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The Bongbong and Imelda Marcos deuterium dud
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Originally published by Vera Files on May 7, 2022.

If surveys on the fast-approaching elections hold, the Philippines will soon have a president who has difficulty discerning fact from pseudoscience — the way his mother also does.

On March 19, 2022, Martin Andanar, acting presidential spokesperson, asked Bongbong Marcos in an interview if he, like his mother, former first lady Imelda, “really believe[s] that there is deuterium in our country.”

This was his full reply:

Ah that, that’s not question, ep . . . people it’s been established that ah . . . especially, kasi ‘yung sa malalim, ah . . . nand’yan ‘yung Marianas Trench sa atin, nand’yan ‘yung sa . . . what—seven kilometers deep. Ah, that, that’s established that it, it belongs there—ah it belongs there—ah that it exists in those places. But it is something na, for, that, that, we will use for a hydrogen-based econ—ah energy economy. Ah . . . it will take time. Eh, for the future siguro p’wede nating tingnan nang mabuti ‘yan. Ito’y kasi ah . . . eh hydrogen is very clean, very green. Ah, ang ang ang ah . . . waste ng ng deuterium, pagka gumawa ka ng hydrogen, ginamit mo ‘yung hydrogen, ginamit mo ginawa mong fuel cell, ang lumalabas dyan, lang dyan is tubig. So walang, walang carbon ah . . . emissions ah . . . kaya’t malinis. But that’s for the future kasi it will require the same infrastructure that we now have for gasoline and for, ah . . . ano, for diesel, and for PNG, and LPG. All of these systems now took, what, over a hundred years to establish. Ah . . . kailangan magrere-adjust tayo. But I think because of the concerns with global warming, du’n ta . . . du’n talaga tayo papunta. At uhm . . . the time will come that we will start to shift to other alternative fuels, the greener fuels, and become a greener economy, we will have a greener system of energy. Nagsimula na, mula nung COP 26 na nagmeeting sa Edinburgh, na ang pinag—, binawasan ‘yung ah . . . pag ah . . . paggamit ng coal. Ang problema walang kapalit na renewable. Kaya tumaas ang presyo bigla. Kaya bumalik na naman ng kaunti dinagdagan na naman ng coal-fired, nga ga, ng kuryente na galing sa coal-fired at ah . . . kaya kailangan talaga natin babalansehin lahat ‘yan. That’s why deuterium is still very attractive ah . . . ah . . . attractive resource . . . ah para sa atin because hydrogen is, has been established, as a clean ah . . . as a clean alternative, a greener alternative to fossil fuels. So, yes, ah . . . ‘yung mother ko talaga malayo mag-ano ‘yan eh, malayo talaga mag-isip ‘yun, she’s very forward-thinking. So that’s, that was her thinking when she ah . . .  started to show an interest in the deuterium deposits that have been established around the Philippines.

Bongbong erred when he said that the Marianas Trench is seven kilometers deep (it’s 11.034), that COP 26 was held in Edinburgh (it was in Glasgow), or that the pursuit of a greener economy began with COP 26 (as quite clear in the name, it was the 26th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), and there is no mistaking his admiration for his “very forward-thinking” mother.

The son’s admiration for Imelda’s supposed prescience seemed to equal the intensity of his belief in deuterium. While a senator from 2010 until 2016, Bongbong filed two bills: Senate Bill 2593 on November 15, 2010  and SB 408 on July 3, 2013. These were identical bills for a Hydrogen Research and Development Center. Both died at the committee level.

The bills failed in their primary objective but succeeded in putting into the Senate’s legislative record, through the explanatory notes, this particular claim regarding deuterium: “Hydrogen is being processed from deuterium which is heavy water or hydrogen water without oxygen. This is obtained from the deep trenches of the world and the world’s largest deposit of deuterium is in the Philippines.”

Bongbong, while running for vice president in 2016, referenced SB 2593 in a press release  to burnish his credentials as an advocate of alternative energy sources.

Mother and son’s conviction that the country has access to unparalleled deuterium deposits goes against peer-reviewed scientific research.  At least one public historian, scientists, and journalists, have used that research to cure those who suffer from what is called “deuterium delirium,” but debunking does not always work in this age of disinformation.

THE SCAM BEGINS

When the first claims on deuterium deposits in the Philippines appeared in local media after the 1986 EDSA Revolution, the naturally-occurring hydrogen isotope was touted to be the resource that would solve the country’s economic woes.

At the time, everyone was aware of the enormous debt that the Marcoses burdened the country with before they were deposed. In a series of online articles about the deuterium hoax, the late historian Bob Couttie found an article released in August 1987 by the Media Mindanao News Service.

The article featured a local “scientist,” Cesar Escosa, who believed the “Philippine Deep in Surigao [del] Norte holds the largest deposit of deuterium.” He said this could be mined to “pay all [the country’s] foreign debts,” allow overseas Filipino workers to come home to “higher paying jobs,” and provide the world with an inexhaustible source of fuel. Escosa supposedly claimed that Washington and then president Cory Aquino was discussing the “deuterium project” as early as March 1986.

Escosa’s claims have not been backed by any reliable source.

Before he was declared a nuisance candidate when he tried to run for senator in 2001, Escosa said he was an accountant.  He was also declared a nuisance when he filed his certificate of candidacy in the 1998 presidential race.

But there were other deuterium believers, notably in the House of Representatives. In August 1987, Rep. Mario S. Ty of Surigao filed House Resolution No. 98 requesting the “Departments of Environment and Natural Resources and Other Concerned Agencies of the Government to Conduct Feasibility Studies and Surveys to Determine the Presence of Deuterium Off the Coast of Surigao in Aid of Legislation.” In the same month, Glenda Ecleo of Dinagat filed HB 483 establishing the Philippine Deuterium Development Authority. Not to be outdone, Ty filed a similar bill.

Both died at the committee level.

In response to “numerous inquiries,” likely stemming from Escosa’s claims and these legislative filings, the Nonconventional Resources Division (NCRD) of what was then called the Bureau of Energy Development, Office of Energy Affairs (OEA), released a backgrounder entitled “Deuterium Explained” in the April-September 1987 issue of the NCRD newsletter Energy Alternatives.

In fairly accessible language, the NCRD affirmed that deuterium, “in combination with hydrogen, is already a recognized source of energy,” and that hydrogen was at the time “already being used as fuel for rockets and spacecrafts” and was “a feasible alternative to hydrocarbon (oil) fuel.”

But the NCRD cited a number of caveats: deuterium extraction can be done through electrolysis, but the process is expensive; and nuclear fusion, the process through which deuterium can become a “tremendous source of energy,” was (and still is) “very much in the research phase.”

The NCRD also revealed what scientists had determined after the discovery of deuterium in 1931: all water has deuterium.

“Deuterium exists in all types of water such as seawater, river water, ground water, rain and snow,” it said, adding that in water, “there is one deuterium atom for every 6,700 atoms of hydrogen.”

In NCRD’s view, deuterium production was not a bad venture—if very expensive and likely impractical—for the Philippine government to go into, but this should not be done on the belief that there is more deuterium in Philippine waters than anywhere else.

The NCRD made this more explicit in an article titled “OEA Paper Debunks Deuterium Myth” in the October-December 1988 issue of Energy Alternatives. Citing OEA Energy Research Laboratory chief Zalson Espino and Nonconventional Resources Division chief Conrado Huruela, it stated that “scientific facts make it impossible for deuterium deposits to be lodged in the Philippine Deep.”

The article further stated that breaking up deuterium oxide or “heavy water” to obtain deuterium gas “requires electric current [i.e., electrolysis] and cannot be initiated in water simply by high pressure [i.e., at the bottom of the Philippine Deep].”

“Even if, by some natural process, deuterium gas gets isolated from water, its natural tendency would be to rise and escape into the atmosphere [not, say, stay in the ocean depths] because it is much lighter than water,” it continued.

“The claim, therefore, that deuterium can be mined from the Philippine Deep and used to generate electricity is utterly fallacious and without basis,” the piece concluded.

“Oceanographic hallucinations.” That was how Roger Posadas, a PhD in physics and former dean of the College of Science at the University of the Philippines, characterized Escosa’s deuterium claims in a March 15, 1988 report in the Manila Standard. He called Escosa a “pseudo-scienfic swindler.”

As noted by Rappler in a January 19, 2021 fact check, all this lines up completely with peer-reviewed papers published well before Escosa started appearing in the news, such as “Deuterium Content as a Parameter of Water Mass in the Ocean” by Yoshio Horibe and Nobuko Ogura in 1968. Another one published in 2012, “Isotope Composition and Volume of Earth’s Early Oceans,” affirmed that hydrogen isotopes actually rise — not sink – in the ocean.

Despite all this —and the much-publicized debunking of an alleged breakthrough “cold fusion” experiment involving deuterium conducted by American chemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons in 1989 — the scam went on.

In 1989, Tarlac Rep. Herminio Aquino accused Escosa of defrauding some 10,000 applicants in a deuterium mining project. The congressman said that Escosa’s firm charged P5 “for application forms” and P10 for notarization when it had “already been established that there are no deuterium deposits in the Philippines.”

ENTER THE MARCOSES

There is no credible proof that the Marcoses were already attached to deuterium claims while the family patriarch was still president. In the last book attributed to him, A Trilogy on the Transformation of Philippine Society (1988), the dictator very briefly mentioned deuterium as a possible energy resource.   In the portion on planned programs, Marcos Sr. said “oil exploitation and other indigenous energy deposits like coal, uranium and deuterium shall also be looked into.”

The deuterium dream was still alive in the early 1990s.  A story in the textbook Growing Up Gracefully (Rex Book Store, 1991) partly used the deuterium hoax to illustrate the value of the country’s natural resources. It said that deuterium was “like diesel oil and is used for cooking, lighting, and for transportation.”

“With our big deposit of deuterium,” a character in the story said “the Philippines could be one of the richest countries in the world.”

But by the late 1990s, deuterium was no joke to Imelda. Before withdraing from the 1998 presidential derby, she talked about deuterium as a possible solution to the country’s economic troubles. It is unclear where Imelda picked up this advocacy, but Escosa’s discussion on deuterium in his continued public appearances may have contributed to her “education” on the topic.

According to Couttie, “the deuterium scam was firmly affixed to the Marcoses and Imelda promoted it heavily through amenable media people” by 2004 as Imelda often talked about this in interviews with both local and foreign media.

Over time, Imelda and her allies started to claim that she owned the deuterium deposits or the rights to them.

HYDROSPHERE RESOURCES FOR MOTHERING, INC. 

What can be ascertained is that on March 31, 2005, a firm named Hydrosphere Resources for Mothering, Inc. applied for an offshore exploration permit in Davao Oriental. The following day, it also filed an application for a permit for the “exploration and development of gold, copper and other base metal resources” in the town of Gen. Luna, Surigao del Norte.

The firm’s address was 204 Mariano Marcos Street corner P. Guevarra Street, San Juan, Metro Manila— the main residence of the former first family before Marcos Sr. became president. The two documents are on display at the Batac World Peace Center/Marcos Photo Gallery, a museum Imelda set up near the Marcos Presidential Center/Mausoleum.

One of Hydrosphere Resources for Mothering, Inc.'s exploration permit applications, displayed at the Batac World Peace Center (photo by Judith Camille Rosette)
One of Hydrosphere Resources for Mothering, Inc.’s exploration permit applications, displayed at the Batac World Peace Center. Photo by Judith Camille Rosette.

Another one of Hydrosphere Resources for Mothering, Inc.'s exploration permit applications, displayed at the Batac World Peace Center (photo by Judith Camille Rosette)
Another one of Hydrosphere Resources for Mothering, Inc.’s exploration permit applications, displayed at the Batac World Peace Center. Photo by Judith Camille Rosette.

Both applications were denied, but another one was filed by Hydrosphere on April 5, 2005.  This time  it was for an exploration permit for  “gold, copper, platinum, tungsten, etc.” in Guian, Eastern Samar.”  This too was rejected because of the company’s failure to submit by the May 22, 2013 deadline the minimum capital requirements for mining applicants.

In short, Hydrosphere does not currently have any valid mining exploration permits on any of  these sites along the Philippine Trench on the country’s Pacific coast.

A map of the Philippines adorns the “Twin Mansion” in Cabuyao, Laguna, one of the Marcos properties sequestered by the Presidential Commission on Good Government but is curiously still sometimes used by the family. Online pictures show that the map depicts the Philippines’s GOD — Gold, Oil, Deuterium, with the “D”  located the “Phil. Trench, Deepest Part of the World.” Similar imagery can be found in Imelda’s Batac World Peace Center.

In Imelda: Mothering and Her Poetic and Creative Ideas in a Troubled World (2012), which is in many ways a rehash of Imelda’s other book Circles of Life, the former first lady tells the author, Cecilio Arillo, that deuterium is “the strategic energy of the future” and that “some people are already calling the Philippines as ‘God:’ gold, oil and deuterium.”

In a 2013 with Norman Pearlstine of Bloomberg Businessweek, Imelda claimed that she spent “millions of dollars a year to maintain her exclusive right to extract water from [the Philippine Trench] in the hope that having an abundance of deuterium can speed the development of advanced nuclear fusion reactors.”

Imelda’s Statements of Assets, Liabilities, and Net Worth when she was a member of Congress from 2010 to 2019 does not show any such payments.

The former first lady likewise said she had known about the deuterium deposits as early as the 1970s when Edward Teller, known as the Father of the Hydrogen Bomb, “persuaded her to develop her country’s deuterium in a 1971 visit to the Malacañang Palace.”

The register of Edward Teller Papers in the Hoover Institution Library & Archives in California shows that Teller, who died in 2003, visited the Philippines in 1981 to discuss matters such as nuclear fusion in conferences held in the country.

In later years, Imelda would drop Teller from her deuterium soliloquy and replace him with Harold Urey, “the discoverer of deuterium.” By this time, she claimed that it was Urey, who died in 1981, who informed her of the deuterium deposits in the Philippines.

Imelda, a notoriously unreliable narrator, repeatedly insists that Irving Berlin wrote the song “Heaven Watch the Philippines” specifically for her. The American composer himself denied this, according to a note in the interview of the Marcos couple published in the August 1987 issue of Playboy.

In the documentary The Kingmaker, Imelda says with a straight face that she visited the Calauit Safari Park after she returned from exile in 1991 and was saddened at what it had become. A caretaker interviewed in the documentary flatly denies this.

By 2015 Imelda and her son began doubling down on their deuterium claims.

In a video posted in one of the Facebook pages of the Marcos loyalist group Friends of Imelda Romualdez Marcos (FIRM), Imelda is seen hawking deuterium in, of all places, the wake of one of her most ardent supporters.

“[Mayroon] akong produkto na deuterium,” she says before the mourners that included the husband of the deceased. “Siya and magiging ating pang-gasolina . . . 20 centavos of deuterium is your fuel per month.”

Imelda said she would be meeting someone about deuterium the next day (the wake took place around late April-early May 2015).  She added that FIRM would be the “foundation of the mission for mothering world peace” and that they would bring peace on earth using deuterium.

Shortly after, Bongbong, in an interview in the June 29-July 6, 2015 issue of BizNews Asia, said that his “mother had access to deuterium deposits,” which had “bequeathed” to her grandchildren.

