10 Lesser-Known Photos from Martial Law Years That Will Blow You Away

by MLC | Jun 8, 2020 | Martial Law Stories

Source: Filipiknow.net

The period between 1972 and 1981 arguably stands as one of the most memorable moments in Philippine history, mainly because of President Ferdinand Marcos’ imposition of martial law during that time.

Nowadays, different Filipinos have different views on martial law, with some saying that it made the Philippines better while others say it practically destroyed the country.

While we won’t take part in the endless debates, we instead present in this article some lesser-known pics taken during the martial law years with very interesting backstories.

1. Lim Seng’s execution.

The picture depicts infamous Chinese drug lord Lim Seng shortly before his public execution by firing squad at a lot behind the Libingan ng mga Bayani in Fort Bonifacio on January 15, 1973.

A struggling restaurant owner in the 1960s, he later became one of the top heroin pushers in Manila and even exported his product as far as the United States. After martial law was declared, Lim was arrested and underwent a trial before a military tribunal where he was given the death penalty.

Also Read: 10 Surprising Facts About Death Penalty In The Philippines

Up until the very end, he thought he could buy his way out and even joked with the soldiers as he was being tied up for execution. Little did he know, he would end up as the fitting candidate for President Marcos to affirm his tough stance on crime.

A popular urban legend goes that after the soldiers fired at him, some Assumption schoolgirls rushed to Lim’s body and dipped their hankies in his blood to show off to their classmates.

2. Ninoy was barely able to walk.

With the declaration of martial law, Ninoy Aquino became one of the first critics to be rounded and imprisoned. Facing a military tribunal for murder, subversion, and illegal possession of firearms, Ninoy refused to recognize their jurisdiction and so started a 40-day hunger strike on April 4, 1975, while in prison.

READ: Ninoy Would Have Declared Martial Law Too (And Other Curious Facts)

As evidenced by this photo taken in one of his court appearances in which he was forced to attend daily, the normally plump Ninoy dropped several kilos (54 to 36) and had to be helped with his walking. He would have continued his suicidal hunger strike too, were it not for his family and friends who successfully convinced him to stop by pointing out that even Jesus fasted for only 40 days.

3. Ninoy’s death sentence.

Shown together with the New People’s Army (NPA) founder Bernabe Buscayno and Victor Corpuz (the AFP lieutenant who made headlines when he defected to the NPA and raided the armory of the Philippine Military Academy on December 29, 1970) is Ninoy, bowing his head and looking somber after the military tribunal sentenced all three men to death by firing squad on November 25, 1977.

Throughout his trial, Ninoy refused to recognize their jurisdiction, saying that to do so would also give legitimacy to Marcos’ regime. Fortunately for him, the sentence was never carried out due to increasing international pressure over its human rights track record. Ninoy would live for at least another six years before his fateful demise on that airport tarmac.

4. The first ever PBA basket toss.

Founded on April 9, 1975, the Philippine Basketball Association is Asia’s first professional basketball league and the second oldest in the world (the NBA is first).

This photo, showing Ms. PBA Mia Montemayor in a ceremonial ball toss between Mariwasa’s Cisco Oliver and Concepcion’s Ramon Lucindo, officially marked the start of the league. Incidentally, this decade marked the greatest rivalry in local basketball ever—that of the Crispa Redmanizers and the Toyota Tamaraws.

Also Read: The First Person to Score a Basket in PBA History

5. First Lady Imelda playing chess with Bobby Fischer.

This photo, taken sometime in 1973, shows First Lady Imelda playing the black piece against renowned American chess prodigy Bobby Fischer while President Marcos looks on in their match.

Also Read: How the “World’s Richest  Girl” bailed out Imelda Marcos

Fischer, as we all know, was a very brilliant yet eccentric genius. At one point, he renounced his American citizenship and openly flouted his anti-Semitism. However, he loved the Philippines because he was treated like a celebrity, with even the president obliging him in a chess game. He settled in Baguio for a while and sired a love child with a Filipina before finally transferring to Iceland shortly a few years before his death.

6. The student who dared to question Imee Marcos.

The photo shows Archimedes Trajano, a student of Mapua Institute of Technology who unfortunately met his end in the hands of Imee Marcos’ henchmen.

During an open forum at the Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila, the then-21-year-old questioned Imee on her capability to lead the youth and told her that she only became the head of the Kabataang Barangay because she was the president’s daughter. He also questioned her on the human rights abuses being committed by her father.

Also Read: Liliosa Hilao and Lorena Barros–Forgotten Martial Law Heroines

On September 2, 1977, his crumpled body was strewn on the streets of Manila. The official explanation was that he had died in a frat rumble inside his dormitory. Witnesses, however, said that Imee’s security dragged him away from the open forum. Trajano’s family successfully sued Marcos for civil damages in a Hawaii court; however, the local Supreme Court overturned it in 2006 due to a technicality committed by a lower court in trying to implement the prior verdict.

7. Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier’s presscon at Malacañang Palace.

On Sept 18, 1975—less than two weeks before they would fight the last of their epic trilogy in the ‘Thrilla in Manila’—Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier paid a courtesy visit to the Palace and met President Marcos and First Lady Imelda.

Also Read: 8 Thrilling Facts You Didn’t Know About ‘Thrilla in Manila’

As usual, the tension was kept high due to Ali’s penchant to mock his opponents before fights. Wearing barong Tagalogs, both men engaged in a duel of witty remarks, with the president acting as their referee.

8. Hiroo Onoda surrenders sword to President Marcos.

The picture shows Japanese lieutenant Hiroo Onoda formally surrendering his sword to President Marcos on March 11, 1974, at Malacañang Palace.

As we’ve pointed out before, Onoda was one of the longest-remaining Japanese holdouts ever, continuing to fight for 29 years in the island of Lubang because he had no idea that World War II had already ended. In fact, his old commander had to be personally flown in from Japan to persuade him to surrender.

After Onoda was indeed convinced, he surrendered peacefully. In this same ceremony, Marcos gave Onoda a full pardon for the Filipinos he killed during his holdout, considering the fact that he thought he had been at war during that time. The president also returned his sword.

9. Cory’s first political speech.

In a bid to legitimize his continuing grip on power, President Marcos ordered the interim Batasang Pambansa elections in 1978. Ninoy, still languishing in his cell at this time, was allowed to run but could not campaign. Instead, he had to rely on Cory to speak to his supporters.

Although preferring to remain in her husband’s shadow for most of her life, Cory obliged and rose to the challenge, delivering her first-ever political speech in this undated photo. Their daughter Kris, then six or seven years old, also displayed her gift of gab by frequently speaking in front of various audiences during the campaign period.

Did you know Cory had to use tranquilizers to keep herself from crying in public when her husband was imprisoned? All this and more in: 9 Things You May Not Know About Cory Aquino

10. A padlocked Congress.

After President Marcos declared the 1973 Constitution, ratified and effective by virtue of the Citizens’ Assemblies on January 10-15, he ordered Congress to be padlocked.

The 7^th Congress had been set to open its second regular session on January 22. The photo depicts Senators Doy Laurel, Eva Estrada Kalaw, Ramon Mitra, and Jovito Salonga posing in front of the Senate session hall which had been padlocked, a stark symbol of power held by a single man.

“THE MARCOSES AND THE MISSING FILIPINO MILLIONS”

by MLC | Jun 1, 2020 | Martial Law Stories

Source: Anywhereiwander.com

By: Anywhereiwander

Speech Delivered Aboard The QE2

June 1987

By Caroline Kennedy

Leaving the Philippines, in 1984, for what seemed like the final time saddened me. I had spent almost two decades there, on and off, and had assimilated myself so much into its history, its culture and its people that many locals referred to me as their country’s favourite “honorary Filipina”.  The advantages were that I could now, from a distance, take a step back and view those two decades objectively. I had always told myself “one day I would write truthfully about the Marcos era” and now here I was in an unique position to do just that.

I had arrived in Manila almost by accident in 1968 and remained there on and off for the next sixteen years. My first decade there turned out to be, perhaps, the most bizarre in my entire life. During that short period I went through more incarnations than most people do in a lifetime.

In those few years I was transformed from budding writer and radio producer, to weekly columnist, to singer, to actress, to TV presenter, to disc jockey, to comic strip heroine, to film star and, finally, ending up annointed as a true “Living Goddess” among a former headhunting tribe in the Philippine’s remote Mountain Province.

