The Society of Honor by Joe America

Comments

1. JoeAm says:

   May 1, 2026 at 3:27 pm

   Thank you, Karl. Wonderful snapshot of the decentralized Philippines, then, and now even. In this light, today’s dynasties are nothing new. They are the Philippines as it’s been for thousands of years, defying modern governmental, political, social, and economic institutions. We ought not wail about the dynasties I think, but better implement ways to make sure they are honest and productive. And for sure the nation should be building boats.

   Reply
   • Karl Garcia says:

     May 1, 2026 at 6:23 pm

     Yes, Joe that is the way to go. Thanks.

     Reply
     • Irineo B. R. Salazar says:

       May 1, 2026 at 8:16 pm

       I have been looking into why it doesn’t work anymore like it did before and have come across several factors that make today different:

       1) there is no more up the mountains option (ilaya) for those not satisfied with their datu

       2) the datu no longer necessarily needs his own people to produce food – imported rice is often cheaper

       3) even the haciendero equation of needing labor no longer works as before – some just sell their resources or rent out to POGOs

       4) the datu can live in BGC far from the people in his locality, send his children to college in Singapore, all that

       5) not even the modern weapons against financial impunity work due to PH bank secrecy laws that protect “crookery” (c) MRP.

       6) small communities work well with personal arrangements due to the Dunbar number – bigger communities need more explicit rules, not just fluidity

       One can blame whatever processes changed the old balance, but the new balance (haha sounds like shoes) cannot be like the old one.

       Reply
       • Irineo B. R. Salazar says:

         May 2, 2026 at 8:59 am

         I asked Claude to act as a political scientist (but one critical of the usual lazy consensus of whatever kind common in the Philippines) and this is most remarkable out of what I got:

         The most important critical point that no one in the thread makes explicitly: the pre-colonial system that Karl describes was not just decentralized — it was also relatively stateless in the sense that mattered. Datus had limited coercive capacity, limited territorial control, and real competition from other datus. Modern Philippine political dynasties have inherited the cultural legitimacy of the datu while acquiring the coercive and fiscal apparatus of the modern state — DILG control, PNP influence, IRA (now NTA) funds, control of local hiring. That combination is historically novel and historically dangerous. It is not a continuation of the old system. It is a mutation of it that combined the worst of both worlds.

         Irineo comes closest to saying this. But the thread, as a whole, stops short of the harder political conclusion that the history arguably demands.

         I asked how one could change things to utilize the best of the old culture and got this answer:

         The pre-colonial Philippines worked well not because it had strong central authority, but because its small-scale, personalistic communities operated at a size where reciprocity, reputation, and exit were real disciplining forces on those in power. The genuine cultural strengths that survive from that era — kapwa (relational identity), bayanihan (cooperative mutual aid), and the maritime trading adaptability demonstrated by OFWs worldwide — are not myths. They are real and still operative. The problem is that each of these values has a corrupted shadow form that emerges when scaled beyond its functional size or captured by political power: kapwa becomes tribalism, utang na loob becomes political debt bondage, bayanihan becomes patron dependence. The design challenge for modern Philippine reform is not to abandon these cultural inheritances but to create conditions where they express in their authentic rather than their corrupted forms.

         The most actionable insight from Irineo’s comment is the Dunbar number problem: Filipino relational culture functions well at the scale of genuine community, and breaks down when stretched across the massive, impersonal constituencies of modern politics. The barangay system nominally addresses this but has been captured — barangay captains are mostly machinery operators for higher dynastic politicians rather than genuine community leaders. The most demonstrated path forward is the Robredo/Naga City model: build institutional systems that *deliver* the way a good patron delivers, but through transparent and accountable processes, so that constituents develop reciprocal loyalty to institutions rather than to individual personalities. This is slow, city-by-city work, but it is where Filipino personalistic culture can be most productively redirected rather than fought.

         Three structural reforms matter most and are more concrete than they appear. First, bank secrecy reform for public officials — one of the most specific and changeable things, since financial opacity is the single greatest enabler of dynastic impunity. Second, genuine barangay fiscal autonomy with participatory budgeting, matching decision-making scale to the scale at which Filipino communal culture actually works. Third, restoring something like the old “exit option” — internally, through genuine regional economic development that gives people alternatives to both Metro Manila migration and overseas departure, since the OFW system is essentially a modern ilaya that unfortunately drains communities of the very people most capable of reforming them.

         The maritime trading mentality is the pre-colonial inheritance most directly usable as economic policy and least politically controversial. Filipinos are demonstrably gifted at navigating diverse cultural environments, brokering, and adapting — skills the archipelago’s history produced over millennia. Yet Philippine economic policy has historically worked against these strengths through overprotection, Manila hyper-concentration, and neglect of the natural maritime corridors linking Cebu, Davao, and Zamboanga to regional trade networks. Reorienting infrastructure investment toward provincial ports, genuinely opening the economy in ways that activate connectivity rather than restrict it, and building seriously on frameworks like BIMP-EAGA would align policy with historically grounded comparative advantage rather than fighting it.

         The honest constraint binding all of this is that the dynasties who most need to be reformed control the legislature that would need to pass most of these changes. The anti-dynasty provision has sat unimplemented in the Constitution since 1987 because Congress will not pass the enabling law. This is why sequencing matters: you cannot federalize before building regional state capacity, and you cannot activate participatory governance without prior economic security that gives people time to participate. But the most dangerous political misuse of Philippine history — the reading that says “we were always fragmented and chaotic, therefore we need a strongman” — is flatly wrong on the history. The pre-colonial Philippines was decentralized *and* interconnected *and* accountable at the right scale. That is a usable political inheritance, and a citizenry educated to understand it is considerably more resistant to authoritarian nostalgia than one taught that genuine self-governance was never part of their story.

         not surprised that the Robredo model is part of the answer.

