The Macapagal Puppet Regime, 1962-1966

Enjoying the political and financial support of the U.S. monopolies, Diosdado Macapagal defeated Garcia in the presidential elections of 1961 despite the latter’s use of government resources and facilities in the campaign. In the era of modern imperialism, Macapagal inanely ran on a platform of “free enterprise” and “decentralization.” The Liberal Party of which he was the principal candidate coalesced with the Grand Alliance to form the United Opposition. This coalition shamelessly echoed the U.S. imperialist dictation made through the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, besides the usual run of U.S. advisors.

The first executive act performed by Macapagal when he assumed the puppet presidency in 1962 was to proclaim immediate and full decontrol. Local U.S. firms were enabled to remit huge profits even without having to conceal them any more through overpricing of goods and services bought from their mother and sister companies in the United States or elsewhere abroad. The comprador big bourgeoisie and the big landlord class gobbled up their dollar income from the export of raw materials and freely converted their pesos into dollars for the import of finished commodities. Graft and corruption shifted from the Central Bank to the Bureau of Customs and the long seacoasts of the archipelago as the system of dollar allocations was replaced by a readjusted tariff system intended to draw government revenues.

Upon the exhaustion of the dollar reserves of the reactionary government, the peso was devalued from the previous fixed rate of P2.00 per dollar to P3.90 per dollar. To maintain this rate, the Macapagal puppet regime had to accept onerous “stabilization” loans from U.S. banks. With the new peso-dollar rate, the broad masses of the people had to suffer high prices which cut down their real income. There was not a single commodity in the Philippines unaffected by the higher cost of importing finished goods, raw materials, spare parts, fuel and the like from the United States. While the peso was devalued to the extent of almost 100 per cent, the statutory minimum wage level was raised by only 50 per cent and could be had by wage-earners only through mass struggle.

The Macapagal puppet regime used the very economic crisis caused by U.S. imperialism as the excuse for advocating an “open door” policy for U.S. investments. The volume of U.S. investments increased but not any higher than the huge profits being remitted. U.S. investments were made only to aggravate the unevenness of the semicolonial and semifeudal economy. U.S. investors took over enterprises which could no longer pay their foreign debts and made new investments in plantations, fertilizer plants and the like. Conforming to their own policy of restraining the outflow of dollars from the United States, the U.S. monopolies employed the tactic of sucking up Filipino savings and loan capital taken by the Philippine government from U.S.-owned and U.S.-controlled hanks. Thus, even with the very little capital that they actually brought into the country, they could enlarge their capitalization through local borrowings. All these were facilitated by the puppet president through the Program Implementation Agency, an office created especially for this purpose. New lending agencies were also created to facilitate the rapid depletion of foreign loans.

Government corporations were made to borrow directly from the World Bank. Private corporations and banks were encouraged to get loans directly from U.S. and other foreign banks and to use government banks to make the guarantees. During the time of Macapagal, it was extremely clear that burdening the reactionary government with foreign loans was deliberately being done to reduce to complete absurdity the illusion of the bourgeois nationalists that they could make use of the puppet state to help them take over U.S. assets in the Philippines.

A program of public works projects which was mainly intended to exhaust foreign loans and abuse the local currency and the whole economy was initiated. It was launched despite the fact that the Macapagal puppet regime could not get from Congress the tax measures it wanted for raising government revenues so as to cover increased government expenditures. A nonsensical agency like the Emergency Employment Administration was put up to conduct sham public works and create the illusion of more employment at a time of mass layoffs.

In an attempt to dissimulate its brazen puppetry to U.S. imperialism, the Macapagal puppet regime had “independence day” changed from July 4th to June 12th. The fable that the United States “granted” independence to the Filipino people was supplanted by the equally arrogant fable that the United States “restored” it. It became a vogue among puppet politicians to pay lip service to the events and heroes of the old democratic revolution so as to give a superficial local color to their puppetry. Romulo, an old running dog of U.S. imperialism, was put in the University of the Philippines to be always on hand for consultations with Macapagal in the embellishment of pro-imperialist policies and also to refurbish the state university as a tool of U.S. imperialism and the local exploiting classes.

To further make itself appear progressive and to swindle the peasantry, the Macapagal puppet regime enacted the Agricultural Land Reform Code. This code piously declares share tenancy as “contrary to public policy” and makes the false promise to emancipate the tenant masses. Underneath all the bombast about emancipating the tenant masses is the full assurance to all landlords that if a piece of land is to be expropriated from them by the reactionary government they shall be given “just compensation.” The tenant masses would not be able to afford the redistribution price and the reactionary government would not have enough funds to go beyond a few token instances of expropriation.

The code also provides that before there can be any expropriation of land from the landlords, the tenant masses should first become “leaseholders,” paying a fixed land rent amounting to 25 per cent of the average annual net crop based on the three normal crop years preceding the landlord-tenant “leasehold” agreement. The tenant is obliged to shoulder all agricultural expenses and to deliver to the landlord the fixed rent whatever is the outcome of the crop, come floods, drought or crop epidemics. “Leasehold” does not actually reduce the land rent; it is nothing but one more form of share tenancy. But the code makes it appear that merely adopting this form of share tenancy means the abolition of share tenancy.

The Philippine claim on Sabah and the Maphilindo (Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia) plan were initiated by the Macapagal puppet regime ostensibly to carry out an irredentist policy but in reality to facilitate the recognition of the Philippines as an intervenor in and supporter of the Anglo-American concoction that is “Malaysia.” The Maphilindo was nothing but an imperialist trick to outwit the Sukarno government of Indonesia and to extort more privileges for U.S. monopolies in Malaya and North Kalimantan. In pretending to take an independent course in Philippine foreign relations, Macapagal even had the U.S.-R.P. Treaty of General Relations abrogated but he allowed all other unequal treaties elaborating on this treaty to continue.

