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IS DUTERTE A RESURRECTED MARCOS?

DEMOBILIZING THROUGH FORCE

The demobilization of the opposition through force is often the distinguishing mark of a dictatorship. Such demobilization also happens in democracies, but in dictatorships, it is done through illegitimate or duplicitous, coercive means.

According to Mark R. Thompson in his 1995 book The Anti-Marcos Struggle: Personalistic Rule and Democratic Transition in the Philippines, “Marcos demobilized much of the traditional opposition by abolishing Congress; shuttering pro-opposition newspapers, radio stations, and television stations; banning demonstrations; and imprisoning many leaders of the opposition.”

Similar developments have taken place: (i) while Duterte has not abolished Congress, he has captured the legislature through a “supermajority” in the House of Representatives and the removal and/or weakening of opponents in the Senate, (ii) Duterte has also tried to “shutter” media institutions such as Rappler, ABS-CBN and Inquirer, (iii) Senator de Lima has been in jail for one and a half years and Senator Trillanes’ arrest now seems forthcoming, and (iv) Duterte’s intervention in the Judiciary has also been revealed in the ouster of Chief Justice Sereno through a quo warranto. Moreover, just like Marcos, Duterte has been looking to the military and the police as a base of support.

Both Marcos and Duterte also made/make use of “enemies” as mobilizing factors. Communists for Marcos, drug users and pushers for Duterte. Consolidating around enemies was/is the way by which these leaders separate/d the grain from the chaff: those who did/do not acknowledge the (identified) “enemies of the state” are also their (Marcos’s and Duterte’s) enemies.

Marcos’s type of dictatorship, prevalent in the ‘70s — the kind that demobilizes traditional opposition and directs and mobilizes the political apparatuses of the state to centralize power in a military junta or a “strongman” — has been labelled by some scholars, most notably by the Argentinian political scientist Guillermo O’Donnell, as “bureaucratic authoritarianism.”

In the regimes between Marcos and Duterte, demobilization of the opposition also happened but it came in the form of capturing hitherto opposition forces through material inducements and political horsetrading (e.g pork barrel). What sets Duterte apart from these regimes and makes him more similar to Marcos is his use of force to quell dissent and mobilize support.

All this has fostered a politics of fear and a culture of violence — exactly what Marcos built and what Duterte is now rebuilding. In Marcos’s time, this kind of politics and culture resulted in more than 70,000 imprisonments, 34,000 torture victims and 3,240 deaths (as per Amnesty International). In Duterte’s time, the number is just as alarming: more than 20,000 deaths. The dominance of fear and violence makes Duterte’s regime a de facto dictatorship — even without the Marcos-style proclamation of martial law.

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