         Reply
         • Joey Nguyen says:

           May 2, 2026 at 9:00 pm

           Some ideas I had before; I don’t believe any require legislation (are within exec authority):

           • SALN digitization and made publicly searchable — raises cost of unexplained wealth.
           • FOI expanded to LGU executive office contracting, procurement, payrolls — frame as transparency rather than attacking dynasties, who control most LGUs.
           • DILG SGLG award tied to supplemental NTA release — creates incentive program for high-performing LGUs while low-performing LGU heads face scrutiny by constituents for not getting extra NTA.
           • LGU Performance Scorecard — Have public and clear point system tied to metrics. May create competition between LGUs when constituents can compare their LGU head’s performance vs other LGUs.

           In addition, perhaps the “Robredo Model,” which under some form is used by the Good Governance Mayors, should become standardized into a “Robredo Method” based on the late Jesse Robredo’s mayorship of Naga. Something I thought might be useful would be a modern-day sandugo blood pact; maybe something along the lines of the Cordilleran practice of bodong or peace pact between one or more tribes to engage in mutual collaboration.

           The diaspora (including OFW) probably still holds most of the power due to education, skills, remittance power, yet they are not organized in any major way. Social media nowadays might be able to facilitate that but then that would require civil society leaders abroad — a thankless job. AFAIK most overseas Filipinos don’t vote for various reasons.

           Irineo I’m not sure if it was intended but I found your point on cheap imported rice to highlight the original datu relationship. In the datu patronage system one of the main functions of a datu was to maintain food security, including redistribution in times of crop failure which Laura Lee Junker observed in Raiding, Trading, and Feasting. But it’s not just cheap imported rice that reinforces modern datu power. Cash transfers and remittances might have separated direct material dependency on the datu, but rather than liberating the modern “clients” of the modern “datu,” decoupling material dependency for survival just meant clients were cheaper to maintain. Modern patrons need to provide even less than a datu of the past provided, while using utang na loob to retain the same political loyalty. It seems to me that this behavior actually got worse after 1987 when Marcos cronyism which had broken old patron networks was itself broken up and had the wealth of Marcos cronies redistributed to a new set of dynasties.

           Reply
           • Irineo B. R. Salazar says:

             May 3, 2026 at 6:16 am

             I asked Claude to give me a wrap up of how local power was from the Third Republic today (with some prompt wizardry of course) and got this:

             **The Cacique Republic: Local Power in the Third Republic (1946–1972)**

             The foundational elements that allowed dynasties to persist — the link between wealth and politics, the patron-client system, and a weak institutional framework — were firmly in place by the end of the Third Republic. Under the 1935 Constitution that governed the postwar republic, the formal relationship between Malacañang and local government was deliberately ambiguous. The President held control of all executive departments, bureaus, or offices, but exercised only general supervision over local governments as provided by law. In practice, this meant presidents could suspend or remove local executives for cause under the Revised Administrative Code — dishonesty, oppression, or misconduct in office — as the Supreme Court confirmed in *Lacson v. Roque* (1953) when the Manila mayor was suspended. The President’s power to remove or suspend the Mayor of Manila was limited to specific grounds such as dishonesty, oppression, or misconduct in office. Yet this removal power, though real, was seldom used against allied warlords; it functioned less as an instrument of democratic accountability than as a presidential weapon against political rivals. Local politics was variously described as rooted in patron-client relations, bossism, or warlordism, with many mayors and governors elected on the basis of family name and networks rather than the strength of their parties or platforms. Local revenue came mainly from market fees, license taxes, and real property levies — thin enough that ambitious *caciques* depended on pork barrel disbursements brokered through Manila legislators, making them fiscally clientelistic even when locally powerful. The Philippine Constabulary, nominally a national force, operated in practice through the patronage of provincial elites, giving strong mayors considerable informal leverage over policing in their territories.

             —

             **Martial Law and the Illusion of Centralization (1972–1986)**

             When Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in September 1972, he explicitly targeted this warlord system. Weapons were confiscated, and “private armies” connected with prominent politicians and other figures were broken up. More dramatically, he personally appointed every provincial governor, city mayor, and municipal mayor throughout the nation, converting elected executives into presidential creatures overnight. Under the 1973 Constitution, Marcos abolished whatever remained of the old supervision/control distinction, concentrating all governmental authority in himself by decree. Under martial law, power was heavily centralized in the hands of President Marcos, who ruled by decree, issuing Presidential Decrees that had the force of law, bypassing the dissolved Congress. The Philippine Constabulary was placed firmly under central military command, and military personnel were assigned to oversee provincial and municipal governance, replacing elected officials in key areas to ensure compliance with central directives. Local governments lost whatever fiscal independence they had possessed: revenue allocation was tightly controlled from Manila, and local executives were functionally administrators rather than autonomous power brokers. Yet the centralization was more illusory than real. Marcos could not govern every barangay from the palace, so he selectively co-opted certain dynasties — those willing to declare loyalty — while crushing rivals. Families like the Singsons in Ilocos Sur and the Dimaporos in Lanao del Norte actually flourished under martial law precisely because their subservience to Marcos gave them a monopoly over their territories. Authoritarianism did not eradicate dynastic politics; it merely reorganized the franchise.

