The Cost of Leaving

The Cost of Leaving

Mary Jane Veloso, citizenship abroad,
and the economics of protection 

 

When Ferdinand Marcos Jr. told reporters in Eastern Visayas that he had signed an absolute pardon for Mary Jane Veloso, the announcement was almost striking for how little ceremony it required. “I signed her pardon yesterday,” he said. The document had been signed on September 24, 2026; the following evening, after the Department of Justice transmitted the release order to the Bureau of Corrections, Veloso walked out of the Correctional Institution for Women in Mandaluyong. A case that had occupied presidents, prosecutors, diplomats, courts, churches, migrant organizations and two governments for more than a decade had reached its legal conclusion in the most ordinary way available to executive power: a paper had been placed before the President and the President had put his name on it.

There was nothing ordinary about what preceded the signature. Veloso was arrested at Yogyakarta’s airport in April 2010 after Indonesian authorities found 2.6 kilograms of heroin in her luggage. She was convicted and sentenced to death later that year. From the beginning she maintained that she had not knowingly carried narcotics, saying that recruiters who had promised her employment abroad had given her the suitcase. In April 2015 she was brought within hours of execution by firing squad before Indonesia unexpectedly spared her. She remained imprisoned there for nearly another decade and returned to the Philippines only in December 2024, after Manila and Jakarta negotiated her transfer. She was forty-one by the time Marcos pardoned her.

It is tempting to regard the pardon as the end of an unusually long humanitarian drama, and in the personal sense it is. No theory of development is needed to explain what freedom means to someone who has spent almost sixteen years imprisoned, much of that time under a death sentence. Children grew up while their mother was in prison. Parents aged while they waited. Appeals that once concerned whether Veloso would still be alive the following morning gradually became arguments about testimony, trafficking, prisoner transfer and finally clemency. The vocabulary changed because time changed the problem. 

But the Veloso case has never fitted comfortably inside the boundaries of one criminal conviction. It began with something considerably more ordinary in Philippine economic life: a woman needed work, and the work appeared to exist somewhere else. Between the worker and the promised livelihood stood recruiters, unfamiliar destinations, documents and travel arrangements she did not control, and people who knew considerably more about the proposed journey than she did. Veloso’s claim was that she trusted those intermediaries and accepted a suitcase whose illicit contents she did not know. Whether one approaches that account through criminal law, labor economics or the law of trafficking, the underlying asymmetry is familiar. A worker with few alternatives must often depend upon the person who claims to possess an opportunity. 

The extremity of Veloso’s eventual predicament can obscure how conventional its beginning was. The Philippines has spent decades learning to regard departure as one of the normal ways a household improves its circumstances. A job in Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Europe or aboard a ship may pay several times what the same worker can obtain at home. The first remittance can finance tuition, medicine, a roof repair, debt repayment or a small business. Overseas employment has become sufficiently ordinary that the elaborate institutional architecture surrounding it—recruitment agencies, training centers, government offices, remittance companies, banks, insurance products—can make the original economic fact seem almost invisible. Someone leaves because the expected return from leaving appears better than the expected return from staying. 

Most of those journeys do not end in an Indonesian prison. That is precisely why Veloso’s case is useful. Catastrophes reveal relationships that normal transactions conceal. The recruiter who honestly matches a worker to a foreign employer performs an economic service, reducing the cost of information and access. The dishonest recruiter exploits the same advantage. The worker usually knows less about the employer, the destination and the route. She may already have borrowed money. Her family may be waiting for the promised income. The intermediary may control not only access to the job but the documents, transportation and possessions accompanying the worker across a border. The same arrangement that makes labor mobility possible can, under sufficiently unequal conditions, make exploitation unusually easy. 

By April 2015, the economics of Veloso’s departure had been replaced by the mechanics of capital punishment. Indonesia was preparing to execute a group of prisoners convicted of narcotics offenses. Veloso was among them. Philippine appeals for clemency had failed. Then the circumstances changed. Maria Kristina Sergio, the recruiter accused of deceiving Veloso, surrendered to Philippine authorities, and Manila found itself in possession of a new argument. Veloso was no longer useful merely as a condemned prisoner asking for mercy; she might be a necessary witness against the people alleged to have trafficked her. 

Benigno Aquino III, then attending an ASEAN summit in Malaysia, appealed directly to Indonesian President Joko Widodo. Philippine officials argued that both countries had an interest in going beyond a courier and pursuing the network allegedly responsible for using her. Indonesian authorities halted Veloso’s execution while the other condemned prisoners were put to death. Reuters reported at the time that officials on the Philippine side understood the reprieve as an agreement, in effect, to pursue the larger trafficking network rather than simply punish what Cabinet Secretary Rene Almendras called a “mere courier.” 

The intervention deserves neither sentimental embellishment nor dismissal. Aquino’s critics were correct to note that the rescue came extraordinarily late. Migrant organizations had been raising questions about the case before the final hours. A state that arrives only when a citizen is already awaiting a firing squad cannot easily present itself as a model of preventive administration. Those who believed Veloso had been trafficked understandably wanted something more than a stay of execution. Their argument was not simply that Indonesia should postpone killing her, but that the circumstances surrounding her recruitment should fundamentally alter the way the case was understood. 

Yet timing does not make outcome irrelevant. The appeal came at the eleventh hour, but the eleventh hour has unusual importance when the twelfth is execution. Aquino did not compel Indonesia to repudiate its legal system. The Philippine government instead supplied Jakarta with another interest that could operate within Indonesian sovereignty: a living Veloso could testify in a criminal case involving the people alleged to have arranged the journey. Indonesia retained jurisdiction. It retained its judgment. But diplomacy created room within the exercise of Indonesian authority. 

This distinction becomes important because the reprieve was followed almost immediately by an uglier argument at home. When Celia Veloso returned to the Philippines after her daughter had been spared, she was expected by some supporters of the Aquino administration to speak principally in gratitude. Instead, she thanked the people, churches, migrant groups and others who had rallied to her daughter’s cause and then spoke angrily about the government. She said the case had been neglected and that the family had questions for officials now that they were back in the country. “There are many things we will demand answers for from the government,” she said in substance at the May 1 press conference. 

The reaction was remarkable. Celia was denounced as "ingrata"—an ingrate. Social-media users attacked the family for criticizing an administration that, they argued, had just prevented Mary Jane’s execution. Some posts went beyond criticism into fantasies of punishment. The hashtag politics of the moment included calls for Celia herself to face a firing squad. Contemporary reporting recorded the intensity of the backlash; days later, Celia publicly appealed for understanding, explaining that her anger came from the experience of watching a daughter she believed innocent sit in a foreign prison and nearly die. 

One pro-Aquino comment from the period captured the political psychology better than any formal defense of the administration could have done. It scoffed at the Veloso family for suggesting that Aquino had failed them, arguing that without his breaking protocol Mary Jane would have been “riddled with bullets” along with the other foreigners executed that night. It then moved beyond defending Aquino and questioned Veloso’s innocence itself: perhaps, the writer suggested, she knew what was in the suitcase and had been blinded by money; perhaps the family would have enjoyed the commission had the shipment succeeded. The family were then called ingrates. Yet the same political voice could later express surprise that Veloso remained alive after Duterte had taken a markedly harder position toward her case. 

It would be unfair to treat one social-media comment as representative of Aquino’s constituency, just as it would be careless to assume that every person who criticized Celia was part of an organized operation. But the episode became notable enough to generate subsequent academic study. A 2016 article in the University of the Philippines journal Daluyan, “#ingrata at si Mary Jane Veloso: Mga Bakas ng Trolling sa Spreadable Media,” examined the controversy specifically as a case involving political trolling and the circulation of the ingrata label. A contemporaneous Pinoy Weekly investigation also argued that some suspicious accounts participating in the attack appeared to behave like organized political trolls, while acknowledging that many genuine users shared the same views. What these materials establish is the existence of a trolling controversy and a recognizable pattern of political messaging; they do not establish, on their own, that Malacañang centrally ordered an “ingrata” campaign. That is an important distinction in a history already overburdened with partisan certainty. 

The more interesting fact is that such coordination was not necessary for the argument to flourish. The moral intuition behind ingrata was already culturally familiar. A powerful figure had helped someone in distress; the beneficiary should therefore exhibit gratitude. Criticism after receiving assistance appeared unseemly, almost treacherous. Translated from the household or patron-client relationship into politics, however, the idea produces an unusual theory of citizenship. It suggests that when a government performs an obligation successfully, the citizen incurs a personal political debt to the officials who performed it. 

This is where the Veloso affair becomes more than another partisan quarrel from the Aquino years. A democracy cannot easily operate on the proposition that citizens petition the state as clients approaching a patron. A president does not spend his private fortune when the foreign service intervenes abroad. Diplomats, prosecutors and officials act under public authority and are paid from public funds. If they save a citizen’s life, that achievement can be acknowledged without transforming the rescued family into political dependents. 