The years I spent in the Philippines coincided almost exactly with the years in power of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. So, as a journalist, I was able to observe and write about them at firsthand. It was hard, in fact, to ignore them.  They dominated every aspect of Philippine life, particularly since the imposition of martial law in 1972. There was nowhere you could look in Manila without seeing their larger than life posters on giant hoardings. There was nowhere you could go without overhearing endless conversations about them and ambitious plots being forged against them. And there was nowhere you could hide without feeling that your every move was being closely monitored by them or their cohorts. Theirs was an all-pervasive presence, neither benign nor compassionate. On the contrary, theirs was a destructive, intimidating and, for the Filipino nation as a whole, an ultimately catastrophic presence.

I spent much of my time in the Philippines chronicling the excesses of Imelda Romualdez Marcos. I think there has been nobody in contemporary history that has so aptly illustrated the saying that:

“Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Imelda always liked to compare herself with Eva Peron. In fact she took it as a compliment if anyone pointed out any similarities between her and the former First Lady of Argentina. But, despite Eva Peron’s excesses – and there were many – at least she did, in part, help her “decamisados” as the Argentine’s poor were referred to. But, in twenty-one years as First Lady of the Philippines, Imelda Romualdez Marcos did nothing for the destitute in her country.

At the time of my arrival in the Philippines the Marcoses had been in power for only three years and so I was able to see and document their rise, from fairly humble beginnings, to what has been dubbed their “conjugal dictatorship”, outlasting as they did so, four US presidents and three British prime ministers until their final ignominious defeat in February 1986.

I suppose the image that springs to most peoples’ minds when they hear the name Imelda Marcos is shoes.  This is hardly surprising since it is now known she owned at least 3000 pairs of them. And it is hard to forget the TV news film, in February 1986, showing row upon row of them left behind in the Palace when she fled to exile in Hawaii.

“Three thousand?“ Imelda protested at the time, “That’s nonsense! I only had 1006!”

Imelda’s shoes have, perhaps, become the very symbol of her excesses. They are currently housed in the Imelda Marcos Museum in Manila, a museum dedicated solely to her greed, her ostentatious lifestyle and her extravagances.

Imelda may have left behind all those pairs of shoes for us to marvel at but many of us probably harbour a secret admiration for what she and her husband, the late President Ferdinand Marcos, did manage to bring with them into the United States under the term “household effects”.  The official customs list drawn up when they arrived into exile in Hawaii reads like pure fantasy.

22 Crates of Cash valued at $717 million dollars

300 crates of assorted jewellery Value undetermined.

$4 million dollars worth of unset precious gems contained in Pampers diaper boxes.

$7.7 million dollars worth of jewellery, including a gold crown encrusted with diamonds, three tiaras, 65 Seiko and Cartier watches

A box, measuring 12 feet by 4 feet, crammed full of real pearls.

A 3 foot solid gold statue covered in diamonds and other precious stones.

$200,000 dollars in gold bullion and nearly $1 million dollars in Philippine pesos

Discovered among their luggage too were deposit slips worth $124 million dollars for banks in the US, Switzerland and the Cayman Islands.

A week ahead of their departure 2000 tons of gold, worth $22 billion dollars, had been dispatched to Australia but, on a tip off, was intercepted by the vigilant Australian Customs. Weekly shuttle flights, transporting crates containing money, period furniture, antiques and Old Master paintings were reported to have flown to Hong Kong during the six months prior to their downfall in February 1986.

A further $250 million dollars worth of jewellery was also confiscated from a friend of Imelda’s who was caught smuggling them out of the country for her.

And this was probably just the beginning. Over two decades later the Philippines government is still trying to locate all the Marcos assets. Imelda has not helped them. She has claimed the Fifth Ammendment. She has obfuscated. She has bribed. And she has lied. She told the Philippines commission charged with retrieving the stolen funds:

“If you know how rich you are, you aren’t rich. I have no idea how rich I am!”

Following a request from the Philippines government, the Swiss government, for the first time ever in its history of secret banking, froze all assets they suspected of belonging to any member of the Marcos family. In the past five years the Swiss government revealed the existence of yet another Marcos account, holding almost $20 billion! And so it seems quite possible that one day we might actually find out just how rich the Marcoses were.

After my arrival in the Philippines, just three years into her husband’s first presidential term, I became fascinated by Imelda Marcos and proceeded to write about her often, mainly in very unflattering terms. My best friend Betsy Romualdez, a writer and poet, happened to be Imelda’s niece and so I was fortunate to have access to many inside stories about the First Lady, more so than most Filipino journalists at the time.

I was still living in Manila in 1974 when Imelda was hosting the 23^rd Miss Universe contest. On the night of the main event the beauties and the foreign Press were lined up for hours in the lobby of Imelda’s brand new Cultural Centre building waiting for the First Lady to show up. Eventually her limousine swept up the driveway and Imelda regally stepped out. As she passed down the line of girls, a bit like royalty, she stopped occasionally to shake hands with them and share a few words.

When she reached Miss South Africa she asked, “What does your father do?”  The nervous young woman replied, “Daddy? Oh, he’s in the mining business!”

“That’s a coincidence ! “ Imelda immediately retorted, sweeping her arms around the magnificent lobby of her new Cultural Centre, “I’m in the mining business too! That’s mine, that’s mine and that’s mine. In fact everything you see here is mine!”

This may have been Imelda’s cynical attempt at a joke, and a handful of journalists among our group giggled politely, but it had a portentous ring. For less than 15 years later, Imelda, her husband and their cronies, would own an estimated 85% of the nation’s wealth, commerce, land, produce, dollar and gold reserves. By their departure in 1986, the country would be left reeling, bankrupt and riddled by foreign debt from which it is still recovering today.

Although Marcos had taught Imelda how to play dirty politics, her drive and ambition were entirely her own. As she succeeded in winning votes for him so he rewarded her with jewellery. She, in turn, would tell journalists and friends that these jewels were Romualdez family heirlooms she had inherited along with a palatial home, priceless antiques, paintings and a silver collection.

In the early days, during the 1965 presidential campaign, Marcos was able not only to switch from being the leader of the Liberal Party to being the leader of the Nacionalista Party but also to clinch the election. But political pundits and colleagues agreed it was Imelda who influenced the result. Marcos was a brilliant tactician, they said, but it was Imelda’s charm, persuasion and sweet singing voice that ultimately won him the presidency.

“It’s not an exaggeration to say,” a political aide told me, “that Imelda used plane, motorboat, banca and literally crawled on her hands and knees to reach each delegate who had a vote. She then swayed them with her voice, her tears and her beauty.”

For his part, Marcos wined and dined his supporters at the opulent Manila Hotel, filled their pockets with 100 peso bills and took them to expensive nightclubs. Following their inauguration, Imelda sent US presidential candidate, Hubert Humphrey, some personal advice on how to win an election:

 “You’ve got to control the site of the convention,” she wrote, “you’ve got to have your people everywhere. We had the bellhops. We had the waiters. We had the elevator boys. We had the desk clerks. We had everybody talking about Marcos. But the most important thing was that we had all the telephone operators so the other side never received their telephone calls!”

The presidential election of 1963 had been the costliest, dirtiest and most vicious campaign in the country’s history, “a year long propaganda orgy” as the American Embassy in Manila discreetly described it. But the foreign press were already referring to the Philippines as the “new Camelot” and to the beautiful, young First Lady as the “Asian Jackie Kennedy.” And a few months after the election the Marcoses paid the customary state visit to America. Imelda took the States by storm. “A photographer’s delight” the newspapers called her as she sang a Filipino love song to a bemused President Johnson at a gala dinner. Washington was mesmerized. Politicians and press alike were seduced by her beauty and her charm. For the first time Imelda witnessed the power of her own personal magnetism.

The newspapers quoted her on her return to Manila saying:

 “The Metropolitan Opera House – it was fabulous – those chandeliers, those paintings…My God, the Rockefellers, the Duponts, the Fords, the Magnins, the Lindsays, the painter Marc Chagall – you know he wanted to paint me. And the jewels the women were wearing… strands and strands of diamonds around their necks!….Wow, in America when they’re rich, they’re really rich!”

Back home Imelda set to work to create her own opulent environment worthy of entertaining her new super-rich friends. She began a massive building programme that, in time, came to be known as her “edifice complex”  – not to house the poor and the dispossessed – but to forward her aims of making Manila into the cultural and financial capital of Asia. Neither she nor Marcos cared for the underprivileged. If the squatters’ huts presented an eyesore to her or her foreign guests, she had them obliterated with a bulldozer. She had once been poor herself and she never wanted to be reminded of the fact.

