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Senator Imee Lies About RITM in Pushing for SB1407
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Originally published by Vera Files on April 25, 2020.

On April 23, 2020, the office of Senator Imee Marcos issued a press release commemorating the 39th anniversary of the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine (RITM) and to highlight Senate Bill (SB) 1407, her bill that is supposed to expand RITM. The press release was posted on the senator’s Facebook page and the Senate website. The Manila BulletinGMA News, and Remate reported on it. The Facebook post, as of this writing, has received over 3,900 reactions and 500 shares.

SB 1407, filed by the senator on March 9, 2020, is entitled “An Act Expanding the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine, and for Other Purposes.” It was also meant to portray her and her late father as the only politicians who have shown support for RITM, though looking through the bills she filed when she was in the House of Representatives from 1998 to 2004 via the House’s website, this was the first bill she ever filed specifically about RITM. The press release states in part:

“The long neglect of RITM dates back more than 30 years ago when the Cory administration started treating it like a leper, just because it was built by my father, then President Ferdinand Edralin Marcos, through Executive Order No. 674 in 1981,” Marcos said.

“The technical cooperation with the Japanese government that helped build and equip the RITM as the country’s prime biomedical research center was pushed aside, erasing its importance in the public mind, and squandering the momentum which could have benefitted us today,” Marcos added.

Marcos has filed Senate Bill 1407 to rescue what is arguably the DOH’s most neglected agency from its decrepit state, increase its qualified personnel and their salaries, expand its presence to key population centers outside Metro Manila, and revive its ability to effectively handle the magnitude of future pandemics.

“The RITM’s mother agency, the Department of Health (DOH), has failed to learn the lessons of history,” Marcos said, citing the slew of pandemics that have already hit the country: acute immunodefficiency syndrome (AIDS), severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), and now the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).

These are lies. The statement “Built. . .through Executive Order No. 674 in 1981” is inaccurate, as the RITM was already under construction well before the order was issued by President Marcos. As we have discussed in a previous article, RITM was heavily dependent on money from the Japanese government for its capital and equipment outlay, and would not have functioned well during the Marcos regime with government funding alone.

In 1985, the original five-year RITM Technical Cooperation Project (TCP) between the Japanese and Philippine governments was scheduled to conclude. In October 1985, the project was extended up to early 1988. The Corazon Aquino administration did not pre-terminate the agreement. In fact, even if the TCP ended in 1988, according to RITM’s annual report for that year, the Institute received “a grant-in-aid from the Japanese government for the improvement and expansion of the institute,” which entailed “a training center and a dormitory facility, construction of which commenced in April 1988.”

Looking at the Philippine government appropriations for RITM from 1983 to 1987 is also instructive. Based on the 1983 General Appropriations Act, in 1983, RITM was given PHP 8,635,000. Based on the 1984 RITM annual report, the institute received PHP 6,655,000 from the national government; and in 1985, based on the RITM annual report for that year, PHP 9,503,656. On the other hand, the 1986 RITM annual report states that throughout 1986, the allotment for RITM was PHP 14,473,000 (a PHP 4.9 million increase). In 1987, based on the budget enacted by Corazon Aquino via Executive Order No. 87, RITM received PHP 14,641,000—over PHP 5 million more than it received during the last full year that Marcos was president.

What was jettisoned from RITM after the EDSA Revolution was a foundation called the Research Foundation for Tropical Medicine, Inc. or RFTM, which was established on November 5, 1984. As noted by Ricardo Manapat in his book Some are Smarter than Others, RFTM’s incorporators included “Ambassador Eduardo Cojuangco, businessman Lucio Tan, [and] Presidential Legal Adviser Manuel Lazaro, all of whom were close associates of Marcos.” On April 24, 1985, Marcos retroactively authorized the RFTM to conduct a “national fund campaign” from December 16, 1984 to December 15, 1985 via Proclamation No. 2416. He called on “all citizens and residents of the country” to “assist in the endeavor by giving generously of their means and to actively support the campaign,” and called upon all government agencies “to donate generously from their funds to the Foundation.” The financial statement in the 1985 RITM annual report did not indicate the amounts the foundation received, if any, as a result of this donation drive.

RFTM was superseded by the New Tropical Medicine Foundation, Inc. in 1987, which fulfilled RFTM’s grant reception and administration functions.

Instead of being treated as a “leper,” RITM in fact continued to thrive under the Corazon Aquino administration. This was the time when RITM’s Office of Public Information and Research Dissemination—to help make RITM’s findings more publicly accessible—and the Tropical Medicine Research Center (TMRC) were established. According to Dr. Mediadora Saniel, former director of RITM, in the institute’s 1990 annual report, that year was RITM’s “most productive year,” getting “the largest total research funding the Institute has ever obtained in any single year.” Among the grants received by RITM was a five-year grant from the U.S. National Institutes of Health for the TMRC.

The 1992 RITM Research and Training Division report opens with the line, “Research and Training activities conducted by the different study groups of the Division were both greater in scale and more diverse than in previous years.” The 1992 RITM annual report also shows that the institute, through the New Tropical Medicine Foundation, Inc., continued to receive millions in research funding, including considerable amounts from the Japanese government.

To highlight RITM’s 25th anniversary, Dr. Fe Esperanza J. Espino, in a 2006 article in the Philippine Star, enumerated the pioneering and robust research that the institute had undertaken on acute respiratory infections (ARI), dengue, diarrheal diseases, Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)/AIDS, leprosy, malaria, rabies, schistosomiasis, tuberculosis, and viral hepatitis.

A book celebrating RITM’s thirtieth anniversary was released in 2011. Its pages show a highly active and accomplished research institution, at the forefront of the country’s battles against diseases such as tuberculosis, rabies, and AIDS, receiving institutional awards from the Philippine government and the World Health Organization between 1997 and 2011. The book also gives a glimpse of how ably RITM faced the SARS and H1N1 pandemics during the Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo administration.

A side note: the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases, from whom we have been hearing from almost daily, was first established by then President Benigno Aquino III via Executive Order No. 168 in 2014 to prepare for and deal with various infectious diseases, including other coronavirus-caused conditions such as SARS and MERS.

Senator Marcos’s use of the words “neglected” and “decrepit” to describe RITM is inaccurate. The 2011 thirtieth anniversary book shows RITM as a well-equipped research institution, with its own vaccine production facilities. As an expression of the government’s confidence in RITM, in 2012 it received the biggest increase in its annual budget, from PHP 148,215,000 the previous year, to PHP 236,408,000, a 63 percent increase.

In 2014, RITM, with Japanese funding, commenced a project to construct a new Biological Safety Laboratory Level 3, capable of processing, detecting, and storing highly lethal viruses such as the Ebola Virus. In June 2018, the laboratory was certified as compliant with World Health Organization standards. It was inaugurated in August 2018. In 2019, it was reported that a Japanese company was going to give RITM advanced equipment for tuberculosis diagnosis. In the same year, RITM’s parasitology department received the Newton Prize Award for a project that, according to RITM’s press release, “resulted in a novel approach to improve malaria surveillance for elimination of the disease.” Finally, in 2017, RITM was ISO 9001:2015 certified—one of the first government organizations given such certification, according to RITM’s press release. The Provincial Government of Ilocos Norte was given the same certification during the same year; Imee Marcos has repeatedly cited this as evidence of how progressive Ilocos Norte became during her tenure as the province’s governor.

In short, Imee Marcos’s claim that the current difficulties of RITM are due to decades of neglect is not only disinformation, it also downplays the numerous achievements of RITM and its dedicated staff over the years and the support it has continued to receive both from the Philippine government and foreign funding agencies even after the Marcoses were ousted from power. Moreover, her claims about RITM in the face of COVID-19 is passing the blame of perceived mishandling of the crisis by the current government to the so-called “yellows” while glorifying her father’s regime—a tactic taken straight out of the Marcos propaganda playbook.

Indeed, this sudden interest in RITM seems to be mostly linked to another classic propaganda strategy—brandish your name, be a savior, especially during a crisis. Just like what her parents did with Kadiwa and nutribun. Unfortunately, Senator Imee Marcos was missing in action during the marathon special session of Congress that led to the passage of the Bayanihan to Heal as One Act. According to news reports, she was in home quarantine after it was confirmed that Senator Miguel Zubiri had tested positive for COVID-19. Nevertheless, she was reported to have submitted her proposed amendments to the COVID-19 emergency bill that was tackled on the Senate floor.

In a series of Facebook videos, she said that she had kept herself busy revising three bills. SB 1416, an amendment to Mandatory Reporting of Notifiable Diseases and Health Events of Public Health Concern Act, specifically to contemplate COVID-19, may be superfluous because the law already gives the Epidemiology Bureau of the Department of Health the power to list “notifiable diseases and health events of public health concern.” The other two bills, SB 1414 and 1415, are related to funding economic and social distress alleviation efforts and coronavirus detection, treatment, and control activities. The short title of her SB 1414 is “Pag-ASA: Alaga, Sustento, at Angat sa Panahon ng COVID-19 Crisis,” which, according to a post on her Facebook page dated March 23, 2020, is a proposed PHP 750 billion COVID-19 “emergency response and recovery package.” These are the three bills in between SB 1413 and SB 1418, the Senate’s versions of the Bayanihan to Heal as One bills. Senator Marcos’s bills were not consolidated with the bill that eventually became the COVID-19 national emergency law, which already allows the president to realign certain funds precisely to mitigate the effects of the current pandemic. As of this writing, a search of these bills via the website of the Senate yields a “not found” result.

Nevertheless, her Facebook and Twitter posts regarding her activities under quarantine have garnered thousands of reactions and shares—hardly unusual for her page, which has over 1.2 million followers. Her page has posted digital posters describing where she wants her proposed Pag-ASA funds to go, but without clarifying that these are merely proposals, leading to inquiries from several of the page’s followers regarding availment of what they think is a form of amelioration fund.

Outside of this social media community, a press release from her office regarding her Pag-ASA bill has been published in several news outlets. She has also talked about the bill herself in radio interviews. In her cross-platform media blitz regarding her efforts to help address the current crisis, she has either explicitly stated that she does not think it is necessary to give the president emergency powers, or, by emphasizing her Pag-ASA bill, is implying that the power of the purse cannot be ceded to the president. With the passage of the Bayanihan Act, she has been roundly rebuffed by her colleagues in the senate and by those in the executive branch.

She has since filed another COVID-19-related bill: SB 1427, which seeks to amend the Bayanihan Act to explicitly designate members of the media as frontliners, granting them a form of hazard pay. Again, this seems superfluous, as the Bayanihan Act already gives the president the power to grant such allowances.

Indeed, if her SB 1414 andSB 1415 were the ones tackled on the Senate floor, Senator Marcos may have had the chance to make the claim that she single-handedly drew up the financial plan to save the country from possible economic and social collapse. If her other COVID-related bills are enacted, she can claim to have been an advocate of particular frontliners. She could have had a ready response to the trending question, “Ano’ng ambag mo?” Instead, she is left to claim falsified past glory and alternative plans as her main contribution. Perhaps, besides the donations that she has been making here and there, she and the rest of her family can give, with no conditions, their fabled wealth to help beat the viral menace?

Marcos Propaganda in a Time of Plague
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Originally published by Vera Files on April 22, 2020.

Nutribun. Kadiwa. Research Institute for Tropical Medicine. These are “brands” associated with the ousted dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos that the COVID-19 crisis has brought to the forefront again.

On March 19, 2020 San Miguel Corporation announced it will start producing nutribun “for the hardest-hit families facing hunger as a result of the COVID-19 crisis.” The Department of Agriculture secured PHP 1 billion from the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases for the upscaling of its Kadiwa program. And Senator Imee Marcos reminded us that it was her dictator-father who built RITM, where almost all testing was done in the first weeks of the coronavirus outbreak in the country.

This is not to disparage these efforts and institutions, especially in this time of crisis. But as with all things Marcos, when history is brought to bear on nutribun, Kadiwa, and RITM, we are bound to learn of their flawed, if not failed execution during the dictatorship. This is what the current propaganda effort erases.

NUTRIBUN

It was also during a time of crisis that the Marcoses tried to make nutribun their own. Fifty years later, Imelda’s daughter, now Senator Imee Marcos continues to tout this piece of bread as Marcos manna.

On July 12, 1972, then President Ferdinand Marcos placed the entire island of Luzon under “a state of public calamity.” He immediately ordered a price freeze in response to the intense flooding that Typhoon Gloring (international name Rita) unleashed in the country from July 10–25, 1972. Up to 543 people were killed according to a report by the United Press International (UPI).