Gratitude and accountability can exist simultaneously. Celia Veloso could recognize that Aquino’s final intervention mattered while still asking why the case had reached the firing squad before such urgency appeared. The two propositions do not cancel each other. A family whose house is saved by firefighters may thank the firefighters and still ask why building inspections failed. A business protected from fraud by regulators may recognize the enforcement action while still questioning why the warning signs were ignored. Public administration is evaluated over a sequence of actions; a successful final act does not purchase immunity from examination of everything preceding it. 

This was particularly obvious when one looked beyond Philippine partisan politics. More than a decade ago, support for Veloso was hardly confined to Filipinos or to the domestic opposition. Indonesian migrant workers became prominent participants in the campaign to save her. Migrante International later thanked Indonesian migrant organizations for helping lead the effort in Indonesia and said their appeals to Widodo had been crucial to the suspension of the execution. Reporting at the time described Indonesian migrant groups, women’s organizations and other activists holding vigils and lobbying Indonesian authorities. 

Their involvement made intuitive sense. Indonesian migrant workers did not need to share Philippine party allegiances to recognize the structure of the story. Many had themselves left home through recruitment networks, worked under foreign employers and lived in countries where a misunderstanding, abusive contract or confiscated document could suddenly become a legal crisis. The argument that Veloso might have been a trafficking victim rather than an intentional drug smuggler resonated because the underlying vulnerability was not uniquely Filipino. It belonged to migrant labor. 

I remember that atmosphere in Hong Kong around the eve of May Day in 2015. At an interfaith gathering, Indonesian migrant women were crying over the prospect that Mary Jane might be executed. Elsewhere in Hong Kong, Indonesian and Filipino migrant workers demonstrated together; Antara reported Indonesian workers joining Filipinos outside the Indonesian consulate to demand that the execution be stopped. They carried the issue not as an abstraction about Philippine presidential performance but as something recognizably close to their own lives. 

It is difficult to reconcile that scene with the online desire to punish Celia for insufficient gratitude. The women crying in Hong Kong were not asking whether Aquino deserved credit in the next election. They were reacting to the possibility that a migrant worker might be killed despite credible indications that she had been used by others. Yet in Manila the argument was rapidly being translated into the grammar of partisan loyalty: the President had acted, therefore the family should know whom to thank; criticism of the administration was treated almost as a betrayal of the rescue itself. 

The strange consequence was that some defenders of Aquino began to reproduce a punitive logic that would become much easier to recognize during the Duterte era. If Mary Jane carried the drugs, perhaps she deserved the consequences. If the President saved her, the family should stop complaining. If they continued to complain, perhaps they did not deserve sympathy in the first place. The rhetoric differed from Duterte’s later language, but one premise was surprisingly durable: once the state had acted, the citizen’s claim to challenge the state became morally suspect. 

Rodrigo Duterte approached the case from another direction, although the eventual destination could look familiar. During his September 2016 visit to Indonesia, Duterte met Widodo. Indonesian reports subsequently quoted Widodo as saying that Duterte had given a “go-ahead” concerning Veloso’s execution. Philippine officials disputed that account. Presidential spokesman Ernesto Abella said Duterte had told Widodo, “Follow your own laws. I will not interfere.” Foreign Affairs Secretary Perfecto Yasay likewise denied that Duterte had issued an explicit green light. The Palace position was that Duterte had accepted Indonesia’s right to follow its judicial process rather than personally authorized Veloso’s death. 

That qualification matters. Political memory has a habit of simplifying ambiguous exchanges until the version most useful to one faction becomes common knowledge. It would be inaccurate to state as proven fact that Duterte directly instructed Indonesia to execute Veloso. Indonesian and Philippine accounts differed. Duterte himself initially kept the details of the closed-door conversation private and said publicly after the visit that the Philippines and Indonesia would continue to respect each other’s judicial processes because “the rule of law is what matters.” 

His later remarks, however, make the underlying view considerably easier to understand. In a December 2016 interview, Duterte said he could not ask for a reprieve for someone convicted in a drug case. “A criminal is a criminal,” he said. His formulation was reciprocal: Filipinos should not interfere with another country’s laws if they did not want foreigners interfering with Philippine law. On drugs, his answer was essentially that offenders had to face the consequences. 

This was more than a statement about narcotics. It reflected a particular conception of citizenship abroad, one closer to the classical territorial understanding of sovereignty than to the increasingly expansive language of consular protection. A Filipino remained Filipino after entering Indonesia, but Philippine nationality did not travel with her as a portable legal enclave. Indonesian territory meant Indonesian law. Indonesian courts determined criminal responsibility. Indonesian penalties followed Indonesian judgments. The Philippine passport identified her nationality and entitled her to consular representation, but it did not place a second criminal jurisdiction around her. 

The familiar expression is “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” It is useful if one does not push it too far. A Filipino entering Indonesia does not stop being Filipino, any more than an Indonesian entering Manila loses Indonesian nationality. What changes is the governing jurisdiction. Citizenship does not give the traveler the option of choosing between two legal systems according to convenience. Territorial sovereignty supplies the first answer to the ordinary criminal-law question: whose law applies here? 

Duterte’s formulation therefore possessed a certain austere coherence. The state might act vigorously when an overseas Filipino was abused by an employer, abandoned by a recruiter or mistreated outside the law, while showing much greater restraint when the host state had already investigated, tried and convicted the Filipino through its own institutions. In that sense, protection had limits. The government could help its citizen navigate the foreign system, but it should not behave as though the foreign system ceased to matter merely because the accused possessed a Philippine passport. 

This view also sat comfortably beside Duterte’s broader foreign-policy doctrine. Returning from regional meetings in September 2016, he repeatedly emphasized “sovereign equality, non-interference and commitment to peaceful settlements of disputes” as principles of his independent foreign policy. The point was larger than Veloso. Duterte wanted relations among states understood as relations among sovereign equals rather than as hierarchies in which one government lectured another about its internal affairs. 

The Veloso case exposed the difficulty hidden inside the elegance of that principle. If she were simply an intentional drug courier, the territorial argument was straightforward. Indonesia had arrested her, tried her and imposed a sentence under Indonesian law. But if she were a trafficking victim who had been deceived into carrying the suitcase, then the fact of conviction did not exhaust the factual problem. Philippine authorities were prosecuting people alleged to have recruited her. Her testimony had become relevant to those proceedings. The categories no longer aligned neatly: the person whom one jurisdiction had convicted as an offender might simultaneously be treated by another as a victim and witness. 

Aquino’s 2015 intervention worked precisely because his government exploited that ambiguity. He did not claim that Indonesia lacked jurisdiction. Manila instead argued that Indonesian interests and Philippine interests intersected: keeping Veloso alive could help expose the network alleged to have placed the drugs in her luggage. The reprieve therefore demonstrated something that the phrase “follow your own laws” can easily obscure. Vigorous diplomatic advocacy and respect for foreign sovereignty are not necessarily opposites. 

This is the difference between recognizing jurisdiction and treating jurisdiction as the end of diplomacy. Governments routinely ask one another for clemency, sentence commutation, humanitarian treatment, evidentiary cooperation and prisoner transfers. None of these requests requires the supplicant government to claim that its own law supersedes the law of the host state. The very existence of diplomacy reflects the fact that sovereign legal systems can have overlapping interests without sharing jurisdiction. 

Duterte’s harder formulation gave greater weight to the conviction itself. “A criminal is a criminal” compresses a complicated set of facts into a status: once law has determined guilt, the political question changes. In the setting of his domestic anti-drug campaign, punishment also had an exemplary function. The offender was not only someone receiving a penalty but someone through whom a warning could be communicated. 

It would go beyond the evidence to conclude that Duterte personally wanted Veloso to die. His government denied that he had ordered such an outcome, and the disputed Widodo account does not prove otherwise. But the political logic of deterrence is visible in Duterte’s own language. Once drugs were involved, his sympathy narrowed. Whether a courier said she had been deceived or exploited became less politically salient than the danger of appearing to excuse a narcotics offense. Punishment instructed others. 

There is a curious continuity here with the earlier ingrata controversy. Some people who opposed Duterte politically had already accepted a related penal intuition while defending Aquino: Mary Jane had been convicted; she had drugs in her luggage; the Aquino government had nevertheless saved her; therefore her family had little standing to demand more. Under Duterte the partisan alignment changed, but the idea that the citizen had reached the limit of what she could reasonably demand from the state remained surprisingly portable. 

The contradiction becomes clearer if one asks a basic democratic question. Does pressuring a government to defend or free a citizen require patronage? If the state acts, is the citizen then indebted to the administration? Such a view makes sense within a system of personal favors: a political patron intervenes, the beneficiary remembers the debt, loyalty follows. It makes much less sense within the theory of republican government. The government is not an independent benefactor. Its diplomatic service exists partly to represent nationals abroad. Its officials exercise delegated authority. The citizen may owe appreciation to individuals who worked exceptionally hard, but gratitude cannot logically extinguish the right to criticize policy. 

