Month: September 2022

Originally published by Vera Files on January 28, 2021.

Toting long firearms and with the media in tow, without any coordination with either the proper authorities of the University of the Philippines (UP) or barangay officials, the military trucks rolled inside UP Diliman to the Materials Recovery Facility in Pook Amorsolo and the gardens in Pook Village B and Pook Arboretum noontime of Jan. 20, 2021.

That was five days after Defense Secretary Delfin N. Lorenzana informed UP President Danilo Concepcion that he is terminating the 1989 agreement between UP and the Department of National Defense (DND) on military and police operations in the premier state university.

Members of the 7th Civil Relations Group of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), said they were visiting their urban farming project in UP Diliman.

Barangay UP Campus chairperson Zenaida P. Lectura, however, belied in a statement that the AFP has an urban farming project in UP Diliman. “The Sangguniang Barangay “maintains that our barangay projects does not involve AFP,” she said.

Lectura said Barangay UP Campus’s “Urban Garden Project” has been around “for a number of years now, even before this present administration.”

In July last year, the AFP did give Barangay UP Campus some seedlings for its project. The plants that grew out of those seedlings have long been harvested. Out of that token gesture, the AFP, as reported by Danilo J. Arceo, a council member of Barangay UP Campus, “went inside the garden and put up a marker indicating it was their project.”

Lectura said she is “appalled that Barangay UP Campus was used for whatever intention of the AFP to justify their presence within our barangay and for the issue on the abrogation of the UP-DND Accord of 1989.”

In his letter, Lorenzana said the agreement is “a hindrance in providing effective security, safety and welfare of the students, faculty, and employees of UP.”

Using the Anti-Terrorism Council’s (ATC) designation of the Communist Party of the Philippines-New People’s Army (CPP-NPA) as a terrorist organization, Lorenzana alleges that “there is indeed an ongoing clandestine recruitment inside U.P. campuses nationwide for membership in the CPP/NPA and that the ‘Agreement’ is being used by the CPP/NPA recruiters and supporters as a shield or propaganda so that government law enforcers are barred from conducting operations against CPP/NPA.” The law that created the ATC is being questioned before the Supreme Court by 37 groups.

Lorenzana tried to reassure Concepcion that he will not be stationing troops within campuses and that his only intent is “to reach out to the youth and provide them with another perspective on our nation and society. We want them to see their Armed Forces and Police as protectors worthy of trust and not fear.”

ALMOST A THREAT

If the history of the presence and influence of the police and the military in UP is any indication, this is almost a threat. Fifty years ago, after the First Quarter Storm and the Diliman Commune, with the full force of the martial backing it up, the military and the police tried what Lorenzana wanted. Their intervention ranged from planting spies to rigging a university student council election and other psywar ops. Those efforts failed to rid UP of what the Marcos regime then considered as “radical” elements.

When former president Ferdinand Marcos assumed dictatorial powers with his declaration of martial law on Sept. 21, 1972 (made public only on Sept. 23 after the enemies of his regime were rounded up), the Philippine Collegian and the student council were banned.

“The campus was teeming with civilian agents,” Marites Sison and Yvonne Chua wrote in Armando Malay’s biography, A Guardian of Memory (2002). Malay was UP’s Dean of Student Affairs from 1970-1978. “Many more were arrested from UP … Some UP cadets were apparently used to identify wanted professors like [Petronilo Bn.] Daroy.”

Activists’ slogan scrawled in front of the Palma Hall in the ’70s.

When the classes eventually resumed, military agents were sitting in on classes. According to a former UP professor cited by Sheena Chestnut Greitens in Dictators and their Secret Police (2016), during martial law, there were students that he “did not recognize, in plain clothes but with military haircut and demeanor, arriving to sit at the back of his classes.” Such acts were, in the words of Prof. Randy David, as quoted by Greitens, demonstrations of “the capacity of the government to monitor,” to “intimidate [one] more than to gather information.”

In Marcos’s diary entry on Sept.19, 1970, he said he has “finalized the instructions on intelligence work to continue. Directed Col. Fidel Ramos J-2 to assign men to all universities to collate information and infiltrate all organizations even on a ten year basis.”

The military’s boldness in making their presence known and felt in UP was rooted in a more extensive operation that had the full blessing and participation of Malacañang. And, needless to say, utilized taxpayers’ money.

RIGGING STUDENT COUNCIL ELECTIONS

In 1971, two parties were contesting the university student council elections in UP Diliman: Sandigang Makabansa (SM) and the more moderate/fraternity-backed Katipunan ng Malayang Pagkakaisa (KAMP/KMP). The standard bearer of SM was Reynaldo “Rey” Vea, an engineering student who had served as an editor of the Collegian. KMP’s candidate was Manuel “Manny” Ortega, a law student who was a member of Marcos’s fraternity, Upsilon Sigma Phi.

Both campaigned using black propaganda and acts of violence, including the use of weapons and explosives. Joseph Scalice, in his 2017 dissertation on the communist parties of the Philippines, mentioned a pillbox thrown during an election convocation during the tail end of the campaign. Ortega won the chairmanship by a little under 400 votes. KMP also won the vice chairmanship and half of the university council seats.

During the campaign, SM and allied groups repeatedly claimed that Ortega and KMP had the backing of Malacañang and the military, or at least were aligned with the government’s anti-communist drive. Scalice recounted the contents of pamphlets released by the “Secret Victor Corpus Movement” which claimed that the violent university convocation was part of “Operation Good Friday,” the “code-name of a highly confidential project being undertaken by Malacañang and the Armed Forces of the Philippines and being executed under the command of top psy-war expert and undersecretary of home defense, Jose Crisol,” which was aimed to “muzzle the militancy of UP as a preparatory step for the silencing of the national student movement.”

Former student leader Jaime Galvez Tan, in an interview quoted in the 1986 dissertation of UP professor Alexander Brillantes, stated that “goons were brought in (by the government)” during the 1971 convocation as agent provocateurs. In his blog, subtitled “Memoirs of an Anti-Martial Law Activist in the Philippines,” Roberto “Beto” Reyes wrote that when Ortega won, SM “quickly branded his victory as the result of ‘red scare’ tactics employed by the opposing party.”