Nutribun as part of the relief efforts in the early 1970s

Nutribun as part of the relief efforts in the early 1970s. From the AID publication War on Hunger, October 1972.

It was during this period of calamity that Imelda made her move to turn foreign assistance into a branded Marcos largesse. A 2017 report in the newslab.philstar.com quoted Nancy Dammann’s memoir, My 17 Years With USAID, on what exactly Imelda did: “the nutribun bags were being stamped with the slogan ‘Courtesy of Imelda Marcos–Tulungan project’.” Lee Lescaze in an August 4, 1972 syndicated column, made a similar observation. “Plastic bags stamped with her name were being widely used at one time for relief grain distributed in central Luzon’s most-damaged villages.”

From these days of disaster, the one product that borrowed deep in the collective memory was nutribun. Not only was it present in relief packages during disasters since 1970, it was a staple in the AID’s fight against hunger and malnutrition in the Philippines.

AID described the bread as a “complete ready-to-eat meal” with more than 500 calories and over half an ounce of protein each. Major ingredients are wheat flour, nonfat dry milk and vegetable oil supplied under the Food for Peace program, combined with lesser amounts of sugar, salt and yeast. All principal nutrients, except VitaminC, are furnished in each bun.

Discussing the origin of nutribun, Paul E. Johnson, wrote in the July 1973 issue of War on Hunger that “the testing and development of soy fortified bread flour was undertaken primarily by Dr. C.C.Tsen and Dr. William J. Hoover of the Food and Feed Grain Institute of Kansas State University. Working under an AID contract, begun in 1967, to improve the nutritive value of cereal-based foods.” Their objective was to develop a bread “with 12 percent soy flour [that] is virtually indistinguishable from white flour bread–in texture, color, taste, loaf volume, or other traits. It is high in total protein, has well balanced protein, and it is relatively inexpensive to produce.”

The nutribun was first introduced in the Philippines in 1970. Mainly as part of relief efforts. The nutribuns that reached the schools as part of a nutrition program, were developed by Albert S. Fraleigh, an AID Food for Peace officer, and Dr. Ruben W. Engel, an AID contract officer and professor at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, who worked together in the field of child nutrition and the fostering of school and pre-school child-feeding programs.

In 1971, as reported by AID in the December 1977 issue of War on Hunger, the Philippine government launched a four-year Philippine Food and Nutrition Program.

Nutribun as part of the feeding program in public elementary schools

Nutribun as part of the feeding program in public elementary schools. From The Marcos Revolution: A Progress Report on the New Society of the Philippines, 1980.

A central part of the government’s nutrition scheme was the school feeding program whose target was to reach 2.7 million underweight or malnourished children, particularly in public elementary schools.

But that goal seems to have been ambitious. AID reports from 1971 to 1982 (the last year when there was a formal assessment of the program) showed the top number reached was in 1973 with 1.7 million recipients. In 1982, recipients stalled at 1.25 million. From 1970 until the Marcoses were ousted in 1986, the number of public elementary school students rose from 6.9 to 8.8 million.

Also, the nutribun was not given free. At the start, an elementary school pupil paid PHP 0.10 for each nutribun; by the mid-1980s, PHP 0.25. The very poor students were provided sponsors.

It was not only the price of nutribun that changed over the years. From 500 calories, content was eventually halved to 250 calories (the same caloric count as today’s SMC nutribun).

There were also doubts on its impact in curbing malnutrition. Barry M. Popkin and Marisol Lim-Ybanez wrote in the journal Social Science and Medicine in 1982: “There is little evidence . . . that present school feeding programs have significantly enhanced the physiological capacity of students.” The 1982 national survey on nutrition also showed 40 percent of some four million households in the bottom half of the economic scale, or 1.6 million households, experienced hunger almost daily.

More than three decades later, on October 8, 2018, the siblings Bongbong and Imee Marcos started circulating in their various social media platforms a short video clip titled “Edukasyon at Palakasan” (Education and Sports) ostensibly to celebrate the 101st birth anniversary of Ferdinand Marcos. It made a straightforward claim: that nutribun solved the problem of malnutrition in schools.

KADIWA

On March 29, 2020, Senator Imee Marcos posted about Kadiwa on her Facebook page. The text was largely lifted from the history of the Food Terminal, Inc (FTI). The short history of FTI correctly attributed the emergence of Kadiwa stores to the oil crisis of 1973, when prices of many commodities soared and scarcity of food was felt. “It was during this time that the concept of retailing the seven basic commodities at government-controlled rates was systematized. On April 14, 1980, the first KADIWA Center was put up at the FTI Complex,” it said.

But even before the first Kadiwa store was put up, another oil price shock rippled through the country in 1979. Transport, water and power rates rose and commodity prices spiked.

Jürgen Rüland, in a 1986 article in the Asian Journal of Public Administration, pointed to a pre-Kadiwa effort of the Imelda Marcos-led Metropolitan Manila Commission (MMC) – the so-called “rolling stores” project in 1979 that sold food and essential items in depressed areas at subsidized prices.

The actual legal basis for the Kadiwa stores was the 1981 Presidential Decree (PD) 1770 which placed FTI, and with it the incipient Kadiwa, under the National Food Authority (NFA). PD 1770 also designated Imelda as the head of the council that ran the NFA.

Inauguration of a Kadiwa store with Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos in attendance. From The New Philippine Republic, 1982.

Ramon L. Clarete, in the 2008 book From Parastatals to Private Trade: Lessons from Asian Agriculture, described how NFA responded to this particular mandate by launching the Kadiwa program, operating mobile and retail stores in urban and depressed areas. The stores sold at subsidized prices basic food items like rice, sugar, cooking oil, coffee, milk, and noodles.

Imelda proved to be the controlling presence behind Kadiwa. As minister of human settlements and head of the MMC, she also led the NFA.

But the public money that went into subsidizing Kadiwa was not just for the commodities it sold. Gerardo P. Sicat, Marcos’ former minister of Economic Planning, explained in a December 1984 speech that to set up and support Kadiwa stores, the NFA, through FTI, had to invest in new buildings, transport equipment as well as raise its working capital to hold inventory and hire addition manpower.

Even during its heyday, reception to Kadiwa by Manila’s poor was not as enthusiastic as now recalled. A perception study on poverty and programs to redress it among Manila’s poor published by Leandro A. Viloria and Dolores A. Endriga in the October 1984 issue of Philippine Planning Journal found that people were discouraged by the queues, the distance of the stores and some irritable service personnel.

By 1983, in the face of ballooning foreign debt obligations, another peso devaluation, and a drought, the promise of cheap prime commodities from Kadiwa became as scant as the goods on its shelves. In June and July of that year, there was a sugar and rice shortage, and the price of cooking oil spiked. All these were before the economic and political tailspin that the assassination of Ninoy Aquino triggered in August that year.

Hoarding and overpricing became common. Raids on stores and warehouses became a news staple. By May 1984, the scarcity of consumer goods accompanied by rising prices, remained an unsolved problem for Marcos. The best he could do was to impose price control on basic commodities.

By November 1984, a kilo of rice cost PHP 5.35 in Kadiwa outlets; it was PHP 4.25 in May. The average minimum daily wage dipped from PHP 20.00 in 1983 to PHP 16.00.

On May 31, 1985 Marcos issued Executive Order (EO) 1028 instructing the NFA to transfer “all Kadiwa and other non-grain operations of the [NFA] to [FTI], and subsequently (b) the transfer or divestment of the operations of [FTI], including the Kadiwa operations, as a joint venture between the government and the private sector, without prejudice to the possibility of a full transfer to the private sector immediately or ultimately.”

Clarete argued that Marcos’s epiphany was more of buckling to pressure from the Asian Development Bank. “In 1985, in need of foreign exchange to manage its foreign debt, the government agreed . . . to end both the Kadiwa program and the wheat import monopoly of NFA. Political support for the program weakened as the Marcos government became increasingly isolated.”

For Sicat, it was a costly and losing operation from the start. And in the end, he said, Kadiwa lost to “the small sari-sari neighborhood store and the medium-sized grocery.” Viloria and Endriga’s study supported Sicat’s conclusion. Instead of going to Kadiwa, respondents went to nearby markets, spending less on transportation, it said.

Rüland also expressed skepticism that Kadiwa actually helped the poor. He pointed out that by government’s own claim, it spent within two years 18 million pesos for the rolling stores and the Kadiwa project, reaching some 247,000 families in 542 depressed and semi-depressed areas. “In actual fact, this means that the government spent 24,658 pesos per day for these prime commodities or 0.10 peso per family per day. It goes without saying that given these allocations the project’s effect on the living conditions of the poor was virtually nil.”

Kadiwa’s failure despite being backed by four government agencies—the MMC, the FTI, the MHS, and the NFA, all ruled by Imelda—points only to the bureaucratic drag that sunk it and the broader economic and political malaise then afflicting the nation.

THE RESEARCH INSTITUTE FOR TROPICAL MEDICINE

With RITM continuously in the news due to COVID-19, Imee Marcos’s Facebook page

showcased the medical facility on March 14, 2020. The text of the post was largely lifted from the Wikipedia entry on RITM, which cites Ricardo Manapat’s Some are Smarter than Others: The History of Marcos’s Crony Capitalism as a source. Imee’s page was careful, however, not to include criticism of RITM from Manapat’s book, which discusses the intricate web of Marcos plunder as it was understood back in 1991.

Imelda Marcos unveiling the RITM marker.

Imelda Marcos unveiling the RITM marker. From the RITM Annual Report, 1981.

Manapat described RITM as “[one] of the relatively unknown projects of Imelda Marcos.” He highlighted how it was organized in cooperation with the Japanese government and funded by the Japan International Cooperation Agency. He said Executive Order No. 674, dated 25 March 1981, defined it “as an institute for the development of basic and applied research [programs] for tropical medicine in the Philippines.” After such factual declarations, Manapat then casts doubt on the value of RITM during the Marcos regime:

[The] impression created by the RITM is that it was organized to benefit Japanese research rather than Philippine health. Of the 1030 admissions in the hospital, 815 or 79.1% were treated as research patients. It claimed that the institute’s research program was supervised by the Ministry of Health, but results of the five years of studies made by local scientists were never published. Instead, the research was merely turned over to the Japanese in return for aid grants. It is not certain that the indigent patients of this institution were ever informed that they were not receiving standard and tested treatment but were being subjected to experiments commissioned by the Japanese.

Most of Manapat’s claims can be checked against various sources. It is difficult to prove the Japanese did benefit more from RITM than Filipinos. However, based on a 1985 JICA report, the original name of the proposed institute was the Philippine Japan Research Institute for Tropical Diseases. This initial proposal made clear it was a joint Philippine-Japanese effort, with the proposed institute having a Japanese co-chairman.

The Technical Cooperation Agreement between the Philippines and Japan for the RITM project entailed an exchange of scientists. According the institute’s 1985 annual report, by that year, 15 Filipino scientists had been posted in various research centers in Japan for training, while 16 Japanese scientists had been sent to RITM as consultants.

The admissions figures cited by Manapat are from RITM’s 1985 annual report, which covers January 1 to December 31, 1985. RITM’s earlier annual reports did not indicate such data. In any case, that majority of admitted patients became research subjects should not be seen as unusual, given RITM’s mandate.

On the publication of research findings, annual reports of RITM from 1981 to 1985 show a lot of the outputs by the institute’s researchers were published in academic and professional journals and presented in conferences even if they were not popularized.

Finally, it seems likely, given the global standards of medical research ethics at the time that patients who participated in RITM research studies did so with their consent. From 1981 to 1985, RITM had Institutional Review and Ethical Review boards.

JICA officials at the RITM. From the RITM Annual Report, 1981.

JICA officials at the RITM. From the RITM Annual Report, 1981.

Indeed, what Imee Marcos and Marcos supporters have failed to emphasize is how dependent RITM was on the Japanese government’s funding. Financial statements in the RITM’s annual reports from 1981 to 1985, showed hardly any capital or equipment outlay from the national government. Its allocation during that period, averaging about PHP 7 million annually, was mostly for personnel services and operating expenses.

RITM’s 1984 annual report indicated JICA had provided USD 1 million (about PHP 18 million) to the institute since 1981. In 1985, the year RITM’s experimental animal laboratory was inaugurated, JICA provided another PHP 3.2 million worth of equipment

Clearly, RITM thrived because of external support and excellent researchers. Without foreign funding, it seems unlikely that RITM would have become a performing asset.

