Susan Quimpo is a friendly, soft-spoken woman who laughs easily and often. She’s an art therapist and counselor. Besides her private practice, she works with civil society groups to help alleviate trauma in communities affected by typhoons and war. She provides therapy to political prisoners and victims of human rights violations. She also writes for Philippine news publications and international journals. She is the co-author of Subversive Lives: A Family Memoir of the Marcos Years (Manila: Anvil Press, 2012), recently re-released by the University of Ohio Press/Swallow Press.
I met Susan after a rally against the proposed burial of Ferdinand Marcos in the Cemetery of Heroes. The body had been flown over from the United States in 1993 and placed on display at the Presidential Center in his home province. The Marcos family was waiting until an administration took power which didn’t oppose his internment as a hero. With the election of Pres. Rodrigo Duterte and the subsequent approval of the Supreme Court, the time seemed right. On November 18, when Duterte was conveniently out of the country, the body was brought in by helicopter. There was a 21-gun salute, but only an hour before the ceremony did outsiders learn that this was not a rehearsal.
On Nov. 24, over lunch in Manila. I asked Susan to tell her family’s story of political activism during the period of martial law and to include an explanation of the anti-Americanism in the revolutionary movement, the burial controversy and the talks she delivers to Filipinos too young to remember martial law.
Susan’s story
I was born in 1961, the youngest of ten children. My parents were married during World War II. They were very pro-American. They grew up in Philippines when it was still a colony of the US. The Philippines was under the US from 1898 through 1946, except during the years of the Japanese occupation during World War II. [The Americans brought in English language education and established public education. As colonizers they were far more popular than the Spaniards.]
But to go back a bit, in 1898 with the end of the Spanish-American War and the Treaty of Paris, the Philippines was sold to the US for $20 million. The Filipinos, who’d been fighting for their independence from Spain since 1896, now discovered they had a newer, stronger enemy. In the Philippine-American War, they put up a good fight. They had gotten some concessions from the Spanish government, including money to buy arms, but these were peasants used to machetes who’d never held guns before. A historian told me that triangular thing on a rifle—the sight—which allows you to aim at your opponent, they considered it a nuisance, so they tore it off and threw it away. The Americans were amazed that the enemy kept firing above their heads. The war supposedly ended in 1903, when the revolutionary republic told people to lay down their arms, but some were still fighting until 1907.
The war was called an insurrection but was actually a national revolution against the new colonizer. The Americans won in part because the Filipino leaders were not united. The different factions were even killing one another. General Luna was assassinated by people within the revolution. In-fighting was a recurring story throughout WW II and throughout the Marcos era, spoiling the revolution against the oppressor—the Americans, Japanese or Marcos.
Anyway, my parents grew up under a time when American education was in the schools. They grew up saying “A is for apple” and “S is for snow,” even though they had never seen snow. They were both staunchly pro-American.
Your dad worked for Coca-Cola as an engineer.
Yes, his entire life. Mom came from the landed elite, although over the years they lost whatever prominence they’d had. In WW II, when my parents were in college, Dad wanted to volunteer as a guerrilla fighting against the Japanese. He went to say goodbye to his sweetheart, my mom, and when he got back to where the volunteers were being bused out of Manila, he missed the bus, which saved his life. All the students were leaving for the provinces because Manila was obviously going to be a battleground for the Japanese and the Americans. My father couldn’t get back to Iloilo, his hometown on Panay Island, so he followed my mom to Pangasinan, where they were married.
When the Japanese came, they lined up all the young men, and when they realized that my dad couldn’t speak the local Pangasinan language they suspected he was a guerrilla. He was about to be shot when my grandfather intervened. Again my dad was saved. He stayed in Pangasinan and was very valuable to the Americans, when they came, because he’d repair the jeeps and military trucks. When the Americans left, a mechanic gave him all his tools. He kept them until the day he died.
Moving into the 1960s, there was the Vietnam War and an overall sentiment against America. My brothers and sisters were in high school and university, where some of the students were mouthing anti-US imperialism slogans. In 1969, I was eight years old. There were heated debates at the dinner table, where my siblings would be spouting Marxist theories and my father would be really angry at them for shouting slogans in the streets against US imperialism.
As the youngest I had no voice. Looking back, I see I kept wondering, “What is my role in all this? All I do is I watch.” Only very recently did I think of the phrase “bearing witness.” I know it’s a biblical term, and I’m not religious, but I suddenly realized I’d watched the transformation of my siblings from good academic students to student leaders to activists to guerrillas and leaders of the revolution against Marcos. Now I am not an eight-year-old anymore, and I see it as my role to speak out for the martyrs of martial law. But I’m getting ahead of my story.
The first activist in the family was Ronald Jan, who went to Philippine Science High School, the premier science high school in the country. When he got there the school building hadn’t been built, and classes were held in an old building that had held government offices. The roof leaked and the chairs were broken. He told us that the chemistry class heated up chemicals in coke bottles because they had no test tubes. Students had to wait in line to use a Bunsen burner. When they complained to the principal, he said, “Look, I’m a government employee, and this is a public high school, I really can’t do much. Go to Malacañang [the presidential palace] and air your grievances there.”
So these kids between the ages of 13 to 17 went to the Presidential Palace. At the gates students from all the other schools were there also. It was the First Quarter Storm—the first quarter or the first three months of 1970, when Manila was hit by a storm of protest rallies. Three, four, five times a week, students were at Malacañang or at the US embassy or at the Congress Building shouting slogans.
Why demonstrations at the American embassy?
It was Marcos’s second term and the height of the Vietnam War. Anti-American sentiment was worldwide. Besides, Marcos was saying things like Filipino troops should be sent to fight in Vietnam under the American flag [as South Korea did]. Filipino students looked at the controversy over the draft in US universities and young Americans’ returning from Vietnam in coffins. They didn’t want that.
Clark Air Base and Subic Naval Base [not far from Manila] were the largest American bases outside the US. There was a lot of abuse—prostitution, drunk American soldiers. Outside the bases, a lot of poor people, scavengers, were picking up garbage, and there were stories of American sentinels using them for target practice. The New York Times ran a story on this. If I remember right, over three years there were at least 32 deaths. The shooters would say, “Oh, we thought it was a wild boar.” It enraged people. [The US military also left a massive amount of chemical waste which has still not been cleaned up.]
People were angry with Marcos for pandering to the Americans. As a child I saw pictures of Marcos with Lyndon Johnson and their wives, all decked out. Imelda invited American dignitaries to lavish parties while the economy was failing. College students had no jobs when they graduated.
I remember Jane Fonda showed up at an antiwar rally. This was just after the release of Barbarella, where she was a sexy science fiction character, and there she was in a baggy white shirt waving her fist in the air. It got the students all fired up to be with an American movie star who was also an anti-imperialist.
