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An Anarchy of Families: State and Family in the

Philippines

Article  in  The Journal of Asian Studies · November 1994

DOI: 10.2307/2059319 · Source: OAI

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An Anarchy of
Families
   
  
Series Editors
Alfred W. McCoy
Kris Olds (Managing Editor)
R. Anderson Sutton
Thongchai Winichakul

Associate Editors
Warwick H. Anderson
Katherine Bowie
Ian Coxhead
Michael Cullinane
Paul D. Hutchcroft
Courtney Johnson
An Anarchy of
Families
State and Family in
the Philippines

Edited by
Alfred W. McCoy

The University of Wisconsin Press

 The University of Wisconsin Press
1930 Monroe Street, 3rd Floor
Madison, Wisconsin 53711–2059

www.wisc.edu/wisconsinpress/

3 Henrietta Street
London WC2E 8LU, England

Originally published by
the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and
Ateneo de Manila University Press

Distributed in the Philippines exclusively by the Ateneo de Manila University Press

Copyright © 1993, 2009

The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any format or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a Web site without written permission of the University
of Wisconsin Press, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews.

1 3 5 4 2

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

An anarchy of families : state and family in the Philippines /
edited by Alfred W. McCoy.
p. cm. — (New perspectives in Southeast Asian studies)
“Reprint edition, with a new preface and updated author biography”—Pub. info.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-299-22984-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Philippines—Politics and government.
2. Family—Political aspects—Philippines.
I. McCoy, Alfred W. II. Series.
DS685.A726 2009
321´.5—dc22
2008042650
 To
Harold C. Conklin
for service to his students and
contributions to the study of the Philippines
and
Brian Fegan
for his camaraderie and
insights shared about social change in Southeast Asia
 Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Preface: The Philippine Oligarchy at the Turn
of the Twenty-First Century xi
ALFRED W. MCCOY

About the Contributors xxxiii

“An Anarchy of Families”: The Historiography of State

and Family in the Philippines 1
ALFRED W. MCCOY

Entrepreneurs in Votes and Violence: Three Generations

of a Peasant Political Family 33
BRIAN FEGAN

Walking in the Shadow of the Big Man: Justiniano Montano

and Failed Dynasty Building in Cavite, 1935–1972 109
JOHN SIDEL

Patron as Client: Warlord Politics and the Duranos of Danao 163

MICHAEL CULLINANE

Mohamad Ali Dimaporo: A Modern Maranao Datu 243

G. CARTER BENTLEY

Political Families and Family Politics among the Muslim

Maguidanaon of Cotabato 285
JEREMY BECKETT
viii CONTENTS

The Dream Goes On and On: Three Generations

of the Osmeñas, 1906–1990 311
RESIL B. MOJARES

Ilustrado Legacy: The Pardo de Taveras of Manila 347

RUBY R. PAREDES

Rent-Seeking Families and the Philippine State:

A History of the Lopez Family 429
ALFRED W. MCCOY

Index 537
 Illustrations

Maps
The Philippines 3
Central Luzon Plain 35
Cavite Province 111
Cebu Electoral Districts before 1972 165
Lanao Province 245
Southern Mindanao 287
Western Visayas Region 431

Genealogies
The de Guzmans: A Political Genealogy 65
The de Leon and Buencamino Families: A Political Genealogy 66
The Durano Family: A Selected Genealogy 196
The Sinsuat Family: A Political Genealogy 298
Descendants of Mastura, Sultan of Maguindanao 299
The Osmeña Family: A Political Genealogy 323
A Selected Genealogy of the Pardo de Tavera Family 381
The Lopez Family: A Patrilineal Genealogy 477
 Preface: The Philippine Oligarchy
at the Turn of
the Twenty-First Century
Alfred W. McCoy

Recent decades have deepened a central Philippine paradox. How and why has
this island nation, a veritable “lost Eden” rich in natural resources, become a very
poor country with a very wealthy oligarchy?1 As revolutions, empires, and re-
gimes have come and gone over the past two centuries, the Filipino oligarchy has
survived from generation to generation, amassing ever greater wealth and power
with every twist in this tangled national history. With each passing decade, the
country’s juxtaposition of private wealth and public squalor seems somehow
more pronounced, lending added significance to this entrenched elite as the key
element in a relentless social stasis. Since the state has proven “ineffective” in its
economic regulation, one analyst argues that “the actual path of growth emerged
from the economic and political behaviour of the most powerful families, which
had been accumulating capital for several generations.”2
But before we sweep through the decades with anecdote and theory to ex-
plore the character of these elite families called “oligarchs,” let me offer a caution-
ary note about the study of the Philippines, particularly when probing a topic as
intimate as family. The archipelago wears its Western face like a brightly painted
fiesta mask that conceals much more than it reveals. Although the act of analysis
forces us to summarize and characterize, we do so with the caveat that even the
best of Western social science paradigms often capture but a fragment of this
complex, elusive Southeast Asian society.
xii P REFACE

Our task has been complicated by the general reluctance of Filipino histo-
rians, until recently, to accept the nation’s oligarchy as a social category worthy of
serious analysis. Throughout much of the twentieth century, Filipino historians
have dismissed the country’s elites as politically treasonous or socially insignifi-
cant.3 In the absence of detailed historical scholarship, we must borrow the most
appropriate theory and analysis to show how the oligarchy has grown, over the
past two centuries, like a tropical hardwood—with each epoch adding ring upon
ring to the composition and complexity of this Filipino elite. Although its eco-
nomic base and social composition are in constant flux, the country’s oligarchy
has persisted for over a century as a cluster of families, knitted together by ties of
blood and marriage, that combines political power and economic assets to direct
the nation’s destiny.4
From the extant literature on the Philippine state, two key elements seem
to have contributed most directly to the formation of these powerful political
families: the rise of “rents” as a significant share of the nation’s economy and the
emergence of the independent Republic as a problematic postcolonial state.5
Simply put, rents—restrictive state licenses that allow holders to gain a monop-
oly or oligopoly over a particular market—have served to strengthen a few fortu-
nate families at the expense of both economic growth and government revenues.
As John Sidel put it so succinctly, “State formation in the Philippines . . . permit-
ted the survival of private, personal control over the instruments of coercion and
taxation.” Reviewing the past half century of Philippine history from this per-
spective, use of the term rent seeking—the active pursuit of political influence to
gain market advantage—seems appropriate for an analysis of elite politics under
the Republic (1946–72) and crony capitalism for the regime of President Ferdi-
nand Marcos (1965–86) and the succession of grand scandals during the last two
decades of a restored democracy.6
Summarizing the historical processes that produced the Philippine state, it
appears that Spain and America tried, and failed, to forge a strong bureaucratic
apparatus above or apart from powerful Filipino elites. After three centuries of
decentralized rule, in the late nineteenth century Spain struggled to impose a
rigid bureaucracy on the archipelago, producing a confrontation with rising pro-
vincial elites that erupted in revolution at the century’s close. By contrast, the
United States tried to moderate the imagined excesses of Iberian centralization by
introducing elections in the Anglo-American tradition of local autonomy. In ef-
fect, the localized patronage that dominated U.S. politics during the Gilded Age
coincided neatly with the aspirations of the Filipino landed elite. Thus, electoral
democracy created a new class of provincial politicians and a national legislature
that opened state resources for privatization by established and emerging fami-
lies, which knitted themselves, during the middle decades of the twentieth cen-
tury, into a national oligarchy. The “persistence of a weak Philippine state,”
argues Temario Rivera, “has made it difficult . . . to formulate and implement
P REFACE xiii