Retrospective accounts, however, generally characterize Vea and SM’s defeat not as a product of government/military machinations, but as a tacit denunciation of the violence that happened during or sprung from the Diliman Commune. According to Scalice, “more than anything else, the UP students in 1971 were voting against the Diliman Commune and the conduct of the KM leadership of the Student Council.” Beto Reyes claimed in his blog that graffiti proclaiming “Long Live the Diliman Commune” and “Mabuhay ang mga Barikada,” among others, on the walls and blackboards of the College of Arts and Sciences building were among the reasons that the student voters, especially “uninitiated freshmen,” swung toward Ortega’s party.

Among the papers left by Marcos in Malacañang after he was deposed were pieces of evidence that give credence to the accusations against Ortega and KMP. In a confidential letter to Marcos dated Aug.10, 1971, Crisol stated that to ensure Ortega and KMP’s win, a total of P17,600 -a considerable sum in 1971 – was spent by various agencies. According to Crisol, a total of P10,000 was given directly to Ortega by Malacañang (via then assistant executive secretary Roberto Reyes); P2,500 came from General Headquarters (GHQ)-AFP; P2,500 came from NICA [National Intelligence Coordinating Agency]; P1,000 came from the Office of Community Relations (OCR) GHQ (via “Col. Pecache”); and another P1,600 from NICA (via “Col. de la Fuente”).

Letter of Undersecretary of Home Defense, Jose Crisol to President Marcos

Crisol noted that the P2,500 each from GHQ AFP and NICA were “funneled through Lt. Col. [Benjamin R.] Vallejo in conducting the four broad psychological warfare activities that required expert, centralized and detailed implementation,” which included printing (counter)propaganda, “black propaganda vs SM organizations and personalities,” and “final persuasion of voters for friendly [organizations] and candidates.” Crisol further noted that “the key to victory was the positive commitment of the ROTC-based organizations in favor of the moderate coalition.”

Toward the conclusion of his letter, Crisol said: “Our student apparatus in Laguna succeeded in getting the Council Chairmanship in the Laguna Institute at Calamba.” That was, he added, “a forerunner of what we intend to do in contesting radical leadership in UP Los Baños by next year.”

Crisol’s “victory” lasted only until the next election. SM regained the council’s chairmanship in the 1972 elections (medical student Jaime Galvez Tan was SM’s standard bearer), but that council’s term was brief, since Marcos suspended all student councils and organizations upon imposing martial law throughout the Philippines in September 1972.

UNDERMINING CAMPUS PRESS

Not content with controlling the outcome of student council elections, military operatives also tried to undermine the free campus press.

Gravely concerned about the rhetoric of the student activists, Marcos’s military operatives placed UP’s student publications under close scrutiny. In the same memorandum written by Crisol to Marcos about the 1971 UP student council election, he outlined four psychological warfare activities jointly funded by Malacanang, the AFP GHQ, OCR, and NICA. One of these was the printing of the Free Collegian, a student tabloid designed to “counter the radical propaganda through the Collegian or other printed means.”

The Free Collegian cost these government agencies P1,500. A separate confidential report analyzing the “leftist radical defeat” in the campus election says that “[t]he FREE COLLEGIAN of the KAMP was disseminated at a right psychological moment. The SM had a panic reaction by forcibly confiscating the paper from student [sic] which served to alienate the radicals.”

The black propaganda rag also targeted university officials. As noted by Sison and Chua in Malay’s biography:

“Copies of The Free Collegian mysteriously appeared on the UP campus. One article, headlined “Malay Bankruptcy Assailed,” stated: “If you want to be the future vice president of the University of the Philippines, all you have to do is lick the boots of S.P. Lopez, submit to the imperial orders of the Student Council chairman, and kowtow to all the demands of the KM-SDK . . .” It described Malay as “old, decrepit, and senile.”

Because the military’s relatively small investment paid off quite handsomely in the UP campus election, in an assessment it was resolved to “[e]nhance [the] unity of direction of moderate student organizations” and to “intensify psyops in all schools affected by radical activism.”

With the firm belief in the effectiveness of this sort of psychological ops, the minister of Public Information Francisco Tatad gave Marcos a copy of another student tabloid entitled Ang Bayani: Official nation-wide publication of the Progressive Vanguard (Tanod Bayan). The title seems to be a play on Ang Bayan, the official organ of the CPP. In a memorandum dated Aug. 9, 1971, Tatad wrote Marcos: “[t]he attached copy is a project of our university boys. They plan to use this extensively during the campaign, particularly during the school mock elections. Can we extend to them some modest support? It will be worth it.” The phrase “modest support” was underlined and annotated with the amount “P2,000.”

Frontpage of Malacañang -funded tabloid Ang Bayani, a play on the CPP-NPA’s official news organ, Ang Bayan.

Ang Bayani, which started circulating as early as March 1971, visibly lauded government programs and vilified student protests. The writers of the tabloid expressed tacit support for the ongoing Constitutional Convention and to the effort of the state’s security forces to suppress dissent. They featured a letter to the editor from the president of the Kapisanan ng Malayang Pilipino (KMP), congratulating Philippine Constabulary chief Gen. Eduardo Garcia “for his decision to enforce laws on subversion and sedition.” The letter continued: “Lately, we have observed that our country has assumed an anarchic atmosphere as a result of the indiscriminate holding of rallies and demonstrations and the consequent use of abusive and venomenous [sic] language by so-called self-styled reformers, who prefer rabble-rousing techniques and destructive criticisms rather than undertake positive actions.”

Five years later, psyops turned visceral with the actual arrest of UP campus journalists and activists.

For writing an editorial that was highly critical of the Marcos regime, and refusing to heed a warning of then minister of Defense Juan Ponce Enrile to tone down their anti-government content, Philippine Collegian editor-in-chief Abraham “Ditto” Sarmiento was arrested at his house in January 1976. Before his arrest, on Jan. 23, 1976, news that other students, including the Collegian’s managing editor, had been detained resulted in a swiftly organized protest march in the Diliman campus. According to a declassified US Department of State cable dated Jan. 28, 1976, the demonstrators numbered between 500 and 1,000. The protest was broken up by campus police. Ten were arrested in UP, but were released on the same day.

