Virata: Martial law pillar
MY condolences to the family of Cesar Virata, who passed away on Oct. 2. However, especially since I seem to be alone in this venture, I cannot acquiesce to not pointing out that he was one of the two pillars of martial law, the other being the late Juan Ponce Enrile. Virata was in charge of the economy, Enrile the military.
That regime resulted in such an economic catastrophe for the country, which started in 1983, that it took us 22 years, not until 2004, to recover the GDP per capita level that year of $1,898. Countless Filipinos died of starvation and lived in misery because of that economic disaster.
If there is any single explanation for our underdevelopment, it is that crisis from 1983 to 1985.
And who was managing the economy for the dictator Marcos since 1972 that led to that quagmire?
It is the height of intellectual dishonesty — and a shameless misrepresentation of history — for the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, the Foundation for Economic Freedom and other big business organizations to deliver panegyrics in the late Cesar Virata’s honor without even mentioning the term “martial law.” It’s as if Albert Speer were honored as one of Germany’s greatest economic managers without mentioning that he was Hitler’s Minister of Armaments and War Production.
Virata ignored the human rights abuses, the torture and killings of many of my comrades during martial law. As a reporter covering Virata in the early 1980s, I asked him why he wasn’t protesting human rights abuses when he was by then the prime minister, the second most powerful man in the country at that time. He scolded me: “It’s obvious I’m busy with other duties.”
In the 40 years he lived after the 1986 overthrow of Marcos, he never apologized for being Marcos’ No. 2 man, never expressed remorse over the killings that happened, especially after Marcos made the Batasan Pambansa elect him as prime minister, nor even over having presided over the severe downturn of the economy he was supposed to manage.
He held the premiership post from 1981 until the end of that regime on Feb. 25, 1986. This was the period when Marcos’ military apparatus worsened its campaign of repression because the dictator was losing his grip on power.
My fellow Atenean and comrade Edgar Jopson was brutally murdered in 1982 after he had already been captured by an army arresting party. Opposition leader Benigno Aquino was killed in broad daylight on the tarmac on Aug. 21, 1983; Fr. Zacarias Agatep was killed in 1982; Cesar Climaco in 1984; Alex Orcullo also in 1984; Fr. Tulio Favali in 1985; and Evelio Javier in 1986. These are just among the most well-known brutal murders when Virata was prime minister. He never said a single word to feel remorse about these killings, no record of him appealing to Marcos or Enrile to stop the atrocities. I would know: I covered him as a Business Day reporter and attended every single press conference he held.
Prime
Marcos trusted him so much that he had practically anointed him as his successor when he made him prime minister in 1981. Virata took the title seriously; his aides asked us reporters to address him as “Prime.” In the closing months of Marcos’ rule, Virata said he was willing to relinquish his finance portfolio but initially declined to abandon the premiership, arguing that because the Batasang Pambansa had elected him, his resignation should formally be submitted to that body.
I discuss this point not to condemn Virata, who has passed on to eternity, but to point out the reality of Marcos’ martial law, hidden from most Filipinos’ view. Martial law was not simply the project of one power-hungry man, Marcos, but of the Philippine big-business elite. Lenin claimed that the modern state is nothing but the executive committee of the capitalist class. In this framework, Virata was a prime member of that committee.
It is always the world-view of the elite, now dominantly the big capitalists, which determines the dominant view in any society. Virata had represented the big-business elite, and therefore in the same way that they view themselves, they have mythologized Mr. Prime Minister and portray him as having zero responsibility for the economic catastrophe and human rights abuses during martial law.
It is irrelevant whether or not they were dragged into accepting Marcos’ imposition of martial law in September 1972. But by the mid-1970s, big capitalists were enthusiastically supporting martial law, and in fact, the wealth of many of them grew by leaps and bounds during the dictatorship.