In 1970 one of the worst typhoons, Typhoon Yoling, hit the Philippines. For the first time, Nueva Ecija, the rice region, was under water. For weeks only the tops of the coconut trees were above water. As a result, there was a lack of rice and the economy dipped. There was an oil shortage, and the price of gasoline went up. But still Marcos and Imelda were holding parties on their yacht; Imelda wore a diamond tiara like royalty at State functions. The typhoon had led to economic ruin, and during the typhoon the government did not help. It was the priests, the nuns, the civic organizations that brought relief to the victims.
So there was a lot of uncertainty inside and outside the country because of the situation in Vietnam. I remember as a kid seeing pictures of Woodstock in Life Magazine and thinking, “Wow, this is wild. Why are people wrapped in mud and dancing? Why’s a half-naked woman dancing in the mud?”
You were not doing drugs at the time, obviously.
[laughs] But I think there was worldwide anxiety anger against anything from the previous decade. I didn’t understand. I was just taking it in. We lived close to the presidential palace, and there were rallies three, five times a week. At least five thousand people marched past each time. Nowadays I tell friends, “As a kid I didn’t watch church parades, I didn’t watch the saints go by, I watched the police beating up demonstrators.”
At that point Mom was still alive, and our home was at the end of a row of modest apartments, which today would resemble townhouses. The row of eight apartments had a metal gate facing the street. We’d see a group of students march to Malacañang, and the mothers in our apartment row would watch for the students running back with the police after them. They’d open the gate for the students and close it so the police couldn’t get in. They’d give the students water or bread or let them use the telephone to call their parents. Despite the fact that my mother was very pro-American, she behaved like a mother. She was worried about the kids.
Ronald Jan, the brother in Philippine Science High School, was demonstrating in the streets. The activists went into all the schools. My siblings were part of it, consciously or not. It was the thing to do. Inside school campuses, at teach-ins students sat in circles on the grass while student leaders lectured on Marxism and imperialism and service to the people.
At the time my father was earning a thousand pesos a month. [During the First Quarter Storm, the value of the peso slipped from P4 to P6 to the dollar, so 1,000 pesos would have been roughly $200]. That was for food, rent, utilities, clothing and tuition for a family of twelve. That was really nothing, even then. We had rice, and we had eggs because an aunt who had a poultry farm brought us the damaged eggs, the ones with two yolks or something. But much of the budget was ear-marked for tuition because my father always believed education would be our deliverance. He was hurt when his children became activists because their grades suffered. It came to the point when he told Jan, “If you attend that rally tomorrow, you’re out of the house.” And he was. Then martial law came.
A week before the declaration of martial law in September 1972, Marcos threw all the legal opposition in jail—Ninoy Aquino, the senators, the Congressmen, the trade unionists, the vocal faculty members of the University of the Philippines. The only ones left to challenge the dictatorship were high school and college students. At least three of my siblings were very much involved in Kabataang Makabayan, a militant youth organization that went underground. I don’t think they’d have become as radical in the underground movement or even in the Communist Party if Marcos hadn’t been so vindictive in going after student leaders.
At the gate of each high school and university was a huge billboard with pictures of all the student leaders, the president of a theater group or the botany club or a writer for the school paper or the head of the student council. If you were the president of anything, you were on that billboard, and the minute you stepped on campus the military picked you up. You were lucky if you were only questioned. A lot of people were tortured. Basically, the idea was that the intelligent students would lead the would-be opposition. That’s why Marcos was so bent on getting them.
Nobody was prepared for martial law to rule the entire country for fourteen years. Everybody had thought that we’d only have a suspension of habeas corpus or that martial law would be declared only in Mindanao. A few months after the declaration, the populations in high schools and universities had dipped because the students were hiding—or going abroad if they had money. Students were scrambling to get to the provinces. The extreme left had painted romantic images of a people’s army. These young people being hunted by the police thought their only option was to join this army. But it wasn’t even an army. According to Time Magazine, there were only 600 guerrillas with arms from WW II which were so covered with rust they wouldn’t fire. A lot of the students who made it to the mountains to form the New People’s Army were killed. They were all young, some of them teenagers, nobody over thirty. They didn’t know how to use guns, which—if they had them—would jam. They’d be ready to fire on the police and the military then retreat because they were out of ammunition. Some of those who died were friends and classmates of my siblings.
Between 1973 through 1978, our family went through arrest after arrest, raid after raid, torture after torture. Once they got you, they’d torture you so you’d point to other students, and then they get them too. The police and the military were seen as pretty much the same thing — Marcos’ soldiers of terror. The military eventually took four brothers and a sister and threw them in the Marcos prisons; four of them were heavily tortured.
A week after martial law was declared, our house was raided. The police were just looking for guns and subversive materials in the homes around Malacañang, not making arrests. But when they came to our apartment, we knew it wasn’t safe for my siblings to come home. They started staying wherever they could spend the night. My brother Ryan, the one who has polio, was 15. He said that he and student leaders from other schools would spend the entire day in Luneta Park eating fried bananas or crackers, and at nightfall, because of the curfew, they’d go into funeral homes and pretend to be relatives of the deceased. They’d eat the food provided at the wake until someone asked them about their relationship to the deceased. My siblings weren’t home much. Now and then they’d call, but we were worried that the phone was tapped. We spoke in codes. So I grew up always conscious of being watched, aware that my siblings could be arrested, I wasn’t supposed to know where they were. It was a very paranoid childhood.
I was just thinking that here was a therapist in the making.
Exactly. Early training. Then they were captured. I’d read in the newspaper and hear on television, Marcos telling the press there were no political prisoners, and he’d laugh it off. And yet every weekend for four years I visited siblings in one or two or three camps. I was really confused. “What am I doing? Are they criminals? I know they did nothing except go against Marcos. So why are they in jail?”
They took people without warrants of arrests; they just barge into your homes, taking people and confiscating property. The military would throw you in jail and there you stayed indefinitely, without charges being filed against you. No court trials, no sentencing procedures. Then I’d hear my dad speak to my sisters who were not arrested, and they’d whisper about the others’ being tortured. “Why were they being tortured? What did they do wrong? What’s wrong with shouting slogans at a rally?”
The pain didn’t stop when they were released. Ronald Jan would have nightmares. He’d be shouting, kicking, screaming and falling out of bed. At the time I didn’t know about post- traumatic stress, but now I do. When my sister was released we were very worried about her. All my siblings played the guitar and sang very sad songs. Once she was singing a song with words like “and this is the end.” My other sister Caren and I exchanged glances as if to say, “Oh, my God, what’s she going to do?”
Well, they were able to pick up their lives somehow. Ronald Jan returned to university and completed his studies. One day, in late 1977, he left to go to school and remarked that we should leave him some dinner that evening. He never returned. To this day, he is a desaparasido [disappeared]. We believe he was picked up by the military and executed extrajudicially. A week before his disappearance our home was raided again, so we knew that we were under military surveillance.