In another declassified cable, dated Feb. 2, 1976, US ambassador to the Philippines William H. Sullivan stated that “about 17 or 18 persons from the UP community have been picked up by [the] military over [the] past two weeks and are still being detained,” including Sarmiento. According to Sullivan, during a university council meeting on January 31, then UP president Onofre D. Corpuz, Marcos’s former education secretary, stated his view that “students engaged in protest movements must be prepared to bear consequences of their actions,” and that the “university could do little officially to help the students.” Corpuz nevertheless said that “he had discussed [the] matter privately with government officials” and that believed Sarmiento would be released in a week’s time.

Sarmiento was released more than seven months after his arrest. He died of a heart attack in November 1977, believed to have been a consequence of his poor health that deteriorated while in detention.

Corpuz’s callousness can be contrasted with the clear interest in the welfare of student prisoners taken by his immediate predecessor, SP Lopez. According to Oscar Evangelista, in his history of the Lopez presidency in University of the Philippines: The First 75 Years (1985), Lopez “went out of his way to protect the students, even visiting the city jails to look after those arrested by the police for participating in riotous demonstrations.”

EXPANDING CONTROL

Then the drive for control turned institutional.

“PCAS Infiltrates the [UP] System,” wrote Evangelista. The Philippine Center for Advanced Studies (PCAS), as candidly admitted by Jose Almonte in his memoir, Endless Journey (2015), was a think tank for Marcos.

PCAS was an autonomous UP unit that came into existence in 1973 via Presidential Decree 342. Its finances, as provided for by Marcos, “shall not be subject to the procurement requirement and restrictions imposed by existing law.”

For PCAS to have its own building in UP Diliman, Alejandro Melchor Jr., then Marcos’s executive secretary, as told by Almonte in his memoir, “saw an item for a hospital or school somewhere. He cancelled the budget for that hospital or school and transferred the funds to the PCAS for the construction of a building.” That building still stands on campus today, the Romulo Hall.

For Evangelista, “the creation of the PCAS established an empire within an empire…particularly vexing to the UP community was the fact that it was imposed from above without consultation or agreement.”

Though said to have been given P20 million by Marcos, PCAS ended up siphoning off funds from UP. The finances of the then existing Asian Center was transferred to PCAS. And UP, starting 1974, had to give PCAS P1.5 million from its own budget.

PCAS formulated policies and provided some of the ideological underpinnings for the continued imposition of martial law. Or as Marcos puts it in PD 342, its members were to “address themselves to the examination of issues of central concern to the government, such as problems of national integration, social technological and cultural change, social effects of national policy, international developments and their impact on our national life, as well as security and strategic problems.”

Almonte, then a colonel, claims to be the main Marcos man who ran it. “I was the vice chancellor and at the same time, dean of the Institute for Strategic Studies. Ruben [Santos Cuyugan, PCAS chancellor] also designated me professor of social engineering . . . I get a good laugh whenever I remember this because nowhere in UP or perhaps other universities in the region was there such a discipline. In the military, there was no such academic field.” What Almonte was, in fact, laughing at was how PCAS trounced the established meritocracy in UP.

But in the end, PCAS’s own activities made it suspicious even to Marcos. One particular program stood out, as pointed out by S. Lily Mendoza in Between the Homeland and the Diaspora (2002):

“Another effect of the travel ban was that government officials and employees (both military and civilian) who did manage to secure special permission to travel abroad were now mandated to first undergo training with the [PCAS], a semi-autonomous unit within the University of the Philippines System commissioned (commandeered?) by the Office of the (Philippine) President to service its policy research and strategic needs . . . . Rumor has it that it was from the threat of its pre-departure seminars “placing brains in men with guns” that finally did it in, referring to what was noted as the potentially subversive effect of the program’s nationalist orientation on military officers undergoing training.”

On Aug. 9, 1979, Marcos ended PCAS through Letter of Instruction 908 in favor of his other creation, the President’s Center for Special Studies. Almonte recalled that “Marcos abolished the PCAS in 1979 when he sensed that we no longer conformed to his idea of strengthening the nation.”

From saving UP students from the clutches of communism to “strengthening the nation,” stories abound of other cases of surveillance, interference, and even violent intrusion in UP by elements of the Armed Forces throughout the Marcos dictatorship. In addition, among other draconian measures implemented during Marcos’s rule, an anti-subversion law was, in effect, making mere membership in the CPP illegal. Finally, by November 1977, both CPP founder Jose Maria Sison and NPA founder Bernabe Buscayno had were captured by state forces. With such tools, techniques, and developments — and the absence of an enforceable explicit agreement like the 1989 UP-DND Accord — was the CPP-NPA successfully suppressed?

BEST CPP-NPA RECRUITER

It has become a cliché to state that the best recruiter of the CPP-NPA during the Marcos regime was Marcos. Indeed, in Proclamation 1081, or the martial law proclamation, Marcos stated that by July 31, 1972, the NPA had a total strength of 7,900, of which only 1,028 were regulars. In the last book authored by Marcos, A Trilogy on the Transformation of Philippine Society, Marcos stated that by 1985, his final full year in office, the NPA had 16,000 regulars.

In his 2006 thesis, “An Analysis of the Communist Counterinsurgency in the Philippines,” submitted to the US Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Antonio Parlade Jr. — now Lt. Gen., head of the Southern Luzon Military Command, and spokesperson of the NTF-ELCAC (National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict) — gave the following description of how the poor, particularly the peasantry, were driven to join the NPA during what he called Marcos’s “reign of terror”:

“[Marcos] had to expand the military organization and patronize the generals to buy their loyalty. Further dampening their morale was the lack of combat equipment and essential organizational requirements to perform their job. Corruption became rampant in the ranks and improving the state of discipline of the troops was hardly a priority. As a result, human rights abuses by the troops became rampant, which further alienated the disadvantaged poor who were caught in the fight between the NPA and government forces. As life being experienced by peasants in the hills was getting harder, they saw the communist party as an option to realize their simple dreams. Uneducated as they were, they became easy prey to the propaganda campaign of the insurgents … When they became suspects for harboring the insurgents in their homes and were beaten by an abusive constabulary on patrol, it was only a matter of time for them to run to the hills and join the NPA.”