Imelda found new partners in deuterium ventures within the last seven years, including one with groups such as the MHLK (M for Maharlika) Foundation and the Official Maharlika Association (OMA) where she is “Chairman – Emeritus.”

A photograph of an OMA board meeting with Imelda at the helm can be seen on its website. In one video of an OMA event held in late 2019—shortly before the pandemic, and about a year after Imelda’s conviction for graft by the Sandiganbayan—she claimed that the “vision” of the deuterium project was “paradise regained unto infinity” and that, contrary to her earlier claims, she had been involved in deuterium, “for several decades, even before [she] was first lady.”

Beside her while she delivered her speech—where she also claimed that she seeded the money that gave birth to Silicon Valley—was businessman Paul Monozca, chairman and CEO of OMA and related firms Formula Green Corporation and Formula Green Foundation. In recent years, Monozca made the news—before actually making the news via OMA’s “affiliate,” Maharlika TV— because of his involvement in the controversial planned Coral World Park in Palawan.

Extract from FGC White Paper FY2020 Final v002 Final8Extract from FGC White Paper FY2020 Final v002 Final8
Extract from FGC White Paper FY2020 Final v002

A document titled “Maharlika Crypto Whitepaper 2020-2021: An Asset-Backed Cryptocurrency Issued by the Formula Green Foundation for Humanity” discusses yet another venture of the Maharlika/Monozca group: Maharlika Crypto, once also called Maharlika Coin or the MHLK-IRM (presumably Imelda Romualdez Marcos) crypto.

The white paper claims that this cryptocurrency—perhaps closer in description to a toke—is backed up by the “Global Assets and Resources” of the “Maharlika Trust,” “the second largest philanthropic fund in the world,” and the “raw material of fusion and its futures.” These “futures” refer partly to Formula Green’s “concessions of the world’s largest deposit of the raw material of fusion energy called ‘Deuterium’ and stakes in the industry verticals including hydrogen economy.”

OMA is supposed to be a “movement of 10 million followers.” Among its “eight key groups” is the “Talleano Estate (direct heir).” While the Marcoses have repeatedly denied having ties to the Tallanos and the Tallano gold claim, the tale of the Kingdom of Maharlika ruled by the Tallanos, purported owners of the entire Philippine archipelago, appears on the website of the Marcos-affiliated party Kilusang Bagong Lipunan.

A further online search leads to a central document of the Tallano myth, the alleged Original Certificate of Title of the whole Philippines. An annotation in this “OCT-04”—several times proven fake—shows another connection of the myth to deuterium fakery: purportedly made in 1941, ten years after the discovery of deuterium.  The annotation states that “Dr. H. F. Bain, Mining Affair Adviser to the Philippine Commonwealth” found “in the area 75 kilometers Southeast of Mindanao, a large undeterminable volume of Deuterium.”

It appears that practically every major Marcos-related group—from FIRM, which claimed in 2019 to have eight million members to the supposedly 10-million strong OMA— are closely linked to Imelda’s deuterium claims.

The Marcoses are also connected to other groups giving away deuterium share certificates: the Royal Alpha Omega Ring Trading Corporation and Philippine Deuterium Development Management Corporation. In April 2018, then Ilocos Norte governor Imee Marcos attended the birthday of the group’s founding chairman, Mahal na Hari (MNH) Filemon O. Reambonanza.

Even one of Imelda’s closest supporters and founder of Marcos Loyalists for God, Country and People, Serafia “Cherry” Cobarrubias, is listed as a board member of the MHLK Foundation. Yet another staunch Marcos defender, Rita Gadi, in the June 9, 2020 episode of her online program The Rita Gadi Hour, claimed that in the middle of the pandemic, Imelda was “finishing” (“tinatapos na”) the deuterium project which had a permit from the government.

Gadi said Imelda already had the instrument needed to extract deuterium from the Philippine Deep and only needed investments “na kanyang inaayos ngayon.”  She repeated Imelda’s line about “paradise regained unto infinity,” and expressed belief that Imelda may be able to finish her deuterium project within that year and then, “maibibigay na niya sa atin sa Pilipinas ‘yang deuterium, the fusion of water and the energy.”    

Of course, 2020 came and went, but deuterium from the Philippine Deep remains a pipe dream.

WHAT’S IN IT FOR THE MARCOSES

Peddling the lies about deuterium have served the purpose of the Marcos family which has been clawing their way back into power over the last three decades.

After returning from exile, Imelda seemed to have latched on to Escosa’s deuterium claims. The imagined deuterium riches of the country would effectively undo the two most damaging legacies of the Marcos dictatorship: a plundered economy and a generation of Filipinos sent into a diaspora to earn a living.

From a propaganda point of view, the deuterium hoax has detracted from public discussions the Marcos plunder — that it is permissible to abandon the effort to recover their ill-gotten wealth since deuterium’s promised bounty would replenish what was stolen from the country’s coffers. Imelda said as much in a February 25, 2006 feature on her by The Independent.

“Our problems are temporary. All I am waiting for is for my lawyers to end these cases against me and I will bring about a new economic order,” she declared.

Barely questioned by media and scientists on this, both Imelda and Bongbong continue to use the deuterium hoax in projecting themselves as advocates for a green environment and hope for the country.  The promise of bounty —be it the Yamashita treasure, the Tallano gold, or deuterium in the Philippine Trench — calls for the surrender of the people’s trust to the machinations of the Marcoses.

It is the ultimate mother-and-son scam.

​Scammers sell Marcos ‘legacy’ to poor Pinoys
Posted on by diktaduraadmin

Originally published by Vera Files on September 25, 2017.

In the morning of Sept. 23, 2017, the 45th anniversary of the actual declaration of martial law by former president Ferdinand Marcos, thousands gathered at the University of the Philippines Los Baños (UPLB) Freedom Park in Laguna.

They said they came to collect the P10,000 they were promised every month for the next four years as claimants to their share of the Marcos wealth. The proof of their claim: a pamphlet purchased for P30, extolling Marcos for his ‘immortal legacy.’

Behind the pamphlet was an organization that had already been discredited by the Securities and Exchange Commission and whose leaders had already been charged with estafa by the National Bureau of Investigation way back in 2013.

So what was this gathering all about? Was there a hidden hand and a hidden agenda that set this in motion? To find some answers to these questions, I go back to my hometown and to a story my mother told me.

‘BAGONG LIPUNAN’ IN BICOL

In the first week of December 2016, my mother attended a Christmas party at a beach resort in our town in Sorsogon. Taking place at the same resort was a bigger gathering of about 100 people.

Nearing noon, someone from that group started praying over the loud speaker, prompting my mother to think that it was an evangelical event. But then the national anthem was played, signalling the start of a formal program. It was the next song, however, that jolted my mother’s memory: “Hymn of the Bagong Lipunan.” She knew the lyrics. My mother, 70 years old and widowed, said she used to hear it all the time over the radio during the martial law years.

After singing the hymn, she said, a handful of speakers started praising the life and accomplishments of Ferdinand Marcos, talking about how the country did so much better during martial law.

Through a friend who attended that program, my mother would learn that the speakers ended their event by convincing the crowd to provide details of their personal information and to buy a pamphlet, initially priced at P50, but later reduced to P30.

Marcos, the speakers told the crowd, bequeathed his wealth to the Filipino people in his last will and testament. The Marcos family was planning to honor the patriarch’s will. But the wealth could not simply be distributed to anyone. Each person’s identity had to be verified. So the people present were told to fill up personal information forms and to submit copies of their voter’s ID, birth certificate, marriage certificate driver’s license, or any such document that could prove who they are. With the pamphlet and their verified personal information, they would be entitled to an outright grant of P50,000.

Those gathered at the resort were asked to refer other interested beneficiaries. Designated coordinators handled the filling up of forms, the sales of the pamphlets, and the gathering of photocopies of the required documents. My mother later learned that the group that organized the event went by the name Bullion Buyer Ltd or BBL.

PROPAGANDA PAMPHLET

The BBL pamphlet mentions Ferdinand Marcos’s record of military service and the honors he received, many of which have been proven to be mere fabrications.

I eventually got hold of the pamphlet that belonged to my mother’s friend, who lent it to me with a caveat that should the promise of a bounty be true, I was to return it to her and we would split the promised amount. She herself is quite sure now that it was a scam, but she spent a mere P30 on it anyway, the cost of less than a jueteng bet.

The cover of the 30-page pamphlet is a portrait of Marcos in full color. The first page of the pamphlet bears its supposed title, Life and Achievements of Ferdinand E. Marcos, President of the Republic of the Philippines (1965-1986). The back cover is a copyright claim: Bullion Buyer Ltd, copyright 2016.

In my copy, the first page contains the name of the coordinator from whom the pamphlet was bought, and the participating leader the coordinator reports to. Stamped on the upper right hand corner of the first page is the name of the member of the national inspectorate to whom the participating leader reports.

The BBL claims that the organization was “established in 2004 which has about 3,100 officers and participating leaders nationwide.” It claims to have the humanitarian objective “of creating one social family and brotherhood of hearts.”

The organizer of the gathering at the UPLB is called One Social Family Credit Cooperative.

People who went to the UP Los Baños campus on Sept. 23 brought with them a pamphlet purchased for P30 produced by a group called Bullion Buyers Ltd. The pamphlet was a collection of propaganda materials on former president Ferdinand Marcos. Photo by Luis Liwanag.

What is meant by “one social family” can be gleaned from BBL’s mission statement: “The ‘family’ being the unit of government will be strengthened by providing them the Livelihood and Investment program thru the cooperatives….. intended to promote the ‘self-reliance’ as embodied in the Letter of Instruction of Pres. Ferdinand E. Marcos, as his ‘Immortal Legacy’ to his beloved countrymen.”

According to one former member, BBL’s founding date is Sept. 11, 2011, Marcos’ birthday. The supposed first organizational meeting was held at Max’s restaurant in Parañaque. Imelda Marcos was supposed to have graced the occasion had a typhoon not stood in her path.

There is even an online video clip of the meeting where two persons spoke. They were identified as “Red Dragon” and “Pink Diamond,” supposedly the pseudonyms of founders Emmanuel Destura and Felicisima Cantos.

PYRAMIDING SCHEME?

Destura and Cantos went into hiding after a charge of syndicated estafa was filed against them in 2013. Destura is said to be a son of Pedro Destura, a mayor of Prieto Diaz, Sorsogon from 1969 to 1971. The younger Destura claimed that Marcos entrusted to his father a still undetermined tonnage of gold deposits in Switzerland.

Emmanuel Destura surfaced at Los Baños yesterday, this time identifying himself as the chair of the One Social Family Credit Cooperative.

The continuing presence of BBL in various parts of the country prodded the Securities and Exchange Commission to issue an advisory on April 6, 2017 warning all local government authorities that the company is unregistered, and that its modus operandi violates the Securities Regulation Code.

From the syndicated estafa charge sheet, it appears that the group’s modus operandi is rather straightforward. The initial recruits were tasked to organize events in the different localities in the country and were initially called participating leaders. They also had to pay the organization P2,000. They were told they would be prioritized once the Marcos wealth is distributed. In exchange for their contribution, they would first receive P1 million and then 30 days later, $1 million.

Not one participating leader was ever paid a centavo, much less the millions of pesos and dollars promised. Some of these disaffected participating leaders were the ones who brought the charge of syndicated estafa against the leaders of BBL in 2013.

The sale of the Marcos pamphlet is a recent addition to the modus, and may have shifted the dynamics within the BBL. The participating leaders may have managed to find a way to recoup their contribution while waiting for the millions of pesos and dollars supposedly due them by selling the pamphlet.

When did the pamphlet become part of the package? The outright answer drawn from the pamphlet itself would be: after Rodrigo Duterte became president. The preface in the pamphlet says, “Can we blame President Marcos in (sic) declaring Martial Law? He only needs peace of mind in the same manner as President Duterte so that he can do all his good plans for the Filipino people.”

“President Duterte cannot do all his good plans for the country without unity. Can we now blame President Duterte if he declares Martial Law in the future if that is the only way in order to achieve peace, unity and prosperity,” the pamphlet continues.

Quite coincidentally, Duterte announced less than a month ago that the Marcoses were willing to return the wealth that rightfully belonged to the Filipino people. “The Marcoses – I will not name the spokesman – said that they’ll open everything and probably return those that had been discovered,” Duterte said.

Former senator Bongbong Marcos has distanced his family from the BBL. He similarly denied any involvement in the gathering at UPLB. “We do not know of nor have any involvement of any of these gatherings. It’s a scam pure and simple,” he said. “I have repeatedly warned the public against unscrupulous individuals who have been using our family to advance their personal interests.”

TRAFFICKING FALSEHOODS

So what does that UPLB gathering have to do with anything?

In 2004, unnamed publishers reworked an undated, earlier edition of a compendium of Marcos propaganda entitled Let the Marcos Truth Prevail. The 2004 publication bore the same title, was 855 pages long and distributed for free to various public schools and universities, mostly in the provinces. In the online catalogues of some universities, the bibliographic entry for this book cites Imelda Marcos as the author.

Photocopy of the cover of an 855-page book titled Let the Marcos truth prevail distributed to different universities all over the country. The publication had neither author nor editor, neither date nor publisher.

Authorship could only be inferred, as the book had neither author nor editor. And as is common in Marcos propaganda material, there is also no stated date of publication nor a publisher. But it contains scanned copies of Imelda’s checks as a widow of a war veteran, material that cannot simply be found in public records. The presence of the check strongly suggests that the Marcoses had direct knowledge in compiling and publishing Let the Marcos Truth Prevail.

Also, a journalist from the Marcos crony press known for her closeness to Imelda Marcos distributed copies of this book to those who were interested. The BBL pamphlet is an abridged version of this compendium.

Pages 5 and 6 of the pamphlet mention Ferdinand Marcos’s record of military service and the honors he received, many of which have been proven to be mere fabrications by Marcos. The entry is just a retyped version of a March 4, 1996 certification from the General Headquarters of the Armed Forces of the Philippines regarding Marcos’s military service. The one who encoded the certification from the AFP into the pamphlet was so faithful to the AFP text, even copying the line breaks from the original.

This AFP certification that is in both the pamphlet and the compendium lately resurfaced in the most unlikely of documents: the submission to the Supreme Court of Solicitor General Jose Calida arguing for the burial of Marcos at the Libingan ng mga Bayani.

Annex 13 of Calida’s Consolidated Comment on the case bears an odd pagination: 165. The Consolidated Comment is only 159 pages long. Page 165 comes from Let the Marcos Truth Prevail, the book that the Solicitor General used in arguing for the burial. This is literally the Solicitor General taking a page from the Marcos playbook.

In his submission to the Supreme Court, the Solicitor General did not bother to secure another certification from the AFP regarding Marcos’s military record nor did he have it authenticated. He merely submitted a photocopy of a page from Let the Marcos Truth Prevail. Not one of the oppositors in this case noticed it, not even the justices.

What we have then are replications of texts that carry the untruths of the Marcoses. In each and every replication, the Marcos myth survives and is passed on. The case of Bullion Buyer Ltd, and its new iteration One Social Family are instances of the trafficking in historical fraud.

Through the pamphlet, Filipinos, often the poorest and most marginalized among us, are induced to literally buy into the Marcos propaganda. In the case of the Solicitor General, such fraud, like Marcos being the recipient of so many war medals, has now found its way into our jurisprudence—a Marcos myth attempting to pass itself off as established fact.