Another brother, Jun, was a college freshmen when he joined a Catholic volunteer organization that assisted an urban poor community set up a livelihood program. When the government moved in bulldozers to demolish shanties, Jun joined the residents in a protest rally. I think 200 people were picked up by the police at the rally and 199 people were released that same evening. The only one detained Jun because they found his school ID with his name on it. The police said, “Oh, another Quimpo. Your family is like a factory for activists.” So he was beaten up for ten days just because his surname was Quimpo. When he got out he was so angry he joined the guerillas. A few years later he was found in an open rice field in the province of Nueva Ecija, with seven bullet wounds in his body.
The sister who was detained and tortured, when released, moved to Australia, got married, had a family and stayed there. Two brothers whom the police were instructed to “neutralize” (kill on sight) sought political asylum in Europe. One of them eventually became a professor in Japan; the other raised a family in France, and after his kids grew up he moved back.
People went on with their lives, but I think the hurt was never processed. Our family doesn’t talk much about it. In fact, Ronald Jan went missing in October 1977. I came back from the States in 1995. Over dinner at my sister’s house, I said, “You know, there’s a wall of remembrance called Bantayog ng mga Bayani or Monument to the Heroes. We should get (Ronald) Jan’s name on it.” She answered, “Oh, this fish is really good. Have more rice.” If you mentioned his name, my siblings would change the topic. So I knew my family wasn’t dealing with it at all.
But because I “bore witness,” all these stories were in my head. In fact, when I was ten I told myself ,” I’d have to write this down. “Much later, when I was in graduate school in the US, I was taking a class called Southeast Asian History from a fantastic professor of social history. He said, “You know, it’s a lot more interesting to look at a country from the perspective of ordinary people, not the leaders.” At that point I started writing.
Of all the lies Ferdinand Marcos propagated, the most interesting one has got to be his Tasaday hoax. I say “interesting” because it is unlike most martial law stories of unconscionable torture and murder; we can be interested in it without feeling ignorant, remorseful, or angry. Marcos’ fabrication of a Stone Age tribe is seemingly harmless beside his plunder and slaughter, so we end up glossing over it and forgetting that it ever happened. But like other stories from that dark period of our history, the Tasaday episode is worth examining if we wish to understand how truly despicable Marcos’ rule was. I stumbled upon the first extensive article in National Geographic magazine on the Tasaday, published August, 1972, a month before martial law was declared. In those 20 months leading to martial law, there was grave political and economic unrest: gas prices soared worldwide; the peso crashed from P3.90 to the US dollar in 1969 to P5.5 to $1 in January 1970 due to the net deficit (i.e., mismanaged debt) of the Marcos government in 1969, standing three times larger than in the previous year and roughly equal to the cumulative deficits between 1961 and 1969; the average income of the richest families ballooned to 15 times more than that of the poorest; and nearly half of the family population (16 million) was unable to satisfy minimum food needs. Marcos needed to take the heat off him, so he decided to rally Filipinos against the Malaysians instead. His administration set out to win back Sabah. But in order to do that, they felt that they needed to prove that prehistoric Filipinos existed. And, as though on cue, the Tasaday sprouted out of nowhere, “discovered” by one of his cronies, Manuel “Manda” Elizalde, Jr.
Worldwide curiosity: A Tasaday child, named Lobo, hanging onto trees; one of the few times the Philippines landed on the cover of the National Geographic magazine.
‘Hero for Indigenous Peoples’
Mando Elizalde was the appointed Secretary of the Presidential Arm for National Minorities (PANAMIN). He had been hailed the hero of indigenous peoples ever since his appearance in an article for National Geographic magazine, entitled “Help for Philippine Tribes in Trouble” in August 1971. He was depicted as the savior for the Lumad, rugged, “young, wealthy, and Harvard-educated,” who, with Marcos’ blessing, helicopters down into their villages (with a Vietnam War veteran as his pilot, no less) as he stops loggers from ever entering their land. Beat that, Captain Planet.
In the 27-page article about the Tasaday, entitled “Stone Age Cavemen of Mindanao,” Manda Elizalde was known to the Tasaday as Momo Dakel Diwata Tasaday, or Great Bringer of Good Fortune. In it Balayem, a representative from the Tasaday, was quoted as saying, “Our ancestors told us never to leave this place of ours. They told us the god of our people would come if we remained here. Their words have been proven true by the coming of Momo Dakel Diwata Tasaday.”Mahayag, also a Tasaday, continued by saying, “If we had not met Momo Dakel Diwata Tasaday, we would probably have died in darkness without seeing the prophecy of our ancestors come true. We can see how he loves us. He has eyes and ears with us now.” Of course, President Marcos was duly credited as the one with the power to give them their lands.
Last Remnants of the Stone Age
Kenneth MacLeish, senior assistant editor for National Geographic magazine at the time, wrote with fascination about the Tasaday. He was stunned the moment he entered their cave, let his guard down, and immediately viewed the Tasaday as mankind’s last remnants from the Stone Age. He swallowed their story without thinking twice and wrote a sensational account of men who called their helicopter “a big bird,” a tribe who had “no words for numbers,” refused meat and hunting bows because they had “no need for it,” scattered their dead around the mountains, had no agricultural implements, and no leader all at the same time. MacLeish dubbed them as “perhaps the simplest of living humans… closest to nature… gentle and affectionate.” He even narrated an instance when a Tasaday attempted to build fire by placing tinder over his flashlight’s lens. The National Geographic Society also filmed them; the documentary was shown repeatedly worldwide. Perhaps unknowingly, MacLeish and his organization became an accomplice to the Tasaday hoax. But it was Manda Elizalde, as well as the Marcos administration, who benefited most from the Tasaday story. They captivated the world’s imagination and a slew of visitors from here and abroad paid handsomely to visit and study the so-called “Stone Age tribe.” Momo Dakel Diwata Tasaday exclusively facilitated the excursions.
But it didn’t take long for archeologists to smell a rat. When the Marcos administration was deposed by the People Power Revolution in February 1986, Elizalde no longer held control of visitations to the Tasaday. The authoritarian government’s filter on what researchers could and could not do on-site was removed. Swiss journalist Oswald Iten, accompanied by Joey Lozano, slipped into the area on March 1986 and spotted the Tasaday living in houses and wearing regular clothes. The following week, German magazine Stern sent their reporters who saw the Tasaday wearing leaves once more… but with cloth garments underneath.
