Amado Guerrero
July 30, 1970

3. The Magsaysay Puppet Regime, 1954-57

As secretary of national defense under the Quirino puppet regime, Magsaysay was credited by U.S. imperialism and the local exploiting classes with the defeat of the revolutionary mass movement. The U.S. propaganda mills misrepresented him as the "man of the masses" and "savior of democracy" and gave all-out support to his bid for presidency in exchange for his brutal suppression of the masses and trammeling of democratic rights. Quirino, on the other hand, became most blamed for the state of civil war, the imposition of martial law and the rampant graft and corruption in the reactionary government.

Magsaysay transferred from the Liberal Party to the Nacionalista Party to run against Quirino in the 1953 elections. By this act, U.S. imperialism exposed the absence of any basic difference between the two reactionary parties. Magsaysay became the third president of the puppet republic despite the efforts of Quirino to manipulate government resources and facilities in his own favor. The U.S. monopolies through the American Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines brought the full weight of their money behind Magsaysay in an unprecedentedly expensive and corrupt election. Using the authority of the JUSMAG as an excuse, U.S. military officers went as far down as the company level in the reactionary armed forces to see to it that their pet running dog would be elected.

In his brief reign, Magsaysay completed the evil work of crushing the Party and the people's army by taking advantage of the anti-Marxist and anti-Leninist policies of the Jesus Lava leadership which had automatically replaced the Jose Lava leadership in 1951. Refusing to learn from the errors of the previous Party leadership, the Jesus Lava leadership continued to dispose the people's armed forces in an adventurist way. It chose to describe the stage of armed struggle it was in as the stage of strategic "counteroffensive." Acting beyond the correct mass line in practically every place, units of the People's Liberation Army became isolated and resorted to grave abuses merely to get food for themselves. More political isolation only resulted in more disastrous military defeats.

The traitor Luis Taruc surrendered to Magsaysay in 1954. Consistently unable to conduct a protracted people's war correctly, the Jesus Lava leadership swung from adventurism to capitulationism. In 1955, the Jesus Lava leadership prepared to abandon the countryside by announcing that the main form of struggle was parliamentary struggle. It dissolved the units of the people's army it could influence and converted them into so-called organizational brigades.

In 1954, the Magsaysay puppet regime sabotaged the ceaseless popular demand for the abrogation of the Bell Trade Act by negotiating for its mere revision. Thus, the Laurel-Langley Agreement was made. This new treaty aggravated the economic subservience of the Philippines to U.S. imperialism by allowing the U.S. monopolies to enjoy parity rights in all kinds of businesses. Adjustments in the quota system and preferential treatment for Philippine raw materials were made only to deepen the colonial and agrarian character of the economy. The formal assertion of the independence of the peso currency did not remove it from the actual control of the U.S. dollar.

The foreign exchange controls showed conspicuously the subservience of the Philippine peso to the U.S. dollar. Having a semicolonial and a semifeudal economy, the Philippines had to make use of its dollar earnings from its raw material exports to get finished commodities from abroad, chiefly the United States. To circumvent the priorities set by the foreign exchange control regulations and the tariff laws for the importation of "essential" commodities, the U.S. monopolies and the compradors disassembled U.S. finished commodities before bringing them into the country and labeled them as raw materials for local processing. Reassembly and packaging plants were put up to create the illusion of local industrialization and import substitution.

The Magsaysay puppet regime signed the first Agricultural Commodities Agreement with the United States in 1957. This agreement was designed to make use of U.S. agricultural surplus to help perpetuate a colonial pattern of economy in the Philippines, keep local agricultural production at the mercy of U.S. imperialism, control intermediate industries requiring imported agricultural raw materials and support U.S. imperialist propaganda.

To cover up his puppetry to U.S. imperialism, Magsaysay resorted to the old colonial and chauvinist trick of attacking Chinese retailers who merely ranked third (after American and British) among merchants of foreign nationality engaged in domestic trade. At the same time, he continued to make it difficult and expensive for foreign nationals of Chinese descent to become Filipino citizens. The Chiang bandit gang and the local bureaucrat capitalists extorted heavily from them. At any rate, Magsaysay allowed all foreign businessmen, especially the direct representatives of U.S. monopolies and the big compradors, to bring capital out of the country at their whim.

To cover up the anti-national and anti-democratic character of his regime, Magsaysay reluctantly allowed the enactment of the Noli-Fili Law requiring the study of Rizal's writings. This law would after all propagate only the old type of national democracy which had been valid only during the pre-imperialist era of bourgeois democracy. At the same time, he plotted with the C.I.A. and the American Jesuits in preparing the Anti-Subversion Law which was intended to whip up a counterrevolutionary atmosphere of anti-communism and to trammel the people's democratic right of assembly and expression.