And the sad truth is that Marcos, too, cared little for the majority of his people. During his rule as president graft and corruption flourished, rural poverty became more crushing, the gap between rich and poor widened and these conditions were exploited by the emerging Communist Party. This was painful to the U.S. because the Philippines was the country America had tried to model after its own democratic image. It was where, in 1899, the Americans had fought their first counter-insurgency war in the name of protecting freedom and defeating what they saw as the growing threat of communism.

On his election to the presidency Marcos had promised a redistribution of the country’s wealth – on that he certainly delivered. But he redistributed the wealth from the poor to his business colleagues, his Army generals, his friends and his own family. Overall, by the mid-1970’s seven out of ten Filipinos were worse off economically. Real wages for workers had fallen about 30% while consumer prices had tripled. Two out of every three Filipinos were surviving below the poverty line and a staggering 40%, 21 million Filipinos, were homeless.

The per capita calorie intake, too, was less in 1976 than it had been in 1960. This, despite the fact the U.S. had provided the Philippines with more than $300 million under the Food for Peace Programme. In the 1950s Filipinos had probably been the best fed people in Asia. Now people in India, Indonesia and, perhaps, even Bangladesh were eating better than they were. 40% of all the nation’s deaths were caused by malnutrition. An American journalist visiting the Visayas Islands (near Imelda’s birthplace) in 1979 reported:

“The young patients I saw in the hospitals there seem to have been transplanted from the famines in Bangladesh and the sub-Sahara earlier in the decade. Big eyes staring from skeletal heads, matchstick limbs and bloated bellies. But they were the fortunate ones. They were receiving treatment.”

Impervious to any such domestic problems, Imelda started her infamous shopping sprees in

Rome, Paris, New York and London – at Bulgari, Harry Winston, Tiffany’s and Cartier. On October 13 1977 she parted with $384,000 for diamonds. Two weeks later on November 2 she spent over $1 million for more diamonds. In July 1978, after her third visit to the Soviet Union, nine days of spartan communism had, apparently, proved too restricting for  her and she flew directly to New York for a retail therapy binge. On her first full morning there she paid out $194,000 for antiques and the following week in a one-day spree she spent over $2 million on more diamonds and emeralds. And all this on her husband’s official presidential salary of just $6500 a year!

Nothing and no one would get in her way. When the world press criticized her for being profligate, she would answer that she was only carrying out the wishes of her people.

“They want me to shine like a star in their midst. Who am I not to carry out their wishes?” she asked.

When hauled before a U.S. Congressional Committee of outraged congressmen, her charm no longer seduced them. They demanded to know where her money came from and threatened to cut off aid to her country if she continued to spend so lavishly. Back home she referred to them as “barbarians.” She compared them to the Spanish Inquisition:

 “I have been to Peking. I have been to Moscow. I have been to Libya,” she fumed,  “and nobody ever treated me so rudely!”

Her husband pacified her with a gift of the world’s largest blue diamond, the notorious “Idol’s Eye”, said then to be worth $5 million.

The following year while her Ferdinand Marcos was negotiating the renewal of the U.S. bases agreement and promising a massive austerity campaign at home because of the spiraling inflation and a huge foreign overseas debt, Imelda again went on a shopping spree in the US. She bought a multi-million dollar estate in Long Island, named Lindenmere. She shelled out $328,000 on more diamonds, $717,000 on a house in Hawaii, $5.3 million on a hotel in San Francisco, $1 million on another house in Hawaii and, on August 25, 1981, she bought a heart-shaped diamond for over $1million and two necklaces for $400,000.

Two days later she spent another $616,000 on antiques and, in September of that same year, she bought the Fan Fox Samuels estate on Long Island for almost $6 million. In that period too she acquired a townhouse on 66^th Street and Madison in Manhattan and she negotiated the purchase of one of New York’s most famous landmarks, the Crown Building, on 57^th Street and Fifth Avenue. In her personal collection too, I was told by my friend, Jun Gonzalez her private art restorer, she owned Old Master paintings and sculptures worth in excess of $20 million. Jun told me Imelda had invited him to the Palace to see a 12 foot X 12 foot painting by Holbein. He asked if I would like accompany him.

“How could she have bought a Holbein?” I was incredulous. “Surely, the whole world would know when a Holbein had been purchased on the international art market ? Where had it come from ? Who had sold it to her  – or had she been duped – yet again?”

That was not all she owned, Jun told me. In her collection I would see Canalettos, Chagalls, El Grecos, Rubens, Rembrandts and Titians, to name just a few.

At the time of these infamous shopping sprees it was estimated that 30% of the population were struggling on barely $200 a year, not enough to afford the barest necessities of life, such as food, shelter, clothing and medicine – the very things that Imelda, in her new capacity as Minister for Human Settlements, was expected to provide.

In their 21 years in power, it has now been established, the Marcoses salted away between $18 and $30 billion, most of it intended for aid programmes but much of it from personal “donations” Imelda had successfully extracted from intimidated local businessmen. There is no doubt the Marcoses certainly robbed in style, particularly Imelda.

Many of my wealthier friends were constantly receiving visits from the Manila Metrocom, Imelda’s own private police force, with a personal note saying,

“Congratulations! You will be delighted to hear you have been selected to appear at the Palace with a cheque for $10,000, (or shares in your company or deeds to your properties) to donate to my favourite charity.” and it was signed, Imelda Romualdez Marcos.

It was a novel kind of reverse lottery.If they refused to cooperate they would automatically receive a visit from the Bureau of Internal Revenue. If this tactic still failed to convince them then their businesses were taken over by one of Imelda’s friends or family.

But, with an armed police escort, threats of imprisonment and promises of in-depth investigations into their business affairs by the tax authorities, few dared to refuse such a subtle and seductive invitation. In fact one of my friends said he received so many of these “congratulation notes” that he wallpapered his entire downstairs bathroom with them.

Parrying questions by American journalists about her extravagances, she explained:

“I must confess that once upon a time Marcos’s family and mine were oligarchs. But we are reformed oligarchs. The Romualdez family has been in office for many years and thank God there is a family who is willing to serve our country. Thank God they know how to make money. Otherwise if Marcos did not know how to make money before, what experience would he have to make his country prosper? The United States is ashamed that it is rich. Why should we be ashamed? We have some gifted members in our family. Good. They want to serve our people. Wonderful!”

She left the reporters as perplexed with this explanation as she did a group of scientists from the august National Academy of Sciences whom she invited to Malacanan Palace to discuss energy conservation. When they arrived she said energy conservation bored her and she really wanted to talk to them about love, truth, justice and beauty. She then entertained them with folk songs, beautiful women, local celebrities, a banquet dinner and dancing.

After the sumptuous meal she took them upstairs and spoke to them for three hours. She told them about her project of giving each prisoner a rabbit, a dog or a plant to love. She then drew a circle on a blackboard representing the universe. She made a hole in the circle and drew some lines. She explained that this represented where cosmic forces entered the Philippines:

“And my scientists tell me,” she said, “that these forces are so powerful that we can use them to protect you – our American friends – against Soviet missiles!”

Imelda’s forays onto the world political stage were equally successful in grabbing the international headlines and she was dubbed, “The Iron Butterfly”. A typical trip abroad might include a visit to Tripoli to dissuade Colonel Gaddafi from financing the Moslem rebellion in the Southern Philippines (for which she later campaigned to receive the Nobel Peace Prize), a short stay in Moscow with the intention of sending shivers down the spines of the domino-theorists in the State Department, an exhaustive tour of Cuba accompanied by Fidel Castro, who fell for her charms. And then, homeward-bound, with a final stopover for an audience with the Pope, to remind him that even an impoverished, developing nation like the Philippines can be the fifth largest contributor to the Vatican coffers.

To prevent boredom at home she pursued her “edifice complex” with a vengeance. Perhaps, like the Pharaohs, she intended to leave the world monuments to remember her by. She built the Cultural Centre in 90 days as a venue for the Miss Universe contest, then came the International Convention Centre to give a forum for overseas investors and businessmen, a Folk Arts Centre, ready in time to accommodate the Ali-Frazier “Thrilla in Manila” world heavyweight fight, a fortress-like Metropolitan Museum to house her personal collection of paintings, a University of Life, a Heart Centre for Asia, a Lung Centre, fourteen luxury hotels and a coconut palace to accommodate her jet-setting guests and to permanently display – although not to the general public – her priceless collection of jewels and Russian icons.

But the building that tops them all is the Parthenon-like structure dominating the center of Manila Bay and housing her Film Centre, built for an international film festival, conceived by her to rival Cannes.