Nor does democracy require the family of a prisoner to adopt the government’s preferred interpretation of events. Celia Veloso had watched her daughter approach execution. Her anger may have been politically inconvenient and, at times, rhetorically excessive. That did not create an obligation to become an administration spokesperson after the reprieve. A government confident that its intervention was successful ought to be able to withstand criticism from the family it helped. 

This point matters because patronage thinking and punitive thinking can reinforce one another. The first says that protection is a favor and therefore gratitude is owed. The second says that protection can be withheld from those judged unworthy. Together they transform citizenship from a durable legal relationship into a moral assessment conducted by the state or its supporters: the obedient and grateful citizen deserves help; the troublesome citizen may be left to the consequences. 

Yet citizenship abroad is valuable precisely because governments cannot know in advance which citizen will become inconvenient. Consular protection would mean little if it existed only for people whose innocence was obvious, whose behavior was exemplary and whose families praised the administration. The difficult cases test the institution. They are precisely the cases in which the government must separate its political preferences from its public obligations. 

Duterte’s own foreign policy adds another layer to the problem because he repeatedly described international relations in practical and economic terms. His administration courted investment in China, Japan, Malaysia and Singapore and told business leaders that the Philippines was open for business. In Singapore he emphasized infrastructure, energy, competition and a more investment-friendly environment. At APEC he linked foreign engagement to infrastructure, rural development, human capital and the competitiveness of Philippine business. After his China visit, the administration explicitly said that foreign relations should help create an economy in which working abroad became “an option and no longer a need.” 

There is much that is sensible in such an approach. Foreign relations cannot subsist on ceremonies and communiqués alone. Developing countries require markets, investment, technology, energy security and infrastructure finance. A government that neglects those interests in favor of permanent geopolitical theater does not necessarily serve its citizens better. Economic diplomacy is diplomacy. 

The problem arises when the definition of economics becomes too narrow. Trade, investment, loans and infrastructure are easily classified as economic because they appear in familiar financial categories. A migrant worker in legal trouble is classified as consular or humanitarian. Yet for the Philippines this division is artificial. Labor itself is one of the country’s major international economic flows. 

The numbers make the point without requiring romantic language about modern-day heroes. The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas reported roughly $39.6 billion in personal remittances in 2025, including about $35.6 billion in cash remittances sent through banks. In the first half of 2026, remittance inflows continued to support household income and domestic demand. These are not incidental sums. They influence consumption, housing, education, savings, creditworthiness and the country’s supply of foreign exchange. 

If foreign relations are to be treated substantially as economics, then the overseas worker cannot be placed outside the economic relationship the moment something goes wrong. The worker is not a sentimental attachment to a commercial foreign policy. The worker is part of the commercial relationship. Employers abroad obtain labor; Philippine households obtain wages; banks and remittance firms process the transfers; recruiters and training providers earn income; the balance of payments records the result. 

This is why “respect their laws,” although entirely defensible at one level, can become too convenient at another. It allows a government to separate the pleasant parts of labor mobility from the difficult ones. Wages sent home are economic. A worker sentenced abroad becomes a legal problem belonging to the other country. Investment is bilateral. Consular protection is humanitarian. The classification makes sense bureaucratically, but the underlying economy does not observe it. 

A company cannot reasonably count the income from an activity while insisting that the risks created by the activity belong to someone else. Supply-chain security is part of the cost of trade. Fraud prevention is part of banking. Safety systems are part of manufacturing. Insurance is part of transportation. In the same way, legal assistance, anti-trafficking cooperation and credible consular intervention are costs associated with an economy that sends large numbers of workers into foreign jurisdictions. 

Mary Jane Veloso provides an extreme illustration of what happens when those costs are recognized only after failure. The state eventually deployed enormous institutional resources. Diplomats made representations to Jakarta. Presidents spoke directly. Lawyers pursued parallel proceedings. Prosecutors investigated alleged recruiters. Indonesian migrant organizations joined the campaign. Indonesian officials halted an execution, maintained the prisoner for years and later negotiated her transfer. What had begun as one person’s employment journey became an intergovernmental affair stretching across administrations. 

From a business perspective, this resembles the familiar problem of privatized gains and socialized losses, although the phrase must be used with care. The recruiter who successfully places a worker receives a fee. The foreign employer gets labor. The family receives remittances. The state gains foreign exchange. But when the labor-migration transaction collapses catastrophically, the expenses move outward. The worker loses years. The family pays legal and emotional costs. Courts, diplomats and agencies expend resources. Political capital may be consumed in negotiations with another government. 

Prevention is usually cheaper than rescue, but the institutions benefiting from a transaction do not always bear the entire cost when it fails. This is why better regulation of recruitment matters, but also why regulation by itself cannot answer the entire problem. It treats the point at which vulnerability is exploited; it does not necessarily change the economic conditions producing vulnerability. 

Francis Pangilinan’s response to Veloso’s pardon concentrated on the first level. Illegal recruiters, human traffickers and drug syndicates, he said, should face stronger action because they exploit people seeking work abroad. Sarah Elago of Gabriela placed the case within a broader structure, arguing that Filipinos would remain vulnerable while cheap labor and economically compelled migration continued to shape the labor market. Their political traditions are different, but the two observations need not contradict each other. One asks how predators operate inside the overseas-employment system. The other asks why the system continually produces workers whose need for opportunity weakens their bargaining position. 

The Philippines does not need to romanticize staying home in order to consider this question seriously. Migration is often an exercise of freedom. A nurse who prefers London, a software engineer who chooses Singapore or a seafarer who enjoys an international career is not proof that the Philippine economy has failed. Wealthy societies also send workers abroad. The relevant distinction is between migration as an attractive option and migration as the ordinary household remedy for insufficient opportunity. 

When the second condition becomes widespread, the recruiter acquires unusual economic power. A prospective migrant may know little about the employer beyond what the agency says. She may not understand the host country’s legal system. She may already have borrowed money to obtain documents and transportation. Her relatives may be counting on income that has not yet been earned. Turning down the offer therefore imposes a cost even before departure. 

The intermediary stands in a different position. He knows—or claims to know—the employer, the destination and the process. An honest agent reduces information costs. A dishonest one exploits them. The same asymmetry that allows efficient matching also allows fraud. Veloso’s account that she accepted luggage from people arranging her journey is an extreme version of the point. The person controlling access to the opportunity can acquire influence over details that would otherwise appear absurdly personal: which route the worker takes, which document she presents, which bag she carries. 

Economic desperation does not erase personal responsibility, and one should be cautious about turning every migrant who encounters legal trouble into a passive victim. But desperation alters bargaining power. A person with credible alternatives can decline a suspicious offer. A person who believes this is the only route out may accept conditions that would otherwise appear unreasonable. That difference matters to any serious analysis of trafficking. 

Regulation operates against this imbalance. Governments can license recruiters, investigate agencies, verify contracts, provide pre-departure education, negotiate labor agreements and fund legal assistance abroad. These measures reduce risk. Yet the strongest protection remains the ability to say no. A labor market that provides productive employment at home gives the worker an exit option before the journey begins. 

This is where the celebration of remittances requires business discipline. The inflows are valuable and measurable. They appear each month in central-bank releases and enter discussions of consumption, reserves and the balance of payments. The costs are more dispersed. Recruitment debt appears in household budgets. Separation appears in family life. Abuse becomes a labor or criminal case. Legal emergencies become consular expenditures. Years lost to detention disappear almost entirely from conventional economic accounting. 

A corporation that reported revenue without discussing contingent liabilities would not be regarded as especially sophisticated. Yet national discussion of labor export often comes close to doing precisely that. The foreign exchange is visible; the risks are treated as individual tragedies occurring outside the economic model that helped produce the movement in the first place. 

Duterte’s own government seemed aware of the contradiction. Its economic diplomacy explicitly pursued the kind of investment and domestic growth that, in its language, would eventually make overseas employment an option rather than a necessity. That aspiration deserves to be separated from the administration’s more restrictive view of intervention in foreign criminal cases. The two positions reveal a tension rather than a simple inconsistency. Duterte wanted a sovereign state whose citizens would not have to leave for economic survival; at the same time, when a citizen abroad became subject to another sovereign’s criminal law, he placed unusual weight on non-interference. 

The classical appeal of this position is easy to understand. Citizenship tells you which republic you belong to; territory tells you which law governs you at a given moment. The Philippine state cannot follow every citizen overseas with an invisible boundary around her. But nationality does not become meaningless merely because territorial jurisdiction shifts. If that were so, consular diplomacy itself would be difficult to explain. 

