Month: September 2022

Originally published by Vera Files on November 27, 2020.

On November 9, 2020, between two destructive typhoons and amid a raging pandemic, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. filed a motion for inhibition against Supreme Court Associate Justice Marvic Leonen, who is tasked with writing the decision on Marcos’ poll protest against Vice President Leni Robredo.

Former senator Ferdinand Marcos, Jr.files a motion for the immediate inhibition of Associate Justice Marvic Leonen from his electoral protest, Nov. 9 2020. Photo from Bongbong Marcos FB page.

Leonen was biased against his family, claimed Marcos, whose petition was seconded by an allegedly unrelated one filed on the same day by Solicitor General Jose Calida, a known Marcos supporter. The Supreme Court, sitting as the Presidential Electoral Tribunal, disagreed, junking both petitions eight days after they were filed.

Marcos started to claim that he was being cheated even before the 2016 race for the vice presidency was officially called. It was only Bongbong’s second electoral loss; he handily won whenever he ran for executive or legislative positions in Ilocos Norte, for decades a Marcos bailiwick. He placed seventh in the 2010 senate election, giving him his first and thus far only national position.

His 1995 senate run was far less successful. He placed in the bottom (losing) half of a thirty-person race. The winning circle was dominated by candidates of the Fidel Ramos administration’s Lakas-Laban coalition, including Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, the election’s topnotcher. Nikki Coseteng, Gringo Honasan, and Miriam Defensor Santiago were the only opposition candidates who won seats in the Senate.

Honasan and Santiago supported Bongbong’s claim that the 1995 polls were tainted with “widespread fraud and trending,” as reported by the Manila Standard on May 9, 1995, the day after the elections. The article quoted Marcos as claiming in a press conference that a “highly placed cabal has been orchestrating a bogus quick count and propagating election results based only on tallies favorable to the administration candidates.” He reportedly said there would be “social unrest” if the Ramos administration “succeeds in defrauding the electorate and frustrating the will of the people.” Marcos formally asked the Commission on Elections to stop what he called an “unauthorized and unofficial quick count.” The same article quoted the administration coalition’s spokesman Ruben Torres, who thought that “young Marcos was seeing ‘ghosts’ of his father’s election machinery,” and who noted that pre-election surveys showed Bongbong was never a popular choice of the electorate at the time.

As reported on May 20, 1995 by the Standard, Marcos later asked for a suspension of the official Comelec canvass, citing irregularities such as “point shaving,” incorrect tabulations, and vote buying. He claimed to have lost many votes to two candidates in particular: topnotcher Macapagal-Arroyo and third placer Ramon Magsaysay, Jr., and that the cheating was within the precinct and provincial levels. The report said Bongbong “insisted that ‘two or three people’ were involved in the conspiracy to ease him out of the winners circle [but] he could not name them at [that] point as his group was still gathering evidence.” By then, only six out of 98 certificates of canvass had yet to be tallied, and Marcos was in 16th place.

Nothing came of Bongbong’s complaints, and the unrest he foresaw did not materialize. He was elected Ilocos Norte governor in 1998, a position he held for nine years.

Bongbong was not the first Marcos to cry fraud after losing an election for the first time under the 1987 Constitution. Imelda, his mother, was confident that she would win the seven-way race for the presidency in 1992. When it became evident that she would become an also-ran after the counting of votes was under way, she cried fraud. As reported by the Standard on May 17, 1992, Imelda held a press conference at the Philippine Plaza Hotel, during which she alleged “systematic and widespread cheating in the Philippine presidential elections” and that she planned to “boycott all court proceedings against her” as a form of “personal civil disobedience.”

A Reuters article published on May 16, 1992 in American and Canadian newspapers quoted Imelda as also saying: “Deep in our hearts we know we won, although subsequent events indicate that many of the ballots were not credited to me.” About a month later, an Associated Press story carried by various American papers reported that Imelda finally conceded and “threw her support behind the front-runner,” Fidel Ramos.

A few years later, she won her first post-EDSA Revolution position. According to a Reuters article that came out in the Standard on May 13, 1995, when Imelda was on the cusp of officially winning as representative of the first district of Leyte, her home province, she reportedly declared, “We received an overwhelming, undeniable majority. We won.” But, with her son’s chances of becoming senator at the time growing slimmer by the day, she also stated, “There are those who will stop at nothing to keep the people from electing the Marcoses.”

Interestingly, there have been times when the Marcoses claimed outright that elections in the country were tainted with fraud—committed by people on their opponents’ side and, by their own admission, their own—but they accepted the results without contest because the results were seemingly in their favor.

In January 1978, President Ferdinand Marcos announced that an election for the members of an Interim Batasang Pambansa, or IBP would be held in April that year. The election for the IBP’s regional representatives was held on April 7, 1978. Marcos’ Kilusang Bagong Lipunan (KBL) coalition won the overwhelming majority of IBP seats. The opposition coalition Lakas ng Bayan (later the “Laban” in PDP-Laban), whose leadership included the then-detained Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, Jr., did not win a post, even after their decision to contest only the twenty-one seats available in Metro Manila.

That votes were cast for opposition candidates, however, bothered Marcos. As the ballots were being tallied, he ordered a survey “to determine why votes were cast against the administration,” according to an Associated Press article. In the same news conference, Marcos claimed that electoral fraud “was done on both sides,” adding, however, that such fraud was “on a small scale and certainly not on a scale to affect the election.” The same AP article said Marcos critic Jovito Salonga disagreed with this assessment, noting that people did not visibly celebrate KBL’s victory because they felt “like they’ve been cheated.”

After the 1978 elections, Marcos became “President-Prime Minister” until 1981, the year he lifted martial law, but retained his power to issue decrees. That year, Marcos was elected to serve as president with a six-year term, in accordance with the amended 1973 Constitution. The opposition boycotted the polls.

Another election, this time for members of the Regular Batasang Pambansa, was held in 1984. Again, KBL became the majority party, though the opposition, strengthened in no small measure by Ninoy Aquino’s assassination the year before, won a third of the available seats. Among the winning candidates was Imee Marcos, the president’s daughter, elected representative of Ilocos Norte’s second district. She held that seat until the EDSA Revolution.

Days before her father’s ouster, member of parliament Imee claimed that “there was fraud on both sides” during the 1986 snap presidential election, of which the Comelec declared Marcos the winner against Corazon Aquino. (The count by the Comelec-accredited monitor, the National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections, said otherwise). Imee said this while still insisting to the Straits Times in Singapore that the election was a “clean and relatively peaceful one.” She said fraud occurred “because [the] election was such an emotion-charged and keenly contested one,” but that “only fraud on the part of the administration was given full media treatment.”

Imee’s father echoed her statements over a year later in an interview he and Imelda gave to Playboy while they were in exile in Hawaii. The August 1987 U.S. issue of Playboy quoted Marcos as saying: “There was fraud on both sides. But mine was not massive.”

However, Marcos and his subordinates had, by then, been linked to significant electoral fraud. In a press conference on February 22, 1986, at the height of the EDSA revolt, then Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile admitted that, in his own region, he knew “that we cheated the elections to the extent of 350,000 votes.” This was preceded by the famous quick count walkout on February 9, 1986 of 35 Comelec programmers, whose tallies of reported returns did not match what was displayed on the tally boards being broadcast on national television.

As reported by Seth Mydans of the New York Times on February 10, 1986, a delegation of 44 election observers from 19 countries noted that “electoral anomalies which we have witnessed are serious and could well have an impact upon the final result,” and that these anomalies included “vote-buying, intimidation and lack of respect for electoral procedures.” According to Mydans, the observers “had seen no instances of fraud committed by Mrs. Aquino’s supporters.”

Ferdinand always claimed that he won legitimately. In a press conference in Malacanang on February 11, 1986, he parried a claim made by a foreign journalist that the closeness of the vote showed that he was, in fact, losing his mandate.

“Voters that supported me are the poorer classes of our people, and those are the people who will do the fighting against the communists,” he said. “It’s not the elite, the elite that seems to have supported my opponent.”

It was widely reported, in articles of the Associated Press and the New York Times, that on the eve of the elections, bags of rice, marked “Gift From the President,” were being handed out by Marcos supporters. On the same day, according to the AP, “Pro-Marcos newspapers ran full-page announcements that said the government food market was offering big discounts on items ranging from ketchup to laundry soap.”

Less well-known today are the reported shenanigans during the 1978 IBP elections. Reuben Canoy, in his book The Counterfeit Revolution, mentioned, among others, a claim that during the 1978 polls, Las Piñas mayor and Marcos loyalist Filemon Aguilar’s men pointed their guns at the LABAN poll watchers in his territory and sent them home. The Citizens’ Report on the First Election Under Martial Law in the Philippines by the Ecumenical Crusade for a Conscienticized Electorate detailed claims that both LABAN and Kilusang Bagong Lipunan watchers were kept from entering precincts in Las Piñas, and that after the polls closed at 5:00 PM, Aguilar himself stuffed the ballot boxes with prepared ballots for Marcos’ KBL.

Despite such alleged irregularities, according to Agence-France Presse, on April 8, 1978, a day after the election, Marcos had announced “a clean government sweep in the parliamentary elections in Manila and a swift crackdown if violent opposition protest demonstrations should occur.” Comelec had not even finished their official canvass by then. So intent was he in securing a win and projecting at home and abroad that the opposition had little to no influence.

Regardless of the outcome of Bongbong’s poll protest, he will likely still have the support of entrenched political dynasties with members in the highest tier of the Philippine political hierarchy—including the Dutertes and the Aguilars, among whom are Filemon’s daughter, Senator Cynthia Aguilar Villar—come 2022, when Bongbong says he will run for another national position. But will such support translate to a resounding electoral victory if Marcos’ loss to Robredo is confirmed with finality?

The sizable Marcos loyalist forces will not care. They believe that Ferdinand Marcos legitimately won all elections held while he was president, including the 1986 snap election. They joined Imelda’s protests in 1992 and Bongbong’s complaint in 1995. They echo on social media whatever the Marcoses say about his ongoing electoral protest, including claims about Justice Leonen. They find a Marcos loss unimaginable—all other evidence to the contrary.

