Ferdinand Marcos had been Philippine president for seven years when martial law took effect on 21 September 21 1972 — 40 years ago today. It was a unilateral decision, made under the pretext of securing the state against communists and dissidents. It essentially kept Marcos in power far beyond his mandate.
When martial law was lifted nearly a decade later, the damage to democratic structures was thorough. Marcos had abolished Congress, made himself concurrent president and prime minister, politicised the military, detained political opponents and student activists, tightened control over the press, and sequestered corporations for distribution among his cronies.
The end of martial law was a mere technicality. There was no longer any need for legislation to keep people compliant since terror had become internalised. That is how dictatorships work: foment fear by demonstrating that it is well-founded.
According to historian Alfred McCoy, there were 3257 extrajudicial executions during the regime. Over 70 per cent of these involved the calculated dumping of mutilated bodies on roadsides and empty blocks. An estimated 35,000 were tortured and 70,000 imprisoned. More than 700 people 'disappeared' between 1975 and 1985.
It is a mark of the oppressiveness of the regime that the atrocities it perpetrated did not penetrate the bubble in which we grew up. I was born during this time, part of a generation dubbed 'martial law babies'. This generation, as well as those born from 1965 onwards, grew up not knowing any other president. By the time Marcos was deposed, he had been in power for 20 years.
His forced departure by unarmed civilians was an anomaly in 1986. Nothing like it had happened previously. The People Power revolution, which saw two million Filipinos converge at Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (EDSA), corrected the dysfunction of martial law. It re-established civilian supremacy over the armed forces.
This became the template for subsequent upheavals elsewhere, from Berlin to Bucharest. We saw it reprised more recently in Tunis, Cairo and Tripoli. Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Gaddafi were Marcos contemporaries who finally met a similar fate, more than two decades later.
As it turns out, there are no textbook outcomes from removing textbook dictators.
Toppling regimes is not simply the means to an end where people may breathe more freely. It