Citizenship abroad has always contained this dual condition. The citizen is subject to the laws of the host state while remaining a national of the home state. Those two facts create the problem that diplomacy exists to manage. A consul cannot overturn the foreign court, but the consul can seek access, ensure representation, transmit evidence, request humane treatment or ask that extraordinary circumstances be considered. A president cannot issue an order to a foreign prison, but a president can ask another president to exercise discretion available under that country’s own law. 

Seen from this perspective, “When in Rome” is not an answer to the Veloso case so much as the beginning of the question. Of course a visitor to Rome obeys Roman law. But suppose the visitor says someone secretly placed contraband in her possession. Suppose alleged recruiters are subsequently arrested in her own country. Suppose her testimony is required to prosecute them. None of these facts abolishes Roman jurisdiction. They do, however, create reasons for the visitor’s own government to speak. 

The dispute between Aquino and Duterte can therefore be described without turning either into a moral caricature. Aquino’s intervention was consequential and very late. Duterte’s theory of territorial sovereignty was coherent and risked becoming too rigid. Aquino demonstrated that diplomatic pressure could operate within respect for Indonesian law. Duterte demonstrated the political appeal of a bright line: the host country’s judgment should normally be accepted, particularly where drugs were concerned. 

Marcos encountered the case at yet another stage. By the time his administration dealt with Veloso, there was no execution scheduled for that week. Years of delay had transformed the problem. The relevant questions were now whether Indonesia would transfer the prisoner, what legal effect the transfer would have and whether the Philippine president could ultimately exercise clemency. Jakarta agreed to send Veloso home in December 2024. Marcos then faced a decision unavailable to Aquino in 2015 and unnecessary to Duterte in 2016: whether to pardon a woman physically in Philippine custody but carrying an Indonesian sentence. On September 24, 2026, he did. 

The three administrations therefore confronted different versions of Mary Jane Veloso. Aquino confronted an execution measured in hours. Duterte confronted a continuing sentence and a question of how aggressively Manila should challenge another state’s penal policy. Marcos confronted a prisoner transfer and clemency. Any comparison that ignores those differences in circumstance risks becoming merely partisan bookkeeping. 

The more useful comparison concerns the conception of the state underneath each moment. Aquino’s final intervention treated diplomatic advocacy as compatible with foreign sovereignty. Duterte stressed that Philippine citizenship did not give a person exemption from another country’s laws. Marcos eventually exercised the sovereign discretion available to the Philippines once Veloso had been returned. These were different instruments applied to different stages, and each tells us something about what government believes citizenship entitles a person to expect. 

The "ingrata" episode adds another dimension because it asks what government believes the citizen owes in return. The answer in a democratic state should be limited. Citizens can be grateful. They can also remain angry. They may praise one action and condemn another. The state does not lose legitimacy when a rescued citizen refuses to become a grateful client. 

There is, after all, something odd in demanding political gratitude from a family while simultaneously celebrating the state for fulfilling a public function. If Aquino’s intervention was admirable because the Philippine government protected a Filipino, then protection was being treated as part of legitimate government. If it was instead a personal favor for which political gratitude was owed, the democratic basis for the praise becomes much weaker. 

The issue extends beyond one administration. Patronage language survives changes of party because it is older than any party. Philippine politics has long blurred the distinction between public service and personal benefaction. A scholarship funded by taxes acquires the politician’s name. Relief goods become evidence of generosity. Access to public institutions is narrated as the accomplishment of a patron. The beneficiary is encouraged to remember who “helped.” 

The danger is not merely symbolic. Once public obligations are recast as favors, selective protection becomes easier to justify. A grateful citizen is deserving; an angry citizen appears less so. A politically inconvenient family can be portrayed as unreasonable even when its substantive complaint remains unanswered. 

Celia Veloso’s refusal to perform gratitude therefore mattered in ways that were easy to miss amid the anger of 2015. She was not arguing that Aquino’s final intervention had no effect on the execution. She was asserting, however crudely, that one successful act did not erase years of frustration. The ferocity of the response revealed how uncomfortable that distinction can be in a political culture accustomed to treating access to state power as a personal transaction. 

The Indonesian migrant women who supported Mary Jane offered, unintentionally, a different model. They had no patronage relationship with Aquino. Many had no political relationship with the Philippines at all. Their solidarity rested on shared economic conditions. They saw a migrant worker whose vulnerability resembled their own. To the extent that the campaign succeeded in making Indonesian authorities look at Veloso differently, it did so by moving her out of the abstract category “drug trafficker” and into the concrete world of recruitment, migration and unequal power. 

That is perhaps the most consequential transformation in the entire case. A legal category had to be reopened by economic facts. The suitcase contained heroin; that was never in dispute. The deeper question was how the suitcase came to be in Veloso’s hands and what she knew about it. The business of recruitment, usually treated as background, became central to the meaning of the crime. 

This is also why the case should resist easy conclusions. “Respect foreign law” is correct but insufficient. “Protect every Filipino” is morally appealing but too broad to function as a legal doctrine. “End labor export” captures one critique of economic dependence but can overlook the agency and genuine benefits experienced by many migrants. “Celebrate remittances” recognizes their economic importance while ignoring the costs distributed outside the national accounts. 

The more useful approach is to hold the contradictions together. The Philippines benefits from labor mobility and should therefore invest in the institutions that make mobility safer. Citizens abroad remain subject to foreign jurisdiction and should therefore be warned clearly that a passport is not immunity. Governments should respect foreign legal systems while retaining the diplomatic confidence to ask for exceptions, clemency or reconsideration when particular facts warrant them. Migrants should possess greater bargaining power before departure so that the need for rescue arises less often. 

This is where foreign relations understood as economics must become broader rather than narrower. Duterte was correct that trade, investment and infrastructure belong at the center of statecraft. But labor mobility means that workers belong there too. A foreign policy that can spend presidential attention securing an infrastructure loan should not regard the legal security of its migrant labor force as extraneous to economics. 

Good relations are not the same as quiet relations. Mature bilateral relations should be capable of accommodating disagreement about a prisoner without threatening trade. If a request for clemency is treated as an unacceptable disruption to commerce, then the commercial relationship has begun to dictate national policy rather than serve it. 

The same is true of sovereignty. Sovereignty does not mean never asking another state for anything. It means that the answer remains the other state’s to give. Aquino could ask; Widodo could refuse. Duterte could decline to ask; Indonesia retained its authority either way. Marcos could negotiate a transfer only because Indonesia agreed to one. Diplomacy occurs precisely in that space between what one government cannot command and what another government may nevertheless be persuaded to do. 

Mary Jane Veloso’s case lasted long enough for every stage of that process to become visible. First there was migration and recruitment. Then arrest and conviction. Then appeals. Then an alleged trafficking network. Then an eleventh-hour reprieve. Then an argument over gratitude. Then another president’s doctrine of non-interference. Then years of waiting, a transfer agreement and finally a pardon. 

The unusual length of the story is what makes it valuable to business policy. Nearly sixteen years separate the original employment journey from the presidential pardon. During that time the Philippines continued to rely heavily on overseas labor, administrations changed, the language of foreign policy shifted and remittance flows kept arriving. Veloso’s ordeal was exceptional; the economic structure that sent her abroad was not. 

This does not mean that the Philippines should aspire to stop its people from leaving. A government that attempted to trap labor at home would merely replace one problem with another. The more ambitious objective is to improve the domestic economy sufficiently that departure ceases to function as compulsion. That requires productive investment, industrial employment, services capable of paying competitive wages, infrastructure, education and the ordinary institutions of a functioning labor market. It is a more difficult program than regulating recruitment agencies because it reaches the source of bargaining power. 

A worker who has alternatives does not become invulnerable, but she becomes harder to exploit. She can question a dubious contract. She can decline to borrow against a promise. She can walk away from a recruiter who asks her to carry something she does not understand. Economic development becomes, in this sense, a form of anti-trafficking policy. 

The Veloso affair also suggests a more disciplined way of thinking about the economic contribution of migration. Remittances should be valued for what they are: income earned by workers and transferred to households. They should not be mistaken for a development strategy in themselves. They may finance private advancement without necessarily creating the domestic productive capacity that would allow the next generation to stay if it wishes. 

For decades, the Philippines has been extraordinarily good at producing workers capable of succeeding in other economies. The harder question is whether it can become equally good at producing enough high-productivity work for them at home. The answer determines whether the overseas worker is principally an expression of Filipino competitiveness or an adjustment mechanism for domestic economic weakness. 

Mary Jane Veloso entered this system at its most precarious end. She was not an engineer recruited by a multinational corporation with a legal department, nor an executive transferred within a global company. She was a worker seeking employment through informal or poorly protected networks, the part of migration in which information asymmetry is greatest and bargaining power weakest. The disaster that followed was extreme, but the vulnerability was structurally ordinary. 

