This development—catalyzed by coordinated actions of the legislature, executive and judiciary to safeguard President Ferdinand Marcos Jr’s power and neutralize his greatest rival—had been building since the impeachment of Vice President Sara Duterte, Duterte’s daughter.
The resilience of oligarchic dominance, exemplified by no less than the Marcoses, raises questions about the Philippines’ political trajectory and its ability to break free from this grip.
Paranoia runs deep in the Marcos bloodline. In 1972, two years into his second term as president, Ferdinand Marcos Sr appeared on television and claimed that subversive elements were plotting to overthrow the government, using it as a pretext to declare martial law.
What followed was not just political upheaval but a profound unraveling that set the nation on a course of political and economic collapse. The two-party system collapsed under Marcos Sr, who consolidated power and ushered in the fracturing of political parties: a legacy of disunity and factionalism that endures to this day (Teehankee, 2024).
Cronyism became entrenched. Oligarchic rule solidified. Local warlords were empowered. The nation descended into economic mismanagement, where poverty soared and wealth disparities widened. Less than three decades after independence, a nation liberated from two colonial masters found itself ensnared in a cycle of political and economic dysfunction.
Marcos Sr weaponized the military, using it to suppress opposition and solidify his control. Historian Alfred McCoy notes 3,257 extrajudicial killings, 35,000 torture victims and 70,000 incarcerations during the Marcos years (McCoy, 1999).
Warlordism, long a feature of Philippine politics, became an instrument of the state under Marcos Sr. He legalized and armed private militias ostensibly to quell communist uprisings but in practice to enforce political control (Parada, 2023).
Today, private armed groups operate with tacit state support, serving as political enforcers and suppressing opposition for local warlords. In March 2023, a governor and nine others were gunned down in Negros Oriental, reportedly orchestrated by a rival family from the 2022 gubernatorial race (Parada, 2023).
The bloodiest example remains the 2009 Maguindanao massacre, when the rivalry between the Ampatuan and Mangudadatu clans ended with the death of 58 people, 32 of them journalists.
Warlordism and militarization are only part of the equation. Innovations such as “behest loans” and kickbacks allowed cronies to become the new oligarchs, consolidating power in regulated service industries, such as power, telecommunications, media, and even agriculture.
These oligarchs, both old and new, wield political power that translates into economic control, or leverage their economic power to influence political structures—many of which are cemented through strategic alliances, including marriage.
Freedom House noted the Philippines’ low democratic status in 2024, highlighting that power remains tightly concentrated within patronage and kinship networks (Freedom House, 2024). As of 2022, around 70% of seats in the House of Representatives were controlled by political families with decades-long tenure (Freedom House, 2024).
Political donations, which face few legal limits, are dominated by a small network of major donors, further entrenching this cycle of influence (Freedom House, 2024). According to the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, the dominance of political dynasties is directly correlated to underdevelopment and poverty, especially in Visayas and Mindanao, where the competitive environment remains weak (Fonbuena, 2024).
Throughout Philippine history, the oligarchs have not merely coexisted with the state—they have captured and then subsumed it, becoming so entwined that today they are nearly indistinguishable. In 1902, William Howard Taft, then Governor-General of the Philippines, enacted laws that eventually allowed wealthy Filipino elites to consolidate control over vast tracts of land.
This entrenched a landed elite that remains the foundation of the country’s modern political and economic oligarchs. Over time they secured key positions in the judiciary, executive, and legislature, adapting so well to historical shifts that they came to see themselves not just as a ruling class but as the sole legitimate voice of the nation.
During World War II, they framed collaboration with the Japanese as a matter of national survival and parroted the co-prosperity ideology (Rafael, 1991). After the war, President Manuel Roxas granted them amnesty, erasing any lingering questions about their power and legitimacy (Rafael, 1991).
This “oligarchic apparatus,” a complex web of power comprising both old and new oligarchs, laws and institutions, has since become the very framework of the nation. While the election of Marcos Jr in 2022 might have appeared as a return to power, it was but an expression of the enduring power and influence of this apparatus.
So entrenched is the oligarchic apparatus that efforts to challenge this dominance have largely failed. The Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG), established to recover stolen assets from the deposed president and his cronies, has made little progress. Despite an estimated $30 billion in unexplained Marcos wealth, only $3.4 billion has been recovered (Montalvan II, 2023)
In 2024, several cases tied to Marcos’ family assets were dismissed by the Philippines’ anti-graft court due to prosecution delays (Elemia, 2024). Notably, PCGG chairpersons and commissioners, as with most executive positions in government above director, and judges and prosecutors, are appointed by the president.
The oligarchic apparatus has always moved unfettered and largely unopposed—but today it stands at its most organized and entrenched form. The durability of this system raises an uncomfortable question for the ICC, which relies on government assent—and therefore the incumbent’s support—to carry out its mandate: can true political accountability exist in a nation where oligarchic rule has become indistinguishable from the state itself?
None of this discounts other explanations for this precipitate political moment. Duterte’s (and his daughter’s) strongman politics, amplified by his war on drugs, emboldened an already corrupt and violent police force and inflamed drug rivalries, setting in motion a new cycle of violence that ultimately turned against him.
Yet strongman politics and even the “anti-oligarch” rhetoric are hardly unique to Duterte, nor was his war on drugs new. Since the fall of Marcos Sr in 1986, strongman candidates have pursued the presidency in every election (e.g., Alfredo Lim, Panfilo Lacson) (Garrido, 2020).
This bias for strongman politics reflects the Filipino’s evolving experience of democracy, one that points to an understanding of the limits of reforms within the existing democratic institutions, such as the failed attempts to break monopolies in key sectors (e.g., utilities) via constitutional amendment.
To call Duterte’s arrest “justice,” then, is to deny a deeper truth: his politics was not an aberration but a reckoning—however flawed—of a political and economic hegemony decades in the making, perfected by no less than Marcos Sr, where oligarchs and the state preserve their dominance while stifling competition and perpetuating poverty, criminality, and even the drug trade in the nation’s peripheries.
Lest we forget, the Marcos Sr dictatorship also facilitated the rise of Jose ‘Don Pepe’ Oyson, a petty smuggler who became the godfather of a methamphetamine trade, with the protection of the police and the military (Sidel, 1999). Duterte’s arrest has not corrected this history; it obscured it in a masterstroke of cooptation.
In this, Marcos is not alone. Time and again, a lineage of neo-colonized intellectuals has played a pivotal role in dissolving the memory of past revolutionary struggles and negotiating compromises that only further entrench oligarchic dominance—from the ilustrados reconciled with the colonial apparatus during the Spanish era to the educated gentry under American rule, to the progressive-minded enablers of the current regime who use the language of justice to paint illusory victories and obscure how deeply they reinforce the power structure they claim to dismantle—the very pawns of an oligarchic order (San Juan, 2024).
The oligarchs’ greatest strength lies not just in their control, but in their mastery of shaping perceptions and mimicking the language of reform. What appears as a battle for justice often is little more than a recalibration of entrenched power.
Oligarchy corrodes, bending even justice, truth, and perception to its will. Yet beneath the rot, the quiet hum of resistance grows: unseen, but ever present, and slow, yet as relentless as steel sharpening over time.
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