Month: October 2024

Originally published by Vera Files on October 24, 2024

There she was again, wrapped in a red shirt emblazoned with the Kabataang Barangay (KB) logo.

Last October 10, 2024, Sen. Imee Marcos spoke with the media for more than an hour in a forum. She was asked questions mainly about her efforts to get reelected to the Senate and the work she is doing there. No one remarked on why she was wearing that shirt. By now, it has become a part of her political brand: the eternal head of Kabataang Barangay, or KB.

But why was Imee in Kabataang Barangay in the first place?

The last time somebody questioned Imee’s association and leadership of the Kabataang Barangay, that person was kidnapped, tortured, and killed by Imee’s security personnel.

Archimedes Trajano

Archimedes Trajano was a 21-year-old engineering student at the Mapua Institute of Technology (now Mapua University). On August 31, 1977, in a forum supposedly geared toward organizing “school-based Kabataang Barangays,” and with Imee present as head of the Kabataang Barangay, Trajano asked why Imee had to be the person who wielded such power.

This prompted Imee’s bodyguards to drag Trajano away. Imee’s thugs were military intelligence personnel under the command of Gen. Fabian Ver, then director-general of the National Intelligence Security Authority. Ver was Imee’s distant uncle. He was a cousin of her father, the dictator, President Ferdinand E. Marcos.

Trajano “was taken to the presidential palace for interrogation under torture.” This was what Trajano’s mother, Agapita, told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser on March 23, 1986. “Trajano was tortured from 12 to 36 hours.” This was what a pathologist testified before the court, as reported by the Honolulu Star-Bulletin on March 26, 1991. Trajano was later found dead in his boarding house; he sustained multiple fractures and a crushed skull.

One is hard-pressed to find extant news articles regarding his death published around the time that it happened. The only one easily accessible today is in the digitized version of a Singaporean daily. The Sunday edition of the Singapore daily New Nation carried an Agence-France Presse story, dated September 4, 1977, headlined “Student Kills Family of Three,” which cited claims made by the police that Trajano inexplicably killed his neighbors and, inexplicably still, “fell to his death from a third floor ledge while apparently trying to escape.” The article noted that Trajano was the same student who was “picked up” for questioning “for creating a disturbance during a recent public rally in Manila where President Marcos’ eldest daughter, Imee, was guest speaker.”

Agapita Trajano recalled that “government newspapers reported that her son ‘ran amok’.” But she was told a different story: that her son was “in a dormitory fight.” Both she did not believe. For her, the three other people killed in the boarding house were witnesses to what Imee’s men actually did to her son. On September 2, 1977 Agapita retrieved her son’s mutilated body in a Manila funeral parlor.

On March 20, 1986, Agapita filed a civil case in Hawaii against Ferdinand Sr. and Imee. Both Agapita, as an immigrant, and the Marcoses, as exiles, happened to be in that US state then. Evading an earlier federal grand jury subpoena in Virginia, Imee “left the United States just after the Marcoses arrived in Honolulu in February 1986.” Using a fake Bolivian passport, she and her family fled to Morocco, then to Europe. She ignored the Trajano case until a judgment was entered and she was cited as being in default. On appeal, Imee, through her lawyers in the US moved for the dismissal of the case. She lost the appeal in the federal court.

The court found that Trajano was “kidnapped, interrogated, and tortured to death by military intelligence personnel” who were acting under the authority of Ferdinand Sr., Imee, and Fabian Ver. Given the facts as appreciated by the court, the claim that Trajano died after running away from the scene of a crime was evidently a cover-up. Imee was held liable for damages amounting to USD 4.1 million, but due to certain maneuverings, she never paid a cent to Trajano’s mother.

Such is how Imee and the KB are remembered among victims of human rights violations during the Marcos dictatorship. Imee would rather we remember her time as KB head much more fondly, though obscuring precisely when and how she became chair of the youth organization. As with many things in her life of autocratic privilege, Imee’s leadership of Kabataang Barangay was a consolation bequeathed to her by her parent’s conjugal dictatorship.

There is an early profile of Imee in the September 17, 1971 issue of the Asia-Philippines Leader. At 15, Imee claimed that “she will never run for any political post in the future.” She was nevertheless opinionated regarding the decisions of her father. She agreed with her father’s suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus in the wake of the August 21, 1971 Plaza Miranda bombing. It was the “last straw,” she said, further stating that the “suspension had long been coming.” In a September 21, 1971 letter to Imee, Ferdinand Sr. called her as his “sweet adorable scramble-brained eldest daughter who claims the temperament of a prima donna and the objectivity of an Oxford Don.”