The pardon cannot repair that structure. Nor can it make the politics surrounding the case disappear. Aquino’s role in the 2015 reprieve remains significant. Duterte’s remarks remain part of the record. Marcos’s pardon is now the act that formally closes the sentence. Supporters of each administration will naturally emphasize different parts of this history. 

But the most important lesson lies outside presidential credit. A modern state cannot promise that its citizens will never encounter foreign law, nor should it pretend that nationality overrides territorial jurisdiction. It can, however, build an economy in which fewer citizens must accept opaque arrangements simply because they need work. It can make recruitment more transparent. It can treat migrant protection as economic infrastructure. It can use diplomacy without confusing advocacy with interference. And it can perform those functions without expecting citizens to repay public service with partisan loyalty. That last point may be the simplest and the easiest to lose. The Veloso family did not receive the reprieve because a president owned the power of mercy as private property. Aquino exercised the office of the Philippine presidency. Duterte later exercised the same office according to a different conception of sovereignty. Marcos now exercises it in granting clemency. Presidents leave; the state remains. A democracy depends upon maintaining that distinction. The citizen may petition the state, criticize it, embarrass it and still retain a claim upon its lawful protection. That is not ingratitude. It is the difference between citizenship and patronage. And abroad, citizenship acquires an even more complicated meaning. The Filipino who enters Indonesia is obliged to obey Indonesian law. The Philippines cannot shield that person from the existence of another sovereign. Yet the citizen does not become politically orphaned at the immigration desk. The home state continues to possess interests and obligations, particularly when credible allegations of trafficking or coercion arise. 

 The old advice remains sound: when in Rome, do as the Romans do. What Mary Jane Veloso’s sixteen-year ordeal demonstrates is that this is a rule for travelers, not a complete theory of foreign policy. The difficult work begins when obedience, guilt, exploitation and citizenship cease to fit neatly together. Veloso left the Philippines looking for work. By the time she was finally free, the journey had passed through a recruiter, an Indonesian airport, a death sentence, a last-minute presidential appeal, an international migrant campaign, an ugly dispute over whether her mother was sufficiently grateful, a second president’s doctrine of non-interference, years of diplomatic negotiation, a prisoner transfer and an absolute pardon. Few employment journeys could accumulate a heavier institutional cost.  

For a country that has made labor mobility an important part of its economic life, that cost belongs in the ledger. The money sent home is real. So is the obligation created when the people earning it cross borders into legal systems the Philippines cannot control. The point of economic diplomacy should not be to choose between commerce and citizens. It should be to understand that, in a labor-exporting country, the citizens themselves are part of the commerce—and that protecting them is part of the price of doing business with the world. 

September 21 and the Continuing Past

September 21 and the Continuing Past

There was something appropriate about the route taken through Manila on September 21.

Activists and multi-sectoral groups gathered at Liwasang Bonifacio before marching toward Mendiola for the 54th commemoration of the declaration of martial law. Their grievances did not stop at 1972. Corruption, human rights violations, the flood-control controversy and the proposed Pax Silica development all appeared in a protest that sought to connect an unhappy past with an equally unsettled present.

The contingent was initially blocked by authorities along Recto near Mendiola before proceeding with its final program. Elsewhere around the capital, police and barricades had already become part of the scenery as thousands were expected to join various September 21 demonstrations. Accountability over corruption, political dynasties and civil liberties figured prominently in the day's mobilizations.

It would be tempting to treat all this as another annual ritual: speeches, placards, the familiar chants of “Never Again,” followed by the inevitable arguments over what martial law accomplished and what it destroyed.

Yet September 21 persists precisely because the argument has never really been confined to martial law. It is also an argument over how power presents itself, how development is sold, how corruption survives political transitions and how easily the language of national salvation can become the language through which entrenched interests protect themselves.

That is why the starting point must still be 1972. Martial law was imposed with promises of order, discipline, reform and national reconstruction. What followed included widespread arrests and detention, torture, enforced disappearances and killings of people considered opponents or critics of the government. Amnesty International documented such patterns during the period; Philippine law itself later formally recognized victims of summary execution, torture, enforced disappearance and other gross human-rights violations committed under the Marcos regime.

These facts need not be embellished. Their weight is sufficient. But the more interesting question today is how such a system explained itself.

Martial law did not advertise repression as its objective. It offered instead a grander proposition: the republic had to be saved and society remade. The old political order was supposedly exhausted. Oligarchs had corrupted democracy. Disorder had become intolerable. Only a more disciplined state could sweep aside the failures of the past and construct something new.

The phrases associated with the period — the “New Society,” the need to “save the republic,” even the notion of a “revolution from the center” — reveal something important about political power. Measures that concentrate authority seldom arrive carrying labels that say concentration of authority. They arrive as solutions to disorder. And the vocabulary was clever because it borrowed the grievances of ordinary people.

The old society really was unequal. Oligarchic power really was a problem. Poverty, landlordism, political patronage and dependence on outside interests were not inventions of martial-law propaganda. The failure lay in claiming that concentrating political authority would solve these problems.

Instead, the attack on the old oligarchy became associated with the rise of cronies and favored interests surrounding the new regime. One arrangement of privilege gave way, in significant respects, to another.

That distinction is worth remembering because it prevents September 21 from becoming merely an argument over whether roads, hospitals or cultural buildings were constructed during the dictatorship. Of course things were built, as Governments build things. But the more serious questions concern lies in how they were financed, who benefited, what institutions were weakened in the process and whether visible construction compensated for costs carried elsewhere by the population. Concrete is an inadequate unit with which to measure political legitimacy.

The same caution applies in the present. The Philippines of 2026 is not the Philippines of 1972. There is no useful analysis in pretending that every controversy involving government is simply martial law reborn. Institutions differ, political competition exists, circumstances change and contemporary abuses require examination on their own terms. But the persistence of certain questions is difficult to ignore. Extrajudicial killings, red-tagging, alleged trumped-up charges, anti-terror laws and the treatment of political dissent have replaced some of the terminology associated with the dictatorship. They are not interchangeable phenomena, and they should not be lazily collapsed into one historical category. Yet they keep alive the older dispute over where legitimate state power ends and political coercion begins.

So does corruption. Every generation seems to discover corruption as though previous generations had somehow neglected the subject. Scandal is exposed, hearings are held, officials denounce wrongdoing, prosecutions begin and reforms are promised. A few years later the country discovers that public money has once again acquired a remarkable talent for finding its way toward private interests.

That recurring spectacle explains why corruption occupied such a prominent place in the September 21 demonstrations. The commemoration became not merely a retrospective condemnation of what happened half a century ago but a convenient occasion for asking why the political structures that permit patronage, concentrated wealth and weak accountability remain so difficult to dislodge.

Pax Silica entered the march from this direction. Opposition to it should not be mistaken for the whole protest, nor should criticism of Pax Silica be reduced to hostility toward technology or foreign investment.

The proposed initiative is tied to semiconductor manufacturing, artificial intelligence infrastructure, critical minerals and other strategic supply chains, with a major hub planned in New Clark City. Supporters see an opportunity to place the Philippines inside higher-value technological industries. Critics, including labor, environmental, church and other civil-society groups, have raised questions about control, land and water use, environmental costs and the extent to which the project aligns Philippine development with the strategic objectives of the United States.

There is a serious economic argument buried beneath the slogans. A semiconductor plant on Philippine soil is not automatically Philippine industrialization. Neither is an artificial-intelligence complex necessarily technological sovereignty. A mine producing strategic minerals may generate exports without developing downstream industry. A data center may attract capital without producing Filipino ownership of the technologies running inside it.

None of this makes such investments undesirable by definition. Foreign capital can create employment. Integration into sophisticated supply chains can expose local firms and workers to new technologies. Industrial parks, transport corridors and energy projects can become foundations for something larger.

But the outcome depends on the terms. That is the part of development policy that ribbon-cuttings tend to obscure. If land, labor, minerals, electricity and public infrastructure are supplied locally while technology, intellectual property, financing and commanding corporate decisions remain elsewhere, then the country may host advanced industry without acquiring much industrial power of its own.

The factory may be modern while the economic relationship remains old. That concern explains why Pax Silica has become useful to a broader critique of Philippine development. Protesters opposing the initiative have explicitly argued that development should occur on Philippine terms rather than those set by foreign powers and large corporations.

Whether that criticism ultimately proves justified will depend on the actual agreements, technology transfers, ownership structures, environmental obligations and industrial policies attached to the project. But the question itself is legitimate.

It is also much older than Pax Silica. Philippine governments have spent decades navigating between domestic oligarchic interests and competing foreign centers of economic and strategic power. Washington retains deep security and commercial links with Manila. Beijing has become a major economic actor and geopolitical rival. Japanese, Korean and European capital occupies important sectors. Global finance exerts its own disciplines through investment, debt and access to markets.

The danger lies in confusing movement between these interests with independence from them. For critics marching on September 21, the issue is not simply American influence, nor should it be. Replacing Washington with Beijing would hardly constitute economic sovereignty. Nor would replacing one set of foreign investors with another while leaving the basic domestic structure untouched.