Henry Sy set up his first SM Mall in Quiapo in October 1972, shortly after martial law; SM Makati in 1975, in Cubao in 1984, and just as the economic crisis was starting in 1985, his big breakthrough as Mall King, SM North EDSA, which opened in 1985. Ayala Corp. got listed in November 1976. In fact, while Marcos nurtured his cronies and dismantled oligarchs supporting his archenemy, the Lopez clan, martial law saw the growth of what are now the biggest conglomerates: that of the Gokongweis, Lucio Tan, Aboitiz, Consunji, the Davao-based Alcantaras, Concepcion, Cebu’s Gaisanos and Rustan’s Tantocos. The semiconductor industry took off in the 1970s, and the big American players set up factories in the country: Intel, Texas Instruments, Motorola and National Semiconductor — many of which folded up as a result of strikes by leftist federations that the Aquino government coddled. Export processing zones were set up in Baguio, Cebu and Cavite.
Oligarchs
Marcos repressed only a few oligarchs, the Lopezes (whose Meralco was taken over by Imelda’s brother Benjamin “Kokoy” Romualdez, the father of Martin), the steel-manufacturing Jacintos, and the Enrique Razon clan, whose core port management business was taken over by Imelda’s brother Alfredo “Bejo” Romualdez.
As a nation, we have to learn from our real history, and transcend the emotional attachments of those that Virata recruited into government, or got them appointed to the top economic organizations like the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, or admired his managerial skills. This requires tearing down the mythology around him that has hidden the fact he was the chief implementor of the free-market, minimize-government-role-in-the-economy ideology, also known as the Washington Consensus, and neoliberal economic policy.
That was the Marcos regime’s economic ideology, the neoliberalism that in the 1980s was called the Washington Consensus as three big economic institutions based in that capital city disseminated it as if it were gospel truth — the US Treasury, the World Bank and the IMF. The implementation of this ideology was a major factor in our nation’s poverty, as well as those of the Latin American dictatorships such as Chile and Argentina.
An Ateneo anti-Marcos manifesto back in 2016 said the Marcos regime’s “debt-driven growth” was disastrous for the Philippines. An engineer mourning the death of Philippine manufacturing wrote in a guest column in another paper, blaming an industrial policy that “lacked focus.” Both are right about the symptoms. Both avoided naming the man who presided over each: Virata.
The record shows a finance chief who signed for the loans, who presided over the manipulation of our international-reserve figures to falsely portray a healthy financial situation, and used his considerable power to defeat the program that aimed at building the country’s industrial capacity. The country built up the huge foreign debt without the industry. That, more than any single crony or any single dictator, is the shape of our underdevelopment.
Foreign debt
As finance secretary and primus inter pares in the Central Bank’s Monetary Board, he negotiated and approved all foreign debt incurred by government and the private sector. It was the buildup of our foreign debt until the government had to default on payments in 1983, that was the trigger for the economic crisis that started soon after.
It was Virata who gave the go-ahead for the building of that symbol of Marcos mismanagement, the mothballed Bataan Nuclear Power Plant, since he was the dominant figure in the Monetary Board, the sole authority that approves foreign loans and board member of the National Power Corp., the state agency that implemented the project.
His admirers often claim he led an austere life. His biographer, Gerardo Sicat, described his life in government as one of “self-abnegation.” That was just one of the many lies Sicat wrote in his book that I had discussed in a 2016 column. The Commission on Audit list shows Virata as chairman or board member of 22 government entities — many of which borrowed abroad or on-lent foreign money to private firms. Add his seats representing the country at the IMF and the World Bank, and the directorships he held came to 24, more than Imelda Marcos’ 22. Had he collected just P50,000 from each in salaries and honoraria, that would have come to P1.2 million a month, the equivalent of P12 million now, nearly the salary of the highest-paid government official now, the BSP governor.
It is very strange that for a former academic (he was dean of the UP School of Business Administration from 1960 to 1967), Virata didn’t write a single piece in the 40 years after his boss Marcos was deposed to explain his role and insights during that darkest period.
He was more intellectually honest than the officials of BSP and the Foundation for Economic Freedom, and couldn’t bring himself to lie. Being the insider during martial law though, he deprived the country of valuable insights during that crucial period of our history.
Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao
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Virata: Martial law pillar
Source: Breaking News PH
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