The claim that people were driven to join the NPA because of military abuse recalls the claims about why UP graduate student and activist Maria Lorena Barros went underground. Barros was among those charged with subversion in the wake of the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus following the Plaza Miranda bombing in 1971. From teaching and studying in the university, she went to the countryside, where she joined the armed struggle. After being captured in 1973, she was able to escape from incarceration a year later. She was killed during an encounter with the military in 1976 at the age of 28.

Today, Parlade and the rest of the NTF-ELCAC are insistent that CPP-NPA recruitment hubs can be found in UP and dozens of other institutions of higher learning, though it seems that he requires further information of such alleged recruitment. “Mas mapag-aaralan ang nangyayaring recruitment ng CPP-NPA sa UP matapos maibasura ang UP-DND accord (The CPP-NPA recruitment in UP can be studied further after dispensing with the UP-DND accord),” he was quoted as saying in a recent interview.

The NTF-ELCAC and Lorenzana are insistent that they are only looking out for the children. In the propaganda materials they release, they frequently include Barros, stating that she was one of the youths who joined the NPA because of deceptive recruitment practices, resulting in her death. Many online supporters of the NTF and Lorenzana have taken to stating that UP is either complicit in the alleged recruitment, or has been very negligent in exercising substitute parental authority over their students.

But history tells us that the parental metaphor can apply both ways. The AFP’s obsession with UP reminds one of a doddering, whiny, and abusive father who, though hard up to provide for his family, is often under the influence of alcohol and other drugs. To hide his impotence in securing his family a decent future, he just shuts them up, beats them up, and locks them up.

Originally published by Vera Files on February 19, 2021.

“I would like to put on notice, if there’s an American agent here, that from now on, you want the Visiting Forces Agreement done? You have to pay.”

Thus, President Rodrigo Duterte laid down the country’s foreign policy.

Ironically, he did so after inspecting new air assets of the Philippine Air Force (PAF) donated by Washington in an event last February 12 at a former base of the United States in Pampanga, which is now the Clark Freeport and Special Economic Zone.

Vice President Leni Robredo and Senator Panfilo Lacson described the move as extortion, a charge dismissed by Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque.In a press briefing three days after Duterte’s pronouncement, Roque even put a price tag on the deal: $16 billion. That’s the same amount that Pakistan receives as military aid from Washington for hosting and maintaining several U.S. military bases, he pointed out.

Duterte’s posturing is reminiscent of the bombast used by former strongman Ferdinand Marcos in dealing with the U.S. when it had bases in the country and was trying to draw the Philippines into the Vietnam war.

As it turned out, his nationalist bluster was only veneer for thievery.

On his birthday on September 11, 1966, with PAF jet fighters doing a fly-by over the Manila port area, Marcos sent off to Vietnam a contingent of the Philippine Civic Action Group (Philcag) composed of 1,000 engineers and medical workers as well as a small security force. Another 900 personnel would leave in the succeeding weeks.

This was a complete turnaround from Marcos’ campaign promise in the 1965 presidential election – that he would not allow the Philippines to be part of the U.S. war effort in Vietnam. Although Philcag was decidedly a non-combat troop whose main job was to go on public works and socio-civic missions in Tay Ninh province in southeast Vietnam, it was part of the effort to win the hearts and minds of the people for the U.S. and South Vietnam.

A U.S. Senate inquiry revealed three years later that Marcos changed his tune for a whopping $39 million.

But Marcos denied ever backtracking on his position.As recorded by Nick Joaquin (writing as Quijano de Manila) in Reportage on the Marcoses (1981), the former president said, “The allegation that this decision was imposed on me by the Americans is unfair, and it is not true. My decision was arrived at purely from a consideration of the national interest . . . I was asked whether any development in Vietnam had attracted my attention. I said yes, the massive support of America for South Vietnam. I was then asked what I, who had been quotedas opposing the sending of hostile troops to Vietnam, had to say about this latest development. I replied: ‘I am now ready to reassess my position; I am now in favor of sending additional aid to South Vietnam in the form of an engineering construction battalion with a security force.’ That was what the Vietnam government had requested—an engineering construction battalion—and I followed the request verbatim . . . I still maintain we are not sending hostile troops—though this may be a point of pure semantics!”

But this was not how many Filipinos saw it as noted by Condrado de Quiros in his column Dead Aim: How Marcos Ambushed Philippine Democracy (1997).He wrote: “But the nation did know a betrayal when it saw one and immediately erupted in protest over the Philcag. That, the Liberals chorused, was the kind of president the people had just voted into office. They warned of direr things to come. Meantime, the activists, who were just beginning to flex their muscles in the campuses, swept through the streets, launching a big demonstration before the American Embassy, a scene that would be repeated more and more frequently in years to come. The rally ended on a bloody note, riot police charging through the ralliers with teargas and truncheon. That, too, would be repeated more and more frequently in years to come.”

By 1967, Philcag’s presence in Vietnam remained controversial. To sustain its operations, the troops needed P38 million but Marcos failed to include a bill financing Philcag among the 31 urgent measures he sent to Congress for approval both in 1967 — and the following year. Philcag started to run out of funds by March 1968, forcing Marcos to reduce the Philcag contingent which by then was drawing funds only from the savings of the defense department.

Two years later, Marcos and Congress agreed to just bring Philcag back to the country. “Funds being spent for Philcag would be better utilized for pressing economic development projects in the Philippines,” a report by the United Press International (UPI) quoted a member of Congress as saying.

In October of that same year, the Senate Subcommittee on US Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad chaired by Senator Stuart Symington began hearings on military aid in the Vietnam War which also looked into funding for Philcag.

Writing on the findings of the Symington subcommittee in a December 10, 1969 article headlined “U.S. ‘Bought’ Marcos Army,” Ward Just of the Washington Post said,

“It is an extraordinary document, mixed with wonderful ironies and absurdities all of which combine to throw the United States into a lover’s embrace with a country whose people probably don’t want us around at all, and a government whose principal preoccupation is cash.”

