CORRUPTION Syndromes of Corruption

Oligarchs and Clans 139
administration. Local elections beginning in 1901 allowed caciques (chieftains)
in remote areas to control administrative posts; elected national
legislative bodies followed in 1907 and 1916 (Hutchcroft, 2003: 6).
Opening up participation in the absence of a framework of strong
institutions – a key aspect of the Oligarchs and Clans syndrome – had
far-reaching implications. Oligarchs and their followers quickly established
their political beachheads. Public resources, land, preferential
access to markets and capital, and unfavorable treatment for competitors
could all be had through the strategic uses of influence, cash, and (where
needed) violence. The Philippine Commonwealth, a multi-branch,
decentralized interim structure set up by the Americans in 1935 as a
step toward independence, quickly fell under oligarchic domination
(McCoy, 1989b; Hutchcroft, 2000: 294–299).
Independence, in 1946, left the pattern largely intact. The United
States reduced its day-to-day administrative presence but remained an
essential source of aid, investment, and political backing. Its strategic
interests and immense military bases both maintained a flow of resources
and bound US policy to the status quo: any democratic movement strong
enough to oust the oligarchs might also be strong enough to end the leases
on military bases. The oligarchs, by contrast, were stable and cooperative.
Moreover, the post-war state was not much stronger than its
Commonwealth predecessor. It vested considerable power in the
President, but the presidents were typically heads of various political
families and – unlike their counterparts in Korea – were more concerned
with rewarding their cronies than with national development.
Distinctions between public and private loyalties were (and remain)
vague; bureaucrats have often been guided much more by loyalty to
their patrons than by formal duties or agency mandates, with the result
that the bureaucracy has long been large, factionalized, and ineffective
(Hutchcroft, 1998: 53; but Kang, 2002a, dissents).
The Ferdinand and Imelda show
Ferdinand Marcos is a dominant figure in the Phillippine corruption
story. He was the son of a locally powerful family in the Ilocos region of
Luzon, but his father moved the family to Manila in the 1920s to pursue a
national political career. In 1935 an Ilocos politician who had defeated
the elder Marcos in a Congressional election was murdered; young
Ferdinand was charged, convicted, and then freed in a sensational retrial.
Marcos’s next moves are unclear, and may have involved wartime collaboration
with the Japanese; but his successful race for Congress in 1949
featured wholly fictitious tales of wartime heroism. In 1954 he married