The Magsaysay Puppet Regime, 1948-1953

As secretary of national defense under the Quirino puppet regime, Magsaysay was credited by U.S. imperialism and the local exploiting classes with the defeat of the revolutionary mass movement. The U.S. propaganda mills misrepresented him as the “man of the masses” and ‘‘savior of democracy’’ and gave all-out support to his bid for presidency in exchange for his brutal suppression of the masses and trammeling of democratic rights. Quirino, on the other hand, became most blamed for the state of civil war, the imposition of martial law and the rampant graft and corruption in the reactionary government.

Magsaysay transferred from the Liberal Party to the Nacionalista Party to run against Quirino in the 1953 elections. By this act, U.S. imperialism exposed the absence of any basic difference between the two reactionary parties. Magsaysay became the third president of the puppet republic despite the efforts of Quirino to manipulate government resources and facilities in his own favor. The U.S. monopolies through the American Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines brought the full weight of their money behind Magsaysay in an unprecedentedly expensive and corrupt election. Using the authority of the JUSMAG as an excuse, U.S. military officers went as far down as the company level in the reactionary armed forces to see to it that their pet running dog would be elected.

In his brief reign, Magsaysay completed the evil work of crushing the Party and the people’s army by taking advantage of the anti-Marxist and anti-Leninist policies of the Jesus Lava leadership which had automatically replaced the Jose Lava leadership in 1951. Refusing to learn from the errors of the previous Party leadership, the Jesus Lava leadership continued to dispose the people’s armed forces in an adventurist way. It chose to describe the stage of armed struggle it was in as the stage of strategic “counteroffensive.” Acting beyond the correct mass line in practically every place, units of the People’s Liberation Army became isolated and resorted to grave abuses merely to get food for themselves. More political isolation only resulted in more disastrous military defeats.

The traitor Luis Taruc surrendered to Magsaysay in 1954. Consistently unable to conduct a protracted people’s war correctly, the Jesus Lava leadership swung from adventurism to capitulationism. In 1955, the Jesus Lava leadership prepared to abandon the countryside by announcing that the main form of struggle was parliamentary struggle. It dissolved the units of the people’s army it could influence and converted them into so-called organizational brigades.

In 1954, the Magsaysay puppet regime sabotaged the ceaseless popular demand for the abrogation of the Bell Trade Act by negotiating for its mere revision. Thus, the Laurel-Langley Agreement was made. This new treaty aggravated the economic subservience of the Philippines to U.S. imperialism by allowing the U.S. monopolies to enjoy parity rights in all kinds of businesses. Adjustments in the quota system and preferential treatment for Philippine raw materials were made only to deepen the colonial and agrarian character of the economy. The formal assertion of the independence of the peso currency did not remove it from the actual control of the U.S. dollar.

The foreign exchange controls showed conspicuously the subservience of the Philippine peso to the U.S. dollar. Having a semicolonial and a semifeudal economy, the Philippines had to make use of its dollar earnings from its raw material exports to get finished commodities from abroad, chiefly the United States. To circumvent the priorities set by the foreign exchange control regulations and the tariff laws for the importation of “essential” commodities, the U.S. monopolies and the compradors disassembled U.S. finished commodities before bringing them into the country and labeled them as raw materials for local processing. Reassembly and packaging plants were put up to create the illusion of local industrialization and import substitution.

The Magsaysay puppet regime signed the first Agricultural Commodities Agreement with the United States in 1957. This agreement was designed to make use of U.S. agricultural surplus to help perpetuate a colonial pattern of economy in the Philippines, keep local agricultural production at the mercy of U.S. imperialism, control intermediate industries requiring imported agricultural raw materials and support U.S. imperialist propaganda.