Moreover, the country’s current crisis emphasizes the fact that RITM and other government hospitals with advanced capabilities are in Metro Manila.

Even Imee Marcos acknowledged the issue of Manila centralization when she filed Senate Bill No. 1407 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which sought to establish RITMs in regions outside the capital. The explanatory note in her bill mentions Ferdinand Marcos’ executive order establishing RITM, but nothing about Japan’s primary role in designing, building, and supporting it for eight years.

The Filipinos who remember with fondness nutribun and Kadiwa, or to have availed of RITM’s services were the very same ones whose lives were reduced to penury by the kleptocratic Marcos regime. Whatever small measure of service they have received from the conjugal dictatorship, they have treasured it as one of those rare instances then when the government appeared in their midst — like the perfumed and bejeweled Imelda sauntering in the slums of Tondo. Such uncritical sentimentalism is the fertile ground for the subsequent Marcos propaganda.

The Marcoses’ Glory Days
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Originally published by Vera Files on September 22, 2020.

High noon of June 30, 1981, the sound of “And he shall reign forever and ever” from Handel’s Messiah soared over the crowd that gathered at the Rizal Park and into the homes of Filipinos all over the country, glued to their TV sets or listening to the radio.

The occasion was the third inauguration of Ferdinand E. Marcos as president of the Republic of the Philippines.

Elected president in 1965, reelected in 1969, dictator from 1972 until 1981, Marcos by then seemed indeed poised to be the eternal ruler, or a “secular messiah” as Raymond Bonner put it in Waltzing with a Dictator. And in Ferdinand’s own estimation he almost was.

Writing in his diary on September 22, 1973, a year after declaring martial law, he believed that “there must be a Guiding Hand above who has forgiven me my sins…and led me to my destiny. Because all the well-nigh impossible accomplishments have seemed to be natural and foreordained. And into the role of supposed hero in battle, top scholar, President I seemed to have gracefully moved into without the awkwardness of pushiness and over anxiety.” Marcos’s diaries are peppered with such musings.

Alexander R. Magno, writing in Kasaysayan: The Story of the Filipino People, included Imelda, consort to the demigod Ferdinand, as the other half of the semidivine duo that also demanded veneration. “Aside from vesting all power in himself, Marcos also tried consciously to build a personality cult around himself and his wife, who began to assume a mythic aura.”

As they were the Malakas and Maganda that gave birth to the New Society, worship must be given unto them on holy days. Ferdinand’s birthday, September 11, became Barangay Day while Imelda’s birthday, July 2, became Working Women’s Day via presidential proclamations.

Then there was, of course, Marcos’ designation in 1973 of September 21, his desired date for the declaration of martial law in 1972 (though it was declared to the public on September 23), as National Thanksgiving Day. He later declared the date a special public holiday, claiming the Association of Barrio Captains requested it in a formal resolution. Why insist on September 21? Ferdinand was fixated with number seven and numbers divisible by seven as harbinger of personal luck.

Barangay Day was a holiday from 1975 until 1985. Marcos issued Proclamation No. 1490 on August 26, 1975, declaring his birthday as “Araw ng mga Barangay sa Pilipinas. In the proclamation, he claimed that it was the Pambansang Katipunan ng mga Barangay that “requested that September 11 be set aside to commemorate the institution of barangays in the Philippines.” Two days before the first Barangay Day, Marcos issued Proclamation No. 1495, making September 11, 1975 into a Special Barangay Day, which enjoined “all citizens of the country both public and private to render civic action work during their off-hours.”

An attempt in 1985 to remove both September 11 and September 21 as national holidays was made by Eva Estrada Kalaw in her capacity as an elected member of the Regular Batasan Pambansa. Nothing came of Kalaw’s bill, what with two-thirds of parliament siding with the administration.

July 2 became Working Women’s Day in the Philippines via Proclamation No. 1984, issued by Marcos on June 27, 1980. The proclamation does not explain why July 2 was chosen, stating that all residents of the country should “celebrate this day appropriately in recognition of the contribution of the working women to nation-building.”

The last Marcos issuance declaring both September 11 and 21 as national holidays was finally repealed on September 10, 1986 by Memorandum Order No. 35 authorized by President Corazon Aquino.

Cover of a specially printed souvenir program of the Armed Forces of the Philippines’s Loyalty Day, September 10, 1976.

ON THE BIRTHDAYS OF DICTATORS AND DEMIGODS

If only the birthdays of Ferdinand and Imelda were just that—a blotch in the calendar. But in furthering their control of the country under martial law, first they turned them into state affairs, then into a tawdry spectacle of power and caprice. At which point, they have invited not only resentment but active opposition from the people, some of which were deadly enough to rattle the conjugal dictatorship.

The impulse for the ostentatious was there early on in the Marcos couple. Halfway into Ferdinand’s first presidency, James Hamilton-Paterson in America’s Boy cited a letter by then United Kingdom ambassador to Manila, John Addis, expressing relief that his “trip to Tacloban to celebrate the First Lady’s birthday was cancelled.” Addis, continued Hamilton-Paterson, has the press people to thank, “that it was newspaper criticism that had caused the cancellation of Imelda’s birthday celebrations in 1967 indicated a growing opposition to her extravagant style.”

Any pretense to propriety vanished with the dawning of the martial law’s New Society. Once a close aide of the president, Primitivo Mijares in The Conjugal Dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, made the assessment that “Philippine media have virtually nothing but praise for the Marcos martial regime and the wealth and beauty of Imelda Marcos. On such occasions as his or her birthday, or anniversary of the martial regime or of their wedding, the praise for Ferdinand and Imelda becomes almost hero worship.”

Beth Day Romulo, wife of Ferdinand’s secretary of foreign affairs Carlos P. Romulo, was part of the couple’s inner circle, one of Imelda’s Blue Ladies. In Inside the Palace: The Rise and Fall of Ferdinand & Imelda Marcos, she described what these birthdays were like.

“On the President’s birthday each September,” Day Romulo wrote, “we either flew to Sarrat for an all-day fiesta or attended a luncheon at Malacañang Palace that lasted at least four hours. All of his Cabinet and all of the generals and their wives were required to perform in his honor.” When it was Imelda’s turn in July, “we flew down to her beachside palace at Olot (in Leyte province, near where she was born) for a long, lavish weekend of beautiful girls, models, dancers, musicians, flowers, and fashion shows. Of the several sitting rooms, there was one—off limits to most of the guests except Imelda’s Blue Ladies—where caviar and champagne were served round the clock.”

Both Ferdinand and Imelda had a taste for the profligate and the frivolous, and even the grotesque. Ferdinand wrote in his diary that a night before his birthday, September 10, 1973, generals of the Armed Forces of the Philippines hosted a dinner in his honor. There was a fashion show of sorts aping Imelda’s then initiative to showcase works of Filipino fashion designers, the Bagong Anyo. The generals paraded themselves in drag. “They looked so credible—a[s] streetwalkers,” an apparently delighted Marcos wrote. So delighted that he “pounded the table to splinters from hilarity!” In his memoir, Juan Ponce Enrile recalled a similar performance by military officers at a Malacañang event also attended by the diplomatic corps.

For his actual birthday, Marcos mentioned that the theme was “austerity, no frivolity.” Just an ecumenical mass and a reception for his well-wishers. Yet he ended up receiving a bronze bust from University of the Philippines president SP Lopez and his birthday capped by a variety show, “Alay ng Bayan” at the Rizal Park where “about 500 movie, TV and radio stars” performed and was seen on TV “by a million and a half people.”

But any tribute from the people paled in comparison to what Imelda and Ferdinand gave each other during their birthdays. Hamilton-Paterson tells it best in America’s Boy:

An interesting after-effect of the Dovie Beams affair was that of making amends by public works. Ferdinand had already claimed to have built the San Juanico Bridge between Samar and Leyte (Imelda’s home province) for his wife. Certainly the public billet-doux Ferdinand attached to it was ‘A Birthday Gift to Imelda the Fabulous by the President’, even though such a road link was a vital part of the nation’s Pan-Pacific Highway running the length of the archipelago. From now on the Marcoses began to play out their marital tiffs by means of public monuments . . . Their ingenious tastelessness embraced the Philippine nation as an extension of the First Family, assuring the children that Daddy and Mommy loved each other very, very much, and this was one family that would never break up.”

Ferdinand gifting Imelda the San Juanico bridge was hard to top. Though Imelda may have started this act of appropriating government infrastructure projects as her own gift to bestow when she opened the Cultural Center of the Philippines on September 10, 1969, eve of Ferdinand’s birthday.

One can argue that the Marcoses pilfering public edifices as their gifts to each other can be said to be more symbolic than actual theft. For the actual theft and corruption of public funds, one must look into a private property they have developed to enjoy their birthdays, especially that of Imelda. In this regard, Mijares offered a damning exposé.

In a memorandum that Mijares submitted to the US Congress on June 17, 1975 as part of his testimony on the profligacy and licentiousness of the conjugal dictators (a term coined by Mijares), he made the following claim:

A glaring example of the misuse of US aid is the case of the Hercules C-130 cargo plane given by the USAF to the Philippine Air Force. Hardly had it been turned over, when the provincial resthouse of the Marcoses in Barrio Olot, Tolosa, Leyte province, was burned down by disgruntled barrio folks. Among those who set the sprawling resthouse afire were people who were practically evicted from their small lots which surround the Olot resthouse; their properties were forcibly purchased from them so the vacation compound could be expanded. The compound was burned down in late May. Since the birthday celebration of the First Lady (on July 2, 1974) was just a month away, the resthouse had to be reconstructed at all cost; Mrs. Marcos has already invited her international jetset friends, headed by Mrs. Christina Ford. So, construction materials, (e.g. cement, hollow blocks, and lumber, etc.) were airlifted from Manila to Tacloban City, which was the nearest airport to Barrio Olot, by Philippine Air Force planes, mainly the C-130 Hercules plane, in order to complete construction of the destroyed area on time for the birthday bash.

Imelda’s Olot resthouse, as described by Beth Day Romulo, had “three heliports, two Olympic-size swimming pools, an auditorium, a chapel, and an 18-hole golf course. Besides the big main house, with its dining room overlooking the sea, there was a string of connected guest suites, individual beach houses, and guest cabanas. There was also a huge flood-lit outdoor pelota court with bleachers for the onlookers.

She continued: “By the time Imelda’s birthday arrived in July of 1974, she had gathered a collection of guests: Van Cliburn and his mother, Cristina Ford, the Italian actress Virna Lisi, and thirty other Italians whom Cristina had brought along for the partying. The entire diplomatic corps had also been invited, plus the Cabinet members and their wives and a goodly splash of generals. (Imelda, like her husband, believed in keeping in close touch with the military—they could make the difference as to whether you kept your throne or not.) There must have been a thousand people at Imelda’s little resort that year.”

How to feed them? Mijares, in his book, reproduced a January 23, 1975 Philippine News interview with Don Eugenio Lopez, from whom Ferdinand took Meralco under duress in his so-called attempt to break the old oligarchy. As per Lopez: “An article last week by your business editor, Mr. L. Quintana, mentioned the fact that during the birthday party of Mrs. Marcos last July 2, 1974, all of the catering personnel of the Meralco employees’ restaurant and cafeteria, together with most of the restaurant facilities (silverware, glassware, china, etc.) were flown to Leyte Island to serve the personal guests of Mrs. Marcos. Also the Meralco planes were used continuously to transport many of Mrs. Marcos’ invited guests. Marcos’ guests.”

When it was Ferdinand’s turn to celebrate his birthday in 1974 he was Caesar. During his dictatorial reign, it was customary for the AFP to hold a “Loyalty Day” for their commander- in – chief a day before his birthday. Usually, this involved a parade and review in Camp Aguinaldo, a symbolic flyover from the Air Force, and a speech from the president. In 1974 though, Agence France-Presse reported that not only was his speech nationally televised, the AFP officers and men made a pledge of loyalty to him as commander in chief.

On his birthday, Ferdinand was extracting pledges of loyalty from another group of men, political prisoners that he rounded up and jailed when he declared martial law. There were about 5,000 of them then. He released five as an act of “executive clemency.” Provided, however, that these men, as Agence France-Presse reported, “sign a pledge of ‘loyalty’ to the republic and to the new constitution which Mr. Marcos had declared as ‘ratified’ after a martial law-style referendum last year.” The most prominent of those released was Sen. Jose W. Diokno.

