CHAPTER V

Ferdinand E. Marcos had a lot to gain from extending his term and he
knew this which is why he manipulated the people by blaming the
communists for the destructions like terror-bombing and even used it as
one of his excuses to extend his term long enough to launch an imperial
dynasty in the Philippines. Another clever way of diverting the people’s
attention from his personal and political infrastructure was making visible
crowd-pleasing infrastructures. According to Mijares, P., (p112), “The first
concrete step taken by Marcos to steel himself for the declaration of martial
law came when he decided to appoint himself as his own secretary of
National Defense when he assumed the presidency for the first time.”
Moreover, he had a lot of ambitions he wanted to achieve at all costs to the
point that every political move he made was according to his future plans
and he was slowly replacing people with the tendency to oppose people on
his side. 

Even when it was unconstitutional, he was fearless in running for

reelection in 1969, the dirtiest election ever held which was won by “goons,
guns, and gold”, declaring martial law for a year, packing the Supreme
court with jurists he prefers, controlling the military establishment, packing
the armed forces with people with the majority from his region, controlling
local governments, and positioning his cronies in top of sensitive
government revenue-collecting agencies and financial lending institutions.
In his first six and a half years in office, he provoked the people by
fabricating incidents to trigger anarchy and thereby justifying the imposition
of martial law. 
When someone is a threat to his plan he eliminates them or bribes
them. In order to fuel the rage of the people, he depreciated rival seats of
power, neglected suffering masses, excessive and scandalous wasting of
public funds in the form of unaccountable allowances of members, riding on
the crest of the wave of dissent, had military personnel infiltrate the ranks of
demonstrators to explode bombs in their midst and to instigate
demonstrators into committing acts of violence and vandalism, launching
by armed forces special psychological warfare units of a series of terror-
bombings, bribing members of the constitutional convention, establishing
his own media empire, blaming Maoist NPA rebels for the Plaza Miranda
incident, and raising the communist bugaboo. When Senator Aquino
exposed the martial law plan as the “Oplan Sagittarius,” Ferdinand E.
Marcos was not yet prepared to implement it and so he seized the person
who leaked it as well as Senator Aquino. With his success, everything
landed under his control and he was almost unstoppable. The truth was
hidden from the public and even information people can get is controlled by
him. It was not a golden age but the darkest age the Filipino people went
through.