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From Sen. Miriam Defensor Santiago’s book, Cutting Edge: The Politics of Reform in the Philippines


Of the Philippine presidents, the most vocal about reform was Ferdinand Marcos. He became president for two terms, and was disqualified from seeking a third term under the Constitution. In a stunning maneuver, toward the end of his second tem, he imposed martial law, and was thus able to secure ratification of a new Constitution, which allowed him to extend his tenure of office. He justified the imposition of martial law with the oft-repeated slogan: To save the Republic and reform society." As a skilled orator, he frequently expatiated on the need to reform society of graft and corruption. But he was in the end a failed administrator, and after his death, political scientists could point only to a redesigned agrarian reform program as the sole beneficial reform of note that could be credited to him. In fact, by the time of his overthrow in 1986, he had turned into the paradigm of a society that desperately needed reform.


The only Philippine president who achieved any lasting attitudinal refom in the culture of corruption was Ramon del Fiero Magsaysay. He had successfully ran for Congress as a party man, and won as president under the same party, against an incumbent who had been tarred and feathered for disreputable management methods, including official purchase of a gòld-plated chamber pot. Magsaysay was not only an honest president, but was also perceived to be honest. So rare is honesty as an official virtue in the Philippines that Magsaysay remains he best-loved and most popular public figure in thís country, on the strength alone of his honesty in public service and in private actuations. He was a political comet; in an increasingly corrupt milieu, he was a virtual heavenly body with a starlike nucleus. The Filipino poor becamea luminous mass around him, as he followed his own parabolic orbit around the sun of clean and honest government.


With Magsaysay's premature death in a plane crash, everything in the presidency went downhill fast. Succeeding presidents simply lost control, as the bureaucracy careened on the side of bribery, extortion, and plain malversation of public funds. The government went over the cliff during the Marcos years, piling up a gargantuan foreign debt that, together with the mounting domestic debt, effectively mortgaged the future of the Filipino nation.

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