Campaign letter of Mariano Marcos, 1936 (In Ilocano) (from the digitized PCGG files)

Indeed, before Ferdinand Marcos launched his political career in 1949, his father Mariano Marcos was known for losing in elections—badly. Mariano was twice elected representative of the second district of Ilocos Norte in the pre-Commonwealth House of Representatives, but lost a bid for a third term to Emilio Medina. In 1934, Mariano tried to win back the congressional seat, but lost to Julio Nalundasan. In 1935, Mariano and Nalundasan ran against each other to be the representative of Ilocos Norte’s second district in the Commonwealth-era National Assembly. Again, Nalundasan won, handing Mariano a third successive electoral loss. Nalundasan was murdered days after winning, and another election was held in 1936 to determine the successor. Mariano lost a fourth time; the winner, Ulpiano Arzadon, won by a landslide—over 7,400 votes to Mariano’s 2,507.

According to Arzadon in an article published in the Tribune on September 13, 1936, nearly two months after he was elected, certain accusations made by Mariano against him that were published in Manila dailies “constitute a series of insults to the electorate” of Ilocos Norte. Arzadon said that his “decisive triumph in each and every municipality within the second district of Ilocos Norte,” including Marcos’ home town, “is an unequivocal expression of the will of my province that Mr. Marcos has completely been repudiated by the electorate.”

Mariano did not run in the 1938 elections, the year he and three of his relatives, including his son Ferdinand, became prime suspects in Nalundasan’s murder. All were eventually acquitted upon appeal, although Ferdinand would keep fending off accusations of involvement.

Left, Marcoses in court, 1940. From the Sunday Tribune, 13 October 1940 (downloaded from Trove/National Library of Australia). Right, cover of “Was Ferdinand Marcos Responsible for the Death of Nalundasan?” book published in time for the 1965 elections, written by Marcos’s lawyer, Vicente Francisco (Third World Studies file)

According to guerilla leader Jose Llanes, in the May 14, 1945 supplement to his May 3, 1945 Report on Ilocos Norte to the Secretary of the Interior, “Ilocos Norte has always been in political turmoil before the outbreak of the [Second World War]. Politicians there kill one another, e.g. the unsolved murder of the late Rep. Julio Nalundasan. Political elections are characterized by defamations and mud-slinging.” Llanes added: “Men involved in such gains do not hesitate to resort to any means to achieve political ends, even murder, as shown in the murder of Rep. Nalundasan. One better proof is the collaboration of political lame ducks.” Among these collaborators, Llanes labeled Mariano Marcos as a “pro-Jap spy.” Ferdinand would insist after the war that Mariano in fact defied the Japanese and was killed by them.

The roundly rejected candidate Mariano now has a university with a sprawling campus named after him in his hometown in Batac, Ilocos Norte, thanks to his son Ferdinand, who decreed the creation of the Mariano Marcos State University on January 6, 1978. Many more streets and institutions were named after Mariano during his son’s rule, as if to ensure that Mariano’s previous ignominy would be buried under steel and concrete.

One wonders if Bongbong’s insistence that he won the vice presidency is intended to help ensure that he could someday do for Ferdinand what Ferdinand did for Mariano.

Originally published by Vera Files on August 20, 2021.

Fact-checkers this year have had to repeatedly debunk claims that President Rodrigo Duterte had approved proposals to rename the Ninoy Aquino International Airport back to Manila International Airport.

VERA Files alone has had to do so thrice this year for uploaded videos making the erroneous claim that the airport has been renamed. All have hundreds of thousands of views, and seem to have been designed to be “clickbait” for the anti-“Dilawan” crowd, promising an honor conferred to “fake hero” Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr.— at the behest of his wife, the alleged presidential usurper—had finally been rescinded, somehow paving the way for a Marcos Restoration.

Looking at the history of how Republic Act No. 6639—“An Act Renaming the Manila International Airport as the Ninoy Aquino International Airport”—came to be, however, shows that MIA did not become NAIA because of a post-revolution whim. It was relatively uncontroversial; the law went through the entire post-EDSA legislative process, and was the fulfillment of proposals to rename the airport shortly after Senator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. was assassinated on its tarmac on August 21, 1983.

How RA No. 6639 became law

RA No. 6639 was among the first laws enacted during the Eighth Congress, the first elected legislature under the 1987 Constitution. It started out as House Bill No. 47, authored by Representative Raul S. Daza of Northern Samar. The bill was approved on second reading on August 4, 1987. According to the first volume of the Journal of the House of Representatives covering the 1987-1988 session, Daza described his proposal as “self-explanatory.”

It was not the first proposal to rename MIA as NAIA. Francisco Tatad, Ferdinand Marcos’s former Minister of Public Information, as a member of the Interim Batasang Pambansa representing Bicol, claimed to be the first to propose the renaming. He reiterated this claim on the Senate floor in 1993, while the Senate was tackling a resolution—the coauthors of which included current Senate President Vicente “Tito” Sotto III—to formally declare Ninoy Aquino as a national hero of the Philippines. That resolution was ultimately approved as one “expressing the sense of the Senate that the late Senator Benigno S. Aquino, Jr. be declared as national hero of the Philippines” a few days shy of the tenth anniversary of Aquino’s death.

In the Regular Batasang Pambansa (1984-1986), Cecilia Muñoz-Palma of Quezon City filed Resolution 36, “Naming the Manila International Airport as the ‘Ninoy Aquino International Airport’ to honor the memory of the late senator and Opposition leader, Benigno S. Aquino, Jr.” Like the earlier Tatad proposal, this resolution was not approved by the largely Marcos administration-allied legislature.

HB 47 was given far more attention than these Marcos-era proposals. One of the interpellators during the bill’s second reading was Representative Dante O. Tinga of Taguig-Pateros. According to the House Journal, Tinga’s main issue with the bill was the use of Benigno Aquino Jr.’s nickname, stressing that “laws are not for this generation alone and heroes are remembered by their full Christian names” to be more respectful and reverential. The Journal states that Daza “replied that heroes should be seen in the context of the times in which they lived”—he was known best by all, supporters and opponents alike, as Ninoy Aquino.

There were also questions raised by Representative Hernando Perez of Batangas, to which Daza gave the following responses: “1) that after the EDSA Revolution, international pilots, whenever they land in the Manila International Airport, announce that they are about to land at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport; 2) that in recognition of the martyrdom of the late senator, airline pilots submitted a petition to the then Secretary of Transportation and Communications that requested the renaming of the airport as Ninoy Aquino International Airport; and 3) that as the then Secretary of Transportation and Communications, Mr. Perez drafted an Executive Order renaming said airport as Ninoy Aquino International Airport but the President [Corazon “Cory” Aquino] reprimanded him on the ground that renaming airports is legislative and not an executive function.” The Journal added that Daza agreed to “accept the foregoing facts as added justifications and consider the Bill appropriate legislative approval.”

Representative Antonio Abaya of Isabela was worried about the “bad name” of the Manila International Airport at the time, resulting from “inadequate facilities” and poor management. Representative David Tirol of Bohol wondered if there was another place that could be renamed to “give more honor to Ninoy Aquino,” such as Tarlac, the late senator’s home province. According to the Journal, Daza replied that “he has not given the matter serious thought but that he would seriously consider supporting the bill Mr. Tirol should see proper to file.”

After these interpellations, amendments were suggested. Tinga was insistent that Benigno Aquino, Jr. International Airport was the appropriate name, but his amendment was not accepted. Parañaque Representative Freddie Webb only wanted to remove the specification “Parañaque, Metro Manila” as NAIA’s location, given territorial issues at the time involving his district.

On August 10, 1987, the House was ready to vote on the passage of the bill on third reading. By then, the bill had 90 other co-authors besides Daza. There were 156 lawmakers who voted to approve the measure, two rejected it, and two abstained. Tirol was one of those who voted in the negative. According to the Journal, Tirol explained his vote by saying that “renaming the Manila International Airport in Ninoy’s honor is not honoring him enough,” believing that “something more important and meaningful should be named after him.” The other representative who voted not to approve the measure, Mariano Nalupta Jr. of Ilocos Norte, did not give an explanation for his vote. Nalupta would later file renaming bills of his own, including one in 1989 to restore the name of Batac General Hospital to Mariano Marcos Memorial Hospital.

After the House vote, the NAIA proposal also breezed through the Senate. The Senate’s counterpart bill was principally authored by Heherson Alvarez. The bill was then transmitted to President Corazon Aquino on August 20, 1987—a day before the fourth anniversary of Ninoy Aquino’s assassination. However, the president did not sign it. It lapsed into law on November 27, 1987—Ninoy’s birthday. Like RA No. 6793, the text of the NAIA law did not contain the justifications for the renaming, which were already discussed at length in Congress.

The editorial of the Manila Standard on August 15, 1987, reflected some of these discussions. It noted that the murder of Ninoy Aquino “triggered off a chain of events that led to the toppling of a dictatorship that has gone down in history as outstanding in brutality and debauchery.” However, it also pointed out that “renaming the airport as it is now would be tantamount to besmirching the memory of the man whose singular act gave a new meaning to the word ‘courage,’” given the airport’s reputation as a “haven of all manner of thieves and hustlers.” The editorial hoped that, after a “drastic overhaul,” the airport could be rid of its ills in order to be “worthy of the name of the man whose death made so many things possible, and whose memory this nation aspires to immortalize.” Legislators and pundits were not concerned that Ninoy was unworthy of having the country’s main international gateway named after him—they believed the deteriorating principal airport was unworthy of being named after him.

It is not known whether Ninoy Aquino’s nemesis, Ferdinand Marcos, still alive and in exile in Hawaii at the time, had any publicly conveyed reaction to the renaming. He did not mention it in his various post-EDSA Revolution interviews nor in the last book he authored, A Trilogy on the Transformation of Philippine Society, nor is it tackled in books about the Marcoses in exile.

Proposals to rename NAIA under Duterte

There have not been any formal legislative proposals to restore NAIA to MIA. The call to revert the name has mostly been made outside the halls of Congress by Marcos loyalists, including those who erroneously claim the airport was only constructed during the Marcos regime. Some loyalists have even been clamoring to rename it the Ferdinand E. Marcos International Airport. There have been at least two Change.org petitions seeking to turn NAIA into MIA again: a closed petition with 8,984 supporters, and a still open petition that, as of this writing, has 143,522 signatories—about 7,700 more than last year. Within two weeks after being filed by lawyer and Marcos loyalist Larry Gadon, a petition to nullify RA 6639 was junked by the Supreme Court on September 9, 2020 for lack of merit.