The problem is less geographical than structural. Wall Street or Shanghai, Washington or Beijing: the relevant economic question is what the Philippines gains beyond the immediate transaction.

Does foreign investment create domestic suppliers? Does it transfer technology? Does it produce engineers and researchers capable of building the next generation of industry? Does it deepen Filipino capital formation? Does it strengthen local control over strategic sectors? Does dependence diminish as development proceeds? Or does the country remain primarily a supplier of labor, land and resources while celebrating each new investment announcement as evidence that industrialization has finally arrived?

Those questions become harder to avoid when set against the conditions experienced by ordinary Filipinos.

The country has changed enormously since 1972. Cities have expanded. Industries have developed. Millions now work in sectors that hardly existed half a century ago. Infrastructure has improved, technology has transformed daily life and the Philippine economy is far larger and more complex.

Yet familiar problems remain stubbornly recognizable: insecure employment, inadequate wages, landlessness, housing shortages, unequal public services, political dynasties and recurring corruption.

This persistence gives every new language of transformation a burden of proof. There was once the New Society. Later governments had their own formulas for national recovery, modernization and reform. "Philippines 2000", "Angat Pinoy 2004", "Daang Matuwid", and more recently came "Build, Build, Build" and now "Bagong Pilipinas". Every administration naturally requires a vocabulary with which to explain itself.

The trouble begins when vocabulary substitutes for examination. Order is not necessarily justice. Discipline is not necessarily consent. Investment is not necessarily industrialization. Infrastructure is not necessarily development. Stability is not necessarily legitimacy.

Nor does questioning these terms require rejecting what they can genuinely accomplish.A useful road remains useful. A functioning railway improves lives. A productive factory creates employment. Foreign partnerships can serve Philippine interests. Public authority is necessary for any functioning society.

The point is precisely to distinguish the thing itself from the political mythology built around it. A road can be necessary and overpriced. A factory can create jobs while transferring little technology. A foreign partnership can be mutually beneficial or profoundly unequal. An administration can construct useful public works and still deserve scrutiny for abuses committed elsewhere.

One does not cancel the other. That is also why arguments defending martial law by listing infrastructure have always been inadequate. They treat repression and development as entries in the same ledger, as though enough bridges might eventually balance an enforced disappearance.

For the families of those arrested, tortured, killed or never seen again, September 21 necessarily means something more intimate than a historical debate over economic statistics. The Philippine state has already recognized that such violations occurred.

For the rest of the country, however, the date poses a different challenge. It asks how a political order promising to destroy oligarchy could produce new concentrations of privilege; how repression could be marketed as discipline; and how policies presented as national development could coexist with enormous private accumulation and continuing poverty.

Those are historical questions, but they are not antiquarian ones. The Marcos dictatorship did not invent inequality, oligarchy or foreign dependence. Its overthrow did not eliminate them. EDSA restored democratic institutions without magically resolving the political economy beneath them. Subsequent administrations operated within many of the same unresolved structures, even as each modified them in important ways.

That is the more sober meaning of a “continuing past.” History does not simply repeat 1972. It does something more complicated. Old problems survive while acquiring new institutions, new personalities and new slogans.

The result is not another New Society but the recurring temptation to believe that political concentration can cure political failure, that foreign alignment can substitute for national strategy, or that impressive construction can settle the argument over who actually benefits from development.

Seen this way, the September 21 march from Liwasang Bonifacio toward Mendiola was less a reenactment of an old struggle than an argument about unfinished business. Pax Silica was part of it, but only part. So were corruption, inequality, state violence, foreign influence and the continuing ability of entrenched interests — domestic or foreign — to adapt themselves to whichever language happens to dominate the moment.

This does not mean that nothing has changed since martial law. Much has. It means instead that democratic memory is most useful when it does more than remember villains and victims. It should also examine the arrangements that made abuse politically possible and economic dependence durable.

“Never Again” remains an important warning. But perhaps the harder lesson of September 21 is that the past rarely announces its return under its old name.

It usually arrives rephrased for the present.  

The Price of Order: Remembering September 21 and the Political Economy of Authoritarian Rule

The Price of Order: Remembering September 21

and the Political Economy of Authoritarian Rule

There are dates in the history of a country that resist conversion into ordinary anniversaries. September 21 belongs to that category in the Philippines, not simply because Proclamation No. 1081 bears that date, but because it has come to represent a political rupture whose consequences extended far beyond the formal declaration of martial law. The arrests, the closing of newspapers and broadcast stations, the detention of political opponents, the enlargement of executive authority, and the subsequent institutionalization of authoritarian rule transformed what had been presented as an emergency measure into a new arrangement of political life. General orders issued immediately afterward directed the arrest and continued detention of persons whom the government considered connected with rebellion, subversion and threats to national security, while other orders placed important categories of offenses within the jurisdiction of military tribunals.

The commemoration of September 21 therefore cannot be separated from the experience of those who were arrested, detained, tortured, killed or disappeared during the years of dictatorship. This is no longer merely a matter of competing recollections between admirers and opponents of the Marcos government. The Philippine State itself, through Republic Act No. 10368, subsequently recognized victims of summary execution, torture, enforced or involuntary disappearance, arbitrary detention and other gross violations of human rights committed during the Marcos regime, and acknowledged a moral and legal obligation to restore their honor and dignity and provide recognition or reparation. The significance of that law lies not merely in the compensation it authorized but in the institutional acknowledgment that the injuries of the period were not simply unfortunate episodes attached to an otherwise conventional administration. They formed part of the historical record of the State and consequently of the obligations inherited by the democratic republic that followed it.

Such remembrance necessarily carries grief and anger, particularly among those whose families experienced detention, disappearance or death. Yet its importance extends beyond the emotional claims of memory. September 21 remains intellectually and politically relevant because the authoritarian experiment of 1972 was justified not merely through the language of emergency but through an ambitious theory of national reconstruction. Martial law was presented as a means of saving the Republic from disorder while simultaneously creating what the government called a New Society. The rhetoric appealed to discipline, social reform, economic development and national regeneration. General Order No. 15, for example, explicitly described one objective of the martial-law proclamation as the achievement of social, economic and political reforms and the transformation of the country into a new society supposedly infused with discipline and social conscience.

The argument had considerable political force because many of the conditions against which it was directed were real. The pre-1972 Republic was hardly an egalitarian democracy. Political parties were frequently personalistic machines, elections were expensive and violent, landed interests retained considerable influence, poverty remained widespread, and access to public authority was substantially conditioned by family, wealth and patronage. Rural insurgency and separatist conflict were real security problems rather than later inventions of official propaganda. The social discontent of the period was likewise genuine. To acknowledge these conditions is not to accept the authoritarian solution that followed; it is instead necessary to understand why the rhetoric of national reconstruction could acquire plausibility among sections of the population dissatisfied with the old order.

The New Society presented itself as a repudiation of precisely these defects. Its official argument held that an exhausted political order dominated by oligarchic interests could no longer reform itself through the conventional mechanisms of liberal democracy. What Ferdinand Marcos would describe as a “revolution from the center” proposed that the State itself would become the principal agent of transformation, disciplining both the political class and society from above while directing the resources necessary for modernization. The old oligarchy was to be restrained, administrative authority centralized, economic development accelerated and the population incorporated into a disciplined national project.

It was an ambitious proposition, but it contained a contradiction that became more apparent as authoritarian rule matured. The concentration of authority that was supposed to free the State from entrenched private interests also made access to the State itself more valuable. Once the executive possessed extraordinary discretion over credit, licenses, contracts, foreign exchange, monopolies, franchises, government guarantees and appointments, the problem of oligarchic influence did not disappear. It changed its institutional location. Competition among established interests was increasingly replaced by a system in which economic advantage depended upon access to an unusually centralized presidency and the networks surrounding it.

The resulting arrangement has frequently been described as crony capitalism, although the phrase itself can conceal as much as it reveals if used merely as an insult. Its more useful meaning concerns the transformation of the boundary between public authority and private advantage. World Bank retrospectives on the Philippine private sector later observed that the distinction between public and private activity had become blurred during the Marcos administration, with selected firms receiving directed credit, foreign-exchange access, tax privileges and other forms of state support. Some investments were productive, while others were inefficient and became liabilities ultimately absorbed by public financial institutions. The broader problem was therefore not state intervention as such, since successful developmental states elsewhere in East Asia also intervened extensively, but the absence of sufficiently impersonal institutions capable of disciplining beneficiaries of state assistance and withdrawing privileges when they failed to serve wider developmental purposes.

