Martial law

The suspension of the normal legal order and the substitution of rule by decree, usually justified by an emergency. Ferdinand Marcos placed the Philippines under martial law in 1972, on the argument that the country faced a communist and separatist emergency. The legislature closed, the press closed, and opponents were imprisoned.

What makes it more than a constitutional event in this course is what it did to the direction of extraction. Before it, private families extracted from a weak state. Under it, the state extracted on behalf of one family and leased the rest of the economy to friends.

Source: Used in its ordinary constitutional sense. The Philippine instance, and the era boundary the course uses, is 1972 to 1986, the periodization the course adopts, published as the History research map. The economic and human-rights record of the period is compiled from the sources listed in Lesson 1.7’s receipts, including the Martial Law Museum, https://martiallawmuseum.ph/ , free.

First used in: 1.6 · Two parties, one class, sixteen elections