             —

             **The OIC Moment and the Constitutional Shift: 1986–1987**

             The People Power Revolution of February 1986 carried enormous popular expectations of democratic renewal, but Cory Aquino’s immediate actions at the local level ironically seeded the ground for a new generation of *trapos* (traditional politicians). Aquino and other top officials fired pro-Marcos governors and mayors, replacing them in all provinces with people loyal to Aquino. These Officers-in-Charge (OICs) — appointed rather than elected under the provisional Freedom Constitution — were drawn overwhelmingly from the pre-Marcos elite families who had been displaced or sidelined under martial law. Rather than installing genuinely new civic leaders, the OIC system restored the Third Republic’s *cacique* class, now rebranded as democrats. The Binays in Makati, the Dutertes in Davao, and countless provincial families across the archipelago entered or re-entered power through OIC appointments, using their unelected tenure to consolidate patronage machines before the first post-Marcos local elections in 1988. Rodrigo Duterte birthed a dominant dynasty as a tough-talking, anti-crime mayor of Davao City after the 1986 revolution, a career that began with his family’s OIC appointment. What compounded this restoration was the 1987 Constitution’s fundamental redesign of center-local relations. Where the 1935 Constitution had given presidents the power to remove local executives for cause — a coercive lever that at least made *caciques* negotiate with Malacañang — the new charter erected a constitutional wall around local autonomy. Article X, Section 4 of the 1987 Constitution provides that the President shall exercise only general supervision over local governments, ensuring their acts are within the scope of their prescribed powers and functions. This provision establishes that the President’s relationship with LGUs is supervisory, not one of control — a limitation that is a manifestation of the principle of local autonomy, which is constitutionally recognized and protected. In practical terms, a president could no longer simply remove a troublesome mayor; cases had to be referred to the Ombudsman and tried before the Sandiganbayan, a process so slow and politically complex that it became largely toothless against entrenched dynasties.

             —

             **Decentralization and the IRA: Structural Foundations of the Fifth Republic’s Dynasties**

             The 1991 Local Government Code, enacted under President Fidel Ramos, was designed to correct the hyper-centralization of the Marcos era by giving local government units genuine resources and devolved functions. Under the 1991 Local Government Code, the Internal Revenue Allotment (IRA) scheme was established, allocating at least 40% of the country’s internal revenue income to LGUs. Health, agriculture, social welfare, and public works functions were transferred from national agencies to provinces, cities, and municipalities. Yet this structural reform, intended to empower communities, in practice empowered the families already in control of those communities. The IRA became the fiscal lifeblood of local dynasties: the bulk of the productive sources of local revenue remained with the central government even in the post-Code period, and many LGUs have not fully utilized their revenue-raising powers due to political constraints and to the disincentive effect of the IRA distribution formula on local tax effort. Because local executives controlled how IRA funds were spent with relatively weak accountability mechanisms, the Code essentially handed entrenched families a guaranteed income stream with which to sustain patronage networks. Police control also shifted: under the Code, local chief executives were given authority over the local PNP in peacetime, meaning mayors once again had leverage over law enforcement within their jurisdictions — a partial return to the pre-martial law arrangement that some mayors exploited to protect allies or suppress rivals. Combined with the 1987 Constitution’s near-prohibition on presidential removal of local executives, this created an extraordinary concentration of unaccountable local power: reliable IRA funds, nominal police authority, and virtual insulation from executive discipline above.

             —

             **The Fifth Republic’s Dynastic Equilibrium: Continuity Through All Regimes**

             What emerges from this long arc — from the Third Republic’s open warlordism through Marcos’s centralized patronage, Aquino’s OIC restoration, the constitutional prohibition on presidential removal, and the IRA-funded decentralization of the Fifth Republic — is a remarkable structural continuity beneath the surface of regime change. Studies find that 75% of district representatives, 85% of governors, and 66.67% of mayors could be considered dynastic, and that candidates from political dynasties register larger winning ratios compared to non-dynastic candidates. Each constitutional transition actually entrenched dynasties further: under the 1935 framework, at least the threat of presidential removal kept local bosses negotiating with Manila; under the 1987 framework, that lever disappeared, and the dynasties that Aquino’s OIC appointments had placed in power now governed from behind a constitutional shield. Despite the provision in the Constitution, no anti-dynasty statute has been meaningfully implemented, and the Local Government Code includes no limitations on the running of an incumbent’s family relations or the holding of multiple political positions by members of the same family. The result is a system in which the trapos of the Fifth Republic are not aberrations but direct descendants of the caciques McCoy catalogued in *An Anarchy of Families* — families whose genius lies precisely in surviving every wave of supposed reform by adapting their methods while protecting their essential position at the intersection of local state power, reliable national transfers, and hereditary electoral machines.

             (OK, cacique as a term is a bit dubious as it is more applicable to Latin America, still it is established)

             The big picture that emerges is that no one really had the “datus” under control. There is BTW the theory that even if the USA had left the Philippines alone, it might have succumbed to Aguinaldo’s various “generals” fighting one another like the 1950s warlords but without any state to hold them together.

