The Conjugal Dictatorship

The Conjugal Dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos
hapless country. I could do it in only eight pages of prepared testimony which I
had had to read hurriedly before the Fraser subcommittee, reserving the rest
of my materials in a memorandum of 24 pages which I appended to my
prepared statement. My opening statement read:
I have come to call the attention of the United States Congress to what
appears right now as just another Southeast Asian sore spot. This
seemingly inconsequential trouble spot could, however, develop into the
proportion of a Portugal gone Communist in the context of America’s global
defense system.
Before I go any further, I would like to express my appreciation to the
members of this honorable committee for this rare privilege of being able to
bare certain hitherto unknown facets of this Southeast Asian sore spot. It is
about a dictatorial martial regime that has supplanted by paramount force
the republican government of what once was pridefully known as the show
window of American democracy in Asia.
I fancy myself here right now as speaking in behalf of my 45 million
countrymen now groaning under the yoke of a ruthless dictator. The tyrant
has clamped down a harsh authoritarian rule with the guns of martial law in
a country that has enjoyed for 72 years the blessings of freedom under a
democracy.
Let me trace the origin and pattern of this new tyranny in Asia.
On Sept. 21,1935, as established ‘beyond reasonable doubt” by a
Philippine court, a young man — an expert rifle marksman by his own
account — felled dead with a single rifle shot a reelected congressman. This
happened less than two days after the reelected solon had defeated for the
second time the father of this young man. Of course, the Supreme Court
later acquitted this young man on a “technicality.”
Thirty seven years to the day after that celebrated murder of a
congressman, or on Sept. 21,1972, this same man, nearing the end of his
second and last term as President of his country, having wisened to the
ways of Dictators Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and Peron, and anarchist Mikhail
Bakunin, with evident premeditation and long, methodical preparation,
wielded a more powerful weapon — this time the entire armed forces of his
country — and snuffed out, not just the life of one man, but the light of
freedom from an entire nation by placing the Philippines under martial
law. The martial regime, now turned corrupt, ruthless and tyrannical, is
showing all the signs that have inexorably driven free nations to the
Communist tentacles.
The man who was condemned to life imprisonment by a trial court for the
murder of his father’s political conqueror on Sept. 21, 1935, and the man
who must face a terrible verdict of history for killing democracy in the
Philippines on Sept. 21,1972, are one and the same man: Ferdinand E.
Marcos.
How Mr. Marcos methodically plotted to kill democracy in the Philippines
just because he did not want to be an ex-President at an early age (55), how
he wielded the terrible guns of martial law to instill and maintain a pervasive
climate of fear and repression, and how he continues to entrench himself in
the presidential palace in a bid to reign for life and establish an imperial
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