To cover up his puppetry to U.S. imperialism, Magsaysay resorted to the old colonial and chauvinist trick of attacking Chinese retailers who merely ranked third (after American and British) among merchants of foreign nationality engaged in domestic trade. At the same time, he continued to make it difficult and expensive for foreign nationals of Chinese descent to become Filipino citizens. The Chiang bandit gang and the local bureaucrat capitalists extorted heavily from them. At any rate, Magsaysay allowed all foreign businessmen, especially the direct representatives of U.S. monopolies and the big compradors, to bring capital out of the country at their whim.

To cover up the anti-national and anti-democratic character of his regime, Magsaysay reluctantly allowed the enactment of the Noli-Fili Law requiring the study of Rizal’s writings. This law would after all propagate only the old type of national democracy which had been valid only during the pre- imperialist era of bourgeois democracy. At the same time, he plotted with the C.I.A. and the American Jesuits in preparing the Anti-Subversion Law which was intended to whip up a counterrevolutionary atmosphere of anti-communism and to trammel the people’s democratic right of assembly and expression.

Magsaysay had a law passed ostensibly to guarantee the tenure of poor tenants. Its actual purpose was to assure the landlords of their privilege to retain their vast landholdings and uphold the state policy of keeping the Philippines an agricultural appendage of U.S. imperialism. Magsaysay continued the programme of land settlement but this merely disguised landgrabbing by the exploiting classes in frontier areas. The Agricultural Credit and Cooperative Financing Administration was created with the avowed purpose of helping the peasantry in general but it turned out to be a mere device for enabling the landlords, merchant-usurers, bureaucrats and rich peasants to control fake cooperatives and cheat the poor and middle peasants.

At one time during the Magsaysay puppet regime, the U.S. government issued the Brownell opinion making a formal claim of ownership over the U.S. military bases in the Philippines. The entire Filipino people were so enraged by this imperialist claim that the reactionary Supreme Court was compelled to make the pretense of denying the claim. However, the court left unquestioned the imperialist privilege of the United States to actually occupy the military bases, enjoy extraterritorial rights and violate the territorial integrity of the Philippines.

In 1954, the Magsaysay puppet regime sponsored in Manila the conference which put out the treaty forming the imperialist-dominated Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO). The majority of the member-governments (United States, Britain, France, New Zealand, Australia and Pakistan) in the treaty organization do not even belong to Southeast Asia. The SEATO arrogated unto itself the privilege of attacking the sovereignty of the peoples of Southeast Asia and of defending reactionary governments. In this regard, the SEATO is another flimsy excuse for imperialism to intervene in Philippine affairs and manipulate the Philippine puppet government against other peoples of Southeast Asia. At the same time, the SEATO allows U.S. imperialism to bring its allies into the Philippines and attack the people under the pretext of regional defense.

In line with the U.S. policy of aggression in Vietnam, the Magsaysay puppet regime recognized the bogus Republic of South Vietnam in flagrant and direct violation of the Geneva Agreements. U.S. military bases in the Philippines were used to launch the interventionist and aggressive activities of U.S. imperialism all over Asia. Filipino agents of the C.I.A. were fielded all over Indochina in the guise of technical personnel under such sinister outfits as the C.I.A.-funded Operations Brotherhood and Eastern Construction Company.

U.S. imperialism ordered the Magsaysay puppet regime in 1956 make an agreement with Japan on war reparations and to ratify the San Francisco Treaty. The Ohno-Garcia reparations agreement was made, enabling Japan to penetrate the Philippine economy through the system of delivering reparations goods. While bowing its head to the U.S.-Japan partnership, the Magsaysay puppet regime was fond of making bellicose statements against national liberation movements and socialist countries, particularly the People’s Republic of China, and of endorsing every aggressive act of U.S. imperialism throughout the world.

The Magsaysay puppet regime was shamelessly proud of the fact that its chieftain Magsaysay was a running dog of U.S. imperialism. The regime tried futilely to label its slavishness as positive nationalism” when faced with the anti-imperialist criticism made by Senator Claro Mayo Recto.