             Reply
             • Irineo B. R. Salazar says:

               May 3, 2026 at 6:25 am

               I followed up with a question on how land reform and migration changed things and got this:

               —

               **Land, Tenancy, and the Original Engine of Dynastic Control**

               The foundation of local boss power in the Third Republic was not primarily electoral machinery or police leverage — it was the hacienda. Landlords and caciques yielded tremendous influence in the social and economic life of the nation, able to dictate to their dependents — the tenants and their families — such matters as to whom to vote for in political elections, and to influence political action in various ways to maintain the status quo. This was not metaphorical influence; in a system of share tenancy, the landlord controlled whether a peasant family kept its plot, received seed credit, or was protected from rivals, making the vote a form of deference woven into the logic of economic survival. In the rice bowls of Central Luzon and Nueva Ecija, tenancy rates ran as high as 53% of riceland on the eve of the 1972 land reform, with the usual practice being for the landlord to take residence in Metro Manila and employ a katiwala, or overseer, to manage the farm and, implicitly, the political loyalties of those working it. In the sugar islands — above all Negros Occidental — the hacienda system was even more absolute: plantation workers lived on landlord land, bought from landlord stores, and owed loyalty to landlord-politicians whose wealth was inseparable from their cane acreage. The sugar haciendas, especially in the Negros Islands, represented the last bastion of feudalism in the Philippines, with the hacienda system having been in existence since the time of Spanish occupation. When Marcos moved against this system with Presidential Decree 27 in October 1972, he was simultaneously pursuing counter-insurgency, punishing rival oligarchs, and — selectively — dismantling the material infrastructure of the old boss class. The decree covered only rice and corn, deliberately exempting sugar, coconut, and banana estates to protect cronies like Benedicto and Enrile. Apart from targeting the production of staple crops, Marcos had mixed intentions with PD 27, seeking to legitimize martial rule, pacify insurgency, and crush his land-based political opponents. In Central Luzon, the results were structurally significant: large-scale rice haciendas, whose owners had formed a prominent political force in the rice bowl of Central Luzon until the 1960s, more or less disappeared. The severing of tenancy relationships destroyed, in those areas, the oldest and most intimate mechanism by which a landlord converted economic dependency into electoral delivery. Cory Aquino’s 1988 Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program extended coverage to all agricultural land in principle, but in practice, more than a decade after CARP’s implementation, the sugar haciendas, especially in the Negros Islands, had barely been touched, with landlord families using their very political control of local DAR offices and beneficiary lists to delay, dilute, or redirect redistribution in their own favor. At the local level, barangay officials and provincial elites continued to control beneficiary lists and DAR decisions, favoring allies or relatives through patronage, undermining tenant selection and perpetuating a cycle where reform targets covered only a fraction of elite-held haciendas effectively. Where land reform did bite, the political class adapted with remarkable speed — converting agricultural land to real estate, using land use conversion permits (LUCs) to reclassify CARP-covered farmland into commercial or residential zones, and reinvesting into infrastructure contracting financed by IRA budgets. The boss did not disappear with the hacienda; he became a developer and a contractor instead, reproducing the same monopoly over local economic life through different property forms.

               —

               **Internal Migration and the Remaking of the Urban Captive Vote**

               The great internal migration of the postwar decades — from upland barrio to provincial town, from province to Manila, from the Visayas and Luzon to the Mindanao frontier — profoundly disrupted the agrarian geography of dynastic control and forced the evolution of entirely new patronage mechanisms. The percentage of the population classified as urban increased from 36% in the mid-1970s to 52% in the early 1990s, meaning that within a single political generation the Philippines had transformed from a predominantly rural country, where the hacienda vote was decisive, to one in which the largest concentrations of voters lived in cities and peri-urban margins entirely outside the landlord’s reach. At the end of the Pacific War, Manila was greatly changed by substantial rural-urban and centre-suburban migration, with new rural entrants tending to settle on industrial and abandoned lands in the inner city, and by the 1960s a growing squatter presence had also spread to the suburbs as vacant land in the inner city became scarce. By the 1990s, an estimated 4.5 million people were homeless or living in informal settlements in the Philippines, with 3 million of this population in Metro Manila alone, forming a vast, precarious urban constituency whose insecurity of tenure made them acutely dependent on the goodwill of local officials for the most basic needs — not eviction, connection to electricity and water, access to public housing lists. This dependency was the urban reincarnation of the hacienda relationship: the squatter owed the barangay captain and the city mayor the same structural deference that the share tenant had owed the landlord. Broader socio-economic transformations were causing political patronage to become more centralized and centred on state resources; pressures on land use were growing through expanded urbanization and the financing of major infrastructure through foreign loans, while options for the orderly relocation of informal settlers were declining with soaring land values, higher population densities, and growing income poverty. City bosses responded to this new landscape not with formal property relations but with the selective distribution of tolerance: squatter communities were allowed to remain or threatened with demolition depending on their political alignment, barangay captains served as ward bosses mediating access to housing certificates and relocation assignments, and scholarship and medical assistance dole-outs — funded ultimately from IRA allocations — replaced the crop advance as the currency of political obligation. For decades, the government had a policy of relocating squatter families off-city to the outer reaches of Manila, but the relocation sites seldom had the economic infrastructure that attracted squatters to the city in the first place, so many ended up moving back and starting another cycle of squatting — a cycle that left them perpetually vulnerable, perpetually negotiating with local officials, and perpetually useful as a captive electoral bloc. The same dynamic reproduced itself on the Mindanao frontier, where migration into virgin land created settler communities with disputed tenures whose political loyalty could be secured by whichever local strongman delivered titles or protection.

