ABSTRACT
The 1969 campaign also produced incidents of political terror of the sort not seen since the 1951 elections. Bolstered by force and fraud, Marcos scored a crushing victory, winning 74 percent of the presidential vote, 86 of 100 House seats, and 11 of 12 Senate seats being contested. In mid-September 1969, the Crisologo goons gunned down a former Bantay municipal mayor, and a month later prosecutors indicted the congressman’s son, Vincent Crisologo, chief of the family’s private militia, for ordering the crime. The military quickly disbanded 145 private armies, two for each of the country’s 67 provinces, and confiscated 523,616 firearms, one for every 15 adult males, leaving the president with a momentary monopoly on violence. A close Marcos friend from their law school days at the University of the Philippines in the late 1930s, Benedicto became the regime’s de facto administrator for sugar, then the country’s leading export industry.
