The Garcia Puppet Regime, 1957-1961

Carlos P. Garcia as vice-president assumed the presidency of the puppet republic upon the death of Magsaysay in 1957 and was elected to the same position under the banner of the Nacionalista Party in that same year. He was basically a puppet of U.S. imperialism and the chief representative of the local exploiting classes. His regime never took any decisive step to break the colonial and feudal chains that bind the Filipino people. Instead, it allowed these to remain.

As a result of foreign exchange and import controls, the middle bourgeoisie became politically assertive in favor of what it called nationalist industrialization. Some Filipino manufacturers using local raw materials were enraged by the establishment of reassembly and packaging plants by the U.S. monopolies and the compradors to circumvent the tariff wall that was supposed to restrict the importation of commodities already locally produced. Even those manufacturers reliant on imported raw materials in various degrees also recognized the advantages of protection and clamored for more.

The political aspirations of the national bourgeoisie were best articulated by Recto who was also able to attract to some extent the interest of the petty bourgeoisie in joining the anti-imperialist movement.

The Garcia puppet regime raised the slogan of “Filipino First” as an apparent concession to a growing anti-imperialist movement among the people. But it did so only in order to cover up its basic puppetry to U.S. imperialism. The slogan meant nothing more than giving preference to Filipino businessmen in the allocation of U.S. dollars for import-export operations over foreign businessmen of a nationality other than American. The basic assumption was still that Filipino businessmen should be subservient to the U.S. dollar. Though there were laws and priority lists encouraging “new” and “necessary’’ industries and restricting the importation of certain goods that could be locally produced, these only served to encourage the establishment of a limited number of assembly and packaging plants by U.S. subsidiaries which took to misrepresenting as raw materials the finished goods that they imported.

Though the Garcia puppet regime was conspicuously encouraging Filipino merchants to push out merchants of Chinese nationality from the retail business, especially in the rice and corn trade, it allowed the big Kuomintang compradors to have a big share in the import-export and wholesale business and to bring their capital to Taiwan. All Chinese residents in the Philippines were coerced to manifest their allegiance to the Chiang bandit gang or else face reprisal.

In line with the scheme of U.S. imperialism to revive Japanese militarism, the Garcia puppet regime hurriedly negotiated and agreed with Japan on the Japan-R.P. Treaty of Amity, Commerce and Navigation. Though ratification of the proposed treaty was held back because of great popular opposition, Japanese companies were already extensively using the reparations agreement as an excuse for setting up liaison offices, making surveys in the country and participating in the import-export business.

Towards the end of the fifties, U.S. imperialism exerted pressure on the Garcia puppet regime to remove foreign exchange controls. Foreign exchange controls had been permitted by U.S. imperialism as a mere tactical and temporary device for putting a brake to the rapid depletion of U.S. dollars and for helping prevent the complete breakdown of the colonial economy at a time when the revolutionary mass movement was on the upsurge. Now, U.S. imperialism wanted a more ‘‘favorable climate’’ for foreign investments in the Philippines and the unlimited remittance of its superprofits. It wanted to counteract its uneven balance-of-payments problem by intensifying the export of its surplus products, by extending usurious loans and making the type of direct investments that would rapidly fetch superprofits. Furthermore, the lifting of foreign exchange controls would pave the way for the prolongation of imperialist privileges in the colonial economy despite the 1974 termination of the Laurel-Langley Agreement.

U.S. imperialism used the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to make an economic survey and recommend the adoption of immediate and full decontrol as the cornerstone of “development.” Due to the resurgent anti-imperialist movement, Garcia could not immediately lift foreign exchange controls. U.S. imperialism had to subject him to a virulent attack for perpetrating graft and corruption in dollar allocations and also to a coup d’etat threat by the C.I.A. gang closely associated with the late Magsaysay in order to pressure and compel him to adopt partial decontrol in December 1960. It was a step calculated by Garcia to appease U.S. imperialism in anticipation of the 1961 presidential elections. However, U.S. imperialism had already decided to depose him and to replace him with another puppet politician who would not hesitate to follow its orders to the letter.

The sly character of the Garcia puppet regime was also evident in the negotiations hoax made concerning the reduction of the 99-year period of U.S. control of the military bases in the Philippines. Though it was publicized that an agreement between the Philippine and U.S. panels was reached reducing U.S. tenure on such bases to 25 years, the U.S.-R.P. Military Bases Treaty was never amended and in later years it would be reported that minutes of meetings pertaining to the reduction of U.S. tenure could not be found in the files of the Department of Foreign Affairs. The negotiations hoax had been put on as a mere tactic to meet the growing anti-imperialist demand for the complete withdrawal of U.S. military bases. The demand had risen especially when U.S. military personnel repeatedly committed the crime of murder on Filipinos in U.S. military bases and base commanders prevented the prosecution of the culprits by asserting U.S. jurisdiction.

During the Garcia puppet regime, the U.S. military bases continued to be used in launching aggression against the peoples of Southeast Asia. In 1958, these were used to support the rightist rebellion against the Indonesian people and to step up U.S. intervention in Indochina. Flaunting the slogan of “Asia for the Asians,’’ the Garcia puppet regime tried to establish the Association of Southeast Asia (ASA ) under the pretext of fostering regional cooperation in the economic and cultural spheres. Actually, the ASA was a device for coordinating a free trade zone for U.S. imperialism and for reinforcing the SEATO which was already wracked by severe contradictions between U.S. imperialism and Pakistan and also between U.S. imperialism and France.

The resurgence of the anti-imperialist revolutionary mass movement became most conspicuous during the Garcia puppet regime when on March 14, 1961 a powerful demonstration led by young men and women broke into the halls of the puppet congress and literally scuttled the anti- communist hearings being conducted by the Committee on Anti-Filipino Activities (CAFA). This mass action marked the beginning of a cultural revolution of a national-democratic character after more than two decades during which the bourgeois reactionary gang of the Lavas surrendered initiative to the reactionaries. The CAFA was thwarted in its attempt to employ the Anti-Subversion Law as a measure for cowing students, teachers and the people in general from expressing their national-democratic aspirations.

As early as 1958, the Anti-Subversion Law had been enacted with the evil purpose of dealing a deathblow to the Communist Party of the Philippines. At about the same time, parallel to the anti- communist maneuver of the reactionary government, Jesus Lava abused his position as Party general secretary by deciding all by himself to liquidate the Party with his “single-file’’ -policy, a policy of destroying even the least semblance of democratic centralism within the Party. The reactionaries in the country so dominated the superstructure that they would immediately denounce as “communist” any intellectual trend opposed to the anachronistic “free enterprise” ideology most rabidly espoused by the Grand Alliance led by such C.I.A. agents and clerico-fascist diehards as Manahan and Manglapus.

All the cultural devices established by U.S. imperialism and the Catholic Church at the beginning of the puppet republic persisted and expanded. The C.I.A. kept on manipulating fanatics of this most numerous church through the Manahan-Manglapus clique and the American Jesuits. In 1961, the U.S. Peace Corps was brought in by U.S. imperialism as an additional device to aggravate the cultural and political subversion of the Philippines.