would implement in the aftermath of the First Quarter Storm.
From January to April 1970, Marcos twice raised the possibility of martial law.63 This was a politically risky move, given that just a year before, during his reelection campaign, he had downplayed reports of stepped-up insurgency in the countryside, confidently assuring Washington and the Philippine public that his administration could “handle the Communist threat.” In May 1970 he predicted an “inevitable confrontation” with Maoist communists. His alarmist prognosis elicited bipartisan criticism in the Philippine Senate. A special committee headed by Senator Salvador Laurel, a Marcos opponent, asserted that there was “no clear and present danger of a Communist-inspired insurrection or rebellion,” and that NPA activity in the countryside posed “no real military threat to the security of the country.”64
The Department of National Defense and the communist media painted a drastically different picture. Based on secret intelligence gathered by the Armed Forces of the Philippines, Marcos announced in August 1971 that the NPA now had one thousand men on the frontline, with support troops of about fifty thousand. Reports from the CPP-NPA’s periodicals, Ang bayan (The nation) and Pulang bandila (Red flag), indicated that the well-equipped and highly mobile NPA was widening its operations in Central and southeastern Luzon. Closely monitoring the NPA’s progress were the Peking media, which had reported in December 1970 that the NPA had wiped out “more than 200 reactionary Philippine troops and police,” and fifteen U.S. military personnel in over eighty operations that year.65
The oligarchy-controlled media, on the other hand, took an overwhelmingly skeptical position, accusing Marcos of sensationalizing the Maoist threat. They accused him of “swallowing all that military commanders were telling him” and asking the public to do the same.66 The Lopez-controlled Manila Chronicle, the most outspoken of the anti-Marcos dailies, would write, “Since the government cannot seem to stop the rising price of bread, it is apparently trying to offer us circuses as a diversion. And these in the form of endless warnings about the rise of subversion.”67
As his critics were quick to point out, Marcos’s counterinsurgency campaign was a public extravagance. It created an “imaginary” crisis, which ironically deflected attention away from “real” crisis conditions voiced by demonstrators in the streets. The spectral nature of the underground Maoists was crucial in this regard. The CPP-NPA seemed to invite fabulous portrayals and mystifications on the part of the government. As Eduardo Lachica put it in 1970,
If a Manilan does not read the newspapers, he would never suspect that a dissident struggle was going on in the countryside only 50 kilometers north of the capital. Most Manilans go through their daily rounds, completely unaffected by what is going on in Central Luzon. One sometimes wonders indeed whether the Huks are not just a convenient invention of the Armed Forces for purposes of raising their budget. . . . The Department of National Defense is the only legitimate source of day-to-day information about the Huks and one of the few agencies officially quotable on the subject. . . . The Huks thus carry on a strangely twilight existence on the front pages based entirely on what the AFP claims they are doing.68
In a series of dazzling pseudo-events that call to mind the covert operations described by Rogin, Marcos would produce “visible evidence” of the communist threat. His anticommunist performance was used not to protect “free institutions,” however, but to justify the imposition of martial law in the country.
Marcos’s uptake of the covert spectacle began with a public bloodbath. On August 21, 1971, at least three fragmentation grenades were hurled at the speaker’s stage at a Liberal Party rally in downtown Manila’s Plaza Miranda. Over ten thousand people were present to witness the presentation of candidates for the November congressional and local elections. Nine people were killed in the explosion. All the Liberal Party’s eight senatorial candidates were among the more than one hundred persons seriously injured. Broadcast before a live national audience, the attack was the most shocking political crime the country had ever seen, an event described by Gregg Jones as the “Philippine equivalent of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.”69
Marcos’s opponents widely believed that the president had himself ordered the massacre—a suspicion that acquired the status of fact until the 1988 confessions of top-ranking CPP-NPA officials revealed that Sison was the true mastermind behind the attack.70 Be that as it may, Marcos manipulated the trauma unleashed by the event for his own political purposes. Eerily reminiscent of Kennedy’s alarmist performance during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Marcos yet again played the role of heroic leader for the national audience, and in a highly dramatic televised address, declared a state of national emergency. Marcos’s televised message climaxed with his announcement that he had suspended the writ of habeas corpus.
As radical students and labor leaders were simultaneously being rounded up, Marcos dropped a second bombshell, announcing