He further noted, “What emerges from this hearing is that the United States is paying for the Philippines for the privilege of defending it against attack. Apart from the $38 million for Philcag, there is $22.5 million a year for military assistance, and beyond that . . . there are 20 American stations in the Philippines, which pump an estimated $150 million a year into the economy.”

Just also quoted Sen. James William Fulbright as saying, “My own feeling is that all we did was go out and hire soldiers in order to support our then-administration’s view that so many people were in sympathy with our war in Vietnam, and we paid a very high price for it.”

The Marcos administration was swift and firm in its denial. Malacanang released a statement saying that it was “erroneous” to describe Washington’s contributions to Philcag as a “subsidy in any form or as a fee.” It stressed that “Philcag received direct exclusive funding from the Philippine government and from no other source.”

Succeeding investigations by the U.S. General Accounting Office and the Philippine senate would belie this. Research have exposed how Marcos squeezed Washington for millions of dollars in the name of the Philcag team in Vietnam. It is uncertain if those funds ever reached the Philcag personnel, but there is confirmation that a significant portion of it went to Marcos’s pocket.

In April 1972, for example, a Philippine senate committee headed by Sen. Leonardo Perez confirmed what the Symington subcommittee already made public. As reported by UPI: “The committee said in a 37-page report that the Philcag received $19.6 million from the U.S. government. It also said former Defense Secretary Ernesto Mata got $3.6 million from the (U.S.) under the military assistance program.”

American author Raymond Bonner recounted in his book Waltzing with a Dictator: The Marcoses and the Making of American Policy (1987) a more damning story on how Marcos received his cut. “At least $39 million was spent by the United States to equip, train, and pay (Philcag). . . throughout Marcos’s first term—the U.S. embassy had been delivering quarterly checks, each in the amount of several hundred thousand dollars.”

According to Bonner, a diplomat at the U.S. Embassy in Manila from June 1966 to September 1973 James Rafferty was responsible for personally bringing some of the checks to Marcos. The author noted that U.S. intelligence, military, and diplomatic officials in the Philippines at the time had no doubt that much of this amount went into the strongman’s pockets or more accurately, into his overseas bank accounts.”

It is well-established that Marcos and his wife, Imelda, opened bank accounts in Switzerland in 1968 under their pseudonyms William Saunders and Jane Ryan. A lesser-known fact is that among the papers with the Presidential Commission on Good Government are photocopies of two deposit slips of a Chase Manhattan account of Marcos: one dated July 7, 1967 was for $215,000 and another for five checks worth $30,000 each on August 18, 1967.

A Chase Manhattan check for Ferdinand Marcos. Photo from PCGG records.

Bonner’s claim is bolstered by David Chaikin and J.C. Sharman in Corruption and Money Laundering: A Symbiotic Relationship (2009), revealing that a General Accounting Office investigation could not trace how U.S. funding for Philcag was spent and several senior U.S. officials suspected that Marcos had diverted the funds for his “own personal political advantage.”

The authors cited a statement by a former U.S. ambassador to the Philippines that Marcos had not “felt under any obligation to use the funds . . . for the Philcag directly, but had actually used it for purposes, such as ‘security matters.’”

Given their classified nature, Marcos was unwilling to disclose how he utilized the Philcag funds—even to the Americans.

According to author Alfred W. McCoy, the former strongman “manipulated” his alliance with Washington to win more resources for the military. In Closer than Brothers: Manhood at the Philippine Military Academy (1999), McCoy wrote,“Aside from equipment for other AFP units, Marcos also demanded, during the three years (Philcag) served in Vietnam, ‘special payments’ of a million dollars per year—delivered directly to his office by the U.S. Embassy. These negotiable checks, never audited, may have provided Marcos with the black funds for covert units within the AFP.”

Fast forward to present day.

Duterte has not made public his statement of assets, liabilities, and net worth since 2018. This reticence in disclosing his accumulated wealth given the decades the President has been in public office does not inspire confidence that the “payment” he now demands from the U.S. will not go the way “aid” from Washington did during the Marcos regime.

Alternatively, Duterte’s bluster can also be read as a way to save face given his near-amorous relationship with China.

So, with one hand Duterte receives goodies from the Americans and with his other hand, slaps the U.S. with VFA issues and demands to show his possibly jealous Chinese mistress that the deal is not part of any deep romantic entanglement. If we follow Duterte’s logic, future trysts with the Americans could include payment upfront and not just a roll of bills left on the side of the bed after the deed is done.

Originally published by Vera Files on July 18, 2021.

Calling it an “ancestral home,” San Juan City mayor Francis Zamora announced on Twitter on July 5, 2021, that the house of the Marcoses in their city will be part of a “historical trail” that they “will be launching this year to help promote San Juan as a tourist destination.” This he tweeted while at a dinner at the said house to celebrate Imelda Marcos’s 92nd birthday.

On November 26, 2020, Mayor Zamora previewed in a Facebook post what he calls the San Juan historical bike trail that includes the “Marcos Mansion.”

San Juan Mayor Francis Zamora and wife, Keri, with former First Lady Imelda Marcos, Sen. Imee Marcos and former Sen. Ferdinand “Bongbong”Marcos, Jr. at theMarcos house on Ortega street.

Imelda and Ferdinand’s house in San Juan may indeed be something for the tourists to gawk at. And surely it will pique their interest if they will learn more about what went before in this storied abode.

To begin with, there was the “first” Mrs. Marcos who lived there before Imelda.

“There was Carmen Ortega,” Primitivo Mijares wrote in The Conjugal Dictatorship (1976), “with whom the president had four children, two of them before he became senator of the Philippines.”

Not much is known about Carmen Ortega or her children by Marcos. Biographers of both Ferdinand and Imelda were even unsure how many children there really were.

What was known then was that Carmen was Miss Press Photography 1949. Mijares described her as “a beautiful Ilocano mestiza.” Her engagement to Ferdinand was announced in the Manila dailies in August 1953. She had been living with Ferdinand about a couple of years by then in the house on Ortega Street (now Mariano Marcos; named after Ferdinand’s father who was executed by guerilla forces in Northern Luzon for alleged treason in 1945).