               —

               **OFW Remittances, Partial Emancipation, and the Limits of Change**

               The mass deployment of Overseas Filipino Workers from the 1970s onwards, accelerating dramatically through the 1990s and 2000s, introduced a powerful but ultimately ambiguous solvent into these patronage relationships. Remittances from abroad, which total billions of dollars annually, both free families from their dependency on local economic and political elites and provide the resources for political activities by new entrants into politics. The mechanism is intuitive: a family receiving regular remittances from a son or daughter working in Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, or Italy no longer needs to cultivate the mayor’s favor to survive a bad harvest or a medical emergency. Their economic independence from local patrons reduces the leverage that patronage politics requires, and scholars have found that migrants empower citizens in sub-national regions by providing funds to family members who become less beholden to clientelistic ties with political parties, fostering expectations of better governmental performance and higher levels of political accountability at the sub-national level. In provinces with high OFW penetration — parts of Ilocos, the Eastern Visayas, and Cebu — this effect is visible in somewhat more competitive local elections and occasional upsets of entrenched dynasties by challengers who campaign on performance rather than patronage. Yet the emancipatory effect has been partial, uneven, and susceptible to reversal. Traditionally landowning classes have diversified out of agriculture and invested in real estate, primarily in urban centres, with commercial and office real estate growing as areas of investment catering to Manila’s growing class of wealthy professionals, while OFW remittances contributed to inflated land prices in central business districts. In other words, the same remittance economy that freed tenants from landlords simultaneously enriched the landlord class’s real estate holdings — the boss adapted upward as his old clients became more independent. At the individual household level, moreover, remittances can produce a form of political disengagement: families with overseas members may focus on private advancement rather than collective political action, effectively withdrawing from the civic pressure needed to break dynastic machines. Remittance transfers and transnational ties offer an “exit without leaving” for those who stay behind, who can build their lives largely independent of domestic political and economic conditions, leading them to distance themselves from institutionalized politics and invest more in social networks that will facilitate their own departure in the future. The result is a paradox at the heart of Philippine political development: the forces — land reform, urbanization, OFW remittances — that most obviously should have dissolved the material basis of dynastic bossism have instead, through a combination of landlord adaptation, urban patron reinvention, and migrant disengagement, left the dynasties structurally intact and merely differently costumed, governing through housing dole-outs and IRA contracting rather than crop advances and eviction threats, but exercising recognizably the same coercive intimacy over the daily lives of those who depend on them.

               that big picture doesn’t look good.

               Reply
               • Irineo B. R. Salazar says:

                 May 3, 2026 at 5:18 pm

                 and now a look at the roots with some prompt magic on Claude:

                 —

                 **The Pact of the Datus and the Making of the Principalia**

                 The foundations of Philippine political dynasticism were laid not in any colonial statute but in a calculated act of co-optation that took place even before Spain had consolidated its hold on the archipelago. When Miguel López de Legazpi established Manila as the colonial capital in 1571, he formalized an arrangement that would define the next three and a half centuries of Philippine governance: all existing doctrines and laws regarding Indian caciques were extended to Filipino principales, whose domains became self-ruled tributary barangays of the Spanish Empire. The system of indirect government helped in the pacification of the rural areas and institutionalized the rule and role of an upper class known as the principalía until the fall of the Spanish regime in 1898. The pre-colonial Philippines had never possessed a unified sovereign power. Each datu ruled his barangay independently, and alliances between barangays were limited to mutual protection and assistance in times of need — they did not entail permanent allegiance. What Spain did, in effect, was crystallize these fluid, competitive chiefly networks into a hereditary administrative class: the gobernadorcillo, the cabeza de barangay, and the body of principales who monopolized local office, tax collection, and social prestige. The datus and other representatives of the old noble class took advantage of the introduction of the Western concept of absolute ownership of land to claim as their own fields cultivated by their various retainers, even though traditional land rights had been limited to usufruct. Crucially, the distinction between principalia membership by birth and by recognized service to Spain meant that the class was not entirely closed: loyal soldiers, prosperous Chinese mestizos, and commercially successful commoners could and did enter it over time. The distinction or status of being part of the principalía was a hereditary right, but it could also be acquired, making it a permeable elite rather than a rigid caste. Yet this permeability only reinforced the logic of the system: ambition was channeled into joining the principalia rather than challenging it, and the Spanish state perpetually reproduced its own local intermediaries. The pact with the datus was thus not merely a colonial convenience but the founding template of Philippine political culture — a bargain in which local elites surrendered formal sovereignty in exchange for the perpetuation of their local dominance, a deal whose essential terms would survive the replacement of the Spanish crown by the American Congress, by Manila’s Commonwealth government, and by five successive Philippine republics.

