Antonio Floirendo, Sr. was a Filipino entrepreneur and landowner whose main business was his 6000-hectare banana plantation in Panabo, Davao del Norte, Philippines, earning him the title as the "banana king" during the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. He was among a group of close associates of Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos referred to in media as "Marcos cronies", having benefitted from his close association with Marcos. The Marcos mansion at 2442 Makiki Heights Drive in Honolulu, Hawaii, in which Marcos spent the last years of his life in exile, was registered under the name of Floirendo Sr.

At 7:15 p.m. on September 23, 1972, President Ferdinand Marcos announced on television that he had placed the Philippines under martial law, stating 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 Muslim Independence Movement (MIM). Opposition figures of the time accused Marcos of exaggerating these threats and using them as an excuse to consolidate power and extend his tenure beyond the two presidential terms allowed by the 1935 constitution. Marcos' signed Proclamation No. 1081 on September 21, 1972, marking the beginning of a fourteen-year period of one-man rule which effectively lasted until Marcos was exiled from the country on February 25, 1986. Proclamation No. 1081 was formally lifted on January 17, 1981, although Marcos retained essentially all of his powers as dictator until he was ousted in February 1986.