Historical Details:

* Six hours after the alleged assassination attempt against Enrile and citing more than 15 bombing incidences, chaos
and lawlessness, Marcos issued Proclamation No. 1081, declaring and imposing martial law in the entire country.
* In September 1972, the second presidential decree that Marcos issued under martial law declared the entire
Philippines a land reform area.
* Martial law was ratified by 90.77% of the voters during the 1973 Philippine Martial Law referendum though the
referendum was marred with controversy.
* Under martial law there were widespread excesses and human rights abuses, even while the regime reduced violent
urban crime, collected unregistered firearms, and suppressed communist insurgency in some areas; Liliosa Hilao was
the first murder victim under Martial Law.
* In total, there were 3,257 extrajudicial killings, 35,000 individual tortures, and 70,000 were incarcerated.
* After martial law was declared, critics of the government were arrested.
* There was some controversy whether the ambush on Enrile used as one of the justifications to declare Martial Law
was staged. However, Enrile himself denied that it was staged in his memoir and defended the declaration of martial
law.
* Martial law was lifted by President Marcos on January 17, 1981, through Proclamation 2045

On the evening of September 23, 1972, the late president Ferdinand Marcos appeared on national television to formally
announce that the Philippines was under Martial Law.

This began almost 10 years of military rule in the country. Marcos formally ended Martial Law on January 17, 1981, but
it was not until 1986 when democracy was restored – after the dictator and his family were forced into exile, overthrown
by a popular uprising that came to be known as the People Power Revolution.

.Through various general orders, Marcos effectively put the entire power of government under the rule of one man: his
own. He was to lead the nation and direct the operation of the entire government. He ordered the armed forces to
prevent or suppress any act of rebellion. Curfew hours were enforced, group assemblies were banned, privately-owned
media facilities shuttered. (READ: Marcos’ Martial Law orders)

Those considered threats to Marcos – such as prominent politicians and members of the media – were rounded up and
arrested by members of the military and the notorious Philippine Constabulary. (LOOK BACK: The Philippine
Constabulary under Marcos)

What did the Martial Law years look like?

There are those who hail the discipline and supposed order of the New Society, as Marcos called it, and considered
that period as among the "best years" of the Philippines.

Among the myths: that the Philippines enjoyed a golden age under the Marcoses. Various reports and historical
accounts debunk this; while it is true that infrastracture spending increased during that period, it came at a staggering
cost: plunging the Philippines in billions of dollars in debt. From $8.2 billion in 1977, the country's debt ballooned to
$24.4 billion in 1982 – or within a period of just 5 years.
The Marcoses also plundered the country's coffers, with various estimates putting the amount at between $5 billion to
$10 billion.
The Presidential Commission on Good Government, the body going after the Marcoses' ill-gotten wealth, is still
recovering this money; over the past 30 years, at least P170 billion have been recovered.
Aside from the billions in illegally amassed wealth, human rights abuses were rampant during those days. (READ:
#NeverAgain: Martial Law stories young people need to hear)

About 70,000 people were imprisoned and 34,000 tortured, according to Amnesty International, while 3,240 were killed
from 1972 to 1981. During this dark chapter of Philippine history, thousands of people were subject to various forms of
torture. Prisoners were electrocuted, beaten up, and strangled. They were burned with a flat iron or cigars. Water was
poured down their throats, then forced out by beating. Women were stripped naked and raped, various objects forced
into their genitals.
Historian Alfred McCoy wrote about Marcos' elite torture units, whose specialty was psychological torture and
humiliation aside from the physical pain.
It has been many years since then, but the victims have not forgotten – especially as the Marcoses have neither
acknowledged their crimes nor made reparations for their sins.
At the Supreme Court hearing on the proposed Marcos burial at the Heroes' Cemetery, victims were asked to speak
before the Court to recount their horrifying ordeals.

Marcos, in his diary entry for September 22, 1972 (time-stamped 9:55 p.m.) wrote, “Sec. Juan Ponce Enrile was
ambushed near Wack-Wack at about 8:00 pm tonight. It was a good thing he was riding in his security car as a protective
measure… This makes the martial law proclamation a necessity.” His diary entry for September 25, 1972 mentions
conditions after two days of Martial Law, also indicating martial law in reality is dated to September 23, 1972.