I watched mesmerized as the mammoth building was constructed in 90 days by literally thousands of underpaid workers struggling day and night to make sure it was completed on time.

A week or two before the grand opening a catastrophe happened. A huge section of the native bamboo scaffolding collapsed resulting in hundreds of workers plummeting headlong into the quick-drying cement. And as their fellow workers scrambled desperately to free the victims, the order came from Imelda that there was no time to dig them out, work must continue otherwise the opening deadline would have to be postponed and her foreign guests would be “disappointed”.

Offending legs and arms that were not completely buried by the cement were ordered to be chopped off and destroyed while the widows and families started assembling at the scene for an impromptu candlelight vigil which was to last for several months.

The opening was a surreal event. Cocteau himself could not have dreamt up a more grotesque one. Despite violent police attempts to remove the grieving families, the vigil outside defiantly continued. As hundreds of demonstrators were forcibly removed, hundreds more arrived to take their place – a never-ending stream of wailing mourners.

Meanwhile I watched as minor celebrities from the United States and ex-royalty from Europe began arriving at the Centre in their stretch limos, ignorant of the disaster and unaware of the grim reception committee that awaited them.

Despite last-minute threats and financial inducements by Imelda to the hostile workers to finish the building on time, the roof was incomplete on the opening night. And, despite the fact that the rainy season was long over, that particular night, of course, it chose to rain. Journalists huddled to keep dry outside as guests were ushered inside to their seats. Some seats that were exposed to the open roof were already soaked, but there was nothing Imelda could do. That night there was no let up. It seemed to those of us watching the event that heaven was resolved to mourn its dead that night.

Imelda was, as usual, the last to arrive. On stage a chorus of hastily assembled patients from her Heart Centre began to sing as she entered the hall and swept down the aisle. They sang The Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah, “And he shall reign for ever and ever!” Except they replaced the word “he” with the word “she”.

At the end of their song, to the disbelief of the audience, each one stepped off the stage, bared their chests and walked among the front rows of the stalls displaying vivid purple scars from recent heart operations. Shocked gasps were followed by an embarrassed silence. People didn’t know which way to look. The emcee on stage proudly announced that these people had all received their operations at the new Imelda Romualdez Marcos Heart Centre.

At this point, of course, the audience was expected to burst into rapturous applause. But, by this time, the persistent wailing from the mourners outside echoed eerily through the hall as rumours of the disaster began to spread. The bizarre ceremony on stage made the audience uneasy and most gave hasty excuses and left.

By now Imelda’s regular guests included Cristina Ford, the ex wife of the American auto magnate, Henry Ford II, the actor George Hamilton, the pianist Van Cliburn, the chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer and Jack Valenti, President of the American Motion Picture Board. These people she referred to as “my gang” and, given a moment’s notice, they were ready to fly to her side anywhere in the world.

Imelda’s most notorious junket with her “gang” in tow was her trip to Kathmandu in March 1975 to attend the coronation and wedding of King Birendra. Before her flight to Nepal she was entertaining her “gang” and others, including the heart surgeon, Dr. Christian Barnard and the actress Gina Lollobrigida, at Malacanan Palace. But instead of ending the party when it was time for her to leave for the Himalayan capital, Imelda decided to take the party with her – without a thought for foreign protocol or expense.

She commandeered four Philippine Airlines planes, one for food, just in case the Nepalese food failed to please her friends’ palates, one for her entourage, which included six hairdressers, manicurists and medical personnel and two for herself, her family and friends. The trip was scandalous by any standards. A former classmate of the King recalled the dismay at court when, upon her arrival, Imelda walked straight up to the King, completely ignoring protocol and the waiting reception line, which included the King’s mother. According to the classmate, the Nepalese Royal Family was furious as word of Imelda holding her own court in Katmandhu and issuing her own invitations spread through Himalayan kingdom and abroad. But she was only repeating what she had done a few years previously at the Shah of Iran’s party in Persepolis.

During the next few days of festivities Imelda kept close to Prince Charles, whom she realized

would attract most of the media attention. By placing herself at his side she could guarantee she would end up on every television screen and on the front pages of every magazine and newspaper the world over. The plan worked and, although the Prince of Wales remained impervious to her charms and refused Imelda’s invitation to visit Manila, another member of the British Royal Family would accept later the same year.

Imelda had been hatching plans to play host to a member of the British Royal Family for almost three years. And the fact that she had been refused by both the Queen and Prince Charles did not dull her determination but she also came to realize she would have to settle for something less. Imelda knew Princess Margaret’s weakness for attending extravagant parties and she planned to create the biggest party of all, one that the jet-setting Princess could not possibly refuse. She employed an Italian art dealer, Mario Durso, an acquaintance of the Princess, to convince, coerce or inveigle the Princess to visit Manila.

Finally, towards the end of 1975, her opportunity arose. Princess Margaret was due to fly to Papua New Guinea to represent the Queen at the Independence Day ceremony. The Princess asked Durso to inform Imelda she would be prepared to visit Manila on her return journey. This was the moment the First Lady had been waiting for. This was the time for her to pull out all the stops. She pleaded with Durso to insist that the Princess arrive in Manila on a Sunday so she could command all Manila’s schoolchildren to line the streets from the International Airport to Malacanan Palace waving British flags.

Plans forged ahead at full steam. No expense was to be spared. Imelda’s coterie of blue-frocked girlfriends, known as the “Blue Ladies”, were dragooned into preparing bacchanalian feasts for the Princess, at least one for every night of her visit. A suite of rooms in Malacanan was hastily redecorated to the Princess’s taste and Imelda’s international celebrity friends were invited, all expenses paid, to come to Manila to join in the fun. Manila was festooned with Union Jacks for almost a month. For the first time British television shows outplayed American ones on local television stations. And shops, such as Rustans Department store, owned by Imelda’s best friend Glessie Tantoco, were inundated by British goods, British fashions and British food.

Bulldozers were hastily put to work razing squatters’ huts on the route from the airport to the Palace. However, as had so often happened before, no sooner had the shanty homes been demolished and the squatters driven out, than the cardboard and corrugated tin houses went back up again. This scenario occurred every time Imelda expected a visit from a celebrity, foreign dignitary or overseas businessman. The result was always the same. Imelda would have a high white-washed wall erected around the whole area so that nobody could see in and the squatters couldn’t get out. Inevitably, the hapless residents inside would be forced to hack their way through the wall so it ended up looking like a giant honeycomb.

But, despite all these preparations, all did not go according to plan. The Princess fell sick with flu in New Guinea and informed the British Ambassador, Sir John Addis, that her arrival would be delayed by a few days.

Sir John, who had become a good friend and travelling companion of mine, later told me:

“I dreaded telling Imelda that the Princess would not be arriving on Sunday as planned but, most likely, on the following Tuesday or Wednesday.” I could tell Sir John was relishing this story. “You can imagine Imelda‘s reaction,” he smiled, “She was not amused. All her plans had to be rescheduled.”

I could visualize the scenario. But even Sir John who was a diplomat of the old school, a quiet scholarly man, a world-respected authority on China and Chinese porcelain, became almost apoplectic whenever he discussed Imelda.

“What about the schoolchildren?” I asked.

“Ah, yes, the schoolchildren!” Sir John grinned, “You see I wasn’t able to give Imelda the exact day Her Highness would be arriving in Manila. And well, even

she couldn’t declare a national holiday for a whole week, could she?”

“So who waved all those thousands of imported British flags?” I asked.

I had heard rumours about this incident but I was eager to know from Sir John what really happened the day the Princess arrived. Sir John laughed. Despite a distinguished career in the Foreign Service and, as such, trained to be tactful at all times, he could never resist gossiping with me about Imelda. We were sitting beside the lake at his magnificent garden in Kent and, as he had many times during our long friendship, Sir John was prepared to let his guard down.

“Well, there was an argument as to whose car the Princess would travel in. Imelda obviously wanted to meet her at the airport and take her in her own car back to the Palace. However, I had to explain to her that technically the Princess was a guest of the Embassy and, as the Queen’s representative in the Philippines, I would be expected to meet her at the airport.”

I giggled. I could imagine the scene.

“Imelda must have exploded!” I said, “She’d been planning this for years!”

“She was definitely not happy.” Sir John chuckled. “I tried to cater to her vanity by saying that, as First Lady, protocol dictated that she and the President should wait and greet the Princess at the Palace. Eventually, she relented but not without a struggle. So off I went to the airport followed by a phalanx of limousines. I noticed that Imelda had been hard at work because the route was lined with thousands of men in grey overalls holding the British flag.”