Worldwide Curiosity
It caused worldwide curiosity and, with the tyrannous Marcos and the PANAMIN gone, the Tasaday’s ways were called into question. If they indeed foraged for food, how come they never migrated from their cave? Introduced to metal, how come they never sought it themselves? And most pressingly, what was up with the habitat/clothing shift (and shift back)? Soon, experts declared that the Tasaday was simply a fake, a ploy by the Marcos regime to revise history and gain sympathy when they needed it. The Tasadays were called con artists by the press, and their existence was wiped out of many history books. In Iten’s article, a Tasaday confessed, “We didn’t live in caves, only near them, until we met Elizalde. (He) forced us to live in the caves so that we’d be better cavemen. Before he came, we lived in huts on the other side of the mountain and we farmed. We took off our clothes because Elizalde told us to do so and promised if we looked poor that we would get assistance. He gave us money to pose as Tasaday and promised us security from counter-insurgency and tribal fighting.”When the initial shock receded early in the ‘90s, it was declared that the Tasaday were probably related to the Manobo of South Cotabato. And while it was true that they had a culture of their own (and were not simply acting), they — most definitely — had not been a tribe from the Paleolithic period. It remains widely accepted that their claim to fame was an outright lie. My cousin, practicing archeologist Anna Pineda, calls the Tasaday hoax “a cautionary tale for nationalism driven by the wrong reasons.” Kara David of GMA News visited the Tasaday in June 2009. In her short documentary, she showed how the Tasadays continued to live real lives, and that they cursed the day outsiders came. They now farm, live in nipa houses, remain poor and sparingly schooled, and they wholeheartedly believe that they are Tasaday. It became clear to me that the real culprit was not the Tasaday, but the ones who declared them relics of the Stone Age. The Tasadays were used, sent back in time, to support the belief that all power, all truth, and all that’s fair emanated from the great Ferdinand Emmanuel Edralin Marcos.
I had been making excuses all week but I knew the time had come to make up my mind. The Philippines Ambassador, the former anti-Marcos journalist J.V. Cruz, had warned me about the impending arrival of the Philippines’ first daughter for some time. Imee Marcos, my old nemesis from Manila, was going to be in London along with her new husband, Tommy Manotoc, as part of their round the world tour.
Imee and father, President Ferdinand Marcos
JV had been an outspoken anti-Marcos columnist on the Manila Times when I first met him in the late 60’s, But, like so many other prominent journalists, he had eventually been seduced by Marcos’s offers of money, power and position. In JV’s case, his loyalty had been bought first by an Ambassadorship to Germany and then, when he had proved his loyalty, to the Court of St. James. Even JV’s younger brother, Jun, had benefited from Marcos’s largesse towards his new Ambassador. First Jun Cruz was made Minister of Finance and then he was nominated head of the GSIS, the Government Service Insurance System. But, like all other favours the Marcoses dispensed, there was a price to be paid. Imelda expected her cut. In this case it was the GSIS that she used as her own private bank to finance many of her multi-million dollar projects. And both Jun and JV had to look the other way. I had known JV from my Café Indios Bravos days. He would drop by occasionally to receive or share the latest political and social gossip, to down a glass or two of whiskey and to cast a jaded eye around for any pretty, available girl. But now, in 1983, he was the essence of civility, his normal casual attire abandoned for a Savile Row pinstriped suit. And, instead of being content with a simple roof over his head he was now living in the vast Philippine Embassy residence on London’s exclusive Kensington Palace Gardens, known locally as millionaires’ row.
Imee Marcos and Tommy Manotoc
“I’ve got strict instructions from Imelda,” JV told me over the phone, “not to let Imee and Tommy out of my sight while they’re in London. They’re my responsibility. I’ve arranged a week of parties, theatres and sightseeing. But,” he hesitated, “there’s one night I just can’t be with them. Please can you and Ben take them off my hands that night for me, please.” JV was pleading. Although Ben proved fairly easy to convince when I discussed it with him later, I was extremely reluctant. Ten years earlier I had crossed swords with Imee on Philippine television. And, like her mother, I knew she was unlikely to have forgotten the exchange. Imee had arrived at the Channel 3 studio that night with an arm encrusted in vast uncut emeralds, the like of which I had never seen before. It seemed an extraordinary coincidence at the time because there was a story doing the rounds in Manila that several Andean miners had lost their lives excavating the world’s largest flawless emeralds intended for the First Lady of the Philippines, Imelda Romualdez Marcos. I couldn’t take my eyes off the huge green rocks circling Imee’s wrist. And, being in a playful mood, I just couldn’t resist the temptation to remark on them. Live on air I asked: “Those are the most magnificent emeralds I’ve ever seen, Imee. Did you ever find out exactly how many men died digging them out of the Colombian mountains?” Flustered Imee hurriedly tried to
The famous Catherine the Great emerald in the collection of Imelda Marcos
obscure the offending jewels by covering them with her other arm. I could see she was uncomfortable but I had started, so I persisted. “I heard your mother has yet to pay the bill, is that right?” The presenter, Elvira Manahan, who was one of Imelda’s coterie of “blue ladies”, pulled one of her characteristic Phyllis-Diller-type expressions and let out a nervous giggle. Her husband Dr. Manahan, Manila’s top gynaecologist, had delivered Imee and the other two Marcos children so I realized this must have been acutely embarrassing for her. I waited for an answer but Imee looked straight through me. For once the bright, intelligent First Daughter, who was being groomed to succeed her father, didn’t have a ready answer. Elvira coughed and tried to change the subject. But I knew my friends would expect me to pursue the subject until I got an answer. And youthful arrogance got the better of me. Besides, I was enjoying myself. “How much do you think they’re worth – $50 million, $100 million? What would you say, Imee?” Composing herself, Elvira reprimanded me: “Now, Caroline, that’s an unfair question. Imee wouldn’t have any idea. They were gifts from her mother.” While I was wondering how Elvira knew that for a fact, she turned to Imee:“
TV Host Elvira Manahan
Now tell me about your life, Imee, are you planning to continue at Princeton in the Fall?” I was tempted to say, “If the Philippines can afford the bill!” for it was well known that funds to educate the Marcos children were extracted not from Marcos’s modest presidential salary of $6500 per annum but from the Philippines treasury. Like everything else in his life, Marcos automatically expected his political dynasty to be paid for by the people. I was also tempted to ask Imee about the rhinestone-encrusted jeans she had been reported wearing during a recent summer barbeque in Long Island. Except that, another guest reliably informed me, they weren’t actually rhinestones at all but real diamonds. Sadly, at this point, my instinct for self-preservation got the better of me. I had almost been deported once, Betsy, Henry and many of my friends had been jailed and now I had my own children’s safety to consider. So I let it go and we twittered on about innocuous subjects that required little soul-searching, little animosity and zero confrontation. I had not spoken to Imee since then. And now JV was asking me to look after her and her basketball coach husband, Tommy, for a whole evening. “Come on, Caroline,” Ben coaxed me, “it won’t be that bad.” So, very reluctantly I agreed. My brother-in-law, Elliott Kastner, had a new musical,
Programme for musical, “Marilyn!”
“Marilyn”, about the life of Marilyn Monroe running at the Adelphi Theatre on the Strand so I reckoned I could invite Imee and Tommy to that. By going to the theatre I imagined, we could keep the conversation to a minimum thus avoiding dredging over old animosities. I called Elliott, explained the situation and he reserved some complimentary tickets at the box office for us. He suggested I call the manager of the theatre to warn him that I would be bringing the daughter of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. The manager was extremely courteous and offered to make all the necessary security arrangements, take us into the private VIP bar during the interval and arrange for us to meet the actors backstage at the end of the show. I knew two of the main actors, Stephanie Lawrence, playing Marilyn and Judith Bruce, playing Marilyn’s mother, so I called them to say we would be dropping in after the performance. Everything was in place. “Sorted”, I thought, almost looking forward to the evening. But how wrong I was. I should have known that nothing involving any member of the Marcos family is ever that simple.