                 —

                 **The Encomienda: Administrative Instrument, Not Agrarian System**

                 A persistent confusion in Philippine historical memory conflates the encomienda of the early colonial period with the hacienda system of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, treating them as a single continuous structure of agrarian exploitation. They were not, and the distinction matters enormously for understanding how dynastic power was reproduced differently across regions. The encomienda was a land ownership system granted by the King of Spain to soldiers who joined military expeditions; the encomendero’s core obligation was to collect tribute from the indigenous residents of his grant and to protect them from external threats, while ensuring their Christianization — an administrative and fiscal relationship, not primarily an agrarian one. The encomendero did not, in the early period, transform his grant into a plantation or manage its agricultural production; he extracted tribute in kind — rice, cloth, beeswax, gold — and relied on the principalia to actually organize the collection. This system began to decay by the seventeenth century as encomiendas reverted to the Crown, were fragmented by inheritance, or were absorbed by the religious orders, whose institutional longevity made them far more effective long-term landholders than any individual soldier-grantee. The modern hacienda — the managed agricultural estate producing cash crops for world markets — was an entirely different creature, born not from the encomienda but from the dramatic commercial transformation that followed the opening of Philippine ports to world trade in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Philippine abaca became indispensable as the finest material for rope and cordage and alternated with sugar as the country’s most valuable export, while the opening of the port of Iloilo in 1855 and the entrepreneurial genius of British vice consul Nicholas Loney, who arranged generous credit terms for local landlords to invest in the new crop, led to the development of the previously unsettled island of Negros as the center of the Philippine sugar industry, exporting to Britain and Australia. The majority of export income of the Philippines during the nineteenth century came from cash crops — tobacco, sugar, cotton, indigo, abaca, and coffee — making agriculture the major source of revenue in the country. It was this export boom, not the encomienda, that created the great agrarian estates of the modern Philippines, and it created them unevenly: heavily in Negros Occidental (sugar), the Cagayan Valley (tobacco), parts of the Visayas and Mindanao (abaca), and Central Luzon (rice for Manila’s growing market), but far less intensively in regions like Bikol where the cash crop economy took a different, more fragmented form. The political consequences of this distinction were profound: where the hacienda dominated, so did the monolithic landlord-boss; where it did not, the political landscape was correspondingly more varied.

                 —

                 **The Inquilino System, the Friars, and the Making of the Ilustrado Class**

                 The agrarian system that Rizal knew and that formed the social matrix of the Philippine Revolution was not the encomienda but something subtler and more specifically Filipino: the inquilino system of the friar estates, which created a layered structure of agrarian subcontracting that simultaneously oppressed the peasantry and nurtured the ilustrado class that would eventually challenge Spanish power. The inquilino was a person who held a near-hereditary lease on agricultural land in the Spanish Philippines; many inquilinos were Chinese mestizos who, by intermarriage with members of the hereditary principalia, had come to constitute a rural upper class especially in Central Luzon by the late nineteenth century. Their wealth not only assured them a reliable body of farmworkers and followers but also enabled them to send their sons to study law and medicine in Manila or overseas. The national hero José Rizal came from just such a family background. Rizal’s father Francisco Mercado leased approximately 500 hectares of land from the Dominican-owned Hacienda de Calamba, subletting it to sharecroppers and acting as the operational intermediary between the distant friars and the actual cultivators — the archetypal inquilino arrangement. The inquilino system stimulated commercial rice and sugar production and expanded cultivation, contributing to the economy, while the ilustrado class — mainly the sons of these large tenant farmers as well as small commercial and professional sectors — rose to prominence during the second half of the nineteenth century with the opening of the Philippine economy to world trade. The friar orders — Augustinians, Dominicans, Franciscans, Recollects — were the real landlords of this system, and their estates concentrated particularly around Manila and in Central Luzon. The Friar Lands were large agricultural estates owned by these religious orders, accumulated through grants, purchases, and other means, and they became a major source of conflict due to high rents, arbitrary rules, lack of tenant security, abuses by administrators, and accusations of land-grabbing; the grievances over the Friar Lands were a key factor fueling anti-friar sentiment and serving as a major cause of the Philippine Revolution. The inquilino thus occupied a contradictory position: economically prosperous enough to educate his children and build political networks, but ultimately insecure and resentful — dependent on the continued favor of a friar landlord who could raise rents, refuse lease renewals, or invoke ecclesiastical authority against a troublesome tenant. It was precisely this combination of relative prosperity and structural vulnerability that made the inquilino class the social base of reformist nationalism: wealthy enough to articulate grievances, educated enough to write them down, and aggrieved enough to mean it.

                 —

                 **The American Moment: Friar Land Sales and the Consolidation of the Ilustrado Landlord**

                 The American colonial period brought what might have been the Philippines’ first genuine land reform — and transformed it almost immediately into a mechanism for elite consolidation. The American colonial government purchased the Friar Lands in 1904 for $7.2 million to pacify the country and address the land question. The stated intention was to subdivide the roughly 166,000 hectares into parcels that could be sold to the tenants already cultivating them, converting inquilinos and kasamas into independent smallholders and dissolving the agrarian tensions that had helped fuel the revolution. The land was eventually resold to Filipinos, some of them tenants but the majority of them estate owners. The result was, in the words of one analysis, entirely predictable: the Friar Lands Act of 1904 dispossessed the friars of their vast landholdings, and these lands were supposed to be distributed to tenants, but because the tenants could not afford to purchase the land, these lands eventually fell into the hands of the local ruling elite who had exclusive access to financial resources. The families who benefited most were precisely the inquilino-ilustrado families who had the capital, legal knowledge, and political connections to navigate the American bureaucratic process — in other words, the Rizal class, or more precisely the class that had produced Rizal, now liberated from their dependence on friar landlords and converted into outright owners. These were often acquired through royal grants, purchases, or sometimes through less formal means, gradually concentrating vast tracts of land in the hands of a native principalia landowning class; when the Philippines started self-rule, it was this elite class that took over the reins of government. The American period also opened vast public lands in Mindanao and Mindanao’s frontier regions through the Public Land Act of 1913, in theory to create a smallholder yeomanry but in practice providing another avenue for elite land acquisition through homestead manipulation and cadastral fraud. The net effect of three decades of American colonial land policy was thus to convert the inquilino-subcontractor class of the Spanish period into a class of direct landowners — now also legislators, lawyers, and eventually presidents — who entered the Commonwealth period and then independence holding the agrarian foundations of political power more securely than any principalia before them had.