Ferdinand jailed Diokno as martial law was declared. For two years, a long stretch of which he was in solitary confinement, no charge was ever brought against him nor was he ever brought to trial. Diokno’s family filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus before the Supreme Court. The High Court, packed with Marcos appointees, never took it up.

To be given clemency by the dictator presupposes that those who were pardoned committed a crime. In Diokno’s case, he was not found guilty of any. On top of signing a loyalty oath, Agence France-Presse said that “he was made to sign another paper in which he acknowledged that he had been accorded fair treatment during detention.” Diokno made written reservations to both. Marcos Caesar not only humiliated his political enemies, he made them complicit in a lie.

As with the AFP Loyalty Day, Ferdinand claimed the following year and the years after that, as reported by foreign news services, that granting “executive clemency” and commuting sentences—which became a toss-up between political detainees and common criminals—was by then in keeping with his “birthday tradition.”

Ferdinand invented other “traditions” around his birthday, all for political effect. On September 13, 1976, the Associated Press reported that Marcos and his family celebrated his 59th birthday with villagers in the central Philippines, which the government release said ‘is in keeping with a tradition for the president to spend his birthday with the barrio people’.”

When he turned 60, another “tradition” surfaced. United Press International reported on September 12, 1977 that “Marcos drove to his hometown of Batac…to fulfill a tradition which calls for a person born in the region to return on his 60th birthday.” It added: “Top government and military officials and members of the diplomatic community went to Batac for the occasion. They participated in a motorcade that began two days ago on MacArthur highway, which was lined with Filipinos, some of whom stood in the rain for hours.”

William H. Sullivan, then US ambassador to the Philippines, in a September 12, 1975 cable to the US State Department called them “heavily publicized pilgrimage to [the] countryside.”

Ferdinand’s pilgrimage ended in 1978. On September 14, a Philippine Air Force plane carrying government officials and reporters on their way home from attending the president’s birthday bash in Batac crashed in Paranaque. Thirty-two were killed. Ferdinand and his family drove back to Manila on September 15.

Marcos himself had no qualms appropriating big-ticket government projects as “birthday greetings” for himself. On the eve of his birthday in 1984, he attended the inaugurations of the Mak-Ban III and Calaca power plants and the first Manila Light Rail Transit line. He stated his belief that the inauguration of these power plants “is the National Power Corporation’s special way of greeting the president a happy birthday.” As for the LRT, after giving his address, Marcos went to the driver’s seat of one train, and took it for a test run. Rides in the still-unfinished line, were free for the next three days.

The urge to propitiate Ferdinand or Imelda on their birthdays was almost an instinct to some people then. In 1984, Imelda was called to testify before the Agrava Commission on what she knew about the assassination of Ninoy Aquino. She showed up on her birthday. When she was done, the board investigating the death of Ferdinand’s chief political rival sang “Happy Birthday” to Imelda.

This gesture is similar to the one made by the Supreme Court when it delivered a decision perfectly timed to coincide with the president’s birthday. The September 12, 1985 issue of Pacific Daily News noted that “the Philippine Supreme Court Wednesday upheld the National Assembly’s decision last month to kill the opposition’s move to initiate impeachment proceedings against President Ferdinand Marcos. The ruling came as Marcos celebrated his 68th birthday.”

Ferdinand twice wielded his birthday as a political tool to directly ward off the opposition. In 1979, there was a strong call for the lifting of martial law. Ferdinand had his birthday celebrated in the Rizal Park, with Cardinal Sin saying the mass. He gathered almost a million people, though the United Press International in a September 12 report observed most of those in the crowd were civil servants and students required to attend, and that buses and jeeps were used to haul people from nearby provinces. Ferdinand did a paper lifting of martial law in 1981.

From the Armed Forces of the Philippines's Loyalty Day souvenir program, September 10, 1976.

From the Armed Forces of the Philippines’s Loyalty Day souvenir program, September 10, 1976.

OLD TRICKS NO LONGER WORKED

With the assassination of Ninoy Aquino in 1983 galvanizing the opposition, Ferdinand tried to use his 68th birthday in 1985 to call for national reconciliation. The formula for the 1979 gathering did not seem to work. The million was then reduced to 50,000 in 1985.

When Ferdinand and Imelda turned their birthdays as days of historical import in the life of the nation, as days when they can extract obedience and gratitude from the people, they have also opened the calendar to the wary hands of those who were unwilling to be daunted by the dictatorship. Those hands circled the Marcoses’ birthdays red and bided their time to dissent.

In the early years of the dictatorship, with a controlled press and the opposition silenced, Imelda expected no criticism of her extravagance. But the people noticed. “A more pointed slight had come on her forty-fifth birthday, in 1974,” wrote the journalist Katherine W. Ellison in Imelda: Steel Butterfly of the Philippines, when three university students staged “The Coffin of Cinderella.” The play was about the rise and fall of a character clearly recognizable as Imelda – raised from poverty by a handsome prince that she killed when he stood on her way, and who was chased off her throne by her indignant subjects. Police closed down the play after three wild performances, and the writers went into hiding, Ellison wrote.

On her birthday in 1980, it was the jeepney drivers that refused to give Imelda her day. The July 3, 1980 issue of the Honolulu Advertiser reported that “about 10,000 commuters were stranded because jeepney drivers refused to join the festivities and provide free rides. They said gasoline was too expensive.”

The urban insurgency that flared up in the early 1980s led by the April 6 Liberation Movement once did their bombing campaign to coincide with Ferdinand’s birthday. A grenade exploded in a vacant lot near Silahis Hotel in Malate killing two women and wounding 25 other people on Ferdinand’s 65th birthday in 1982.

On Ferdinand’s birthday in 1983, held less than a month after the assassination of Ninoy Aquino, the Catholic Church and Ninoy’s widow, Cory, pushed for a general amnesty for political prisoners. Ferdinand ignored the call for a general amnesty and released 37 political prisoners. Jaime Cardinal Sin, archbishop of Manila, considered it a “positive first step” but insisted that more than 500 political detainees remain in jail, according to a September 12, 1983 Associated Press report. The following year Cardinal Sin refused to hold a mass in Rizal Park in honor of President Marcos’ birthday.

In 1984, while Ferdinand was playing LRT driver, “anti-Marcos activists were cheered by thousands as they began a protest march. About 250 protesters escorted two statues of opposition leader Benigno Aquino on the start of a planned march from the airport where he was assassinated last year to his home province 78 miles away. Some of the protesters used their teeth to rip apart cloth signs hanging along the way wishing Marcos a happy birthday,” reported David Briscoe of the Associated Press on September 12, 1984.

On Imelda’s birthday on July 4, 1985, United Press International reported that “about 500 priests, nuns and pastors marched near the presidential palace Tuesday to protest alleged government persecution and the recent killings of several church workers….One priest noted that it was first lady Imelda Marcos’ 56th birthday and said he wanted to present the coffin as a gift to the ‘two crocodiles in the palace’.”

And while Ferdinand and Cardinal Sin were talking of national reconciliation in a mass at the Rizal Park celebrating the former’s birthday in 1985, “about 500 students marched to Marcos’ palace,” Associated Press reported that day, “and set fire to what they said was their birthday gift to him—a cardboard coffin marked ‘Death to the Dictator’.”

Cover of the special issue of The Republic solely devoted to celebrating Imelda Marcos's birthday in 1973.

Cover of the special issue of The Republic solely devoted to celebrating Imelda Marcos’s birthday in 1973.

LEGISLATED LEGACY

Around twenty years after the last celebration of Barangay Day and National Thanksgiving Day, a significant attempt to restore September 11 as a legislated holiday was initiated with the filing of HB 4592 on August 3, 2005 by Ilocos Norte first district representative Roque Ablan Jr, It was unanimously approved by the House on third reading three months later, but it did not prosper in the Senate.

The 2005 Marcos Day bill was one of dozens of local holiday bills tackled by the Senate in late 2006 up to June 2007. Only thirteen of these bills became laws. The Marcos Day bill was apparently given low priority since Ilocos Norte already had one legislated holiday and senators were concerned over potential economic losses if a locality has too many non-working days.

Before Marcos’ 91st birthday in 2008, Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita, by authority of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, issued Proclamation No. 1604, declaring September 11, 2008 a special non-working day in Ilocos Norte.

In August 2016, the Ilocos Norte Provincial Board passed a resolution urging then newly elected president Rodrigo Duterte to declare September 11 of that year as President Ferdinand Edralin Marcos Day. Duterte did not oblige. Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea, by authority of Duterte, did make Marcos’s birth centennial a special non-working holiday in Ilocos Norte via Proclamation 310, signed September 4, 2017. The proclamation noted that “the Ilocano community has been annually celebrating the birthdate of the late Ferdinand E. Marcos, and commemorating his life and contributions to national development as a World War II veteran, distinguished legislator, and former president

In 2016, Ilocos Norte first district representative Rodolfo Fariñas, along with 26 other lawmakers filed HB 2615, made another attempt to declare September 11 of every year as a holiday in Ilocos Norte. Similar to what happened in 2005, the bill was approved in the House but it died in the Senate.

On Sept, 2, 2020, the House of Representatives approved House Bill 7137 declaring September 11 as “President Ferdinand Edralin Marcos Day” in Ilocos Norte. One of the authors of the bill, Ilocos Norte 2nd District Rep. Angelo Marcos Barba, said the bill “will afford us Ilocos Norteños a day to fully celebrate [Ferdinand Marcos’] birthday, honor his greatness, his brilliance, his legacies to us and to the nation as a whole.”

LOCAL HOSANNAS

Memorials to Ferdinand Marcos litter Ilocos Norte. In 2017, the National Historical Commission of the Philippines turned over a historical marker to Ilocos Norte to commemorate Ferdinand Marcos’s birth centennial. The marker is now in the pedestal of the Marcos monument in Batac, close to the Marcos Presidential Center.

There’s also gilded statue of Ferdinand Marcos in Sarrat, near another museum marketed as Marcos’s birthplace. The welcome arch of Sarrat proudly states that the town is the “Birthplace of Pres. Ferdinand E. Marcos, 1965-1986.” In the Heroes Walk in Laoag, a bust of Marcos is among other famous Ilocanos. Heading to Paoay, one will see the Malacañang of the North, which is filled with portraits of the Marcoses.

The museums and monuments underwent significant rehabilitation or were put up during the nine-year governorship of Imee Marcos (2010-2019). It was also during that period that the commemoration of Ferdinand Marcos’s birth in Ilocos Norte was revitalized as a major youth-oriented event, dubbed “Marcos Fiesta.” Activities include concerts, art and literary competitions highlighting achievements of the Marcos administration, and a Little Ferdie and Imelda duet competition.

Under the governorship of Imee’s son, Matthew Marcos Manotoc, the tradition of paying homage to Ferdinand Marcos continues. Covid-19 was not a hindrance to the propagation of the myth of Ferdinand Marcos. The young governor, not yet born during his grandparents “glory days,” exhorted his constituents to remind themselves “that our country owes a great deal to President Marcos. We certainly would not be where we are today without him.”

How Marcos Kept his Martial Law Plans a Secret
Posted on by diktaduraadmin

Originally published by Vera Files on September 19, 2021.

“Of course, Imelda and I denied it.”

That was what then president Ferdinand Marcos wrote in his diary for September 21, 1972. It was his response when asked by Jose Aspiras and Carmelo Barbero, two of the strongman’s most loyal political lieutenants from the “northern bloc,” if rumors were true that he would declare martial law within 48 hours.

While he denied it publicly, Marcos had secretly signed Proclamation 1081 imposing martial law in the entire country. The public would know about this only on the evening of September 23 when he announced it on live television, saying that martial law was the appropriate response to meet the growing threat from the armed Left and Muslim rebels.

Many had suspected this would happen, but only a dozen men knew for sure and not even all of them were aware of the timing. Within this clique, there were differences in what the “Seven Wise Men” or the “Group of Seven” knew beforehand to what the rest of the “Rolex 12” would eventually come to learn and implement. Close Marcos aides, including those tasked to prepare plans for or study the feasibility of martial law in the country, were surprised when it finally happened.

But one man already held a copy of Proclamation 1081: then US ambassador to the Philippines Henry Byroade.