According to the article, Imee was then in the “5th Form (equivalent to [Philippine] fourth year high school) at the Convent of the Holy Child Jesus in Old Palace, Mayfield, Sussex, England.” A little over a year after that article came out, the Philippines was placed under martial law. Imee was still abroad, a student at the Santa Catalina School in Monterey, California. She later transferred to the International School in Makati and graduated on May 11, 1973 with her father as the commencement speaker. In September 1973, she was enrolled at Princeton University.

Imee failed all of her courses in Princeton

Her ascent toward becoming a well-credentialed daughter of a dictator, supposedly with no political ambitions, hit a snag in mid-1976. In his June 16, 1976 diary entry, Ferdinand Sr. said, “Imee arrives tomorrow [from Princeton.] We have a problem with her as she has lost interest in her studies in Princeton.” Indeed, based on a letter from Paolo Cucchi, assistant dean of the College, West College, Princeton University, dated June 11, 1976, Imee failed all of her courses during the 1976 spring term.

We may send her to Peking,” Ferdinand Sr.’s diary entry continued; “The Chinese will think we are trying to get into their good graces. But she will be there when Mao dies and a violent factional conflict develops.” She was indeed sent to China, but about a year later, after Mao Tse-tung had died. She left for China on June 21, 1977 and returned to Manila on July 18, 1977. Afterward, she was briefly enrolled in the University of the Philippines (UP) as a non-degree student, acted in local theater productions, and, most importantly, given her first public position: a leader in the KB. Oddly, in a list prepared by the Office of the President of KB members who went to China for the study tour, Imee was not even identified as an officer of the organization.

Overage for KB

Imee’s official biography claims that she chaired the KB from 1975 to 1986. She did not. The KB was indeed established on April 15, 1975, via Presidential Decree 684. The first KB elections were held on May 1, 1975. Those eligible to be part of the organization “shall be at least fifteen years of age or over but less than eighteen.” Imee was then 19 years old, Bongbong was 17.

Imee was not associated with the KB prior to her return from abroad in 1976, nor was she immediately made one of its leaders. Ferdinand Sr. may have even been considering another political heir to rule over KB. On July 20, 1975, in a leadership training graduation of around 800 Kabataang Barangay members in Mt. Makiling, Ferdinand Sr. spoke of how “the New Society will be handed down as a noble legacy to the young” through the Kabataang Barangay. Bongbong, yet to start his failed attempts to obtain a Philosophy, Politics, and Economics degree in Oxford, was the one with him.

As Imee was failing in Princeton University and slouching towards Malacañang, the first President Marcos issued Presidential Decree 935 on May 15, 1976. It suspended the age limit (below 18) of members in youth organizations “to allow the Kabataang Barangay officers to continue in office.”

And then on February 28, 1977, Imee’s father, as a dictator ruling by decree, issued Presidential Decree 1102 specifying that only those “twenty-one years of age or less” can be a member of the Kabataang Barangay. Imee was then 21 years, 3 months, and 16 days old. (Note that Ferdinand Sr. also enacted Batas Pambansa 52 in 1979, lowering the age requirement from 23 to 21 for local candidates to accommodate Bongbong’s ascendance to the vice-governorship in Ilocos Norte on January 4, 1980)

But there remained nagging questions on Imee’s KB takeover. From which barangay was Imee a member of KB of and from which KB council was she elected to? Which municipal or city federation voted for her to lead the provincial federation? Which provincial federations voted for her to lead the regional federation? Which regional federations voted her into the national one and finally who voted her into office as KB’s national chair? If you have a father as dictator, such questions are superfluities.

An article in the November 25, 1976 issue of the Philippine Collegian noted that Imee was in UP partly “to observe the Kabataang Barangay unit [there],” but did not refer to her as a KB leader. The article quoted Imee as saying that she was unhappy about “‘many things’” regarding the implementation of martial law, such as “the state of civil liberties, the treatment of labor strikes, and the muzzled press.” If that made her sound like a critic of her father’s rule, that is precisely how she wanted to appear; “My relations with the President is surprisingly frank, verging on rudeness. My father once said, referring to me, that the greatest subversive is in Malacañang.”

Imee as KB national chairman?

The supposed subversive was formally given a role in the KB sometime in 1977. A 1978 UNESCO working paper on the KB by Dr. Wilfredo Villacorta—who was with Imee and the KB leaders during their China sojourn—claimed that after she “involved herself more actively in the movement,” Imee “officially became [KB’s] national chairman” in 1977. Villacorta also noted that KB, which was under the Ministry of Local Government and Community Development, then became a body under the Office of the President. Another source, a profile of Imee in The Straits Times, published on June 5, 1977, notes that her involvement in the KB, “of which she is currently national chairman, has been recent.” “Asked how she became involved with the movement…[Imee said]: ‘My father thinks very highly of the KB. He used to keep telling me about their wonderful achievements….If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. So there I am.”