                 —

                 **Bikol and the Regional Exception: Fragmented Land, Civic Possibility**

                 The political culture produced by these agrarian structures was never uniform across the archipelago, and the case of Bikol illustrates how differently constituted land systems could yield meaningfully different local political possibilities. Bikol’s geography — a long, narrow, typhoon-battered peninsula with no single dominant river valley comparable to the Pampanga basin of Central Luzon, broken up by volcanic massifs like Mount Mayon — militated against the consolidation of the vast, flat monocrop estates that defined Negros and the Central Luzon rice bowl. Bikolanos grew both wetland and upland rice and corn for subsistence, and coconut and abaca for cash crops, a diversified agricultural profile that naturally resisted the hacienda model: coconut and abaca smallholdings were economically viable at modest scale in ways that centralized sugar milling was not, requiring no equivalent of the Negros haciendero’s capital equipment or labor concentration. The result was a land tenure structure characterized by smaller holdings and more widespread private smallownership than in the great estate regions, without the extreme polarization between landlord and landless tenant that defined Central Luzon or the Visayan sugar islands. The development of the sugar industry in Luzon and then Negros, based on tenanted and centrally managed haciendas employing hired labor, represented confrontations between wage laborers and hacendero planters that were structurally unlike the agrarian institutions of other regions. In Bikol, by contrast, the absence of this extreme polarization meant that local political competition was not simply an expression of landlord monopoly over dependent voters. The region produced a comparatively robust tradition of municipal civic institutions, church-community organizations, and cooperative structures, and — significantly — a pattern of political competition in which middle-class professionals, clergy, and civic organizations could periodically challenge landed families in ways that were structurally impossible in Negros or Pampanga. This is not to romanticize Bikol as a democratic paradise — dynasties existed there too, and poverty was severe — but the regional comparison does support the broader analytical claim that land structure was not merely an economic variable but a political one: where tenancy was deep and concentrated, boss power was nearly total; where land was fragmented and ownership more widely distributed, civic space existed in which alternative political actors could breathe.

                 —

                 **From Pre-Colonial Pact to Republican Dynasty: The Thread of Continuity**

                 These five centuries of accumulated agrarian and political structure flowed directly into the Third Republic of 1946 and all subsequent Philippine governance, not as residue but as active architecture. The principalía families — transformed through the inquilino system into ilustrados, reconstituted as outright landowners through American-era friar land purchases, and empowered as legislators and local executives under the Commonwealth — were the families who ran the Third Republic. Long-run socioeconomic change had eroded traditional local patron-client relationships in the economically most advanced provinces such as Central Luzon and in certain cities, but agrarian reform, slow though it was, had only begun to erode the power of the landlord class, while urbanization was increasing economic differentiation and the share of the vote up for grabs rather than under the control of political leaders. The hacienda-based boss of 1950 was the direct institutional descendant of the inquilino-leaseholder of 1880, who was himself the successor of the cabeza de barangay of 1700, who was the baptized datu of 1571 — each generation re-securing its local dominance through the available institutional forms of its era. Marcos’s land reform under PD 27 broke the Central Luzon rice landlord class but not the dynasty — the landlord simply became a provincial politician living off IRA contracting. The friar land beneficiaries of the American period became the CARP-resisting hacenderos of the Aquino era, using stock distribution options and land use conversion permits to preserve their holdings. And the regional exception of Bikol, where smaller land holdings had permitted a more differentiated civic society to exist, was gradually compressed by urbanization, IRA-funded patronage machines, and the nationalizing tendencies of television and social media politics, which rewarded celebrity and resources over community rootedness. Since the colonization of the Philippines in the sixteenth century, the agrarian system has been characterized by a growing concentration of land ownership, and after Philippine independence in 1946, this highly skewed land distribution persisted, with peasant uprisings requesting land redistribution and greater social justice recurring throughout the post-independence period. The Philippine political dynasty is, in the deepest sense, not a product of democratic failure but of colonial success — the success of a system designed over five centuries to channel power, land, and authority through the same narrow class of families, simply updating its operating methods with each new sovereign that arrived to claim the islands.

                 I specifically asked about Bikol because it never had that many large haciendero clans, it always had a pronounced ilaya (and a tradition of people going there) and a very specific middle class culture.. possibly the presence of natural disasters also played a role.. in any case civic society there is different from what it is in Iloilo City.. that place is probably way more patrician in its liberalism..

                 Reply
                 • Joey Nguyen says:

                   May 3, 2026 at 8:41 pm

                   The big picture that emerges is that no one really had the “datus” under control.

                   The pattern of mass energy, then elite capture — is the defining structural feature since the 1897 Tejeros Convention feud between Bonafacio’s Magdiwang and Aguinaldo’s Magdalo that has endured until the present. In this way Bonafacio’s execution at Maragondon was the first demonstration which systemized: the masa can start, but not finish revolutions, because system change requires the organizational and institutional resources the masa do not yet have.

                   OK, cacique as a term is a bit dubious as it is more applicable to Latin America, still it is established

                   I think most readers of Philippine history know the “cacique democracy” epithet used by Liberals became popularized after Benedict Anderson’s 1988 New Left Review article “Cacique Democracy in the Philippines: Origins and Dreams.”

                   Yes, “cacique” is a Carib Indio word for chieftain so it has Latin American origins. In Hispanophone and Lusophone Americas “cacique” broadly means a local political boss who exercises polical power in a system of bossism-clientelism (i.e. caciquismo) similar to the Peninsular caudillo-gaucho (i.e. caudillismo) system.