policies independently of the powerful vested interest groups,” specifically the

“dominant families, clans, and kinship networks.”7
Surveying the nations of Southeast Asia for a point of comparison, the
Philippines combines four aspects in ways that others do not—rival elite families,
a weak central state, a hybrid capitalism, and a protracted experience of elections.
Although the Philippines has had powerful elites for over two centuries, it has
never enjoyed the aristocratic lineage or bureaucratic support found elsewhere in
Southeast Asia—introducing an element of conflict, even volatility, into this con-
tinuity. In contrast to Thailand’s strong monarchy or Indonesia’s bureaucratic
elites, the Philippine state has remained weak and incapable of controlling the
powerful families that plunder its assets, rule its provinces, and contend for con-
trol of national politics. Through a confluence of historical forces, moreover, over
the past two centuries the Philippines has developed a hybrid capitalism, moving
from “rent capitalism” to “rent seeking,” that has encouraged accelerated accu-
mulation by the country’s elites. To these three we need to add another, perhaps
determining factor: a protracted experience of formal elections that has provided
some political legitimacy for elites at the cost of heightening elite rivalries, reduc-
ing the cycle for development planning, and breaching any insulation that might
allow government to impose some market discipline upon elite corporations. In
striking contrast to the orderly, ritualized politics of Singapore or Malaysia, the
Philippines has, for the better part of a century, conducted free-for-all elections,
featuring massive expenditures and a death toll sometimes reaching hundreds,
that can provide stunning turns in the nation’s destiny. With all due caution and
qualification, these four factors can help illuminate the rise of a distinctive na-
tional elite—so strong, so persistent, and so pervasive that the term oligarchy
seems merited.
In comparison with South Korea, a postcolonial nation that once suffered
a similar plight, the key element in their different developmental paths seems to
be the relative degree of insulation of the bureaucracy from particular interests,
allowing Filipino entrepreneurs to break rules in ways that Seoul or Tokyo would
never permit. For two hundred years, moreover, the Philippine state, colonial and
national, has attempted a succession of failed development schemes—the Span-
ish Real Sociedad and Tobacco Monopoly, the U.S. regime’s Philippine National
Bank (PNB) and Manila Railroad, the Commonwealth’s National Development
Corporation and the Development Bank of the Philippines (DBP), Marcos’s Na-
tional Sugar Trading Association (Nasutra), and President Fidel Ramos’s Philip-
pines 2000. There are, of course, notable exceptions to this dismal succession that
serve to highlight the significance of the road not taken. During much of the
1950s, for example, Miguel Cuaderno managed the Central Bank through disci-
plined policies that, by fending off elite interests, sparked a decade of double-
digit growth in manufacturing.8 In general, however, elites have been able to use
these programs in unintended ways to offer society minimal economic growth
xiv P REFACE

while deepening their own control. Surveying the broad sweep of recent Philip-
pine history, the state has, through the sum of its successes and failures, shaped
the character of the society and its oligarchy.

Historical Origins
Although Spanish colonials restricted Filipino participation in governance, their
colonial regime presided over a period of marked growth in the mid-nineteenth
century that, by default if nothing else, enriched Filipino landholders and urban
merchants. As the export economy expanded after 1820, the Spanish colony for-
feited its economic leadership to British and American merchants who worked
with Filipino provincial elites, many of them Chinese mestizos, in exporting sugar
and hemp. During the nineteenth century, the emerging Filipino elite, in its
formative landholding phase, practiced a nongenerative, even parasitic form of
capitalism that, as Hans Bobek argues, featured a refinement of extraction rather
than a rationalization of production. Instead producing profits by means of inno-
vation, these landlord “rent capitalists” increased the rate of extraction from their
tenants, raising rents to 70 percent of the harvest and interest rates for crop loans
to 100 percent.9
During four decades of direct colonial rule, the United States created a
comprehensive electoral system, fostering a new class of professional politicians
and opening the state to rent seeking by both Manila oligarchs and provincial
politicians. Moving from local elections in 1901 to legislative in 1907 and presi-
dential in 1935, the U.S. regime built electoral politics from the municipality up-
ward, thereby entrenching elite families at both the regional and national levels.
To restrain the abuses and autonomy of these provincial elites, American officials
created an efficient civil service and used the Philippine Constabulary as a politi-
cal police to check abuses of the peasantry by these so-called caciques—a term
these colonials applied to Filipino local elites with an intentional Latin American
connotation.10
Similarly, the colonial executive tried to use the insular auditor to restrain
rent seeking by the national elite. Although it was penetrated and manipulated by
an oligarchy from the outset, the U.S. colonial bureaucracy maintained its influ-
ence through the Commonwealth period of the late 1930s, providing some re-
straint on rent seeking. With the founding of the PNB and other government
corporations after 1916, the dominant Nacionalista Party used state capital to
reward its allies with low-cost loans. By 1922, the emerging oligarchs had
plundered the PNB and allied corporations, bringing the country to the brink of
fiscal collapse—a remarkable display of both financial acumen and early, preda-
tory rent seeking.11
After independence in 1946, the new Republic inherited the task of re-
straining both rent seeking by Manila’s oligarchs and the autonomy of provincial
elites. Unlike the U.S. colonial governors, who were appointed rather than
P REFACE xv

elected, Philippine presidents had to win office with the electoral support of these
same elites. Elected through the support of rent-seeking political brokers, succes-
sive presidents were forced to reward these powerful politicians with local and na-
tional benefices, regulating the cash flow to reward and punish loyalty. From the
1930s onward, argues Patricio Abinales, Philippine presidents had to compro-
mise “with local political clans . . . , warlords, and bosses” by making “state lar-
gesse available in exchange for fidelity to national authority.”12
Of course, the Philippines was by no means alone in allowing rents to play
a significant role in its national economy. Since the end of colonial rule, rent
seeking has played a major role among the capitalist nations of Southeast Asia, in-
cluding Indonesia under Suharto, Malaysia under the ruling UMNO party, and
Thailand under both the generals and civilian prime ministers such as Thaksin
Shinawatra. Farther afield in East Asia, rents have been evident in South Korea
and in both prewar and postwar Japan. The puzzle, of course, is why some soci-
eties, such as the so-called Asian tiger economies, have succeeded in experiencing
more substantial economic growth than the Philippines despite equally pervasive
rent seeking. The answer to this riddle might lie in a distinctly Philippine fusion
of rents with regular elections and the absence of export-led industrialization.
Through the intersection of a two- and four-year electoral cycle, local Filipino
elites and the national oligarchy were able to extract concessions from the execu-
tive that breached the insulation of the regulatory bureaucracy, removing any re-
straint on pure rent seeking. In the South Korean case, the state also heavily sub-
sidized its chaebol industrial conglomerates through low-interest loans that were
ill-disguised rents, but simultaneously forced them to compete in the world mar-
ket. Similarly, the Japanese corporations that relied on government-guaranteed
loans all competed by exporting industrial goods into the world market. With
sugar exports to the protected U.S. market dominating Philippine economy for
most of the twentieth century, 1909 to 1975, key Filipino elites lacked any ana-
logue to such market discipline. The Philippine Republic thus developed as a pol-
ity with both substantial economic resources and limited bureaucratic capacity—
a paradoxical pairing of wealth and weakness that opened the state to aggressive
rent seeking by powerful elites.

Crony Capitalism
To understand the rise of the oligarchs and the decline of the democratic institu-
tions that roiled this infant Republic, we need to examine three social forces that
shaped this process—persistent rent seeking, the weakening of political patron-
age, and the centrality of intra-elite conflicts. Under the Philippine Republic and
the Marcos dictatorship, the dominant sectors of the Filipino elite engaged in an
aggressive rent seeking. Successive Philippine presidents used the state’s licensing
powers as bargaining chips with national and provincial elites, thereby creating
rents that favored these dominant families. By the mid-1960s, this system was
xvi P REFACE