Magsaysay had a law passed ostensibly to guarantee the tenure of poor tenants. Its actual purpose was to assure the landlords of their privilege to retain their vast landholdings and uphold the state policy of keeping the Philippines an agricultural appendage of U.S. imperialism. Magsaysay continued the programme of land settlement but this merely disguised landgrabbing by the exploiting classes in frontier areas. The Agricultural Credit and Cooperative Financing Administration was created with the avowed purpose of helping the peasantry in general but it turned out to be a mere device for enabling the landlords, merchant-usurers, bureaucrats and rich peasants to control fake cooperatives and cheat the poor and middle peasants.

At one time during the Magsaysay puppet regime, the U.S. government issued the Brownell opinion making a formal claim of ownership over the U.S. military bases in the Philippines. The entire Filipino people were so enraged by this imperialist claim that the reactionary Supreme Court was compelled to make the pretense of denying the claim. However, the court left unquestioned the imperialist privilege of the United States to actually occupy the military bases, enjoy extraterritorial rights and violate the territorial integrity of the Philippines.

In 1954, the Magsaysay puppet regime sponsored in Manila the conference which put out the treaty forming the imperialist-dominated Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO). The majority of the member-governments (United States, Britain, France, New Zealand, Australia and Pakistan) in the treaty organization do not even belong to Southeast Asia. The SEATO arrogated unto itself the privilege of attacking the sovereignty of the peoples of Southeast Asia and of defending reactionary governments. In this regard, the SEATO is another flimsy excuse for imperialism to intervene in Philippine affairs and manipulate the Philippine puppet government against other peoples of Southeast Asia. At the same time, the SEATO allows U.S. imperialism to bring its allies into the Philippines and attack the people under the pretext of regional defense.

In line with the U.S. policy of aggression in Vietnam, the Magsaysay puppet regime recognized the bogus Republic of South Vietnam in flagrant and direct violation of the Geneva Agreements. U.S. military bases in the Philippines were used to launch the interventionist and aggressive activities of U.S. imperialism all over Asia. Filipino agents of the C.I.A. were fielded all over Indochina in the guise of technical personnel under such sinister outfits as the C.I.A.-funded Operations Brotherhood and Eastern Construction Company.

U.S. imperialism ordered the Magsaysay puppet regime in 1956 make an agreement with Japan on war reparations and to ratify the San Francisco Treaty. The Ohno-Garcia reparations agreement was made, enabling Japan to penetrate the Philippine economy through the system of delivering reparations goods. While bowing its head to the U.S.-Japan partnership, the Magsaysay puppet regime was fond of making bellicose statements against national liberation movements and socialist countries, particularly the People's Republic of China, and of endorsing every aggressive act of U.S. imperialism throughout the world.

The Magsaysay puppet regime was shamelessly proud of the fact that its chieftain Magsaysay was a running dog of U.S. imperialism. The regime tried futilely to label its slavishness as "positive nationalism" when faced with the anti-imperialist criticism made by Senator Claro Mayo Recto.

4. The Garcia Puppet Regime, 1957-61

Carlos P. Garcia as vice-president assumed the presidency of the puppet republic upon the death of Magsaysay in 1957 and was elected to the same position under the banner of the Nacionalista Party in that same year. He was basically a puppet of U.S. imperialism and the chief representative of the local exploiting classes. His regime never took any decisive step to break the colonial and feudal chains that bind the Filipino people. Instead, it allowed these to remain.

As a result of foreign exchange and import controls, the middle bourgeoisie became politically assertive in favor of what it called nationalist industrialization. Some Filipino manufacturers using local raw materials were enraged by the establishment of reassembly and packaging plants by the U.S. monopolies and the compradors to circumvent the tariff wall that was supposed to restrict the importation of commodities already locally produced. Even those manufacturers reliant on imported raw materials in various degrees also recognized the advantages of protection and clamored for more.

The political aspirations of the national bourgeoisie were best articulated by Recto who was also able to attract to some extent the interest of the petty bourgeoisie in joining the anti-imperialist movement.

The Garcia puppet regime raised the slogan of "Filipino First" as an apparent concession to a growing anti-imperialist movement among the people. But it did so only in order to cover up its basic puppetry to U.S. imperialism. The slogan meant nothing more than giving preference to Filipino businessmen in the allocation of U.S. dollars for import-export operations over foreign businessmen of a nationality other than American. The basic assumption was still that Filipino businessmen should be subservient to the U.S. dollar. Though there were laws and priority lists encouraging "new" and "necessary" industries and restricting the importation of certain goods that could be locally produced, these only served to encourage the establishment of a limited number of assembly and packaging plants by U.S. subsidiaries which took to misrepresenting as raw materials the finished goods that they imported.

Though the Garcia puppet regime was conspicuously encouraging Filipino merchants to push out merchants of Chinese nationality from the retail business, especially in the rice and corn trade, it allowed the big Kuomintang compradors to have a big share in the import-export and wholesale business and to bring their capital to Taiwan. All Chinese residents in the Philippines were coerced to manifest their allegiance to the Chiang bandit gang or else face reprisal.