All Hail and Glory to the Marcoses!
Posted on by diktaduraadmin

Originally published by Vera Files on May 27, 2019.

A day after the May 13 elections, the “Marcos Centennial” and “Kabataang Barangay Worldwide” accounts in Facebook became inaccessible. Prior to their decommissioning, the two Facebook pages had actively campaigned for Imee Marcos. Despite being the unapologetic eldest daughter of dictator Ferdinand Marcos and racked by controversy surrounding, among others, her false academic credentials, she garnered almost 16 million votes in a successful run for a Senate seat.

Imee’s 2019 campaign explicitly called for a Marcos Restoration: Vote for her, and she would revive the programs of the deposed dictatorship. One of her campaign ads online merely repeated words like “BLISS,” “Kadiwa,” and “nutribun,” as if to conjure a treasured past.

In contrast, the 2010 and 2016 national campaigns of Bongbong, Imee’s brother, were more focused on his claimed achievements as governor of Ilocos Norte and as senator of the republic. He had previously run for the Upper Chamber in 1995, only nine years after the People Power Revolution that ousted his father from Malacañang; then, he failed in his bid, placing 16th in the race.

Under the administration of President Rodrigo Duterte, whose accommodating stance towards the Marcoses was highlighted by the burial of Ferdinand in the Libingan ng mga Bayani, Imee and her campaign handlers believed that reinforcing her ties to the Marcos regime was a winning strategy. She was the public face of the Marcos-era Kabataang Barangay, as well as head of the Experimental Cinema of the Philippines and representative of the second district of Ilocos Norte in the regular Batasang Pambansa, among other appointments and designations. Instead of downplaying her links to her father’s administration, she owned up to them. She wound up receiving the eighth-highest number of votes.

Senator-elect Imee Marcos is joined by her family including her mother, former First Lady Imelda Marcos, during her proclamation by the Comelec.

Interestingly, another online site related to the Marcoses became inaccessible late in the 2019 campaign season. The website of the Human Rights Victims Claims Board (HRVCB) (http://hrvclaimsboard.gov.ph), which contains the only complete government-recognized list of victims of human rights violations during the Marcos regime, 11,103 names in total, is currently offline. The site says: “This Account has been suspended. Contact your hosting provider for more information.”

Inquiries via email and Facebook messenger regarding the status of the site have not yet yielded any response. The HRVCB has ceased to function as mandated by Republic Act No. 10368 or the “Human Rights Victims Reparation and Recognition Act of 2013.” Enacted in February 2013, the law states that “The Board shall complete its work within two (2) years from the effectivity of the IRR promulgated by it. After such period, it shall become functus officio (of no further authority).” RA 10766 extended RA 10368’s effectivity from May 12, 2014 to May 12, 2018, while Joint Resolution No. 4, approved by President Duterte on February 22 this year, extended the availability and release of funds to the victims recognized by the HRVCB to Dec. 31, 2019. With the HRVCB closing shop, the Commission on Human Rights assumed the responsibility of distributing checks to the victims.

Even if the HRVCB has fulfilled its mandate, RA 10368 states that a roll of victims—who include those who were tortured, killed, involuntarily disappeared, or detained for exercising their civil or political rights, had their property or businesses unjustly or illegally taken over by enforcers of the estate, or were victims of such seizures “caused by” the Marcoses themselves—should have been produced by the Board, and a “compendium of (these victims’) sacrifices” should be “prepared and may be readily viewed and accessed in the internet.” The list uploaded to the site was the best approximation of an online roll of victims.

U.P. PRESIDENT DOES BALANCING ACT

RA 10368 also created the Human Rights Violations Victims’ Memorial
Commission (HRVVMC). Its Board of Trustees is made up of heads of the
Commission on Human Rights, the National Historical Commission, the
Commission on Higher Education, the National Commission on Culture and
the Arts, the Department of Education, and the University of the
Philippines-Diliman Main Library. The CHR chairperson is the HRVVMC
chairperson.

From the U.P website

According to RA 10368, the Commission’s main responsibility is the “establishment, restoration, preservation and conservation of the Memorial/Museum/Library/Compendium in honor of the (victims of human rights violations) during the Marcos regime.” The Commission agreed to establish a Freedom Memorial Museum, which was launched on April 28, 2016, just before the presidential elections of that year. At the time, the proposed site for the museum was the grounds of the Ninoy Aquino Parks and Wildlife Nature Center. President Noynoy Aquino led the launch.

Little was heard of from the HRVVMC after President Duterte’s election. On Sept. 21, 2018, the 46th anniversary of Marcos’ declaration of martial law, members of the HRVVMC gathered at the steps of the University of the Philippines’ Palma Hall in Diliman to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the state university for the establishment of the memorial museum and/or library. A new location for the museum had been determined — a vacant lot in UP Diliman, where the experimental Automated Guideway Transit railway track once stood.

Critics consider the MoU signing to be an offshoot of the condemnation received by UP President Danilo Concepcion when he attended a Kabataang Barangay reunion with Imee Marcos at UP Diliman’s Bahay ng Alumni on August 25, 2018. Concepcion was a high-ranking member of the Kabataang Barangay and Batasan assemblyman during the Marcos regime.

Also as reported in the Philippine Collegian on June 21, 1983, Concepcion was that year’s chairman of the recognition day committee for the graduating class of the UP College of Law. He appealed to then UP President Edgardo Angara to hold recognition rites specifically for students who completed all subjects in the law school curriculum, but were not necessarily qualified to graduate with a Bachelor of Laws degree. Imee attended that ceremony despite lacking an undergraduate degree, which barred her from getting her law degree.

Photos from the Concepcion-initiated academic pageantry were circulated by Imee’s camp during the 2019 campaign period as incontrovertible proof of her earning a degree from the UP College of Law. UP had to issue a statement—twice—to say that she did not graduate from UP.

Despite Concepcion’s ties to the Marcoses, the construction of the Freedom Memorial Museum in UP Diliman is proceeding as scheduled under his watch. The museum has a website (https://www.thefreedommemorial.ph/) that details the mechanics of the Freedom Memorial Museum Design Competition. Entries were accepted from April 5, 2019, until May 15, 2019. A winner is scheduled to be announced this June.

Once constructed, the Freedom Memorial Museum will share common space with numerous structures and locations bearing names closely associated with the Marcos regime. Most prominent of these is the Cesar E.A. Virata School of Business, named after the former prime minister and Marcos’ chief technocrat. The school, formerly the College of Business Administration, was renamed in April 2013. The College of Law also houses the UP Law Class of 1987-Juan Ponce Enrile Reading Room, which bears the name of the defense minister and architect of martial law. The room was formally turned over to UP in June 2013. UP President Concepcion was then dean of the College of Law.

THE OLD NETWORK IS ACTIVE AND DELIVERING

Then there’s the money for the arts. Irene Marcos-Araneta was a known patron of Dulaang UP. But her largesse is dwarfed by that of a Marcos associate. Currently under construction is the Ignacio B. Gimenez Foundation–Kolehiyo ng Arte at Literatura Theater. The groundbreaking ceremony for the theater was held on June 13, 2013, and a cornerstone-laying ceremony was held on Dec. 14, 2016. Gimenez was in attendance during both ceremonies. At least two theaters are already named after him: the Ateneo Areté Ignacio B. Gimenez Amphitheater and the CCP Black Box Theater, formally known as the Tanghalang Ignacio Gimenez, inaugurated in 2017 and 2018, respectively.

An alumnus of UP, Gimenez, husband of Fe Roa Gimenez, former social secretary of Imelda Marcos, has served as the chairman of the Sogo Group of Hotels. He represented Sogo during its turnover of outdoor exercise equipment donated to UP Diliman in January 2015. These can currently be found at the College of Science Complex and the Department of Military Science and Tactics Complex. There is also an Ignacio B. Gimenez Award for UP Student Organization Social Innovation Projects. Gimenez was also among the first UP Gawad Oblation awardees. He was bestowed the award with 13 others—including businessman Magdaleno Albarracin, who, as recorded in the minutes of the 1288th meeting of the UP Board of Regents on June 20, 2013, “made a commitment to donate “₱40 Million as a condition to the renaming of the College of Business Administration into the Cesar E.A. Virata School of Business, after the finality of the Board’s approval on the said renaming.”

Besides setting up at least one dummy firm for the Marcoses’ ill-gotten wealth, according to a 2008 Supreme Court minute resolution, Gimenez was also tangentially connected to at least one other UP-related project. On June 27, 1984, Gimenez, as president of the Transnational Construction Corporation (TNCC), signed an agreement to sublease a lot in Pasay City owned by the Light Rail Transit Authority (LRTA). The principal lessee of the LRTA property was the Philippine General Hospital Foundation, Inc. (PGHFI). At the time, both LRTA and PGHFI were chaired by then First Lady Imelda Marcos.

LRTA agreed to lease its Pasay property to PGHFI for P102,760 a month. Gimenez’s TNCC agreed to sublease the property for P734,000 a month. The significant difference was supposed to go to UP PGH. After the EDSA Revolution, the state attempted to convict Imelda for this and related deals for violation of the Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Act. She was convicted in 1993 but was acquitted in 1998 due to technicalities. In his dissent to the 1998 decision, Justice Artemio Panganiban noted that “(other) than her out-of-court utterances, petitioner has submitted no evidence whatsoever to indicate that the money gained by PGHFI from TNCC (and lost by the LRTA) was actually spent for a hospital or any other charitable purpose.” A director of the PGH interviewed by journalist Raissa Robles in the early 1990s told her that “PGH never got a centavo” from PGHFI.

THE REHABILITATION OF THE MARCOS NAME

Since their return to Philippine politics in 1992, only six years after Ferdinand Marcos was deposed, the Marcoses have been spearheading attempts to rehabilitate their patriarch’s rule. As is now clear, it was borne out of their need for political survival than out of filial duty.

From the Bagong Lipunan Facebook Page

In 1992, Bongbong, as the representative of the second district of Ilocos Norte, filed House Resolution No. 80 calling for the return of Ferdinand’s remains from exile in Hawaii and according his father a state funeral “befitting a former president of the Republic.” Less than half of the House co-authored the resolution, which was consigned to the House archives in 1994. In March 1993, Bongbong filed House Bill No. 8363, which aimed to rename the Mariano Marcos State University in Batac to the Ferdinand E. Marcos State University. The bill died at the Committee on Education and Culture that same year.

Imee, in contrast, left such lionization attempts outside of her legislative agenda. In her 2012 Statement of Assets, Liabilities, and Net Worth, Imee is listed as the officer-president of the Marcos Presidential Center, Inc. since January 16, 2002. Among the Center’s projects were: a website (www.marcospresidentialcenter.com, launched in 2002, now defunct); the publication of books that highlighted the achievements of Ferdinand, initiated in 2007; the renovation of the Ferdinand E. Marcos Presidential Center in Batac, Ilocos Norte; and the drafting of public relations pieces. The Center provided the text and photos for a press release, used as a basis for articles published in various media outlets, regarding the November 2017 marriage of Michael Marcos Manotoc, Imee’s son, to Carina Manglapus, granddaughter of former senator Raul Manglapus. The piece characterized the marriage as a reconciliation of rival political families from Ilocos.

In one of his papers, film scholar Joel David mentioned an informal interview with then-representative Imee, who “expressed her plan to popularize what she called ‘Marcos studies.’” On Sept. 16, 2002, the Manila Standard printed an article by Imee titled “Revisiting Martial Law.” There, she stated that the “time has come to study intently, intensely, dispassionately, completely, the Marcos era, before, during and following the Martial Law period, applying intellectual rigor over emotion, scholarship, not partisanship.”

Manuel Alba, once Marcos’s budget minister, was interviewed twice by Professors Teresa Encarnacion Tadem, Cayetano Paderanga, and Yutaka Katayama for their oral history project, “Economic Policymaking and the Philippine Development Experience, 1960-1985.” In one of the interviews, held in January 2009, Alba mentioned that Imee had a “Pamana project,” which intended to “document the Marcos’ achievements,” for which he committed to “write on budget and education.” Alba also revealed that Onofre D. Corpuz, one of Marcos’s education ministers and former UP president, was going to write a “framework” for the project. It is unknown if there was any further progress on the project before Corpuz’s death in 2013.

In a lengthy interview by Jojo Silvestre, published on the website of the Philippine Star on Nov. 21, 2010, Imee complimented Alba along with many other members of the Marcos cabinet, calling him brilliant. In the same interview, Silvestre noted that “Cabinet meetings must have been a free-for-all.” Imee revealed intimate knowledge of such meetings, as if she had attended some, though she was not known to have held any Cabinet-level position during her father’s rule. When asked about martial law, Imee told Silvestre, “I don’t see myself as an apologist. Sa haba ng panahon, you have to judge it in context, in its time … (The) other side of the story is very well documented. And even over-documented.”

IMEE MORE FOCUSED IN RESTORING MARCOS NAME IN HISTORY

During the 2019 campaign, Imee seemed unwilling to engage on the issue of her family’s ill-gotten wealth and the abuses committed during the Marcos regime. When asked about the recent Sandiganbayan decision convicting her mother Imelda of seven counts of graft, Imee would cite the sub judice rule barring public disclosure of details of pending court proceedings. The rule does not apply to the cases on the Marcos’s ill-gotten wealth that have been decided with finality, though she denied that any existed when she filed her certificate of candidacy on Oct. 15, 2018.Earlier, during the 2018 anniversary of the assassination of Ninoy Aquino, she was quoted by the Philippine Daily Inquirer as saying “(the) millennials have moved on, and I think people at my age should move on as well.”

Propagating Ferdinand Marcos’ statements. From Imee Marcos Facebook Page.

She made a similar statement almost 20 years ago. On Dec. 12, 1999, the Associated Press quoted her as saying, “Many of the younger people who don’t have so many preconceived notions, actually received a lifetime virtually of propaganda, are beginning to think that it is important to review what actually happened.”

Under current political conditions, Imee may succeed where brother Bongbong failed. The votes that secured for Imee a Senate seat were not just a product of nostalgia for an authoritarian past or merely a reflection of first-time voters’ ignorance of the brutality and excesses of the Marcos regime. They were also, in part, paid for by long-time allies and cronies of the Marcoses who, in the process of buying respectability from academic institutions, also contributed to the cause of burnishing and enthroning the Marcos name in Philippine history and politics.

The increasingly favorable political fortunes of the Marcoses and their cabal may also mean the effective erasure of memories of both human rights violations and compromises with those who obtained their wealth through plunder or abuse of authority, signaling that if the Marcoses could get away with such abuses, so can others. If the record of the human rights victims of the past can disappear, so, too, can the record of the comparable brutalities of the current dispensation. One bloody bejeweled hand washes the other.

The Duterte-Marcos Connection
Posted on by diktaduraadmin

Originally published by Vera Files on September 29, 2019.

VICENTE AND FERDINAND

Sino sa inyo ang nagsuporta sa akin? Ilan lang? Sino? One or two. Ilan lang? Four, five six? Wala akong barangay captain, wala akong congressman, wala akong pera. Si Imee [Marcos] pa ang nagbigay. Sabi niya inutang daw niya. Si Imee supported me.