collapsing as the nation’s economic strategy of import-substitution industries

(ISI) could no longer provide employment for a large generation of secondary
and university graduates. Simultaneously, the system of political patronage, di-
luted to a thin gruel by a soaring population, failed to deliver essential services to
most voters. On the eve of martial law in August 1972, overall unemployment in
Manila was 11 percent, with 800,000 recent graduates pushing youth unemploy-
ment to 20 percent.13 Exemplifying this swelling electorate, the number of voters
in Cavite Province rose from just 7,000 in 1912 to 400,000 in 1992.14
As political conflict intensified in 1971–72, military intelligence suppos-
edly warned President Marcos that “reactionaries and radicals, rightists and left-
ists” had joined in an assassination plot as the first step toward revolution. “I
again went through the humiliating exercise of seeking to propitiate some of the
oligarchs,” Marcos wrote, trying to stall these powerful reactionaries by “visiting
them in their lairs, breaking bread with them and temporizing on their demands
for special favors from the Government, hoping to delay their fatal decision to . . .
place their resources at the disposal of the rebellion.” In September 1972, Marcos
declared martial law and assumed extraordinary powers sufficient for a sustained
attack on what he called the “reactionary nature of the oligarchy.”15 In his
martial-rule manifestos, the president condemned these oligarchs as the “root
cause of social corruption” who blocked all progress by bribing the bureaucracy,
buying politicians, and controlling the masses through media.16
Although Marcos posed as a social reformer fighting the old oligarchy in
pursuit of equality, his authoritarian regime rested on a new coalition of avari-
cious, rent-seeking families. In the first years of his dictatorship, Marcos built a
new national oligarchy of close kin and courtiers, creating a family-based fusion
of national and provincial power. By year four of marital rule, the pattern was so
obvious that the president felt compelled to deny that “we have liquidated an oli-
garchy to set up a new oligarchy,” claiming that his new rich were worthy indus-
trialists, not the “oligarchs of old, who controlled media and even the politicians
so they could protect their interests.”17 In fact, Marcos had used his exceptional
powers to punish enemies among the old families, stripping them of assets and
denying them loans or licenses to rebuild. Simultaneously, he invested his entou-
rage with extraordinary financial opportunities, creating unprecedented private
wealth. Enriched by monopoly control over key national industries, powerful
courtiers assumed political responsibility for their home regions. In Negros Oc-
cidental, Roberto S. Benedicto became president of the national sugar-trading
monopoly, Nasutra, and regional vice president of the ruling party, the Kilusang
Bagong Lipunan (KBL, or New Society Movement). Similarly, in Central Luzon,
Eduardo “Danding” Cojuangco, regional vice president of the ruling KBL party,
took control of the country’s once diffuse coconut industry through a complex
network of production taxes and export licenses, using the revenues to acquire the
blue-chip San Miguel Corporation.18 In 1980, a World Bank team found that
eight years of martial rule had led to “the political decline of regional, rural-based
P REFACE xvii

leaders” and created a “new ruling coalition consisting of the Marcos family and
personal associates, high-level technocrats, key bureaucrats, and military officers,
and some wealthy businessmen.”19
Instead of using his extraordinary powers to promote economic develop-
ment, Marcos thus expanded the role of rents within the economy. But in the fi-
nancial crises of 1981 and 1983 many crony corporations collapsed, leaving only
Danding Cojuangco and Juan Ponce Enrile viable political leaders by the time of
the critical 1986 elections—a failing that doomed Marcos to defeat by an oppo-
sition candidate, Corazon “Cory” Aquino, who enjoyed the support of a resur-
gent oligarchy. More broadly, by destroying or damaging established elite fami-
lies, many of them proven entrepreneurs, and replacing them with untested
cronies, Marcos’s attempt to generate Schumpeterian “waves of creative destruc-
tion” became simple destruction—producing negative economic growth, crip-
pling Filipino capitalists, and creating by default a new economic elite, the Fili-
pino Chinese.20 During the twenty years of Marcos’s misrule, the Philippine
gross national product per capita grew imperceptibly from $495 to $540, virtual
stagnation, while South Korea’s soared from $330 to $2,345.21
If politics under the pre–Marcos Republic relied on the “three Gs,” guns,
goons, and gold, then we can describe the new forces that emerged in the two
decades following his fall in 1986 as the “four Cs”—continuity, criminality, Chi-
nese, and celebrity. The sum of these forces has fostered a merger of the formal
and informal sectors, transforming the country’s elites and forming new, unstable
political and economic underpinnings for the country’s electoral politics and eco-
nomic development.

Continuity
The element of elite continuity was soon evident in the administration of
Marcos’s rival and successor, Cory Aquino. Amid the high political drama of
Marcos’s flight into exile, President Aquino took power in February 1986 with
contradictory political agendas—a mandate for change and a personal plan for
restoring the status quo ante Marcos. Mindful of the abuses of the Marcos era,
Aquino’s Constitutional Commission adopted articles designed to break, for all
time, the influence of “political dynasties” through both universal term limits and
a specific prohibition on relatives “within the fourth civil degree of the President”
holding any public office.22
Despite these aspirations, in her first year as president Aquino restored both
provincial dynasties to political office and Manila’s oligarchs to control of leading
corporations. During her presidency, the media, ignoring her elite background,
made much of her rise from housewife to chief executive. Born in 1933 into the
powerful Cojuangco family, Corazon Cojuangco led a secluded life at religious
schools until 1954 when she married Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, Jr., scion of the
rival political family in her home province of Tarlac. Showing the significance of
xviii P REFACE

Marriage ceremony, October 1954, Pasay City, Metropolitan Manila, with President
Ramon Magsaysay (sponsor, second from left), Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, Jr. (groom, third
from left), and Corazon “Cory” Cojuangco (bride, second from right).

this union, President Ramon Magsaysay was principal sponsor at their wedding
mass and Salvador “Doy” Laurel, the groom’s closest friend and the bride’s future
vice president, was veil sponsor. From her father, Cory inherited both substantial
wealth and provincial power. From her husband she acquired the aura of associa-
tion with the nation’s most charismatic leader. Through these family ties, she was
related to nine other oligarchic families, including the Antonio Cojuangcos, who
owned the nation’s telephone monopoly; the Yabuts, who dominated Makati
City; the Tanjuatcos, who combined an industrial conglomerate with political of-
fice; and the Oretas, who fused real estate dealing and local politics in suburban
Malabon.23
That a housewife named Cory should move into Malacañang Palace was
remarkable. That a Cojuangco married to an Aquino should become president
was not. Indeed, in the May 1987 congressional elections that followed her in-
auguration many of the president’s relatives won seats with the support of the rul-
ing political party headed by her brother, Jose Cojuangco, Jr.24 From exile, more-
over, the president’s chief rival was her own cousin and blood enemy, Eduardo
“Danding” Cojuangco, Jr., who financed both coups and opposition political par-
ties in a determined, desperate bid to oust her from power.25 During the 1987
elections in their home province of Tarlac, Cory’s brother defeated Danding’s sis-
ter for Congress, and Cory’s sister-in-law beat Danding’s brother in the race for
P REFACE xix

provincial governor.26 More broadly, by the end of Aquino’s term in 1992 the
restored Congress was virtual congeries of elite families, with 32 percent of the
representatives children of established politicians and 15 percent “third- or
fourth-generation politicians.”27
Paralleling this restoration of elite families, President Aquino returned ex-
propriated corporations to Manila’s old oligarchy—many of them relatives, class-
mates, compadres, and close friends. To cite the best-known example, the Lopez
family, which had suffered exile, expropriation, and imprisonment under martial
law, flew back to Manila after Marcos’s fall to reclaim its corporations—the Ma-
nila Electrical Company (Meralco), the Manila Chronicle, and TV Channel 2. In
the struggle between a dictator and a single family, the family had survived and
the dictator had not, an indication of how deeply this oligarchy is embedded in
Philippine society.28
These patterns persisted under her anointed successor. In his July 1992 in-
augural address, President Fidel Ramos promised to end the country’s entrenched
rent seeking, which privileged the few and meant poverty for the many.29 In Oc-
tober, the World Bank cited poor telecommunications as a key barrier to the
country’s growth, and a month later Lee Kwan Yew quipped dismissively during
a visit to Manila, “Ninety-nine percent of Filipinos are waiting for a telephone
and the other one percent for a dial-tone.” These criticisms were, as everyone
knew, directed at the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company (PLDT),
prompting the president to make this mismanaged monopoly the prime target of
his signature deregulation effort. But when Ramos broke PLDT’s grip on tele-
communications his new regulations were rigged in such a way that the corpora-
tion still emerged with the lion’s share of the business thanks to ex-president
Cory Cojuangco Aquino’s personal intercession with Ramos on behalf of her
nephew, Antonio “Tony Boy” Cojuangco, the president of PLDT.30 More
broadly, Ramos’s diversification under Republic Act 7926 (the Philippine Tele-
communications Act of 1995) transformed the Cojuangco monopoly into an
oligopoly of elite family firms, including the Gogkongweis of Digitel, the Co-
juangcos of PLDT, the Lopezes of International Communications, the Delgados
of Isla Communications, Lucio Tan of Powerpage, and the Santiagos of Philip-
pines Telegraph & Telephone (PT&T).31
In retrospect, the capacity of Danding Cojuangco to survive President
Aquino’s administration and Tony Boy Cojuangco’s ability to emerge from Presi-
dent Ramos’s deregulation unscathed serve to highlight how this Filipino mix of
family and oligarchy often seems more powerful than the state.