On June 25, 2020 in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, Representatives Paolo Duterte of the 1st District of Davao City, Lord Allan Velasco of Marinduque, and Eric Yap of ACT-CIS partylist filed HB 7031, “An Act Renaming the Ninoy Aquino International Airport as the Paliparang Pandaigdig ng Pilipinas.” According to the bill’s explanatory note, “NAIA is the international gateway of the Philippines, being the biggest and largest international airport in the country. As such, there is a need to identify the same as belonging to the Philippines.”

In a statement, Yap further explained that he and his fellow proponents “deem it more appropriate for our international airport to bear the name of our country,” reflecting not “just one hero,” but also “our everyday heroes.” The renaming was not meant to discredit “the heroic contributions” of Ninoy Aquino, Yap claimed. He also believed that the rebranding was necessary to “let go of [NAIA’s] negative image,” in an inversion of the most resonant among the renaming issues back in 1987.As of this writing, the bill has been pending with the Committee on Transportation since July 28, 2020.

It is unclear whether President Rodrigo Duterte shares the same sentiments about renaming NAIA as his allies in Congress or those of Marcos loyalists, even if he is the president who finally ordered the internment of Ferdinand Marcos’s remains in the Libingan ng mga Bayani. Annually, the president still issues a commemorative message on Ninoy Aquino Day. Last year, he exhorted Filipinos to “emulate Ninoy’s courage and patriotism so we may all be heroes through acts of discipline, goodwill and social responsibility.”

Moreover, President Duterte does not seem averse to officially naming things after Ninoy Aquino, or even Cory Aquino, who appointed Duterte as OIC vice mayor in 1986, giving him his entry point into politics. On June 29, 2018, President Duterte signed into law RA No, 11041, “An Act Renaming the Montevista-Cateel National Highway Traversing the Municipality of Compostela, Compostela Valley Province into the Benigno S. Aquino Jr. National Highway.” In the explanatory note of the House bill that became the law, HB 833, filed by Representative Maria Carmen S. Zamora, reference is made to Compostela Valley Municipal Resolution No. 2011-2041, wherein the Sangguniang Bayan of Compostela expressed the desire “to honor the late national hero whose role and involvement in nation-building and dedication to public service greatly affected our people.”

Also on June 29, 2018, the president enacted RA No. 11045, “An Act Renaming the Kay Tikling-Antipolo-Teresa-Morong National Road in the Province of Rizal, Traversing through Barangay Dolores in the Municipality of Taytay up to Barangay Maybancal in the Municipality of Morong, as Corazon C. Aquino Avenue.” This law states that the renaming was being done to recognize Cory Aquino’s “public service rendered to the people as the 11th President of the Republic of the Philippines, and of her legacy in the restoration of political democracy and constitutional rule in the country.”

Both laws were passed unanimously in the House during the immediately preceding Congress. One wonders if the tide has truly changed, given an Aquino-less Senate, a second Senator Marcos after the EDSA Revolution, and allies of the president who seemingly want to divert people’s attention away from the ongoing health crisis by occasionally bringing up and amplifying decades-old partisanship and rivalries.

Originally published by Vera Files on April 17, 2021.

President Rodrigo Duterte’s frequent public disappearances followed by staged photos to dispel rumors about his health recall the waning years of the dictator, Ferdinand Marcos.

Despite widespread talk that Marcos was terminally ill, this was never confirmed by Malacañang Palace. But proof of the strongman’s grave illness was there for all to see when the first family fled the country in 1986.Discovered in Malacañang were five dialysis machines, emergency oxygen equipment, and a hospital bed. Among the luxury vehicles in the Palace garage was a 40-feet long, air conditioned, rainbow-colored hospital-on-wheels furnished with a kidney dialysis machine, x-ray equipment, a bed, and a kitchen.

American journalist Sandra Burton also found there a telltale sign: a copy of the “Handbook for Renal Transplant Outpatients.”

Duterte’s recent week-long absence from public view once again sparked speculation about the 76-year-old president’s health. Unlike Marcos, Duterte has never said he is free from any affliction, but insists he has no serious illness which the Constitution would require him to publicly reveal.

In truth, Marcos’ health problems trailed him to the presidency.

In Ferdinand E. Marcos: Malacañang to Makiki (1991), the strongman’s long-time military aide, Arturo Aruiza detailed almost all the maladies that tormented Marcos. Aruiza had access to the medical history of his boss, culled from reports of attending physicians to Marcos’s lawyers.

To begin with, Marcos had hemolysis (which destroys the body’s red blood cells) and hyperuricemia (high levels of uric acid in the blood).By 1979, his blood pressure was shooting up to alarming levels and he was showing signs of renal dysfunction as well as problems with his heart, lungs, stomach, and prostate.

“The president’s first hemodialysis was on September 24, 1979. This soon controlled his hypertension,” Aruiza said. “He kept a full schedule, however, interrupted occasionally with emergency dialysis because of pulmonary infections.”

What would eventually finish Marcos off were “his failing kidneys” as he suffered from lupus erythematosus.

Marcos, avid golfer. Photo from The Marcos Revolution: A Progress Report on the New Society of the Philippines (National Media Production Center, 1980).

STATE SECRET

Aruiza said Marcos’s true state of health “was the most closely-guarded secret in the Palace.” Cesar Virata, Marcos’s prime minister, confirmed this in a November 23, 2007 interview for the oral history project, “Economic Policymaking and the Philippine Development Experience, 1960-1985” (a.k.a. “The Technocracy Project”):

“(Marcos) did not want us to find out about his health condition. Although we had suspicions because in certain afternoons when we called him by phone, Malacañang would say that he was not available. I think he was having dialysis at those times. He would call back maybe at eight or nine in the evening when the (dialysis) session was finished. It became more frequent, maybe twice a week or something like that.”

Officials who worked in the Palace like Adrian Cristobal, Marcos’s lead speechwriter, claimed they were simply oblivious to the strongman’s condition. Cristobal told James Hamilton-Paterson in America’s Boy (1998): “You may find it hard to believe, but I think I only noticed he was really ill as late as 1984. We were all so busy. Then one day I did notice a patch of fresh blood seeping out on the inner sleeve of his barong. I didn’t know it then, but he’d obviously just come off the dialysis machine.”

Then there were others, like Rafael Salas, who had a strong sense that Marcos was covering up a serious illness and would eventually find a way to confirm his suspicion but shared it only with the people he trusted.

Salas was Marcos’s executive secretary during his first term as president, until they had a falling out and Salas left and worked for the United Nations. Having spent long hours with Marcos, Salas initially believed that “genetically,” Marcos “had a weak intestinal system. He was prone to vomiting and indigestion, which he did his best to hide from everybody.”

In The World of Rafael Salas (1987), he told his biographer, Nick Joaquin, that “there was already something farcical” about Marcos’s health. “He was completely a teetotaler: no alcohol and no coffee or tea. He drank only water and juice. He exercised daily and had as rigid a regimen at table . . . This strict program of diet and exercise did not, however, keep him from falling sick.”

When Salas met Marcos again in 1981, “he was already puffed up from Lupus. He tried to cover up his illness but it was visible to me.”

After almost 2 weeks of presidential absence, Senator Christopher Go released this photo on April 11, 2021.

SI MALAKAS AT SI MAGANDA

Then there were those who altogether denied that Marcos was sick.The charade was led by the strongman himself who put to work an entire bureaucracy to boost his image as the Ilocano Leviathan, the Malakas to Imelda Marcos’s Maganda.

“Whenever Marcos was asked about his health, his ready reply was that he was having a ‘bout of flu’ or was just ‘a little bit under the weather’ or his ‘asthma’ was bothering him again. During press conferences, whenever his health came up, his standard jest was to challenge anyone in the room to a few rounds of boxing,” Aruiza recalled.

Several pages of Marcos’s 1964 biography For Every Tear a Victory, which helped propel him to the presidency, explain that his previous ailments—including a supposed tumor detected in 1961 and removed without anesthetics in New York —were linked to injuries and ailments he suffered during the Second World War. The book portrays him as otherwise healthy, and capable of almost miraculous recovery.

This image of Marcos as an avid golfer and a physical fitness buff was maintained by the Marcos propaganda machine which released shirtless photos of the president displaying a “physique that a man half his age might envy.”

THE TRUTH OOZED OUT OF CRACKED WALLS

But the truth had a way of oozing out of cracks in the wall.

On September 13, 1979, the State Department sent a confidential cable to its embassy in Manila regarding press queries in the United States asking if “Marcos had kidney problems requiring twice-weekly dialysis.”

Two months later, the embassy received another cable informing them of another rumor from anti-Marcos groups in the US: that Marcos was seeking kidney treatment at the Stanford Medical Center. A December 13, 1979 cable followed saying the State Department “welcomes the embassy’s proposed plan to prepare a contingency plan” should Marcos die or be incapacitated since “Marcos’s health is of current concern.”

Burton in her book, Impossible Dream: The Marcoses, the Aquinos, and the Unfinished Revolution (1989), mentions ‘A-1’ information from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that Marcos had lupus.

Marcos lasted a full decade after his first dialysis, but the period was marked by the steady decline of his health as evidenced by episodic absences from public view — andludicrous excuses for them offered by Malacañang.

In August 1983, Marcos announced he was taking a three-week vacation, supposedly to finish writing several books — despite persistent rumors that these were actually ghoswritten by the likes of Cristobal.In an article in Ang Pahayagang Malaya a week after the announcement, the First Lady said her husband was just “allergic” to dust particles coming from renovations of their house and was on “self-imposed privacy.”

She described loose talk about Marcos’s failing heath as the “wishful thinking” of his opponents who were “like vultures feeding on rumor.”

“I should be the best barometer of the President’s health, especially since I am quite devoted and intensely in love with my husband,” Imelda insisted.

TWO KIDNEY TRANSPLANTS

Marcos persisted with the lie. In an interview with foreign correspondents on September 9, 1983, he said, “I can tell you I have not been operated on. I’ve had no dialysis. I have not undergone any unusual operations like strapping myself to a machine, utilizing a mobile dialysis machine.”

In reality, Marcos was feeling the after effects of the first of the two known kidney transplants that he secretly underwent.

