The Philippines: Surprise in Manila

THE PHILIPPINES

The Philippines’ presidential elections were expected to be the closest in the islands’ history. Certainly the campaign had been the longest, costliest and most frantic. For an entire year, President Diosdado Macapagal, 55, the Liberal Party’s choice for reelection, had swapped bombas (personal attacks) with the Nationalist Party challenger, Senate President Ferdinand Marcos, 48. In addition to bombas, Macapagal and Marcos spent $8,000,000, a princely sum in Filipino politics, to swamp the country with a deluge of political pamphlets, placards, and tear-jerking biographical movies. But last week, as 8,000,000 Filipinos went to the polls, the election turned out to be not close at all. Marcos won in a walkaway, with a margin of more than 630,000 votes.

Exciting Image. Surprised Filipinos searched for an explanation of the one-sided vote. Throughout the campaign, Marcos had been supplying what he thought was the answer: he hammered constantly on the theme that Macapagal had failed to clean up corruption in government or to halt the country’s alarming crime increase. No one ever suggested that Macapagal himself was involved in anything shady, but Marcos’ message apparently made a telling impression on the Philippine electorate. Then too, Filipinos prefer new faces in politics, have never elected a President to two full terms in the islands’ 19 years of independence. But Marcos’ flair as a campaigner may well have caused the landslide. Brimming with vigor, he stumped through virtually every barrio in the archipelago and delighted thousands of voters by warbling duets with his beauteous wife Imelda, the Miss Manila of 1954.

Marcos comes by his exciting image rightfully. As a law student at Manila’s University of the Philippines, he was a member of the boxing, wrestling and swimming teams and became the national small-bore rifle champion. Largely owing to his reputation as a good shot, he was convicted in 1939 of having murdered a political opponent of his Congressman father. Marcos graduated from law school while free on bail with the highest mark in Philippine history and took on his own defense as his first case. Arguing before the Supreme

Court, he demolished the prosecution’s chief witness and won acquittal.

Emerging a Hero. When the Japanese invaded the Philippines, Marcos was serving as an army lieutenant. Captured after the fall of Bataan, he soon escaped into the hills, led a guerrilla band that terrorized the Japanese. He emerged from the war his country’s most decorated hero, with 27 medals, including the U.S. Army’s Distinguished Service Cross.

After the war, Marcos went into politics, serving first as a special assistant to President Manuel Roxas and later. as a member of the House and Senate. He has never lost an election, and in winning his Senate seat, he piled up the greatest plurality ever in a Philippine election. Wiry and energetic, he never smokes and seldom drinks. He and his wife, who is the daughter of a politically powerful family that controls Leyte and Samar, have three children. Until last year, Marcos was a leading Liberal Party man. But then, sensing Macapagal’s yearnings for a second term, he bolted to the Nationalist Party, where he elbowed the other presidential hopefuls aside.

Burying the Bomba. As soon as his victory seemed assured last week, the President-elect called a press conference to tick off his goals. A steadfast friend of the U.S., Marcos said that he foresaw no changes in U.S.-Philippine relations. Backing the U.S. stand in Viet Nam, he pledged that if needed, he would send combat troops in addition to the 100-man Philippine medical unit already there. And he called for a strengthening of economic and cultural relations among the SEATO nations.

But most of his effort would be directed toward shoring up the home front. To trim down the government’s $180 million budget deficit, he promised a reduction in spending and a drive to reduce graft in the revenue service so that the Treasury would collect at least some of the estimated $350 million a year in duties that it now loses to smugglers. Burying the bombas, Marcos called on politicians to forget the recent bitter past and cooperate for the tasks ahead. “My intention,” he declared, “is to harness all available talents and perhaps to appoint to the Cabinet members from opposing parties.”