Crony

A private beneficiary who controls a market not because he outcompeted anyone but because the ruler handed it to him. The word is precise rather than insulting: it describes how the position was acquired, and it says nothing about whether the holder ran the business well.

Under martial law whole commodity sectors were held this way. Logging went to Juan Ponce Enrile, coconut to Eduardo “Danding” Cojuangco, sugar to Roberto Benedicto and bananas to Antonio Floirendo. Naming the sectors matters more than naming the men, because the sectors are what the arrangement was made of.

Source: The crony map is compiled from the Martial Law Museum, https://martiallawmuseum.ph/ , free, as carried in this course’s History research map, era E8. The general use of the term for this period is standard in the Philippine literature and is not a course coinage.

First used in: 1.7 · When the state itself became the looter