A less flippant version of Imee’s rise within KB is told in the pages of We Forum, particularly its June 16-30, 1977 issue. Written by Chuchay Molina, the article titled “Who is really running the Kabataang Barangay?” noted that Imee had referred to herself as a “‘mascot’” of the KB, an “‘honorary everything,’” not the KB’s national chairman. But the article also noted that at that time, the national chairmanship of the KB was vacant, since the elected national chairman had resigned in February 1977, and its national vice-chairman had been suspended. Imee was seemingly the de facto head of the organization.

A declassified US Department of State cable, dated September 20, 1977, subject: “Weekly Status Report – Philippines,” makes reference to a “young Filipino who was national president of the Kabataang Barangay (youth organization) until supplanted by Imee Marcos.” According to Molina’s 1977 We Forum article, the KB national chairman who resigned earlier that year was Bernardo Tensuan.

Molina wrote a follow-up article, “Who’s Really Running the KB?—Part II,” published in the May 6-12 issue of We Forum. She noted that a year after her last KB article, and shortly after the April 1978 Interim Batasang Pambansa elections, which included the election of youth representatives, Tensuan told her that “since he resigned last February 14, 1977, there has been no recognized chairman in his stead.” Tensuan claimed that the national KB was run by its National Secretariat (NASEC), which Molina noted was run by “much, much older coordinators,” and that the “NASEC” was only supposed to be an implementing body. In his paper, Villacorta noted that the Secretariat supports the regional KB federations and “grass-root membership.”

KB Foundation, not KB

Reliable sources show clearly why it has never been entirely factual to state that Imee was the chairman of the KB national organization—she chaired what was called the Kabataang Barangay Foundation, Inc. The decree creating the KB does not mention a KB Foundation. The first statute to define the role of the foundation, in relation to what was called the Pambansang Katipunan ng mga Kabataang Barangay ng Pilipinas or PKKB, was PD no. 1191, enacted on September 1, 1977. The decree gave some measure of autonomy to the PKKB, as the earlier KB-related decrees charged the Secretary of Local Government and Community Development to “promulgate such rules and regulations as may deemed necessary to effectively implement the provisions [of PD no. 684].” Whereas the PKKB chairman was elected from among the presidents of regional KB federations, the law was silent on the selection of the KB Foundation’s Board of Trustees. The foundation released and administered the funds annually appropriated for the PKKB. Effectively, as KB Foundation chair, Imee had the power of the purse over the most significant source of KB funding.

And as noted by Jose L. Burgos Jr. in his “Now and Then” column in the March 1, 1986 issue of Ang Pahayang Malaya, Imee was indeed her parents’ daughter. “I am not a bit surprised that the Marcos children were able to accumulate wealth of their own during the regime. I remember that early during the martial years, after the Kabataang Barangay [Barangay Youth] had been established, then Imee Marcos used to collect money from the cities and towns of Metro Manila by the millions. Quezon City, Manila, Makati and perhaps Caloocan and Pasay used to give her checks for millions of pesos which were never accounted for. I used to see some of those checks given her by Quezon City.”

Marcos Sr. expanded the roles of his daughter’s KB Foundation via executive orders. For instance, EO no. 887, s. 1983 made Imee, as chairman of the KB Foundation, the head of the Philippine Commission for the International Youth Year. That EO amended an earlier one, EO no. 795, s. 1982, which named “the Chairman of the Kabataang Barangay”—without “Foundation”—as head of the subject commission. A 1981 order, EO no. 734, tasked the KB Foundation to handle the release of government funds for the Kilusan sa Kabuhayan at Kaunlaran ng Kabataan program.

In the late 1970s until the early 1980s, despite her command of the KB, Imee continued to claim that she did not want to follow in her father and mother’s footsteps. Her June 1977 Straits Times profile quoted her as saying, “My ambition is everywhere except in politics. I think I want to be a lawyer of sorts when I return to Princeton in September.” She did return to Princeton in September 1977, but went home in 1979 without having completed a bachelor’s degree.

Her Princeton failure had no effect on her leadership of the KB (Foundation). She became synonymous with KB, even when certain leaders of the movement appeared opposed to certain government thrusts. A burning issue in 1978-1979 was the extension of the US-Philippines Military Bases Agreement. Imee was among the signatories of an August 1978 open letter from the KB against the renewal of the agreement. According to news accounts, the letter included lines such as, “[these] military bases are clear evidence of our being American stooges because they represent foreign interests.”

According to a declassified US Department of State cable, dated August 9, 1978, US Ambassador Richard Murphy talked to Marcos about the letter. Marcos said that he “asked his daughter…what she thought she was doing signing such a letter, asserting that he had been unaware it was in works. Imee replied that she had signed the letter, which she recognized reflected [the] sentiment of [the] radical wing of KB on bases, because in her opinion it was better to hold KB together and keep radicals within [the] organization rather than drive them to agitate outside of KB.”

