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This chapter documents the legal and political efforts initiated by a coalition of leftist workers’ rights activists allied with the ACWA to seek retribution for the murders of two beloved young radical labor leaders, Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes. While prosecutors, police, and mass media blamed the murders on internecine infighting among Asian gangs, the activists formed the Committee for Justice for Domingo and Viernes (CJDV) and offered evidence of political assassination by a conspiracy involving the Local 37 union president, Philippine President Marcos, and complicit U.S. officials. Following successful criminal state prosecution of several gang members, the CJDV filed a civil lawsuit against the alleged conspirators. After many fascinating twists and turns, the CJDV legal team triumphed, winning a landmark ruling that proved the conspiracy allegation and generated a substantial monetary award. The chapter interprets this decade of dramatic court battles through the lens of legal and political mobilization theory. Considerable attention is granted to the heroic efforts of CJDV leaders Cindy Domingo and Terri Mast as well as lawyer Mike Withey, among others, in this story of anguish, anger, and triumph.

Ferdinand Marcos ruled the Philippines for two decades, using his position to amass a personal fortune. When Benigno Aquino—Marcos’s key political rival—was assassinated in 1983, cross-class opposition to the regime erupted. Opposition protests drew international attention, and under mounting pressure, Marcos agreed to hold elections in 1986. Aquino’s widow, Cory, ran against Marcos; no one was surprised when Marcos rigged the election. Just as Cory Aquino announced a plan for nonviolent civil resistance, two military leaders defected. The cardinal of the Filipino Catholic Church asked citizens to protect the two defectors. Millions responded, forming a human barricade between Marcos’s troops and the officers. Civil resisters encouraged the advancing soldiers to defect. After several days, the majority of troops joined the opposition movement. With no sanctioning power left, Marcos fled, and Aquino assumed the presidency.

This chapter illustrates the institutionalization of culture and the display of modernism under the Marcos dictatorship through the creation of the Cultural Center of the Philippines in the late 1960s and into the 1970s. There is a particular focus on the role of Imelda Marcos in defining national culture through patronage.

This prologue outlines a variety of developments in the post-World War II era that set the stage for Part Two of our historical narrative. On the one hand, the Philippines emerged economically devastated, politically divided, and dependent on the US in new ways. The Cold War increased the strategic significance of the Philippines as an American client state and contributed to the context in which autocrat Ferdinand Marcos rose and imposed a reign of terror. On the other hand, the Second World War, the Cold War, and industrial economic expansion transformed global racial politics, catalyzing the civil rights movement in the U.S., American immigration reform, anti-colonial and anti-apartheid movements in the Global South, and eventual neo-liberal pro-business backlash against progressive causes that restricted the forms of justice available under racial liberalism. The geographic context of Seattle will be emphasized as a site for these contested historical developments of racial capitalist empire.

This chapter turns to the variegated drama(s) of Philippine Martial Law under the dictatorship of President Ferdinand Marcos. It considers how the Filipino performing body enacts the drama of Martial Law in two seemingly disparate sites: the protest performances of Sining Bayan, a cultural arm of the radical Filipino American political group Katipunan ng mga Demokratikong Pilipino (KDP), and the multiple productions of Dogeaters: A Play by Jessica Hagedorn. Both cultural sites dexterously mobilize the logic of puro arte through their use of spectacle to undercut the discourse of exceptionality surrounding the Martial Law regime and its placement in Philippine national history. In these performances, puro arte provides the conceptual pivot that enables a differentiated understanding of Filipino subjecthood and subjugation in the shadow of Martial Law. The chapter looks at how viewers are confronted with a Filipino performing body actively engaged with the embattled conditions of its historical possibility.

This chapter details the growing frustration of political exiles and opposition groups in the Philippines. In 1978, the KBL party had won control of the new legislature, and Imelda Marcos had been appointed to the cabinet. At the end of 1979, Marcos would call for nationwide elections for governors and mayors. His KBL candidates were expected to sweep the field (which they ultimately did). During a meeting of the Movement for a Free Philippines in San Francisco in September 1979, the members were in a combative mood. Was there no stopping the man? Where was the light at the end of this long, dark tunnel, which was already six years in the making? They had received reports that the moderate opposition in the Philippines was likewise frustrated and angry, and even—surprisingly—calling for violence. These were not the radical leftists who had always endorsed aggressive means and followed their convictions by joining the militant National Democratic Front and its military arm, the New People's Army, in the hills. The moderate voices who were now advocating for a shift in tactics reasoned that peaceful means had gotten them nowhere, and that the dictatorship was as entrenched as ever. It was time to take up arms.

This chapter details the series of political events from the proclamation of Ferdinand Marcos as the sixth president of the Philippines to his usurpation of power in 1972. Marcos' dream of a march to greatness started well. Expansive public works projects as well as intensified tax collection led to a measure of prosperity in the 1970s. He was reelected in 1969, becoming the first president to win a second term. However, during this second term, militancy also increased among student groups. On July 7, 1972, the constitutional convention voted to change the form of government from presidential rule to a parliamentary system. This allowed Marcos, whose last and second term would have ended in December 1973, to seek a third term. On September 22, Marcos signed the martial law decree, which was dated September 21. As justification, he claimed that an “armed insurrection and rebellion” was being waged against the government by “lawless elements” and “terroristic organizations.”5He would wield absolute power for the next fourteen years and eight months.