In Imelda (1988), Beatriz Romualdez Francia, Imelda’s niece, recounted what Loreto Ramos, a cousin of Imelda, remembered about Carmen and Ferdinand. Loreto “saw Ferdinand and Carmen Ortega together once and she remembered Carmen for her good looks and rosy cheeks. Loreto ran into the pair at the office of Atty. Quilates at the Central Bank in ‘52. They made an impression on her and Loreto remembers vividly that Ferdinand had his arm around Carmen . . . He introduced Carmen to Atty. Quilates as ‘Mrs. Marcos’.”

When Imelda and Ferdinand got married on May 1, 1954, with Imelda unaware of Ferdinand’s first family, Carmen Ortega and her children were moved out of the San Juan house. According to Mijares, “Carmen has been amply provided for, along with her brood of four small Marcoses.”

When Imelda learned of Carmen Ortega and her children by Ferdinand, Mijares recalled that she demanded that they “be ‘thrown away, some way far from my sight.’

Ferdinand’s mother, Josefa, with the help of some of Ferdinand’s trusted lieutenants, made sure that Carmen Ortega remained out of Imelda’s way.

Later on, Marcos propagandists would outright lie to erase Carmen and her children from Ferdinand and Imelda’s love story. But whatever stories they have spun, Imelda cannot unlearn what she knew.

Carmen’s prior presence in the San Juan house may have further rankled Imelda when Ferdinand barred her from making any changes in how the house was put together. Some credit it to Ferdinand’s superstition. He found the house lucky as it was.

However, Imelda’s anger over Carmen Ortega did not lead her to walk out of the marriage. Instead, she tried to find ways to keep her husband for good. Citing again Loreto Ramos, Francia wrote that Imelda “once confided to her [Ramos] about her discovery regarding Ferdinand’s common-law wife, Carmen, and his children by her. Imelda said she made a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Fatima in [Portugal] and prayed that she be quickly blessed with a child by Ferdinand to keep him from roving.”

Ferdinand’s relationship with Carmen Ortega was just one of the secrets that Imelda had to bear in the Ortega house. As a politician’s wife, Imelda not only had to learn the ropes of how to deal with the parade of supplicants asking for various favors at all hours of the day from Ferdinand (then three-term congressman of Ilocos Norte). She would also eventually learn the cost of the favors that Ferdinand traded in.

Their fabled eleven-day whirlwind courtship—more of “an amorous bulldozing” for James Hamilton-Paterson in America’s Boy (1999)—did not prepare Imelda for her husband’s persistent plotting to further his political career. An effort that drove Imelda to the point of a mental breakdown two years into their marriage.

Marcoses at Ortega before they moved to Malacañang in 1965. Source: Kerima Polotan, Imelda Romualdez Marcos: A Biography. New York and Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1969.

Francia portrayed Imelda as being trapped. “She could have no peace in her house. Ortega was so packed with callers that at times she could entertain her own friends only in her bedroom. Moreover, Ferdinand, who had hounded her so, was now emphatic about wanting her to change into a sophisticated urbanite. It was quite a crash course Imelda had undertaken. She was being obliged to change drastically from her old Tacloban self.”

And this from a man who betrayed her right at the start of their marriage. The whole house was proof of that deceit.

For Hamilton-Paterson, Imelda’s effort to step up, “far from restoring her branch of the family to public esteem, looked like guaranteeing its enduring status as faintly pariah.” And all this because of her husband. “For all his wealth and growing power, he was revealed as indelibly provincial, the exemplar of rough-and-ready Ilocano politics of the variety she must have heard a lifetime of Romualdezes openly disdaining,” he wrote.

Yet Imelda, on her own, managed to set aside the disdain of others. To cure her afflictions, the doctors advised Imelda to practice auto-suggestion. In Kerima Polotan’s 1969 biography of Imelda, Imelda just had an epiphany one day. “Suggestion had become fact. She told herself she was lucky, and she was—she had the love of a good husband, the affection of fine children, youth, beauty, comfort, friends, and the saving perception to regard all these as opportunities to help others as well as Ferdinand.”

“Having accepted the terms of her kind of life,” Polotan continued, “she never again flinched or took a step backward . . . The headaches stopped forever, the vague pains disappeared, and the double vision fused to become a single, concentrated look on the possible heights her husband’s career might take.”

But, of course, the wealth Ferdinand threw her way, helped Imelda find joy. As recounted by Francia, her mother once visited Imelda and in the course of the visit “Imelda spread out her jewelry for her viewing. Auntie Meldy said, ‘You see, Amy, whenever I’m depressed, I spread my jewelry out on my bed; it cheers me up quickly’.”

Imelda’s mania for jewelry-induced happiness will soon plunder a nation’s wealth. But that will come later. Until then, there was no better vantage point from which to survey her and Ferdinand’s imminent future than from 204 Ortega Street. From there, their next stop would be Malacañang. And as revealed by Frederick King Poole and Max Vanzi in Revolution in the Philippines (1984), in that house not only did Imelda practice how to be first lady, she also imagined how to be queen.

“Back in 1965, on the night Marcos won the election that made him President, Presy Lopez, later Psinakis, was present at their home. She came upon Imelda in front of a mirror. The new First Lady was watching herself make stiff motions of greeting with her right arm. ‘How does she do it?’ Imelda wanted to know. ‘How does the Queen of England wave?’”

FERDINAND BUYS A HOUSE

“His sprawling bungalow with its magnificent gardens in smart suburban San Juan on Ortega Street was a showcase of his success.” That was how Carmen Navarro Pedrosa, in The Rise and Fall of Imelda Marcos (1987), regarded Marcos’s place in San Juan.

But not before qualifying the roots of such success. “Marcos’s reputation in knowledgeable political circles was that of a hustler. Although he carefully nurtured a scholarly and statesmanlike image, it was no secret that he sponsored avaricious Chinese businessmen in Congress, and he was known there as a wheeler-dealer. Moreover, as a representative of the Solid North, where money and violence ruled, his capacity for ruthlessness was well-known.”