Pres. Rodrigo Duterte
Oct. 4, 2016

These statements by President Rodrigo Duterte, made during a meeting with local
officials of Luzon at the Dusit Thani Hotel in Makati City on October 4, 2016, are puzzling. For one, Duterte seems to have forgotten that one of the earliest “Duterte for President” groups was launched by barangay captains from Davao City in October 2014. For another, as reported by various media outlets, Imee Marcos is not listed in Duterte’s Statement of Contributions and Expenditures. However, as pointed out by Vera Files, the biggest contributor to Duterte’s campaign was Antonio “Tonyboy” Floirendo Jr., who was “among the prime movers of the Alyansa ng Mga Duterte at Bongbong (ALDUB), a
group that campaigned for a Duterte-Bongbong Marcos tandem.”

Antonio Sr., Floirendo’s father, was a known Marcos crony. He was chairman of the
Marcos administration party Kilusang Bagong Lipunan in the Davao Region, a position that, based on other files in the custody of the Presidential Commission on Good Government, he used to lobby for appointments of local officials in his domain.

Antonio Floirendo Sr. with Ferdinand Marcos, from Notes on the New Society II: The
Rebellion of the Poor by Ferdinand Marcos, 1976

Are there any available documents or accounts showing the Dutertes and the Marcoses
had a very close personal relationship prior to the leadup to the 2016 elections? In an academic workshop last year, a former journalist claimed that he had never known Duterte to praise Marcos when he was mayor of Davao City in the 1990s. What do we really know
about the purported ties of these political families?

There is adequate evidence to show that the political fortunes of the Dutertes have
been intimately tied with those of the Marcoses for decades, but insufficient evidence to show that the former were loyal to Ferdinand Marcos well before he became president. Among the few who seem to have the authority to claim the contrary is President Duterte. In his above-quoted October 2016 address, Duterte also said:

“I do not know if because you know my father was a Cabinet member of President
Marcos during the first term of his presidency. My father was one of the two who stood by Marcos in his darkest hours. Everybody was shifting to the Liberal at that time, kay Diosdado Macapagal. And it was only [Zamboanga del Sur Governor Bienvenido] Ebarle and my father who stood by Marcos.”

Again, the president’s meandering way of speaking aside, those claims are
confusing, given the facts of Philippine political history.

Vicente Duterte. from the 1967 Philippine Officials Review

Then Senate President Ferdinand Marcos defected to the Nacionalista Party in
1964, after it became clear that President Diosdado Macapagal would not honor the well-documented promise he had made to let Marcos be the standard bearer of the Liberal Party in 1965. There were, indeed, defections from NP to LP between 1964 and 1965, but the switching at that time did not result in only two incumbent governors from
Mindanao staying with the NP. The mass switching that led to that happened earlier, within the first year of the Macapagal administration, a development in keeping with the political
traditions practiced in the Philippines until today.

Was Vicente Duterte ever strongly identified with Ferdinand Marcos, who appointed
him Secretary of General Services on December 30, 1965? Tom Sykes, in his 2018 book The Realm of the Punisher: Travels in Duterte’s Philippines, writes: “Vicente didn’t take to national politics [after his appointment as General Services secretary] and soon went
back to practicing law in Davao. On 21 February 1968, he collapsed in court from heart failure and died.” Sykes’ information on Vicente’s date and manner of death appear to be correct. However, Vicente did not leave Marcos’ cabinet simply to return to private
practice.

In June 1967, President Marcos signed Republic Act No. 4867, splitting the undivided Province of Davao into Davao del Norte, Davao del Sur, and Davao Oriental. An election was held on November 14 of the same year for the representatives of Davao del Sur and Davao Oriental, coinciding with the 1967 midterm election. Vicente ran against two
other Nacionalistas for the congressional seat of Davao del Sur. Artemio Al. Loyola, the official Nacionalista candidate and long-time member of the Davao Press Club, won; Vicente, who was still a member of the NP but ran as an independent, trailed the winner by over 8,000 votes.

The loss—his first and only—must have been devastating to Vicente. Four years earlier, he won his second elected term as governor of the Province of Davao, beating two LP candidates.

But if Vicente had enjoyed Marcos’ support, why was he not an official NP candidate in 1967? If the account of Rodrigo’s sister Eleanor “Baby” Duterte, in the I-Witness documentary “People Power sa Davao” is to be believed, Vicente actually did not leave Marcos’ cabinet in the best of terms. According to Eleanor, her father was fed up with the corruption he had witnessed in Malacañang under Marcos.

But Marcos must have trusted Vicente, who as Secretary of General Services would have
had to deal with government suppliers and contractors constantly as well as sensitive communications that went through his department. Vicente’s association with Davao may have also played a role in the decision to bring him to Malacañang. The first two who occupied that position before Vicente came from Mindanao, and the appointment arguably had been seen as one for Mindanawon politicians. Vicente’s replacement was Salih Ututalam from Sulu.

But even with the power and trust he was given, was Vicente ever personally loyal to
Marcos? In his profile in the 1967 Philippine Officials Review, Vicente is described thusly:

During his incumbency as Davao governor, he was once cited as one of the
“Outstanding Governors” of the Philippines. Twice offered study-travel grants to observe the progress of community development in Thailand and Israel, he declined both as a matter of conviction and principle for he was then in the opposition party. At the height
of the Liberal Party power, it was his distinction to be the only Nacionalista governor in Mindanao who did not change party affiliation for personal, political convenience or even in the face of presidential pressure.

Based on this, it can be surmised that the loyalty President Duterte was alluding to in
October 2016 was not tantamount to allegiance to Marcos, who was still a Liberal when that party was dominant. Vicente was, unlike his many flip-flopping compatriots, a true Nacionalista stalwart, who, either because of his own political ambitions or because he did not see eye to eye with his party’s turncoat leader, decided to return from Malacañang to Davao, where he probably thought that he was still, according to his 1967 profile, seen as someone who “rendered personalized service to his constituents” and had “humble, modest and unassuming self-qualities” that “endeared him to his legion of friends and admirers.”

While campaigning in Batac, Ilocos Norte in February 2016, Rodrigo was quoted as
saying, “Speaking of loyalty and friendship, I am proud to say that my father was a close ally of President Marcos until his death.” Why did Rodrigo decide to package Vicente as a true-blue Marcos loyalist, despite evidence to the contrary? Were the votes of those who love the Marcoses worth bending the truth about Vicente?

THE YELLOW-LOYALIST-LEFTIST CANDIDATE

Davao City was where Rodrigo Duterte cut his teeth as a politician, seeing up close conflicts ranging from squabbles in the local judiciary to bloody urban warfare to the movements that led to the overthrow of the Marcos dictatorship.

His involvement in the last one has not been extensively discussed. Various sources note that he was identified with anti-Marcos forces because he is the son of Soledad “Soling” Duterte, a known leader of the opposition in Mindanao.

Soledad Duterte, Mr. & Ms. January 6, 1984

In 1977, according to historian Macario Tiu in the book Davao: Reconstructing
History from Text and Memory, church leaders in Davao “dared [to] initiate open protest actions” against the Marcos regime. The protests gradually intensified and became much more frequent after the assassination of Ninoy Aquino in August 1983. Soon after, there
sprung what was called the United Opposition of Region XI. According to Tiu, among the leaders of organizations forming the alliance was Soling Duterte of Kalikuhan alang sa Tawhanong Kagawasan, or KATAWHAN.

Ana Maria Clamor, in the monograph entitled NGO and PO Electoral Experiences: Documentation and Analysis, notes a major activity of this alliance was the almost weekly non-violent “Yellow Friday” marches in Davao City’s major thoroughfares, which “drew inspiration from the yellow confetti rallies in Makati.”

After the dust of the EDSA Revolution settled, President Corazon Aquino appointed
Zafiro Respicio officer-in-charge of Davao City. Soling Duterte’s son, Rodrigo, was appointed OIC vice mayor. There are sources who say that, at the time, Rodrigo was a logical choice for the position, even though he was a member of the Marcos-era bureaucracy.

Clamor, writing in 1993, says that Rodrigo was “one of the few city fiscals who actively supported the Cory-Doy [Laurel] ticket and joined the February 1986 revolution.” Adrian Chen, citing Luz Ilagan, in an article published in November 2016 for the New Yorker, wrote that “Duterte was able to help dissidents without compromising his position in the government” by ensuring that activists arrested in Davao City were not abused while under custody.

Davao-based journalist-turned-academic Jose Jowel Canuday, in an interview published in the September 2016-March 2017 issue of Social Transformations: Journal of the Global South, recalled that Rodrigo was always in the “parliament of the streets” in Davao, and that there were even claims he “arranged for meetings between foreign journalists and the [communist rebels, the New People’s Army].” Canuday, however, noted that older Davao journalists “initially failed to notice Duterte,” as he was “just in the sidelines” of the opposition.

Picture of Yellow Friday rally in Davao City, photographs by H.V. Paredes, from Mr. &
Ms., Nov. 4, 1983.

An interesting claim about Rodrigo during those times was made by presidential
sister Baby Duterte. In a documentary broadcast by GMA Network, she says Ferdinand Marcos himself called up Rodrigo to try to silence Soling, but the dutiful son refused. Historians Lisandro Claudio and Patricio Abinales took it as fact, stating in their chapter in the book A Duterte Reader that “the dictator believed he could call on Rodrigo to quell anti-government sentiment in Davao City, even if these protests were being led by the former’s own mother.”

It seems more likely that Rodrigo and Ferdinand Marcos never interacted after the
death of Rodrigo’s father. During the San Beda Law Grand Alumni Homecoming in November 26, 2016, while discussing Ferdinand Marcos’ recent burial in the Libingan ng mga Bayani, Duterte claimed that he had thrice tried to tender his resignation as a Davao City prosecutor because of his mother’s anti-government activities, but his requests were denied by his superior. He then segued into his family’s relationship with the Marcoses, stating that “there’s nothing close, we [himself or the Dutertes] did not have any dinner together [with the Marcoses] except one or two.”

SUPPORTED BY MARCOS’S POLITICAL ALLIES

Nevertheless, various sources note that he was supported by influential pro-Marcos
individuals when he ran for mayor of Davao City in the 1988 elections. David Timberman, in A Changeless Land: Continuity and Change in Philippine Politics, notes that Duterte won the mayoralty in 1988 because he was “backed by many of Davao’s traditional
politicians.” Clamor, citing a Mindanao Daily Mirror source, and a November 2005 article published in Davao Today name some of these politicians: former representative Manuel Garcia; Elias Lopez, KBL mayor of Davao City before the EDSA Revolution; and Alejandro
Almendras, Vicente’s cousin. Almendras’ friendship with Ferdinand Marcos blossomed while both of them were first-term senators between 1959 and 1965.

Almendras organized a political party called Lakas ng Dabaw for the 1988 elections. Clamor speculates that Rodrigo was chosen by the party as its candidate for mayor because “he had serious rifts” with Respicio, and also because of “personal ambition and consanguinial affinity with Almendras.” Davao Today states that Almendras “supported” Rodrigo’s candidacy, something that Soling initially did not; “one politician in the family is enough,” she said. Cory Aquino also did not support Rodrigo, endorsing Respicio
instead.

Rodrigo won in 1988, his first in an uninterrupted series of electoral victories. In addition to backing from pro-Marcos elites, Rodrigo, Clamor claims, won partly because of an “unholy alliance” between Rodrigo’s supporters and those of Jun Pala, another mayoral candidate and a key figure in the violent anti-communist rebel militia called Alsa Masa. To synthesize Clamor’s and Davao Today’s narratives, theirs was a divide-and-conquer tactic: Pala, secretly funded by Alemendras’ group, would take some of the votes that would have gone to Respicio, who supported Alsa Masa; Duterte, who was running with pro-Marcos
people but had a “leftist” reputation because of his mother, would take both pro-Marcos and anti-Marcos votes, as well as votes from areas under the control of the New People’s Army.

Clamor claims that the NPA’s support for Rodrigo came about due to its resentment
of Respicio’s alliance with Alsa Masa. Jonathan Miller, however, in his biography of Rodrigo, highlights the role in the would-be mayor’s 1988 campaign played by Leoncio “Jun” Evasco, an ex-NPA member detained for rebellion in North Cotabato and incarcerated and tortured in Davao City. Rodrigo was the public prosecutor who
succeeded in getting Evasco a five-year sentence, but, according to Miller, throughout his time in prison, Evasco was visited by Rodrigo. As with many other detained rebels, Evasco was freed after the EDSA Revolution. He became a key member of Samahan ng Ex-Detainees Laban sa Detensyon at Aresto, or SELDA, which later played an important
role in efforts to ensure that human rights violation victims of the Marcos regime are recognized and compensated. Rodrigo enticed Evasco to become his campaign manager in 1988; certainly, he continued to have some pull with the NPA at that time.

If Rodrigo (with Evasco) and Pala (with Almendras) did enact a vote division strategy, it worked like a charm: Rodrigo obtained 100,021 votes; Respicio, 93,676; Pala, 71,355; while two independent also-rans trailed behind. Clamor also reads the immediate concession of Pala—only a day after the then-manual elections—as further evidence that he ran for Rodrigo’s benefit.

THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY MAY BE MY FRIEND

According to a declassified United States Department of State cable dated May 8, 1992, then Mayor Rodrigo Duterte was among Davao City’s “most vocal” backers of 1992 presidential candidate and Marcos crony Eduardo “Danding” Cojuangco. That was even if Rodrigo was not a member of the Nationalist People’s Coalition, Cojuangco’s party.

Apparently, by 1992, Duterte did not see the need to stick close to the Davao-based Marcos loyalists who helped him win his first term as Davao City mayor in 1988. The 1992 cable highlighted how majority of Davaoeños “agree that Duterte’s Lakas ng Dabaw party is the best political machine in the city and will probably reelect the mayor.” But the presidential candidate that he backed lost. Cojuangco placed a respectable third in a seven-cornered fight, not only nationally, but also in Davao City.

In the 1998 elections, Duterte supported the presidential bid of Joseph Estrada,
long an ally of the Marcoses, who also had the backing of Cojuangco. The support was mutual; reportedly, Estrada even considered including Duterte in his senatorial line-up as early as in February 1997.

Ever the pragmatist, Duterte eventually allied himself with Gloria Arroyo, who succeeded Estrada after his “constructive resignation” in January 2001. In mid-2002, Duterte was appointed Arroyo’s anti-crime adviser. Apparently, the president wanted Duterte to have a bigger role in battling crime nationwide, but as reported by Philippine Star, Duterte said, “I don’t want to do anything other than [be an adviser] because I do not want to jeopardize my primary task as city mayor.” He was also quoted as saying that “I am only good in my
city or in the region but not in the entire country. I’m afraid I’d fail because I am not really cut out for it.”

Perhaps Duterte, already well-attuned to the volatility of Philippine politics, knew
that closely associating himself with any Philippine president might hinder the continuation of his dominance in Davao. Indeed, during the 2004 elections, Duterte’s association with Arroyo, who was gunning for a full elected term, was apparently severed and reconnected
numerous times.

