![]() His two sons Ricardo and Roberto, mainstays now of the politically noisy Makati Business Club organized in 1981, would become legal and business luminaries during martial law. The revered Carlos Romulo, the only Filipino United Nations General Assembly president, was Marcos’ foreign secretary until his retirement in 1984. Vicente Paterno, chair of the Board of Investments, then trade and industry secretary and finally public works secretary, was at the forefront in rallying the support of ethnic Filipino big-business groups for Marcos. The elite junked him only when the economy collapsed-and their wealth shrank-first as a result of the banking crisis of 1981 when textile tycoon Dewey Dee absconded on his loans, and second, because of the 1983 debt default that led to an economic conflagration that had the GDP shrinking by an unprecedented 7 percent annually. Much of the Philippine elite embraced and supported Marcos’ “constitutional authoritarianism” for nearly a decade, unsurprisingly, since the economy grew at a respectable average of 6 percent annually from 1972 to 1980. ![]() Even the big guns of the Cojuangco clan were Marcos’ pillars of support: Ramon who took over the American-owned telephone monopoly in 1967 and Eduardo who bought San Miguel in 1981. Few among the elite sympathized with the Lopezes, which owned the Meralco monopoly, and arrogantly wielded the two deadly weapons of media (The Manila Chronicle and ABS-CBN Network) and political power (Fernando was Marcos’ vice president). Marcos suppressed only a small faction of it that was his avowed enemy, consisting mainly of the powerful Lopez, Osmeña and Roxas-Araneta political and economic elite. ![]() There was no split at all among the ruling class.
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