Oplan Sagittarius by VERA Files

Oplan Sagittarius by VERA Files on Scribd

Various authors and sources have reasonably surmised that Marcos started to seriously plan for martial law when he won his second term in November 1969. While his stated rationale for imposing martial law changed and shifted in 34 months, what remained unchanged was his resolve to gain dictatorial powers. Marcos devised ways to keep secret his ambition to gain political dominance even as he started enlisting the help of a chosen few to justify martial law and how best to execute his plan given the expected opposition.

If the memoir of martial law administrator Juan Ponce Enrile would be believed, Marcos, then newly re-elected, began planning for martial law in early December 1969. Marcos had asked Enrile to “study his powers under the commander-in-chief provisions of the [1935] Constitution” as he “was foreseeing an escalation of violence and disorder in the country.” His commander-in-chief told Enrile he could ask for help in completing the study, but the project should be done “discreetly and confidentially.” Enrile enlisted two 1954 magna cum laude graduates from the University of the Philippines (UP) College of Law, Efren Plana and Minerva Gonzaga-Reyes.

As he was hatching plans for imposing martial law, Marcos was quoted as saying in a November 14, 1969 Manila Times article that he would never become a dictator because this would “invite a violent reaction from the people.”

Enrile made it appear in his memoir that he was Marcos’s sole brain trust, but this was not the case. Marcos liked to compartmentalize when farming out sensitive and crucial work for his martial law plans.

Gen. Rafael Ileto told author Conrado de Quiros in Dead Aim: How Marcos Ambushed Philippine Democracy that Marcos had asked him to look into the military strategy needed for martial law . Jose Almonte and his boss, then executive secretary Alejandro Melchor Jr. were assigned to study authoritarian regimes in Asia and Adrian Cristobal was tasked to envision a government without a Congress. Ronaldo Zamora had to study the early years of American occupation when the governors-general ruled by decree. Even as he was about to declare martial law, Marcos was still asking Blas Ople to look into the workings of totalitarianism in the Soviet Union.

At some point, Marcos even had Philippine embassies in authoritarian countries draw up reports on how their host governments worked.

But only Marcos knew how this surfeit of information fit together in his pursuit of a dictatorship. When some of these studies proved unsupportive of what he had in mind, Marcos treated the authors with suspicion — as in the case of Ileto, Almonte, and Melchor.

In late January 1970, Enrile submitted to Marcos a compendium of the results of the study. A week later, Marcos instructed him “to prepare the documents to install martial law in the country.” Enrile claimed that, working alone (save for Simplicio Taguiam, Marcos’s private and confidential secretary who did the typing), it took him six months to complete what would eventually become Proclamation 1081.

As the First Quarter Storm raged in 1970, Marcos intimated to the United States that he may resort to martial law. The attack on Malacañang mostly by student activists during the January 30 Battle of Mendiola almost prompted Marcos to declare martial law or at least, suspend the writ of habeas corpus right then and there. Ileto has claimed to have dissuaded Marcos from taking this course of action.

In a memorandum dated February 7, 1970 to US President Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, then assistant for national security affairs, quoted a report by Byroade describing “a rambling conversation with a very distraught and unnerved President Marcos.” Kissinger said Marcos wanted the ambassador’s ‘active help’ as he might have to impose martial law. Marcos wanted to know if Byroade would ‘stand behind him.’”

“Byroade reacted cautiously to keep us from being drawn into this situation. He tried discreetly to suggest the need for social programs and land reform, and to head off drastic actions such as martial law,” Kissenger wrote.

In a marginal note, Nixon wrote that he “doubts this line’s effectiveness.”

With US military bases still in the country then and the US war of aggression in Vietnam a hotspot in the Cold War, Washington was keen on constantly knowing what Marcos was up to as his actions would have bearing on its strategic interests. There were also substantial American economic interests in the country that must be protected.

Almost a year later, as related in a January 15, 1971 memorandum of conversation involving Nixon, Byroade, and John H. Holdridge, a member of Nixon’s National Security Council, Marcos asked the White House if the US would oppose or support his martial law plan.

“The President [Nixon] declared that he would “absolutely” back Marcos up, and “to the hilt” so long as what he was doing was to preserve the system against those who would destroy it in the name of liberty. The President [Nixon] indicated that he had telephoned Trudeau of Canada to express this same position. We would not support anyone who was trying to set himself up as a military dictator, but we would do everything we could to back a man who was trying to make the system work and to preserve order. Of course, we understood that Marcos would not be entirely motivated by national interests, but this was something which we had come to expect from Asian leaders. The important thing was to keep the Philippines from going down the tube, since we had a major interest in the success or failure of the Philippine system. Whatever happens, the Philippines was our baby,” the memo stated.

In late May 1972, Byroade had another conversation with Marcos that he reported to the US State Department. He wrote that again, Marcos “talked of the ‘great upsurge of communist insurgency threat in the country,” noting that the Philippine leader had warned that he “might have to reinstate martial law. He asked again if we would support him or at least not oppose him.” To this, Byroade said that he ‘mumbled that our position on that had not changed, but added the hope that he would not find such a move necessary as I thought it would clearly at this time tear the nation apart into opposing factions.’”

Byroade may have made a mistake by using the word “reinstate” in his report — unless, of course, he and Marcos were referring to the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus that was implemented in response to the August 21, 1971 Plaza Miranda bombing.

September 1972 was ushered in by a spate of bombings in Metro Manila, now more frequent than in previous months. For the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), “at least some of the bombs were set by pro-Soviet terrorist groups, that none can be definitely traced to the Maoists.”

1972 09 08 Letter of Enrile… by VERA Files

1972 09 08 Letter of Enrile to Marcos Re Urdaneta Village Meeting by VERA Files on Scribd

In hindsight, the CIA half failed in its intelligence effort here. Ever since Jose Ma. Sison founded the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) in December 1968 espousing Marxism–Leninism–Maoism as a breakaway faction from the old Partiko Komunista ng Pilipinas, a rivalry — sometimes lethal — had existed between the two groups. In his book, de Quiros wrote that a leader of the CPP’s Armed City Partisans admitted that the group “did carry out some bombing . . .but not during that period [August-September 1972] . . . we did not bomb without reason . . . and we made sure no innocent bystanders got hurt.”

But as later admissions and pieces evidence would prove, the bombings were, in fact, the work mostly of Marcos’s own military. Ironically, whatever the motives of the armed partisans from the Left, their violent actions combined with those of the military worked to sow fear and chaos among Filipinos. It was a near-perfect condition for Marcos to declare martial law.

As recorded in Marcos’s diary entries, it appears that after each passing week in September, critical elements in the declaration of martial law were agreed on and put in effect by the “Rolex 12.” The potent surprise of springing martial law on an anxious and terrified populace continued to be a well-guarded secret even after Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr., Marcos’s foremost political adversary, had almost exposed a crucial part of it.

In his September 7, 1972 diary entry, Marcos reveals he had finalized his martial law plans after one development: Enrile, then defense minister, informing him that Aquino had invited him to discuss “a matter of the highest urgency and of national importance,” and they were set to meet that evening.

In Enrile’s memoir, he narrated that the meeting happened almost around midnight at the residence of their common friend, Ramon Siy Lay, at Urdaneta Village in Makati where Enrile also lived. During the meeting that lasted for over an hour, Aquino disclosed information that he insisted Enrile keep confidential. Enrile wrote that he protested, but was “already tired and sleepy” and wanted to end their conversation. So he agreed.

But when he got home, Enrile immediately called Marcos and briefed him on what Aquino had revealed. Typing it himself, Enrile also wrote a report that he sent to his boss in the morning. Enrile wrote that he betrayed Aquino because he felt that Marcos needed to know for “the very obvious national security implication of the matter brought to [his] attention.”

Marcos and Enrile used what transpired in the Urdaneta meeting to counter what Aquino was about to publicly reveal.

On September 13, 1972, Ninoy, speaking in the Senate, exposed Oplan Sagittarius, the plan for the imposition of martial law leaked to him by sources from the Armed Forces. In his book, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines, Stanley Karnow wrote that Aquino had in fact brought the information to the US Embassy the day before but Byroade did not believe him.

Both Marcos and AFP Chief of Staff Romeo Espino denied that Oplan Sagittarius was a plan to place the Greater Manila Area under the control of the constabulary before imposing martial law in the entire nation. They said that it was merely a contingency plan to coordinate military and police response to violent acts by the communists.

In fact, Marcos would insist via his ghostwritten books such as Notes on the New Society that he had tricked the opposition with a fake version of Oplan Sagittarius. He said that Ninoy’s claim that the plan was for the imposition of martial law, including the takeover of certain industries, was indeed based on documents obtained from his intelligence network, but these papers were just part of the “dummy plans made to spot security leaks in [their] organization.”

Based on a copy of a document with the subject title “Letter of Instruction 6/72 (Sagittarius)” dated August 25, 1972, which was among those found in Malacañang after the February 1986 revolt, Sagittarius involved equipping all AFP units with “as many rifle (Inf) platoons, companies and battalions as possible with the capability of sustained employment for at least 48 hours without resupply in both conventional and unconventional warfare.” General Headquarters would announce daily one of four internal defense conditions (IDCs) in “each military zone; in each operational area of task forces under GHQ, and in the Greater Manila Area.” Each IDC level, from normal to IDC III, would entail increasing centralization of operational command and under IDC III, “GHQ assumes overall responsibility for the conduct of operations to restore normalcy or reduce internal threats,” while all camps, posts, and stations would maintain 100 percent “effective strength.”

According to a document attached to the LOI, the conditions warranting IDC III include “intensified and widespread insurgency” including, among others, “widespread offensive operations against government troops,” paralyzing “massive civil disturbance,” “imminent threat or confirmed indications of insurrection/rebellion/secession” and “large scale breakdown of peace and order or threat of civil war as a result of political upheaval.”

In short, if LOI 6/72 is the actual Oplan Sagittarius referred to by Marcos and Espino, it did not involve martial law. Before the nation discovered that martial law had been enforced, the national situation would not even merit an IDC III declaration, based on news accounts and various assessments of the offensive capabilities of the CPP-NPA which had no capability to seize power or incite a high-intensity civil war.

All these fine points, however, were lost in the media blitz that Aquino launched against the Philippine leader, who fought back. Writing in his diary on September 14, Marcos planned to “start another raging controversy,” using what he knew from the Urdaneta meeting.

On September 16, the Malacañang press office released a statement from Marcos timed for the Sunday edition of the major broadsheets. In the press release, Marcos accused Liberal Party (LP) leaders of meeting with Jose Maria Sison, CPP founder and chairman, where they talked about “a common plan…in the event of a revolutionary situation.”

This was not entirely correct, based on a September 8, 1972 letter from Enrile to Marcos marked top secret which was also recovered from Malacañang. In the letter, Enrile said that Aquino had told him that CPP leaders he met with in Dasmariñas Village earlier that night had broached the possibility of an alliance with the Liberals if Marcos declared martial law, which they viewed as a precondition for an actual CPP-LP coordination. According to Enrile, Aquino told Sison “something about his duties as a duly-elected senator of the Republic and so forth” when asked about the LP’s “post-martial law-plan.”

But Sison did not meet with Ninoy. In his book, de Quiros wrote that years later, Julius Fortuna of Kabataang Makabayan and a close Sison associate, admitted that it was he and a few that others who met with Aquino in Dasmariñas Village. It is unclear if it was Aquino or Enrile who dragged Sison into the story.

Marcos likewise said in his statement that the meeting vaguely involved a discussion on the landing of weapons by the M.V. Karagatan at Digoyo Point in Isabela, the bombings in Manila, and an increase in the strength of the CPP’s New People’s Army. Marcos did not mention that, as narrated by Enrile, Aquino said that the CPP had denied involvement in the bombings and was “non-commital” about the M.V. Karagatan incident, which was definitely an attempt to ship arms from China to the NPA.

Marcos’s pronouncements forced Aquino and the LP leadership to issue denials. To a certain degree, the Malacanang statement dampened the impact of Aquino’s Oplan Sagittarius exposé and these media distractions proved to be the perfect camouflage for what was really going on.

On September 13, as his only son, Bongbong, celebrated his 14th birthday in Malacañang and media attention was focused on Aquino, Marcos wrote in his diary: “We agreed to set the 21st of this month as the deadline” for declaring martial law. By “we” Marcos meant Enrile and some advisers that he did not name.

