Is being a dictator due to luck or destiny?
“I often wonder what I will be remembered in history for. Scholar? Military hero? Builder? The new constitution? Reorganization of government? Builder of roads, schools? The green revolution? Uniter of variant and antagonistic elements of our people? He brought light to a dark country? Strong rallying point, or a weak tyrant?” – Ferdinand Marcos.
The question is not easy to answer but one thing is certain: all those who became a dictator had come from different backgrounds and circumstances. We can also allude to some personal factors as a profile in understanding their commonality: strong ambition, lust for power, risk-taker, ruthlessness, cunning, lack of conscience, serial liar, absence of empathy, superman delusion, to name a few.
Knowing the submissive personality of Filipinos brought about by colonial mentality, it is difficult to fathom that we were capable of producing one. He must be exceptional, not grounded in the democratic values of the American model the country had inherited nor of the humility of the Catholic teachings introduced to us by the Spaniards.
Or as Filipinos, we really love absolute rulers and are just waiting for someone brave enough to grab the opportunity. After all, before the coming of the Spaniards, we were once ruled by the datus who controlled all facets of the tribes.
We were historically familiar in obeying the dictates of a father-like figure, especially the wise, the strong and the brave. But these character qualities are rarely manifested in our leaders of today. Yet we continue following the drumbeat of our illusion, hoping that someday there will emerge a true leader who will serve the best interests of the Filipinos and the country.
In the meantime, please indulge me to speculate and describe to you three events in the life of Ferdinand Marcos that I think played a role in making him a dictator.
- The Nalundasan Case
Julio Nalundasan was a local tax official in the town of Batac, Ilocos Norte. In 1931, he entered politics for the first time with the objective of being a Congressman in the second district of Ilocos Norte, currently held by Mariano Marcos. This would be Marcos’s third term if he won. But Nalundasan, as a spoiler candidate, helped Emilio Medina win by a mere fifty-six votes. Mariano Marcos loathed Nalundasan ever since.
In 1935, Nalundasan ran again for the national assembly in the same district, this time under the ticket of then President Quezon’s National Party. Meanwhile, Marcos returned to Batac from Mindanao and ran under the banner of the Republican Party headed by Bishop Aglipay. The contest between these two arch-enemies was brutal, each employing every dirty political trick they could muster. In the end, Nalundasan won. To rub the victory cruelly in the face of Mariano, Nalundasan’s supporters dragged two coffins, one labelled Aglipay, the other Marcos. On the night of September 20, 1935, three days after the election, a shot rang out and pierced Nalundasan’s heart and lung while he was brushing his teeth at his porch. He died instantly. Three years later, Ferdinand Marcos, along with his uncles, Pio Marcos and Quirino Lizardo, were arrested. On December 1, 1939, the Laoag Court of First Instance found Ferdinand and Lizardo guilty while Mariano and Pio were acquitted. On appeal to the Supreme Court, Justice Laurel, who was the presiding judge, dismissed the case basing his decision that “By and large, we find the testimony of Calixto Aguinaldo to be inherently improbable and full of contradictions in important details. For this reason, we decline to give him any credit. In view of this conclusion, we find it neither necessary nor profitable to examine the corroborative evidence presented by the prosecution. Where the principal and basic evidence upon which the prosecution rests its case fails, all evidence intended to support or corroborate it must likewise fail.”
Marcos got away with murder. This experience proved to Marcos that the legal system could be swayed and manipulated with the brilliance of a legal mind, especially if one could have total recall of entire section of legal textbooks and recite the constitution backwards, skills of which Marcos possessed. He would resort to twisting of the law once again by justifying the imposition of Martial Law with the “constitutional authoritarianism” argument. Of course, he couldn’t do it all by himself. He needed willing enablers to do his biddings, reinforced by fear, intimidation, violence, corruption, and the assistance of the military. Marcos was emboldened and believed he was above the law, like kings and dictators.
- The Dovie Beams Affair
Dovie Beams was hired as an actress portraying the role of “Evelyn”, Marcos’s wartime girlfriend in the production of a movie entitled Maharlika, a story about Marcos as a war hero. Marcos was mesmerized with Dovie’s beauty and they had their first sexual encounter on the night of December 28, 1968. In between filming, Dovie resided in a Greenhills house and Marcos became a frequent visitor. Unbeknownst to Marcos, Dovie recorded Marcos singing a Spanish love song and his favourite Ilocano folk song Pamulinawen. The relationship cooled off by the time Marcos delivered his State of the Nation address in January 1970. But what finally killed the affair was when Imelda became aware of Marcos’s dalliance. Imelda ordered the banning of Maharlika from being shown in the country.
