This was no longer just about kickbacks. Marcos started to steal whole companies, using the crude tactics of a gangster. He wanted the nation’s electricity company, Meralco, owned by Eugenio Lopez, patriarch of one of the families who had run the country for centuries. He had Lopez’s son charged with plotting to assassinate him, which carried the death penalty. The old oligarch handed over his company for $220 (it was worth $400m). To have gunmen is a gangster’s requirement; to have gunmen in uniforms, with all the power of the state behind them, is a gangster’s dream.
Yet most of Marcos’s takeovers involved no violence. Martial law allowed him, literally, to write his own law: his decrees passed straight on to the statute book. When he wanted to take over the sugar industry, he set up companies and then issued decrees that allowed them to dominate the planting, milling and international marketing of Philippine sugar, which accounted for 27% of export earnings. He then created a Philippine Exchange Company, decreed it should handle all foreign sugar sales and used its monopoly position to buy from farmers at rock-bottom prices and sell at vast profit. This allowed him to buy Northern Lines, which had the contract to ship the sugar overseas. Finally, he decreed that the sugar industry be exempt from minimum-wage law, with the result that 500,000 labourers saw their income fall to less than $1 a day, making even more profit.
Marcos’s scribbled sums counting his stolen millions. Photograph: Nick DaviesThe PCGG archive shows how, in the same way, Marcos used his own companies to take over the three other key areas of agriculture: coconuts, tobacco and bananas. Granting himself government contracts, monopoly deals and tax exemptions, he levered his way into dominating industries across the whole economy – logging and paper, meat, oil, insurance, shipping and airlines, beer and cigarettes, textiles, hotels and casinos, newspapers, radio and TV. His was an early and particularly rapacious version of privatisation.
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