Stephanie Lawrence as Marilyn Monroe
I spoke to Imee the day before the event. I gave her the name and address of the Adelphi Theatre and told her exactly what time we should meet there. In order to avoid misunderstandings I asked her to write it all down. “Everything’s clear,” she told me. “And please make sure you’re there ten minutes before curtain‘s up!” I said as politely as I could. And then, more pointedly, “Theatre starts on time in England.” “Sure, no problem!” she replied and put the phone down. At the allotted time, Ben, the theatre manager and I were waiting patiently in the lobby. Five, ten, fifteen minutes – half an hour – passed and still no sign of Imee. Yet again, just as it always did in Manila, the theatre curtain was forced to wait for a member of the Marcos family. As the audience inside began to hiss and boo, the red-faced manager could wait no longer. He gave the nod for the show to begin. My heart sank. I visualized Ben and me waiting in the lobby all night. I was indignant. This was discourteous not only to the management but also to the actors and the audience. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, seven stretch black limousines rolled up outside the theatre. Doors flung wide open and uniformed men, carrying armalites, spilled out onto the pavementt. I watched in horror as some of the armed minders rushed inside and others surrounded the perimeter, effecting a cordon sanitaire around the theatre. And, when they decided the venue was safe, they snapped their fingers, whispered into their walkie-talkies and nodded the go-ahead for Imee and Tommy to emerge.
Adelphi Theatre in the Strand
By this time people in the street had stopped dead in their tracks. They stared incredulously, probably wondering who on earth deserved such a massive security operation. I, too, couldn’t believe my eyes. This was like finding myself in a cheap gangster movie. I couldn’t help thinking that nobody in London would even recognise Imee Marcos, let alone care who she was or what happened to her. Nobody in London was ever likely to threaten her physical harm or kidnap her. Well, nobody that is, except, of course, her own parents who had already proved they were more than capable since they managed to “kidnap” the hapless Tommy Manotoc following their daughter’s hasty marriage to him. And all for the simple reason that Imelda didn’t approve of him. When the scared young man was finally “released” from a month in his secret mountain cave and when his supposed captors, the NPA Communist guerrillas, had been suitably “punished”, Tommy emerged into daylight for the benefit of the television cameras looking healthier and more robust than he did before he “disappeared”. But nobody was about to drag Imee off the streets of London and hold her against her will. Nobody was about to make an attempt on her life. Nobody was going to hold her for ransom. This was exhibitionism at its most vulgar. This was simply a very successful attempt at drawing attention to herself. And, whether it was her own idea of making a dramatic entrance or “Daddy’s” orders for protecting his anointed heir, I never did find out. But seven decoy cars and nine armed bodyguards seemed, in my opinion, definitely excessive. By now the manager was at his wits’ end. Armed guards were illegal in London and with them posted inside and outside the theatre so flagrantly he felt he was bound to get into serious trouble with the law. “Can’t you ask her to get rid of them?” he whispered to me, as Imee swept into the lobby. “I doubt it,” I replied, “the Marcoses are a law unto themselves. Nobody tells them what to do!
That’s tantamount to suicide where they come from!” I greeted the newlyweds and introduced them to the manager. There were no apologies but then I didn’t expect there to be. There was more hissing and booing from the audience as we were escorted into the theatre in the middle of Scene 2 and blindly groped our way in the dark towards our seats in the middle of the front stalls. I cringed as people making space for us to pass, were forced to stand up, dropping their bags, coats and boxes of chocolates, their seats swinging shut with loud thuds. Feeling no guilt at all, Imee then whispered to me: ”What’s going on? What’s the story so far?” Trying to keep my voice as low as possible I whispered back. I could feel the glares in my direction as I explained the plot. I desperately wanted to leave, preferably in the dark, so no one could see me and point the finger. In the interval, as promised, the manager led us around to the private bar. He offered us drinks and then left. I started to make small talk. Where had they visited, who had they met on their travels, that sort of thing. I finally plucked up the courage to ask Imee the question that had really been on my lips. “Didn’t you feel really bad leaving your baby behind?” “Oh, yes, I miss him terribly,” Imee replied. “Surely you could have brought him with you, I mean with a yaya (nanny) so you could still have gone out and enjoyed yourselves?” “Yes, but Daddy wanted me to leave him. He thought it would be safer.” “But,” I persisted, “I heard you were breastfeeding. Did you have to stop, just like that?”
Tim Rice and Elaine Paige
I was really dying to know the answer to this. But, before Imee had a chance to reply, the composer Tim Rice and the actress Elaine Paige turned round to talk to us. More introductions and more pleasantries and then the bell rang and it was time to return to our seats. When the play was over, I escorted Imee and Tommy backstage. Imee was at her sparkling best. She talked, she laughed and, like her mother, she turned on the charm – but, if I or the actors were hoping for an apology for her late arrival, we were destined to be disappointed. Judith Bruce turned to me and whispered, “Well, Caroline, I’ve known you a long, long time but you always manage to surprise me with the people you know! Who on earth will you show up with next?” Graciously, like a well-rehearsed politician, Imee made her excuses to leave. Ben and I walked her back to the lobby where the theatre manager was waiting patiently. As soon as they spotted her the bodyguards sprang into action, raised their armalites, swivelled their eyes to scan the lobby and the street outside and fell into step behind her. She shook hands with the manager, thanked him for his arrangements and made her way through the glass doors out onto the Strand. The seven cars were waiting, engines revving. As she stepped into one of them, the minders piled themselves into the others and, with horns blaring and screeching tyres, they were off down the Strand. Ben and I stood, beleaguered, on the pavement. There had been no goodbyes for us, no thanks for arranging the evening and, despite the seven stretch limos, no offer of a lift home.
Irene Marcos
Later that same summer I found myself sitting on a sofa next to Imee’s younger sister, Irene. She and her new husband, Greg Araneta, were visiting London on their honeymoon. I now had a perfect opportunity to ask Irene why Imee had left her baby Ferdinand at home. “Daddy thought it was safer for him to stay in Manila,” Irene replied. “But I think I heard her saying she was still breastfeeding…” “Yes, she was.” Irene sounded bored. But I was intrigued. “How on earth did she continue to do that when she was travelling around Europe?” I persisted.” Irene glanced at me as though I was stupid. “Simple, Caroline!” she laughed. “She just expressed her milk everyday and then Daddy sent a Philippine Airlines plane to wherever she was and it would bring the milk back!” Irene shrugged her shoulders as if to say – isn’t that what every mother does when she’s away from her newborn baby for several weeks? Now I understood why all my friends had been complaining during that time that all the Philippine Airlines flights to Europe had either been delayed or cancelled. The solution was obvious. The presidential dairy run was abducting the planes and flying Imee’s precious breast milk back to Manila. This is when it really dawned on me that the Marcoses lived on a totally different planet to the rest of us.
