A Nation of Serfs
In 300 years of Spanish colonization, the Philippines (like other Spanish colonies) became a theocracy. As friars arrived and set about converting the Malays, they acquired immense landholdings. In time, the friars controlled 21 gigantic haciendas around Manila.
The Spaniards were fearful of the Chinese because of their incomprehensible language and customs, their greater numbers, their ambition, their financial acuity, their capacity to endure hardship, their secretiveness, and their clannishness. They put a ceiling on Chinese immigration, restricted their movement, confined them to Manila ghettos, and barred them from citizenship or direct ownership of land. Periodically, Chinese were massacred.
Most Spaniards, like the Chinese, came to the islands without women and made temporary arrangements with Malay girls, producing prodigious numbers of illegitimate mestizo children. Fortunately, Chinese mestizo children were not considered Chinese. Raised as good Catholics by their Malay mothers, they could come and go at will, own land, and engage in business more or less as Malay Filipinos did. However, since they had access to Chinese credit and often inherited their fathers’ business sense, Chinese mestizos were in a much better position to buy property, and to act as middlemen or moneylenders, which gave them exceptional leverage.
Ordinary Malays foolishly but naturally tried to emulate their Spanish rulers by throwing pig roasts on feast days, christenings, confirmations, weddings, or any other occasion that came along. Without cash, in a rice and fish subsistence economy, they had to borrow money from the Chinese, using their traditional land as collateral. When the debt could not be paid, the land was forfeited. By this indirect form of extortion, more and more land came under the ownership of Chinese mestizos. The original Malay landowners became mere tenant farmers in their own country.
For Spanish mestizos there was a different path to wealth and power. Lacking the business sense, energy, and credit system of the Chinese, they turned to the professions, primarily to the law. Using the law, they enlarged their personal landholdings by entangling the original Malay owners in costly litigation. Any native Malays who had not already forfeited their land to the grasping Iberian friars were soon caught between the money squeezing of the Chinese mestizos and the legal squeezing of the Spanish mestizos and were gradually turned into a nation of serfs.
The American Occupation
The Philippine Insurrection or the Philippine-American War (whichever your point of view) was marked by some serious atrocities including the burning of Samar by Gen. Jacob Smith following the massacre in Balangiga of 59 American soldiers by Filipino rebels. Gen. Smith vowed to turn Samar into a “howling wilderness” and proceeded to do so. It was an ugly war.
On top of the war, by 1902 the Philippines was crippled by famine. Wealthy landowners decided that some things were more important than independence, and threw their support to the Yankees. When America passed a law that any Filipino who continued to resist would be ineligible for a job in the colonial civil service, the middle class defected. Fighting ceased. Washington claimed victory and the American public put the whole unsavory affair out of mind. The war had lasted 3 years. Only 883 Americans died in battle and 3,349 more of disease. Of the 1 million dead Filipinos (out of a population of 6 million), 16,000 were guerrillas and 984,000 civilians.
The government in Manila became a genial collaboration between ambitious Americans and rich Filipino landowners. Four hundred millionaire families controlled 90 percent of the wealth. At their center were 40 billionaire families who rivaled the great fortunes of Paris, London and New York – the Rothschilds, the Mellons, the Rockefellers. Sugar generated many of these fortunes in a perverse way. Philippine sugar, so inefficiently produced that it could not compete on world markets, was allowed to enter the United States duty free. In return, Washington was guaranteed the support of a powerful political-economic bloc in Manila which mediated all issues with Filipino peasants and the middle class. Sugar barons held political power while Chinese clans controlled high finance.
Outside of Manila, provincial dynasties developed – such as the Laurels in Batangas, the Aquinos and Cojuangcos in Tarlac, the Quirinos and Crisologos in Ilocos Sur, the Lopezes in the Visayas – which formed temporary alliances to further their political ends. Unlike America, where the great industrial monopolies were broken up in the 1930s and “trust busting” has continued ever since, these corrective measures were never dispatched across the Pacific and implemented in America’s colony. So the wealth of the Philippines remained in the tight grip of a few hundred families. In concept, this oligarchy was rigidly medieval in the Spanish model, but under America they became masters of insincerity. Democracy was only a well-oiled pretense. The most shop-worn joke in Manila was that the Philippines had spent “300 years in a convent, 50 years in a brothel.” The oligarchy kept the keys.
From the turn of the century, America’s involvement with its Pacific colony had been composed of halfway measures – grand designs without adequate follow-through, democratic institutions without checks and balances, permissiveness without restraint, financial aid without accountability, cunning manipulation masked by expressions of virtue – all engineered with the help of agreeable men lacking in principle. America sought out and encouraged a tiny group of leaders who were servile toward their masters, ruthless among their own kind, and contemptuous of all those beneath them. The colonial experiment was doomed by its own hand, a form of suicidal opportunism. After setting such an example for half a century – “50 years in a brothel” – it is no wonder that corruption had eager understudies waiting in the wings.
During the 1946 elections, President Osmeńa campaigned with the promise of a new law that would give tenants 60% of their harvest rather than the customary 50%. This alienated the ruling class and Osmeńa was doomed. In central Luzon, peasant farmers turned out heavily, electing 6 Huk-backed congressmen. Nationwide, 3 reform senators were also elected, including the well-known non-Communist Jose Diokno.
Manuel Roxas won the presidential slot handily but his party gained only 13 of the 23 senate seats – too narrow an edge to control the legislature. Without a quorum, and in violation of the constitution, he declared the 6 Huk congressional victories invalid, and refused to seat the 3 reform senators, including Diokno. Among the new congressmen expelled was Luis Taruc, leader of the Huks.
In all of this, there was an ulterior motive. All 9 expelled legislators had campaigned on a platform opposing an important treaty pending between the US and the Philippines. The Bell Trade Act would open Philippine markets to a duty-free flow of American products, and grant Americans equal rights with Filipinos to exploit the country’s natural resources – but not the other way around. Furthermore, Washington would only release postwar reconstruction money to the Philippines once the Bell Act was approved. “A more brazen attempt at blackmail could hardly be conceived,” commented The Nation. Roxas won approval of the act by a single vote. Had the 9 legislators been present, the Bell Act would have been blocked. The islands thus became a dumping ground for duty-free American commodities – a classic replay of 16th century colonialism.
As president, Roxas went on to negotiate the other one-sided treaties with Washington – the Mutual Defense Treaty and the Military Bases Agreement.
With Roxas securely in power, Gen. MacArthur decided that the time had come to put the war-time collaboration with the Japanese by 90% of the ruling elite to rest. The leading collaborators were released from Sugamo prison and brought back from Japan for trial with Jose Laurel’s case as the centerpiece. Under pressure from President Roxas, the courts evolved a peculiar theory that a public official was not responsible for his public behavior if a disclaimer was expressed after the fact. This enabled the wartime elites to claim that they had been motivated only by patriotism and therefore were completely innocent. The courts upheld this defense. Laurel and his cronies were released. As he was freed, he observed trenchantly that all Filipinos were collaborators. Laurel’s political power was intact. In May 1947 he was nominated for the Senate, and by October he was already being talked up for the presidency. | 