Using KB as leverage in bases negotiation with U.S.

It was all for show though and a seeming bad one at that. Ross Marley, an associate professor of political science at Arkansas State University, writing for the journal Pilipinas in 1985 pointed out what it was all for. “Marcos is also capable of flirting with the U.S.S.R., but as Filipinos say, it is only palabas (for show), as when he told reporters that if the U.S. Congress didn’t want to pay the rent he was asking for the air and naval bases, he might offer them to the Soviets. American diplomats understand that this is only for the newspapers. Another ploy was to have daughter Imee lead the Kabataang Barangay youth corps in a demonstration against the presence of the bases, an exercise which did little to move the American negotiators or to legitimize the KB in the eyes of Filipino nationalists. The campaign was soon dropped.” When the new basing agreement was signed in Malacañang on January 7, 1979, who else was standing behind President Marcos as he inked the pact but the “subversive,” Imee.

A profile of Imee, written by Marra PL. Lanot for the March 7, 1982 issue of Philippine Panorama, continued to call her “head of KB,” a role for which she “rode helicopters and visited schools and youth centers in white T-shirt and blue jeans, her Farrah Fawcett hair flying in the wind.” The piece also mentioned that she was studying law in the University of the Philippines and headed the Experimental Cinema of the Philippines. Despite her many hats and public visibility, she continued to claim that she would not be gunning for an elected position in the future. Lanot asked if she would she go into politics. In response, Imee said, “Well, that’s a bit redundant. I mean, being Marcos and all that sort of thing. Nakakaantok na.”

It might have been something to yawn about for Imee, but in her father’s machinations to never loosen their family’s grip on power, Imee was always a valued pawn.

The August 16, 1982 issue of the Official Gazette, in its “Official Weeks in Review” section, reported that on June 8, 1982, “President Marcos said he liked the idea of letting leaders of the Kabataang Barangay sit on rotation basis as observers in the executive committee which runs the government on a day-to-day-basis. The Kabataang Barangay, in its national congress held in Malacañang’s Maharlika Hall, had asked for permanent representation in the seven-man executive committee, proposing that KB Chairman Imee Marcos be the representative. The President replied that this could not be done because he would be accused of setting up a dynasty.”

Again, as with the US bases, it was all for show. As reported by Agence France-Presse, in an article that appeared in the the July 13, 1982 issue of the South China Morning Post, Imee was designated “a member with observer status of the country’s seven-member cabinet executive committee.” The article noted that the committee was meant to be a “‘collective successor’ should anything untoward [happen] to the President.” However, according to another SCMP article, in September 1982, Imelda said that Imee “resigned all her Government posts” in order to “finish her law studies.”

At the time, unknown to the public, Imee was pregnant. Seven months later, on April 9, 1983, she had her firstborn at Kapiolani Children’s Medical Center in Hawaii, Fernando Martin “Borgy” Marcos Manotoc. Imee married Tomas “Tommy” Manotoc in a civil ceremony in Arlington County, Virginia on December 4, 1981.

Fake graduation ceremony

Fifty days after giving birth, on May 29, 1983, a ceremony was staged to make it appear that Imee graduated from the UP College of Law. Imee did not and could not graduate from UP with a law degree. Having failed Princeton University, Imee has no college degree. Yet the UP College of Law allowed her in as a regular law student despite its supposed stringent admission requirements. The University of the Philippines, however, could not simply gloss over this glaring deficiency and grant her a law degree in the end.

In October 1982, Marcos issued another KB-related order, EO no. 841, which created (or perhaps formalized or redefined the roles of) a Kabataang Barangay National Secretariat, intended to “serve as the staff support” for the PKKB. The KB secretariat was headed by an “Executive Director who shall be appointed by the President of the Philippines”; Imee was not the secretariat’s director, but she continued to be head of the KB Foundation, the one position she is known to have never relinquished.

Nurturing patronage politics

According to an article by Margarita Logarta, which appeared in the October 26, 1983 issue of the magazine Who, the KB executive director was a Miles Millena. An Edward Chua of the KB National Executive Committee told Logarta that “Imee still heads the movements which includes the elderly leaders in the community who could support the organization in the attainment of our objectives.” Roger Peyuan, then a member of parliament and a former KB federation president, added, “[Imee] has taken the cudgels many times in our behalf. She would personally write officials asking that our proposals be granted or to cure some anomaly.” It thus seemed that Logarta was justified in calling Imee the KB’s “most tireless campaigner,” even if it remained difficult to show where she was exactly in the KB’s organizational structure.

Or viewed differently, like a fungal spore that latched on a moist, dark place, Imee, through the KB, spawned her own kingdom of petty corruption and patronage. Those that benefited from it, those who gained their leadership skills through the Kabataang Barangay, or even those who would like to look back on their KB days as days of youthful joy and camaraderie, these are the people that Imee hopes to still endlessly lure into voting her brand. The very same generation who thought that Imee and KB became one and the same—which clearly, they were not.