One remark you might hear from supporters of Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. is that we shouldn’t blame the son for the sins of the father. Even Satur Ocampo said something to this effect when he defended his decision to run alongside the dictator’s offspring in 2010.
Ocampo even added that “the guy was sincere to us.”
Ocampo, it seems, forgot that Bongbong Marcos had called human rights victims like himself greedy back in February 24, 1999, during the 13th year celebration of the Edsa 1 People Power. Bongbong Marcos insulted all his father’s human rights victims whom he noted were squabbling among themselves because:
Basta’t may pag-asang magkapera, nagaaway-away na sila” (As long as there’s a chance of making money, they’ll fight among themselves).
I am posting at the end in full the news item entitled – Bongbong: Apology? They only want money
In reviving his political career, Bongbong Marcos has successfully detached himself from the sins of his father.
Today I’m offering readers the proof why Filipino voters shouldn’t let him do that. Because the truth is, Sen. Bongbong Marcos colluded with his father then to hide the family’s ill-gotten wealth and he continues to this day to hide this from the Filipino people.
And the proof came from what Sen. Bongbong Marcos himself told me in a public forum held by the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines (FOCAP) last year, just before the 25th anniversary of Edsa 1 People Power.
Sen. Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos seems to have trouble with his tie. Behind him to the right is businessman Lance Gokongwei – PHOTO by Raissa Robles
I wrote about this last year for my newspaper South China Morning Post. Now I’d like to share with you the answers that Sen. Bongbong Marcos gave to my questions during the FOCAP forum.
I took pictures of him, too.
First, a brief background
When Sen. Bongbong Marcos fled from Malacañang Palace with his family, their loot hidden worldwide was estimated to run from US$2 billion to up to US$10 billion. Only a fraction of that has been recovered by the Philippine government.
I intentionally use the word “loot” because no less than the Swiss Federal Supreme Court used the phrase “of criminal origin” to describe the Marcos Swiss deposits in Credit Suisse bank when it issued a ruling to award this money to the Philippine government.
Here’s how the Swiss Federal Department of Justice and Police website explained the Swiss court ruling on the Marcoses’ deposits in Credit Suisse:
The Marcos case began in 1986 when the Federal Council ordered bank accounts to be frozen. In 1990, the Swiss Federal Supreme Court approved the handover to the Philippines of bank documents relating to the Marcos family, but ruled that the actual return of assets would be conditional upon a final and absolute judgment by a Philippine court. In 1997, the Court established that the majority of the Marcos foundation assets were of criminal origin and permitted their transfer to a escrow account in Manila, even though no Philippine court ruling had yet been issued.
It is the same Credit Suisse deposits that I had asked Sen. Bongbong Marcos about last year during the FOCAP forum. I asked him whether he had a direct hand in trying to withdraw US$213 million dollars from Credit Suisse.
The forum was well attended and had as other forum speakers Supreme Court Chief Justice Renato Corona, Supreme Court administrator Midas Marquez, Cebu Pacific CEO Lance Gokongwei, Pete Troilo (executive director of the private think tank Pacific Strategies and Assessments), senior businessmen and diplomats from various embassies.
I wrote an article on the matter last year for my newspaper SCMP but didn’t get around to writing one for my blog because it is such a complicated story. I will try to tell it now as simply as I can.
Why am I raking up an incident of 26 years ago?
It’s a legitimate question.
Here are my answers.
First, Sen. Bongbong Marcos told me during the FOCAP forum that he still intends to pursue a compromise settlement with the present government of Benigno Aquino III:
We’ve been pursuing a compromise settlement since 1986. We will continue to do so.
Second, he knows where other Marcos deposits are hidden outside the country. Why else would his Statement of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth (SALN) and that of his mother skyrocket so much even if the family has no business empire like the Gokongwei or Sy tycoons.
Third, Sen. Bongbong Marcos and his two other siblings were named the “beneficiaries” of various foreign deposit accounts held by dummy foundations set up by their parents. Unfortunately for them, this mode of hiding the loot was discovered because they left some of the bank documents in Malacañang Palace when they fled. Others were later turned over by the Swiss Federal Court to the Philippine government.
Still, the Philippine government has no idea how many more foreign deposit accounts are still out there.
And fourth, Sen. Bongbong Marcos’ mother Imelda really wants to put another Ferdinand Marcos inside Malacañang Palace. Given all these, they seem to have the money to bankroll a presidential campaign.
Just think, in the last election, the family funded three electoral campaigns.
My Q & A with Sen. Bongbong Marcos
It was during the the FOCAP forum when Sen. Bongbong Marcos confirmed to me that he was not an innocent abroad but was as much a part of the plot to hide the loot.
Senator Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos replies to my questions during the January 2011 FOCAP prospects forum. Beside him is Supreme Court Chief Justice Renato Corona – PHOTO by Raissa Robles
I asked him about the events that occurred shortly after his family fled Manila in February 1986 and ended up exiled in Hickam Air Base, Hawaii.
What happened in Hawaii in 1986
After the Marcoses fled and the new government of President Corazon Aquino found papers in Malacañang Palace pointing to the Marcoses’ Swiss bank deposits, two men took it upon themselves to try a sting operation on the ousted dictator. They wanted to get a portion of the Swiss assets without going the complicated legal route.
The two men were then Colonel Jose “JoeAl” Almonte and Micheal Cesar de Guzman or Mike – a Filipino who had acquired a small bank in Austria called the Export-Finanzierungsbank or EFBA. Mike, according to an affidavit he executed afterward, personally knew Bongbong Marcos.
Mike had been Bongbong Marcos’ tour guide during the latter’s 1982 visit in Vienna and had proven he could deliver. Mike had personally facilitated the purchase of two expensive Austrian cars for Bongbong Marcos and his sister Irene.
retired Gen. Jose Almonte
According to President Cory Aquino’s government and to Jovito Salonga, the first chairman of the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG), It was Almonte and Mike’s failed attempt to withdraw the Marcos loot which prompted the Swiss government to unilaterally freeze Marcos’ Swiss bank assets in 1986.
Sen. Bongbong Marcos, however, told me that was not the case. He said he blamed the United States government for the unilateral freeze on their Swiss deposits.
Sen. Bongbong Marcos confirmed to me during the FOCAP forum that on March 22, 1986 or weeks after the family fled Manila, Mike visited them in their quarters at Hickam Air Base. They were de facto prisoners on the island since the US government barred them from leaving Hawaii.
This is how I asked Sen. Bongbong about the events that transpired then between Mike and him. I taped my Q and & with Sen. Bongbong Marcos on a digital recorder and have transcribed them below:
RR: If I close my eyes I hear your father. The timbre of your voice is the same. And your father’s voice was a very good voice. .
Bongbong Marcos:
Well, thank you.
RR: Sen. Marcos I would appeal to you to clear the air at this point. We are again going to celebrate Edsa next month (in February 2011). So I thought I would ask you about something that has intrigued me and bothered me all these years.