During her elected term as president, Arroyo had become exceedingly unpopular, hounded by allegations of cheating in the 2004 elections, human rights violations, and corruption. Duterte once again did what a pragmatic politician would do. According to Grace Uddin of Davao Today, in April 2010, instead of endorsing Gilberto “Gibo” Teodoro Jr., Arroyo’s former secretary of defense and anointed successor, Duterte publicly declared his support for Senator Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III of the Liberal Party, who, through fortuitous circumstances, had become one of the most visible faces of the
anti-Arroyo political opposition. Uddin quoted Duterte as saying that “Aquino is easy to talk with. He is a principled man and clean.”

Carlos Isagani Zarate, then secretary general of the Union of Peoples’ Lawyers in Mindanao, told Uddin that Duterte chose the candidate likeliest to win, even if it meant supporting someone he had not been previously associated with over a friend like Estrada. Estrada at the time was attempting a Malacañang comeback. Indeed, the nationwide outpouring of grief for Noynoy’s mother, Cory Aquino, after her death on
August 1, 2009, made it clear that Noynoy was a viable contender for the presidency in 2010.

Even before Cory Aquino’s death, Duterte had already resolved to throw his lot with
the Liberal Party, which counted among its members Peter Tiu Laviña, one of his most trusted men. In a March 2015 article, Edwin Espejo stated that it was Duterte who took over as Davao City’s LP chair after Laviña bowed out in April 2009. In a November 18, 2009, press release from then Senator Mar Roxas’ office, Duterte was described as giving Roxas “the royal treatment” when the latter visited Davao City that month. The statement relayed that Duterte personally endorsed Roxas’ vice presidential bid because “limpio
ini”—“[Roxas] is clean.”

And so, for a brief moment in Philippine history, Duterte seemingly went full yellow, the color associated with the Aquinos and the non-violent protestors who fought against the Marcos dictatorship. Duterte even ran in 2010—for the position of vice mayor because of term limits—as a member of the Liberal Party. In an article posted on her blog in 2011, Raissa Robles pointed out that Duterte’s running mate, his daughter Sara, ran under PDP-Laban, whose vice presidential candidate, Jejomar Binay, was running with the Partido ng Masang Pilipino’s standard bearer, Estrada. Binay and Estrada were the top vote-getters in Davao City. In a way, the Dutertes were still shrewdly supporting a pro-Marcos presidential candidate while appearing to be very close to an anti-Marcos one.

THE 2016 DUTERTE-MARCOS CONVERGENCE

Besides having presidents of the Philippines as members, the Marcos and Duterte
families have many other things in common. For one, both families have patriarchs who had high positions in the undivided Province of Davao.

Wilson Leon Godshall, in the article “Can the Philippines Maintain Independence?,” published in Social Science in October 1935, says Mariano Marcos, Ferdinand’s father, was appointed Deputy-Governor-at-Large of Davao in 1931 by Governor-General Dwight F. Davis. Mariano’s duty, according to Godshall, “was to procure reliable and direct information concerning the state of affairs and to prepare a program to correct evils.” However, Godshall says when the acting governor was replaced, the new governor did not act upon Mariano Marcos’ intelligence or recommendations. Mariano eventually returned home to the Ilocos region, where he died during the Second World War. Thus, it was unlikely that he ever interacted with Vicente Duterte—appointed governor of Davao from 1958-1959 and elected to the same position from 1959-1965—as Vicente and his family were still in the Visayas before, during, and immediately after the war. Vicente was even appointed as acting mayor of Danao, Cebu—his birthplace—from January 1946 until July 1947, when Manuel Roxas appointed a fellow LP member in his place

Both the Marcoses and the Dutertes also have links with the wealthy Villar family and the Nacionalista Party, whose long-time president is former senator Manny Villar. To cite one instance of such ties, the 2019 senatorial campaign of Imee Marcos was partly financed by Manny Villar and his brother, Virgilio Villar, based on her Statement of Contributions and Expenditures. Duterte’s 2016 campaign was not personally financed by a Villar, but a stockholder in one of Villar’s companies, Marcelino C. Mendoza, was a top contributor.

Then President-elect Rody Duterte met with Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr., who lost in the vice-presidential race, in Davao City June 11, 2016.Photo by Kiwi Bulaclac of Davao City Mayor’s Office. From Mindanews.

During the 2016 campaign, Duterte said that if he failed to curb criminality and corruption in the country within three months of becoming president, he would let Bongbong Marcos take over. He might have been playing to the crowd; Duterte made these remarks while campaigning at the Mariano Marcos State University in Batac, Ilocos Norte. Still, many
latched on to the Duterte-Marcos tandem, even if they were not running mates. Even the influential Iglesia ni Cristo went for the pair, officially endorsing them only a few days before the elections.

The results of the exit poll conducted by TV5 and Social Weather Stations, as reported by Mahar Mangahas in his Philippine Daily Inquirer column on May 14, 2016, suggest that the unofficial tandem was beneficial to both Marcos and Duterte. According to Mangahas, of Duterte’s 40 percentage points of the vote, “only 13 came from voters of his co-candidate Alan Peter Cayetano; the bulk of 18 came from Marcos voters, and another 6 from [voters of Leni Robredo, running mate of administration candidate Mar Roxas].” If the exit poll was representative of the actual vote, then of the 16.6 million or so votes obtained by Duterte, about 45 percent, or nearly 7.5 million, came from those who also voted for Marcos.

The results of the 2016 elections show that the Duterte-Marcos tandem was truly
formidable. Why, then, did they not formally run together? A member of Bongbong Marcos media team told VERA Files during the 2016 election campaign that Bongbong’s first choice as presidential candidate was Duterte. But he got impatient with Duterte’s dilly-dallying on whether to run or not so he teamed up with former senator Miriam Santiago, who was already very sick at that time.

There are other explanations. One may be because some who wanted to vote for Marcos did not like Duterte. Anti-communists, for instance, did not seem keen on supporting someone with known ties to the left. When Duterte controversially permitted a hero’s burial in Davao City for New People’s Army leader Leoncio “Ka Parago” Pitao in July 2015, for example, he received condemnation from anti-communist lawmaker Pastor Alcover of the Alliance for Nationalism and Democracy.

Perhaps some in the Duterte camp also considered themselves fundamentally opposed to
the Marcoses. As previously discussed, Duterte had ties to the Liberal Party, even becoming the party’s chairman in Davao City at one time. There was even talk that Duterte might become the LP’s standard bearer before Mar Roxas was formally proclaimed the party’s candidate in July 2015.

Moreover, though Duterte-Marcos seemed like a logical combination—strongman from the
south, son of a strongman from the north— there is no indication that Rodrigo Duterte and the Marcoses were an “item” before 2015.

It is hard to identify people within the inner circle of Duterte’s 2016 campaign—excluding financial contributor Antonio Floirendo Jr.—who have a long history with the Marcoses. Many in that circle are identified with post-EDSA Revolution administrations such as Angelito Banayo, Jesus Dureza, Emmanuel Piñol, Carlos Dominguez III, and Jose
Calida. Of that group, Calida is known to have supported a Duterte-Marcos tandem during the 2016 campaign, and, being the son of Ilocano settlers in Davao, also has ties to the ethnolinguistic group most closely associated with the Marcoses. But he had also been
linked to Ramos and served under the Arroyo administration at a time when the Marcoses considered themselves members of the opposition.

One who may have been a link between the Dutertes and the Marcoses during the 2016
election season is Salvador Panelo, currently Duterte’s Presidential Legal Counsel and spokesperson. Panelo actually ran for senator under Imelda Marcos’ Kilusang Bagong Lipunan ticket in the 1992 elections. He placed 125th among 164 candidates. A United Press International report, dated August 2, 1995, names Panelo as “a lawyer for the Marcoses” at the time Bongbong Marcos had been convicted of tax evasion by the Quezon City Regional Trial Court. Much later, Panelo would also include the Dutertes among his clients.

In March 2015, Panelo was quoted by Rosalinda Orosa of Pilipino Star Ngayon as saying that he knew a presidentiable willing to give way to Duterte in 2016. The would-be candidate was not named, but Panelo said that he/she wanted to be Duterte’s running mate. One wonders if this was Panelo brokering a Duterte-Marcos pairing.

A few months later, on June 15, 2015, the country finally saw Duterte and Bongbong
Marcos together, as the latter was a guest in the former’s weekly television program Gikan sa Masa Para sa Masa. While the focus of the interview was largely federalism, they also talked about the 2016 elections. At one point, Marcos said, “sumusunod lang ako kay
Duterte. He is my mentor in politics. Ako’y tagahanga lang.” Duterte jokingly replied, “hindi ko tuloy malaman kung ako ba ang presidente o siya.”

That interview was sufficient to fuel talk of a Duterte-Marcos tandem. Alas, it was not meant to be. Panelo, one of the few in Malacañang who has unmistakable ties to both the Marcoses and the Dutertes, may have failed as matchmaker.

Imelda Marcos greets President Duterte after his State-of-the-Nation address in July 2016. Malacañang photo.

The double issue of Kasarinlan: Philippine Journal of Third World Studies, entitled “Marcos Pa Rin! Ang Mga Pamana at Sumpa ng Rehimeng Marcos,” notes that there may be two extremes among current Marcos loyalists: “(1) those who literally worship former president Ferdinand E. Marcos as a divine entity (absolute loyalty), and (2) those who at least appear loyal to him for electoral purposes (contingent loyalty).” The Dutertes seem to be closer to the latter. Duterte may have been the president who finally had Ferdinand Marcos buried in the Libingan ng mga Bayani, but that may not be a reliable indicator of who he is personally loyal to, given that he also allowed a hero’s burial for an NPA commander in 2015.

How long will the Dutertes see the Marcoses as politically useful? How long until the Marcoses fully reassert their continuing dominance in Philippine politics? Perhaps, while they are figuring out who will run as what in 2022, the rest of the electorate can find out if there are alternatives to political elites, whether from the north or the south, who have long worn out their welcome.

The Marcoses: A History of Rejecting Election Defeats
Posted on by diktaduraadmin

Originally published by Vera Files on November 27, 2020.

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

Photo from Bongbong Marcos FB page

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why is it named the Ninoy Aquino International Airport?
Posted on by diktaduraadmin

Originally published by Vera Files on August 20, 2021.

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

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

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

How RA No. 6639 became law

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Proposals to rename NAIA under Duterte

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like Duterte, her father was a misogynist too, Imee reminds us
Posted on by diktaduraadmin

Originally published by Vera Files on January 23, 2021.

Senator Imee Marcos just has to butt in. She defended President Rodrigo Duterte’s low regard for women in politics only to remind us of her father’s similar, if not more atrocious view.

Just before 2020 ended, Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte emerged as the presidential frontrunner in a Pulse Asia survey conducted for the period November 23–December 2. The results also show that she is statistically tied with Senate President Vicente Sotto III and Manila Mayor Isko Moreno in the vice-presidential race.

Speaking at the inauguration of the Skyway Stage 3 project on January 14, 2021, Duterte advised his daughter against seeking the presidency. Right after saying that he would not fantasize about a term extension, he said, “And my daughter, niudyok man nila. I have told Inday not to run kasi naaawa ako na dadaanan niya na dinaanan ko. Hindi ito pambabae. Alam mo, the emotional setup of a woman and a man is totally different. Maging gago ka dito.” (My daughter, they are prodding her. I have told Inday not to run because I would pity her if she goes through what I experienced. This is not for women. You know, the emotional setup of a woman and a man is totally different. You’ll be made into a fool here.)

After two days, Imee Marcos, asked by DWIZ radio to respond to Duterte’s statement, mentioned Sara’s miscarriage in 2016, and said, “Kawawa nga ‘yan e, kasi hirap na hirap siya. Sabi nga niya napaka burned out na, ayaw na niya mag mayor e kasi hirap na daw siya.” (She’s pitiful because she’s having a difficult time. She said that she is burned out and that she does not want to be mayor anymore.)

Unprompted, she continued, “Pero ‘yung mga reaction na very misogynistic and chauvinist na ‘not a job for a woman,’ naintindihan ko ‘yun e kasi yung tatay ko ganun din e, sinasabi sa akin na si Bongbong ang dapat pumasok sa pulitika, period. Pero yung nanay ko, ako, parati siyang very protective kasi bakbakan ‘yan e, sabi niya. ‘Wag na nga ‘yung mga babae, kawawa naman.”

(But the reaction that [the statement] was very misogynist and chauvinist, that [the presidency] is ‘not a job for a woman,’ I get that because my father used to say the same thing. He used to tell me that it should be Bongbong who should enter politics, period. He was very protective of me and my mother because he says that [politics] is a down and dirty fight. Women should shy away from it. They should be pitied.)

I think it’s not out of being chauvinistic, that you have inferior capabilities as a female, but more as a father who worries about pushing his daughter out to the brutish world of politics,” added Imee, who just has to conjure the ghost of her father, the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, whenever the opportunity presents itself. In her statement, Imee defended the idea that women should not be in politics, and that they should seek the protection of powerful men. According to her, this is not misogyny or chauvinism, but an act of love and concern.

First, Imee’s claim that her father shielded her from “the brutish world of politics” is untrue. At 21 years old, Marcos appointed her national chair of the Kabataang Barangay (KB), an organization for the youth to engage in politics. In other words, the late dictator gifted Imee with her own political network. In 1977, in order for Imee to qualify as a KB member and leader, Marcos signed Presidential Decree (PD) 1102, adjusting the age limit for members from 15–18 to 15–21 years old. Imee stayed as national chair until her family was forcibly removed from power by the 1986 Edsa Revolt. The decree was signed a day after Archimedes Trajano was tortured and killed for asking in a public forum why the president’s daughter had to lead the KB.

Meanwhile, a declassified diplomatic cable from the American Embassy in Manila to the Secretary of State in Washington DC dated August 9, 1978 revealed that Marcos was leveraging his daughter in pacifying “radical” KB members on the verge of conducting anti-US bases strikes and demonstrations in Clark, Subic, and other neighboring towns. One can reasonably say that Marcos did not protect his daughter from the “brutish world of politics.” She was long in on the family business.

And lest Senator Marcos forgets, or claims that she is too young to have remembered, her father unleashed a barrage of sexist remarks—from patronizing to utterly demeaning—against Cory Aquino during the 1986 snap presidential election.

Under pressure from the United States to undertake sweeping political reforms, and amid growing frustration with his administration domestically, Marcos called for a snap election on November 3, 1985 in an attempt to prove his mandate. On December 5, 1985, Cory Aquino, wife of the slain opposition leader, Senator Benigno S. Aquino Jr., announced her candidacy. This came three days after Sandiganbayan acquitted Armed Forces of the Philippines chief of staff General Fabian Ver and 25 others in the murder of her husband at the tarmac of the Manila International Airport, a decision that enraged many.

In her first press interview after announcing her candidacy, Aquino declared she wanted a debate with Marcos on live TV. Initially, Marcos said he was willing to do so. A Tokyo-based media service quoted him as saying, “My conversations with ladies have always been pleasant and I don’t think that this will be different from others. I presume I will survive this encounter.” Two weeks later, Marcos publicly refused to debate with a woman but would only have a “friendly conversation” with her. Aquino responded with, “Why not, I am all for a friendly conversation.”

In January 1986, Aquino renewed her challenge, but Marcos refused once again. As carried in the US State Department Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) daily report on January 27, 1986, the government-run Maharlika Broadcasting System (MBS) had this to say:

Had the debate pushed through, Cory’s lack of government programs, her flip-flopping position on vital issues, and her abysmal ignorance of statecraft would have been exposed to full public view, embarrassing the lady no end. Mr. Marcos, a formidable debater, was too much of a gentleman to let such a thing come to pass.