Juan Ponce Enrile, Marcos’s minister of defense, wrote in his 2012 memoir that the strongman had a kidney operation on August 7, 1983 citing a Filipino doctor who treated him, and Imelda Marcos in a luncheon at the Palace a week after the surgery. Enrile said he and other visitors were ushered into the guest house and saw Marcos, looking “pale and very weak” from a distance.

Virata learned about the operation two weeks later when he was summoned to Malacañang.In a conversation that followed, Viratas said Marcos admitted that “something went wrong with his system so he had to be operated on,” but concluded that his boss was “misleading us because I think he had a kidney transplant.”

Aruiza said that transplant was the first of two and was performed by a select medical team led by Dr. Claver Ramos at the Philippine Kidney Center. The kidney which, according to Aruiza was donated by Marcos’s only son, Bongbong, was rejected by Marcos’s body and removed 48 hours after the operation.

A second transplant was scheduled on November 26, 1984, with a kidney donated by a “distantly related nephew from the North.” This time, it was successful. Former health secretary Enrique Ona, then a director at the National Kidney and Transplant Institute, confirmed to the media that when Marcos had both operations done by American doctors, the government closed the hospital to the public for three weeks.

When Marcos disappeared from public view again, Imelda tried to dispel the rumors about her husband’s health once more.In an interview with Radyo Veritas she said, “The president is overworked. He is only sick with colds and bronchitis.”

Malacañang then published a photograph of Marcos sitting upright, smiling, and holding up a copy of Bulletin Today with the headline “Marcos stresses he is healthy.”

On December 8, 1984, then 67-year old Marcos lifted his shirt in front of his cabinet in a television program aired on a state-run network in an effort to prove that he did not undergo major surgery. Marcos invited photographers to come closer and take shots of his bare, scar-free chest, but foreign newspapers that published the picture carried the caveat from kidney specialists that scarring from a transplant “could be below the belt (area) or out of view of the camera.”

A syndicated photo of Marcos showing his scarless torso; “proof” that he had no kidney transplant. The media made a caveat in the caption.

In his book The Marcos Dynasty (1988), Sterling Seagrave wrote that Marcos ordered his Armed Forces Chief Fabian Ver to find out who leaked confirmation on the second transplant to the CIA and to “silence it.” Media reports linked the death of Dr. Potenciano Baccay on November 2, 1985 to the interview he and Ona did with the Pittsburgh Press on Marcos’ transplants. Baccay was stabbed 19 times while tied with a nylon rope inside his car.

Author Raymond Bonner in Waltzing with a Dictator (1987) offered a clue on how the information was obtained and validated: “A CIA officer succeeded in locating the immigration official at the airport who stamped the passports of two American doctors each time they arrived. With enough money, the agency persuaded the immigration officer to divulge that the doctors were from New York and their names.”

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SUCCESSION CONCERNS

As Marcos’s bouts with illness became often and severe, people in the military became concerned. Burton would learn later on that then General Fidel Ramos had formed a “crisis committee” that met daily during periods when Marcos got sick “to ensure that the constitution would be followed if something happened to the president.”

“Ramos’s aim,” according to Burton, “was to prevent a takeover by the First Lady, with the help of the Ver faction of the military, and to install in power instead Assembly Speaker Nicanor Yñiguez.”

This was in keeping with the 1973 Constitution which provided that “In case of permanent disability, death, removal from office, or resignation of the President, the Speaker of the National Assembly shall act as President until a successor has been elected for the unexpired portion of the term of the President.”

With the country in severe economic and political crises and the legitimacy of his 20-year rule in question, Marcos called a snap presidential election on February 7, 1986.

Journalists who covered the campaign for the December 19, 1985 poll reported that Marcos had to be carried by his aides from a helicopter to his car, and to the stage.

Marcos admitted to “a little” limp because of an old shrapnel wound from his purported war exploits. His aides, on the other hand, claimed they had to carry the president because so many people wanted to shake his hand. Marcos used the same excuse when a plastic strip was ripped from the back of his hand, causing blood to ooze out.

“In Pangasinan, the people love me (so) very much that they scratched my two hands,” he said.

Eventually, his own body betrayed Marcos. Blood from needle wounds in his arm seeped through his shirt, a urinal became a necessary companion as he fought for his political survival, and on the eve of his exile to Hawaii, as angry Filipinos massed up towards Malacañang, “Mr. Marcos had shitted in his pants.”

A fitting end to his rule, Nick Joaquin wrote in The Quartet of the Tiger Moon (1986). “It seems all too proper that one of the last things Mr. Marcos did in the Palace was to defile it.”

DEJA VU?

And now there is Rodrigo Duterte, who was elected at the age of 71, just a few months younger than Marcos when he died in 1989.

Duterte’s laundry list of ailments and the treatment he uses for them are public knowledge because the president himself talks about them, although varying their severity on different occasions.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Duterte confessed that he had the typical ailments of people in their 70s, mentioning Buerger’s disease and Barrett’s esophagus. Although he often downplayed the severity of these conditions, Duterte has acknowledged that his Barrett’s esophagus could progress to cancer.

But not once did he offer medical evidence to any of his claims.

In fact, Duterte and his underlings sometimes did not even bother to explain his no-shows and sudden disappearances. When president elect Duterte did not show up for the 2016 Independence Day rites in Davao, the media quoted city administrator (now palace undersecretary) Jesus Melchor Quitain as saying that the mayor was probably still sleeping.

During his April 12, 2021 pre-recorded public address, in response to public criticism about his week-long disappearance, Duterte shrugged off the concern, simply saying, “Sinadya ko yun. Ganun ako e.” By nature like a petulant child, he explained.

In light of the President’s penchant for ghosting and the incoherence of his public addresseses, lawyer Dino De Leon filed a petition before the Supreme Court in April 2020 seeking to force the Chief Executive to release his medical records and citing Section 12, Article VII of the 1987 Constitution.

The provision states that “in case of serious illness of the President, the public shall be informed of the state of his health.” The High Court dismissed the petition outright, ruling that more trust should be placed on the Office of the President to know the “appropriate means” to release information about Duterte’s health.

In issuing the ruling, the Supreme Court cited Blas Ople, a member of the Constitutional Commission that drafted the 1987 charter who introduced the provision. In December 1984, Ople, who was labor minister, was among the first in the Marcos cabinet to publicly acknowledge that the strongman’s health was “undergoing certain vicissitudes.”

It now seems that the health disclosure provision of the 1987 Constitution is difficult to operationalize, with leeway given to the president to determine if his illness is serious. It smacks of a decades-long deceitful game Marcos played with the public. A déjà vu, if you will.

The more forceful legacy of the Marcos regime is the absolute ban on re-election of a sitting president, as contained in Section 4, Article VII of the 1987 Constitution. This and another provision clearly specifying the line of succession in case of “death, permanent disability, removal from office, or resignation” of the president, are among the constitutional safeguards against another Marcos, or an incumbent chief executive holding on to power despite an inability to effectively govern because of illness.

Some may argue that Duterte’s health is not especially concerning, given that he has only a little over a year left in his term. Or that he is indeed quite well for his age and this is just his style of dispensing public office — with utter sloth and habitual distaste for the public he is sworn to serve.

Two things are clear, however: if Duterte is forced to step down due to grave illness, Vice President Leni Robredo – who is from the political opposition – must take over as mandated by the Constitution; and, in this time of a raging pandemic, an absent president fond of keeping the public guessing about his true health condition is the last thing the country needs.

Originally published by Vera Files on August 21, 2022.

August 21, 2022 is the first Ninoy Aquino Day to be observed under the administration of  President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.  Based on social media posts, Marcos loyalists are, of course, not keen on commemorating the legally declared holiday which marks the assassination of the former senator and main political rival of the Chief Executive’s father.

They echo claims long made by supporters of the former dictator: Aquino was a power-hungry communist; Marcos Sr. had nothing to do with his death 39 years ago; and that Aquino’s widow and son, who both became presidents, should have sought the truth behind the murder but, for some conspiratorial reason, did not.

When Aquino was shot dead while being escorted by uniformed men at the airport after returning from the United States in 1983, Marcos and some of his military men were put in a defensive position. The crime committed in broad daylight triggered a torrent of protests condemning the regime, especially from the business sector and the Church hierarchy, and deeply impacted its credibility at home and abroad.

The former dictator did everything in his power to ensure that he and some of his most loyal men would appear to be free of any culpability for the crime. Marcos put Gregorio Cendaña, his  information minister and chief propagandist, to work.

Three days after the Aquino assassination, Marcos created a fact-finding commission to investigate the crime. But the five-member panel, led by then Supreme Court Chief Justice Enrique Fernando, was short-lived as its members resigned due to public outcry over the composition of the commission.  By virtue of Presidential Decree No. 1886, another fact-finding team led by the retired associate justice of the Court of Appeals Corazon Agrava was constituted to investigate the murder.

AN ATTEMPT AT MANIPULATING PUBLIC OPINION

Approaching the first anniversary of the assassination, Cendaña had outlined a government communications strategy to match the planned activities of the political opposition as the Agrava Board, which the fact-finding commission came to be known, was about to release its reports.

In a memorandum, the minister informed Marcos that the National Media Production Center (NMPC) and the Philippine News Agency (PNA) would field photographers and video teams to cover public demonstrations from August 17-22, 1984. PNA would write a calendar story on the “official version” of the assassination, which meant the military version that it was a lone civilian assassin, Rolando Galman, who shot Aquino as part of a communist conspiracy.

The plan further stipulated, “[w]e are preparing column feeds on the Aquino statue and the ‘eternal flame’ in Makati, generally ridiculing efforts by anti-government groups’ effort to cast Ninoy prematurely as a national hero” (emphasis from the original document). Cendana said that his agency had been “coordinating with private TV networks to ensure that commercial programming for August 20 and 21 will be particularly interesting—to induce people to stay at home and watch, instead of going out on the streets.” Utilizing the state’s intelligence machinery, the information agency also prepared to circulate “black” leaflets during this period.

The Manila Sun by VERA Files

Cendana’s memorandum included an attachment, the first issue of “our own tabloid,” The Manila Sun. Nowhere in the paper, however, did it say that it was published by the Office of the Media Affairs (OMA), NMPC , or any government-controlled agency.  Cendaña wrote that “the first issues carries (sic) lead stories on the Agrava case and the clandestine foreign funding for opposition demos and riots.”