The following morning, Marcos met with Enrile, Espino, Army chief Maj. Gen. Rafael Zagala, Maj. Gen. Fidel Ramos, Police Constabulary chief Maj. Gen. Fidel Ramos, Air Force head Maj. Gen. Jose Rancudo, Adm. Hilario Ruiz who headed the Navy, Maj. Gen. Fabian Ver, chief security, Intelligence chief Col. Ignacio Paz, commander of the First PC Zone Gen. Tomas Diaz, Metrocom Chief Col. Alfredo Montoya, Rizal PC commander Col. Romeo Gatan, and Eduardo “Danding” Cojuanco. The so-called “Rolex 12,” supposedly because Marcos gifted each of them the expensive watch. (Espino, however, later told De Quiros that what Marcos actually gave them were fake Omega watches that broke easily.)

Alex Brillantes Jr., in Dictatorship and Martial Law: Philippine Authoritarianism in 1972, identified the “Seven Wise Men” within the Rolex 12 as Marcos, Enrile, Ver, Diaz, Montoya, Gatan, and Cojuangco. These were the men more deeply involved in the planning of martial law. Diaz, Montoya, and Gatan were relatively junior officers at the time were and as de Quiros said, “Not knowing that their superiors were included in the plan, they were not anxious to open their mouths, lest they pay dearly for it. Their superiors in turn were not anxious to ask questions, lest they be thought of as being disloyal. And neither group was anxious to leak the plan to the outside world, lest they be traced as the source.”

By September 14, they were all ready to turn their plans into specific missions. Marcos remained mum on when exactly he would start exercising his dictatorial powers but with daily meetings starting that day, they all knew it would be soon.

On the evening of that day, as if to signal the ominous turn that Marcos had made, a major spill of formaldehyde happened in Manila’s port area. “Manila had entered the last days of Philippine democracy,” William Rempel noted in Delusions of a Dictator, “smelling vaguely like a morgue.”

Strange omen that it was, Marcos had yet to murder Philippine democracy so the secrecy remained.

A mass rally organized by the Movement of Concerned Citizens for Civil Liberties (MCCCL) was held at Plaza Miranda in Quiapo. (Photo courtesy of Philippines Free Press Magazine) Photo downloaded from Official Gazette.

A mass rally organized by the Movement of Concerned Citizens for Civil Liberties (MCCCL) was held at Plaza Miranda in Quiapo. (Photo courtesy of Philippines Free Press Magazine) Photo downloaded from Official Gazette.

In a September 15, 1972 telegram to the US State Department, Byroade related that he had asked Marcos the day before “if he were about to surprise us with a declaration of martial law.” The response was, Byroade wrote, “no, not under present circumstances. (Marcos) said he would not hesitate at all in doing so if the terrorists stepped up their activities further, and to a new stage. He said that if a part of Manila were burned, a top official of his Government, or foreign ambassador, assassinated or kidnapped, then he would act very promptly. He said that he questioned Communist capability to move things to such a stage just now.”

The ambush of Enrile’s convoy in San Juan on the night of September 22 would satisfy one of the listed circumstances although by then, it seemed just a violent flourish, an orgasmic bang that Marcos just needed to have to become a full-pledged dictator.

So the ambush was staged. Or not staged. Enrile had flip flopped on the subject.

Witness accounts later tended to support the view that it was a contrived move. In the 1985-86 issue of the Fookien Times Philippines Yearbook, Doreen G. Yu asked Enrile, “What about the incident of your alleged ambush that triggered the declaration of martial law?”

Enrile’s replied, “That was not my idea. In fact, when I was fired upon I just came from headquarters. I had transmitted to them the orders of the President declaring martial law. I was on my way home; martial law was already ongoing at this time, the operations were already on. Pres. Marcos simply used that to dramatize this, but that was not really necessary. Because he already decided to declare martial law long before that, because of what was happening in the country.”

In his memoir, Enrile insisted that the ambush was real and perpetrated by his unknown enemies.

Excerpt from the diary of Ferdinand E. Marcos on September 22, 1972. From the Philippine Diary Project. Photo downloaded from Official Gazette.

Excerpt from the diary of Ferdinand E. Marcos on September 22, 1972. From the Philippine Diary Project. Photo downloaded from Official Gazette.

Byroade’s effort to pierce Marcos’s secrecy yielded tangible result only on the evening of September 20, when he received a copy of Proclamation 1081. Raymond Bonner, in Waltzing with a Dictator, said that Marcos was betrayed by one of his “most trusted confidants.”

This was just two days after Marcos claimed in his diary on September 18 that they had finalized the plans for the proclamation of martial law, and that, after a four-hour meeting ending at 10 p.m. that day, the Rolex 12 minus Cojuangco and Gatan, settled on September 21 as the date of declaration “without any postponement.”

That an event that happened on September 18 made its way to a key legal document on martial law was proof that Marcos and his Rolex 12 would take advantage of any new developments to justify their move. The bombing at around 3:40 p.m. that day at the Quezon City Hall, where the Constitutional Convention did its work, was the latest event mentioned in Proclamation 1081. Writing in his diary around midnight, Marcos noted that the Quezon City Hall bombing was “the answer of the subversives to the raids on their headquarters in Manila, Quezon and Pasay…where about 48 were arrested.”

On the evening of September 20 and the day after, Byroade met with Marcos. In a September 21, 1972 telegram to the US State Department, the American diplomat said, “Marcos . . . had made no decision to move towards martial law, and he had never considered anything beyond that, such as military rule. He did admit, however, that planning for martial law was at an advanced state.” At the end of the telegram Byroade admitted that he was unsure if he “succeeded in at least postponing new developments.”

By September 21, the only seeming hindrance to Marcos’s plans was the fact that Congress was then in session. According to Enrile, “President Marcos was waiting for Congress to adjourn sine die . . . on Friday, September 22, 1972. It was for that reason that he had not acted on the declaration of martial law. President Marcos wanted Congress to adjourn first before he would proclaim martial law in the country. He wanted to avoid any resistance from Congress once he declared martial law in the country.”

But Congress did not adjourn. And Marcos was right in his sense that there could be resistance, but it was one that he managed to easily crush. “[A] few days after the declaration of martial law,” Petronilo Bn. Daroy wrote in a chapter of Dictatorship and Revolution: Roots of People’s Power, “a bipartisan caucus of congressmen and senators was held in the cell of Benigno Aquino, Jr., who had already been arrested and detained in Camp Crame. The caucus deliberated on convening a special session of Congress to declare Presidential Decree 1081, null and void. Aquino’s cell was, of course, bugged; the following day, soldiers secured the legislative building and dismantled the offices, carting away equipment, tables, and chairs. The legislative building was turned into the National Museum.”

The Sunday edition of the Philippine Daily Express on September 24, 1972, the only newspaper published after the announcement of Martial Law on September 21, the evening prior. Photo downloaded from Wikipedia.

Since the start of 1972, talks of martial law abounded in the chattering class of Manila. It finally descended and Marcos exacted vengeance with the mass arrest of his enemies on the evening of September 22 until the early morning of the next day.

With his critics in jail and the press silenced, Marcos addressed the nation on radio and TV in the early evening of 23 September to state what was, by then, a matter of fact: martial law was in effect.

In the CIA’s daily brief for Nixon on 23 September 1972, there was almost a hint of admiration for what Marcos had done, that “Marcos carefully orchestrated the move well in advance.”

As Imelda exclaimed to Enrile when things settled down on the morning of September 23, “Ang dali pala ng martial law!”

The Military’s Obsession with UP: Some Historical Notes
Posted on by diktaduraadmin

Originally published by Vera Files on January 28, 2021.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ALMOST A THREAT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RIGGING STUDENT COUNCIL ELECTIONS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UNDERMINING CAMPUS PRESS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EXPANDING CONTROL

Then the drive for control turned institutional.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BEST CPP-NPA RECRUITER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marcos and the First Quarter Storm Part II: Of Pillboxes and Firearms
Posted on by diktaduraadmin

Originally published by Vera Files on March 11, 2020.

The story of the two First Quarter Storm protests that ended with violent dispersals in January 1970 has been told repeatedly across five decades.

One particular narrative on the First Quarter Storm has achieved canonical status: Jose F. Lacaba’s Days of DisquietNights of Rage. In that book, four students who died during the January 30 Battle of Mendiola are named: Feliciano (actually Felicisimo) Roldan of Far Eastern University, Ricardo Alcantara of the University of the Philippines, Fernando Catabay of Manuel Luis Quezon University, and Bernardo Tausa of Mapa High School.

Lacaba did not mention whether the protesters carried any type of firearms. They did not, according to findings released on March 12, 1970 by the Senate Special Committee that investigated the violent January rallies.

“Not a single firearm has been claimed to have been discovered on a demonstrator. How then justify the military’s resort to firepower, aimed at first upward but later directly at the ground a few feet before the crowd?,” the committee said.

Juan Ponce Enrile, who was in Malacanang at that time in his capacity as Secretary of the Department of Justice, stated in his 2012 memoir that claims that some of the demonstrators had Garand rifles—hardly concealable weapons—were “not verified.” Nelson Navarro, who edited Enrile’s memoir, said in his own autobiographical book that the protesters on that fateful night—himself included—had “crudely and hastily made sticks and pillboxes” as “the most serious weapons in [their] arsenal.”

Marcos always claimed the contrary. In his January 31, 1970 diary entry, he said “the rioters were sniping at the MPD, Metrocom& soldiers with .22’s.” The 1971 book Today’s Revolution: Democracy, ghostwritten for Marcos by writer-bureaucrat Adrian Cristobal, noted an “exchange of gunfire”between demonstrators and palace defenders.

Brig. Gen. Raval, the Philippine Constabulary chief who reportedly asked for Marcos’ permission to fire during the Battle of Mendiola (Marcos repeatedly said that he only gave permission to fire water hoses), was more conspiratorial than his commander-in-chief. On February 4, 1970, Raval was quoted by the Manila Times as stating that he had seen a worldwide pattern of “demonstrators killing some of their members to dramatize it and gain public sympathy,” and he was certain the gunshots did not come from his men.

His “false flag” insinuation drew widespread condemnation, even from then Armed Forces Chief of Staff Gen. Manuel Yan.

Raval tendered his resignation a few days after making such statements. In his February 6, 1970 diary entry, Marcos said that he had asked Raval to resign, though he found him to be “one of the most loyal of the officers in the Armed Forces.”

Raval was not among officers Marcos commended in his broadcast address to the nation on January 31, 1970. This, despite Enrile’s account that Raval was the only general to immediately respond to Marcos’s call for reinforcements.

The Senate Special Committee found that it was the arrival of such reinforcements—which increased the number of troops guarding Malacañang to almost 800—that re-agitated protesters who had already started to mellow down.

Sen. Benigno Aquino Jr., Marcos’s chief critic, lambasted the president for his praise of his military men. In a February 2, 1970 speech in the Senate, Aquino asked: “What has he done to bring the murderers of Alcantara, Catabay, Roldan and Tausa to justice? Instead of trying to locate them, he has paid tribute to their killers—and the Commander of the Metrocom, Colonel Ordoñez, has been promoted to General!”

Raval’s relief was the closest approximation of a law enforcer suffering as a consequence of the January 30 deaths.

As he had immediately decided, sans evidence, that the siege was a full-on attempt to forcibly wrest power from him and the demonstrators were armed for assault—all later countered by investigations, foreign observers, and recollections of Enrile and Gen. Ileto—Marcos may not have been particularly interested to know who among his men fired the fatal shots.

In fact, according to the Manila Bulletin, on February 1, 1970, Marcos, accompanied by his wife and children, met with the January 30 palace troops in Malacañang Park. He praised the “exemplary conduct of the soldiers …in successfully repelling, without firing a shot, the riotous students who tried to force their way into the Malacañang grounds.”

He contradicted himself in his January 30, 1970 diary entry: “I hear shooting and I am told that the MPD have been firing in the air.” It was just one of his several contradictory and unverified claims about the Battle of Mendiola.

It seems Marcos was severely rattled by the siege. Dozens of armed soldiers surrounded Malacañang days after the battle. But even the presence of his own army at the palace did not give Marcos comfort. In its April 25, 1970 editorial, the Philippines Free Press gave the reason why: “His mortal fear in that January 30 incident was not so much that the masses of students would succeed in storming and destroying the Palace as that the troops guarding the Palace would turn around and stage a coup.”

Money for Maulings, Cash for Corpses

In their February 2-3,1970 issues, newspapers in the Philippines and abroad noted that in the immediate aftermath of the January 30 Battle of Mendiola, Marcos had publicized setting up a fund for student activities. It was such a transparent attempt to appease student activists with money that even the CIA, in its April 3, 1970 memorandum, noted that “Marcos has tried to buy off and redirect the students rather than acknowledge and deal with their grievances.”

