How cultural institutions are dealing with the Philippines’ authoritarian past

This summer, I was honored to spend nearly a month in the Manila metropolitan area in the Philippines to conduct research for the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy. It is important to recognize that the Philippines is an archipelago comprised of over 7,000 islands and is the land of hundreds of ethnolinguistic groups that have interconnected, yet highly distinct histories. The Philippines’ national identity has been homogenized largely due to Spanish, Japanese, and American colonial rule. Through colonialism, these powers coerced Filipinos into abiding by their rigid systems rather than granting autonomy, which led to the Philippine government itself reproducing and reinforcing the homogenization of the Filipino identity.

The stakes of this are important, especially in academic discourse, since it results in a preference towards Manila-centric research and produced knowledge. I particularly decided to go to the Manila area since this was the area where the fascist Ferdinand Marcos ruled, starting from 1965. He declared martial law in 1972, citing supposed emerging violence from the Philippine left. However, he declared this state of emergency only to regulate or eliminate any Filipino dissenters, such as students, journalists, or spiritual leaders. Despite tensions between dissenting groups and subjection to immense state-sanctioned violence throughout the two decades of Marcos’s rule, in 1986, the Marcos regime was toppled due to the nonviolent EDSA (Epifanio de los Santos Avenue) People Power Revolution. At EDSA, millions of Filipinos mobilized to occupy the major intersection as a civil disobedient resistance against the Marcos regime.

After talking with intellectuals across Manila, I came to understand that EDSA itself was not as crucial as I had perceived it to be. Rather, it was living through and organizing against a backdrop of political persecution, economic disparities, and human rights violations across the archipelago that has informed people’s political strategies both in the past and present conjuncture.

Early on in my research, I visited Bantayog ng mga Bayani (Monuments to the Heroes), a monument, museum, and archive that lies directly across EDSA. Its mission is to ensure the memories of Filipino martyrs who unequivocally resisted the Marcos regime will never be forgotten. I spoke with the executive director of Bantayog and a survivor of the Marcos regime, Maria “May” Christina Rodriguez; one of the issues she has been grappling with regarding strategizing ways to remember the Marcos regime is the lack of a national consensus on the despicable harms caused by Marcos.

The issue of historical amnesia is further exacerbated since the human rights violations occurring during the Marcos Regime are often not characterized as a dark era in the nation’s collective memory. What remains the starkest to me is Tita May’s description of EDSA: a peaceful revolution that marked the end of Marcos’s fascist rule, but it was not a bloodless one, as she cites the brutal tortures and murders of young students who were suspected “guerrilla warriors.” Despite this, she explains how, as a nation, the Philippines does not question the colonial aggression perpetrated by the Spanish and Japanese, but there is no coherent stance on the Marcos regime. Many Filipinos still perceive it as a “Golden Age,” particularly citing infrastructure projects such as the Cultural Center of the Philippines and the Manila Film Center, led by the Marcos regime.

This was further confirmed by current Filipino college students I spoke with, as they shared the lack of K-12 curriculum they had in regard to the violence enacted by the Marcos regime. Public school educational materials go as far as to omit the word “dictatorship” when describing Marcos, and refuse to confront how urban renewal projects were funded through foreign loans that remained unpaid and exploited the labor of working-class Filipinos.

It was in these conversations with Filipino interlocutors that I began to raise an essential question in grand strategy: How and can long-term planning be facilitated when there are limited resources? In this case, one of the most limited resources is national memory. Connecting this inquiry with social movement theory, I also began to ask myself, what cultural and social foundations or shifts are vital to social movements? How can collective memory-building efforts be used to shape long-term democratic practices?

I then talked with leading cultural and educational stakeholders in Manila to take a deeper look into the issues of historical distortion and denialism of the detrimental impacts of the Marcos regime. This burdens the Philippine political landscape, as Filipinos are socialized into not locating the Marcos regime as a time of crisis. This lack of coherence is premeditated by the state, which is a sentiment echoed by survivors of the Marcos regime, including Tita May and Professor Roy Mendoza at Ateneo de Manila’s history department. They have pointed out that deliberate efforts, such as long-term media regulation by the state, were enacted to create and sustain gaps in national memory, thereby weakening current connections to past struggles of the nation. For example, one of the most urgent issues in the Philippines is the national debt it faces — a remnant of the Marcos regime.

Professor Mendoza emphasizes that amongst Filipinos, even in the capital city, there are impoverished families who only eat scraps or resort to smoking cheap cigarettes to appease their hunger since they live in an economic system that is eerily similar to a caste system. I see a direct correlation of these unpaid debts to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund that make it, so the Philippines continues to be in a precarious economic position; paradoxically, the Marcoses stay well-loved in the Philippine national memory despite their “beautification” projects, causing rippling economic destruction due to their narrative building.

