A Short History of the Philippines

What we call “The Philippines” is a large archipelago comprising over 7,000 islands and 100,000 square miles. Although the national language is Filipino, there are dozens of other dialects belonging to the wide assortment of tribes and nationalities that dwell on the tropical, mountainous, forest rich Philippine Archipelago. 

It is believed the first humans came to the Philippines about 30,000 years ago, from nearby Borneo. Known as the Negritos, they are a diminutive, dark skinned people who in our day inhabit primarily the mountain regions. The largest ethnic group came next: the Malays, an Asian race from the South. Chinese pirates and traveling Arabs visited the islands, and sometimes settled there. When the Spanish explorer Magellan claimed the Philippines for Spain in 1521, he was rewarded with death when he tried to mediate a dispute between two warring tribes.

Instead of sending conquistadors to subdue the population, Spain sent missionaries to convert the Filipinos. The priests found a tropical paradise populated by multitudes of warring tribes who practiced slavery, human sacrifice, the buying and selling of wives, and the enslaving of parents by their own children. One tribe, the Ifugaos, put rings in their ears to signify the number of human heads they had collected. The Zambales made drinking cups out of their victim’s skulls. Priestesses killed chickens and studied the entrails to determine the most favorable day to commit homicide.

For the next three centuries the Philippines were Christianized by an assortment of Jesuits, Franciscans, Augustinians, and Dominicans, who occasionally clashed with Spanish colonial rules on behalf of the natives. Yet aside from external invasion attempts by the Japanese, Dutch, and English, the three hundred year colonization effort was on the whole remarkably peaceful. Even today, over eighty per cent of Filipinos remain Roman Catholic.

In 1880 a Jesuit, Father Mateo Gisbert, became the first human to scale the 10,000 foot Mount Apo. It is unlikely that, even from his lofty vantage point, Father Gisbert saw the end of Spanish rule. Yet it occurred less than twenty years later when, in 1898, American ships led by Admiral George Dewey destroyed Spanish ships in Manila Bay, took the levers of control from the Spanish, and ended up buying the Philippine Archipelago from Spain for $20,000,000. In a warm up for his later role as U.S. President, Judge William Howard Taft was appointed the new governor of the Philippines.

 As a Unitarian (and a Republican), Taft had little comprehension of, or sympathy for, Filipino culture. He disestablished the Catholic Church, and allowed much Church property to be either taken or destroyed. This upheaval led to the Philippine-American War (1899-1902) which, despite a peace proclamation of 1902, continued sporadically for another decade. America’s foreign policy in the Philippines was similar to American interventions elsewhere around the world: set up an American style government, legal, and educational system, put the natives in charge of it, and leave. In reality America ended up staying much longer, in part because the Japanese captured the Philippines during the Second World War.

General Douglas MacArthur began a bloody reconquest of the Philippines on October 20, 1944. In September, 1945, the Japanese surrendered. One million Filipinos died taking their country back, and now it lay in ruins. The following Fourth of July, 1946, marked the date the Philippines became the independent Republic of the Philippines. America gave the new republic financial aid rebuild the country, and military aid to fend off Communist insurrections. Communist agitation was the reason given by Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos to declare martial law in 1972. Martial law became daily law, and Marcos became a quasi-dictator, suppressing not only the Communists but opposition political parties. Events came to a head in 1983, when Benigno Aquino, the opposition leader in exile, was assassinated upon his long awaited return to the Philippines.

Public outcry over the assassination created a momentum that brought Aquino’s widow, Corazon Aquino, to the head of a nonviolent movement by civilians and the military that eventually forced President Marcos to flee the country. Although a popular figure, Corazon Aquino’s chief triumph was ousting Marcos. She had no answer to the dilemmas of democracy, so it was left for her successors to grapple with the problems of Communism and militant Islam, charges of corruption and incompetence at high levels of government, and preserving order in an infant democratic republic. The struggle continues today, and the Philippine government has recently relied on American counter-terrorism to combat the rise of militant Islam in the form of the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). On July 29, 2009, the Philippine Republic and MILF signed a cease fire and resumed peace talks. Yet peace is elusive even for established democracies, so American involvement with the Philippine Republic is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.