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The Future of Dynastic Rule in the Philippines

The Marcos regime was “exceptional for both the quantity and quality of its violence,” Alfred McCoy, a historian at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, wrote in 1999. McCoy estimated that 3,257 extrajudicial killings were carried out under Marcos. The specter of violence was horrific and deliberate. Many of the victims were mutilated and then dumped roadside for passersby to see, McCoy wrote: “Marcos’s regime intimidated by random displays of its torture victims—becoming thereby a theater state of terror.”