The rule of Ferdinand Marcos over the Philippines took a rapid turn for the worse as the decade of the 1960s drew to a close. While his initial term had achieved much progress in improving living standards compared to his predecessors, it soon became clear that much of that was the result of fiscal profligacy and… generous disbursements of public funds to political supporters. Predictably, when Marcos unleashed a new round of public spending before his reelection, inflation spiked and the government ran into a fiscal crisis. Even worse, OPEC price hikes hit at an inopportune moment, spiking the cost of living even further.

Citizens from all walks of life soon took to the streets, initially to demand action on rising prices and corruption. However, as intellectuals, members of the opposition Liberal Party, and university students began to join the protests, criticism increasingly began to target Marcos’s corruption and widespread use of political violence and intimidation. In Mindanao, protests also began to take on a Moro nationalist bent as news of the horrific Jabidah massacre began to spread. Soon, hundreds of thousands of people were protesting throughout the Philippines, demanding reform and change to what was evidently a broken political system.

All in all, a perfect storm. Too perfect, Marcos thought. He responded by accusing the entire protest movement of being a communist plot to divide the nation and cracked down hard with the security forces, injuring and killing hundreds. This had the predictable effect of radicalizing the students and driving large numbers of them into the arms of the actual communists. Marcos’s move to change the constitution to enable his own hold on power and his brutal attack on the so-called “Diliman Commune” further alienated even the most moderate opposition organizations against him, turning universities into hotbeds of communist activity.

However, students reaching out to campus communist groups or fleeing into the jungles found only small, disorganized communist cadres. The downfall of Mao and the concurrent SEATO victories in Southeast Asia had sapped the PKP of supporters and enthusiasm. Most of the remaining PKP cadres before the “First Quarter Storm” were composed of Huk veterans and old-school pro-Soviet Marxist-Leninists, who were often perceived as out of touch with popular opinion.

Finding that the leadership of the vaunted PKP had little in common with them, the new wave of student recruits often took to founding their own cadres, using the PKP name but having little else in common with the original core of the group. Soon, pro-Soviet Marxists, radical Maoists, Trotskyists, Roy-Tanguyists, and Liu-ists were all fighting against the Marcos government with varying degrees of success. The strongest armed group is the Maoists, who possess a strong base among the youth and student populations and an ideology heavily geared towards rural guerilla war.

Meanwhile, in Mindanao, the Moro opposition to Marcos's Christian-supremacist policies has grown increasingly violent. Unsatisfied with the conciliatory policies of the Moro Independence Movement, radical Moros broke off to form the Moro National Liberation Front and began fighting their own little war against the government. The movement has sought support from muslim countries, especially Malaysia, despite its officially secular stance – a move which has strengthened the influence of Islamist factions within the movement.

Despite the disunified nature of the opposition, the response of the Marcos government to the insurgency has been totally inadequate. Marcos clearly is no Magsaysay – under his presidency, corruption has infected every level of the law enforcement and armed forces. Soldiers, left unpaid and abandoned by their superiors, defect to the communists and sell their weapons on the black market. Units garrisoning more remote islands like Leyte and Samar do whatever they can to make a profit while avoiding the attention of the central government, a tendency which is proving highly counterproductive as insurgent activity spreads from Luzon to the outer islands. “Elite” units closer to Marcos’s regime are better equipped and motivated, but mostly notorious for frequent abuses of the local population, especially Muslims, inflaming support for the rebels.

The centralized and corrupt government of Ferdinand Marcos has effectively lost control of large parts of the rural Philippines. Public support for the guerillas varies in these areas – in many “no-go zones,” local small businesses and peasants, tired of Marcos’s economic policies, enthusiastically support the opposition. In other areas, the guerillas financially support themselves with “liberation taxes” and highway tolls. Both guerilla cells and government units on the frontline find themselves fighting their own little wars, without much outside support or even coordination from their supposed allies – police and army units often go weeks without supplies or pay, and even though the various leftist and Moro guerillas have so far kept truces with each other, tensions over territory and ideology frequently arise, preventing true cooperation. Throughout the whole conflict, Marcos has of course continued to insist that he faces a single, coordinated, Soviet/Malaysian funded opposition movement, ironically driving up recruitment for the enemy by creating the mistaken impression that any kind of unified anti-government armed group exists.