The Manila Sun headlined that according to “intelligence sources,” a certain group was forcing the Agrava Board “to recommend that it was not Galman who killed”  Aquino and was waging “one big smear campaign to discredit the body here and abroad.”

The article included statements from three lawyers who worked under the Office of the Government Corporate Counsel. Manuel M. Lazaro, Virgilio C. Abejo, and Expedito D. Tan reportedly said that the memorandum sent by the fact-finding board indicated that it was Galman who killed Aquino on orders by the New People’s Army (we know now that the Board unanimously rejected this theory). The lawyers were also reported to have said that “the government exhausted all measures to protect the life of the late senator from persons bent on harming him,” that “the groups aiming to liquidate Aquino included persons who wanted to take revenge on him for the ‘killings of their relatives by you [Aquino] and your [Aquino’s] men.’”

Lazaro, Abejo, and Tan also listed several instances when Marcos Sr. and his wife, Imelda, showed mercy and saved the former senator’s life — the reopening of Aquino’s case after he had been convicted of criminal offenses, their “timely intervention” when Aquino went on a hunger strike in his military cell, and the health care provided him at the Philippine Heart Center for Asia when he was suffering from a heart ailment.

The headline story was bolstered by an opinion piece with the title “The Task At Hand.” The anonymous writer said, “The pressures brought on the (Agrava) board are therefore malicious, tantamount to obstructing the board from its sworn task to flush out the truth, with substantial evidence as the only yardstick.”

Another article entitled “Demos for Dollars” claimed that a “foreign-based” group connected with Kilusan ng mga Demokratikong Pilipino was responsible for the slew of protests in the country at the time. Citing “intelligence reports,” the article said that “student ranks and those of the labor groups were infiltrated by elements from the dissident movement and other radical groups which seek to sow terror and spark an unarmed urban warfare in order to topple the present government.”

Highly-conscious about his image in the United States, Marcos Sr.’s state machinery closely monitored the negative publicity that his administration was receiving abroad.  In a memorandum dated August 22, 1984, Cendaña updated his boss about the reportage in U.S. media about the Aquino affair. The information minister shared that major publications (New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Newsday, and Boston Globe) as well as TV and radio stations mentioned the assassination and reported about the demonstrations in Manila.

He also alluded to an article written by opposition leader Raul Manglapus in the New York Times on August 21, 1984 entitled “To Honor Aquino, Drop Marcos.” In response to the piece, Cendaña told Marcos that “our New York information staff prepared a rejoinder signed by Amb. Rey Arcilla of the U.N. (United Nations) Mission.” The response signed by the Filipino diplomat noticeably focused on poisoning the well, calling Manglapus a “discredited politician,” a “steak commando” and a “political has-been.”

The Marcos regime was also in the business of spying on opposition leaders in order to monitor and influence the narrative on the Aquino assassination in the U.S. In a memorandum to Marcos with the subject line “Butz Aquino’s Appearances in the U.S.” dated March 15, 1984, Cendaña briefed Marcos on the highlights of the remarks of the former senator’s younger brother before the Ninoy Aquino Movement (NAM) in Chicago and the National Press Club in Washington.

In his speeches, Butz, who had by then become a prominent opposition leader, reportedly declared that the Aquino family did not recognize the Agrava Board. He also cast doubts on the integrity of the upcoming election and advocated a boycott. As relayed in the memo, Butz reportedly said that “even before the people cast their votes, the results are already known.” Cendaña then told Marcos that “based on the information material we furnished them, our attaches abroad have prepared materials to counter (Butz) Aquino’s claim. The rejoinder will be sent to Filipino civic organizations in the areas.”

THE AGRAVA BOARD FINDINGS

After almost a year into its probe, the Agrava Board submitted its reports to Marcos in October 1984. The five-member panel was unanimous in rejecting the version blaming Galman for Aquino’s murder, concluding instead that the assassination was the result of a military conspiracy.  But the panel members disagreed on the extent of the plot.

The majority report, which represented the opinion of four Board members (Luciano Salazar, Dante Santos, Ernesto Herrera, and Amando Dizon) accused 26 people, including then Armed Forces Chief Gen. Fabian Ver and two other military generals of plotting and killing Aquino.  Agrava, however, argued that there was insufficient evidence to implicate Ver.

Since the Agrava Board was not a court of law,  Marcos forwarded its findings to the Tanodbayan (ombudsman) “for final resolution through the legal system” and trial in the Sandiganbayan.

The Sandiganbayan Verdict Sum by VERA Files

On December 2, 1985, the Sandiganbayan acquitted Ver and 24 other military men as well as a civilian (Hermilo Gosuico) from all liability in the case. The court fully embraced the military version of events, which was the same position that Marcos took shortly after Aquino was killed, and disavowed the testimony of the prosecution’s main witness, Rebecca Quijano (a passenger on Aquino’s flight and popularly known at the time as the “Crying Lady”).

This was noted in a telegram from the United States Ambassador to Manila Stephen W. Bosworth to Secretary of State George P. Shultz where he wrote that “the court merely glossed over without refuting the ‘concrete’ photographic, audio and video evidence adduced by the Agrava Board, and ignored altogether the evidence indicating a high-level conspiracy behind the assassination.”

The envoy went on to say, “As we reported in our August analysis of the Aquino trial . . . very little effort was made to disguise the orchestrated nature of the Sandiganbayan proceedings. It is clear that the real purpose of the trial was to mount a slow but relentless attack on the Agrava Board’s findings under the guise of legality and to condition the public to expect the eventual outcome.”

“It is of record that the Tanodbayan, Bernardo Fernandez, blocked efforts to introduce potentially crucial evidence which surfaced during the course of the trial,” the telegram added.

The Tanodbayan filed the case that would be known as People v. Custodio, et al.(referring to BGen. Luther Custodio, commander of the Aviation Security Command) before the Sandiganbayan. Ver and Maj. Gen. Prospero Olivas, then commander of the Philippine Constabulary Metropolitan Command, were among the eight who were indicted only as accessories.

Shortly after Marcos was deposed, the courts were urged to reopen the case. In March 1986, Deputy Tanodbayan Manuel Herrera, one of the prosecutors in Aquino’s case wrote a statement (and in June 1986 testified in court) that there had been a “failure of justice” in the criminal proceedings.

Herrera told a special Supreme Court commission (formed to determine if the Aquino case should be reopened) that on January 10, 1985, Marcos summoned him, Sandiganbayan Justice Manuel Pamaran (presiding justice), Justice Bernardo Fernandez (Tanodbayan) and other prosecutors to a meeting in Malacañang. Also present in the meeting were Justice Manuel Lazaro and then first lady Imelda. Herrera said that in the two-hour long meeting, Marcos induced them to undertake a sham trial on Aquino’s case.

In his comment dated April 14, 1986, Herrera narrated how Marcos was at some points angry and then calm and pragmatic throughout the meeting where he made it clear that although it was politically expedient to charge the defendants in court, the endgame had to be a dismissal of the case.

Herrera relayed Marcos’s sentiments, “Politically, as it will become evident that the government was serious in pursuing the case towards its logical conclusion, and thereby ease public demonstrations; on the other hand, legally, it was perceived that after (not IF) they are acquitted, double jeopardy would inure. The former President ordered then that the resolution be revised by categorizing the participation of each respondent.”

The Supreme Court G.R. 72760 further detailed Herrera’s testimony on how the men accused of conspiring to kill Aquino were acquitted.  A part of it reads:

Herrera further added details on the “implementation of the script,” such as the holding of a “make-believe raffle” within 18 minutes of the filing of the Informations with the Sandiganbayan at noon of January 23, 1985, while there were no members of the media; the installation of TV monitors directly beamed to Malacanang; the installation of a “war room” occupied by the military; attempts to direct and stifle witnesses for the prosecution; the suppression of the evidence that could be given by U.S. Air Force men about the “scrambling” of Ninoy’s plane; the suppression of rebuttal witnesses and the bias and partiality of the Sandiganbayan.

By the end of the conversation, “after the script has been tacitly mapped out,” Herrera said that  Marcos told the prosecutors: “Mag moro-moro na lang kayo.”

His parting words, according to Herrera, were “Thank you for coming. Thank you for your cooperation. I know how to reciprocate.”

The Commission found that “the only conclusion that may be drawn therefrom is that pressure from Malacanang had indeed been made to bear on both the court and the prosecution in the handling and disposition of the Aquino-Galman case.”  This was in turn given credence by the Supreme Court, and on September 12, 1986, ordered a re-trial of the Aquino murder case.

Adea to Ver by VERA Files

Documents left by the Marcoses in Malacañang after they fled at the height of the 1986 People Power Revolt can give us a closer look into how Marcos’s henchmen helped create a spin for Ver and the others accused of Aquino’s murder.

Coming into the criminal proceedings in February 1985, the military defendants who, like Olivas, were caught red-handed trying to mislead the Agrava Board about the firearm that was used by the gunman.

During the hearings, Olivas forwarded the “Magnum theory,” which alleged that Galman used a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum to shoot Aquino. The firearm was supposedly retrieved by Sgt. Arnulfo De Mesa, a member of Aquino’s supposed close-in security unit, from Galman. Olivas used as basis for his theory Chemistry Report No. C-83-872, which was an examination of fragments from a standard Magnum bullet, not the bullet fragments recovered from Aquino’s head.

The minority report found that Olivas excluded from the report he submitted on December 19, 1983 and his testimony on June 27, 1984, the second chemistry report (No. C-83-1136) which was the analysis of the two fragments from the actual bullet that killed Aquino. This document revealed that the murder weapon was either a .38 or a .45 caliber pistol, not a .357 Magnum.

The minority report said that the reason for exclusion was clear, “the first report supports his [Olivas’s] theory, but the second overthrows it.”

In response to Olivas’s misstep, Presidential Secretariat Ed Adea wrote a memorandum to Ver dated February 1, 1985 (coursed through Col. Balbino Diego) proposing a strategy for the trial of the military defendants (and one civilian) before the Sandiganbayan. On this same day, the defendants were brought before the court for the arraignment on the criminal proceedings.