Expectedly, the radical left scoffed at the fund. Ang Bayan, the official organ of the Jose Maria Sison-chaired Communist Party of the Philippines, called it “one face of the counter-revolutionary dual tactic of the fascist regime to soften up their struggle against the reactionary state.”

The first four fatalities of the January 30, 1970 Battle of Mendiola. Top photos (left to right): Bernardo Tausa, Ricardo Alcantara, Felicisimo Singh Roldan; bottom photo: Fernando Catabay. From Mercedes A. B. Tira’s “The Mourning of Protest,” Graphic Magazine, February 18, 1970, 10-11.

Marcos also publicly supported directly compensating heirs of those who died during the battle. On 30 September 1971, he signed into law Republic Act 6399. Its full title reads: “An Act Appropriating Ninety Thousand Pesos as Compensation to the Heirs of Mass Demonstration Victims Ricardo Alcantara, Fernando Catabay, Felicisimo S. Roldan, Bernardo Bausa, Jesus Mejia and Leopoldo Inelda, All Deceased, and Authorizing the Appropriation of Five Hundred Thousand Pesos as Compensation for Deaths and Injuries Sustained in a Public Demonstration, Rally, Protest March, Assembly or Mass Action.”

Six victims were named, although commemorations—especially those led by leftists—usually mention only four. Mejia and Inelda also died from gunshot wounds sustained during the Battle of Mendiola, but they perished a few days later. Newspaper reports referred to them as bystanders.

RA 6399 stated the fund was to be administered by the Department of Social Welfare, suggesting it was a form of assistance, not judicial settlement. A Malacañang press release said Marcos signed the law in the palace in the presence of the heirs of the victims.

While the bipartisan bill was being shepherded toward legislation, scores were injured or killed in protests throughout the country. Among them were Enrique Sta. Brigida, who was beaten to death by law enforcers during the March 3, 1970 “People’s March” in Manila, and Francis Sontillano, who died when a pillbox exploded over his head nearFeati University during a student demonstration on December 4, 1970.

In addition, the bombing of the Liberal Party election rally in Plaza Miranda left nine dead and nearly a hundred injured on August 21, 1971.

Apparently, some were able to make claims against the P500,000 fund. But in 1977, five years into his martial law dictatorship, Marcos declared a number of appropriations dormant and reverted them to the General Fund. Among them, the P272,000 balance of the demonstration victim fund. Thus, RA 6399 became a dead law.

However, after 1977, there were numerous other casualties in mass protests dispersed by law enforcers using lethal weapons. The dead include: two at the February 1981 rally of farmers in Guinayangan, Quezon; four at the “Daet Massacre” in Camarines Norte in June 1981; five at the December 1981 demonstration in Culasi, Antique; and 22 at the Escalante Massacre of September 20, 1985. At least three protests in Manila after 1977 also ended with fatalities. Among them was a second “Mendiola Massacre” in September 1983, where seven protesters, two firemen and a soldier died.

National Day of Sorrow protest rally in 1983 in Mendiola that turned bloody.

Neither Marcos—who retained legislative power up to his last days as president—nor the Interim/Regular Batasang Pambansa ever appropriate additional funds for deaths and injuries in public protests up to the time Marcos was deposed in 1986.

The most significant law related to such activities was the Public Assembly Act of 1985, which punishes law enforcers who carry firearms within a hundred meters of a public assembly or unnecessarily fire their guns to disperse such gatherings.

But by then, the blood of protesters was already on the hands of security forces who had time and again, over a period of 20 years, dispersed rallies with gunfire with nary an effect on their freedom, finances, or careers.

A total of P318,000 was given to families of those killed or injured in demonstrations during the Marcos regime. Whether justice was given to those victims—and to those who never received a centavo from the government—is another matter.

Marcos and the First Quarter Storm Part I: Paranoia and Pretense
Posted on by diktaduraadmin

Originally published by Vera Files on March 10, 2020.

With six deaths and hundreds injured, the bloody opening salvo of the First Quarter Storm in January 1970 both riled and excited President Ferdinand Marcos. But he cannot appear to give in to both sentiments. His plans for a one-man rule restson how well he handled himself in public and capitalized in the ensuing chaos.

The first impulse was to lie. Marcos had to put up a facade that his government was unrattled and magnanimous in the face of the hostility of youth activists.

On March 5, 1970, Marcos’s interview with Nick Joaquin, aka Quijano de Manila, came out in the Philippines Free Press. Marcos admitted that on January 26, 1970, after delivering his State of the Nation Address, a cardboard coffin and a papier-mâché crocodile were thrown his and Imelda’s way on the steps of Congress. But what of the bottles and stones? “[I]t was originally not intended against the First Lady or me but against the police.” As their car sped away, “students were waving their hands at us. I was therefore surprised when I learned that there was a riot after we left.”

Marcos “was booed by demonstrators as he emerged from the [C]ongress building.” He was also booed when he came in, as noted by the journalist Hermie Rotea in I Saw Them Aim and Fire.

Had Marcos written the history of that fateful day, there would have been a lovefest and an adoring crowd as he and the first lady came out of Congress, instead of protest by up to 50,000 demonstrators (according to media accounts).

“The First Lady was … busy shaking hands with everybody, including the students. I was also shaking hands with students, first in the lobby, then on the stairs, then on the sidewalk. We were hemmed in by students; we were shaking hands with them. Everybody wanted to shake hands with us.”

A United Press International photo published in the January 27, 1970 issue of the Honolulu Advertiser makes one wonder when all the glad-handing could have happened as a phalanx of policemen immediately surrounded the First Couple as they exited Congress.

Photo by United Press International

From Rotea:

[A]s President Marcos and the First Lady were being escorted by security aides to their waiting limousine, stones, empty bottles, sticks, placards and other projectiles were thrown at their direction.

Alert security men immediately formed a human cover to protect the First Couple from the “flying missiles.” Fearing an assassination, Col. [Fabian] Ver pushed them into the car. His men covered the limousine from top to the sides and practically hid it from sight.

Fabian Ver, Marcos’ confidant and chief of praetorian guards, may have instinctively thought it was an assassination because that was what his boss often had in mind.

In a January 23, 1970 entry in his diary, Marcos cited Ver’s idea to “meet force with force and that the conspirators be eliminated quietly before they prejudice our country and democratic institutions.”

THE BACKLASH OF THE 1969 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

Ver and Marcos were not referring to the student demonstrators who in a week’s time would breach Malacañang’s Gate 4. They were talking about partisans of Sergio Osmeña Jr., the losing presidential bet in the 1969 election who they suspect to be planning a coup, if not the president’s assassination.

As pointed out by William Rempel in Delusions of a Dictator, Marcos was “troubled” by the “American rumor. The one suggesting that the U.S. embassy was secretly supporting advocates of a coup attempt” against him.

Still, Marcos demurred on Ver’s plan, insisting they instead “obtain evidence to prosecute them in court.” He feared that if he went with Ver’s plan, they “may unleash a wave of violence [that they] may not be able to control and do greater damage to our freedoms.”

Then the First Quarter Storm broke. Entries in his diaries and his public statements indicated a Marcos enticed by the violence he helped unleash, lusting to implement his “final solution,” the imposition of martial law. Which he almost did during the January 30, 1970 siege on Malacañang.

In Dead Aim, Conrado de Quiros credited Brig. General Rafael Ileto, then commanding general of the Philippine Army, for dissuading Marcos from imposing such draconian measure, explaining how unprepared the armed forces were to execute such a plan.

Marcos himself noted in his February 22, 1970 diary entry that he and his top military men were of the “unanimous assessment . . . that the subversives have no capability of mounting an attack of company proportion [a fraction of the total number of state enforcers around Malacanang during the Battle of Mendiola] and will not but are capable of small unit harassment.”

What he did not mention, but were brought up by de Quiros and Rempel, was that besides the police and the military, there was the immediate presence in the palace of armed Ilocano warlords and their bodyguards. Congressmen Roque Ablan Jr. and FloroCrisologo, Rempel surmised, did not only offer moral support, but “machine-gun support” as well.

Marcos may have the loyalty of the Ilocano politicians but not the full support yet of the military. Despite his fear for his life, Marcos could not give himself emergency powers just yet. Until then, his pretense at keeping faith with the country’s democratic institutions must be kept. In public, he conjured confidence and contrition; in private he wrote of spies and saboteurs—including the very ones he claimed to have fielded to sabotage the opposition.

This was the mind of a man who just a month earlier achieved a unique feat in the country’s postwar history. He got himself reelected as president. He bested Osmeña with 1.8 million votes. On December 30, 1969 he was sworn in at the Quirino Grandstand for a second term.

Two years into his first term as president, Marcos started planning his 1969 re-election campaign. It was to be a violent and expensive campaign. So violent that during the election campaign, assassins lurked in Marcos’s mind. At election’s eve, Marcos confided to Joaquin that a Huk commander is after him. Before that, a group of 60 Muslims in Cebu. At that point, Marcos could simply have conjured enemies, both to show bravado and justify the violence inflicted on his opponent.

What was not imagined was how Marcos pillaged the public treasury for his reelection. As recounted by Raymond Bonner in Waltzing with a Dictator:

Two weeks before the election Marcos’s campaign manager, Ernesto Maceda, withdrew 100 million pesos (roughly $25 million). Then, with an air force plane and military security, he hopped around the islands, dispensing peso-filled envelopes: Barrio captains received 2,000 to 3,000 pesos, mayors up to 100,000 pesos, and favored congressional candidates as much as a million pesos. “We were prepared to cheat all the way,” Maceda said in an interview many years later.The election cost Marcos a staggering $50 million, which was $16 million more than Nixon had raised for his successful presidential bid the year before . . . . What votes Marcos couldn’t buy, he stole . . .

Marcos had the special forces of the Philippine Constabulary do the dirty work for him. They were under the command of Brig. Gen. Vicente R. Raval. The same police general would figure in the bloody events of January 1970. The flagrant electoral violence they committed put into question the legitimacy of Marcos’electoral victory.

Raiding the nation’s coffers tanked the economy. As he started his second term, Marcos stopped all government infrastructure projects as his government had almost ran out of money.

A month later, on January 26 and 30, activists, mostly university students, were to lay siege to Malacañang. Their protests exposed Marcos’ venality and sheer greed for power. In Marcos’mind, wrote Condrado de Quiros, “. . . when the students attacked Malacañang, they ceased to be only students . . . Behind them, he saw variously the NPA, Sergio Osmeña’s assassination squads, Ninoy Aquino’s private army, the Liberal Party, and the communist-infiltrated media, all carrying out a preconceived plan of action.”

Marcos limited his movement to the presidential palace in February that year, though Joaquin claimed “he traveled to Ilocandia to face another kind of demonstration: a public avowal of Ilocano affection” on the last week of that month.

Marcos’s ego seemed to be in need of constant tending. On February 6, when he started receiving visitors again, the Official Gazette said the first one was a large delegation of veterans who formally pledged support, “reiterating their faith in the leadership of President Marcos.”

The next visitor was former ambassador Amelito R. Mutuc “who, along with seven of his nine children, staged a ‘demonstration’ at the Freedom Park in front of Malacañang.” Mutuc told Marcos that he “was just showing my children, Mr. President, how to conduct a peaceful demonstration.” The day of adulation ended with Marcos receiving “500 copies of the book Ferdinand Edralin Marcos,” written in Ilocano by [Placido] Real.

In March 1970, Marcos went out of the presidential palace six times, spending its last week in Baguio City and the Ilocos region to observe the Lenten Season. He seemed to have gotten hold of himself.

In his interview with Joaquin, he portrayed himself as the calm, cool, and collected commander-in-chief, giving instructions on the telephone to palace guards while eating his supper at the height of the January 30, 1970 siege of Malacañang.

Maybe to keep this composure, he fortified the palace to fend off any military incursion. “All the windows of the Palace facing Aviles,” observed Joaquin, “have been paneled up with plywood.” There was a sepulchral quality to the place. “In the hall of the chandeliers, lights burn before the Santo Niño enshrined on an altar.”

On February 5, 1970, the Manila Times published a photograph of earth mounds being piled up along the fences of Malacañang. Joaquin asked him about it. Marcos showed him pictures, claiming the diggings “were for power-line pipes. Since the rioters had cut all the wires along the fence . . . there has been no putting up of unusual constructions for the defense of the Palace.”

