EDIT: whatthehell reddit screwed up my formatting

Some of these answers were previously written for another planned thread.

Did Marcos really steal from the Nation during his term or did he amass that wealth during his time as a lawyer and getting payed with tallano gold?

First off is that you should know that the Marcoses themselves have denied this (quite frankly) ridiculous conspiracy theory.Secondly, exact accounts of Marcos plunder are hard to find, with estimates ranging from 5 billion to even 30 billion USD stolen from government coffers. Additionally, the Marcoses have managed to avoid the subsequent charges of graft in the USA through the intervention of President Reagan (https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-10-31-mn-307-story.html), or in the case of the Philippines simply straight up refusing to go to prison (https://www.philstar.com/headlines/2020/11/09/2055672/whatever-happened-to-graft-conviction-imelda-marcos).

Was the martial law just a pretext for extending his rule or was he really fighting against NPAs/insurrectionists. They said that his rival, Noynoy Aquino, was just a communist spy and stirring up rebellion aginst the government.

Was the Communist threat to the Philippines significant?

There are not many people left alive today that could conclusively answer this question. Both Marcos and the communists were responsible for varying degrees of civil unrest and violence:

- Marcos had an unofficial paramilitary terror squad called the "Monkees" that were first deployed in his violent presidential campaign in 1969, and who were later directed to detonate bombs in Manila in the early 1970s. Their existence was unearthed in a sworn affidavit by alleged ex-Monkee Jose Fronda Santos to the US Congress.

- The MV Karagatan incident, where a freighter was found to have been carrying shipments of rifles allegedly from China to support the NPA rebellion. Primitivo Mijares alleges that these rifles were planted by the Marcos government on account of a lack of identifying marks.

- The Plaza Miranda bombing was at the time widely considered to have been the work of Marcos (even by the CIA!). But, Victor Corpuz and other former communists in interviews with journalist Gregg Jones have come out and claimed that the bombing was on the directive of Party leader Joma Sison. To this day there has been no former investigation on this besides allegations.

Nevertheless, it is still worth noting that martial law was for the most part an initiative on the part of Marcos himself, not the US government that supported him. Also note that in the following year, the United States sponsored a military coup in Chile to overthrow a democratically elected socialist president, and covertly funded an intrastate network of state repression of leftist elements in Latin America. It is likely that in the case that the Philippines was really that close to being controlled by a regime unfriendly to US interests, US assets would have likely deployed their own countermeasures in the country. In addition, some Philippine military officers since then have contended that nationwide martial law was not needed to contain an insurrection of around 500 poorly-armed insurgents in the countryside.

Was Ninoy Aquino, prominent anti-Marcos politican, a communist and/or terrorist?

Aquino has never been mentioned as a “founder” of the Communist Party of the Philippines in any official party documents, nor was it likely that he was ever an actual member of the Party at any point in his life. However, he was on friendly terms with some commanders of the defunct leftist Huk rebellion, from which the burgeoning Party recruited its first guerrillas for the New People’s Army. Communist leaders like Joma Sison and Bernabe “Dante” Buscayno have alleged that Ninoy hosted Party meetings in his house prior to martial law, and that for a time Party cadres were allowed to pass unmolested through the Cojuangco family estates. So-called “tactical alliances” with the Communists by opposition politicians were not uncommon and became less taboo as Marcos’s authoritarian tendencies increased. In addition to this, in his exile in the United States Ninoy helped organize the radical Light-A-Fire movement with Steve Psinakis who were responsible for a series of bombings in Manila in the early 1980s.

And while we're on it:

Who shot Ninoy Aquino?

There have been two official investigations into this incident. The first was by a Marcos-appointed military committee that blamed alleged CPP-NPA member Rolando Galman as the sole gunman. But the more independent Agrava commission led to the following conclusions:- The exact details of Ninoy's landing were only made known to the military a few hours before. If the military's intelligence was that late, what more the intel machinery of a ramshackle rural insurgency?

- Following on from this, the military did manage to get the Manila International Airport reasonably locked down to the extent that anyone who would have penetrated their lines would have only been successful with the cooperation of an insider. This is the basis of the Agrava commission's conclusion: that it was a military conspiracy where the soldiers present deliberately allowed Aquino to fall into harm's way.

Was the people power revolution just a plot by the catholic church and the Aquinos to overthrow the Marcoses.

Of course anti-Marcos conservative politicians would have many things to gain from an ouster, and they did. But as to the question of the Church: at the time its ranks were already bleeding from the numerous clergy (estimated at around 5% to 10%) who were allegedly sympathetic to the NPA. Cardinal Jaime Sin found that he could no longer maintain the former policy of "critical collaboration" he had previously proposed with the Marcos government. Would it have really been in his interest for the majority of his clergy to fall to what he would have considered a godless, materialistic and totalitarian ideology?

As to the nitty-gritty of why People Power succeeded:

- The fact that it was a snap election and thus one of the few remaining ways for Marcos to gracefully relinquish power.

- Additionally: the COMELEC walkout, footage of burnt ballots and the Namfrel alternative count that all led credence to fraud on the part of Marcos.

- The RAM faction of the military, who started the coup that would instigate EDSA. Many junior officers and other military personalities (Ramos, Enrile, Honasan) were against Marcos's "overstaying generals" that they perceived were harming the counterinsurgency effort.

- (Most crucially) The US was already running out of patience for Marcos, after more than a decade of trying to get him to institute cleaner elections, reform the military, and put down the Communist insurgency that was being directly bolstered by his own military's abuses and poor economic policies.

Is there any foreign comprehensive studies/literature regarding this era? I am having a hard time trusting local testimonies, its so conflicting.

- The Philippines: A Situation Report by the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence- Concludes that as a result of the incompetence of the Marcos regime, the Communist insurgency had grown stronger, the economy was markedly weakening, and a threat to US assets in the country was already tangible.

- Waltzing With A Dictator by Raymond Bonner- The most comprehensive account of the Marcos dictatorship, told mostly from the perspective of the US diplomatic corps. Through interviews with senior US diplomats and declassified FOIA documents, Bonner maintains a similar conclusion that the Marcos dictatorship was a practical and diplomatic disaster for US foreign policy.

- Rise and Fall of Ferdinand Marcos by William Overholt- Similar conclusion as above.

- Closer Than Brothers: Manhood at the Philippine Military Academy by Alfred McCoy- Details the endemic corruption and authoritarian tendencies of the Philippine military as a result of their role in implementing martial law.

- Priests on Trial by Alfred McCoy- Uses the framing of murder charges on two Irish priests to explain the underlying causes of the Negros famine.

- The CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room has many declassified documents on the NPA insurgency which they were monitoring: just type "npa" into the search bar for some examples.

- Crisis of Revolutionary Leadership by J Scalice: details Aquino's collaborations with the leftists.