Adea’s memorandum was connected to their “little talk last Saturday in the Study Room,” reffering to Marcos Sr.’s office in the presidential palace. He suggested to Ver: “We can give a break to the respondent soldiers by changing a minor aspect of the defense theory as framed by Gen. Olivas. How: By admitting the supposition that the fatal caliber .38 was fired from the .357 Magnum of Galman.” (Emphasis from the original)

He continued, “But we need a witness, preferably an expert expert (sic) on firearms, to demonstrate this.” Adea believed they could still change their position at that stage because the Sandiganbayan trial had “not yet begun.”

Cendana’s Information P… by VERA Files

The Marcos propaganda machine shifted gears nearing the release of the Sandiganbayan verdict. Three weeks before the decision came out, Malacañang was already preparing to condition the public on the acquittal. In a memorandum entitled “Information Program Re: Sandiganbayan Decision” (presumably addressed to Marcos) dated November 12, 1985, Cendaña wrote about a media plan to “prepare people’s mind for a verdict favorable to the accused; and then justify the decision, once”—not if—“it is handed down.”

The campaign was divided into two phases: the “pre-decision phase” and the “post-decision information program.” The pre-decision phase is further divided into four platforms: print media, national radio, television, and the international audience.

For print media, one plan was to publish a four-part series “only carr[y]ing the byline of the Bulletin reporter covering the Sandiganbayan.” The strategy was to emphasize the “sterling records” of the judges and to recap some of the “key characters” in the trial. The reporter was to make references to the “sordid personal life” of the Galman family’s counsel, Lupino Lazaro, and “the Quijano woman’s legal and psychiatric profile.”

The same narrative would be rehashed in a 30-minute special to be produced by the news department of the Maharlika Broadcasting System, and aired on government-controlled television networks.

Another “special-report type program is to be prepared for showing over the Pilipino station, Channel Two,” Cendaña said in the memo. For the international audience, the same program would be aired “on existing NMPC TV outlets in Chicago Los Angeles, and Honolulu, which are beamed to the Filipino communities in these U.S. cities.” The information minister even proposed “buying time in San Francisco and New York local stations” for this “special report.”

To maintain a veil of credibility, Cendaña noted that “the two programs are to be low-key, ‘objective’ in tone and non-argumentative. They will be made up mostly of clips from the Sandiganbayan proceedings.”

As for the post-decision media plan, the program starts on the day the decision was handed down. Day 1 was all about making sure that the OMA had control over the framing of the news regarding the verdict. As early as 20 days before the verdict, Cendaña said that a PNA report would be prepared “to ensure that we hit the right tone for the Pamaran statement and the reactions from General Ver and the president.” The OMA would also take charge of drafting statements for Marcos and Ver, coordinating with Pamaran about his talking points explaining the court’s decision, and shepherding how Filipino diplomats were to respond to questions from the foreign press.

Day 2 of Cendana’s plan dealt with the herding of “friendly” reactions to the decision, while Day 3 was about running “friendly analyses.” The PNA, Cendaña said, could “commission a noted criminal lawyer to write his own assessment of the case.” In this phase, the minister suggested that the OMA produce a “Where are they Now?” series “to give our side a chance to point out that the crying lady now lives in the United States with all her family—including three brothers whose applications for visas had initially been denied.”

Before he concluded the proposal, Cendana said that a separate information program was being prepared by his agency “to deal with the issue of Gen. Ver’s reinstatement as Chief of Staff.”

Within November 1985, before and after Cendana submitted his information strategy memo, Marcos publicly stated that he would reinstate Ver if he was acquitted, at one point stating that the reinstatement would be “automatic.”

But their renewed relationship as president and armed forces chief was brief.  In a little over two months, these two ruthlessly powerful men and their families were fleeing the Palace from civilian crowds and defecting soldiers that they had hoodwinked far too many times.

Originally published by Vera Files on June 23, 2020.

Often, as internal oppression intensifies, the closer and more scathing external scrutiny becomes. In response, the authority being made accountable calibrates its response as the crisis deepens: from outright denial to obfuscation to censorship and to an eventual crackdown on its critics.

On June 4, 2020, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) released its comprehensive report on the Philippines. “The long-standing overemphasis on public order and national security at the expense of human rights has become more acute in recent years, and there are concerns that the vilification of dissent is being increasingly institutionalized and normalized in ways that will be very difficult to reverse,” it said.

The report added that “in just the first four months of 2020, including during the COVID-19 pandemic, OHCHR documented killings of drug suspects and human rights defenders. Charges were filed against political opponents and NGO workers, including for sedition and perjury. A major media network was forced to stop broadcasting after being singled out by the authorities. Red-tagging and incitement to violence have been rife, online and offline.” It said while measures were taken to mitigate the pandemic’s economic impact on vulnerable communities, “threats of martial law, the use of force by security forces in enforcing quarantines, and the use of laws to stifle criticism have also marked the Government’s response.”

The Office of the Presidential Spokesperson, in a statement on June 6, 2020, took note of the UN agency’s recommendations but rejected its “faulty conclusions.” It said the government will continue to respect its international legal obligations, including human rights.

How or why the OHCHR’s conclusions are faulty, the government offered no explanation. Just an outright denial. A refusal to be made accountable — reminiscent of another time in our history when government’s denial came with both threat and censorship.

Almost forty years ago today, on July 4 to 6, 1980 the New York Times published a three-part story by John B. Oakes entitled, “The House of Marcos.”

In the local press, the Oakes article appeared only in We Forum, with a significant portion excised. In running the story We Forum heeded then President Marcos’s dire warning to them: “Not to press your luck too far.”

We Forum ran the excerpts from the Oakes story in its July 19, July 26, and August 2, 1980 issues. Side by side with it was the rebuttal from then Minister of Foreign Affairs Carlos P. Romulo, which was carried by all the major newspapers in Metro Manila.

Oakes started his story with these questions: “How much longer will President Marcos be able to retain his grip in Malacanan? How has he managed to do it thus far?”

In July 1980, Marcos was in his fifteenth year in office as president. He was twice elected to the post, totaling eight years. He would have been president only until 1973. Before his second term expired in 1972, he declared martial law and by then, for almost eight years, ruled as a dictator. There seemed to be no end in sight to the martial law that he imposed. And only he could end it.

“The Marcoses have kept their tenancy of Malacanan by subverting the Constitution, suborning the army, corrupting the elections, trampling on civil rights, muzzling the press, squandering the country’s resources, plunging into heavy foreign debt and enriching their family and friends,” Oakes wrote. To be able to pursue all these with impunity, Marcos had to have the United States firmly in his corner.

Here Oakes switched to Marcos’s reputation as a skillful politician. “There is no doubt that Marcos has been skillfully playing ‘the American card.’ He publicly inveighs against possible ‘intervention by the United States in the affairs of the Philippines.’ Yet he managed last year to obtain from the Carter administration a $500 million, five-year commitment in military and economic aid as ‘compensation’ for American use of the huge air and naval bases at Clark Field and Subic Bay.”

The second installment in the Oakes series made a grim portrait of the impoverished Filipinos suffering under the Marcos regime. “Three out of five Filipino children, according to the government’s own figures, are malnourished—partly because their parents are ignorant of proper nutrition but also because they are ‘economically restrained’ from buying nutritious foods.’”.

The latter third in the second installment of Oakes’s piece was not published by the We Forum. It was on the First Lady Imelda Romualdez Marcos, who on July 2 that year, just celebrated her 54th birthday. Birthdays then of the conjugal dictator were celebrated as days of public thanksgiving. Oakes excoriating Imelda during her birthday week would not have suited her well.

In addition to the “Bliss” projects, the first lady has instituted a system of subsidized food shops, where some basic necessities can be purchased at heavily discounted prices. But such socially useful innovations tend to be obscured in the public mind by the enrichment of her family and friends, and also by her style of extravagant spending and display, which she is convinced the Filipino people need, admire and want to emulate. “I think of myself as the star and the flame,” she says, “to inspire the people and move them to progress.”

Once, when asked why so many of her entourage had become so wealthy and powerful since Marcos’s imposition of martial law, the first lady was reported to have replied: “Some are smarter than others.”

That’s the sardonic title of an impressively documented underground pamphlet now circulating in Manila. It was written by “a group of concerned businessmen and professional managers.” It lists, with names and details, some of the principal beneficiaries of the “new society” along with the scores of major corporations and business institutions in which they have an important voice or outright control.

At least half a dozen members of the Marcos family, several high officials, including a general, and more than a dozen newly rich friends and close associates are among those “smarter than others”, with wealth and influence to show for it.

The last of the installments asked whether Marcos will go the way of the deposed Shah of Iran. “Like the shah, he and his consort pursue an ostentatiously luxurious style of life, as do their families and friends—while an estimated 40 percent of their people live in extreme poverty, some approaching the starvation level.”

For Oakes, Marcos was then sitting atop a rumbling social volcano. Marcos only managed to keep himself on top and contain the opposition through “cases of arrest without warrant, imprisonment without charge, torture without mercy, murder without cause.”

Oakes’s story for the New York Times was syndicated in various newspapers outside of the Philippines.

On July 12, 1980, then Minister of Foreign Affairs, Carlos P. Romulo held a press conference in his Waldorf Astoria Hotel suite in New York to refute Oakes’ assertions. He turned the transcript of his question-and-answer session into a six-question primer distributed to the media. As mentioned, all newspapers of note in the country published it.

Is the Marcos regime repressive?

“Authoritarian, yes; repressive, no.” Romulo denied that there was widespread trampling of civil rights. If civil rights were “in varying degrees regulated and limits set to their free exercise,” it was “in accordance with the imperatives of public order, community welfare, and the values of society.” Romulo continued, “The government is ‘authoritarian’ in the sense that the President exercises the strongest executive powers. There is greater central planning especially of social economic development. But there is also greater participation of people in the political process, and more regional and local autonomy. In effect, a balance has been achieved between individual rights and the demands of law or of authority. Where before there was license and even anarchy: to this extent it is ‘authoritarian’.”

Is there rising opposition to the Marcos regime?

The notion of a rising opposition, Romulo said, was merely “based on the superficial observations of hurried visitors to Manila, or on armchair speculations in some New York office.” In turn, this amusing observation came from elements who were at “the fringes of Philippine society”: “long-term opponents of President Marcos, habitual critics of government, impractical idealists, or the disaffected.”

How has President Marcos maintained his position of leadership?