Crime
In the post–Marcos era, syndicate crime emerged from society’s margins to be-
come, for the first time, a visible force in the country’s politics. In the chaos that
followed Marcos’s fall, vice syndicates flourished, and senior police protected
xx P REFACE

these criminals in exchange for a share of the take, making Manila a metropolis,
akin to Shanghai in the 1930s or Havana in the 1950s, where criminal bosses ex-
ercised enormous influence. In Luzon, large gambling syndicates that operated
the illegal jueteng lottery and were protected by the Constabulary grew to un-
precedented size and power. In metropolitan Manila, powerful robbery gangs
began to hit banks with military precision, getting away with millions of pesos.
Between 1989 and 1998, professional kidnap gangs, several linked to senior
Constabulary officers, launched a wave of kidnapping against wealthy Chinese
families. In this same troubled decade, illegal methamphetamines, called shabu,
spread in pandemic proportions throughout Philippine slums. In each of these il-
licit fields, the most prominent criminal syndicate or gang was somehow con-
nected to the fragmented military, either a former civilian defense force militia
such as the Kuratong Baleleng or a wayward “intelligence project.”
Filipinos may not pay heavy taxes, but they support jueteng gambling in
ways that allow this illegal lottery extraordinary political influence. During the
country’s costly electoral campaigns, jueteng networks provide critical support for
political machines in the form of cash donations, political intelligence, and voter
mobilization. A 1999 survey found that 28 percent of all adult Filipinos bet reg-
ularly on jueteng. The legislature has estimated the annual gross from Luzon’s jue-
teng syndicates at nearly a billion U.S. dollars with protection payoffs running to
U.S. $180 million. If we add this billion dollars in illegal gambling revenue to the
five billion earned through illicit drug sales, then by 2000 the Philippines’ vice
economy had emerged as a vast underground industry with revenues equal to half
the government budget and a corresponding capacity to corrupt both police and
politicians.32
During its first year in power, the Aquino administration forged a carefully
concealed alliance with the jueteng bosses, swapping political protection for kick-
backs in a corrupt bargain that raised the incidence of illegal gambling to un-
precedented levels. Shaken by a succession of nine coup attempts, the administra-
tion used the vice economy as a counterweight to the state security apparatus,
which was now compromised through coup plotters in its ranks. Through the
president’s brother, Peping Cojuangco, the palace operated a clandestine fund-
raising machine that tapped illegal gaming revenue to finance a civilian counter-
coup force, the mysterious “Yellow Army.”33 During congressional hearings in
1995, President Aquino’s antigambling enforcer, Potenciano “Chito” Roque,
came forward to confess that he and his police bagmen made regular collections
from Luzon’s top twenty-five jueteng bosses.34
With this covert presidential patronage and police protection encouraging
consolidation, regional jueteng syndicates replaced more local operators across the
main island of Luzon. A 1999 survey by the Philippine National Police (PNP)
found a high level of syndication with sixty jueteng operators dividing a daily
turnover of P84 million. While each province usually had a single syndicate, a
P REFACE xxi

few financiers had a regional reach, notably Luis “Chavit” Singson in Ilocos and,
above all, Rodolfo “Bong” Pineda in Central Luzon.35
To protect their operations, jueteng syndicates paid an estimated 30 percent
of their revenue to police and politicians, making the regional bosses powerful
figures with direct access to the palace under presidents Joseph Estrada and
Gloria Arroyo, respectively. In this impoverished society, jueteng had replaced
pre-martial-law party machines by funding a costly electoral patronage system
that was otherwise unsustainable.36 A senior police analyst estimated, from data
collected in 1999, that syndicate payments to politicians and police had reached
an extraordinary P9 billion (U.S. $225 million) annually.37 By the time he left of-
fice in 2001, President Estrada, using national police to expropriate profits from
the jueteng industry, had accumulated a fortune sufficient to elevate him to the
ranks of the nation’s oligarchy, a social ascent postponed for a generation by sev-
eral years of imprisonment on graft charges.38
Illustrating the familial dynamic found even within this criminal milieu,
Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s political rise was assisted significantly by her ill-
concealed alliance with the country’s leading jueteng operator, Bong Pineda,
which sprang from shared roots in the same small town, Lubao, Pampanga. From
the time Arroyo launched her political career with a race for the Senate in 1995
through her election to the presidency in 2004, Pineda, according to opposition
politicians, used his vast cash resources to bankroll her successful campaigns. So
close was this alliance that Arroyo befriended the gambling boss’s wife, former
Lubao mayor Lilia Pineda, and stood as godmother to the Pinedas’ son. After her
inauguration in 2001, President Arroyo admitted to this ritual kinship with the
country’s top syndicate boss in an interview with Asiaweek, but she insisted that
it was traditional not political—in effect trying to mask a corrupt realpolitik re-
lationship with an endearing familial rhetoric.39 To this solid financial support,
Arroyo could add name recognition as an ex-president’s daughter and oligarchic
connections through her marriage to Jose Tuason Arroyo, a descendent of the
aristocratic Tuasons of Manila and the landed Arroyos of the Western Visayas.

Chinese
Long apolitical, Manila’s Chinese emerged in the post–Marcos era as powerful
entrepreneurs who had a pressing need to become involved, for the first time, in
Philippine politics. Over the past two centuries, one of the defining attributes of
Filipino society has been the capacity to assimilate overseas Chinese, admitting
them fully into the Catholic Church, communities, and corporations. From
1898 to 1975, however, Filipino economic nationalism blocked the assimilation
of Chinese migrants who had arrived after 1898, denying them citizenship under
an exclusionary doctrine of jus sanguinis. This blanket denial was reinforced by
strong anti-Chinese laws, including the prewar Manila Public Stalls Ordinance;
xxii P REFACE

Commonwealth legislation requiring that Chinese ledgers be kept in English; the

1954 Retail Trade Nationalization Act; and regulations adopted by the National
Economic Council in 1957–58 giving priority to Filipino firms. In 1975, how-
ever, President Marcos ordered a more liberal naturalization policy, simultane-
ously increasing his illicit income and allowing thousands among the Chinese
community, then about 1 percent of the country’s population, to finally win for-
mal citizenship and fuller participation in the society.40
While the Filipino oligarchs exhausted themselves in the self-destructive
infighting of martial law intrigues, the Chinese taipans had quietly focused on
business to emerge from the Marcos dictatorship as the country’s most dynamic
entrepreneurs. At the end of Marcos’s regime in 1986, Chinese-Filipinos already
owned 45 percent of the top 120 manufacturing firms. Many of these Chinese
families were “poorly educated immigrants . . . more predisposed to a family-
based type of business than their Filipino counterparts” who often mitigated the
familial influence with foreign equity or public listings. In the fire-sale privatiza-
tion of government corporations mismanaged under Marcos, totaling some P43
billion, Chinese conglomerates acquired, among other businesses, Philippine
Shipyard and Engineering (Philseco); Oriental Petroleum, the nation’s largest oil
exploration company; and Philippine Airlines, the national flag carrier. By 1994,
Chinese banks held 38 percent of total commercial banking assets, and six top
Chinese entrepreneurs, the so-called taipans, controlled diversified conglomer-
ates led by “flagship firms” active in finance and real estate. Far from the “low-
profile” rice and commodity traders of decades past, Manila’s leading Chinese
now controlled some very visible corporations—banks, insurance companies,
shopping malls, distilleries, the national airline, telephone networks, and the
capital’s premier newspaper.41
Driven by this rapid growth, six of the leading taipan conglomerates began
merging with the established Filipino business elites while simultaneously guard-
ing family control over core operations. As the Gokongwei group expanded be-
yond its original food-marketing operations into real estate and finance, the pa-
triarch, John Gokongwei, developed what he called a “close relationship” with
Eugenio Lopez, Jr., leader of one of the “old rich” Filipino families, to buy a con-
trolling share in the Philippine Commercial International Bank (PCIB) and form
the First Philippine Power Corporation, which built a 215-megawatt generating
plant. Yet even as the Gokongwei holdings grew into a diversified conglomerate
of thirty-six major corporations by 1994, the family retained tight control
through a holding company, JG Summit Holdings, Inc. Although Summit had
two Filipino directors and three Filipino senior managers, real control remained
with the executive committee of seven close relatives—ranging from John, age
sixty-eight, to Lance, age twenty-eight—thereby assuring that any “non-family
member is definitely excluded from decision making at the Group’s headquarters,
indeed.” In their centralization of management under family control, a trait
shared with other Philippine ethnic groups such as the Spanish Filipinos at the
P REFACE xxiii