Intrigued I asked, “Who were they?”

“Well, deprived of the schoolchildren, Imelda had replaced them with inmates from all the prisons around Luzon! Sir John giggled. “And, wait for this, Caroline, just in case the prisoners decided to make a communal bid for freedom she had sharpshooters from the Army and the Manila Metrocom hanging out of windows and suspended in the branches of trees above with rifles aimed at the them.”

“What was the Princess’s reaction to all these men in identical outfits?” I asked, “Did she realise who they were?”

Again Sir John laughed. “She looked amazed and then turned to me and in her very upper crust voice, asked, “Tell me, Sir John, are they all civil servants?””

“And what was your answer?”

Still chuckling from the memory, Sir John replied, “Well I said, “In a manner of speaking, Ma’am, yes they are!”

In 1986, during the “Peoples’ Revolution”, as it came to be called, newsreels and photographs

emerged from Manila’s presidential palace, Malacanan, that filled viewers with a mixture of fascination and horror. There were the rows upon rows of discarded shoes, the obscene mountains of unused cosmetics, the 3000 bras and panties, leading most observers to ask themselves, who was this woman who called herself the “Goddess of all the Arts” and the “Star and Saviour” of the 54 million Filipino people?

Imelda never expected to be forced into exile. She had lived with delusions of her own infallibility for twenty-one years – and the US government was, in most part, to blame. While Imelda “shopped till she dropped” and her husband imprisoned, tortured or killed any dissenter, agitator or critic, successive US Presidents went out of their way to praise and support them both.

In 1980 former President Nixon called Imelda “our Angel of Asia.” In 1981, after a blatantly corrupt election, Vice President George Bush Sr told the couple:

“We just love your adherence to democratic principles and the democratic process!”

And, during the Marcoses state visit to Washington a year later, President Reagan heralded their dedication to “improving the living standards for all their countrymen” and called them, “Nancy’s and my greatest friends and America’s greatest allies in Asia.”

It seemed then the couple could do  no wrong in the eyes of each United States government, convulsed as it was in the aftermath of Vietnam and ever fearful of Henry Kissinger’s “domino theory”, a theory that never stood up to serious scrutiny even then.

In fact Marcos and Imelda never even considered themselves mortal. In one issue of Playboy magazine, recorded during the Marcoses exile in Hawaii, they were asked the question:

“Do you think of yourselves as Gods?”

To which Imelda’s immediate reply was:

“Yes, because we are on a divine mission to return to the Philippines and reclaim our destiny.”

The ex President then chipped in:

“We are part of the achievement of being a God. That is what we are about now. An ordinary mortal would not be able to stand it. All of our statements now have to prove that we have not gone back to being ordinary mortals.”

But robbed of her personal fiefdom and her bottomless Treasury, with her own Swiss bank accounts frozen and nowhere to display her priceless jewels, Imelda Marcos presented a pathetic figure, hardly that of a deity. The Iron Butterfly’s wings had been severely clipped and, with it, her freedom to jet around the world at will. Her hard-earned memberships to the exclusive playgrounds of the privileged few had been withdrawn. Doors, once open by the rich, titled and powerful had been firmly slammed in her face. She complained that in Hawaii her telephone never rang and friends were always out when she called. The “enchanted fairytale” as Imelda once described her life, was over but, according to the Playboy interview, she saw it only as a “temporary intermission.”

When her husband died in exile, Imelda’s only dream for herself was a triumphant return to Manila. Forty years ago she had arrived in Manila with a beautiful young face, a dream in her head and five pesos in her pocket. Again she would arrive in Manila, this time broken but unbowed. She vowed she would seek the Presidency “for all those supporters who have anxiously awaited for my return.”

From her exile in Hawaii she made this promise to them. “I’ll go back with only five pesos and I’ll make billions and billions of dollars, because what I do comes from the heart and the brain – and I’ve got both!” 

But the support she expected had evaporated in her absence. The Philippines had moved on. Ferdinand’s corpse, she was told, would not be welcome, his body would have to remain in Hawaii. The housewife, Cory Aquino, who had become President by default negotiated Imelda’s return in exchange for access to some of the stolen money.

So Imelda bided her time, staging her political comeback to coincide with the inauguration of her former friend, the actor-turned politician, Joseph Estrada, an alcoholic womaniser who abused his position to such an extent that he, too, was toppled within his second year. And, despite, crawling down the aisle of Manila’s Cathedral on her knees to beg God’s assistance in returning her to power, Imelda has reluctantly had to give up all ideas of obtaining the Presidency and setting in motion the family dynasty that was her husband’s dying wish.

Later, when asked about this, and other similar, tactics by Fortune magazine, Imelda simply shrugged:

“I’m like Robin Hood. I rob the rich to make my projects come alive. It’s not really robbing. I do it with a smile !”

Her projects included literally hundreds of buildings. Palatial homes all over the world for her and her family, luxury condiminiums and office blocks, larger-than-life monuments of herself and her husband, numerous “love bridges”, health centres and art centres and a string of shopping malls and five-star hotels.

Imelda’s response to accusations of extravagance was simple:

“In the material world,” she explained coyly, “where everything is valued, when you commit yourself to God, beauty and love, it can be mistaken for extravagance ! But I have never been a material girl. My father always told me never to love anything that cannot love you back!”

And these words from a simple girl who went out of her way to obtain the world’s largest uncut diamond from Harry Winston, obviously so it could love her back, and not so she could outshine Elizabeth Taylor !

Imelda’s extravagance knew no bounds. She grabbed everything, bought everything, hoarded everything. Her excuse was that she was doing it for her “little people”. Like the “meek” in the Bible, she assured us, they would inherit it all.

“Everything I have is theirs,” she informed us journalists one day:

“I am their star and their slave. No matter how poor they are, whenever they see me they smile and they are happy!”

POSTSCRIPT: Just thought I would add this as it strikes me as funny  – and, typically, Imelda.

Another postscript by Rappler. Following the outrage by ex-alumni of Ateneo inviting Imelda to the Universitiy recently. The photograph of her with the alumni went viral and many wrote in to protest. “Did the alumni remember those students who died during the Marcos regime?” I understood their anger. I knew Eman Lacaba, the young poet, very well. He even wrote a poem dedicated to me. He was hauled away to Camp Crame one day never to be seen again. Shame on Ateneo. The alumni has since issued a statement. You can read the full story here:

Yet another postscript: An off-Broadway musical, “Here Lies Love” about the love affair and conjugal Presidency of the Marcoses is getting a rerun at The Public Theater in New York.

The $10bn question: what happened to the Marcos millions?

by MLC | May 25, 2020 | Martial Law Stories

Source: Theguardian.com

By: Nick Davies

In the 21 years Ferdinand Marcos ran the Philippines, billions went missing. As his son stands for vice-president, will the stolen fortune ever be recovered?

The content that this network circulated included numerous claims that sought to alter public perception of the Marcoses by either downplaying or outrightly denying kleptocracy and human rights violations during the Martial Law years, exaggerating Marcos achievements, and vilifying critics, rivals, and mainstream media.

In the early hours of a February morning in 1986, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos flew into exile. After 21 years as president of the Philippines, Marcos had rigged one too many elections. The army had turned against him, and the people had come out on to the streets in their thousands. The Marcoses had seen the crisis coming and been able to prepare their escape, so when they landed that morning at the Hickham USAF base in Hawaii, they brought plenty of possessions with them.

The official US customs record runs to 23 pages. In the two C-141 transport planes that carried them, they had packed: 23 wooden crates; 12 suitcases and bags, and various boxes, whose contents included enough clothes to fill 67 racks; 413 pieces of jewellery, including 70 pairs of jewel-studded cufflinks; an ivory statue of the infant Jesus with a silver mantle and a diamond necklace; 24 gold bricks, inscribed “To my husband on our 24th anniversary”; and more than 27m Philippine pesos in freshly-printed notes. The total value was $15m.

This was a fortune by any standards, easily enough to see the couple through the rest of their lives. Yet the new government of the Philippines knew this was only a very small part of the Marcoses’ wealth. The reality, they discovered, was that Ferdinand Marcos had amassed a fortune up to 650 times greater. According to a subsequent estimate by the Philippine supreme court, he had accumulated up to $10bn while in office.

Since his official salary had never risen above $13,500 a year, it was blazingly clear this was stolen wealth on the most spectacular scale. Some of his closest allies also stole billions. As their victim was a nation in which 40% of the people survive on less than $2 a day, the Republic of the Philippines decided urgently to try to retrieve its money.