I’m talking about March 22, 1986. You were in Hawaii and there was a person who visited you. His name was Michael De Guzman. He owned a small bank in Vienna. It was called the Export Finanzierungsbank. And he went to you and you gave him two separate powers of attorney from your parents to withdraw US$213 million from Credit Suisse to transfer to his Exportfinanzireungsbank.
The reason why I know is that Michael de Guzman executed an affidavit afterward. You even scribbled De Guzman a farewell note saying ‘we all feel that you are being a real friend. Since the goods won’t be in your bank for too long, please feel free to charge what handling fees you feel are appropriate.’
So De Guzman went to Switzerland and he happened to be accompanied by Gen. Almonte. But you didn’t know that because he (Almonte) was in the background.
They were going to do actually a sting operation on the Marcoses. They were going to get the money that you were supposed to put it in his (Mike’s) bank, but they were going to get it for the Philippine government, allegedly.
Anyway, De Guzman attempted to withdraw that amount using the powers of attorney he got from you. That’s what triggered Switzerland to freeze the assets held in your family’s name. At least that’s what he said in his affidavit. At least that’s what Jovito Salonga kept telling us reporters.
At this point, Sen. Bongbong Marcos said “No” that was not what triggered the freeze. I can’t give you the exact quote because it’s obscured by ambient noise on my digital recording.
RR: Okay, you’re saying no to that. Just the particular specific point that his actions were what triggered the freezing of the supposed Marcos accounts in Switzerland that was initially from the Swiss government rather than what Mike did?
Sen. Bongbong Marcos:
What happened there is the first of what has become a procession of people coming to the family saying that we have identified Marcos funds in a certain bank and we can release it if you give us a power of attorney.
There has been…the family gets one of those at least once every one month or two months where people come to us and they say – just sign this special power of attorney. We will take the special power of attorney. We will take it to the bank. And we have identified assets that belong to the Marcoses. We will then withdraw it in your favor and then we will take our handling fee.
And speaking of a handling fee these people will ask of us by Mike.
And he (Mike) did not come to see me. He came to see my parents. But he went through me because he was a close friend of, with Irwin Ver. And it was Irwin Ver who came to us and said Mike wants to come because he thinks he can help. He says he has identified an amount of money in a certain bank and he feels if he is given the necessary authority – the legal authority – he can withdraw it again in your favor and he will take his handling fee.
And so that was a general situation and it was as I said, it was the first. We still continue to receive offers of this nature. And although we have learned our lessons since then and we do not issue these special powers of attorney quite so easily anymore.
Again it is only remarkable in the fact that it was the first.
It was a precursor of what has been happening to us for the last 20 odd years. And as I said we get this constant offers of help, supposed help. And it would always take the same form: If you give us the power of attorney we would withdraw the amount for, if you give us money we need that money, we would use that money to be able to … shake the money loose from some bank.
RR: So Senator, you did have US$200 million in Credit Suisse?
Sen. Bongbong Marcos:
That’s what Mike said.
RR: Your parents gave him a power of attorney.
Sen. Bongbong Marcos:
What happened is it was not money that the family identified. It is a – let us say, Juan de la Cruz comes to us… and says we found some in the banks of London, Hong Kong, China, Switzerland, Luxembourg. Always and the amounts are mind boggling in millions of dollars.
RR: Would you confirm because I’ve seen documents that came from Malacanang that your family left behind. Some of these documents pertain to foundations. And among the beneficiaries of these foundations are all the three of you – you and your two sisters. Would you confirm that you were beneficiaries of these investment accounts?
Sen. Bongbong Marcos:
I cannot confirm because I haven’t seen or read them. We – I don’t know. I cannot – I cannot say that I know. Definitely the Swiss money were there. Or are there now. It’s for us – again this constant – that people are saying – more and more participating in that —
RR: In the next six years would you vigorously pursue a compromise settlement with the Philippine government over the Marcos assets?
Sen. Bongbong Marcos:
We’ve been pursuing a compromise settlement since 1986. We will continue to do so.
Just a note – Michael de Guzman had a different take on the story. Under oath, he told a Philippine congressional probe – the House Special Committee on Public Accountability – on July 10, 1989 that it was the young Bongbong Marcos who gave him the name Ernest Scheller as the contact inside Credit Suisse. Scheller was the senior Vice-president of Credit Suissse then.
Mike also executed an affidavit narrating his version of the events when he returned to Austria. I obtained a copy of this affidavit a long time ago.
The same amount that the Marcoses tried to have withdrawn from Credit Suisse with Mike’s help was part of the money awarded to the Philippine government by the Swiss Federal Court in 2003. By then, it had grown to US$683 million due to interest earnings.
The Marcoses are fond of saying that neither Ferdinand Marcos nor Imelda Marcos has ever been convicted of any crime.
The truth is that Ferdinand Marcos avoided any court suit by pleading ill health.
The reason why the anti-racketeering case in New York never prospered against Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos was that they successfully blocked at that time the release of documents from Swiss banks showing the money trail.
Later, the Philippine government obtained these documents and used them to build a civil forfeiture case against the Marcoses. It was Associate Justice Renato Corona who issued the landmark decision on this case where he traced the money trail from Manila to Switzerland.
I am providing below the text taken from the Swiss Federal Department of Justice and Police calling the Marcos money “of criminal origin”.
Meaning – stolen wealth from the Filipino people.
If you see Sen. Bongbong Marcos, please ask him about this.
In 1995, Sen. Bongbong Marcos tried to push a “universal settlement” with Fidel Ramos’ government that would have allowed the Marcoses to keep a fourth of the wealth “net of taxes” and all their civil forfeiture cases dropped. But the Supreme Court struck it down as unconstitutional.
Today, Congresswoman Imelda Marcos continues to tantalize the poor with the promise that once a settlement is reached with the Philippine government they would be the direct beneficiaries.
But why wait for that? If Imelda Marcos is really sincere, she would simply waive any claims to all those contested assets here and abroad in behalf of the nation’s poor. That would instantly place her forever in the nation’s heart.
There is a saying that goes, “those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it,” and truer words have never been said, especially when talking about the Marcos era of Philippine history. It’s cool to play history revisionist.
It’s cool to look at things that happened, and take a different viewpoint and interpretation of these events, and come away with a different understanding of what has happened. This is not what millennials are doing when it comes to the Marcos era, unfortunately: what they’re doing is ignoring very troubling issues wholesale in favor of some nifty sound bites that make our current situation look pathetic in comparison.
I’m sure if Marcos had you taken without a warrant and then summarily executed for criticizing him, he did it in a “mahinahon” way.
Let’s look at some of these claims about the Marcos era.
8. Ferdinand Marcos would have been perfect if not for Imelda.
The Assertion: While it’s true that there were some issues with the Marcos presidency, none of it would have happened if not for Imelda. She’s the reason why the whole thing ended up the way it did!
The Reality: First of all, way to understate what happened by just calling it “some issues.” Secondly, are we seriously going to go with the Adam and Eve defense for the guy who was supposed to be the most powerful man in the country? You mean to tell me that this great, awesome man turned out to be such a softy for his wife that he couldn’t resist her when she asked for a little violation of human rights. 107,240 times.
