DAVAO CENTRAL COLLEGE

College of Education and Liberal Arts

Toril, Davao City, Philippines
Tel. No. (082) 291-1882 / Fax No. (082) 291-2053
With Accredited Programs by ACSCU-ACI

▪ Email Address: [email protected] ▪ Website: www.davaocentralcollege.com

SSC 2- Teaching Social Studies in Elementary Education

(Philippine History and Government)
STUDY GUIDE
Unit 5: The Third and Fourth Republic (Martial Law Period)
Lesson 14: Administration of President Diosdado Macapagal and President Ferdinand Marcos

Introduction

The President of the Philippines is elected by direct vote by the people for a term of six years.
He may only serve for one term and is ineligible for reelection. The term of the President of the
Philippines starts at noon of the 30th day of June after the election. Article VII, Section 1, of the
1987 Constitution vests executive power on the President of the Philippines. The President is the
Head of State and Head of Government, and functions as the commander-in-chief of the Armed
Forces of the Philippines. As chief executive, the President exercises control over all the executive
departments, bureaus, and offices.

Learning Objectives

LO3: Promote unity among ethnic groups and regions in the Philippines; and importance
of proper civic responsibility.

Intended Learning Outcomes

o Critique the Philippine presidents’ exercise of power.

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Key Concepts:
Administration of President Diosdado Macapagal and President Ferdinand Marcos

Diosdado Macapagal, (born Sept. 28, 1910,

Lubao, Philippines—died April 21, 1997, Makati, Phil.),
reformist president of the Philippines from 1961 to 1965.
After receiving his law degree, Macapagal was admitted to
the bar in 1936. During World War II he practiced law in
Manila and aided the anti-Japanese resistance. After the
war he worked in a law firm and in 1948 served as second
secretary to the Philippine Embassy in Washington, D.C.
The following year he was elected to a seat in the Philippine
House of Representatives, serving until 1956. During this
time, he was Philippine representative to the United
Nations General Assembly three times. From 1957 to 1961
Macapagal was a member of the Liberal Party and vice president under Nacionalista president
Carlos Garcia. In the 1961 elections, however, he ran against Garcia, forging a coalition of the
Liberal and Progressive parties and making a crusade against political corruption a principal
element of his platform. He was elected by a wide margin.
While president, Macapagal worked to suppress graft and corruption and to stimulate the
Philippine economy. He placed the peso on the free currency-exchange market, encouraged
exports, passed the country’s first land-reform legislation, and sought to curb income tax evasion,
particularly by the wealthiest families, which cost the treasury millions of pesos yearly. His
reforms, however, were crippled by a House of Representatives and Senate dominated by the
Nacionalistas, and he was defeated in the 1965 presidential elections by Ferdinand Marcos.
In 1972 he chaired the convention that drafted the 1973 constitution, but in 1981 he
questioned the validity of its ratification. In 1979 he organized the National Union for Liberation
as an opposition party to the Marcos regime.

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 Ferdinand Marcos, in full Ferdinand Edralin
Marcos, (born September 11, 1917, Sarrat, Philippines—
died September 28, 1989, Honolulu, Hawaii, U.S.),
Philippine lawyer and politician who, as head of state from
1966 to 1986, established an authoritarian regime in the
Philippines that came under criticism for corruption and
for its suppression of democratic processes.
Marcos attended school in Manila and studied law
in the late 1930s at the University of the Philippines, near
that city. Tried for the assassination in 1933 of a political
opponent of his politician father, Marcos was found guilty
in November 1939. But he argued his case on appeal to the Philippine Supreme Court and won
acquittal a year later. He became a trial lawyer in Manila. During World War II he was an officer
with the Philippine armed forces. Marcos’s later claims of having been a leader in the Filipino
guerrilla resistance movement were a central factor in his political success, but U.S. government
archives revealed that he actually played little or no part in anti-Japanese activities during 1942–
45.
From 1946 to 1947 Marcos was a technical assistant to Manuel Roxas, the first president
of the independent Philippine republic. He was a member of the House of Representatives (1949–
59) and of the Senate (1959–65), serving as Senate president (1963–65). In 1965 Marcos, who was
a prominent member of the Liberal Party founded by Roxas, broke with it after failing to get his
party’s nomination for president. He then ran as the Nationalist Party candidate for president
against the Liberal president, Diosdado Macapagal. The campaign was expensive and bitter.
Marcos won and was inaugurated as president on December 30, 1965. In 1969 he was reelected,
becoming the first Philippine president to serve a second term. During his first term he had made
progress in agriculture, industry, and education. Yet his administration was troubled by increasing
student demonstrations and violent urban guerrilla activities.
On September 21, 1972, Marcos imposed martial law on the Philippines. Holding that
communist and subversive forces had precipitated the crisis, he acted swiftly; opposition
politicians were jailed, and the armed forces became an arm of the regime. Opposed by political
leaders—notably Benigno Aquino, Jr., who was jailed and held in detention for almost eight
years—Marcos was also criticized by church leaders and others. In the provinces Maoist
communists (New People’s Army) and Muslim separatists (notably of the Moro National
Liberation Front) undertook guerrilla activities intended to bring down the central government.
Under martial law the president assumed extraordinary powers, including the ability to suspend
the writ of habeas corpus. Marcos announced the end of martial law in January 1981, but he

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continued to rule in an authoritarian fashion under various constitutional formats. He won election
to the newly created post of president against token opposition in June 1981.
Marcos’s later years in power were marred by rampant government corruption, economic
stagnation, the steady widening of economic inequalities between the rich and the poor, and the
steady growth of a communist guerrilla insurgency active in the rural areas of the Philippines’
innumerable islands.
By 1983 Marcos’s health was beginning to fail, and opposition to his rule was growing.
Hoping to present an alternative to both Marcos and the increasingly powerful New People’s
Army, Benigno Aquino, Jr., returned to Manila on August 21, 1983, only to be shot dead as he
stepped off the airplane. The assassination was seen as the work of the government and touched
off massive antigovernment protests. An independent commission appointed by Marcos concluded
in 1984 that high military officers were responsible for Aquino’s assassination.
To reassert his mandate, Marcos called for presidential elections to be held in 1986. But a
formidable political opponent soon emerged in Aquino’s widow, Corazon Aquino, who became
the presidential candidate of the opposition. It was widely asserted that Marcos managed to defeat
Aquino and retain the presidency in the election of February 7, 1986, only through massive voting
fraud on the part of his supporters. Deeply discredited at home and abroad by his dubious electoral
victory, Marcos held fast to his presidency as the Philippine military split between supporters of
his and of Aquino’s legitimate right to the presidency. A tense standoff that ensued between the
two sides ended only when Marcos fled the country on February 25, 1986, at U.S. urging. He went
into exile in Hawaii, where he remained until his death.
Evidence emerged that during his years in power Marcos, his family, and his close
associates had looted the Philippines’ economy of billions of dollars through embezzlements and
other corrupt practices. Marcos and his wife were subsequently indicted by the U.S. government
on racketeering charges, but in 1990 (after Marcos’s death) Imelda was acquitted of all charges by
a federal court. She was allowed to return to the Philippines in 1991, and in 1993 a Philippine court
found her guilty of corruption (the conviction was overturned in 1998).

References

https://www.officialgazette.gov.ph/about/gov/exec/#:~:text=The%20President%20is%20the%20
Head,departments%2C%20bureaus%2C%20and%20offices
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Diosdado-Macapagal
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ferdinand-E-Marcos