It is on record that Mrs. Aquino, much like a woman changing clothes, has altered her own position on such issues as the U.S. bases, participation of Communists in her government, and recognition of independence of the Muslim regions in the south. With her shifting stance on these important issues, how can there be any meaningful debate?

The much-awaited debate took almost two months to happen. Veteran newscaster and host of the ABC News program Nightline Ted Koppel casted doubt that Marcos will ever accept the challenge, saying Marcos’s advisers “want him to duck the debate.”

ABC News had agreements with both candidates two and a half weeks before the scheduled debate on February 6. But just two days before this, Marcos said the confrontation should not take place on American TV, but on Philippine television, which could have happened had he accepted Aquino’s earlier challenges. A day before the interview, Donald M. Rothberg of Associated Press quoted Marcos as saying, “Let’s put this to bed. . . I’m glad I was challenged to debate with her.” And with a hint of sarcasm, added “I’m trembling all over because of this debate.”

Held on February 5, the “debate” was a buzzer-beater. The snap election was scheduled on February 7, and the Election Code forbids any type of campaign activity 24 hours prior to the polling day. Marcos opened the interview with an explanation as to why the supposed debate was not held on the 6th, saying he did not want to break the law. To which Koppel responded, “No one has yet explained to us how an interview on American television, not rebroadcasted in the Philippines, could violate any law. Furthermore, we offered to do the broadcast last night [February 4], Mrs. Aquino accepted, President Marcos did not.” Nightline ended up broadcasting two separate, recorded interviews of Marcos and Aquino. During his airtime, Marcos as usual drilled on Cory Aquino’s inexperience.

But the issue of inexperience is hardly the vilest of Marcos’s attacks against Cory. On January 23, 1986, the Associated Pressquoted Marcos as criticizing Aquino for “having the nerve to aspire for the presidency when she knows little about running the country.” Speaking in Filipino, he said that the ideal Filipino woman is “modest, does not challenge men, is intelligent but she keeps it to herself and teaches her husband only in the bedroom.”

Francis X. Clines of the New York Times followed up on this story in his article published a week after. Having no hint of remorse, Marcos complained about being vilified for his sexist remarks. He said, “Of course they belong to the bedroom, but in the sense of a woman’s being discreet. If she had something to say to her husband which might humiliate her husband.” Marcos further professed that Aquino “has not run anything in her life” and would govern the country using “cram courses” and “pious intentions. . . . A family tragedy simply cannot be the justification for leadership or for flirting with national destiny naively or carelessly,” referencing the assassination of Ninoy Aquino in 1983.

The then first lady Imelda Marcos, once touted as Marcos’s “secret weapon” in his previous electoral campaigns, and who held multiple high-ranking government positions, shared her husband’s misogyny and chauvinism. The Los Angeles Times reporter Mark Fineman quoted Imelda saying that Aquino is the “complete opposite of what a woman should be because she is challenging the power of a man.”

The former first lady also managed to criticize Aquino‘s appearance whilst implying the shallowness of an entire community, “[o]ur opponent, she does not wear any makeup. She does not have her fingernails manicured. How else, Imelda wondered, can Aquino capture the large Manila gay vote? You know gays. They are for beauty,” a United Press International report quotes. This is the same Imelda who expressed grave concern that her daughter Imee was hanging out with “faggots” in Princeton University, as revealed in a diplomatic cable from the American Embassy in Manila dated November 4, 1974.

Marcos was indeed fixated on the fact that his opponent is a woman. In a campaign speech in Malolos Bulacan on December 27, 1985 (as transcribed by FBIS), he said:

I have said we are having difficulty because our adversary is a woman. As you know, to me all women are beautiful. So I should say she is beautiful. You can see the dilemma I am in. As I have told some people, I do not know what I should do. If we criticize her, we get attacked; so perhaps it is best not to say anything about her. So you see, we are damned if we do, we are damned if we don’t. In the past it was not so bad. Perhaps I should just keep quiet, but she is the one making all the noises. As you know, I am not used to quarreling with women. I do not like to provoke women.”

Marcos’s (and apparently his running mate Arturo Tolentino’s) bigotry, in full view of the public, only went from bad to worse. So much so that the public information chief of Cory’s Crusader, Narzalina Lim, decried the “blatantly sexist and often obscene language employed [by] the two KBL candidates in their provincial sorties.” She said in a statement quoted in the Manila Times Journal, “[t]he constant harping on the ‘woman on top’ and ‘hamon ng babae’ [challenge of women] theme is an insult to Filipino womanhood worthy only of male chauvinist pigs.”

But for a man who had seemingly infinite ways of insulting women, Marcos appealed to them the only way he knew how: by extolling their good looks and that of his wife. In an FBIS transcript of his campaign rally speech in Iloilo on January 27, Marcos insulted both his opponent’s intelligence and rationality, all the while pandering to the Ilonggo women:

That Cory Aquino is something else, she does not have Ninoy’s intelligence. Look at her, what has she been saying? “The moment I win as president, I will have Marcos arrested”. . . But as you can see I am accompanied by a beautiful woman. I am surprised here in Iloilo—all the women are beautiful. [cheers] All the beautiful women, more so especially the older ones. [laughter]

Juxtaposing women and pitting them against each other was Marcos’s strategy for wooing their votes.

But for Marcos and his campaign machinery, women were not only potential voters who would blush at his flattery. They were also deemed as tools for entertainment. The Associated Press reported on January 23 that “hundreds of bar girls and prostitutes marched through Manila’s red-light district” chanting Marcos’ campaign slogans as they were escorted by a marching band and cops in motorcycles. Several bar operators and employees said they received veiled threats that their licenses would not be renewed if they did not take part in the march, the report added.

The 1986 election was Marcos’s most crucial electoral campaign, and yet he was at his most vulnerable. Among the main issues thrown at Marcos was his failing health and his falsified war records. For someone who has dedicated almost his entire life (and a ton of public funds) creating a myth out of his purported manly prowess and vitality, these two issues might have delivered the worst blows to his public image, and more importantly, his ego. In fact, in the February 5 debate-cum-interview with Ted Koppel, when asked a follow up question regarding his falsified war records, the Filipino dictator snapped. With visible clues of scorn in his face, he said, “now look, I don’t want to talk about this anymore. If you do, I’m gonna walk out.”

This is reminiscent of a recent outburst of our current Commander-in-Chief. In the wake of scathing criticisms on his typhoon response encapsulated by the viral hashtag #NasaanAngPangulo (Where is the president?), Duterte spewed sexist innuendos, lies, and threats towards Vice President Leni Robredo, who was at the time being lauded for her efficient and timely rescue and relief efforts in typhoon-ravaged areas.

In the commemoration rites of another deadly typhoon back in 2016, he teased Robredo about her short skirt, and basically reduced the second highest elected public official to a nice pair of legs.

To soothe their bruised egos when challenged by women in politics, Marcos and Duterte resort to the same crude tools in the machismo bag: patronize and demean their women opponents, beat them back to the home and hearth, toy with them as sex objects. And their daughters are not exempt from their machinations.

With one sexist remark Duterte generated a strand of public opinion that welcomes his daughter’s entry in the presidential derby. That’s not Duterte taking pity on his daughter. Marcos did not shield Imee either, contrary to Imee’s spin. These misogynist fathers were not, in fact, protecting their daughters from the rough and tumble world of politics. They treat their daughters as political merchandise that they can sell to voters to expand their political control.

Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s Last Election Campaign (Part 2)
Posted on by diktaduraadmin

Originally published by Vera Files on May 1, 2022.

Epic fail of a political machinery

Almost a month before the May 9 national elections, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr.’s presidential campaign claimed to have the support of 85 percent of all municipal and city councilors (or 14,600 out of the 17,177 total) and 90 percent of all the country’s governors (73 of 81).

No verifiable proof to these claims were offered, except photos of 31 governors (or their representatives) and one gubernatorial aspirant seated around a table with Bongbong on April 311, and 28. But for Quezon Governor Danilo Suarez, it’s all over but for the counting. “Right now we have a new President,” he said.

Not satisfied with this claim of overwhelming strength, Marcos partisans are now even saying that the very parties that challenged Bongbong’s father, Ferdinand Sr., at the tailend of his dictatorship like PDP-Laban and UNIDO, in their unrecognizable resurrections, now favor a Marcos restoration.

Reliance on political machinery to canvass votes and transforming that very same mechanism into a juggernaut of intimidation, deception, corruption, and violence brings us back to Marcos Sr. who had so depended on it in his unrelenting quest to keep himself and his family in power.

In his 21 years as president (1965-72) and dictator (1972-86), Ferdinand Marcos destroyed all political parties other than his own Kilusang Bagong Lipunan (KBL).

When he ran for president a third time in 1981, Marcos Sr. had almost complete control of local government officials. In a recent study on the KBL by Julio C. Teehankee, he pointed out that in the 1980 local elections, Marcos’ party “won 69 out of 73 governorships and nearly 1,450 out of 1,560 mayoral contests.”

Tested in two presidential referendums and one election, this much vaunted-political machinery delivered the votes at the dictator’s command. Marcos Sr.  was the unrivaled practitioner of machine politics in the country — or so it seemed.

Cracks in the Marcos political machine started to show in the 1984 Batasan election. And the dictator’s last campaign ended in a popular revolt that forced him, his family, and his cabal into exile.

If Black, Manafort, and Stone were putting on a show for Marcos for Washington, who then functioned as the domestic campaign managers of the Marcos-Tolentino tandem in the snap election?

Unsurprisingly, those who principally oversaw the campaign included people in the Marcos cabinet, with the starring role given to labor minister Blas Ople.

Foreign correspondents referred to Ople as Marcos’s campaign manager or, more specifically, the head of Marcos’s campaign in Luzon. Documents in the custody of the Presidential Commission on Good Government suggest that he was a bit more than that.  Ople led a team that formulated Marcos’s 1986 national campaign strategy shortly after he announced in November 1985 his willingness to hold a snap election.

Ople headed an ad hoc group that produced a report that “[embodied] early perceptions of the political situation, the possible strategy and specific proposals towards an effective information campaign,” which was transmitted to Imelda Marcos on November 22, 1985.

In the 32-page “Election Memo,” Ople’s group stated that although “the First Lady [asked them] to specifically look into the information and propaganda problem [emphasis theirs],” they could “only formulate an adequate information and propaganda plan within the context of a coherent and unified overall campaign plan.”

The report was precisely that: a brief, though detailed, electoral campaign playbook.

03 Ople Campaign Plan Memo … by VERA Files

At that time, Cory Aquino had not officially declared that she would run for president, but the “Ople Plan” already considered her the most viable opposition candidate. Ople acknowledged the difficulty of running against the widow of Ninoy Aquino, whose assassination was being pinned by many on Marcos or his closest allies.

“Cory’s candidacy will run on emotion and inflated invective against the President and his family . . . We cannot afford to make the Aquino widow more sympathetic to voters than she perhaps already is,” the report stated.

“It’s the kind of candidacy which can either be beaten mercilessly at the polls or catch fire and spark popular support,” it added.  “You cannot predict where it will end [emphasis theirs].”

To address this, the Ople Plan suggested that Marcos “lay down the [line of his party, the KBL]: while Mrs. Aquino deserves our compassion, the question of running the affairs of state is something else entirely, particularly at this time [emphasis theirs].”

It elaborated further, recommending a “strong attacking line to dent the [opposition] candidacy”: “Cory Aquino is weak on experience and looks even now befuddled outside of public office. Doy Laurel [should the opposition field him instead, was to be painted as] irascible, mediocre, and born to be caricatured.”

Cory wirh Noynoy
Cory Aquino with her son, Benigno S. Aquino III (who later became the 15th Philippine president) on the campaign trail, 1986. Photo from Teddy Locsin Jr. from https://www.officialgazette.gov.ph.

In connection with this line of attack, Ople’s recommended central campaign theme was: “The problems that confront our country today—insurgency, economic depression, social ferment, a restive Armed Forces—call for a Man of Strength, Courage, Intelligence and Experience to be at the helm [emphasis supplied].”

Ople, however, was well aware of Marcos’s physical limitations at the time. He was among the first officials to publicly confirm that Marcos had health issues. The Ople Plan stated that “the more punishing task of leapfrogging the whole country should be left to the Vice-Presidential candidate [then yet to be determined] and the First Lady, who will serve as the President’s surrogate in the campaign.”

Besides attacking the opposition’s perceived weakness and projecting Marcos’s strength, the Ople Plan recommended a number of other strategic interventions. Among these was to make it appear that the opposition was in bed with the communist insurgency.

“The ‘coalition-government’ plan of the Opposition should be exposed as a proposal that will offer the nation on a silver platter to the Communists. That, after all, is its history,” the memo stated, recommending sanctions against “certain anti-administration provincial radio stations and commentators,” such as “the radio station of Luis Villafuerte [of Camarines Sur] which apart from being abusive in its attacks against us, has provided regular hour for the [New People’s Army].”

Subversion,” the plan continued (emphasis theirs), “can be the reason for suspending or revoking its (the radio station’s) license to operate.”

The Bureaucracy and Local Governments as Campaign Machinery 

In a section of the election memo on campaign organization, it urged that “[in] this all-important electoral contest, the President must sound the call to all: We must get our act together. The in-fighting and intramurals must stop. Our political future, perhaps even our lives, are on the line.”

“All” referred to “elements of the broad campaign organization,” which included 1) the KBL: “its leadership and membership; 2) The Cabinet and the government bureaucracy; 3) The local governments and local officials up to the barangal [sic] level”; and 4) The civic action groups and sectoral organizations supporting the president.”

Of interest is the inclusion of the bureaucracy which, under current laws, are banned from engaging in partisan political activity during elections.

In a memorandum to Marcos dated January 15, 1986, Ople updated Marcos about the matters of political interest discussed in a meeting of the cabinet which adopted a proposal to use appointments in government positions as a way to “turn some of our own lukewarm soldiers and officers into tigers in the battlefield.”

Marcos’s campaign manager was referring to government officials who had been officers-in-charge for more than the recommended period and whose “appointments have not been acted upon simply because of lack of time on the part of the President, insufficient lobbying or timorousness of the ministers, or plain and simple inertia.” The ministers were then asked to “submit all proposed appointments on a single sheet of paper, and the Prime Minister should handcarry these proposals of all ministries for immediate action by the President.”

04-Ople Memo Re Jan 1986 Ca… by VERA Files

Ople also touched on the cabinet’s take on “the proper and effective utilization of the bureaucracy.” He decried “the fact that many public servants and employees are working openly and covertly for the opposition, sometimes using government facilities for this purpose.”

The cabinet then agreed that “ministers and agency heads should exercise more vigorous leadership to convert or recruit renegades in their own jurisdictions and equally important, mobilize the special constituencies under their jurisdictions.” Ople cited the Ministry of Agrarian Reform and his own Ministry of Labor that were to mobilize unions and peasant groups.

The Ministry of Trade and Industry, he continued, “should organize the businessmen and industrialists sympathetic to us, who will then articulate principled grounds why business should support the Marcos-Tolentino team.”

