Marcos Cuts the Corners

Our people have come to a point of despair. Justice and security are as myths. Our government is gripped in the iron hand of venality, its treasury is barren, its resources are wasted, its civil service slothful and indifferent. Not one hero alone do I ask, but many.

EVIDENTLY Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos has changed his mind since he made that bold-sounding call for reform in his 1966 inaugural address. Instead of waiting for "many heroes," he has decided that the multiple ills that still beset his country can be cured by one only: Ferdinand Marcos. Within days after his sudden imposition of martial law to deal with a supposed threat of "Communist subversion" (TIME, Oct. 2), Marcos last week had begun to transform his island nation of 38 million from a raucous, imperfect democracy into what looked like a strongman government on the model of South Korea.

As Filipinos calmly observed a mid-night-to-4 a.m. curfew, military camps outside Manila began to fill with detainees picked up by Marcos' police on charges ranging from smuggling and tax evasion to "giving aid and comfort" to Communist subversives. By week's end there were 98 in the camps, among them three Senators, three Representatives and at least ten prominent journalists. Elementary schools began to reopen, but university campuses remained closed, as were all but two of Manila's 15 newspapers, five of its twelve radio stations, and one of its seven television stations. The media that were left were reliably pro-Marcos. The tabloid Sunday Express reassuringly cooed CIVILIAN GOVERNMENT STILL FUNCTIONS; NO MILITARY TAKEOVER. The President went on TV to explain his drastic measures ("We are falling back on the last line of defense") and to make vague promises of a "new society."

To judge by Marcos' moves last week, that society is to be the product of an improbable mix of needed populist reforms and a crackdown on public mores and morals that might do Greece's ruling colonels proud. On the needed-reforms side, Marcos announced programs to curb inflation (running at 18% in recent months), tax evasion and smuggling; fire corrupt judges; disarm the private armies maintained by rural warlords; prohibit minor functionaries like customs officers from carrying guns; and "give the peasant what is his due" in a sweeping and overdue land-reform program that will allow tenant farmers to purchase their land with government assistance. Marcos summarily yanked 450 "notoriously undesirable" workers off the swollen civil service payroll; 400,000 others, ranging from customs clerks to Cabinet secretaries, were ordered to turn in their resignations pending a massive government reorganization.

"Friendly Persuasion." On the puritan side, Marcos closed down blue movies, strip shows and casinos, ordered police to seize slot machines. Newspapers that are allowed to resume publication will be forbidden to run editorials, society pages, gossip columns and lurid crime stories--a significant literary genre in a nation whose homicide rate is eight times that of the U.S. After a few nasty incidents, word came out of Malacanang Palace, Marcos' downtown Manila residence, that soldiers were not to cut off long hair or rip off miniskirts on sight. But Marcos' press secretary, Francisco Tatad, declared that ROTC units would be turned out to use "friendly persuasion" to encourage short hair and longer skirts. They will also teach good driving habits and educate Manila shoppers in "how to form queues like they do in other cities."

Filipinos took it all calmly. Most Manilenos applauded Marcos' law-and-order moves, even though his ban on the sale of guns seemed rather belated in a country whose inhabitants have more weapons than the entire Philippine military and police forces. During a tour of Manila last week, TIME Correspondent Robert Elson saw few soldiers and found life "normal except for the companies of ROTC students scrubbing anti-Marcos graffiti off the walls of buildings and traffic dividers. Otherwise, the city went untroubled about its business. Open-air shops were thronged, and early-morning Masses were crowded."

With outside investors already skittish about the Philippines, Marcos went out of his way to emphasize that his reforms did not pose a threat to foreign capital. That mainly comes from U.S. corporations, who have a $1 billion stake--more than in any other Asian country except Japan--in oil, mining and other industries in the Philippines. In a telegram to Malacanang Palace, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Manila, forgetting its manners as a foreign guest, effusively praised Marcos' program.

Fitful. Though he made his move within hours after his Defense Secretary escaped from what was purported to be a terrorist assassination attempt, Marcos had in fact planned to assume emergency powers well before the attempt was made. In doing so, he may or may not have exaggerated the potency of the New People's Army, a Maoist revolutionary movement blamed for several suspicious bombings in the Manila area. Certainly, his act hardly suggests that he has given up his admitted desire to stay in power after the end of 1973, when he is due to step down--unless a constitutional convention that has been in session in Manila for five months now changes the political system to his advantage, or Marcos manages to keep his emergency powers indefinitely.

So far, Marcos has encountered little opposition. Even some of his opponents yearned for a way to end the Philippine political paralysis, and saw a dictatorship as one way of getting things done. Deep social inequalities and high-level corruption have made the country's 26-year experiment with democracy a fitful experience at best. With Congress mired in battles among bickering factions of the ruling Nacionalista Party, the government has been virtually immobilized--unable to pass, among other things, the land-reform program that Marcos simply decreed last week.

Ironically, the leading advocates of a period of strongman rule in Manila included Benigno Aquino, an opposition Liberal Party Senator and presidential aspirant whom Marcos has had arrested as a Communist collaborator. In July, Aquino argued in the weekly Far Eastern Economic Review that "our people are ready for leadership. Right now they will accept even a Lee Kuan Yew or a Chung Hee Park. They will accept a diminution in civil liberties if only these are properly explained to them. You can cut corners now." Marcos had cut the corners all right, but whether he could stitch them together again remained to be seen.

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