Of those who thought of Imee as KB boss during the dictatorship, many have gone on to hold prominent government positions. These include former Quezon City Mayor Herbert Bautista, current Defense Secretary Gilbert Teodoro, former University of the Philippines President Danilo Concepcion, and Marilyn Barua-Yap, recently appointed by Bongbong as ad interim chief of the Civil Service Commission. Next year, just before the elections, they will likely commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Kabataang Barangay, with their senate reelectionist “founding chair.”

Originally published by Vera Files on October 3, 2024

After hearing the harrowing story of a survivor during last month’s national summit on combating online sexual abuse and exploitation of children (OSAEC), a visibly-moved President Marcos said he could not help but shed a tear.

“Accompanying those tears that I just shed,” he said, “was a deep sense of shame because we have not done enough for the Philippines to now be considered the epicenter of—let us not shorten it into a clinical term, OSAEC—it is sexual abuse and exploitation of children.”

The president’s sense of shame should be deeper because his parents, former president Ferdinand Marcos Sr. and former first lady Imelda Marcos were the originators of sexual tourism in the country.

Burgeoning sex trade

In the 1970s, the Philippines had a population of around 40 million, of which, “20,000 [were] rest and recreation entertainers and the rest of the 300,000 hospitality girls, massage and bath attendants, performers in sex shows, hostesses and waitresses,” a third of whom worked in Metro Manila, Pennie Azarcon-de la Cruz wrote in Filipinas for Sale (1985).

These numbers were known because the Marcos government, through changes in the Labor Code and in the functions of the Bureau of Women and Minors, kept tab of those engaged in sex work. Hence the Marcos administration knew exactly what it was doing.

Azarcon-de la Cruz pointed out that, “despite the government’s reluctance to admit a burgeoning sex trade, a Manila ordinance requires these girls to submit to periodic health check-ups before they are issued government permits as employees of the hospitality industry. Hostesses, hospitality girls and massage attendants are required to secure the Mayor’s permit, NBI and police clearance, professional license and health certificate before they are allowed to work (Ordinance 2961 and 3000).”

The annual tourism receipts in the hundreds of millions of dollars hardly made a dent on the enormous debt that the government incurred in simultaneously building 14 luxury hotels that Marcos cronies benefitted from. The list of new resorts, golf courses, museums, and “beautification” projects was both for flaunting political patronage as it also became the record of the urban poor’s and the indigenous peoples’ dispossession and loss. Marcos’s reliance on the tourism industry for cash and legitimacy would later on invite fires and bombings from those opposing his regime.

This seamy past was brushed away during the Department of Tourism’s (DOT) 50th anniversary on June 27, 2023 at the Manila Hotel’s Tent City where Tourism Secretary Christina Frasco handed the president a “ginintuang pasasalamat at pagpupugay,” for his late father’s  “instrumental contributions to the Philippine tourism industry, primarily the creation of the Department of Tourism 50 years ago.”

For his part, the president affirmed in his speech his father’s vision in creating the DOT. “Indeed, the potential of the tourism industry as an economic pillar was well seen by my father when he established the Department of Tourism in 1973,” he said.

Joe Aspiras, father of Philippine tourism

As he continued his speech, Marcos ad-libbed to acknowledge “the family members of Manong Pepito, Joe Aspiras, who was the first secretary of tourism upon the creation of the department.” The only former DOT secretary that the president mentioned by name in his speech.

Aspiras served as Marcos’s tourism secretary (later minister, when Marcos shifted the form of government to partly parliamentary, semi-presidential in 1978) from the time that the DOT was established on May 11, 1973 until the Marcoses fled to Hawaii on February 25, 1986 as they evaded the People Power Revolt. At almost 13 years, he is the longest-serving DOT secretary. Before that, he was press secretary during Marcos’s first term as president (1965-69). Aspiras ran for office in 1969 and became the representative to Congress of La Union’s second district until 1972. He was also a member of the Interim Batasang Pambansa. After Marcos, he continued to represent La Union in Congress from 1987-1998. He died in 1999.

Given Frasco’s and Marcos’ lofty recollections, what did Aspiras and Marcos Sr. actually do for Philippine tourism during the martial law years? Was it something deserving of a plaque, “golden in tribute and gratitude”?

Narzalina Z. Lim, writing in Women on Fire (1997), recalled that she “used to march with my women friends past [the Ministry of Tourism] on T.M. Kalaw Street and Rizal Park to protest the organized sex tourism which flourished in the late Seventies and early Eighties, which was clearly condoned, if not encouraged, by the ministry.”