Even amid the chaos of the revolution, the very first executive order issued by the new president, Cory Aquino, established the Presidential Commission on Good Government, the PCGG. It was to recover “all ill-gotten wealth accumulated by former president Ferdinand Marcos, his immediate family, relatives, subordinates and close associates” and given the power to sequester any assets believed to be the proceeds of crime.

Thirty years later, the PCGG is still working, its 94 lawyers, researchers and administrators housed proudly in a building recovered from the Marcos family. The government gives it an annual budget of $2.2m. Its staff have traced money through jurisdictions all over the world and fought their way through hundreds of court cases. And yet something has gone terribly wrong: to date, the PCGG has recovered only a fraction of what was stolen by the Marcos network; no one has served a prison sentence for their part in the crime.

Now, with its task still far from complete, its survival is threatened by a political development that would never have been anticipated by the crowds who swelled the streets in triumph as Marcos fled. The former president’s son, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, generally known as “Bongbong”, is a frontrunner to become vice-president in the national elections on 9 May. If he wins, he would have the power to shut down the PCGG, as political allies of his family have tried to do in the past. The world’s biggest thief will have won.

Last month I was given unrestricted access to the enormous archive the PCGG has assembled in its years of global detective work: the president’s handwritten diary, frequently puffed with self-regard; the notepaper headed “From the office of the president”, with scribbled sums endlessly totting up his cash; minutes of company meetings with his comments scrawled in the margins; contracts; “side agreements”; records of multiple bank accounts; hundreds of share certificates; private investigators’ reports; and tens of thousands of pages of court judgments.

It needs to be said that this is not about Imelda Marcos and her infamous collection of shoes, although her shopping habit is real. She bought perfume not by the ounce but by the gallon. She hoarded old masters; at one point, she tried to buy Tiffany & Co. But in this particular circus she was only a clown, her crazy consumption deflecting attention from the big beast that was out of its cage.

The PCGG archive tells the inside story of the biggest theft in history, and of the master criminal who organised it: skilful, arrogant, cruel. It also opens a door into the offshore world revealed by the Panama Papers. Marcos was one of the first to exploit the rats’ nest of secret jurisdictions and hidden ownership then in the early stages of being built beneath the floorboards of public life.

But what is most important about Marcos is that he committed his crimes as a politician. His career starts with a cynicism that now seems familiar – manipulating electorates, using money to buy power and power to make money. But he went one big step further in merging politics and finance, converting the instruments of government into one vast cash machine. A handful of other autocrats were also busy stealing from their people in that era – in Haiti, Nicaragua, Iran – but Marcos stole more and he stole better. Ultimately, he emerges as a laboratory specimen from the early stages of a contemporary epidemic: the global contagion of corruption that has since spread through Africa and South America, the Middle East and parts of Asia. Marcos was a model of the politician as thief.

A single document in the Manila archive marks the start of the detective story. In a sworn deposition, a young civil servant named Chito Roque describes how, on the night the Marcoses flew into exile, he worked his way through the crowds outside the presidential palace to the gates where anxious soldiers were posted. He was with his boss, a senior official in the new government, and they eventually found their way into the inner sanctum, the Marcoses’ private living quarters. There, they could see the signs of hasty flight: food still warm on the dining table, empty boxes, papers scattered on the floor, shredding machines stuffed with more paper.

His boss went home, but Chito wandered into the bedroom of the deposed president, where “I saw a filing cabinet and I opened the first drawer and I saw a safe inside and there were numbers, a combination that was pasted on the door, so I followed the combination and opened the safe.” Inside, he found records of bank accounts in Switzerland and Canada, share certificates and several letters signed by Marcos.

Those documents now sit in the offices of the PCGG, along with thousands more retrieved from the palace and the 50 or so other properties the Marcoses and their allies owned in the Philippines, and from homes and offices in the US. As the years have gone by, hundreds of thousands of pages have been added from other sources, all now sitting, neatly ordered, in a white, two-storey building near the centre of Manila. Outside, a six-lane highway is jammed with traffic, bellowing and belching fumes. Inside, all is calm and cool. A notice asks visitors kindly to leave their firearms at reception.

In the early years, the PCGG documents suggest, Marcos was naive in his crime. With sacks of cash from rich backers and help from the CIA, the bright young lawyer won elections to congress, then the senate, but he was nothing special, just another “Mr Ten Per Cent” selling his political influence. After he became President Ten Per Cent in 1965, his income from kickbacks for government contracts increased, but his guile went no further than stashing $215,000 in a New York bank in his own name. As far as the records show, he and Imelda took their first steps to real secrecy on 20 March 1968, when they used false names to deposit $950,000 in four accounts with Credit Suisse, he as William Saunders (he practised his new signature on the headed paper), she as Jane Ryan. By February 1970, the Swiss accounts were so loaded, the couple added an extra layer of concealment, transferring their ownership to foundations registered in Liechtenstein. Then Marcos started to get really clever.

On 21 September 1972, he declared martial law. As his diary records, the Nixon administration consented as he shut down congress, arrested his political opponents, took control of the media and courts, and suspended all civil rights. On the same day – as a PCGG worker pointed out to me with some passion – he took time off to open another Swiss bank account. In his diary a week later, reflecting on his “reforms”, Marcos wrote: “The legitimate use of force on chosen targets is the incontestable secret of the reform movement.”

Over the following nine years, an estimated 34,000 trade unionists, student leaders, writers and politicians were tortured with electric shocks, heated irons and rape; 3,240 men and women were dumped dead in public places; 398 others simply disappeared. With total power over politics, the president closed in on the country’s wealth.

This was no longer just about kickbacks. Marcos started to steal whole companies, using the crude tactics of a gangster. He wanted the nation’s electricity company, Meralco, owned by Eugenio Lopez, patriarch of one of the families who had run the country for centuries. He had Lopez’s son charged with plotting to assassinate him, which carried the death penalty. The old oligarch handed over his company for $220 (it was worth $400m). To have gunmen is a gangster’s requirement; to have gunmen in uniforms, with all the power of the state behind them, is a gangster’s dream.

Yet most of Marcos’s takeovers involved no violence. Martial law allowed him, literally, to write his own law: his decrees passed straight on to the statute book. When he wanted to take over the sugar industry, he set up companies and then issued decrees that allowed them to dominate the planting, milling and international marketing of Philippine sugar, which accounted for 27% of export earnings. He then created a Philippine Exchange Company, decreed it should handle all foreign sugar sales and used its monopoly position to buy from farmers at rock-bottom prices and sell at vast profit. This allowed him to buy Northern Lines, which had the contract to ship the sugar overseas. Finally, he decreed that the sugar industry be exempt from minimum-wage law, with the result that 500,000 labourers saw their income fall to less than $1 a day, making even more profit.

The PCGG archive shows how, in the same way, Marcos used his own companies to take over the three other key areas of agriculture: coconuts, tobacco and bananas. Granting himself government contracts, monopoly deals and tax exemptions, he levered his way into dominating industries across the whole economy – logging and paper, meat, oil, insurance, shipping and airlines, beer and cigarettes, textiles, hotels and casinos, newspapers, radio and TV. His was an early and particularly rapacious version of privatisation.

Crucially, he saw his crime through a lawyer’s eyes. Of course people would observe that the Marcoses were suddenly very wealthy – they could live with that. What mattered was to ensure that there was no evidence. Repeatedly, he set up his companies so that outwardly they belonged to other people. Marcos deployed dozens of cronies: relatives, golf partners, political allies, anybody who shared his greed. The crony would sign a deed transferring ownership of most of the business – usually 60% – but would leave a blank space for the name. Marcos would hold the deed and leave the space blank. There was no “evidence” that he owned the 60%.

Marcos stole, then stole more. The Japanese paid reparations for the second world war; he skimmed it and put the profit into his Swiss accounts. He stole international aid money, gold from the Central Bank, loans from international banks and military aid from the US. He decreed that more than a million impoverished coconut farmers must pay a levy, supposedly to improve the industry, amounting to $216m. He had already issued decrees to gift most of the coconut trade to one of his own companies; now he stole great chunks of the levy fund, all the while taking kickbacks on government contracts.

All this theft created a logistical problem: how to handle the tidal flow of money. The PCGG archive shows how Marcos set up his own banking system, using cronies to buy private banks and others to control the state banks. These were useful for stealing more money, in loans that would never be repaid, and for accessing foreign currency – although eventually he set up his own specialist bank to trade currency on the black market.

