President José P. Laurel of the wartime Second Philippine Republic placed the Philippines under martial law in 1944 through Proclamation No. 29, dated September 21. Martial law came into effect on September 22, 1944. Proclamation No. 30 was issued the next day, declaring the existence of a state of war between the Philippines and the US and Great Britain. This took effect on September 23, 1944. According to the 1986 edition of "RR Philippine Almanac: Book of Facts", there was martial law in Nueva Ecija on January 7, 1946. At 7:17 pm on September 23, 1972, President Ferdinand Marcos announced that he had placed the entirety of the Philippines under martial law, through Presidential Proclamation № 1081, which was dated September 21, 1972. 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 25, 1986. Even though the formal proclamation was lifted on January 17, 1981, Marcos retained virtually all of his powers as dictator until he was ousted by the EDSA Revolution. When he declared 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 reign beyond the two presidential terms allowed by the 1935 constitution. 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 later determined to be "of criminal origin." This 14-year period in Philippine history is remembered for the administration's record of human rights abuses, particularly targeting political opponents, student activists, journalists, religious workers, farmers, and others who fought against the Marcos dictatorship. 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, 35,000 documented tortures, 77 'disappeared', and 70,000 incarcerations. Through a combination of loan-funded deficit spending and large-scale infrastructure projects, the administration of Ferdinand Marcos became very popular during his first term as president - enough so that Marcos ran for reelection in 1969 and succeeded in becoming the first President of the Third Philippine Republic to be re-elected.