A bit of hustling does appear to have attended the way Ferdinand bought his home in San Juan.

Portion of the Deed of Sale of 204 Ortega to Ferdinand Marcos, August 1951 (from digitized PCGG files)

Based on documents seized from Malacañang after the 1986 EDSA Revolution, Ferdinand bought the spacious bungalow and the sprawling lot in San Juan on August 14, 1951 from a Luis P. Arnaiz. Covered by two titles, the almost 1,600 sq. m. property cost the thirty-three year-old lawyer and lawmaker PHP 50,000.00 (about PHP 12.5 million today). According to a memorandum listing his income, assets, and liabilities as of 1951 which was given to the Bureau of Internal Revenue to contest a claim made in 1953 that he owed the state nearly PHP 100,000.00 in taxes and penalties, Marcos was able to buy the San Juan property—as well as a house and farmland in Batac, Ilocos Norte, for about PHP 20,000.00 and PHP 2,000.00, respectively—through a number of loans in addition to his earnings. His stated income for 1951 was PHP 71,800.00—nearly nine times more than his stated income in 1949, the year he first became an elected official.

In a transcript of a statement taken from then Congressman Ferdinand Marcos in 1955, the future president said, “In 1950, I began negotiating for the purchase of my present residence in San Juan, including [the] lot. I had so many rivals then on this property, hence, in anticipation of an eventual agreement with the owner on the matter, I had to borrow money in order that I would have ready funds.” Specifically, he borrowed PHP 35,000.00 from Pablo Floro and PHP 15,000.00 from Alfredo Montelibano. The funds were given to him in cash, and he kept them in an heirloom safe at home instead of depositing them in a bank. Apparently the loans were not secured; “My friends trust me,” said Marcos.

The deal to buy the property was not completed in 1950, however, so, according to Marcos, he used the PHP 50,000 “for other purposes.” The following year, Marcos contracted a further PHP 46,000.00 in liabilities: a chattel mortgage loan of PHP 33,000.00, as well as a PHP 13,000.00 debt to the Philippine Trust Company, which was the balance of a mortgage loan taken out by Arnaiz against the San Juan property that Marcos had assumed. By December 31, 1951, as per his own declaration, his total indebtedness amounted to almost PHP 130,000.00.

Copy of a letter from Ferdinand Marcos to the manager of the Manila Metropolitan Water District right after buying his house in San Juan (from digitized PCGG files)

IMELDA MAKES A HOME

According to Ferdinand’s profile in the 1967 Philippine Officials Review, “Imelda Romualdez, a great beauty from the well-known Romualdez family in the province of Leyte, brought to 204 Ortega Street, San Juan, Rizal on May 1, 1954, Youth, Grace, Happiness, and many years later, offered her husband the laughter of three well-disciplined children—Imee, Bongbong and Irene.”

According to Hartzell Spence, in Ferdinand’s 1964 biography, For Every Tear a Victory, a month after moving in, she joined her husband on a “long honeymoon” that took them from Hong Kong to North America—intercut by Ferdinand’s official functions abroad. They were back on Ortega Street by early 1955 at the latest.

Soon after settling back into their San Juan home, Imelda became pregnant with her firstborn, Imee. Pedrosa, among others, state that 204 Ortega also started to regularly feature Imelda’s brothers and sisters, whom Ferdinand treated like his own siblings. Imelda also brought her father, Vicente Orestes, to her house in an attempt to save his life from late-stage cancer. However, soon after arriving in Manila, in September 1955, Vicente died at his daughter’s house, where his wake was then held.

Besides housing a growing (extended) family, 204 Ortega was also a commercial address. Among the files taken from Malacañang after EDSA are income tax returns for a Lammin Mining Company, office address at 204 Ortega, with Imelda Romualdez-Marcos listed as president. None of the ITRs from 1958 to 1961 show that the company had any income. Other documents show that Imelda found herself holding shares of stock (e.g., in the Steel Tubing and Rolling Mills Company) after contracting marriage.

Even with their real properties and their stocks, they were not millionaires, based on Ferdinand’s official declarations. According to his Statement of Assets and Liabilities filed on January 31, 1962, his income at that time totaled PHP 118,917.23—PHP 7,200.00 of which came from his salary as senator, and PHP 100,000.00 from legal fees. But he also had notable liabilities, including a considerable loan from the Government Service Insurance System. Based on his SAL, his net worth at the start of 1962 was less than PHP 100,000.00.

CAMPAIGN/ DROP-OFF HEADQUARTERS

The Ortega house was Ferdinand’s national campaign headquarters. It often continues to function as such for his heirs to this day. It was where campaign strategies were discussed and political connections were strengthened. According to Pedrosa soon after they were married, “[describing] the house to his new bride, [Ferdinand] said, ‘It is made for entertaining.’” Indeed, those writing about how the house was in the 1950s and the 1960s note how unceasingly busy it was, with people—and money—coming in and out of it at all hours.

Spence noted that after becoming Mrs. Marcos, Imelda took upon herself “the burden of 4,000 ritual kinships”—kumpadres and kumadres, which necessarily meant inaanaks—that were mostly “acquired by her husband politically.” Spence stated that Senator Marcos’s wife oversaw a household that saw 150 visitors a day, which supposedly meant the daily preparation of “60 breakfasts, 250 lunches, and 30 dinners.” Imelda’s stay-in staff numbered 16, a little under half of the household staff she commanded. If this is true, then the expense for maintaining these connections and entertaining callers would have been immense.

As much as Ferdinand was spending, however, he was apparently also accumulating a presidential campaign war chest. According to Rafael Salas, head of Marcos’s 1965 presidential campaign, in his biography written by Nick Joaquin, while operating out of 204 Ortega, “Marcos came into the fight with money of his own. He had been preparing to run for President for years and had accumulated what I estimated to be some fifteen million pesos for the campaign.” If true, given his stated income vis-a-vis his expenditures and debts, it is puzzling how Ferdinand was able to accumulate PHP 15,000,000.00 from his publicly stated sources of revenue.