The same was relayed by Edgardo “Ed” B. Adea, assistant cabinet secretary, in his letter to Marcos dated January 17, 1986.  He revealed that some ministers “confirmed their problems with regard to their employees’ voting tendency,” prompting Ople to urge ministers Jose Dans (transportation) and Roberto Ongpin (trade and industry) to “confer with drivers and businessmen whom they are serving.”

Other communications further prove the participation of the sprawling Marcos bureaucracy in aiding the reelection effort. These include political assessment reports from the Minister of Natural Resources, Rodolfo Del Rosario. One such report, dated January 10, 1986, detailed information gathered by “field area managers” that reached the central office of the Wood Industry Development Authority showing that Marcos was not favored in many provinces, such as Benguet, Pangasinan, Bulacan, Pampanga, Bataan, and Camarines Sur.

In Camarines Norte, Del Rosario mentioned that the opposition was gaining ground, with officials such as Daet mayor Marcial Pimentel and MP Roy Padilla—father of current senatorial candidate Robin Padilla—controlling five of the province’s twelve mayors against Marcos.

05-Min. Del Rosario (Natura… by VERA Files

In fact, many areas in the Philippines did not vote KBL in the 1984 parliamentary elections, resulting in over a third of the membership of the first Regular Batasang Pambansa going to the opposition and independents. The Ople group concluded that “over-confidence in the 1984 parliamentary elections was probably a turn-off in addition to being unwarranted.”

The annex of the Ople Plan, “Notes on the 1984 Parliamentary Elections,” pointed out that “of the thirteen regions, only three voted solidly for KBL [Regions II, VIII, and XII],” and that KBL “lost heavily” in the National Capital Region, Region IV, and Region V.

“In general, the KBL lost in urban areas,” the memo continued, further noting that “[the] vaunted Solid North has shown some dents.”

Even Marcos’s running mate, Tolentino, was quoted by the foreign press (i.e., Asiaweek, as reported by TIME in an article published on January 26, 1986) as saying that Cory was “slightly ahead of Marcos in the surveys, with 40% of voters undecided.”

Still, Ople continued to fulfill his role.  An editorial published in We Forum noted that while campaigning in Iriga on January 15, Ople said that with a new mandate, “a new Marcos will emerge from the cocoon of the old,” with “a vision that will impel him to reject all forms of worldliness and the importunings of friends and associates for self-aggrandizement.”

The editorial noted that this was, at the very least, an indirect admission that “the President had failed to temper his worldliness, control the lust for riches of those close to him, during his past years in power” and that it was difficult to believe that “what the younger and healthier Marcos failed to fulfill in the past 20 years, an older and visibly faltering Marcos could achieve if given another term.”

Other ministers also provided words for the Marcos campaign, sometimes in the form of statements for their principal. A January 7, 1986 memorandum was sent by National Economic Development Authority director-general/Minister of Economic Planning Vicente Valdepeñas Jr. on the “Draft Economic Statement for [the] Makati Business Club” which Marcos was to deliver later that month. The draft comprehensively covered economic developments and policies, and contained a push for Marcos to issue a presidential decree on National Policies on Agricultural Development and Incentives.

Although the statement was drafted for Marcos, Adea would fawn over the dictator’s “eloquent and convincing replies” to questions from the Makati businessmen.  In a January 21, 1986 letter, Adea wrote that this was “100% proof” of Marcos’s knowledge and affirmed that a debate with Cory would be like “a novice against a professional fighter in the ring.”

A document with the header “Ministry of Human Settlements, Region X, Cagayan De Oro City” contains what is purportedly the results of an “opinion poll survey” as of January 26, 1986. While it showed that Marcos would win in Region X, it projected a Marcos loss in three cities there: Cagayan de Oro, Surigao, and Tangub, due to “relative inactivity and/or indifference of the mayor on the campaign,” specifically in Surigao.

The Ministry of Human Settlements was headed by Imelda Marcos. The 1988 COA annual audit report on the Light Rail Transit Authority (LRTA) — chaired by Imelda—noted that the Metro Manila Commission (MMC) —yet another body led by Imelda—took P135,372.50 worth of LRT tokens on February 4-5, 1986, a few days before the snap election, presumably to give free rides. In its 1987 report on the LRTA, COA recommended that the agency recover that amount, as well as the cash value of an earlier transfer of tokens to the MMC for “Barangay Day” in 1985, via the Office of the President or the Presidential Commission on Good Government, but this recommendation—which would have added over P 210,000 to the LRTA’s bleeding coffers—went unheeded.

Also under the MMC were the metro aides (street cleaners). In his column in the January 14-20, 1986 issue of We Forum, Raul Gonzalez—future Secretary of Justice of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo—said that he saw metro aides “removing posters from walls and other public places and the usual target are the posters of Cory Aquino and Doy Laurel.”

In his autobiography Light from my Father’s Shadow, current vice presidential candidate Lito Atienza claimed that “extra allowances” from the “KBL kitty” were also given to metro aides, as well as to Manila city hall employees and even “individual oppositionists” to ensure that Marcos won in the capital.

Some local officials contributed to a Marcos victory in a rather odd manner. On election day, NAMFREL volunteers, who were tasked to guard the electoral process, became fair game for Marcos operatives. James Hamilton Paterson in America’s Boy recounts the effort by local leaders of Caloocan who transported lepers from Tala Leprosarium to polling precincts, effectively warding off both voters and volunteers.

Still, both the Comelec and NAMFREL tallies showed that Marcos lost to Aquino by hundreds of thousands of votes in NCR.

The Campaigning Armed Forces

Ople had some suggestions on how Marcos should deal with uncooperative government agents, particularly one Philippine Constabulary commander. In a January 20, 1986 memo, Ople told Marcos that “Governor Juanito S. Remulla of Cavite and the main KBL grouping in that province are extremely concerned that the incumbent PC Commander, Col. Wilfredo Nicolas, has remained allegedly indifferent and uncooperative [thus being an] impediment to delivering the proportions of the vote” pledged to Marcos. Ople suggested that either Nicolas be coerced to be more cooperative, or replaced. He said Remulla’s preferred replacement was then Lt. Col. Panfilo Lacson (now senator and presidential candidate), “who assists Col. Rolly Abadilla” in the Metrocom Intelligence and Security Group.

06-Ople Memo on Cavite PC C… by VERA Files

It is unclear what Marcos’s response to Ople’s memo was; there is no evidence that Lacson or anyone else replaced Nicolas.

But it was clear that members of the military and the police did participate in the campaign effort.

From the Integrated National Police, Maj. Florendo Gascon, station commander of Muntinlupa, wrote a letter dated December 30, 1985 with the subject “Political Situation Report” to the district superintendent of the Eastern Police District of the Metropolitan Police Force. Gascon reported about a “volatile political situation” in his area because of the “poor leadership” of then mayor Santiago Carlos Jr., a KBL member.

Gascon wrote that Carlos appointed oppositionists from UNIDO/Laban to “vacant key positions” and cut subsidies that lowered police morale. He suggested that the KBL leadership in Muntinlupa be reorganized, giving the party chairmanship to “an aggressive and strong leader,” and that more active campaigning be done, mobilizing “all available resources to offset whatever political gain the Unido has achieved.”

From the constabulary, Brig. Gen. Carlos F. Malana sent a memo dated January 27, 1986 to Marcos regarding “Organizations Given Seminars on Filipino Ideology Who are Willing to Support the President.” Malana stated that “the officers of these organizations are willing to have an audience with His Excellency and give their pledges of full support to the President’s reelection bid.” Malana, however, noted that some groups in the “Loyalists for Marcos Movement”—led by Anacleto Dizon, author of Ferdinand Marcos: Itinadhana sa Kadakilaan—“sense they are only used for political purposes during elections, after which they are totally ignored and forgotten.”

Retired military officers given government positions also campaigned for Marcos. A January 21, 1986 letter written on the letterhead of the National Housing Authority (NHA) was sent to Col. Arturo Aruiza and Capt. Ramon Azurin, aide-de-camp to the president, by retired Maj. Gen. Gaudencio V. Tobias, NHA general manager. The letter talked about preparations for the “Assembly of the Urban Poor for the President” scheduled on January 23, 1986 in Tondo, Manila.

Protecting the ballot
To thwart ballot-box snatching, vigilantes form human barricades for ballot boxes being brought from precincts to municipal halls for official tally of the results of the snap election. Photo by Ben Avestruz, People Power: The Philippine Revolution of 1986.

Other members of the AFP or the Civilian Home Defense Force (CHDF) took an even more direct—and violent—approach to assisting the Marcos-Tolentino campaign. The Report on the February 7, 1986 Presidential Election in the Philippines by the International Observer Delegation noted a number of violations by members of the military, either directly observed by them or from other sources. These included “individuals in military uniform, or otherwise armed, well within the 50 meters (from polling places) proscribed by the Election Code,” military men attacking the headquarters of the National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL) in Baybay and Tacloban, Leyte and harrassing/injuring NAMFREL volunteers in several other locations.

Military trucks carried armed men in the convoy of campaigning officials. This was reported in Antique, with the particular official being a Marcos ally, MP Arturo Pacificador, by Evelio Javier, who was UNIDO party representative. On February 11, 1986, while the counting of votes was still ongoing, Javier was assassinated by masked gunmen.

The Ople Plan contained a warning: “An Escalante occuring at the height of the campaign will be a disaster for the party and could be the boost needed by the Opposition.” This was a reference to the Escalante Massacre, which was declared by the Supreme Court as an unjustified killing of activists by government agents on September 20, 1985.

“In urging an energetic campaign effort throughout the country, we nonetheless would counsel our regional leaders and local commanders to take every care that our forces do not commit local acts of repression in the drive to win votes. Any local repression on our part will be laid at the President’s door on the national level (emphasis theirs),” the Election Memo stated.

Javier’s killing was suspected to have been instigated by Pacificador, whose proclamation as the representative of Antique in1984 over his rival,Javier, was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court after the EDSA Revolution. Pacificador was acquitted of masterminding Javier’s assassination in 2004, but his lawyer Avelino Javellana, former Antique PC chief Capt. John Paloy, and several of his security men were found guilty of the crime.

Last February 23, the memory of Javier’s killing by Marcos allies and henchmen forced the campaign of Bongbong Marcos to call off their rally in the very same field where Javier was killed after residents protested.

The International Observer Delegation noted other deaths, such as that of Jeremias de Jesus, “a UNIDO organizer in St. Lucia, Tarlac” who was killed “apparently by four members of the CHDF.” It said that “[the] most serious form of intimidation observed by members of the delegation was that practiced by the CHDF in provinces and cities with a local strongman [areas, where they] were responsible for threatening voters and opposition poll-watchers with guns, poles or by their mere presence [and were also] responsible for snatching and stuffing of ballot boxes.” The Delegation noted that the Army’s count of election-related deaths was 80, claiming that more KBL supporters were killed (20) than UNIDO supporters (10).  It cited two NAMFREL volunteers who were killed, including one who challenged “the anomalous counting of ballots in the province of Agusan del Sur.”

Not content with intimidation and rigging of polls at the local level, the Marcos electoral machine tried to tamper with the final tally of votes. Thirty-five Comelec technicians and computer programmers, unable to stomach the blatant cheating, walked out of the Philippine International Convention Center where the election results were being canvassed on  February 9, 1986.  They were given sanctuary by the Catholic church.

Maleen Cruz, who was among the 35, related to Marilies von Brevern in her book The Turning Point that they received word “that Bongbong Marcos had dispatched some men to track us down” but none of them was harmed.

The Delegation concluded that Marcos’s “win” as proclaimed by the Comelec in 1986 was not the result of a free and fair democratic exercise.”  Before the group completed its report, events such as Javier’s killing had already convinced some in the opposition of the need to force Marcos out —by means of a revolt, if necessary.

On February 15, 1986, the Batasang Pambansa declared Marcos and Tolentino winners of the snap election. The following day, Cory Aquino gathered more than a million Filipinos at the Luneta to protest the results and launch a civil disobedience campaign against Marcos.

In her memoir, To Love Another Day, Aquino recalled that when asked how long she could sustain the protest, she replied: six months. But in her mind, she doubted if she could continue the effort protest for more than three months.

Ten days later, the Edsa revolt happened. Marcos, his family, and close associates were forced into exile in Hawaii.

As the Ople Plan noted, “[the] most powerful issue that the opposition can use in the campaign is the issue of Responsibility, i.e. the President and his administration are responsible for the crises that now confront the nation, [such as] the murder of Ninoy Aquino, the miscarriage of justice, the plunder of the coffers of government.”

The events before, during, and immediately after the 1986 snap election show that an assignment of such responsibility by the opposition to the Marcos government was perfectly justified.

Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s last election campaign (Part 1)
Posted on by diktaduraadmin

Originally published by Vera Files on April 30, 2022.

“A sovereign act.”

That is what posting on his Facebook (FB) page is  — for Victor Rodriguez, chief of staff and spokesperson of presidential aspirant Bongbong Marcos. In an April 26 press statement, he bemoaned the decision of the social media app to suspend his account the day before for failure to follow its Community Standards.

Rodriguez, who previously claimed that he had no social media presence, created an FB page last February 25.  Believing he has “not violated anything,” he refused to appeal the suspension.  If he maintains this stance, FB can permanently disable the account after 30 days, based on its rules.

In his statement, Rodriguez accused the popular app of “censorship of the highest degree” and “digital terrorism” by a “foreign platform provider.” The only reason this was done to him, he insisted, is because he is for Bongbong Marcos.

On the same day that Rodriguez, a lawyer, excoriated FB, he regained access to the account  as the app had mistakenly assessed his posts as those of an imposter.

Rodriguez issued a “Statement of Gratitude.”  Not to thank FB, which he labeled as a “usurper,” but “the media, lawmakers, social media influencers and other personalities for making a firm stand on, and fighting for, the Filipinos’ freedom of expression, a basic freedom enshrined in the Philippine Constitution.”

The 1987 Philippine Constitution was drafted after the family of Bongbong Marcos was forced into exile by the EDSA people power revolt.

In depicting social media presence as a foreign, malevolent force out to stifle  Filipinos’ constitutional rights, Rodriguez has, in effect, concealed the fact that FB is one of the social media platforms that the Marcoses have long exploited to their advantage.

Rodriguez’s pretend distaste for foreign meddling simply does not align with the Marcoses’ history of relying on influence and operatives abroad to improve their political stock, especially during elections.

When Ferdinand Marcos called for a snap presidential election on November 3, 1985, he knew fully well the power and resources that he could deploy to ensure his victory. But just as important as an overwhelming victory was the perception that the election was a legitimate democratic exercise. He needed to show the world that the Filipino electorate wanted to keep him in office for another six years, or until 1992.

Ferdinand Marcos snap election campaign. Photo by Joe Galvez.
A very sick Ferdinand Marcos Sr being carried by security officers during a rally in Cavite during the 1986 snap election campaign. Photo by Joe Galvez.

This posed a dilemma to Marcos, who died in exile in 1989. Given the depth of the crisis he had plunged the country into with his misrule and with the widow of the martyred opposition leader Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr., Corazon (Cory), running against him, the dictator could lose in a free and fair election.

Marcos staged a free and fair election in part with the help of American lobbyists and propaganda experts for the benefit of the Reagan administration. To keep the trust and support of the United States, Marcos needed to demonstrate that his victory in the polls would be free of fraud and violence, that his vaunted constitutional authoritarianism worked.