Ayala and Aboitiz corporations, the taipans were ensuring the “transfer of power
along their hereditary lines to solidify their concerns as family business in the true
sense of the word.”42
These new Chinese taipans ranged from politically neutral entrepreneurs
such as Henry Sy of the Shoemart retail chain to the hyperpolitical Lucio Tan. Al-
though Tan was born in China and is nominally Chinese, his business operations
seem strikingly reminiscent of the old Filipino oligarchs. His Fortune Tobacco
and Tanduay, for example, both operate through rent seeking and tax avoidance,
and he has backed presidential candidates with lavish donations, receiving lucra-
tive rents in return. In 1966, Tan established his first major firm, Fortune To-
bacco, with the backing of President Marcos and soon won “tax breaks and near
monopoly licenses” to capture some 70 percent of the country’s cigarette market.
At the height of martial law in 1980, the president also awarded Tan a license to
open Asia Brewery as a rival to San Miguel beer, allowing this upstart company to
win 20 percent of the market. Illustrating the transfer of assets from declining
Spanish families to rising Chinese taipans, Tan purchased the Tanduay distillery
from Manuel “Manda” Elizalde in 1986, attracted, said Elizalde, by the ease of
tax evasion in alcohol distribution, which matched Tan’s trademark practices at
Fortune Tobacco. Indeed, the government filed a massive, billion-dollar tax eva-
sion case against Tan’s tobacco company, but in 1996 the Supreme Court ruled in
his favor, a decision so controversial that the justices felt compelled to issue a for-
mal denial that they had been bribed. By using his vast profits from alcohol and
tobacco sales, allegedly amplified by systematic tax evasion, in 1992 Tan invested
P5 billion in Philippine Airlines and six years later bankrolled Joseph Estrada’s
successful 1998 presidential campaign, prompting the new president to cancel
competing flights by rival carriers and press a striking union to settle on terms fa-
vorable to Tan.43
Tapping into the country’s ill-concealed racism and resentments, kidnap
gangs preyed on the Philippine Chinese during the 1990s with a ruthlessness that
extracted huge ransoms and then executed some of the victims. According to the
PNP, reported kidnappings nationwide rose from 25 in 1991 to a peak of 179
in 1996 before dipping back to 129 in 1998. At the height of this crime wave,
Lloyd’s of London ranked the Philippines as the world’s fourth most dangerous
kidnap site. Fortune magazine called it “the kidnap capital of Asia.”44 As kidnap-
ping and armed robbery surged, Manila’s Chinese community was forced to mo-
bilize politically against corrupt police and their criminal allies, marching in mass
demonstrations, holding rallies, and supporting candidates. With their visible
wealth, pressing need for security, and newfound political involvement, the Chi-
nese community emerged as major financiers in the 2004 presidential elections,
backing the candidacy of the former national police chief Panfilo “Ping” Lacson,
known for his success against kidnappers.
Paradoxically, these formal barriers to assimilation, which remained in
place until the late 1970s, had allowed taipans to remain aloof from politics,
xxiv P REFACE

facilitating their capital formation and economic rise. With legal restraints now
removed, these violent kidnappings and visible Chinese protests seemed to be
manifestations of a slow, painful assimilation. In the next generation, we will
likely witness taipan intermarriages with Filipino oligarchic families and more ac-
tive Chinese community involvement in Philippine politics.

Celebrity
With the weakening of patronage networks, national elections have become more
genuine expressions of the popular will, allowing pop culture icons to parlay their
celebrity into successful campaigns for both the Senate and the presidency. Just as
land, lineage, and erudition were once credentials for joining the national elite, so
now a good jump shot or a telegenic personality seems to be an equally valid
qualification. Sparking this change, new media have made these celebrities a
more constant public presence. In decades past, film stars and sports personalities
were fleeting figures seen only at the local arena or cinema. Under Marcos’s New
Society, however, the arrival of the videocassette recorder (VCR) and domestic
satellite television brought professional basketball and Filipino films into most
households morning, noon, and night.
Once a forum for statesman distinguished in law and politics, the Senate,
elected nationally, has become a collection of basketball players, television per-
sonalities, movie stars, and failed coup plotters. During the 1990s, two former
basketball stars, Freddie Webb and Robert Jaworski, were elected to the Senate
solely on name recognition in this hoop-crazed nation. By 2008, six among the
twenty-four senators had won office through celebrity—three as former film and
television stars (Loren Legarda, Lito Lapid, and Ramon Revilla, Jr.) and three for
notoriety in their military service (Gregorio Honasan, Panfilo Lacson, and Anto-
nio Trillanes IV). Similarly, in 1998 Joseph Estrada was the first, though probably
not the last, movie star elected to the presidency. Indeed, only three years after his
ouster the action star Fernando “Ronnie” Poe, Jr., challenged Gloria Arroyo for
the presidency and might well have won without the systematic fraud that as-
sured her reelection.
Even within the world of Philippine celebrity, family connections have also
proved critical. With little talent and less training, Ronnie Poe, born Ronald
Allan Poe, adopted his father’s screen name to become “Fernando Poe, Jr.,” and
break into films as the son of a prewar matinee idol. Senator Ramon Revilla, Jr.,
followed his father into the Filipino film industry as an action star and then went
into politics, parlaying this multigenerational name recognition into a Senate
seat. Similarly, Senator Lito Lapid’s son Mark enjoyed some success in the film
industry before winning election as the governor of Pampanga, a position his
father held before his elevation to the Senate. These family connections can also
prove a liability. After years of adulation as a college and professional basketball
star, Freddie Webb was elected to the Senate in 1992 only to have celebrity turn
P REFACE xxv

to notoriety when his son Hubert was charged in a sensational murder-rape case,
sending his poll numbers to rock bottom among the thirty-two Senate candidates
in 2000.45
Ultimately, the blending of crime and celebrity in ways seemingly ephem-
eral yet somehow substantial is slowly changing the country’s political culture
and the character of its ruling elite. Just as the once august Senate has become an
odd collection of criminals, media celebrities, sports stars, and coup plotters, so
the presidential palace has lost its luster. In an earlier generation, the ambitious
used celebrity to gain access to the presidential palace, but now some would use
the palace to achieve celebrity. While President Cory Aquino held office with the
propriety and privacy that marked the old elite, her daughter made the palace a
stage on which shed her identity as Ms. Kristina Bernadette Cojuangco Aquino
and become instead “Kris Aquino”—the star of blood-soaked slasher films, the
queen of gossip on daytime TV, and the object of fan-magazine fascination for
her succession of steamy affairs with basketball players and action stars, replete
with sexually transmitted disease, encounter sex, and babies legitimate or illegiti-
mate. Even the aristocratic Lopez family has been marked by this mix of crime
and celebrity. Instead of a marriage compact within oligarchic circles sealed by an
exchange of landed assets as his parents had done, in 1999 Manuel “Beaver”
Lopez, Jr., heir to this long lineage, married Jacqueline Ejercito, the legitimate
daughter of President Estrada, the star of over a hundred Filipino films, and was
given a massive mansion that the president had purchased with gambling kick-
backs and transferred via a fraudulent tax-evasion scheme.46
Through the sum of such change, the oligarchy is no longer comprised
of austere aristocrats such as Manuel Elizalde, Sr., Oscar Ledesma, or Eugenio
Lopez, Sr., and is instead becoming an eclectic collection of gambling bosses,
media stars, smugglers, telecom rent seekers, real estate wheeler-dealers, and Chi-
nese taipans. It is by no means clear whether this changing elite is a manifestation
of dynamism akin to, say, that of India or instability comparable to, say, that of
Colombia.