Meanwhile, Dovie insisted that she be paid approximately $100,000. The spat continued privately until the October 1970 issue of the Philippines Free Press that had a cover picture of Dovie in a bikini outfit with the headline, Dovie Beams — A Lovely Argument For “Special Relations”. Whatever emotional pains the scandal had brought into Imelda’s psychological being, she came out of it with a renewed sense of independence and confidence. She demanded a bigger political role that led her to have private audiences with Pope Paul VI in Vatican and with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in the White House Oval Office. When she visited the United Nations, Secretary General U Thant acknowledged her with a toast. Queen Elizabeth stopped her vacation in Scotland and received Imelda at Buckingham Palace. She met the Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis and his famous wife, the elegant former First Lady of the United States, Jacqueline Kennedy. She spearheaded an organization called the “Blue Ladies” which became a potent political force in maintaining and sustaining the Marcos regime. At the same time, Imelda’s lifestyle became ostentatiously lavish. She also embarked on the construction of many expensive architectural projects dubbed as her “edifice complex”.
Imelda gained the status of an equal partner in crime. She became a formidable political campaigner and obtained political power by being installed as Governor of Metro Manila in 1975. Ever since the Dovie Beams, Imelda was given the free rein to do whatever she wanted. That’s the price Ferdinand had to pay for his sexual indiscretion. She could jet set around the world, spend lavishly on jewelry, shoes, perfumes, paintings, and many more, and have extravagant parties without being questioned by her husband. She described herself as “a butterfly breaking out of its cocoon”, which prompted a foreign journalist to call her the “Iron Butterfly”. Later on, the partnership of Imelda and Ferdinand under Martial Law was fittingly described as the “Conjugal Dictatorship.”
- The Threat of Communism
In the face of the growing influence of communism in the world stage as exemplified by the successes of the Soviet Union and Mainland China after World War II, the United States adopted a geo-political strategy called the “domino theory”, which meant that the fall of a non-communist country to communism would lead to the fall of the other non-communist countries. Marcos took advantage of the US foreign policy in his favour. Time and time again, he would mention the threat of communism and get strong support from the United States. He was nicknamed the “America’s Boy” which was also the title of James Hamilton-Paterson’s 1998 book. No wonder he easily obtained dictatorial powers under Martial Law with the blessings of the United States.
The New People’s Army (NPA), the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), was a mere shadow of itself when Marcos set it up as the fall guy for the violence and chaos occurring in the country. But during the Martial Law regime, it expanded rapidly in the countryside, growing a mass base of over one million sympathisers and a thousand armed fighters. Marcos, ironically, became the NPA’s number one recruiter. Instead of looking for a better alternative, the United States continued to boost the Marcos regime until it was toppled peacefully in 1986 by its own people.
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In the introductory page of C. S. Denton’s book, Absolute Power: The Real Lives of Europe’s Most Infamous Rulers, he wrote: “Throughout the history of Europe, all monarchs who had any real degree of power have lived with that strange dichotomy of simultaneously being human and more than human. Absolute kingship was perhaps the most unique condition into which any human being could have been born. Imagine a life with seemingly no limits on your freedom of wealth, where honest friends are hard to find but flattering sycophants are everywhere, where you are raised from birth to believe that you embody the voice of God and the nation, and day to day live with the knowledge that anyone could turn into a traitor and at any time take your crown and your life. Under this strange life and its all too dangerous pressures, it is possible that being conditioned to rule as kings, queen, or emperor was itself a cause of mental illness and all monarchs were, in their own ways, mad.”
Aware of history’s judgment, Marcos wanted to ensure that his side of the story would be part of the historical record. Thus, on January 1, 1970, the eve of his second term as president, he began a diary. He wrote: “I am president. I am the most powerful man in the Philippines. All that I have dreamt of I have.”
Later on, he would claim that God ordained him to be the saviour of the country. That all he was doing, including having dictatorial powers, had a divine purpose. “And I am strengthened,” he wrote, “as I hear the Lord say: Fear not. I am with you. You shall not fail. For you bear my words in your mouth and my courage in your heart.”
Even when faced with civil and economic unrest, Marcos maintained that “I must be just as cool, deliberate but bold and daring as we were during those dark days of the war. There [is] no other course. God [has] made it so.”
He received divine messages in his dreams. God said to him: “This is your principal mission in life—save the country again from the Maoists, the anarchists and the radicals. Subordinate everything to this. And you are the only person who can do it. Nobody else can. So do not miss the opportunity given you, [because] if you do, it will mean not only your death but that of your wife and children and of the wives, children and friends of men of equal persuasion.”
Even when he attended a religious service or retreat, he would encounter God. “I could feel I was in communication,” he wrote, “with my Creator. The sermon on being alone was apropos. And as I prayed I felt tears springing to my eyes from the joy of communication. I was on the verge, I believe, of one of those mystic seizures where the spirit lifts up from the body.”
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I have given you my take as to the three factors that propelled Marcos in wanting to be a dictator. Now it’s your turn to see things clearly and reflect. So next time in the future, when the president asks for more powers, just ask yourself: Is another dictatorship worth the risk in achieving what’s really good for the country?
21 August 2025