CORRUPTION Syndromes of Corruption

140 Syndromes of Corruption
beauty queen Imelda Romualdez, merging two political clans in the
process. By 1959 Marcos was a rising figure in the Senate; he became
President of the Senate in 1963, and was President of the Republic from
1965 until the ‘‘People Power’’ revolution of 1986 (Hamilton-Paterson,
1998).
As President, Marcos enjoyed extensive US backing, particularly for
his active support of the Vietnam War. Early on he was seen by some as a
modernizer, but very quickly he moved to enrich himself and his cronies
while making life more difficult for rival families. These trends accelerated
in 1972 when, after a series of alleged communist provocations
(many staged by government security forces), he declared martial law
(McCoy, 1989a: 192). The legislature and political parties were abolished
in favor of Marcos’s own Kilusang Bagong Lipunan (KBL), or
‘‘New Society Movement.’’ The US, apparently liking what it saw, rapidly
increased assistance. The crackdown, Marcos claimed, would help him
pursue land reform and fight corruption, but any such measures were
aimed mostly at personal opponents. Meanwhile the President, the First
Lady, and their cronies were hard at work building a large network of
interlocking businesses (many of them monopolies), using state power to
favor those enterprises and drive out competitors, and extracting bribes,
commissions, and kickbacks wherever they could be found (Montinola,
1993; Wedeman, 1997a: 470). Toward the end of the Marcos years it was
commonly said that corporations in the Philippines were like towels in a
bathroom – labeled ‘‘His’’ and ‘‘Hers.’’
Marcos made some administrative changes during martial law, but
they mostly aided and protected his own enrichment (Hutchcroft,
1991: 438, 440): state capacity increased in some respects but bureaucrats
were no more independent of the President than before. Kang
(2002a: 136–150) argues that martial law reversed a metaphoric pendulum
of corruption: before, family oligarchs had plundered the state, but
now the state controlled the oligarchs. It seems more accurate, however,
to characterize martial law as a very difficult time for some oligarchs and
clans (and for society at large), and as a very lucrative phase for others
who enjoyed Marcos’s personal favor.
Me and mine: crony capitalism in action
Many oligarchs consolidated both their local bailiwicks and their administrative
networks early in the twentieth century, at a time when sugar
producers operated with near impunity. Politically connected growers
extracted so much capital from the Philippine National Bank between
1916 and 1920 that it nearly collapsed. After independence in 1946, local