Conclusion
In conclusion, there can be no conclusion to the ever-changing history of such a
dynamic social stratum. Looking back over the past two hundred years, the Fili-
pino elite, both provincial dynasties and the national oligarchy, has changed con-
stantly in both composition and character. Looking forward twenty years, it
seems likely that this oligarchy will adapt to maintain its sole defining attribute—
the continuity of control over the Philippine economy and society.
Over the past half century, this oligarchic system has proved flexible, even
fluid, ignoring the source of any ill-gotten gains and readily integrating parvenu
families within this social elite. Lucio Tan might be a déclassé Chinese émigré,
but he has become the nation’s leading entrepreneur through unerring political
xxvi P REFACE

instincts, which have allowed him to maintain an unbroken record of corporate

expansion under five rival administrations, winning key licenses under Marcos,
acquiring the national airline under Marcos’s enemy Aquino, surviving a mass tax
investigation started by Ramos, and winning extraordinary executive boons from
Estrada. No matter how determined any administration might be to destroy a
particular oligarch, all seem to survive. Danding Cojuangco came home, wealth
intact, after his cousin and blood enemy President Aquino left office; the Lopezes
restored much of their lost financial empire after their nemesis Marcos fell from
power; and the Marcoses, too, are back from exile and back in office, many of
their plundered billions still somehow under their control.
Even the most tawdry of these arrivistes, ex-president Joseph Estrada, may
yet recover his lost influence, now that he is out of prison, and translate his pur-
loined assets into social prestige even though much of his wealth came from bla-
tant bribery, illegal gambling kickbacks, and stock market fraud that brought the
nation’s financial markets close to collapse. As a veteran screen actor, Estrada has
shown an uncanny ability to play contradictory social roles in ways that assured
his social ascent, winning the presidency with an angry anti-oligarchic, pro-masa
rhetoric, and then using that office to marry his daughter into the blue-blooded
Lopez clan while plundering sufficient assets from his pro-masa (pro-masses) so-
cial programs to join the oligarchy on his own.
The persistence of oligarchic power is, moreover, made possible by both
negative and positive factors, that is, not only the active pursuit of power by elite
families but also the relative weakness of countervailing social forces. Instead of
insulating the state from oligarchic influence, the judiciary is often compromised
by corruption or political pressure. Adding to the oligarchy’s political influence,
the traditional role of the middle class as an insulating factor between the elite
and the masses has been diminished by a complex of socioeconomic forces.
Confusing charity with philanthropy, the country’s oligarchy has failed to
transfer significant capital to the public sector in ways that would create educa-
tional and cultural institutions accessible to the middle class. While America’s
Gilded Age industrialists, for example, cleansed their money by means of philan-
thropy, building public libraries and private universities, the Filipino oligarchs
have not developed the habit, producing relatively small public institutions inca-
pable of sustaining a larger, more lively middle class. Many members of the elite
publicize their generosity in granting a few scholarships, Teodoro Yangco in an
earlier era, Lucio Tan today. But this is an insignificant share of their assets, far
from real philanthropy.
In recent years, the Chinese taipans have been buying up many of the
established private institutions in Manila’s downtown university belt of some
forty universities with several hundred thousand students. Mapua University, a
leading center of engineering and architectural studies, is now controlled by the
Yuchengcos, owners of Malayan Insurance Company; University of the East
(UE), the country’s largest private university with over 60,000 students, by Lucio
P REFACE xxvii

Tan; National University by the Sy family of the ShoeMart retail empire; Centro
Escolar University by Dr. Emilio T. Yap, who also owns the Manila Hotel and the
Manila Bulletin. For the time being, the taipans have appointed presidents of
Mapua and UE who were well-respected professors from the University of the
Philippines, the country’s premier institution. In principle, some kind of devel-
opmental synergy between the business sector and the universities might be pos-
sible. Whether the taipans will manage these institutions to maximize cash flow
from their swelling student populations or transform them into centers of educa-
tional excellence and social mobility remains to be seen. In the pursuit of philan-
thropy, profit taking might prove hard for these taipans to resist.
Other mechanisms for social mobility are also weak. All societies need to
renew their elites by the regular recruitment of natural leaders from the lower
classes. In the Philippines, with a closed oligarchy and the University of the Phil-
ippines admission captured by the middle class, the Philippine Military Academy
(PMA) has been one of the few vehicles for such lower-class recruitment. Over
the past two years, the University of the Philippines has imposed a 300 percent
increase in student fees that has made it much less accessible to lower- and
middle-class students, no matter how promising. Although its cadets are still
drawn from the poor and middle class, the PMA’s graduates, no matter how
prominent, do not generally marry into the elite, and retired military officers
have remained at the threshold of power, still waiting to be invited inside.
Further weakening the middle class, out-migration of skilled workers and
educated professionals since the 1960s has reduced the social mass of this key
stratum. Created by Spain in the nineteenth century and expanded under U.S.
rule in the early twentieth, members of the Filipino middle class, largely white-
collar workers and civil servants, found their social position weakened by the po-
liticization of a bloated, ill-paid public service after independence. As real income
and social status fell, this sector was confronted with a cruel choice: either slip
downward on the social scale or emigrate. By the late 1990s, some five million
Filipinos, almost 20 percent of the total labor force, were working overseas, and
the middle-class presence in Manila was much diminished.47 With some
800,000 new “job entrants” every year, the number of overseas workers rose to
7.4 million by 2005 and the middle-class presence in Manila continued to fade,
removing this catalytic element for social and economic change.48
With a weak middle class, Philippine politics has become a stagnant bal-
ance between an entrenched oligarchy and an impoverished mass whose votes are
often bought cheaply with cash.49 In the more prosperous decade of the 1950s,
before the middle class began its precipitous decline, these middle forces served as
a social engine driving successful campaigns for social reform and good govern-
ance. In the absence of a strong middle class to support such reform, relatively
popular presidents—Aquino, Ramos, and Estrada—have been “stymied when
they pursued policies inimical to local elite interests.”50 Although the potential of
this class as a force for change made brief reappearances in the famed “people
xxviii P REFACE

power” mobilizations EDSA I and EDSA II, which toppled Marcos in 1986 and
Estrada in 2001, this social strategy has proven to be a problematic, extraconsti-
tutional means of change and is now largely spent, leaving the country mired in
political-cum-social stalemate without any clear means of moving forward.51
In the future, if this out-migration is somehow reversed and the middle
class recovers its social mass, civil society movements may serve as a check on
government corruption and oligarchic excess. For the time being, however, the
country, caught in the grip of this social stalemate, will stumble through “its per-
petual state of varying levels of crisis,” mired in a politics marked by deepening
oligarchic control, fraudulent elections, abortive coups, and spreading poverty.52