It was anomalous that, whereas the Macapagal puppet regime could not assert Philippine sovereignty and jurisdiction over the U.S. military bases within the Philippines, it sought to acquire more territory outside. When the number of murder cases involving U.S. military personnel and their Filipino victims increased, the Macapagal puppet regime conspired with the U.S. ambassador in the old trick of negotiating the amendment of the U.S.-R.P. Military Bases Agreement. The amendments agreed upon actually enlarged the jurisdiction of the U.S. base commander. However, no serious step was ever taken to submit these to the Philippine Senate for ratification.

The Macapagal puppet regime thoroughly exposed to all the Asian peoples its puppetry to U.S. imperialism when it rabidly campaigned for the sending of Filipino mercenary troops to participate in the U.S. war of aggression against the Vietnamese people. Filipino C.I.A. agents who had gained substantial business interests in the U.S. war of aggression in Indochina were most vociferous in joining Macapagal’s call for sending Filipino mercenary troops to Vietnam. The first mercenaries to be sent there under an act of the puppet Congress took the guise of engineering and medical teams.

To promote the imperialist partnership of the United States and Japan in exploiting the peoples of Asia and strengthen Japan’s role as the regional puppet chieftain of U.S. imperialism in Asia, the Macapagal puppet regime sponsored the conference which led to the formation of the U.S.-Japan- controlled Asian Development Bank and offered to make Manila its headquarters. The Asian Development Bank is one more financial institution designed to manipulate the Philippine puppet government into perpetuating a semicolonial and semifeudal economy for supplying raw materials principally to both the United States and Japan. During the time of Macapagal, the share of Japan in Philippine foreign trade had already gone up to around 20 per cent.

In opposition to the reactionary policies of the Macapagal puppet regime, the revolutionary mass movement in the city surged forward. Increasingly bigger protest demonstrations were staged by workers, peasants, students and other patriots. On October 2, 1964, workers and students demonstrated against U.S. parity rights and the U.S. military bases in front of the U.S. Embassy and then in front of Malacanang Palace where they battled the presidential guards. The most militant demonstrators subsequently became charter members of the Kabataang Makabayan. The Kabataang Makabayan was founded on November 30, 1964 to become a consistent major factor in the struggle for national democracy.

On December 25, 1964, the people of Angeles City and adjoining towns held a big meeting to denounce the murder of Filipinos inside the U.S. military bases and demand the withdrawal of these bases. On January 25, 1965, twenty thousand people composed of workers, peasants, students and the unemployed marched to the puppent Congress and then to the U.S. embassy to expose in a comprehensive way the workings of U.S. imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism. Demonstrations were also repeatedly made against the Anglo-American concoction of “Malaysia” and the U.S. war of aggression in Vietnam.

These demonstrations were preceded and followed by study meetings at several places in order to discuss the issues thoroughly. Altogether, the militant demonstrations and study meetings constituted a further development of the cultural revolution of a national-democratic type signaled by the anti-CAFA demonstration of 1961. The youth played a vanguard role in these mass actions. The workers and peasants could have immediately played an even bigger role were it not for the more than one decade of sabotage perpetrated by the bourgeois reactionary gang of the Lavas and Tarucs in the revolutionary mass movement.

In the countryside, Red commanders and fighters who refused to heed the call of the Jesus Lava leadership for liquidating the armed struggle persisted in their revolutionary efforts. However, in the absence of a definite Marxist-Leninist leadership capable of striking down the counterrevolutionary leadership of the bourgeois reactionary gang of the Lavas and Tarucs, those who persisted in revolutionary armed struggle in the countryside were susceptible to the outlook of the roving rebel band and were prey to the usurpation of leadership by the Taruc-Sumulong gangster clique. Despite the usurpation of leadership by both the bourgeois reactionary gang of the Lavas and the Taruc-Sumulong gangster clique, the broad masses of people clamored for a correct proletarian revolutionary leadership.

The one-man Jesus Lava leadership exposed its completely bankrupt character when it forwarded letters of support to Macapagal for its policies, especially the Agricultural Land Reform Code, and when it subsequently arranged its surrender in May 1964. Before his surrender, Jesus Lava vainly tried to sow disorder in the ranks of the revolutionary mass movement by making arbitrary appointments that appeared to recognize the independent kingdom of the Taruc-Sumulong gangster clique and yet encouraged certain kinsmen of his to claim Party leadership even as they were isolated from the masses and were actually accomplices in his surrender.

The independent kingdom of the Lavas based in Manila took to using a reformist peasant organization, the Masaka, to assert its fake authority in the revolutionary mass movement and also to comply with Jesus Lava’s commitment of supporting the sham land reform programme of the reactionary government.

Soon after the surrender of Jesus Lava to Macapagal, Marxist-Leninists emerging from the revolutionary mass movement rose up to criticize and repudiate the counterrevolutionary acts of the Lavas and Tarucs. At first, expressions of criticism and repudiation were spontaneous. Then these matured into a full-scale rectification movement. The rectification movement would still entail some years to develop towards the stage when the Revolutionary School of Mao Tsetung Thought could be formed and the Communist Party of the Philippines could be reestablished under the great red banner of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought. The long dynastic rule of the Lavas and Tarucs in the Party could not be done away with overnight.