Then as now, these allies would like to keep up the pretense of being democratic states that draw their government’s legitimacy from the ballot.

In the raging Cold War with the USSR then, and after having just lost a war with Vietnam, Washington supported the Marcos dictatorship with military and economic aid thinking that these safeguarded the bulwark of American influence in the region, best represented by U.S. military bases in the country. Appeasing Marcos meant keeping these bases in the country — and U.S. military presence in the region.

Marcos plundered the American largesse.

Washington was well aware of Marcos’s capability to rig the election and as before, was willing to look the other way. In 1969, when he ran again for president,  Marcos — his own campaign funds notwithstanding — raided the nation’s treasury to the point of near bankruptcy.

A year after declaring martial law in the country, Marcos asked the Filipino people in a referendum if they wanted him “to continue beyond 1973 and finish the reforms he has initiated under the martial law.”  Of the 19 million votes cast, he got 17 million in his favor.

In a1977 referendum, Marcos again asked the people if he should “continue in office as incumbent president and be prime minister after the organization of the Interim Batasang Pambansa in 1978.” Of the more than 24 million who voted, he received the affirmation of around 20 million.

In 1981, as he lifted martial law on paper, Marcos also ordered a presidential election to claim a new mandate. Opposition parties boycotted the election, arguing that it would be a sham. He won 80 percent of the votes or 18 million of the 20 million votes cast and was to serve as president until 1987.

But with Ninoy Aquino’’s assassination in 1983 — largely perceived as his doing — the economy in tailspin, and his grip on power literally loosening as he became ridden with fatal diseases, Marcos had to once again coerce and cajole Filipinos into giving his one-man rule a new lease on life. The fraud and violence during the 1986 snap election, however, proved so staggering that the dictator’s American patrons were unable to simply dismiss it.

Marcos’s American PR Men: Black, Manafort, and Stone

“Well I understand the opposition has been asking for an election. In answer to their request, I announce that I am ready to call a snap election perhaps earlier than eight months, perhaps three months or less.”

With this statement, on November 3, 1985, Marcos told the world, through the American public affairs TV program This Week with David Brinkley, that he was calling for a referendum on his administration, which was approaching its twentieth year.

A month later, the national assembly enacted Batas Pambansa Blg. 881, or the Omnibus Election Code and what became known as the 1986 Philippine snap election. The Batasang Pambansa was drafting this law even before Marcos’ announcement in preparation for what would have been the presidential election of 1987.

At stake were the presidency and the vice presidency, a position previously abolished but  restored via amendments to the constitution in 1984. In December 1985, the largest opposition groups came together as UNIDO-PDP-LABAN and fielded Cory Aquino as standard bearer. Salvador Laurel, who wanted to gun for the presidency himself, yielded to Cory and became her running mate.

Ferdinand Marcos, on the other side, ran in tandem with Arturo Tolentino, his minister of foreign affairs. Despite all the political and military implements of an incumbent, the Marcos-Tolentino tandem was far from being a sure bet. Denunciations of the Marcos regime’s abuses were heard on the streets across the country. Unrest was growing among the hungry and the downtrodden, some of whom thought that joining the underground movement and engaging in the “protracted people’s war,” was a viable alternative to their suffering. Abroad, many were questioning Marcos’s credibility and that of the upcoming polls.

To counter this, Marcos relied on the advice of the American public relations and lobbying firm of Black, Manafort, and Stone. Some of what the firm did for Marcos in 1985 and 1986 have been described in books and articles, often alongside the foreign PR professionals on Cory’s corner, principally the American firm Sawyer Miller and their British representative, Mark Malloch Brown, who became a life peer of the British House of Lords in 2007.

Cory’s campaign strategists, both foreign and local, have been eager to share precisely how they helped their candidate win hearts and minds. These can be read in books such those written by Raymond Bonner and James Harding, as well as numerous interviews with Lord Malloch Brown and Teddy Boy Locsin, Foreign Affairs Secretary of the Duterte administration.

In contrast, details of what Paul Manafort and his firm specifically suggested to Marcos—advice apparently worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, based on U.S. records—remain sparse. Until one looks at records of the actual communications between Manafort’s firm and the Marcos administration, some of which can be found among the documents in the custody of the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG).

It must be noted that the Marcos administration, and Marcos himself, was no stranger to hiring American public relations and lobbying firms.

Leading up to the 1965 presidential election, American PR practitioner Leonard Saffir connected Marcos with Hartzell Spence and McGraw-Hill, author and publisher, respectively, of his biography For Every Tear a Victory. This book, which propagated numerous lies about Marcos such as his false bar exam results and his fictitious war exploits, would be published with updates as Marcos of the Philippines in time for the 1969 elections.

Marcos continued to rely on American PR while he was president, especially during the martial law years in light of mounting criticism of his administration. Between 1978 and 1979, the Marcos government hired 10 U.S.-based public relations and lobbying firms for various purposes. Of these, Doremus & Company, Inc. and the firm that bagged the Philippines account after it, International Counselors, Inc. were charged with cleaning up the country’s reputation in the U.S.  Yet another firm, Rogers and Cowan, Inc., was hired to handle the PR program of the Manila International Film Festival in 1982.

Manafort came in around 1984, a time when Marcos was being pressed locally and internationally to undertake genuine political and economic reforms — and U.S. pressure to bring to justice those responsible for the Aquino murder. A highly-paid consultant associated with right-wing Republicans, Manafort crafted a program that emphasized the need to retain Marcos to keep communists at bay.  This was a decidedly Cold War-era justification appealing to U.S. conservatives.

To the tune of $750,000, Black, Manafort, and Stone proposed to provide the Marcos regime “with expanded senior level government affairs expertise in the most cost effective manner.”

In its proposal, the Manafort group warned Marcos that the platform being advanced in the Democratic National Convention was “especially harsh in its treatment of the administration.” The platform was seeking to “tie all future United States assistance to a ‘return to Democracy, free speech, free press and a subordination of the armed forces to civil government’” which, the firm believed, were inimical to the interests of the Marcos administration.

The Manafort group expressed the urgency of implementing a PR strategy for Marcos in the US, given that “legislative initiatives” were being presented to “re-allocate the percentages of United States assistance called for by the various agreements relating to Clark Air Base and Subic Air Base.”

In light of the growing domestic unrest, more visible rifts in the ranks of the military, and the rising communist insurgency, Senator Richard G. Lugar, chair of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, sent Frederick Z. Brown on a study mission on August 2-15,1985 to observe the deteriorating political situation in the Philippines.

In his report to the committee, Brown said that Marcos and First Lady Imelda were “worried about their image in Congress and about hostile reporting in the U.S. media.” The Marcos couple, in granting Brown a private meeting, intended to send a message to the U.S. Congress that the government was “in control of the present difficult situation in the Philippines,” that the dictator was “the only individual with power to guide the country through its troubles,” and that American interests could “best be protected by full and open support for the Marcos regime.”

Following the study mission, U.S. President Ronald Reagan deputized Sen. Paul Laxalt in October 1985 to “express his concern” about the worsening military, political, and economic situation in the Philippines. Reagan, although a vocal Marcos supporter, expressed through Laxalt Washington’s dissatisfaction with the pace of military reforms and his concern over the growing communist insurgency, heightened further by the deepening economic woes and corruption in the Marcos government.

In the meeting with Laxalt, “Marcos defended himself in a windy monologue, digressing into complaints about his unfavorable image in the American press,” author Stanley Karnow wrote in his book, “In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines,  

Marcos showed irritation with the strong urge for reforms by the Reagan administration conveyed through Laxalt. He was quoted in a palace press release saying that the U.S. should not “intervene in the internal affairs of the Philippine government.”

While Marcos was publicly pushing for an independent foreign policy, he was contracting Black, Manafort, and Stone to protect his interests behind the scene. Marcos was, at least in part, urged by Laxalt to hire the firm.

In November 1985, Manafort’s firm registered with the Department of Justice as an agent for the Chamber of Philippine Manufacturers, Exporters and Tourism under a  $950,000 contract. A January 23, 1986 article in the Washington Post reported that the PR firm was hired to counter the rising criticisms against the Marcos government in the U.S., which Philippine officials claimed was a result of a “disinformation” campaign.

During the November 1985 interview in This Week with David Brinkley, Marcos was asked by commentator George Will about his willingness to renew his mandate by holding an election. Marcos replied, “These claims to popularity on both sides should be settled. I think we’d better settle it by calling an election right now, or say, give everybody 60 days to campaign and to bring the issues to the people.”

Pandering to the skeptical American audience, Marcos added, “You’re all invited to come. And we will invite members of the American Congress to please come and see what is happening here.”

Manafort’s firm, therefore, advised Marcos on how to deal with crucial American visitors who would either vouch for the integrity of the election before the U.S. Congress or declare the whole process questionable.

One of the Manafort group’s tasks was to brief Marcos for his meeting with Allen Weinstein, president of Center for Democracy and head of the congressional bipartisan group evaluating if the U.S. should send a formal congressional observer delegation on election day. Weinstein’s group was also tasked to assess if the elections would be “free, fair, and an accurate reflection of the wishes of the Philippine electorate.”

The Manafort group advised Marcos about the objectives of Weinstein’s visit, his commitment towards democratic stability in the Philippines, and that by the end of his trip, Weinstein  should be “convinced about your [Marcos’s] seriousness toward the democratic process.”

02-Memorandum and Attachmen… by VERA Files

The Manafort memorandum further stated that Weinstein wanted  to “depersonalize the election process in order to secure a non-communist dominated future.” To this end, the Manafort group had “sensitized him to opposition-candidate statements that are anti-American and that promote discord in U.S. Philippine relations.”

What was left for Marcos to do in his meeting with Weinstein was to “reinforce this perception of the opposition candidates by quoting their own statements regarding the U.S. bases, their position on the role of the Philippines in regional Asian stability, and statements made by the Communist insurgency leaders who will use the opposition for their own political advantage.”

In the actual meeting with the Weinstein team, Marcos went a bit off-script, expressing instead his confidence that he would win overwhelmingly.

Despite Manafort’s efforts to manage perceptions about Marcos’s ability and willingness to undertake reforms, elements in the U.S. Congress were not convinced. In a committee hearing  of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on December 18, 1985, Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut said, “Is it not a fact that really, no matter what we do here, President Marcos is going to do exactly what he wants to do. He will try to appease us, make us feel better, and at the same time hold all power he can, retain his position as President of the country and allow his cronies to continue doing what they are doing.”

In the same hearing, Richard Armitage, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, noted Marcos’s “continued lip service” in remodeling the notorious paramilitary group Civil Home Defense Force, and that his verbal commitment towards reorganizing and revamping the Armed Forces had been “much more form than substance.”

Leading up to February 7, Manafort’s firm helped Marcos spread the view that the upcoming election was good for democracy and that there had been “fraud on both sides.” Even Marcos’s daughter Imee, then a member of parliament, stated this in at least one interview to foreign media.

This was the same view espoused by Reagan (who was re-elected to the presidency with Manafort’s help) after the election. In a February 11, 1986 news conference, the U.S. president said, “I think that we’re concerned about the violence that was evident there and the possibility of fraud, although it could have been that all of that was occurring on both sides.”

The New York Times reported that “President Marcos made no public comment on Mr. Reagan’s remarks, but the Government television station played and replayed a videotape of the Reagan news conference.” A Marcos aide was quoted as saying, “’The President is pleased . . . I don’t think he feels he needs to add anything at this time.”

Reagan’s statement was much criticized, in particular by members of the U.S. Congress who would like him to stop giving aid to Marcos and propping his regime. “Officials said a communications failure beginning with the president caused the confusion, rather than the kind of deep-seated divisions that exist among Reagan’s top advisers on many other issues” the Washington Post reported on February 15, 1986.

The following day, Reagan tried walking back his statement. He was quoted in a Los Angeles Times report as saying that the fraud and violence in the snap election was “perpetrated largely by the ruling party.”

Raymond Bonner, in Waltzing with a Dictator, argued that Reagan did not misspeak in his initial remark. “The statement reflected the policy, at least as it existed in the White House . . . The White House intended to stay with Marcos, fraud or not,” he wrote.

Bonner further said that this position was advanced “within Reagan’s conservative inner circle” by Marcos’s lobbyists from Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly.

On February 15, 1986 the Batasang Pambansa formally proclaimed Marcos as the victor of the snap election. However, the official U.S. bipartisan observer delegation concluded that the “ticket of Aquino-Laurel won a majority of votes honestly cast” and that there was clear evidence that the “electoral process was marred by government sponsored or supported fraud.”

Not even the PR firm with some of the best access to the gates of power in Washington could save Marcos after his own military and the U.S. turned against him in the final days of his dictatorship.

Shortly after Reagan’s call urging Marcos to step down, a spokesman, Alvin Drischler, announced that the firm was terminating its contract with the Philippine government. Although its strategy was unable to keep Marcos in power, a Wall Street Journal report claimed that the firm collected $237,000 of the $950,000 contract.

That the 1986 snap election was used by Marcos in the perception game he played with Washington is not new. That he spent millions of dollars to remedy his reputational issues abroad and keep himself in power, is another issue.

A postscript: Manafort’s firm reemerged in Philippine politics not long after the fall of Marcos. As reported by Keith Richburg of the Washington Post on March 10, 1989, “the then coalescing opposition [called the Union for National Action or UNA, featuring former Cory allies Vice President Salvador “Doy” Laurel and Senator Juan Ponce Enrile] hired the Washington-area public relations firm of Black Manafort Stone and Kelly” in 1988.

The firm was retained because it was “vital to  present accurate information concerning events in the Philippines” to counter the “fiction perpetrated by the Aquino administration,” according to a spokesman of the opposition group.“

Washington Post reported on August 12, 1989 that Manafort’s firm was paid $950,000 for its services to Laurel’s group.

A description of selected records on Paul Manafort from the George Bush Presidential Library mentions “a request from Mr. Manafort to Mrs. Bush for a letter of congratulations to Mrs. Celia Diaz-Laurel, wife of Vice President Salvador Laurel of the Philippines, for a 1990 peace award.”

Manafort went on to chair the presidential campaign of Donald Trump in 2016 and was the former president’s trusted adviser. In 2018, Manafort was sentenced to 90 months in prison for tax and bank fraud. Four years later, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee considered Manafort “a grave counterintelligence threat” given his ties to Russian intelligence services and for allowing “Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump campaign.”

As Trump ended his term in 2020, he pardoned Manafort who still faces a P3 million civil suit from the U.S. Department of Justice for failing to disclose his interests in foreign bank accounts.

On April 23, 2022, local news outlets reported that UNIDO — now a regional party whose interim president is Jose Laurel IV, Doy’s nephew — is supporting the candidacy of Bongbong Marcos.

Duterte’s frequent absences a grim reminder of Marcos’ tricks to hide illness
Posted on by diktaduraadmin

Originally published by Vera Files on April 17, 2021.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


STATE SECRET

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SI MALAKAS AT SI MAGANDA

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

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

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

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

THE TRUTH OOZED OUT OF CRACKED WALLS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TWO KIDNEY TRANSPLANTS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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SUCCESSION CONCERNS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DEJA VU?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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