This distinction is important because criticism of the Marcos economic order need not proceed from the assumption that government intervention in economic life is inherently undesirable. Such an assumption would itself distort the development experience of much of Asia. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore all employed different combinations of state direction, industrial policy, public investment, controlled finance and collaboration between government and business. The decisive distinction was not between an interventionist State and a laissez-faire one, but between intervention governed by developmental discipline and intervention subordinated to privileged political access. A State that directs credit toward an industry while requiring exports, technological upgrading or measurable increases in productivity performs a different economic function from a State that socializes the liabilities of enterprises because their proprietors possess political connections.

The Philippine case under martial law increasingly revealed the latter danger. State power could be used to reorganize industries, grant monopolistic privileges and extend financial support, yet the State itself lacked effective independent mechanisms through which these decisions could be publicly contested. Congress had ceased to function in its old form; media institutions operated under severe restrictions; opposition figures were imprisoned, marginalized or forced abroad; and the political environment discouraged the kind of scrutiny that might otherwise have exposed the costs of favored economic arrangements at an earlier stage. The suppression of political accountability therefore had economic consequences. Authoritarianism was not simply a question of what government could say or whom it could imprison; it affected the distribution of resources and the ability of society to examine how those resources were being used.

This is why the enduring argument over martial law cannot adequately be resolved by inventories of infrastructure. Roads, bridges, irrigation systems, hospitals, schools, cultural buildings, power plants and other public works were built during the period, and any serious historical assessment has to acknowledge their existence and, where appropriate, their continuing usefulness. Yet physical accomplishment by itself is an insufficient measure of development. Every public structure embodies a financing decision, an allocation of scarce resources and an opportunity cost. A project paid for through foreign borrowing continues to impose obligations long after the inauguration ceremonies have ended. A government guarantee extended to an unsuccessful private enterprise may later become public debt. An industrial undertaking protected from competition may produce employment while simultaneously imposing higher costs elsewhere in the economy. A large infrastructure program may increase productive capacity, but it may also become economically burdensome if projects are poorly selected, contracts are inflated or foreign liabilities accumulate faster than the country's capacity to service them.

The relevant question is therefore not whether public works existed, because they plainly did. The question concerns the economic and institutional terms under which they were undertaken and the distribution of their benefits and costs. The developmental State cannot be evaluated through concrete alone. It has to be examined through employment, productivity, industrial capability, technological acquisition, agricultural transformation, real wages, public health, educational access and the long-term capacity of the economy to reproduce growth without repeatedly depending upon unsustainable external financing.

The external debt accumulated during the 1970s and early 1980s consequently belongs within the discussion. Borrowing is not inherently evidence of economic failure; developing economies commonly borrow to finance investments whose returns are expected to exceed the eventual cost of repayment. The difficulty arises when the quality of investment deteriorates, when borrowed funds sustain politically protected enterprises without corresponding increases in productive capacity, or when the structure of debt leaves the economy dangerously exposed to changes in international interest rates, export conditions and investor confidence. World Bank reviews of the Philippine economy have noted that a number of large investments during the period contributed to the external debt burden without producing commensurate increases in output.

The eventual economic crisis cannot be attributed to a single cause. The oil shocks, the changing international credit environment, higher global interest rates, deteriorating terms of trade, weaknesses in domestic industry, policy errors, capital flight and political instability all formed part of the deterioration. The assassination of Benigno Aquino Jr. in 1983 then intensified an already serious crisis of confidence. Any useful economic history must resist the temptation to explain the collapse entirely through either foreign circumstances or domestic corruption. Both external vulnerability and internal institutional weakness mattered, and they interacted with one another. A heavily indebted economy could have endured international shocks more successfully had investment returns been stronger and public confidence greater, while even competent domestic policy would have confronted severe pressures from the global environment of the period.

What remains particularly relevant is that the promise of authoritarian efficiency did not insulate the Philippines from either economic crisis or political decay. The restriction of political competition removed certain obstacles to rapid decision-making, but it also weakened the mechanisms through which bad decisions might be corrected. Administrative speed and administrative quality are not identical. A government may acquire the capacity to decide quickly while simultaneously losing the institutional capacity to determine whether the decision is correct, because officials become reluctant to transmit unwelcome information upward, private interests cultivate access to concentrated authority, and public institutions become increasingly identified with the political survival of the regime.

The language of the “revolution from the center” deserves particular scrutiny in this regard. It attempted to appropriate grievances traditionally associated with movements seeking structural transformation while insisting that such transformation could be accomplished without transferring political initiative to the population itself. The State would attack oligarchy, direct development and reorganize society, but the citizen would participate largely within structures defined by that same State. The contradiction was obvious: the New Society claimed to act in the name of ordinary Filipinos while narrowing the independent political spaces through which ordinary Filipinos might contest the policies being implemented on their behalf.

This contradiction was most visible when the language of social reform encountered the continuing realities of inequality. The regime promised agrarian transformation, national discipline and economic modernization, yet the structure of landed and commercial power proved more resilient than its rhetoric suggested. Existing oligarchs were weakened in some sectors, but politically favored economic groups emerged or expanded in others. The result was not the abolition of elite economic power but its partial recomposition. A more centralized State altered the manner in which wealth and influence interacted with government without necessarily democratizing ownership or substantially redistributing control over the productive resources of the country.

The experience also demonstrates why the political and economic dimensions of democracy cannot easily be separated. Freedom of the press, judicial independence, freedom of association and political opposition are sometimes treated as liberal luxuries distinct from the material problems of employment, wages and development. In practice, they are among the institutional instruments by which economic power is made answerable to society. Independent journalists investigate questionable contracts and monopolies. Legislatures examine public expenditure. Labor organizations contest wage policies and conditions of work. Farmers' groups challenge land arrangements. Universities subject official development theories to criticism. Courts establish limits upon executive action. When these institutions are weakened, those already possessing administrative or economic power encounter fewer obstacles to converting public authority into private advantage.

The human-rights question thus belongs within the political economy of martial law rather than in a separate moral appendix. Arbitrary detention, torture, disappearance and political intimidation affected not only individual liberties but the capacity of society to organize around competing economic interests. A worker who fears association, a peasant organizer exposed to military suspicion, a student movement constrained by surveillance, or a journalist unable to investigate politically connected firms operates within an economic system in which bargaining power has already been altered by coercive political arrangements.

This is also why the commemoration should avoid a simplistic nostalgia for the constitutional order preceding 1972. The failures of that order were among the conditions that permitted authoritarianism to present itself as an attractive alternative. Restoring elections by itself could not eliminate oligarchy, just as removing martial law could not automatically resolve landlessness, low wages, unemployment, inadequate housing or regional inequality. The deeper historical question concerns whether Philippine democracy has developed institutions capable of addressing these structural problems without repeatedly inviting the argument that political liberty must be suspended because democratic government is supposedly too disorderly to undertake serious reform.

More than half a century after the proclamation, many of the issues that gave force to the language of the New Society remain recognizable, even though the country itself has undergone profound political, demographic and economic change. Questions concerning unequal development, precarious employment, insecure housing, agrarian conflict, the concentration of wealth and dependence upon external sources of capital continue to influence political life. It would be inaccurate to suggest that nothing has improved since the 1970s, just as it would be misleading to treat every contemporary social conflict as a repetition of martial law. The more useful conclusion is that the endurance of these problems continues to create political opportunities for those who promise order as a substitute for difficult institutional reform.

The persistence of practices such as red-tagging demonstrates the relevance of this institutional caution. The Supreme Court has recognized that red-tagging, vilification, labeling and guilt by association may constitute threats to life, liberty or security, while civil-society monitors continue to report cases in which activists, journalists, environmental defenders and organizations are publicly associated with communist or terrorist movements. These contemporary practices do not make the present constitutional order identical to the dictatorship, and historical differences should not be erased for rhetorical convenience. They do, however, show how the vocabulary of national security can extend beyond armed groups and affect individuals engaged in lawful political, labor, environmental or community activity.

The lesson of 1972 therefore lies less in searching for exact repetitions than in recognizing recurring institutional temptations. Governments facing disorder will naturally invoke security, and the State possesses a legitimate responsibility to confront rebellion, terrorism and criminal violence. The democratic question concerns how that authority is exercised, whether accusations are supported by evidence, whether defendants receive due process, whether legitimate dissent remains distinguishable from armed activity, and whether the language of security becomes a convenient instrument against criticism that may be uncomfortable but lawful.

The same caution applies to the rhetoric of discipline. Discipline has frequently possessed an almost mystical place in Philippine discussions of development, as though national poverty were principally a consequence of insufficient obedience among the population. Yet development is not merely the accumulation of personal virtues. It depends upon institutional capability, productive investment, land use, industrial organization, technology, infrastructure, education, public health and the distribution of bargaining power. A poorly paid worker cannot be disciplined into a high-wage industrial economy; a tenant cannot practice his way into land ownership; a country cannot moralize itself into technological independence without institutions capable of financing, coordinating and protecting long-term productive investment.