This chapter details events following the arrival of Benigno S. Aquino, Jr. to the United States. Aquino, better known by his nickname “Ninoy,” arrived in Dallas, Texas, on May 8, 1980, for heart bypass surgery. He had spent the preceding seven years and seven months in a military prison in the Philippines. Caught in the dragnet of martial law mass arrests in 1982, he was among the first political prisoners to be rounded up. At thirty-four years of age, he was the youngest senator elected to the national Congress, the lone opposition Liberal Party candidate amid the election sweep of the incumbent Nacionalista Party of President Marcos. During the next four years, Aquino stood in the Senate as the severest critic of Marcos. While Aquino was in jail, he had a heart attack. Concerned with the consequences for his regime should Aquino die incarcerated, Marcos temporarily released him for medical treatment abroad. His arrival in the United States galvanized the Filipino opposition movement.

This chapter examines the queer critiques of martial law and U.S. popular culture as staged in novels by Bino Realuyo, R. Zamora Linmark, and Noël Alumit. This group of texts—Relauyo's The Umbrella Country (1998), Linmark's Rolling the R's (1995), and Alumit's Letters to Montgomery Clift (2002)—reviews the 1970s and 1980s by locating the emergence of queer male sexualities and genders in the martial law period of Ferdinand Marcos' presidency, and by highlighting the impact of U.S. popular culture on erotic fantasies. These novels, which cover issues of youth sexuality, cross-age sex, and gender transitivity, link martial law to exilic departures and desires and thus implicate the United States not simply as the Cold War supporter of Marcos' efforts to stanch the spread of Communism, but also as the supposed site of freedom from political and sexual persecution.

This chapter recounts a long history of abusive rulers that found safe havens abroad once they were no longer welcome in their countries. It introduces Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, who had presided over the killing of several thousand people in 1979 and was then exiled in Saudi Arabia. It refers to Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who retired to Hawaii when the People Power Revolution toppled him following a fraudulent election. It also explains why recent leaders like Muammar al-Gaddafi, Laurent Gbagbo, and Bashar al-Assad desperately clung to power whereas past leaders such as Idi Amin, Ferdinand Marcos, and François Duvalier were willing to spend their days in exile. It discusses proponents of international justice that were frequently mocked as out-of-touch idealists.

This chapter details the early organization efforts of political exiles. When the exiles first began to mount an opposition front, they had no idea that Marcos' staying power would test their endurance and commitment. Within a year after the September 1972 imposition of martial law, enough members and a core of leaders got together to formally create identifiable groups—the Movement for a Free Philippines (MFP) was established at a convention in Washington, D.C., on September 22, 1973, and the Friends of the Filipino People (FFP) on October 20, 1973, in Philadelphia. The Katipunan Ng Mga Demokratikong Pilipino (KDP; Union of Democratic Filipinos) is said to have had its beginnings in California in August 1973. In the following years, splits and mergers among and between these groups created a succession of other subgroups, all offshoots of these pioneers.

This chapter discusses Reagan’s foreign policy. In his first two years as president, Reagan succeeded in resetting U.S. foreign policy on a newly aggressively rightward course. Carter had become more hawkish in his last year as president, but his support for the global right had been tempered by human rights concerns. Reagan, instead, almost embraced a no-enemies-to-the-right stance. Violent and ethically compromised regimes traditionally allied with the United States received fresh and unqualified support, as evidenced by his trip to South Korea for his first state visit as president. South Korea was a key bastion of U.S. military power, home to about forty thousand U.S. troops. Shortly after Reagan came to power, the country received new fighter aircraft from the United States, despite president Chun Doo Hwan’s seizure of power in 1979–1980. Reagan nearly doubled the level of U.S. aid to Ferdinand Marcos, who had suspended democracy in the Philippines in 1972 and he had ruled as a dictator since then. Relations with the Soviet Union had also become frostier. Yet, by late 1982, there were indications already that Reagan realized he might have to temper his tone regarding superpower relations in light of popular anxiety over nuclear brinkmanship.

Chapter 5 examines the role of political consultants in presidential campaigns, focusing on the role of media and polling consultants, particularly during the 1964 and 1968 presidential campaigns. The role of Clifton White in persuading Goldwater to run in 1964 is examined, as is the role of Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) and Tony Schwartz in the Johnson media campaign. Particular attention is given to the impact of the “Daisy” ad. In the 1968 presidential election the role of Joseph Napolitan and Larry O’Brien in the Humphrey campaign is examined. Of great historical significance is Joe McGinniss’s exposé of the Nixon campaign, along with the role of Roger Ailes and Harry Treleaven. In addition, the consultants Robert Squier and Joseph Napolitan went outside the country to work on presidential campaign of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines.

On September 22, 1972, a nationwide dragnet swept up hundreds of Filipinos deemed hostile to the sudden imposition of martial law that day. They included politicians, journalists, civil rights activists, lawyers, and suspected members of the Communist-leaning insurgent New People's Army. In the days to come, more people would be apprehended and moved to detention centers. President Marcos declared that this drastic action was necessary because these sectors had all threatened to overthrow the government. Marcos had been impelled to act, it was reported, because of an assassination attempt on Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile while he was reportedly riding in his car in the late evening of September 22. Senator Raul Manglapus was in a Tokyo hotel on September 23, on his way to California for a series of speaking engagements, when he read about the assassination attempt in the Japan Times. He had left Manila the previous afternoon. This chapter presents a slightly edited account of that day, which Manglapus wrote on October 15, 1983, in Washington, D.C. This account appears in A Pen for Democracy, a compilation of published articles, letters, and U.S. congressional testimonies compiled by the Movement for a Free Philippines. It omits details about how those who managed to escape the dragnet made it out of the country, because when it was written, Marcos was still in full control, rounding up more suspects.