Above all, the banks acted like a network of dykes receiving his ocean of income. Bank staff would make regular – sometimes weekly – trips to the palace, to pick up cheques and bundles of cash, which were then deposited in dozens of accounts. The millions were then channelled into Marcos’s expanding reservoir of offshore accounts (he had 69 in Switzerland alone). Then all he and Imelda had to do was turn on the taps anywhere in the world and cash would come pouring out; cash that had been washed clean of its connection to crime.

For all its craziness, the gorging on consumer goods that followed now seems a natural progression. There were multiple houses for the extended family, a $5.5m yacht, private planes, helicopters and dozens of Mercedes-Benzes. When their youngest daughter was married in June 1983, they built a new runway and hotel, renovated a 200-year-old church, demolished nearby houses and rebuilt them in traditional style, imported carriages from Austria and horses from Morocco. Advertisement

The men and women who work at the PCGG are driven by an anger. Each day they discover more detail of this crime, while its victims sleep on the pavements and in the slums around them. They are well aware of what the money could do for the impoverished people of the Philippines: if Marcos stole $10bn, this would have paid for the entire government budget for his last year in power three times over. And so they want not only to retrieve the stolen money, but to restore it. It is not easy. The Marcoses, with their money and their connections, have always been in the lead.

***

Consider the saga of the missing paintings. When the PCGG searched the president’s palace after he fled, they found that the walls of the ballroom displayed 23 pale patches where once there had been masterpieces. The Marcoses had a town house on East 66th Street in New York, where Imelda held many parties. Neighbours told investigators that they had seen two 18-wheel trailers pull up a few days after the couple went into exile: they had been loaded up with antiques and paintings, and driven away. By the time the house was searched a few weeks later, there were only brass plaques boasting of treasures that had once occupied its walls: the Madonna And Child by Michelangelo, the Marquesa de Santa Cruz by Goya, a couple of Monets, two Braques, a Pissarro, a Manet.

Paperwork retrieved from their various homes revealed that the Marcoses had bought at least 304 valuable paintings. Almost all were now missing. The Philippine investigators were left with a few dozen inferior works abandoned in some of the Philippine homes, and one Henri Fantin-Latour found wrapped in a blanket under a maid’s bed in one of their New York apartments, apparently an attempt to thieve from the thief. They got a judge to order galleries and auction houses not to sell anything that might have come from the Marcoses. There was not much else they could do. Advertisement

During their first year, the PCGG received a little help from several former Marcos staff and allies. A financial aide, Rolando Gapud, gave them details of five Swiss bank accounts. By Marcos standards, they did not contain very much (only $356m) and the banks refused to hand it over. All the PCGG could do was persuade a Swiss court to freeze the accounts. Gapud and others began to disclose the scale of Marcos’s ownership of the Philippine economy. In Manila, the government set up an “anti-graft” court; by the end of 1986, the PCGG was opening cases against Marcos and his network.

One of those who came forward was Oscar Cariño, former manager of the New York branch of the Philippine National Bank. In a sworn statement, he claimed he had created accounts for two fictitious companies to conceal the Marcos millions. It emerged that the paintings had changed hands with the help of some powerful connections. The court heard that some part had been played by Adnan Khashoggi, the notorious Saudi arms dealer. An Australian TV programme claimed that dozens of Marcos paintings had been flown out of the US on a private plane; 38 others had been shipped from Hawaii. Acting on a request from the PCGG, French police raided two of Khashoggi’s apartments and found paperwork confirming that many of the masterpieces were now in his hands.

Khashoggi argued that he had made bona fide purchases from the couple, of the paintings and of four Manhattan skyscrapers. But the US authorities claimed that the documents he produced to support this had been backdated, and formally accused him of obstructing the course of justice.

Khashoggi was arrested in Switzerland and extradited to New York, where he joined Marcos, Imelda and a network of others indicted under anti-racketeering law. But Ferdinand Marcos died in September 1989, before the case came to trial; he was 72 and had been in a hospital in Honolulu for months. Without Marcos, some evidence became inadmissible. There were reports that the White House was leaning on the prosecutors to go soft, that there was too much potential embarrassment for the last five US presidents. Imelda told the court she was “a poor widow who knew nothing about her husband’s activities”. Khashoggi protested his innocence and was acquitted of any offence. The transcript of the trial runs to thousands of pages. It ended in July 1990, with all the defendants declared not guilty on all counts.

The US authorities agreed to take no further legal action if Khashoggi surrendered the paintings and the skyscrapers. But when the skyscrapers were finally sold, it turned out they had been mortgaged to the hilt by the Marcoses. The city demanded unpaid property taxes. Though the buildings’ total sale price was $50m, the Philippine people received only $5.7m. Most of the dozens of paintings Khashoggi is believed to have handled were no longer in his possession. The PCGG retrieved just 26. Advertisement

For the investigators, this was a frustrating journey. Aquino’s government, which had launched the commission in the heat of revolution, rapidly stepped on the brake. Her supporters say there was no option: Marcos and his cronies owned so much of the economy that to seize their assets would crash the banks. Her critics, meanwhile, argue that her government was always compromised: the Aquinos were one of the wealthiest families in the country; the old oligarchy was back in power. Whatever the motive, the PCGG was ordered to seize nothing, but instead to work through the courts. Over the following few years, it became clear that this had handed the initiative to the Marcoses, who had the money to hire the very best lawyers. Soon, dozens of cases were sidetracked by endless technical argument.

Just as Marcos’s wealth was too great to seize, so his political influence was too big to beat. Two weeks after the revolution, a source in New York had shown the PCGG a report revealing that, even before he was deposed, his allies in US intelligence were aware that he had stolen up to $10bn. But the CIA refused to disclose what they knew. The Japanese government made it clear to Aquino that they were not going to hand over information, and aid packages could be in jeopardy if the PCGG pushed too hard. In the UK, Margaret Thatcher’s government said it was “not our business”.

The problem for these governments was that they had turned a blind eye while their companies had waded into the muck alongside Marcos – taking his money without asking where it came from. In some cases, Marcos, in turn, had paid bribes to senior politicians and made illegal contributions to election campaigns, including those of US presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. (When this surfaced in 1986, they said they had not known where the money came from.) Advertisement

A PCGG veteran of nearly 30 years has a special frustration with the US. He says they have never handed over all the paperwork seized from Marcos when he arrived in Hawaii, and he flicks through the copies he has: “See? Some pages which are blank, some inventory pages which are blank. We think they have redacted transactions involving US organisations. They were partners in theft.” And he pauses to consider how the US would react if some other nation seized evidence of their most prolific criminal and handed it over in redacted form.

***

By the autumn of 1991, Imelda Marcos was feeling sufficiently safe to go back to the Philippines with her three adult children. In New York, the PCGG picked up rumours that some of the paintings were still there and being sold by a professional dealer. They hired a firm of private investigators, IGI, to watch the dealer, and established that he had some of the Marcos collection, including Goya’s portrait of the Marquesa de Santa Cruz.

Early in June 1992, the investigators discovered the dealer had been warned that they were on to him. The next morning, they watched as five men and women “of Filipino appearance” turned up outside the dealer’s apartment in two vans, loaded up boxes and large blue suitcases, and drove out to JFK airport, where all five checked in as first-class passengers along with their unusual cargo. With no legal power to intervene, the investigators could only watch as they flew off to Manila.

The pattern of impunity was set. In Seattle in December 1989, a jury found that the Marcoses were implicated in a plot to murder two Filipino union activists who had been shot there in 1981. The jury ordered them to pay $15.1m compensation to the victims’ families. The money has not been paid. In Hawaii in 1995, a court found the regime had abused the human rights of thousands who’d been tortured and killed, and ordered that Ferdinand’s estate pay nearly $2bn compensation. Less than 1% of that has been paid. Having returned to Manila, in September 1993 Imelda was convicted of personally defrauding the state in a land deal while Marcos was still in power. She was sentenced to 18 years in prison but bailed while she lodged an appeal. Five years later the supreme court threw out her conviction on technical grounds.

Soon, the PCGG was running into more problems, as Marcos allies found their way back into power and argued that the failure to retrieve more stolen money proved the commission was pointless and should be closed. Worse, the PCGG was tainted by the corruption it was trying to expose. Some officials were caught exploiting empty Marcos properties and pocketing “excessive” expenses. Twice the weakened PCGG made compromise agreements with the Marcos family that were so generous, the Philippine courts blocked them.

By the late 1990s, Imelda had been elected to the Philippine House of Representatives and was emboldened to give provocative interviews in which she declared “there is more money the government is not yet aware of” and “we own practically everything in the Philippines”. Increasingly secure, her confidence got the better of her. In 2007, she gave more interviews and posed for photographs that clearly showed eight of the missing paintings gleaming on her walls, including Goya’s portrait. Another old master hung on the wall of her office in the House of Representatives.