A strange and true answer was: Ferdinand and Imelda hid their loot under their bed. Imelda had no qualms showing the sacksful of money they had to close relatives. Six years into her marriage to Ferdinand, then a first-term senator, Imelda was able to say, “Money doesn’t mean much to me anymore.” And: “Our money comes in sacks. I’m tired of counting money.” Imelda made these remarks to her cousin, Loreto Ramos, Francia cited Ramos in her book.

Salas claimed that Ferdinand initially used his own (secret) money during the campaign because pledges did not immediately come through. However, “[as] the campaign drew to a climax, the businessmen started to smell a Marcos victory and began contributing generously to his campaign . . . so that he came out richer in the end.”

Indeed, according to then Supreme Court Justice Renato Corona, in Republic v. Sandiganbayan (July 15, 2003), Ferdinand only reported an income of PHP 16,408,442 from 1965 to 1984. Of that, PHP 11.1 million was supposedly income from Ferdinand’s legal practice, of which PHP 10.6 million were purportedly received only between 1967 to 1984, when he had already been barred from practicing his profession. Corona noted that Marcos never claimed that he had any receivables from any client in his 1965 ITR, and that his stated net worth by December 1965 was only PHP 120,000.00—more or less the same as his declared net worth in 1961-62. According to Corona, “[the] joint income tax returns of [Ferdinand] and Imelda cannot, therefore, conceal the skeletons of their kleptocracy.”

TO MALACAÑANG AND BACK

Sometime after the Marcoses had already moved into Malacañang, the portion of Ortega Street fronting the Marcos house was renamed after Ferdinand’s father. Throughout their overextended stay in the presidential palace, the Marcoses did not forget to take care of their San Juan home. Among the files in the hands of the PCGG, one can find evidence of renovation costs for 204 Mariano Marcos amounting to almost PHP 200,000.00 in 1974.

Yet when Imelda returned to the Philippines in November 1991, with Ferdinand dead and their exile ended, she stayed at a hotel. A decision regarding an electoral case filed against her in 1995 said the house “was in a state of disrepair, having been previously looted by vandals.” She lived in various places in Makati for about a year, but in her certificate of candidacy for president in 1992, she stated that she was a resident of San Juan.

By that time, numerous properties of the Marcoses had been sequestered by the PCGG. According to an Associated Press article in the Manila Standard on May 22, 1992, the PCGG had repeatedly stated that the “house in Ortega, San Juan” had never been sequestered; it was one of the few assets Ferdinand clearly bought before he became engaged in presidential plunder. If it was looted—Arturo Aruiza, in Ferdinand Marcos: Malacañang to Makiki claimed that even the washbowls were taken—it was not by government order.

Statement of Assets and Liabilities as of January 1962 of then Senator Ferdinand E. Marcos (from digitized PCGG files)

A HOUSE OF SECRETS AND LIES

While on hiatus from politics in 1998, Imelda let the late Christine Herrera of the Philippine Daily Inquirer into her homes for several weeks for a series of interviews. These were the main source for a series of articles in the Inquirer in December 1998. In the first article, Imelda was quoted as saying, “We practically own everything in the Philippines, from electricity, telecommunications, airline, banking, beer and tobacco, newspaper publishing, television stations, shipping, oil and mining, hotels and beach resorts, down to coconut milling, small farms, real estate and insurance.” She asserted that she would reclaim these from the Marcos cronies. The Marcoses have not yet succeeded in this effort.

Imelda told Herrera that her husband was able to acquire all that wealth through “secret gold trading.” She said that her husband had amassed 4,000 tons of gold, showing Herrera a “three-inch thick document” in support of her claim. Herrera noted that in “several interviews, the [Inquirer] found Ms. Marcos’ aides and lawyers busy sorting out papers from a room full of documents at the Marcos ancestral home in San Juan…to prepare the Marcos cases against the government and the cronies.”

This was likely the beginning of the “evidence room” in the San Juan house—actually Ferdinand’s former gym—where Imelda would take interviewers from local newscasters like Mel Tiangco to foreign documentary filmmakers like Lauren Greenfield (The Kingmaker). Featured there are the documents presented during her racketeering trial in New York.

Imelda is hardly shy when showing her documents, even though some of them, especially the purported gold certificates, have been found to be spurious. Then Bangko Sentral Governor Gabriel Singson, in an Inquirer article published in December 1998, described Imelda’s claims as “unbelievable.” Another BSP official noted that if what Imelda was saying was true, then the late president “violated the foreign exchange controls” by concealing his gold trading. In any case, Imelda “failed to show other documents proving that her husband was an active buyer and seller of gold.”

Still, Imelda’s doubtful documents have become a staple of recorded tours of 204 Mariano Marcos. Photographs and footage of such tours show that she also kept on display the fake Philippine Collegian cover showing Ferdinand’s fake bar exam results and portraits of Ferdinand and Imelda in regal garb.

While this shrine to Marcos glory has never been sequestered, the Marcoses have at least twice nearly lost the house to satisfy judgments against them. It appears, however, that to this day, the Marcoses retain ownership of their “ancestral house” in San Juan.

At the very least, the San Juan house has yielded fifteen paintings seized in 2014. In a December 2019 Sandiganbayan partial summary judgment, these and hundreds of other artworks worth USD 24.3 million in total—USD 24 million more than the incomes of Ferdinand and Imelda throughout the Marcos presidency—were declared ill-gotten.

That judgment was one of two recent issuances by the Sandiganbayan against the Marcoses. The other one is Imelda’s criminal conviction for seven counts of graft, for which she has posted bail and filed an appeal. It was promulgated on November 9, 2018. She was absent when the decision was read, purportedly because she was, per her counsel, indisposed. That night, at 204 Mariano Marcos, she was at her daughter Imee’s birthday party, which was attended by former presidents Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and Joseph Estrada, Solicitor General Jose Calida, and Davao City mayor Sara Duterte.

In sum, 204 Ortega, now Mariano Marcos, is truly historical. It is linked to a former flame of Ferdinand who has been all but erased from his official biographies. It is from here that Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos launched their plunderous conjugal dictatorship, time and time again proven by the courts. It plays a role in maintaining Marcos myths to this day. Are these to be mentioned in San Juan’s historical trail?