"Marcos Regime: Looking back on the military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s, the Marcos government appears, by any standard, exceptional for both the quantity and quality of its violence. The Marcos regime's tally of 3,257 extra-judicial killings is far lower than Argentina's 8,000 missing. But it still exceeds the 2,115 extra-judicial deaths under General Pinochet in Chile, and the 266 dead during the Brazilian junta. Under Marcos, moreover, military murder was the apex of a pyramid of terror—3,257 killed, 35,000 tortured, and 70,000 incarcerated.
Some 2,520, or 77 percent of all victims, were salvaged—that is, tortured, mutilated, and dumped on a roadside for public display. Seeing these mutilated remains, passers-by could read in a glance a complete transcript of what had transpired in Marcos's safe houses, spreading a sense of fear. Instead of an invisible machine like the Argentine military that crushed all resistance, Marcos's regime intimidated by random displays of its torture victims —becoming thereby a theater state of terror. This terror had a profound impact upon the Philippine military and its wider society.
Martial Law: Under martial law from 1972 to 1986, the Philippine military was the fist of Ferdinand Marcos's authoritarian rule. Its elite torture units became his instruments of terror. Backed by his generals, Marcos wiped out warlord armies, closed Congress, and confiscated the corporations of political enemies.
Even at its peak, however, the Marcos state, reflecting the underlying poverty of Philippine society, lacked the skilled manpower and information systems to effect a blanket repression. As a lawyer, moreover, Marcos, at first maintained a facade of legality and spoke with pride of his constitutional authoritarianism. But as the gap between legal fiction and coercive reality widened, the regime mediated this contradiction by releasing its political prisoners and shifting to extra-judicial execution or salvaging.
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