At 7:17 pm on September 21, 1972, President Ferdinand Marcos announced that he had placed the entirety of the Philippines under martial law.[better source needed] This marked the beginning of a 14-year period of one-man rule which would effectively last until Marcos was exiled from the country on February 24, 1986. Even though the formal document proclaiming martial law – Proclamation No. 1081, which was dated September 21, 1972 – was formally lifted on January 17, 1981, Marcos retained essentially all of his powers as dictator until he was ousted.[better source needed]
While the period of Philippine history in which Ferdinand Marcos was in power actually began seven years earlier, when he was first inaugurated president of the Philippines in late 1965, this article deals specifically with the period where he exercised dictatorial powers under martial law, and the period in which he continued to wield those powers despite technically lifting the proclamation of martial law in 1981 .
When he declared the martial law in 1972, Marcos claimed that he had done so in response to the "communist threat" posed by the newly-founded Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), and the sectarian "rebellion" of the Mindanao Independence Movement (MIM). Opposition figures of the time, such as Lorenzo Tañada, Jose Diokno, and Jovito Salonga, accused Marcos of exaggerating these threats, using them as a convenient excuse to consolidate power and extend his tenure beyond the two presidential terms allowed by the 1935 Constitution.[citation needed]
After Marcos was ousted, government investigators discovered that the declaration of martial law had also allowed the Marcoses to hide secret stashes of unexplained wealth which various courts[better source needed] later determined to be "of criminal origin".[better source needed]
This 14-year period in Philippine history is remembered for the administration's record of human rights abuses, particularly targeting political opponents, student activists,[better source needed] journalists, religious workers, farmers, and others who fought against the Marcos dictatorship.[citation needed] Based on the documentation of Amnesty International, Task Force Detainees of the Philippines, and similar human rights monitoring entities, historians believe that the Marcos dictatorship was marked by 3,257 known extrajudicial killings,[additional citation(s) needed] 35,000 documented tortures, 77 'disappeared', and 70,000 incarcerations.[page needed][page needed]