“Contrary to gossip, speculation, and highly biased judgment of some foreign observers, President Marcos remains as titular, factual, and effective head of the Philippine government and leader of the Filipino people, by legislative fiat, by direct expression of the will of the people through various referendums, and by the undeniable fact that he is best suited to lead his people out of their age-old problems and into new life of greater opportunity and prosperity for all…,” Romulo said. “As President Marcos himself says, ‘It is simply inconceivable that a people who have gone through a hundred years of struggle for their rights and liberties would tolerate, let alone support, a repressive government’.”

Is American aid serving to prop up the Marcos regime? Is President Marcos “skillfully playing ‘The American Card’”?

Romulo’s retort was if there was an “American Card” and if Marcos was playing it, then he was not doing so skillfully since “the current levels of American economic aid average $75 million per year. For 1980, American military security support assistance will amount to $20 million. . . It is a hyperbole—and perhaps ironic—to say that they represent a ‘skillful’ playing of the American card.”Proceeds from the military bases agreement, Romulo contended, cannot be considered as propping up Marcos since they will be in the form of military assistance from 1980-85, regardless of who was president. What it props up is “the American security arrangements for the entire region as a part of the US global security system.”

Much has been said about endemic poverty in the Philippines, the gap between the rich and the poor is said to be widening, and there is widespread privation, and even starvation. Are these reports true? What are the effects of President Marcos’ policies on the situation?

Romulo conceded that, “There is no starvation, but malnutrition.” But that was only expected because, for Romulo, during those times everybody’s poor and suffering: “Poverty is endemic in most societies today, be they developed or developing, the Philippines is no exception.” The current situation is not Marcos’s fault. “In the case of developing societies, disparities in wealth, property, status and power can be traced to their colonial past.” And how could anyone speak of widening gap between rich and poor and there was hardly any wealth to speak of? “There can be no equalization of wealth if in the first place that wealth does not yet exist, there can be no creation of national wealth if that nation does not enjoy the opportunity to share the world’s production of goods.” But Marcos was doing his best to make things better.

Is it true that President Marcos has plunged the Philippines into heavy foreign debt, and that he squanders Philippine resources?

Romulo claimed that the Philippines’s external public debt until then was much less than that of similarly situated countries, like Mexico or Indonesia. All other economic indicators like the debt service ratio, the in-flow of foreign investments, the country’s international reserves, and the export receipts all point to “a picture of progress, not of stagnation or squandering.”

When the Philippines plunged into a deep political and economic crisis after the assassination of Ninoy Aquino in 1983, all the untruths in Romulo’s response were laid bare.

Besides Romulo, Teodoro Valencia and Gerardo Sicat also took to the Marcos controlled press to impugn the Oakes story. Valencia, known then as the dean of Marcos apologists, wrote in his Daily Express column that Oakes’s article was biased, unfair, and malicious. Sicat, then Marcos’s economic planning minister, quibbled with the statistics that Oakles cited in his piece. Like Romulo’s, his rebuttal was featured in all the metro dailies.

Ernesto Avila, in a letter to the We Forum, pointed out the absurdity of the situation. “Unfortunately, yet quite expectedly, these apologists wrote against an article that the supposed ‘free’ Philippine press never published. Not until your voice-in-the-wilderness of a paper printed the Oakes feature story. We were being asked to damn a foreign newspaperman whose article we were not even allowed to read.”

For all the defenses that the dictator’s men put up, they dare not mention one topic: the excesses of Imelda Marcos. The copy published in the We Forum was sanitized, so they may have thought it prudent not to call attention to the issue.

Forty years later, the Oakes story is available in online digital archives and all the extant We Forum issues at the Rizal Library of the Ateneo de Manila University is accessible online (http://rizal2.lib.admu.edu.ph/weforum/). This minor controversy reminds us that what is often suppressed amidst a threatened press bears the truth.

In April 21, 1980, a couple of months before the New York Times published the Oakes story, Marcos himself spoke before the American Newspaper Publishers Association in Hawaii, maintaining that he “remain[ed] convinced that the American tradition of fair play and giving the other guy a chance to talk still governs.”

But in his book In Search of Alternatives: The Third World in an Age of Crisis, published also in 1980 by his government’s main propaganda arm, the National Media Production Center, Marcos did not hide his annoyance of the foreign press, especially the American ones.

“Western press reports about government failures, tyranny, alleged denial of human rights, poverty, assassination and coup d’etat often stem from a pre-judgment of the societies in which these events occur . . . the Western press hardly reports, discusses or interprets Third World objectives, strategies and programs for development,” he wrote.

In the same April 21 speech in Hawaii, Marcos claimed that though his government was authoritarian, it was not tyrannical, “We have never driven out a correspondent.” But as the Honolulu Star Bulletin observed in the same news report on his speech, “his government refused reentry to Arnold Zeitlin, the Associated Press Manila bureau chief who had written a piece considered critical of the Philippine president.”

In the history of the Marcos regime, the Oakes story is a mere footnote. It was a front-page piece, above the fold story in the We Forum, but it was not the main headline.

Two years later, the dictator had had enough of the We Forum. Marcos’s animosity towards the paper escalated, promising at one point, the Los Angeles Times reported, “that he would make Burgos and his colleagues ‘eat’ the newspaper.”

On charges of “conspiracy to overthrow the government through black political propaganda, agitation and advocacy of violence” because the paper aimed to “discredit, insult and ridicule the president to such an extent that it would inspire his assassination,” the paper was raided and shuttered on December 7, 1982 and its editor-publisher, Jose Burgos Jr. and thirteen others were hauled to jail (there were two more but they were in the United States). Eventually, they were put under house arrest. The trigger for the arrest and closure was a story on the fake Marcos medals written by Bonifacio Gillego. As one Catholic cleric remarked in the Oakes story, “Oh, yes, we have freedom of speech. But what we don’t have is freedom after speech.”

When the We Forum was closed, the January 2, 1983 issue of the Los Angeles Times quoted Teodoro Valencia’s column in the Daily Express: “Newsmen know that constructive dissent and criticism against the government have never provoked such serious reaction from the government. Is freedom the right of any man to say or print whatever he pleases?”

After 774 days, on January 21, 1985, We Forum reopened. In its December 26, 1984 decision (G.R. No. L-64261), the Supreme Court found that the warrants were defective.

For the Supreme Court, “Such closure is in the nature of previous restraint or censorship abhorrent to the freedom of the press guaranteed under the fundamental law, and constitutes a virtual denial of petitioners’ freedom to express themselves in print.”

As authorities today again resort to semantics to mask the brute application of law, We Forum’s saga – from the Oakes story to the fake Marcos medals – is a reminder of machinations of those in power to silence the more critical voices in media.

The soon-to-be law Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020 is characterized by Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque as tough but not draconian. The conviction of Rappler CEO Maria Ressa and former writer/researcher Reynaldo Santos Jr. for cyberlibel is not an assault on press freedom but an issue of accountability. So says Chief Presidential Legal Counsel Salvador Panelo in his press release. So says Presidential Communications Secretary Martin Andanar in his response to a statement from the US State Department. As if Romulo is still speaking: authoritarian but not repressive. As if Marcos is still around: authoritarian but not tyrannical.

But as before, external scrutiny matters. It forces the administration to go on record. A fragment in our country’s long history of oppression gets written. We are able to relearn this history during these trying times because their struggle left an imprint of courage, however imperfect. And the writing of that history always starts with the likes of Burgos and the We Forum.

Jose Burgos Jr., in his publisher’s note in the resurrected We Forum wrote: “But here we are once again, alive and kicking, ready to continue with the struggle for truth, justice and freedom, to contribute to our modest share to the efforts of all freedom-loving people to dismantle all the devilish instruments of oppression and suppression under which the nation has long suffered.”

Here we are once again, indeed.

Originally published by Vera Files on November 2, 2021.

So how did Ferdinand “Bongbong” R. Marcos, Jr. end up in a graduate program in business administration at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania without an undergraduate degree?

On November 25, 1978, Marcos swore in his 21-year-old son as special assistant to the president. In a press release on this, Malacañang stated that Bongbong held a special diploma in social studies from Oxford University.

Two months later, Malacañang announced that while undergoing a six-month basic officer’s course at the Philippine Marine Training Center, Bongbong had been commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Philippine Constabulary. But as the Honolulu Advertiser noted, Bongbong “[did] not have to wear a uniform because he was sworn in last [November] as one of the president’s special assistants and will be detailed to the presidential palace.” A US Department of State cable noted that Bongbong “[had] been elected president of his officers’ class” and that a columnist “noted tongue-in-cheek that this class is now sure to produce a high percentage of generals.”

The papers left behind when the Marcoses fled Malacañang in 1986 describe the extent of the family’s efforts to ensure that Bongbong was accommodated in one of the most prestigious business schools in the United States, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

On January 27, 1979, Marcos received a confidential personal letter from Francis Ablan, then an executive of Caltex (Philippines), Inc., conveying a cable from Frank Zingaro, a vice president of the multinational oil giant Caltex Petroleum Corp. and once president of the Philippine-American Chamber of Commerce of New York. Both had personal ties to the Marcoses.

Ablan wrote that Zingaro “[had] some good connections with people of Wharton School of Business and with some other graduate schools of business. He also offered that if it is your desire, we can send Bongbong’s application through him and he will personally handle the submission of same to the right offices/people. By the way, Frank reminded me that his assistance is purely a personal matter between you and him. He welcomes the opportunity of being of help in return for the many courtesies extended to him during his visits with you and the First Lady.”

In his cable dated January 25, 1979, Zingaro explained to Ablan the admission process at Wharton and Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. He wrote that “Arjay Miller currently dean of the Stanford Business School and formerly once president of Ford Motor Company has been advised of applicant’s impending application submission and we’re hopefully confident he will use his good offices to assist.”

But then he hedged: “I must remind you that admissions committees of graduate schools and more particularly Stanford and Wharton are an unusual breed and they take pride in their independence to make evaluations of candidates without outside pressures or without regard to the applicant’s social or political status.”

Photo 3 1979 01 25 Privatel… by VERA Files

After initially considering Stanford, a decision seemed to have been made by May 1979 that Bongbong would attend Wharton instead. On May 3 that year, Jose A. Syjuco Jr., deputy chief of mission of the Philippine embassy in London, sent a telex to Malacañang to inform Bongbong that he must “rush Wharton forms to Ernie Pineda [Ernesto C. Pineda, Philippine consul general in New York] soonest. He will make [a] strong attempt to push it through but he needs the basic application.”

