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Hannah Reyes Morales is a Filipina photographer who focuses on bringing historical memory and current events home, by looking at how they shape daily life. Her long-term project Living Lullabies explores the role of lullabies in creating safer spaces for children and caregivers in challenging environments globally.
Her work has been published in The New York Times, National Geographic Magazine, and the Washington Post, among others. She is the recipient of the Tim Hetherington Visionary Award and the ICP Infinity Award for Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism, and was named a cultural leader by the World Economic Forum ASEAN. She was commissioned as the Nobel Peace Prize photographer in 2021. She is the recipient of a 2023 Pictures of the Year International Award, and a 2023 World Press Photo Award.
Hannah is currently focusing on longer term projects. She is a co-founder of Emerging Islands, a grassroots program connecting artists with scientists and coastal communities to tell island stories through art. She is a National Geographic explorer and a 2022-2023 fellow at Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris.
Instagram: @hannahreyesmorales
In Philippines, Democracy Dies In Other Ways
By: Sheila S. Coronel
There are no armored vehicles rolling down Manila’s streets today. No army colonels seizing TV stations and declaring a coup. No dictators haranguing crowds from balconies. Not anymore.
Instead, in my country, democracy dies in other ways, in other spaces.
In an empty courtroom, for example, where a judge convicts a journalist of criminal libel for an article she did not write, edit, or assign. Irony was not there when the judge quoted Nelson Mandela in her verdict, “To be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”
Or in a classroom where students are taught a whitewashed version of history devoid of any mention of torture, plunder, and long-deposed dictator Ferdinand Marcos’s other crimes.
And in a dark alley, where a 17-year-old begs for his life as two plainclothes policemen, accusing him of drug dealing, pump two bullets into his head. The police were heeding then-President Rodrigo Duterte’s call to “Kill all the drug lords!”
Over forty years earlier, in September 1972, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law and ruled by decree. We knew democracy had died because the army padlocked the newspapers and broadcast stations and jailed thousands of dissidents, journalists, and opposition politicians. Congress had been shuttered and gatherings of more than three people banned.
No such drama today. Just a slow, steady accumulation of transgressions by elected autocrats. If you listen hard, you may hear the drip, drip, drip of seemingly minor and mundane acts that erode democratic norms. Otherwise, there is only the silence of corrupt courts, cowardly congresses, and self-censoring publishers. No one talks about the everyday compromises made by citizens that appease—and normalize— autocratic power: Those who told on their drug-using neighbors, for example, knowing they would be put on a police hit list or those who spread the autocrats’ lies on Facebook while averting their eyes from the corruption and abuse.
When Marcos declared martial law, he borrowed from the fascist playbook: Point to a threat and exaggerate it so people believe their safety and security are at stake. Many applauded Marcos when he said only he stood in the way of perdition. Only he could “save the Republic“ from communists and from becoming another Vietnam. Only he could reform a society gone bad.
The slogan of the martial law years was “Sa ikauunlad ng bayan, disiplina ang kailangan.” There can be no progress without discipline. The country’s problem wasn’t poverty, injustice, or inequality, it was an undisciplined people.
Marcos ruled from a barricaded palace for 14 years during which he looted the country and trampled on rights. Finally, in 1986, angry Filipinos gathered on the streets of Manila demanding his ouster. Abandoned by his people, his army, and the United States, which had long been his protector, he and his family fled the country. They boarded two U.S. Air Force helicopters crammed with cash, jewelry, gold bars, and a statue of First Lady Imelda’s patron, the Santo Niño, an infant Jesus adorned with a diamond necklace and a cape sewn with gold thread.
In 1989, Marcos died in exile in Honolulu, and in 1991, his family was allowed back to the Philippines so they could face trial. The new government alleged they had stolen as much as $10 billion.
Back from exile, Imelda and her two children, Ferdinand Jr. and Imee, ran for public office, winning congressional seats and governorships on their home turf. Deploying their still-considerable resources and influence, they rebuilt their political machine from the ground up, taking advantage of democratic processes and institutions to assume power, first at the local and later, national, level. On social media, cinema, and popular entertainment, they recast the Marcos years as the country’s Golden Age.
In 2016, Rodrigo Duterte, a Marcos fan, was elected president, and soon after allowed the dictator’s burial, with military honors, in the national heroes’ cemetery. Like Marcos, Duterte declared himself the slayer of the oligarchy and the savior of the poor. In rallies and on social media, he stoked the flames of resentment against effete elites and the corrupt and dysfunctional democracy that displaced dictatorship. He fanned the people’s fear of drugs and crime. Crowds cheered him on when he said the fish in Manila Bay would grow fat from feeding on the corpses of criminals.
Duterte was Marcos’s heir. He tapped into the shadow policing system that had long carried out the extrajudicial executions of criminals, insurgents, and other threats to the social order. He cranked up the rusty killing machine of a former police state—its death squads, surveillance networks, clandestine operators—and then unleashed it with a force and velocity that left many reeling with shock.
By the time his presidency ended in 2022, the official number of drug war dead was 6,000. Human rights groups say the real number could be as high as 30,000. This carnage, F. Sionil José, a leading Filipino literary figure, said, was “Mr. Duterte’s assault on the rotten status quo.”
Banned by the constitution from seeking a second term, Duterte backed the candidacy of his daughter Sara. She ran for vice president alongside the dictator’s son. Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said his family were blameless victims of liberal elites that conspired to oust them from power. The pair ran on a platform of unity, telling voters their critics had divided the country by dwelling on the supposed sins of their fathers.
In 2022, fifty years after his father had declared martial law, Ferdinand Jr. took his oath as president in front of the old Congress building where Marcos Sr. had begun his political career and where his parents had met for the first time. He was sworn into office on the same Bible his father had held during his 1965 inauguration. The hymn of Marcos Sr.’s “New Society” provided the musical backdrop for the ceremony.
It was a Second Marcos Coming, seen by supporters as the fair prince returning to take back the throne that had been unjustly seized from his father. The inauguration was an homage to the Marcos myth and to the past.
Democracy in the Philippines was introduced by American colonizers, who invaded the country in 1898 and ruled it for 50 years. Filipinos have since lived with this contradiction: Democracy was a colonial imposition, both distrusted and desired. The enemies of democracy intuit this and are experts at manipulating popular disaffection with democracy’s many flaws. They know that the more democracy and society are in disrepair, the greater the allure of absolute and unaccountable power.
Like bears in winter, they await the autocrats’ spring. No tanks or troops needed. Just money, votes, false promises, and lies. The trouble with democracy is you only miss it when it’s long dead and gone.
Sheila Coronel is director of the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University in New York. She is a co-founder of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism and served as its executive director for many years. Coronel is the author and editor of more than a dozen books, including “Coups, Cults & Cannibals”, “The Rulemakers – How the Wealthy and Well-Born Dominate Congress”, and “Pork and Other Perks: Corruption and Governance in the Philippines”. She has received numerous awards for her work, including the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism in 2003.
Samson Otieno | Jit Chattopadhyay | Hannah Reyes Morales | Fred Ramos | Agata Szymanska-Medina
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