14-05-2008 09:44:07
The republic of the Philippines
Republic of the Philippines 1946 -1965
President Quezon died in exile in Saranac Lake, New York on August 1, 1944. Sergio Osmena became President of the Philippine Commonwealth and came ashore at Leyte with MacArthur.
Osmena's Nacionalista Party had split with Manuel Roxas leading the newly formed Liberal Party. Roxas had served in Laurel's government and a bitterly divisive election campaign centered on his conduct during the war. Roxas won the election on April 23, 1946 to become the first President of Republic of the Philippines on July 4, 1946.
Relations between the Republican government and the Hukbalahap were confrontational and often violent in the post-war years, especially as landlords returned to reclaim the estates they had abandoned during the occupation. Roxas was in turns conciliatory and repressive in his dealings with the Huks. In 1948 he extended a general amnesty to all those arrested for collaboration with the Japanese and, in the same year, declared the Huks a subversive and illegal organization.
Roxas died of a heart attack in April 1948 and was succeeded by Elpidio Quirino. Quirino attempted to negotiate with the Huk leader Taruc but the effort came to nothing. Huk strength reached its peak with as many as 15,000 armed men during and for a time following the 1949 presidential election campaign. Quirino and the Liberals were returned to office.
Quirino's Secretary of Defense, Ramon Magsaysay, succeeded in his policy to put down the Huks militarily and gain popular support for the civil authority. He imposed strict discipline on the military police to restrain their abuses of civilians. At the same time, the Huks lost their popular support through their indiscipline. Many had become nothing more than common robbers and bandits. The Huks finally lost the sympathy and respect of the people with the murder of President Quezon's widow and her family.
Magsaysay ran for the Nacionalista Party in 1953 and took two-thirds of the vote to defeat Quirino. Magsaysay enjoyed a popular presidency. He started many small but important local projects building roads, bridges, wells and irrigation canals. He established special courts to resolve landlord-tenant disputes. Taruc surrendered to the government in May 1954 signalling the decline of the Huk threat.
Carlos Garcia became President when Magsaysay died in an airplane crash on March 17, 1957. Garcia was reelected President in 1957 in the warm afterglow of Magsaysay's popularity. The Liberal Party recovered its strength under Diosdado Macapagal who won the 1961 presidential election.
Soon after taking office, President Macapagal proclaimed June 12 a national holiday in celebration of Philippine Independence. General Emilio Aguinaldo, who first proclaimed Philippine Independence on June 12, 1898, was the guest of honour at the first Independence Day celebrations held on June 12, 1962.
Marcos Dictatorship 1965 - 1986
Ferdinand Marcos ran for the Nacionalista Party in 1965 and delivered Macapagal a resounding defeat. Marcos initiated an ambitious spending program on public works; building roads, bridges, health centers, schools and urban beautification projects. He maintained his popularity through his first term and in 1969 was the first President of the Philippine Republic to win a second term in office. His popularity declined precipitously in the second term.
The criticism of Marcos grew directly from the dishonesty of the 1969 campaign and his failure to curb the bribery and corruption in government. There was also a more general discontent because the population continued to grow faster than the economy causing greater poverty and violence. The Communist Party of the Philippines formed the New People's Army and the Moro National Liberation Front fought for the secession of Muslim Mindanao. Marcos took advantage of these and other incidents such as labour strikes and student protests to create a political atmosphere of crisis and fear that he later used to justify his imposition of martial law.
The popularity of Senator Benigno Aquino and the Liberal Party was growing rapidly. Marcos blamed communists for the suspicious Plaza Miranda bombing of a Liberal Party rally on August 21, 1971. A staged assassination attempt on the Secretary of Defense, Juan Ponce Enrile, supplied the pretext for the declaration of martial law on September 21, 1972. Benigno Aquino was amongst the first of the 30,000 some opposition politicians, journalists, critics and activists detained under martial law.
With civil rights and the Philippine Congress suspended and his enemies in detention, Marcos brought in a new constitution in 1973 that replaced the Congress with a National Assembly and extended the term of the President to six years with no limit on the number of terms. With pay raises and selective promotions, he made the armed forces under General Fabian Ver his personal political machine. With his wife and friends, he established monopolies and cartels in the agricultural, construction, manufacturing and financial sectors that extracted billions from the Philippine economy. By the time Marcos was finally forced from power in 1986, the Philippines was a poorer country than when he first took office in 1965.
After five years in detention, a military court found Benigno Aquino guilty of subversion in November 1977 and sentenced him to death. Aquino, though, was too well-known and prominent to execute. He developed heart disease in prison and in May 1980 he was released for treatment and exile in the United States.
In order to gain the implicit endorsement of the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church for his regime, Marcos ostensibly lifted martial law on January 17, 1981 - although all of the orders and decrees issued under martial law remained in effect. Pope John Paul II visited the Philippines in February 1981. A new election was scheduled for June 16, 1981. The opposition boycotted the election and Marcos won a huge majority for another six year term as President.
After three years in exile, Benigno Aquino decided to return to the Philippines. On his arrival at Manila International Airport from Taiwan on August 21, 1983, a military escort took Aquino from the aircraft and shot him in the back of the head as he came down the stairs to the tarmac.