Let’s turn back the clock even further. Long before Ferdinand Marcos even met Imelda he was already convicted with murder, and was the guy who supposedly pulled the trigger on his own dad’s political rival. The story goes that he studied law, and even while incarcerated, easily topped the Bar Exams, and then represented himself in an appeal to the Supreme Court, who overturned his death penalty conviction. Impressive? Yes. But aren’t we also the same guys who look at really good lawyers with disdain because they let people get away with murder? Why are we suddenly getting wet over Marcos doing it now?
Let’s look at his vaunted military service more, where he earned a ridiculous amount of medals for his service during World War II. Impressive, right? Right, except an overwhelming majority of those medals were lies. If he can make a lie this brazen, are we seriously going to take every other claim about his legacy without a hefty pinch of salt?
7. The Peso was 1.50 to a Dollar
The Assertion: The Peso was practically on equal footing with the dollar back in the day. Surely, this was a sign that we were a prosperous country under his time!
This graph, though, suggests how we feel about what the Marcoses did to us.
The Reality: The exchange rate alone isn’t enough of an indicator as to whether or not a country is prospering. Just ask Japan.
While it was true that the Peso and the Dollar were close to each other during the beginning of the Marcos era, let’s not forget that by the time Macapagal was president, the Peso already sank to 3.70 to a Dollar, and during the first quarter storm in 1970, the Peso went from 4.00 to 6.00 to a Dollar. It was not 1.50 or 1:1 during Marcos’s time. This did not happen.In fact, if you look at this graph, it’s clear that from the 3.70 Marcos began with, he managed the dubious feat of sinking the Peso to 20 to a dollar. That’s a devaluation of almost 600%, which, when compared to the devaluation of the Peso in the ‘90s, where it went from 26 to 41 to a dollar, seemed pretty ridiculous.
Apropos of nothing, the “nakaraang administrasyon” who actually uncoupled the Peso from the Dollar, no longer allowing it to be 2:1 by default, was none other than Diosdado Macapagal. Makes you wonder if Marcos spent his first few SONA’s railing against the guy.
6. Marcos was the Lee Kwan Yu of the Philippines
The Assertion: Lee Kwan Yu was also a dictator in Singapore, but look where his country is now! It’s first-world, it’s first-class, and it’s everything you could ever hope for in a strong Asian nation! Marcos was doing the same thing for us, and we kicked him out!
Bring on the Lee Kwan Yu!
The Reality: No. No, he wasn’t. And even if it were true, the only reason you don’t hear people badmouthing LKY nearly as much in Singapore is that doing shit like that gets you in trouble over there. Or have we forgotten that Singapore isn’t exactly a democracy, really?
The biggest difference between Marcos and Lee Kwan Yu was that for Marcos, propaganda was the end. For LKY, it was a means to accomplishing the things he wanted to do. Does that justify his own litany of human rights violations? Of course not. But this distinction is what allowed LKY to hold onto power for 50 years, almost thrice as long as Marcos did, to the point where Lee Kwan Yu was able to relinquish the position, yet Singapore still remains as prosperous as it had been when the man left the highest office of the land.
Neither did Lee Kwan Yu send Singapore into crippling national debt thanks to his attempts at modernization.
5. The International community supported the Marcos administration, thus legitimizing it.
The Assertion: If the Marcos regime was so bad, why did the US tolerate it for as long as it did? Why did the international community at large just let it run its course? Surely, they saw something there that those of us too close to the matter didn’t.
You have to admit, Marcos was pretty good at Foreign Affairs.
The Reality: People don’t just get to change a government just because they don’t think they like it, especially if it’s not their own government. Otherwise, do you really think the United States would have allowed Fidel Castro or Kim Jong Il or even Saddam Hussein to stick around for as long as they did?
There’s also the little matter that the U.S. stood to gain much more if it let Marcos stay in power, particularly because he helped them establish a military presence in Asia (they had this war to fight or something in Vietnam, right?), and he was also a staunch ally against Communism, which was America’s agenda at the time. Speaking of which…
4. Marcos fought against Communism.
The Assertion: Marcos was a Commie-fighter, while every administration after him pretty much just tolerates Communism! They’re a threat to our democracy and freedom!
The Reality: How exactly did Marcos “protect” our democracy and freedom against Communism if he took both of these things away from us to “protect” us from Communism?!? Do you see the complete lack of logic in saying this?!? Martial law meant we were not free. He was practically running unopposed in his subsequent elections during the Martial Law era. If we were so afraid that the Communists were going to take our freedom away, why did we let Marcos do it for us instead?
The Assertion: Marcos was better because some of the best buildings and roads we use to this very day were built over the course of his 20-year regime. We were on the road to progress!
We might have misheard what we needed for this progress, though…
The Reality: We were also on the road to debilitating national debt, to the tune of $28.5 Billion when he left power. It’s really easy to build roads, buildings, and all sorts of infrastructural projects when, in abolishing Congress, you have complete control over the country’s coffers, and you have twenty years to do them.
Think of it this way: the greatest cultural landmarks of some of the greatest countries in the planet were built on the back of slaves: Egypt and their pyramids, for example. When you look at how we’re still paying for Marcos’s debts all the way ‘til 2025, you realize who the slaves in this analogy happen to be: us. Yes, even you, millennial who wasn’t even a glimmer in his dad’s eye while Marcos was president.
2. Bongbong Marcos doesn’t need to show remorse over his father’s regime.
The Assertion: Why do we need to shame Bongbong to apologize on behalf of his dad? It was his dad. For all we know, he could be even better as president! Marcos 2016!!!
The Reality: Because if he refuses to acknowledge what his father did, then there is something fundamentally broken in Senator Marcos’s understanding of what his family has done to this nation. None of those roads, none of those schools, none of those edifices could ever bring back the lives snuffed out by Martial Law, but a simple apology, a simple acknowledgment to not let these things ever happen again would go a long way towards healing the pain.
Oh, of course not. Doing that might make his family legally liable, so best keep your mouth shut and pretend these things were just a small part of the era, right?
1. Martial Law was a safer time.
The Assertion: Martial Law may have taken a few liberties here and there, but it was a great time for the country, because everyone was disciplined. People were nicer. Crime rates were low.
Pictured: The only Marshall Law that should be legally allowed to kick ass.
The Reality: And if it were Martial Law today, we wouldn’t have the ability to debate its merits on the internet. I mean, seriously. We can complain about every single president who came after Marcos and say we wish we had better days, but when people complained about Marcos and wished for better days back in their time, they disappeared. For good. Just ask Liliosa Hilao. Oh, right. You can’t, because she was raped, tortured, and murdered for the “crime” of being the editor of the campus paper for Pamantasan ng Maynila and a staunch critic of Martial Law.
Normally, when we criticize people, we get a sassy retort as a comeback, or maybe a string of four-letter words. Not rape, torture, and murder. If those three things sound a bit like an overreaction to you, that’s probably because they totally are.