In line with the scheme of U.S. imperialism to revive Japanese militarism, the Garcia puppet regime hurriedly negotiated and agreed with Japan on the Japan-R.P. Treaty of Amity, Commerce and Navigation. Though ratification of the proposed treaty was held back because of great popular opposition, Japanese companies were already extensively using the reparations agreement as an excuse for setting up liaison offices, making surveys in the country and participating in the import-export business.

Towards the end of the fifties, U.S. imperialism exerted pressure on the Garcia puppet regime to remove foreign exchange controls. Foreign exchange controls had been permitted by U.S. imperialism as a mere tactical and temporary device for putting a brake to the rapid depletion of U.S. dollars and for helping prevent the complete breakdown of the colonial economy at a time when the revolutionary mass movement was on the upsurge. Now, U.S. imperialism wanted a more "favorable climate" for foreign investments in the Philippines and the unlimited remittance of its superprofits. It wanted to counteract its uneven balance-of-payments problem by intensifying the export of its surplus products, by extending usurious loans and making the type of direct investments that would rapidly fetch superprofits. Furthermore, the lifting of foreign exchange controls would pave the way for the prolongation of imperialist privileges in the colonial economy despite the 1974 termination of the Laurel-Langley Agreement.

U.S. imperialism used the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to make an economic survey and recommend the adoption of immediate and full decontrol as the cornerstone of "development." Due to the resurgent anti-imperialist movement, Garcia could not immediately lift foreign exchange controls. U.S. imperialism had to subject him to a virulent attack for perpetrating graft and corruption in dollar allocations and also to a coup d'etat threat by the C.I.A. gang closely associated with the late Magsaysay in order to pressure and compel him to adopt partial decontrol in December 1960. It was a step calculated by Garcia to appease U.S. imperialism in anticipation of the 1961 presidential elections. However, U.S. imperialism had already decided to depose him and to replace him with another puppet politician who would not hesitate to follow its orders to the letter.

The sly character of the Garcia puppet regime was also evident in the negotiations hoax made concerning the reduction of the 99-year period of U.S. control of the military bases in the Philippines. Though it was publicized that an agreement between the Philippine and U.S. panels was reached reducing U.S. tenure on such bases to 25 years, the U.S.-R.P. Military Bases Treaty was never amended and in later years it would be reported that minutes of meetings pertaining to the reduction of U.S. tenure could not be found in the files of the Department of Foreign Affairs. The negotiations hoax had been put on as a mere tactic to meet the growing anti-imperialist demand for the complete withdrawal of U.S. military bases. The demand had risen especially when U.S. military personnel repeatedly committed the crime of murder on Filipinos in U.S. military bases and base commanders prevented the prosecution of the culprits by asserting U.S. jurisdiction.

During the Garcia puppet regime, the U.S. military bases continued to be used in launching aggression against the peoples of Southeast Asia. In 1958, these were used to support the rightist rebellion against the Indonesian people and to step up U.S. intervention in Indochina. Flaunting the slogan of "Asia for the Asians," the Garcia puppet regime tried to establish the Association of Southeast Asia (ASA) under the pretext of fostering regional cooperation in the economic and cultural spheres. Actually, the ASA was a device for coordinating a free trade zone for U.S. imperialism and for reinforcing the SEATO which was already wracked by severe contradictions between U.S. imperialism and Pakistan and also between U.S. imperialism and France.

The resurgence of the anti-imperialist revolutionary mass movement became most conspicuous during the Garcia puppet regime when on March 14, 1961 a powerful demonstration led by young men and women broke into the halls of the puppet congress and literally scuttled the anti-communist hearings being conducted by the Committee on Anti-Filipino Activities (CAFA). This mass action marked the beginning of a cultural revolution of a national-democratic character after more than two decades during which the bourgeois reactionary gang of the Lavas surrendered initiative to the reactionaries. The CAFA was thwarted in its attempt to employ the Anti-Subversion Law as a measure for cowing students, teachers and the people in general from expressing their national-democratic aspirations.

As early as 1958, the Anti-Subversion Law had been enacted with the evil purpose of dealing a deathblow to the Communist Party of the Philippines. At about the same time, parallel to the anti-communist maneuver of the reactionary government, Jesus Lava abused his position as Party general secretary by deciding all by himself to liquidate the Party with his "single-file"-policy, a policy of destroying even the least semblance of democratic centralism within the Party. The reactionaries in the country so dominated the superstructure that they would immediately denounce as "communist" any intellectual trend opposed to the anachronistic "free enterprise" ideology most rabidly espoused by the Grand Alliance led by such C.I.A. agents and clerico-fascist diehards as Manahan and Manglapus.

All the cultural devices established by U.S. imperialism and the Catholic Church at the beginning of the puppet republic persisted and expanded. The C.I.A. kept on manipulating fanatics of this most numerous church through the Manahan-Manglapus clique and the American Jesuits. In 1961, the U.S. Peace Corps was brought in by U.S. imperialism as an additional device to aggravate the cultural and political subversion of the Philippines.