Martial Law and Carceral Order: From the Mindanao “Problem” to CIA-Backed Resettlement Programs

Between 1951 and 1985, Islamic separatist and Communist-led insurgency in the Philippine hinterlands posed consistent threats to established agricultural production flows through both the recruitment of peasant farmers and armed resistance to centralized government. As counterinsurgent warfare waged by the Armed Forces of the Philippines evolved in collusion with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, so too did the usage of prison colonies, two of which were founded within a twenty-year span; and which were based on earlier models of national prison-plantation colonies established during the U.S. colonial period in the islands.

This paper looks to Philippine state documents, newspaper records, and declassified CIA correspondences to argue that U.S. military involvement in the Philippines was synonymous with the intensification of plantation expansion and hierarchical subject formation, resulting in variations on counterinsurgent penal colonization through the twentieth century. In this case, prison colonies established by both U.S. military men and Philippine statesmen act as analytical prisms through which to understand colonial and postcolonial continuities in the Philippines. Carceral and environmental histories thus help to explain the broader political contestations of national economic development that have characterized U.S.-directed counterinsurgency policies across the postcolonial world.

Through analyses of the spatial and environmental histories of plantation colonies and the military’s critical role in establishing them, I highlight the relationship between counterinsurgency and prison development to frame Philippine governance as an ongoing war over land use, resulting in increased incarceration of both people and landscapes. By detailing prison colonial expansion in connection to both an evolving centralized Philippine state and the U.S. military, this paper articulates a story of imperialist counterinsurgency, ideal worker-soldier hierarchies, and plantation agriculture for global consumption that has fundamentally shaped the Philippine nation-state and a twentieth century, U.S.-dominated global political economy.