N OT E S
I am indebted to Patricio Abinales for some excellent suggestions after a close reading of an
earlier draft. I am also grateful to a former student, Temario Rivera, for his insightful analysis
of the changing Filipino elite, which informs the contemporary sections of this analysis.
1James K. Boyce, The Philippines: The Political Economy of Growth and Impoverish-
ment in the Marcos Era (London: Macmillan, 1993), 1–3.
2Peter Krinks, The Economy of the Philippines: Elites, Inequalities, and Economic Restruc-
turing (London: Routledge, 2002), 3.
3Teodoro A. Agoncillo, Malolos: The Crisis of the Republic (Quezon City: University of
the Philippines Press, 1960), 644–45; Renato Constantino, The Philippines: A Past Revisited
(Quezon City: Tala Publishing Services, 1975), 232.
4Mindful of Sidel’s critique of what he calls the “strong oligarchy, weak state” thesis, this
analysis uses a more fluid definition of oligarchy, drawing its economic resources from diverse
sources not tied to rural landholdings. See John T. Sidel, Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism
in the Philippines (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 9–11.
5Paul D. Hutchcroft, Booty Capitalism: The Politics of Banking in the Philippines (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 45–64; Sidel, Capital, Coercion, and Crime, 4–22; Eva-
Lotta E. Hedman and John T. Sidel, Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century
(London: Routledge, 2000), 5–6, 16–17, 172–79.
6Sidel, Capital, Coercion, and Crime, 18; James M. Buchanan, “Rent Seeking and Profit
Seeking,” in Toward a Theory of the Rent-Seeking Society, edited by James M. Buchanan, Robert
D. Tollison, and Gordon Tullock (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 1980), 7–8; Louis Kraar,
“The Philippines veers towards Crisis” Fortune, 17 July 1981, 34–39.
7Temario C. Rivera, Landlords and Capitalists: Class, Family, and State in Philippine
Manufacturing (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1994), 32.
8Miguel Cuaderno, Problems of Economic Development: The Philippines—A Case Study
(Manila: Miguel Cuaderno, 1964), 40–55, 86–95, 114–26; International Labour Office,
Sharing in Development: A Programme of Employment, Equity, and Growth for the Philippines
(Geneva: International Labour Office, 1974), 14–15.
9Brian Fegan, “The Social History of a Central Luzon Barrio,” in Philippine Social His-
tory, edited by Alfred W. McCoy and Ed. C. de Jesus (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
1982), 96–97.
10Onofre D. Corpuz, The Roots of the Nation, vol. 2 (Quezon City: Aklahi Foundation,
1989), 547–48; The Philippines (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 65–66.
11Peter W. Stanley, A Nation in the Making: The Philippines and the United States,
1899–1921 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 236–48.
12Patricio Abinales, “The Philippines: Weak State, Resilient President,” in Southeast
Asian Affairs, 2008 (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008), 303–4.
P REFACE xxix

13International Labour Office, Sharing in Development, 5–7, 14–17; Thomas C. Nowak

and Kay A. Snyder, “Economic Concentration and Political Change in the Philippines,” in Po-
litical Change in the Philippines: Studies of Local Politics Preceding Martial Law, edited by Bene-
dict J. Kerkvliet (Honolulu: University of Press of Hawaii, 1974), 185–86, 225–29.
14Sidel, Capital, Coercion, and Crime, 79.
15Ferdinand E. Marcos, Notes on the New Society of the Philippines (Manila: Ferdinand
E. Marcos, 1973), 11, 18, 23.
16Ferdinand E. Marcos, The Democratic Revolution in the Philippines (Manila: Ferdi-
nand E. Marcos, 1977), 91–93, 111, 113.
17Ferdinand E. Marcos, Notes on the New Society of the Philippines II: The Rebellion of the
Poor (Manila: Ferdinand E. Marcos, 1976), 208–10.
18Gary Hawes, The Philippine State and the Marcos Regime: The Politics of Export (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 55–82, 83–101; Boyce, The Philippines, 8, 165–82, 233,
240–41; Earl G. Parreno, Boss Danding (Manila: First Quarter Storm Foundation, 2003),
125–73, 152–66.
19Walden Bello, David Kinley, and Elaine Elinson, Development Debacle: The World
Bank in the Philippines (San Francisco: Food First, 1982), 30–31.
20Ibid., 185–85; Rivera, Landlords and Capitalists, 95–99, 118–22.
21Boyce, The Philippines, 2–3.
22Republic of the Philippines, The Constitution of the Republic of the Philippines (Ma-
nila: National Bookstore, 1986), 20.
23The Fookien Times 1985–86 Philippines Yearbook (Manila: Fookien Times, 1986),
30–37; Nick Joaquin, The Aquinos of Tarlac (Manila: Cacho Hermanos, 1983), 89–198; Eric
Gutierrez, Ties That Bind: A Guide to Family, Business, and Other Interests in the Ninth House of
Representatives (Quezon City: Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, 1994), 56.
24Dr. Fernando Carrascoso, aide to Jose “Peping” Cojuangco, interview with the au-
thor, Manila, 30 August 1986.
25The Final Report of the Fact-Finding Commission (pursuant to R.A. No. 6832) (Manila:
Bookmark, 1990), 234–36, 248–53, 486–87.
26Parreno, Boss Danding, 78.
27Gutierrez, Ties That Bind, 18–19.
28Raul Rodrigo, Kapitan: Geny Lopez and the Making of ABS-CBN (Quezon City: ABS-
CBN, 2006), 197–203, 287–97; Phoenix: The Saga of the Lopez Family, 1800–2000, vol. 2
(Manila: Eugenio Lopez Foundation, 2000), 547–92; The Power and the Glory: The Story of the
Manila Chronicle (Pasig City: Eugenio Lopez Foundation, 2007); Meralco: A Century of Service
(Pasig: Manila Electric Company, 2004).
29Philippine Daily Inquirer (Manila), 1 July 1992.
30Sheila S. Coronel, “Monopoly,” in Pork and Other Perks: Corruption and Govern-
ance in the Philippines, edited by Sheila S. Coronel (Quezon City: Philippine Center for In-
vestigative Journalism, 1998), 113–49. Lecture by Anthony “Tony” Abad, former legal
aide to presidential adviser Jose Almonte, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of
Wisconsin–Madison, 28 February 1997. For a description of Abad’s role, in the PLDT
breakup, see Coronel, “Monopoly,” 137–38.
31Temario C. Rivera, “The Chinese-Filipino Business Families and Industrial Reform in
the Ramos Administration,” in The Filipino-Chinese Business Families under the Ramos Govern-
ment, edited by Temario Rivera and Kenji Koike (Tokyo: Institute of Developing Economies,
1994), 3–4; Krinks, The Economy of the Philippines, 210–14.
32For various press reports on the gross revenues from jueteng, see Manila Bulletin, 18
September 2000; Philippine Daily Inquirer, 22 March 2000, 6 October 2000, 9 October 2000;
and Wilfredo R. Reotutar, So The People May Know: All about Gambling in the Philippines
(Quezon City: Programs Enterprises, 1999), 113–17. On jueteng’s popularity, see Social
Weather Stations, SWS Media Release, 8 December 1999, “Moral Attitudes against Gambling
Hardly Affect Gambling Behavior—SWS Survey,” http://www.sws.org.ph/pr120899.htm
(accessed 5 June 2001). For sources on the gross sales of illicit drugs, see U.S. Department
xxx P REFACE