Primitivo Mijares—a former journalist for Marcos who would later write against Marcos and disappear without a trace
in 1973—claimed that the Enrile ambush was fake as it was made as the final excuse for Marcos to declare Martial
Law.[11] Mijares also claimed that the ammunition planted by the Presidential Guard Battalion in Digoyo Point,
Isabela—which was later confiscated by the Philippine Constabulary on July 5, 1972—was used to connect the ambush
with alleged Communist terror attacks.
In the biography of Chino Roces, Vergel Santos questioned the elements of the Enrile ambush: “Why inside a village
and not on a public street, and why in that particular village? Possibly for easier stage-managing: the family of Enrile’s
sister Irma and her husband, Dr. Victor Potenciano, lived there, in Fordham, the next street in the Potenciano home
and got the story straight from him, as officially scripted.”[12]

September 21 or September 23?

When Marcos appeared on television at 7:15 p.m. on September 23, 1972 to announce that he had placed the “entire
Philippines under Martial Law” by virtue of Proclamation No. 1081, he framed his announcement in legalistic terms that
were untrue. This helped camouflage the true nature of his act to this day: it was nothing less than a self-coup.
Marcos announced that he had placed the entire country under Martial Law as of 9 p.m. on September 22, 1972 via a
proclamation which, he claimed, he’d signed on September 21, 1972.
Yet accounts differ. David Rosenberg, writing in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (“The End of the Freest Press
in the World,” Vol. 5, 1973) chronicled that about six hours after the ambush, Marcos signed Proclamation No. 1081,
placing the entire country under Martial Law, placing the signing at around 3 a.m. on September 23. Raymond Bonner,
in his book Waltzing with the Dictator, narrated his interview with Enrile, during which the former Defense Secretary
recalled that he and Acting Executive Secretary Roberto Reyes witnessed Marcos sign Proclamation No. 1081 in the
morning of September 23, 1972. The Bangkok Post asserted in a series of articles called “The Aquino Papers,”
published from February 20 to 22 of 1973, that Proclamation No. 1081 had been signed even earlier, on September
17, 1972, postdated to September 21. Mijares also mentioned in his book that Marcos said as much in an address to
a conference of historians, in January 1973.
Two things emerge: first, whether they conflict or not, all accounts indicate that Marcos’ obsession with numerology
(particularly the number seven) necessitated that Proclamation No. 1081 be officially signed on a date that was divisible
by seven. Thus, September 21, 1972 became the official date that Martial Law was established and the day that the
Marcos dictatorship began. This also allowed Marcos to control history on his own terms.

Day one of the Marcos dictatorship

The second is that the arbitrary date emphasizes that the actual date for Martial Law was not the numerologically-
auspicious (for Marcos) 21st, but rather, the moment that Martial Law was put into full effect, which was after the
nationwide address of Ferdinand Marcos as far as the nation was concerned: September 23, 1972. By then,
personalities considered threats to Marcos (Senators Benigno S. Aquino Jr., Jose Diokno, Francisco Rodrigo and
Ramon Mitra Jr., and members of the media such as Joaquin Roces, Teodoro Locsin Sr., Maximo Soliven and Amando
Doronila) had already been rounded up, starting with the arrest of Senator Aquino at midnight on September 22, and
going into the early morning hours of September 23, when 100 of the 400 personalities targeted for arrest were already
detained in Camp Crame by 4 a.m.
In the meantime, the military had shut down mass media, flights were canceled, and incoming overseas calls were
prohibited. Press Secretary Francisco Tatad went on air at 3 p.m. of September 23 to read the text of Proclamation No.
1081. The reading of the proclamation was followed by Marcos going on air at 7:15 p.m. to justify the massive
clampdown of democratic institutions in the country.
Marcos would subsequently issue General Order No. 1, s. 1972, transferring all powers to the President who was to
rule by decree.
The New York Times reported about these events in an article titled “Mass Arrests and Curfew Announced in
Philippines; Mass Arrests Ordered in Philippines” in their September 24, 1972 issue. The Daily Express itself
announced in its September 24 issue that Marcos had proclaimed martial law the day before, September 23, 1972.

“Never again”
After the declaration and imposition of Martial Law, citizens would still go on to challenge the constitutionality of
Proclamation No. 1081. Those arrested filed petitions for habeas corpus with the Supreme Court. But Marcos, who had
originally announced that Martial Law would not supersede the 1935 Constitution, engineered the replacement of the
constitution with a new one. On March 31, 1973, the Supreme Court issued its final decision in Javellana v. Executive
Secretary, which essentially validated the 1973 Constitution. This would be the final legitimizing decision with on the
constitutionality of Martial Law: in G.R. No. L-35546 September 17, 1974, the Supreme Court dismissed petitions for
habeas corpus by ruling that Martial Law was a political question beyond the jurisdiction of the court; and that,
furthermore, the court had already deemed the 1973 Constitution in full force and effect, replacing the 1935 Constitution.

Martial Law would officially end on January 17, 1981 with Proclamation No. 2045. Marcos, however, would
reserve decree-making powers for himself.