Photo 4 1979 05 03 Syjuco t… by VERA Files

With all the diplomatic efforts and muscle-flexing of business executives, it remains unclear how Bongbong got into Wharton without an undergraduate degree, extensive work experience, or what persuasive arguments Marcos presented that the school gave credit to. Bongbong would later give various reasons for why he was unable to finish his studies at Wharton.

And then there was the lie, of course, that he did complete the program.

Bongbong started at Wharton on or about August 10, 1979, which means that he was accepted by the prestigious business school within three months after two Philippine diplomats offered to “push through” his application. This is based on a Department of State cable dated August 7, 1979 stating that the young Marcos was to arrive in Philadelphia “to begin a two-year course of study at the Wharton School of Business” and that the state department had known about his study plans “for some time.”

The cable also noted that Marcos’ son, “with appropriate bodyguards,” had been earlier “accredited by the Philippine Mission to the United Nations as its ‘military advisor’ with the rank of attaché, with an assistant who also carries the rank of attaché.” The people who drafted the communication for the undersigned, US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, noted that the ‘nominal U.N. assignment is presumably intended to give Bong Bong diplomatic immunity while he is in [the U.S.]’.”

Why he needed to have diplomatic immunity and bodyguards who stayed with him in a house in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, is unclear. Bongbong, as Ferdinand Marcos II, continued to be listed as an attaché of the Philippine U.N. Mission in 1980, based on that year’s edition of Permanent Missions to the United Nations: Officers Entitled to Diplomatic Privileges and Immunities.

How did the “military advisor”—fresh out of months-long training— perform in Wharton?

Bongbong himself has provided a means for evaluating this. On his official website, a copy of his Wharton MBA transcript issued on April 2, 2015 is posted showing that the presidential aspirant in next year’s elections enrolled for four terms between the fall 1979 and 1981. He did not enroll for the 1981 spring term.

Looking at a course description of Wharton MBA program in the mid-1980s and Bongbong’s transcript, it appears that in the fall term of 1979, he failed to earn credit for a core subject: administration. He performed a bit better during the spring 1980 term, passing all the courses taken by Wharton MBA students regardless of their major. Of the five courses he took during the fall 1980 term, he earned credit in only two.

Bongbong did not pass any of the courses during the fall 1981 term; he received two incompletes, suggesting that he attended classes but failed to submit all prerequisites to earn course credit. Overall, he earned eleven credit units before withdrawing from the program. He was far from finishing his MBA; he retook administration in the fall 1981 term, but received a mark of NR (not reported) for the course. The transcript states that his major is “undeclared.”

It would have been necessary for him to declare a major and complete major courses before he could write a thesis or do a capstone/advanced study project. Yet in several biographic notes and at least one interview, Bongbong claimed that he was already writing his MBA thesis or dissertation when he had to cut his studies short because he was elected vice governor of Ilocos Norte.

Marcos Jr. was elected vice governor of Ilocos Norte not in 1981, as many online profiles of him claim, but on January 30, 1980 at the age of 22. Batas Pambansa Blg. 52, enacted on December 22, 1979, lowered the minimum age for governors and vice governors from 23 to 21. In fact, based on an Agence France Presse article dated December 20, 1979, Bongbong was originally being pushed to run for governor. His aunt, Elizabeth Marcos Roca, who had held the Ilocos Norte governorship since 1967, even stated that she was willing to give way to her nephew. But the article noted that Bongbong was “not enthusiastic about making politics a career.”

According to an article published in the Honolulu Advertiser on January 4, 1980, Bongbong had “told a crowd of well-wishers (in the Philippines) that he planned to complete his studies leading to a master’s degree in business administration in the United States.” Even with his election assured, he maintained that his focus was on his studies.

Bongbong ran uncontested and became vice governor of Ilocos Norte after the January 30, 1980 elections while still a student at Wharton. The foreign media reported that so as not to interrupt his studies, Bongbong chose to be sworn into office at the Philippine embassy in Washington D.C. on February 28, 1980. Eduardo Z. Romualdez, Bongbong’s uncle and then Philippine ambassador to the U.S., administered his oath.

Indeed, it seems that throughout 1980, or several months after he was sworn in as vice governor, Bongbong remained in the U.S. His transcript reflects that he continued to take classes. As reported by international media, such as the Ohio-based New Herald and Kyodo News, in November 1980, Marcos asked the U.S. government to give Bongbong additional protection because of purported threats to his life. The New Herald article noted that Bongbong was “an attache to the Philippine delegation to the United Nations in New York.” Marcos himself eventually beefed up security for his son in the U.S.

There is ample written, photographic, and audiovisual evidence that Bongbong was in the Philippines during the April 7, 1981 constitutional plebiscite, the June 16, 1981 presidential election, and the third inauguration of his father as president on June 30, 1981. This period coincided with the time he did not enroll in Wharton.

There is evidence though that he returned to the US in the fall of 1981 to attend classes again. But it seemed that besides attending classes, Bongbong was attending to other business as well. A November 25, 1982 article in The Cincinnati Enquirer reported that in 1981, a state trooper stopped Bongbong for driving over the speed limit at the New Jersey Turnpike. The article said, “The state trooper who pulled over the young Marcos, a student at the University of Pennsylvania, was startled to see a semi-automatic rifle at the backseat and a revolver strapped to the leg of a young woman in the passenger seat.”

Bongbong flashed a diplomatic passport and was let go. “Except,” the article concluded, “the State Department said, that young Marcos was not registered as a diplomatic agent of his country.”

Thus, for Bongbong and his people to say that he discontinued his studies solely because he was elected vice governor—a position that, based on Batas Pambansa Blg. 51, practically only required him to serve as the governor’s substitute or spare tire, the latter function that he would fulfill in a few years—is, to put it charitably, inaccurate.

THE LIES

On March 24, 1983, Bongbong assumed the governorship of Ilocos Norte after his aunt resigned for health reasons. It was around this time that lies about his university education were carried by the local press. The Religious of the Good Shepherd, Philippines-Japan, in an October 27, 2021 Facebook page post, showed a March 25, 1983 news clipping from an unidentified newspaper announcing that Bongbong was the new Ilocos Norte governor. The news item claimed that Bongbong “is a graduate of Oxford University in London, where he earned B.A. and M.A. degrees in politics, philosophy, and economics. He later attended the Wharton School of Finance in Pennsylvania.”

On March 31, 1983, a member of the Religious of the Good Shepherd wrote Oxford about what she read in the news report. A month later, on April 20, the university wrote back to her with a definite answer.

“Ferdinand Martin Romualdez matriculated in 1975 at St. Edmund Hall, University of Oxford, to read Politics, Philosophy and Economics. He did not however complete his Preliminary examinations, and is not therefore a graduate of this University. It follows that he does not hold any degree. He was however awarded a Special Diploma in Social Studies in 1978.” The emphasis was in the original.

After getting exiled in Hawaii with his family in 1986 as a result of the People Power revolt, Bongbong returned to the Philippines in 1991 and was elected as representative of Ilocos Norte’s second congressional district from 1992 to 1995.

In the featured profile in the 1993 Congressional Highlights Quarterly Report, Bongbong’s educational background not only indicated that he obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in PPE, it also stated that he obtained a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Pennsylvania.

On February 24, 2015, Marites Danguilan Vitug writing for Rappler, once again raised the question of how truthful Bongbong was regarding his university education. A senator since 2010, Bongbong posted his resume in his official senate page indicating that he had a Bachelor of Arts degree in PPE political and a master’s degree in business administration from the Wharton School of Business. Vitug’s article belied Bongbong’s claims.

In a statement released in response to Vitug’s piece, Bongbong maintained that his academic records were “accurate,” that he “got a diploma” from Oxford but did not finish his studies in Wharton because he was elected vice governor of Ilocos Norte.

In an ambush interview on March 2, 2015, a reporter asked Bongbong if he had a degree. He replied, “I suppose. I got a diploma, kaya nga may diploma ako e.” This which is reminiscent of his sister Imee’s “sa pagkakaalam ko, nag graduate ako” (as far as I know, I graduated). Imee Marcos, now senator, also made false claims of having graduated from Princeton University, the University of the Philippines College of Law, and the Asian Institute of Management.

In the same interview, Bongbong admitted that he did not finish his MBA in Wharton, saying “I was writing my dissertation. I never got to. . . Pinauwi na ako e (I was asked to come home).” This was a reiteration of claims about his achievements at Wharton—which do not conform with his transcript—that can be found as early as the 2009 version of his official website and written profiles or recorded interviewee introductions that drew from such sources.

On October 28, 2015, he was asked once more about his academic degrees. In his interview with Julius Babao, Karen Davila, and Ces Drilon on ABS-CBN’s Bandila, he definitively claimed that he received a bachelor of arts degree from Oxford. Pressed by Davila that official records showed that what he got was a special diploma, Bongbong insisted that, “Yes, but it is still a bachelor of arts degree.”

In another interview on January 21, 2016, in a DZMM program, Marcos claimed that the certification he obtained from Oxford University in 2015 states, “This is to certify that Ferdinand Marcos has completed a BA degree in social sciences.” He further said that he transferred from PPE to politics, and that is the college degree he completed.

In response to the more recent questions about Bongbong’s education, his spokesperson Vic Rodriguez said on October 23, 2021 that Bongbong has “always been forthright” about his academic records.

This is akin to Imelda vouching for her son.

Cecilio T. Arillo, in his 2012 book Imelda: Mothering and Poetic and Creative Ideas in a Troubled World asked the former first lady, “Will Bongbong pursue the vision of his father?” Imelda replied, “He’s committed to that. Humbly speaking, his leadership qualities, his intellectual and managerial skills and moral and ethical upbringing, I am confident he will not fail. Bongbong was educated at Oxford University, England in 1978 with AB Political Science, Philosophy and Economics, and at Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania, USA with a Master’s in Business Administration.”

His father, the dictator, lied about his son’s degree. His mother, the undead half of the conjugal dictatorship, flaunted the same lie. And the son, who now wants to be president, continues the lie. For the past 43 years, the Filipino people have been lied to.