The watershed year seemed to be 1971, when the Cloma claim came up again because Taiwanese on Ligaw Island (which they call Itu Aba Island and occupied) fired on a Philippine fishing vessel carrying Rep. Ramon Mitra Jr. The Philippines, at this point, stuck to its position since the Quirino era that any construction on islands needed the permission of the allies: the victors of World War II, which included us. In July of that year, we filed a diplomatic note with Taiwan (still recognized as the Republic of China), saying their troops represented a danger to Philippine national security.

Marcos then went further and ordered troops to establish a foothold on Kota, Likas, Pag-asa, and Parola Islands; a presidential communiqué announced they’d be known as the “Kalayaan Islands Group.” Carlos P. Romulo, for his part, advised Marcos to develop these features for defensive purposes.

And it’s here where the old met the not-as-old: another justification was the Philippine occupation by means of the Cloma claim.

But it all actually began three years earlier. Just as the race to annex the Spratlys before the war was driven by the need to prepare naval facilities for war, the scramble over the Spratlys in the ‘70s would increasingly be driven by the global thirst for oil and other natural resources.

In 1968, the United Nations Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East, after conducting a geological survey, announced that the continental shelf of the South China Sea could contain oil and gas deposits. Another survey, the year after, identified “substantial energy deposits” in the seabed between Taiwan and Japan. The year after that, the Philippines posted troops on Lawak Island.

In 1972, Marcos decreed oil exploration (Presidential Decrees No. 8 and No. 87, October and December, respectively), and in 1973, the definition of Philippine territory in the new Constitution was written to include the claims in Sabah and the Spratlys.

But a new party was on the scene. The People’s Republic of China, and it is at this point that Marcos officially took on the Cloma claim. Then South Vietnam fell to Northern Vietnam, which promptly took away one feature from the Philippines in 1975.

Marcos’ gung ho grabbing ran aground on domestic realities. He’d embarked on a kind of homegrown imperialism in 1967-1968 with the planning of Operation Merdeka, the infiltration of Moro troops to lead a “spontaneous rebellion” in Sabah; this, in turn, helped trigger the Moro National Liberation Front’s rebellion in 1971. Increased confrontations between Taiwanese and Filipinos in 1971-1972, the government announcing it was assuming Cloma’s claim, the rewriting of the definition of territory in the 1973 Constitution to include both Sabah and the Spratlys, a clash between China and South Vietnam and the Philippine occupation of five islands in the Spratlys in 1974, and the government announcing in 1975 it was assuming Cloma’s claim all took place in the background of the brutal war in Mindanao, as Manila battled the Moros, culminating in the burning of Jolo in 1974. Having joined in the Spratlys scramble, an outgunned, outnumbered, militarily anemic (after the enormous losses in Mindanao) Philippines now demanded American security guarantees. In Washington, Henry Kissinger ensured the success of a new round of United States bases negotiations, enough to maintain the status quo. But in exasperation, he decided to maintain American ambiguity on the Mutual Defense Treaty.

On March 11, 1976, oil was finally discovered offshore northwest of Palawan. The next day, the Armed Forces of the Philippines Western Command in the Spratlys was created. On June 11, 1978, Marcos annexed the Spratlys: to be precise, he proclaimed the “Kalayaan Islands Group” part of Philippine territory. That act had its own origins, three years earlier, with another annexation, which must’ve made Marcos envious.

In 1975, Indonesia invaded, then annexed, East Timor. Until East Timor gained independence in 2002, neither the UN nor most countries recognized this. But in 1978, Australia did, according to Christopher Joyner, since the “area is of considerable interest to petroleum geologists.” No coincidence then, that in the same year, 1978, Marcos decreed the formal annexation of most of the Spratlys as part of our national territory. He named Cloma’s claim the “Kalayaan Island Group,” a literal translation of Cloma’s “Freedomland.” The island group was integrated as a municipality in the province of Palawan, the Philippine island closest to the incorporated cluster.