For Lim, the tourism ministry that Marcos Sr. formed, and Aspiras led, “was used by the Marcoses to window-dress the stench and corruption of their regime.” Lim would later serve as DOT secretary in the Aquino and Ramos administrations. She was not at the DOT’s 50th anniversary event.

When Marcos Sr. formed the DOT via Presidential Decree 189 on May 11, 1973, of the four whereas clauses, the reasons for the decree, three were on issues of administration and governance and one stands out which in due course would be the main concern of the DOT—it’s the whereas clause that is all about the money. There must be a DOT because “the tourist industry will represent an untapped resource base toward an accelerated socio-economic development of the Philippines.”

Gregorio Araneta II, commissioner of the pre-DOT Board of Travel and Tourist Industry, reported in the 1972 Fookien Times Yearbook that in 1971, there were 144, 321 visitors to the Philippines. “Americans have, as usual, been our No. 1 arrivals totalling 64, 740 . . . with the Japanese taking second place at 23, 539 arrivals. Ranking third are the Australians totaling 12, 415.”

Araneta attributed this dismal record to the Philippines’s negative image abroad, limited flights per week to Manila, and the high cost of airfare. For the first factor he attributed this to “peace and order, unfavorable publicity overseas, sensational reportage of crime, dirt and poverty, sanitation, garbage collection, bad state of roads, lack of information on the Philippines abroad due to budgetary limitations.”

It was as if the whole tourism industry was just waiting for Marcos’s martial law for it to take off, the same way that the martial law regime’s New Society needed tourism’s “Where Asia Wears A Smile” slogan to mask its depravities.

“What has happened since the declaration of martial law to stimulate tourism arrivals from 144,321 in 1971 to over one million in 1980,” Linda K. Richter argued in her book Land Reform and Tourism Development (1982), “simply cannot be explained as a response to artificially suppressed demand. Rather it reflects a political program of the utmost seriousness implemented with an almost cavalier disregard for the economic costs of such an endeavor. That tourism was chosen as one of the most important props of the new order is indicative of the imagination as well as the vanity of the New Society.”

One of the regime’s own publications, The Philippines (1976), said political program was translated into the following: “Hotel-room taxes have been abolished. Crimes against tourists are now tried by a military tribunal. An ‘open-skies’ policy allows airlines with reciprocal agreements with the Philippines to operate an unlimited number of flights to Manila. Visa requirements for a stay of up to two weeks have been lifted and special entry privileges now await visiting businessmen and investors.”

Dollars at the expense of reputation

A year into office as DOT secretary, Aspiras, wrote in the 1974 Fookien Times Yearbook that “the Philippine tourist industry today is in an unprecedented high state of stimulation, animated by a dramatic surge of growth in 1973 and keyed up even further by visible signs of a promising future . . . Measured in terms of visitor arrivals and their expenditures, last year’s increase was phenomenal. The 242,800 tourists who visited the Philippines in 1973 represented an increase of 46 percent over 1972—against an average annual growth rate of 10 percent in the preceding ten years . . . . In 1973 tourism ranked as the fourth largest dollar earner for the Philippines, next only to such traditional exports as logs and lumber, copper and sugar.”

At its peak in 1980, with one million annual visitors, tourism’s receipts for that year amounted to USD 420 million. It was third in terms of earning dollars for the country, the tourism ministry would claim.

But Aspiras himself provided a caveat in their computation. In his report in the 1979 Fookien Times Philippines Yearbook, he conceded that the Central Bank “calculates strictly on the basis of what goes through the banking system while the MOT bases its own estimate on the assumption that each tourist spends about $49 daily on average stay of eight days.”

Aspiras may not be wholly certain of how much money the tourism industry was making for the country, but whom to credit for such an appearance of success he was without doubt.

“[T]he active participation of President Marcos and the First Lady, Metro Manila Governor and Minister of Human Settlements Imelda Romualdez Marcos in world affairs gained for the country an international stature . . . The heavy influx of foreign visitors to the Philippines has become virtually the expression of acceptance and endorsement of the political, economic and social reforms brought about by martial law,” Aspiras wrote in the 1981 Fookien Times Philippines Yearbook.

To earn this much dollar and beckon this many tourist meant trading Filipino bodies for cash—and this Aspiras knew. Two years into his post as secretary of tourism, Aspiras had to battle the sordid reputation that Manila gained as the “flesh capital of the Orient.”

In a March 9, 1975 Associated Press (AP) report in the Hawaii Tribune-Herald, Aspiras, was quoted complaining about “malpractices in the hospitality industry,” by which he meant “‘free wheeling sex’ in some hotels and other tourist establishments.” If Aspiras would only have his way, he wanted to “change this growing negative image. It is time we emphasize the cultural, historical, scenic and other attractions aside from base pleasure.”