While, I firmly believe implementation of political interventions for urgent social issues ensures liberation, I also believe that the long-term strategy must curb the proliferation of social issues through shifting the pro-Marcos narrative. Undoubtedly, community organizers and activists alike help radicalize the status quo, but the onus should not only be on grassroots movements to shift the sociocultural sphere. Rather, educational institutions should work in tandem with these grassroots movements to contribute to shifting cultural narratives while recognizing their own capacities.

To this end, sustained and consistent efforts to disrupt national historical amnesia regarding the Marcos regime for current and future generations are essential to effectively educate citizens regarding systemic social issues and help them curate strategies that adequately address them. These sites of knowledge enable people to confront fraught histories which, at a minimum, allow for more accurate historical connections to the present conjuncture’s crises and, at best, help identify the symptoms of a fascist government to ensure it does not happen again. Time and again, these sites of knowledge that are explicitly anti-Marcos have been targeted. These educational institutions clearly possess political power, and those who defend the Marcos regime understand that their narrative-shifting tactics are detrimental to upholding a pro-Marcos Philippine national stance.

Despite these obstacles, protection of long-term democratic memory is key to the ethos of Bantayog and HRVVMC, which are two leading institutions in the narrative shift of the Marcos regime, particularly in the curatorial and public education realm. Both of these institutions strive to unearth the horrors of the Marcos regime to a wide audience — the differences being that HRVVMC is a government-funded agency founded nearly a decade ago, while Bantayog is a non-profit that has existed since the year EDSA occurred. Bantayog, I have learned, specifically outreaches to thousands of students to visit, as well as establishes partnerships with surrounding educational institutions. Bantayog invites its patrons to read primary newspaper clippings that expose the crony capitalist systems set up by Marcos, view protest cultural productions created by activists of the present and past or visit a model prison cell for a political prisoner during the Marcos regime. Tita May tells me that they also organize events in which they not only commemorate the valor and resilience of Marcos Regime survivors, but also ones in which veterans during that period can exchange experiences with younger Filipinos.

When I spoke with Chuck Crisanto of Human Rights Violations Victims’ Memorial Commission (HRVCC), he told me that every social movement must grapple with what values should be upheld, and he sees museums as a vehicle for ideations on political possibilities. This is why the HRVCC has been working towards the creation of a government-sponsored museum called the Freedom Memorial Museum to highlight the horrors of the Marcos regime and the resistance of martyrs. But even as the building process takes place, HRVCC has not halted its programming, instead creating educational materials such as pamphlets written in both Filipino and English to engage a wide audience. In their office, they have a small gallery that provides insight into the breadth and depth the Freedom Memorial Museum will go into, such as featuring the “Roll of Victims,” which recognizes 11,103 state recognized victims of the Marcos regime’s human rights violations and bloodstained clothes of Fidel Nemenzo, a student protestor who was shot during a protest against Marcos.

Crisanto asked me a haunting rhetorical question, “Is it always that we have to sacrifice our human rights for more development?” With the brutalities that occurred and persist as a result of the Marcos regime that the HRVVMC highlights, it makes it clear to me that the answer is no. It is fitting that cultural avenues such as curriculum-building and curatorial practices are being implemented for long-term strategic goals to counteract the pro-Marcos regime. This is also echoed by Crisanto, who firmly believes that culture is central to a social movement’s success. For decades, this regime has oppressed and haunted the Philippines as a nation, as exemplified by the survivors of the Marcos regime and current young people in the Philippines who strive for democracy and dignity. A liberated Philippines and a democratic recollection can only be achieved through a combination of political and cultural interventions, and it is something that Bantayog and HRVCC are doing and will continue to do.

I extend my greatest gratitude to the Grand Strategy program for its wisdom and kind guidance as I parsed through archival material and research questions throughout the summer. I also extend my greatest gratitude to all the interlocutors I met in the Philippines who granted me their time, vulnerability, and knowledge as they engage in theory and praxis that work towards a more democratic Philippines: professors Danilo Arao, Aaron Viernes, Sir Miguel Paolo P. Reyes, and the Third World Studies Center; professors Roy Mendoza and Sir Alvin Cabalquinto; Sir Chuck Crisanto and the staff of the Human Rights Violations Victims’ Memorial Commission; Tita May Rodriguez and the Bantayog ng mga Bayani staff; Sir Jaeson Cruz; and those who wish to remain anonymous.