The PCGG went to court for an order to recover them. But with the Marcoses opposing every move, the case took six years. When they finally raided Imelda’s office and four of her homes in October 2014, they again found only pale patches on the walls where the eight paintings had once hung and “Imelda crying into her handkerchief”.

Even so, the PCGG has dragged some victories out of the swamp. In 2004, they finally retrieved the money from the five Swiss accounts. At an even slower pace, they seized the assets of half a dozen crony companies and recovered most of the coconut levy. They auctioned paintings, jewellery, silver and dozens of houses.

In total, the PCGG has succeeded in retrieving $3.7bn. That amounts to less than half the top estimate for what was taken by Marcos alone. In spite of their efforts, they have watched his associates retire to a life of self-indulgence with most of their fortunes intact. They have dozens of cases still bogged down in the courts, including 22 that started in 1987 or earlier.

The head of the PCGG, Richard Amurao, is a conspicuously decent lawyer, aged 41, who spent five years as a commissioner before becoming chairman last year. He points out how a single piece of Imelda’s jewellery could have paid for 2,000 young Filipinos to go through college. He is not giving up, yet reflects that it has been exhausting, and hard to see how they can win. “It is like the traffic jams in Manila. You begin to accept that it just is this way.”

Deep in the vaults of the Central Bank, he says, there is a large collection of Imelda’s jewellery, due to be auctioned next month. It includes most of what was seized 30 years ago by US customs, another stash found in the palace, and a third intercepted at Manila airport as a friend of Imelda’s attempted to fly out of the country. Last year, Christie’s valued the collection; they identified treasures that had previously been missed, including a tiara with 25 pearls in a diamond frame seized from the Russian tsar’s family in the 1918 revolution. It is estimated to be worth more than $4m. Amurao’s workers have invented their own word to describe anybody who is extravagantly greedy: “Imeldific”.

What will happen if Bongbong Marcos is elected vice-president? Will he allow his mother access to the vaults to retrieve the jewellery she insists is hers? Will he kill the PCGG entirely? Bongbong, 58, started his political career before his family was exiled, becoming vice-governor of Ilocos Norte province in 1981, aged 23. Six years after exile, he returned to become a congressman. He recently denied any involvement in the legal moves that have blocked so much of the PCGG’s work. In February, Amurao issued a tough response, saying his claim was “belied by court records which show his involvement”. He listed cases in which Bongbong and his mother are still laying claim to what the PCGG says is ill-gotten wealth. Imelda is now 86, and actively campaigning for her son.

“The work is not finished,” Amurao says. “There is no statute of limitation on seeking justice. But the passing of time makes it more and more difficult to find new leads. Time is an ally for those who want us to forget. And if Bongbong wins, we don’t really see how we can do our work – not with the son of the former president only a heartbeat away from the presidency.”

To young Filipinos who never knew martial law and dictatorship

by MLC | May 18, 2020 | Martial Law Stories

Source: Globalnation.Inquirer.net

By: Benjamin Pimentel

SAN FRANCISCO — You’ve been hearing a lot about the date – September 21, 1972 — and the event — the day martial law was imposed on our country, the day the Marcos dictatorship was born.

That was 40 years ago.

This may not mean much to you who grew up after the nightmare finally ended, after Filipinos rallied to oust one of the most despicable leaders in world history.

You’ve probably heard about him. If you travel north, you might even see his corpse in a glass case. You might also see remnants of a giant bust carved on the side of a mountain.

You know how shameless Filipino politicians show off by putting up big posters with their photos in public places?  Well, try to imagine living under a leader who actually thought that he was so great he should have his face carved on a gigantic rock for all to see.

Think about it.

Someone blew up that bust many years ago — which is really a shame. It was hideous, but still, it could have served as a reminder of what we went through. What your parents and grandparents went through under Ferdinand Marcos.

You probably heard about the debates on whether he should be buried with our other heroes at the Libingan ng mga Bayani. You probably heard his son, now a senator, defending his record, claiming that had Marcos not been overthrown, the country would have turned into another Singapore.

It’s a bizarre claim. And I never get tired of pointing this out: Bongbong is essentially arguing that the Philippines would have become another Singapore, known as one of the least corrupt nations in the world, under a president considered one of the most corrupt leaders in history. (Google “most corrupt leaders” and you’ll understand why Bongbong is bonkers.)

You’ve probably also heard the dictator’s supporters remember those years as the good ‘ol days. The country was more peaceful, and people were happier, they’d say.

You know what, in some ways, they were right.

I was eight years old when martial law was declared, and I remember being so happy that day. Classes were suspended, and there was nothing to watch on TV but cartoons.

Our neighbors and even my parents were glad to see an end to the student demonstrations. People were lining up to ride a jeepney. To some, it certainly looked like an entirely different country.

And it was.

But these were not the changes that most people, especially the middle class, thought were actually taking place.

For in those early months and years, middle class and upper class families welcomed Marcos’s version of  “peace and order,” the orderly queues and the empty streets where activists once voiced their opposition to corruption and injustice. But behind the scenes, unknown to many, the stealing, the torture, the killing had begun.

It had grown quiet all of sudden, because those who had the guts to speak out had been silenced. Imprisoned. Tortured. Co-opted. Murdered.

Actually, back then, the term Marcos’s goons used was “salvage.” Yes, salvage, as in “to save” or “to rescue.” For that was how Marcos and his allies imposed “peace and order.” They saved the regime’s critics and opponents – by killing them.

Later on, even the phrase “peace and order” morphed into a sick joke. My father enjoyed telling it.

“Peace and order? Ah, that actually means, ‘I want a piece of this. I want a piece of that. And that’s an order.’”

Remember that the next time you hear of Imelda’s jewels or shoes, of news about some mansion or bank account linked to the Marcoses.

Then there’s the argument that goes like this: ‘What was the point of getting rid of Marcos? Look at how there’s still so much corruption and injustice in Philippine society after all these years.’

Good point.

But one thing you need to remember, and perhaps we need to remind ourselves about this too, those of us who joined the uprising to get rid of Marcos — We didn’t march thinking we would suddenly live in paradise. We didn’t face riot police and the security forces thinking that the country’s problems– the corruption, the poverty, the abuse of power — would suddenly disappear.

We joined the fight to get rid of a tyrant. And guess what – we won. And you won.

I know it’s hard to believe, especially given all the news of corruption and abuse and of people dying and disappearing.

But trust me: it was much, much worse back then. It was a much scarier, more violent time, when even the mildest criticism of government, of Marcos, of Imelda, could land you in jail or even get you killed.

Look at it this way. Some of you don’t like the current president. And you probably even joined the fad of Noynoying, making fun of the guy, calling him all sorts of names. You know what would have happened to you if you had tried a stunt like that during the Marcos years?

Marcos’s allies want you to forget that. They want you to see the long struggle against dictatorship, and the uprising that finally brought it down as wasted effort.

Which is really an absurd view if you think about it. It’s like telling our heroes and those who waged past struggles in our history that everything that happened, everything they did was a waste.

It’s like telling Jose Rizal, “You know those novels and essays and poems you wrote, including that last one you composed shortly before you were shot to death by the Spaniards, all that was a waste of time. For look at how messed up the country is right now.”

It’s like telling my own father, “Papa, joining the guerrillas was a stupid idea, given how the country whose freedom you defended against the Japanese has turned out.”

Fighting Marcos was worth it. For we took on a bully and we won.

This is not to downplay or dismiss the problems the country faces today.

And you should speak out about them. You should complain and protest. You should demand that things should be better, and you should go out there to try to make them better. It is perfectly all right for you to march, to picket and even to go Noynoying.

Just don’t believe those who say it was much better before.

You’ll hear it from Marcos’s old allies.

You’ll hear it from those who simply don’t like democracy, who find it inconvenient because it keeps them from acquiring more wealth and more power.

You’ll hear from those who just can’t stand ideas they don’t agree with, who arrogantly think they have all the answers and must therefore have all the power.

They’ll present themselves as the nation’s saviors based on twisted claims. Some would point to their military discipline and experience.  Others would claim to have the correct political line base on historical truths. Some would claim to have god on their side.

Don’t trust the liars and the bullies. Democracy can be messy and chaotic. But the alternatives are even messier. They create a false, deceptive sense of “peace and order.”

A delusion.

Like the cartoon shows I watched the day Marcos’s dictatorship began its reign of destruction.