Because of Aspiras’s supposed displeasure, the police, from January to March 1975, “have rounded up 600 suspected prostitutes and pimps in the tourist belt.” The last raid “resulted in the arrest of 206 suspected call girls and their procurers.” The AP report noted that “in 1973, the first full year of martial law, only two girls were arrested on charges of prostitution.”

Proliferation of Japanese sex tours

The link between tourism and the flesh trade was made plain by the police. The AP report extensively cited Capt. Vicente G. Vinarao, then chief of Manila Police Special Operations Division. “Vinarao said pre-paid tours, which some local travel agencies negotiate with foreign partners, particularly Japanese, usually included ‘a night with a girl’.”

“He said under the arrangement, a tour agency would send about 50 tourists to a cocktail lounge. ‘There they pinpoint any girls they want. These girls are booked in the hotels as guests or friends of the tourists.”

“We have informants in hotels so we know who to pick up. But we usually arrest a girl when the tourist-customer is not around. We don’t want to embarrass our visitor. Oftentimes, we pick up a girl emerging unescorted in a hotel lobby in the early morning hours.”

Vinarao’s qualm in offending lecherous foreign tourists and the intermittent police action that it led to was characteristic of the ways the Marcos’s dictatorship condoned and profited from prostitution until it was no match to what by then had become mass sex tourism.

One particular incident showed clearly how complicit the tourism industry was in the sex trade.

Ikuo Anai of Reuters reported in the July 1, 1979 issue of the San Francisco Examiner: “The sex tour business achieved a new prominence in Japan after a respected national newspaper [Yomiuri Shimbun] published a report detailing a ‘sex auction’ at a Manila hotel [Ramada Hotel]. According to the paper about 200 Philippine ‘hospitality girls,’ each one wearing a number, were offered to 100 visiting Japanese at the price of $60 each.” The event involved dealers for the Japanese electronics company, Casio Computer.

Of the $60 price, “she gets a little more than $5 of the fee,” A. Lin Neumann penned in the February 1984 issue of Ms. magazine. The rest of the money was divvied up among the “club owner, the tour guides, and the tour operator, with a few dollars thrown in for police protection.”

A November 11, 1979 Associated Press story quoted a “former Philippine tourism ministry official,” that an estimated “2,000 prostitutes in Manila are catering solely to the Japanese.”

Japanese publishers that specialize in adult content, like Sanwa Publishing Co., came up with Tengoku Hyoryu (Drifting in Paradise). The subtitle tells all: “Guide for the Night Life of Nymphomaniac Filipinas.”

Additional numbers can be gleaned from an August 5, 1979 Times News Service report: “Travel agents offer packages at $300 to $400 for four-day excursions to Manila, which drew 172,000 Japanese visitors last year, of whom well over 80 percent were men. The overwhelming majority went ‘for pleasure,’ according to immigration bureau records, not business.”

“It is called baishun tsuaa,” Donald Kirk wrote in the November 4, 1979 issue of San Francisco Examiner. “Or a prostitution tour by Japanese travel agencies and is one of the most popular packages they offer. Almost any travel agent here will book a tourist for three to five days in Seoul, Taipei, Manila, Hong Kong or Bangkok for a fixed fee that includes an evening with an ‘escort’ hired to keep the customer satisfied for the rest of the night . . . Charges of ‘sexual imperialism’ often appear in the newspapers of Seoul and Manila, and government officials occasionally pledge to stop the more blatant forms of whoring. The fact is, however, that the bait of young flesh at prices a third or a quarter the going rate for similar services in Tokyo has done wonders for the tourist trade throughout the non-Communist countries of Asia.”

As Kirk had noted, the government mouthpiece in the censored press, like the Philippine Daily Express, would indeed pontificate against Japanese sex tours in Manila but would undercut such bluster with a remark that maybe the Japanese tourists should just pay more. In an excerpt of their editorial reprinted in The Pacific Daily News in its November 1, 1980 issue: “There is no denying that the country needs as many tourists as our facilities can accommodate. But if it means turning Manila into one sprawling sex haven for them, then a re-examination of our tourism policies is clearly imperative. While we howl over obscene billboards and lewd shows in some of our eateries, the tourist belt is being transformed into one big sex market where sexual favors are nightly sold, and for a pittance at that.”

Filipino and Japanese women jointly campaigned to stop sex tourism

It was the women, both Japanese and Filipino, who in solidarity campaigned to shame the Japanese men and the Japanese government to put an end to mass sex tourism.

“A Japanese government clamp-down on for-men-only, prostitution-pornography package tours to Southeast Asia has resulted in a drastic decline in the number of visitors to the Philippines,”

Andrew Horvat wrote for Southam News on June 29, 1981.

“Japanese tourists, whose numbers had increased from 22,000 in 1972 to 260,000 in last year, dropped 25 per cent in one peak month alone.”