Authoritarian political language nevertheless finds discipline attractive because it relocates responsibility downward. Structural failures can be attributed to the supposed indiscipline of citizens rather than to deficiencies in government policy or economic organization. Poverty becomes a problem of individual conduct; protest becomes evidence of disorder; demands for redistribution become obstacles to stability. This moralization of economic failure can coexist comfortably with policies that protect powerful interests, since the burden of adjustment is placed primarily upon those with the least influence over the design of policy.

The memory of martial law consequently becomes relevant to the continuing debate over what development means. If development is measured chiefly through highly visible projects, the State can present itself as benefactor while leaving largely unexamined the manner in which those projects are financed and administered. If development is understood more broadly as the enlargement of productive and human capacities, however, then the condition of the worker, farmer, small entrepreneur and household becomes central. The issue is no longer simply how many projects were completed but whether the economic structure enabled ordinary citizens to obtain secure employment, adequate wages, housing, education and meaningful opportunities for advancement.

The infrastructure defense of authoritarian government becomes especially problematic when it implicitly asks that political repression be weighed against economic accomplishment, as though a sufficient quantity of public works could compensate for abuses of state power. This is conceptually mistaken. Public infrastructure is one responsibility of government, while the protection of basic rights is another. The construction of a dam or highway cannot retroactively provide due process to a detainee or restore a person who disappeared in custody. Nor does the existence of human-rights violations establish that every economic undertaking of the same government was without value. Historical judgment need not choose between these two simplifications. It can acknowledge useful public investments while still recognizing that such investments did not confer upon the government a license to violate rights or eliminate political accountability.

For the victims and their descendants, the distinction is especially important because developmental nostalgia can transform their suffering into an incidental cost of modernization. Such reasoning effectively requires those who suffered to justify their claims against an accounting of buildings, roads and statistical growth. Republic Act No. 10368 rejected that logic by recognizing that human dignity created obligations independent of whatever material accomplishments the regime might claim.

At the same time, remembrance gains analytical strength when it refuses to treat every person who initially supported martial law as either malicious or foolish. Some Filipinos welcomed the declaration because they feared crime, insurgency and political disorder; others believed that strong government could finally break the control of entrenched families; sections of the business community initially valued administrative predictability; and some technocrats saw centralization as an opportunity to implement reforms previously obstructed by congressional patronage and electoral politics. These expectations form part of the historical record and should be understood rather than caricatured. Their eventual disappointment also reveals how authoritarian systems acquire legitimacy: not simply through force, but by attaching themselves to genuine social frustrations and promising solutions that existing institutions have failed to provide.

It was precisely this combination of legitimate grievance and concentrated authority that made the New Society politically significant. The regime did not invent the poverty of the countryside, the weaknesses of Philippine industry, the corruption of electoral institutions or the dominance of established families. Its historical responsibility lay in claiming that these problems required the concentration of political power while subsequently reproducing important elements of privilege under a more centralized arrangement.

The lesson is broader than the fate of any single administration. Political systems frequently survive by appropriating the language of those who criticize them. Demands for social justice can be converted into programs administered from above; nationalism can be invoked while external dependence continues; anti-oligarchic rhetoric can accompany the emergence of new privileged networks; and appeals to popular welfare can be used to legitimize institutions in which the population possesses limited influence over decisions supposedly undertaken in its interest. The contradiction between rhetoric and structure is therefore one of the most important subjects of any serious commemoration of September 21.

This also explains why remembrance cannot consist solely of remembering repression. The economic promises of the regime must be remembered alongside the repression because the two were components of the same political project. The New Society justified extraordinary authority partly through the assertion that ordinary democratic procedures had become obstacles to transformation. Evaluating that claim requires attention to the economy produced under extraordinary rule, including the development projects that succeeded, the enterprises that failed, the debt that accumulated, the industries that received protection, and the social groups that gained or lost bargaining power.

Such an evaluation also guards against the opposite historical error: the notion that the restoration of formal democracy in 1986 resolved the social conditions that had preceded authoritarianism. Many of the economic structures inherited from both the pre-martial-law republic and the dictatorship remained intact or were reorganized rather than abolished. Oligarchic politics did not disappear with the return of elections. Foreign dependence did not disappear with the restoration of Congress. Rural poverty and unequal landholding did not vanish with the new Constitution. The democratic restoration was indispensable because it reopened political space and restored institutional restraints upon executive authority, but it did not by itself complete the social transformation that generations of Filipinos had demanded.

The continuing task is therefore more difficult than either defending or condemning a single historical period. It requires a conception of democracy that extends beyond periodic elections without diminishing the importance of elections, and a conception of development that extends beyond economic growth without dismissing the necessity of growth. Political liberty and material security have to be treated as mutually reinforcing components of a democratic society rather than competing objectives between which the country must permanently choose.

Under such a conception, the dignity of the person acquires both political and economic content. It involves freedom from arbitrary arrest and coercion, but also access to the material conditions necessary for meaningful citizenship. It includes freedom of expression and association, but also the practical capacity of workers, farmers, communities and professional groups to organize around their interests. It requires due process against the power of the State while also requiring institutions capable of preventing private wealth from exercising disproportionate power over public decisions.

September 21 therefore remains a difficult but necessary date precisely because it forces Philippine society to examine the relationship among order, development and freedom. The dictatorship claimed that extraordinary authority could save the Republic and reconstruct society. Its history demonstrated instead the danger of attempting social transformation while weakening the institutions through which society itself can scrutinize those entrusted with transformation.

The commemoration need not become an annual exercise in partisan accusation, nor should it be reduced to a contest between nostalgic inventories of infrastructure and equally mechanical lists of abuses. The record is sufficiently important to demand more serious treatment. The period should be examined as an experiment in authoritarian development whose achievements, failures, contradictions and human costs remain relevant to any discussion of Philippine state-building. Its victims deserve remembrance not because memory requires the country to remain imprisoned by the past, but because a political community incapable of recognizing the injuries committed through its own institutions becomes more vulnerable to repeating them under new circumstances and new language.

The enduring significance of September 21 consequently lies in the unfinished character of the Republic. The conditions invoked in 1972—inequality, insecurity, political corruption, concentrated economic power and social conflict—were not abolished by martial law, just as they were not abolished by the restoration of democratic government. Their persistence should not be used to romanticize authoritarianism or to dismiss democratic politics as futile. It should instead encourage a more demanding understanding of democracy, one capable of confronting economic concentration and social deprivation while preserving the rights through which citizens participate in that confrontation.

Such a democratic order would have little need to describe repression as discipline, exclusion as stability or privilege as development. Its legitimacy would rest upon institutions sufficiently strong to permit disagreement, sufficiently impartial to restrain both public and private power, and sufficiently developmental to demonstrate that political liberty need not condemn the country to economic stagnation. The remembrance of September 21 would then cease to be merely an argument over whether the past was good or bad and become what historical commemoration ought to be: an examination of the choices that produced that past and of the institutional safeguards necessary to prevent its most destructive features from acquiring new forms.

In that sense, the struggle associated with the memory of martial law is not adequately understood as a struggle against one family, one party or one generation. Its more enduring content concerns the effort to construct a political order in which the State can be strong without becoming arbitrary, development can be directed without becoming patronage, security can be maintained without converting dissent into criminality, and economic growth can be pursued without treating the common citizen merely as the taxpayer, debtor, laborer or passive beneficiary of decisions made elsewhere.

The victims of authoritarian rule occupy an indispensable place in that continuing national argument because their experiences reveal what happens when the authority to define the national interest becomes excessively concentrated. The economic record occupies an equally necessary place because it demonstrates that the legitimacy of government cannot be established through physical accomplishment alone. A Republic worthy of preservation requires both the material capacity to improve the conditions of its people and the political restraint to recognize that those people are citizens rather than instruments of policy.

The commemoration of September 21 thus remains neither an antiquarian exercise nor a demand that succeeding generations inherit every bitterness of those who came before them. Its value lies in historical vigilance: in understanding how legitimate demands for order, reform and development can be absorbed into political arrangements that gradually narrow the space available for public judgment, and how the vocabulary of ordinary people can itself be appropriated to justify concentrations of power from which ordinary people remain distant.

More than five decades after 1972, that is perhaps the most important reason the date continues to matter. The historical problem was never simply that a government promised to save the Republic and build a new society. The deeper problem concerned the terms under which that Republic was to be saved, the distribution of authority within that proposed new society, and whether citizens themselves retained sufficient freedom and institutional power to determine whether the transformation being undertaken in their name was genuinely their own.

Any durable democratic settlement must answer those questions differently. It must make social justice compatible with political freedom, public investment compatible with accountability, national development compatible with human dignity, and effective government compatible with the participation of those whose lives are most affected by its decisions. The continuing relevance of September 21 lies in the fact that these questions remain unfinished business, and that the lessons of authoritarian rule become useful only when remembrance is joined to the construction of institutions capable of addressing them.