August and September stand out in our political calendar as moments signifying upheaval and transition. On Aug. 21, 1971, the bombing of the Liberal Party rally at Plaza Miranda prompted then President Ferdinand Marcos Sr. to suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, a prelude to the declaration of martial law in September 1972. On the same date in 1983, opposition leader Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino was assassinated upon his return from exile.
In my memory of the martial law years, I will now associate October with Cesar Virata, who died last Oct. 2 at the age of 95. Recruited from the University of the Philippines, where he became dean of the business school at a very young age, Virata served as Marcos’ chief economic technocrat from 1970 until the regime’s fall in 1986. This gentle and self-effacing economist became, in many ways, the face of Filipino technocracy at the height of the dictatorship.
If anything earned the martial law regime a measure of international respect, I would say it was the presence of highly educated and capable administrators like Virata in the Marcos Cabinet. He and others like Vicente Paterno, Gerardo Sicat, Jaime Laya, Onofre Corpuz, and Geronimo Velasco were known to be nonpolitical and professional, even as they seemed to share Marcos’ long-term vision.
That vision of a developed and prosperous nation coexisted with a policy of repression and arbitrary rule. It made possible the killing, detention, and torture of countless critics and activists, and the plunder of the economy by the Marcos family and its cronies. It drove a whole generation of our brightest people abroad. And it left a mountain of foreign debt that present and future generations continue to pay.
Yet it never ceases to amaze me how we, as a community, can celebrate the heroism of Aquino and Edgar Jopson, felled by the regime’s bullets, and in almost the same breath pay tribute to the steadfast service of those who knowingly and voluntarily kept alive the dictatorship that destroyed our institutions of political accountability.
I have heard it said: Who are we to judge, when Filipino voters themselves returned the Marcoses to power in 2022, and our courts have since cleared them of criminal liability and dismissed many of the remaining ill-gotten wealth cases? But elections and judicial rulings settle other questions. We are talking here of personal responsibility.
This is not a uniquely Filipino question. Hannah Arendt took it up in her 1964 essay “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” written in reply to critics of her report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the functionary who organized the deportations to Hitler’s death camps. Arendt argued that moral choice remains available even under totalitarian rule, and that in politics, obedience amounts to support. Whatever their private reservations, those who keep the machinery running lend it their support.
Something similar has long been whispered about our technocrats. They stayed, it was said, to restrain the plunder and to make sure there would still be a country after the dictatorship. Perhaps they did. But no one could ever know, for the only witnesses to what was prevented were those who claimed to have prevented it.
The choice to resign was always there, however hard. Paterno, who served as industry secretary and later public highways minister, negotiated his resignation from the Cabinet at the end of 1980, six years before the regime fell. He did not become a critic until after the Aquino assassination.
Virata stayed on until the regime was overthrown. After the Aquino assassination, an economy already strained by Mexico’s 1982 debt default slid into a full-blown liquidity crisis as foreign banks cut their credit lines. Central Bank governor Jaime Laya, whom Virata had recruited, was moved out when the country’s international reserves were found to have been overstated by $600 million. According to Sicat’s biography of Virata, it was Virata who then persuaded the banker Jobo Fernandez to take over the Central Bank. Thus, at the very moment the regime’s legitimacy was collapsing at home, its chief technocrat was keeping its credit alive abroad.
The issue about Virata has never been his personal integrity or professionalism, which has been the focus of the eulogies about him. It is rather about the kind of structure that allows a man of character to serve a repressive regime without ever having to answer for it. But responsibility does not disappear when a dictatorship abolishes every forum before which its officials must answer. It falls back squarely on each person’s conscience. The technocrats may have had nothing directly to do with the atrocities and the corruption, but they surely kept the machinery running.
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