of State, Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, “International

Narcotics Control Strategy Report, 2001, Philippines,” http://www.state.gov/g/inl/rls/
nrcrpt/2001/rpt/8483.html (accessed 28 March 2002). In 2000, the U.S. $6 billion gross for
gambling and drugs was equivalent to P300 billion or 46 percent of the P651 billion in total
government expenditures for that year. For budgetary statistics, see Republic of the Philip-
pines, National Statistical Coordination Board, 2000 Philippine Statistical Yearbook (Manila:
National Statistical Coordination Board, 2000), tables 15.2, 15.4, 15.5.
33Manila Standard Today, 28–29 May 2005.
34Philippine Daily Inquirer, 29 November 1995, 25 December 1995; Philippine Star, 29
December 1995.
35These figures are drawn from tables provided by General Wilfredo R. Reotutar (ret.),
with the operators’ names removed (see Reotutar, So The People May Know, 53, 113–17), and
identical tables, with the names intact, in an anonymous study found in the files of the Philip-
pine Center for Investigative Journalism, “Latest Developments on Jueteng and the Protection
Rackets as of June 1, 1999.”
36Reotutar, So The People May Know, 53, 113–17.
37Ibid., 113–15.
38Yvonne T. Chua, Sheila S. Coronel, and Vinia M. Datinguinoo, “Estrada’s Entrepre-
neurial Families,” in Investigating Estrada: Millions, Mansions, and Mistresses, edited by Sheila S.
Coronel (Quezon City: Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, 2000), 59–69.
39Sunstar Manila, 26 May 2005; Inquirer News Service, 20 May 2005; Sheila S.
Coronel, “Anak ng Jueteng,” I Report (Manila), September 2005, 2–5; Yvonne T. Chua,
“Jekyll-and-Hyde Campaign,” I Report, September 2005, 7.
40Rivera, “The Chinese-Filipino Business Families and Industrial Reform in the Ramos
Administration,” 8–9.
41Ibid., 3–4, 9, 19, 23; Rivera, Landlords and Capitalists, 99–106; Hedman and Sidel,
Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century, 67–71.
42Rivera, “The Chinese-Filipino Business Families and Industrial Reform in the Ramos
Administration,” 21–22; Kenji Koike, “Changing Ownership and Management Structure of
Taipans Compared with Ayala Group,” in Rivera and Koike, The Filipino-Chinese Business
Families under the Ramos Government, 39–45, 60–63.
43New York Times, 15 September 1996; Sun Star Manila, 3 August 2007; Manuel
“Manda” Elizalde, Makati, interview with the author, 15 November 1988; Emil P. Bolongita,
Jr., “The Philippines in 1999: Balancing Restive Democracy and Recovering Economy,” Asian
Survey 40, no. 1 (January–February 2000): 72; Gabriella R. Montinola, “The Philippines in
1998: Opportunity amid Crisis,” Asian Survey 39, no. 1 (January–February 1999): 70.
44Today, 1 December 1998; Caroline S. Hau, “‘Who Will Save Us from the ‘Law’? The
Criminal State and the Illegal Alien in Post-1986 Philippines,” in Figures of Criminality in In-
donesia, the Philippines, and Colonial Vietnam, edited by Vicente L. Rafael (Ithaca: Southeast
Asia Program, Cornell University, 1999), 134–36; Philippine National Police, Annual Accom-
plishment Report, 1998 (Manila: Philippine National Police, 1999), 3–4.
45Manila Times, 17 January 2005; Social Weather Stations, SWS Special Media Release,
10 April 2000, “Reelectonists and Balik-Senado are Early Favorites for May 2001 Elections—
SWS Survey,” http://www.sws.org.ph/pr_41000.htm (accessed 30 August 2008).
46Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, “A Transaction Marred by Fraud,”
2000, http://www.pcij.org/stories/2000/houses2.html (accessed 4 September 2008).
47Krinks, The Economy of the Philippines, 215–17.
48Eva-Lotta Hedman, “The Philippines in 2005: Old Dynamics, New Conjuncture,”
Asian Survey 46, no. 1 (January–February 2006): 192; Arsenio M. Balisacan and Hal Hill,
“The Philippine Development ‘Puzzle,’” in Southeast Asian Affairs, 2002 (Singapore: Institute
of Southeast Asian Studies, 2002), 247.
49William Case, “The Philippine Election in 1998: A Question of Quality,” Asian Sur-
vey 39, no. 3 (May–June 1999): 483.
P REFACE xxxi

50Abinales, “The Philippines,” 296–97.

51Sheila S. Coronel, “The Philippines in 2006,” Asian Survey 47, no. 1 (February
2007): 175–79.
52Frank Cibulka, “The Philippines: In the Eye of the Political Storm,” in Southeast
Asian Affairs, 2007 (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2007), 257.
 About the Contributors
J E R E M Y B E C K E T T is emeritus professor of anthropology at Sydney University.
He earned his Ph.D. in anthropology from the Australian National University
with a dissertation on “Politics in the Torres Strait Islands” (1964), later pub-
lished as Torres Strait Islanders: Custom and Colonialism (1987). In addition to his
work with the Magindanao Muslims, he has served as an expert witness and con-
sultant on Aboriginal affairs, notably in the landmark Australian High Court de-
cision Mabo v. Queensland (No. 2) (1992), which struck down the colonial doc-
trine of terra nullis and granted land rights to Aboriginal peoples.

G . C A R T E R B E N T L E Y is an anthropologist and private consultant. He

completed his doctoral dissertation under Charles Keyes at the University of
Washington–Seattle on “Law, Disputing, and Ethnicity in Lanao” (1982). Draw-
ing on his fieldwork among the Maranao Muslims of the southern Philippines, he
has published several articles on this subject. More recently, he served as editor,
with Peter Carey, of East Timor at the Crossroads: The Forging of a Nation (1996).

M I C H A E L C U L L I N A N E is a historian of the Philippines and serves as the

associate director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of
Wisconsin–Madison. After six years of Philippine fieldwork in the mid-1970s, he
completed his doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan, later published
as Ilustrado Politics: Filipino Elite Responses to American Rule (2003). He has con-
tinued to publish widely on the social history of Cebu and the political history of
the Philippines.

B R I A N F E G A N was senior lecturer in anthropology at Macquarie University in

Sydney, Australia, and a development consultant in the Asia-Pacific region until
his death in 2008. After fieldwork in Barrio Buga, San Miguel de Mayumo, in the
early 1970s, he wrote his doctoral dissertation at Yale University with Professor
Harold C. Conklin under the title “Folk Capitalism: Economic Strategies in a
Philippine Wet-Rice Village” (1979). Drawing on this data as well as later
xxxiv ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

fieldwork in San Miguel, he published a series of academic articles on the politics

and economics of Filipino peasant life. This essay, along with those published in
Philippine Social History (1982) and Lives at the Margin (2000), can be read, in
toto, as a comprehensive ethnography of Barrio Buga, exploring problems of eco-
nomic decision making, peasant politics, social change, and masculinity. At Mac-
quarie University, his memory is honored by the award of an annual prize in ap-
plied anthropology, a specialization that he refined as a development consultant
to aid projects across Asia from fisheries in Bangla Desha and Indonesia to grain
handling in Malaysia and Manchuria.

A L F R E D W . M C C O Y is the J. R. W. Smail Professor of History at the Univer-

sity of Wisconsin–Madison. After field research in the Western Visayas region, he
wrote his dissertation at Yale University under Professor Harold C. Conklin,
titled “Ylo-ilo: Factional Conflict in a Colonial Economy” (1977). He has con-
tinued to publish on Philippine social and political history, most recently Closer
Than Brothers (1999). This volume is the second in a trilogy he has edited explor-
ing themes in Philippine historiography, including Philippine Social History
(1982) and Lives at the Margin (2000). In addition to his Philippine work, he is a
specialist on the netherworld of crime and covert operations and is the author of
The Politics of Heroin (1972, 1991, 2003), Drug Traffic: Narcotics and Organized
Crime in Australia (1980), and A Question of Torture (2006). In 2001, the Associ-
ation for Asian Studies awarded him the Goodman Prize for his contributions to
Philippine historiography.

R E S I L B . M O J A R E S is professor emeritus at the University of San Carlos in

Cebu City and works as senior official at the Magsaysay Foundation in Manila.
He completed his Ph.D. dissertation at the University of the Philippines in 1979,
and it was later published as Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel (1983). Among
his publications are Theater in Society, Society in Theater: Social History of a
Cebuano Village (1985), The Man Who Would Be President: Serging Osmena and
Philippine Politics (1986), Vicente Sotto: The Maverick Senator (1992), Waiting for
Mariang Makiling: Essays in Philippine Cultural History (2002), and, most re-
cently, Brains of the Nation (2006).

R U B Y R . P A R E D E S is a historian of the Philippines and serves as an assistant

vice chancellor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She wrote her doctoral
dissertation, “The Partido Federal, 1900–1907: Political Collaboration in Colo-
nial Manila” (1989), at the University of Michigan and edited Philippine Colo-
nial Democracy (1989).

J O H N S I D E L is Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative

Politics at the London School of Economics. After completing his doctoral dis-
sertation on politics in Cavite and Cebu provinces at Cornell University under
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS xxxv

the supervision of Professor Benedict Anderson, he published this research as

Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (1999) and, with Eva-
Lotta E. Hedman, Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century: Colo-
nial Legacies, Post-colonial Trajectories (2000). In recent years, he has shifted his
focus to Indonesia, publishing Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indone-
sia (2006) and The Islamist Threat in Southeast Asia: A Reassessment (2007).
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