As a consequence, Aspiras wrote in the 1982-83 Fookien Times Philippines Yearbook that “the Ministry of Tourism and the private sector in the industry saw it fit not to rely heavily on the Japanese market.” Despite the downturn, Aspiras noted that the “Japanese continued to dominate the number of tourists who came to the country in 1981 with 193,146 arrivals, chalking up a 10.57 per cent share of the aggregate market.”

The Japanese men who continued to come for their sexual gratification learned to skip Manila and went to other locales, like Cebu. Those who claimed to have clout with Marcos himself even tried building their own sex colony.

Plan for a nudist colony in Mindoro

The April 11-17, 1981 issue of the We Forum broke the news that the World Safari Club in Lubang Island in Mindoro, a hunters’ club exclusive to Japanese tourists, was planning to put up a nudist colony.

We Forum, quoting from a brochure in Japanese advertising the World Safari Club, reported that the club “was organized by . . . President Ryoichi Sasagawa at the request of President Marcos who is eager to promote tourism in the Philippines!” As profiled by the Central Intelligence Agency, Sasagawa was a convicted war criminal that managed to rehabilitate himself by becoming a “gambling (legal) czar, right-wing leader, political broker and a modern philanthropist.”

In its brochure, the World Safari club hinted at selling sex to its patrons, of it being able to provide “private companions,” which the Japanese tourists may decline if not to their liking.

A week later, in its April 18-24 issue, the We Forum’s frontpage headline was as forthright as it could be: “Jap group offers sex in wilderness.”

Citing an article in an unnamed Japanese newspaper, We Forum gave more details to what the World Safari Club was doing in Lubang Island. “The sex part is provided for by hospitality girls from Manila who are tagged along to Lubang Island in Mindoro, the hunting ground, by the hunter-members of the club.” And the would-be Japanese members need not even be an actual hunter. “Any person without a slight knowledge of handling guns can participate.”

As if the sex and the hunt were not enough, the article quoted by We Forum also appealed to the prospective member’s sense of history. “Six years ago, Kinshichiro Kozuka, [a] Japanese straggler was killed and Hiroo Onoda was found alive there. Now the same Lubang Island is converted into an island [for] killing animals and birds.”

The article was quick to add that the World Safari Club’s activities had the “full collaboration of the Philippines Government.”

Pedophile capital of the world

By the 1980’s, as stories of mass sex tourism faded from the foreign press, a new blight emerged. News reports identified the town of Pagsanjan in Laguna as the “pedophile capital of the world.”

In November 1983, the Australian police busted a pedophile ring in Melbourne, the Australian Pedophile Support Group. Among the illicit items confiscated from the group were “obscene pictures of Philippine children and discovered plans to bring Philippine boys to Australia,” William Branigin wrote in his December 29, 1983 Washington Post Service report.

A later report from the Australian newspaper The Age on August 22, 1985 indicated that the Australian police informed Philippine diplomatic officials in Melbourne that the pedophile group in Australia was “internationally linked with groups in Sweden, West Germany, the US and Canada.”

“Pagsanjan’s infamy is far flung.” Another report in The Age on March 30, 1985 noted that “paedophile journals throughout the world; journals like the Australian Support Group for Paedophiles newsletter, the French paedophile ‘Desert Patrol’, and its Dutch counterpart ‘Spartacus’,” were all carrying accounts of sexual exploitation of Pagsanjan’s children.

As a tourist site, the Marcos government promoted Pagsanjan for its falls and white-water rapids. But as The Age reported on March 30, 1985, the foreign tourists it hosted (500 on weekdays, 2000 on weekends, for a town with 29,000 inhabitants) “have come for another reason: Pagsanjan’s children.”

The Age reported in August 22, 1985 that “children can be procured for sex for $25 and girls as young as nine have been treated for herpes and other sexually transmitted diseases.”

Nigel Smith of The Age wrote on March 30, 1985: “[Child] prostitution is so widespread in Pagsanjan that it has become the town’s main industry. Its opponents estimate about 3000 children, mainly boys, are regularly sold for sex: a staggering proportion of the juvenile population. More than half the townspeople are dependent on the income generated by the traffic in young bodies that has dominated economic life there for more than a decade. Known locally as pom-poms, the paedophiles’ objectives, some as young as four years old.”

The Marcos government did try to combat child prostitution. When Australia handed it a list of known pedophiles, it promised to bar the entry to the Philippines of anyone on the list. It also enforced a ban on “unauthorized travel by minors who are not accompanied by parents or legal guardians,” William Branigin reported.

In general, the Marcos government simply wouldn’t want to be reminded of the problem. According to A. Lin Neumann, “a series on the phenomenon was slated to appear in a prominent Manila daily. It was killed, reportedly, after the First Lady made the editor aware of her displeasure with the first installment of the exposé.”

Sweeping under the rug a shameful past does not ennoble the present acts even when washed with tears.