                   By the reign of the liberal Queen Isabella II the liberalization allowed for political parties, but without many rules clientelist networks arose under “caciques.” It was also common during this time for publications in the Philippines to bemoan the local caciques, according to some Spanish-language documents of that period (I was fortunate to read a few in person years ago when I visited a friend at UST).

                   As Bonafacio styled himself as “Supremo,” one of the auto-granted styles of Aguinaldo was “El Caudillo,” I guess in an attempt to have a perceived higher title than the commonly used cacique.

                   The term “cacique” persisted under the American Period and I guess was forgotten for a while until Benedict Anderson’s 1988 article.

                   that big picture doesn’t look good.

                   I think the main issue pro-democracy Filipinos is a failure of imagination to utilize levers of power one can capture in the existing system — there is too much focus on starting over with a new transformation to copy-paste American-style or Euro-style democracy, which can’t happen unless there is another revolution.

                   But what is wrong with a Philippine-style democracy that respects Philippine heritage while integrating new ideas necessary for modernity? I think there is a lot of mine regarding alliances and coalitions between datus in centuries past. That is still the operating logic of the Philippine system as shown by how dynasties are constantly forming and switching coalition alliances with every election.

                   Check out the following link to see what I’m playing around with now:

                   https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/f6070512-52d5-45ad-b9fb-911c8fcac4ec

                   Reply
2. Irineo B. R. Salazar says:

   May 4, 2026 at 5:43 am

   created two pictures with AI that summarize the discussion between Joey and me, the first one is how the “datus” evolved over the centuries, the other is Joey’s idea of a modern political alliance that utilizes the best aspects of Philippine culture.

   

   Summary (from Claude)

   The roots of Philippine political dynasticism reach back to the sixteenth century, when Spanish colonizers struck a foundational bargain with the pre-colonial datu class: local chiefs surrendered formal sovereignty in exchange for the perpetuation of their hereditary dominance as the principalía. Spain crystalized what had been fluid chiefly networks into a fixed administrative class that monopolized tax collection, land, and local office. This class adapted across centuries — becoming inquilinos subletting friar estate lands in the nineteenth century, then converting those leasehold positions into outright ownership when American colonial authorities purchased and resold the friar lands, overwhelmingly to those with capital and legal connections rather than to the tenant cultivators the policy nominally intended to benefit. Each colonial transition, rather than dismantling the elite, merely updated its legal and economic costume.

   The material engine of this dynastic order was the hacienda, whose form varied sharply by region and crop. In Negros Occidental, a feudal sugar plantation system tied plantation workers to landlord land and landlord stores in near-total dependency. In Central Luzon’s rice bowls, share tenancy running at over 50% of riceland gave landlords coercive control over the peasant vote, with absentee owners managing political loyalty through hired overseers. Bikol, by contrast, with its fragmented smallholdings of coconut and abaca, produced a more differentiated civic society in which middle-class professionals and church organizations could occasionally challenge landed families — demonstrating that land structure was not merely an economic variable but a directly political one.

   The formal independence of 1946 changed the sovereign flag but not the operating system. The Third Republic’s elected bosses — governors, mayors, district representatives — were the direct institutional descendants of the principalía, now exercising power through the patron-client networks of a weak state rather than colonial appointment. The 1935 Constitution gave presidents at least a coercive lever over local executives — removal for cause — but this was seldom used against allied warlords, functioning mainly as a weapon against rivals. Ferdinand Marcos’s martial law in 1972 promised to break the warlord system and did dismantle the Central Luzon rice landlord class through Presidential Decree 27, but the decree deliberately exempted sugar, coconut, and banana estates to protect cronies, and it ultimately reorganized rather than eradicated dynastic patronage, selectively co-opting loyal families while crushing rivals.

   The 1986 People Power Revolution and its aftermath paradoxically deepened the dynasty’s structural entrenchment. The Officers-in-Charge appointed by Corazon Aquino to replace Marcos loyalists were drawn overwhelmingly from the pre-Marcos elite families who had been sidelined under martial law — the Binays in Makati, the Dutertes in Davao — who used unelected tenures to consolidate patronage machines before the 1988 elections. The 1987 Constitution then removed the presidential removal power that had at least kept local bosses negotiating with Manila, erecting a constitutional wall of local autonomy that made entrenched mayors and governors nearly impossible to discipline from above. The 1991 Local Government Code compounded this by directing at least 40% of national internal revenue to local government units, giving dynasties a guaranteed fiscal lifeblood — the Internal Revenue Allotment — with which to sustain patronage networks while weak accountability mechanisms left spending largely unchecked.

   The forces that should logically have dissolved dynastic bossism — land reform, urbanization, and OFW remittances — have instead, through elite adaptation, left the structure essentially intact. Where agrarian reform did bite, landlords converted farmland into real estate and infrastructure contracting financed by IRA budgets, reproducing the same monopoly over local economic life through different property forms. Urban squatter communities became the new captive electorate, owing the same structural deference to city bosses that share tenants had once owed to hacienderos. OFW remittances created partial economic independence from local patrons in some provinces but also produced political disengagement among migrant families, withdrawing the civic pressure needed to break dynastic machines. Studies confirm that 75% of district representatives, 85% of governors, and two-thirds of mayors could be considered dynastic, a continuity that reveals the Philippine political dynasty not as a democratic failure but as the logical outcome of a system designed, across five colonial and republican regimes, to channel power through the same narrow class of families — merely updating its methods with each new sovereign that arrived to claim the islands.

   Joey’s proposal would look more like this, the link to it is below the picture:

   

   https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/f6070512-52d5-45ad-b9fb-911c8fcac4ec

   Reply