Manila Times photo, February 5, 1970

This was belied by his press secretary, Kit Tatad, who recalled seeing: “a machine-gun nest.” Tatad made the disclosure to William C. Rempel in Delusions of a Dictator. What Marcos denied, Rempel debunked:

Emergency remodeling projects were launched throughout the palace. The president’s basement gymnasium was converted into a bunker, a fully stocked shelter with baffled walls to withstand mortar attacks. Outside, armored gun emplacements were constructed at the gates. The lawn west of the veranda was cleared and lights were installed, making it a helicopter landing zone. Overnight, new fences went up. Instant foxholes pockmarked the lush grounds.

For security reasons, it was understandable that Marcos downplayed the fortification of Malacañang. The changes, however, offered a clear view to the bunker mentality that had set in on his mind. His February 28, 1970 diary entry said the “cement shelter in the ground floor [of Malacañang] has just been finished,” and that it was built to withstand “any possible mortar or grenade attack.”

Arturo Aruiza, one of Marcos’s closest aides, said in his book Ferdinand Marcos: Malacañang to Makiki that on the night of the Battle of Mendiola, he led a convoy of trucks from Malacañang “loaded with papers, guns, ammunition, and money” to Baguio, where he set up a contingency seat of government. Aruiza said Col. Fabian Ver summoned him back to Manila weeks later.

Even the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency saw through Marcos’ attempts to project himself as a fearless leader. In an intelligence memorandum titled “Philippine Student Agitation,” dated April 3, 1970, the CIA noted that “Marcos’ fearful concern for his personal safety, reinforced by the influence of soothsayers who have predicted his assassination, have caused him virtually to barricade himself in the presidential palace.”

However, the ghosts of those who died in the January 30, 1970 Battle of Mendiola cannot be kept at bay by the new fortifications in Malacañang. Marcos had to devise a political ploy to give his administration a facade of compassion for atrocities he himself was partly responsible for. (To be continued. Part II: Of Pillboxes and Firearms)

Duterte Does a Marcos ‘Show me the Money’ Tactic
Posted on by diktaduraadmin

Originally published by Vera Files on February 19, 2021.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fast forward to present day.

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

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

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

Ferdie and Meldy’s House of Love, Lies, and Loot
Posted on by diktaduraadmin

Originally published by Vera Files on July 18, 2021.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FERDINAND BUYS A HOUSE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IMELDA MAKES A HOME

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

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

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

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

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

CAMPAIGN/ DROP-OFF HEADQUARTERS

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

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

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

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

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

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

TO MALACAÑANG AND BACK

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

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

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

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

A HOUSE OF SECRETS AND LIES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Woman Marcos Left Behind Fleeing the EDSA Revolt
Posted on by diktaduraadmin

Originally published by Vera Files on February 22, 2022.

At 9:05 in the evening of February 25, 1986, as the multitude of Filipinos in revolt closed in on Malacañang, the Marcoses scurried out of the palace with their 22 crates of loot on board four helicopters from the United States embassy. It was believed that the deposed dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos had taken everyone dear to him and everything of immense value into exile.

He did not. Marcos abandoned his own mother.

“It wasn’t until a month later,” Nick Joaquin wrote in The Quartet of the Tiger Moon: Scenes from the People-Power Apocalypse, “that Doña Josefa was located at the Philippine Heart Center (PHC) in Quezon City, a patient there, it turned out, for the last eight years, running up bills amounting already to over a million pesos when her son fled the country, his mother’s hospital bills still unpaid. President Cory Aquino has announced that her office will pay those bills.”

Then PHC director Dr. Esperanza Cabral placed the bill at $57,333, about P7 million today. Josefa was later transferred to the Veterans Memorial Medical Center, where she died on May 4, 1988 at age 95.

This seems to be an unlikely parting for mother and son who used to be thick as thieves. Ferdinand is known to have cherished his mother, a high school teacher in Manila before the Second World War, as he found roles for her in consolidating his financial and political powers.

After the 1986 EDSA revolt, as Josefa languished in the government hospital, the public would learn more of the part she played in her son’s kleptocratic regime.

Figure-Photo from the book The President's Mother

On June 6, 1966, in a ceremony at the then Independence (now Quirino) Grandstand, Ferdinand awarded his own mother, and 23 others, with a Presidential Merit Medal for campaigning for women’s right to vote which was won in 1937. Josefa’s role in the Philippine suffrage movement, however, is unclear.

Making suspect claims in a grand manner seemed to be a practice both mother and son indulged in. While Ferdinand’s exaggerated and criminal claims about his supposed heroism in World War II are now well documented, Josefa’s efforts in the conflict are not so well known.

Ferdinand’s war time ignominy are found in File No. 60, “Ang Mga Maharlika Grla Unit” and File No. 140, “Allas Intelligence Unit” from Record Group (RG) 47 of the Philippine Archives Collection. Physical copies of these documents may be viewed at the US National Archives in Washington and are freely accessible via the Philippine Archives Collection website of the Philippine Veterans Affairs Office.

Josefa’s record is in File No. 253, “Guerrilla Special of the President (GSP)”

ANOTHER FAKE GUERRILLA IN THE FAMILY

Purportedly led by Consuelo Fa. Alvear, also known as “Maria Teves,” a teacher who claimed the rank of Lt. Col., the “GSP” counted among its roster “1st Lt.” Josefa E. Marcos. Both Alvear and Josefa graduated with degrees in education from the University of the Philippines in 1935.

GSP’s members were supposedly mostly women. Based on a profile of herself that Alvear included in her submissions, the “GSP” acronym also stood for another group to which she belonged, the Girl Scouts of the Philippines. Another name for GSP was Calfa, derived from Alvear’s name.

But Alvear made claims about activities unsupported by evidence. She stated that she joined a national oratorical competition where she placed second and that she attended Japanese language classes at the Nippongo Senmon Gakko to gather intelligence and was elected secretary of the student council in March 1944.

In a letter to Alvear dated February 26, 1947, Captain R.E. Cantrell wrote that GSP was “not favorably considered for recognition as an element of the Philippine Army” for lack of evidence that the unit existed as a sustained, structured, and cohesive group. Assessors also noted that “the number of officers, commissioned and non-commissioned, was excessive and not reasonably proportionate to the (U.S.) Army or to pre-war Philippine Army tables of organization.”

Indeed, the submitted GSP rosters listed over 60 persons with ranks ranging from 3rd Lt. to Lt. Col., although the unit only had 200 supposed members. Cantrell’s letter noted that many of these purported members were civilians, with some only claiming to have contributed money or supplies to the war effort. Their affidavits showed that some highlighted the roles of their relatives in the resistance effort. Josefa Marcos was one such “soldier.”

Figure-1946 01 15(_) Josefa's Guerrilla Special of the President Affidavit

Josefa was not, based on a signed affidavit included in Alvear’s submissions, a gun-toting commando. She certainly was not, as implied by Ferdinand and his allies, a veritable one-person army. Josefa herself stated that before joining the GSP, she “helped in sending food, medicine and clothes to the WP [war prisoners] at Capas [Tarlac] by giving them through laborers inside the camp or by bribing the Jap guards to let us women give the articles to the WP that were sent out on special detail, especially to Major [Simeon] Valdez [her husband’s cousin] and Major Ferdinand Marcos…my son.”

Ferdinand was not a major when he was in Capas. He was a lieutenant.

She then claimed that she took care of released WPs at her home or gave them money, specifically mentioning giving P10,000 to Liberato Bonoan. Josefa described Bonoan as a member of the Ramsey Unit, or the East Central Luzon Guerrilla Area. Marcos’s mother further claimed that she distributed intelligence, served as a messenger between Calfa and Maharlika, and “took care” of Ramsey and Maharlika papers, returning them “to the people concerned.”

Photo from the book The President's Mother

Josefa stated that her house on 1555 Calixto Dyco Street in Paco, Manila was “the meeting place of Calfa members, Maharlika boys and Ramsey boys in Manila.” That role apparently ended when the place was “intensively raided” by the Japanese who were supposedly looking for Ferdinand.

According to Josefa, both she and her younger son, Pacifico, were going to be sent to Fort Santiago, but she was allowed to stay home “to look for Ferdinand.” When Pacifico was released a week later, “at all hours, the Japs came to investigate [her; she] kept on staying in [her] home in order to camouflage the whereabouts and work of Ferdinand and the other boys they were looking for.”

By most accounts — generally by those who wrote favorably about Marcos’s wartime heroism — Pacifico’s arrest and release happened in August 1944.

Josefa executed her affidavit in January 1946, the same date as many of the other affidavits in Alvear’s submission. That was about five months after Ferdinand first filed the necessary paperwork to have Ang Mga Maharlika recognized by the U.S. Army. Ferdinand’s unit was not favorably considered (NFC) by the U.S. Army in June 1947, four months after GSP was also “NFC’d.” Ferdinand appealed, but the stories of Ang Mga Maharlika being a significant guerilla force was affirmed to be completely fake by the U.S. Army in March 1948.

Some claims in Josefa’s affidavit and Ferdinand’s documents do not add up. One document with the title “Ang Mga Maharlika: Its History in Brief” was submitted to U.S. Army assessors in December 1945. The most glaring deficiency in Ferdinand’s tales of Maharlika’s exploits and the other documents is the absence of any mention of GSP, Alvear, or his mother’s role in the war effort. The “History in Brief” contained a section called “Liaison with Other Guerrilla Groups.” That too had no reference to Calfa or Alvear.

Ferdinand mentioned many other relatives — Pacifico, a number of uncles, and even a barely disguised reference to his father, Mariano — but never Josefa. When Ferdinand talked about the time Pacifico’s room “was raided by two truckloads of Kempei Tai,” he remarkably failed to note that his mother was also there.

Although the former dictator referred to the Marcos home in Paco, he never claimed that it was a meeting place for guerrillas. References to his “quarters” in the “History in Brief” presumably refer to where he slept in that house. According to Ferdinand’s biography For Every Tear a Victory, written by American Hartzell Spence, the Marcos brothers shared a room where, Liberato Bonoan “used to hide out.” Marcos further stated in a document submitted to the U.S. that papers of the Maharlika “were buried in the lot” where their house stood. If this were correct, one wonders why the papers were not discovered when “Japs intensively raided” the property, as per Josefa’s narration, or when they visited her “everyday…at all hours.”

Photo from the book The President's Mother

This claim of frequent visits also contradicts a story in Spence’s biography and 77 Days in Eastern Pangasinan, published in 1981 by the Office of Media Affairs, under the Headquarters of the Philippine Constabulary Historical Committee. Both these books state that Ferdinand returned home, after spending some time recuperating and hiding out at the Philippine General Hospital, following Pacifico’s release from Fort Santiago. Before Ferdinand was supposedly smuggled out of his house wearing a constabulary uniform, Josefa allegedly took care of her son at home.

Notably, Spence wrote that Ferdinand was brought home specifically because it was “the safest since the Japanese had already raided it.” Only Josefa claimed that she had daily enemy callers.

Another set of documents among the Marcos papers collected under the administration of Ferdinand’s successor, Cory Aquino, simultaneously confirms a detail in Josefa’s affidavit while falsifying another.

The documents pertain to Josefa’s attempts to be reimbursed by the U.S. Armed Forces for the P10,000 she gave to Bonoan. Included in her claim was a receipt from “Col. I.J. Willis”—supposedly a code name of Bonoan—dated December 8,1944. By then, Ferdinand had long left his home in Manila to head north where he would join the 14th Infantry of the U.S. Army of the Philippines-Northern Luzon on December 12, 1944, based both on Marcos-approved narratives and more objective sources. How then was Josefa able to engage with guerrillas hiding from the enemy if she was under constant surveillance by the Japanese?

Josefa’s claim for reimbursement was filed in December 1947. Based on her written response to a 1953 claim by the Bureau of Internal Revenue that she owed the state over P100,000 in taxes, she did not get the P10,000.00 back. In the same response to the BIR, Josefa noted that her husband Mariano was a “practicing attorney” until his death, which she dated “February 1944.”

But Ferdinand, in one of the documents included in his submissions for Ang Mga Maharlika’s recognition, stated that “M.M.”—Mariano Marcos—was an active commanding officer in his unit as of July 1944.

However, there is compelling evidence—including an article published in The Tribune in 1943, an immediate post-war report on Ilocos Norte by an Ilocano war hero, the recollection of an American guerrilla commander, and Japanese war diaries—that Mariano was in fact a Japanese collaborator (a propagandist to be exact) executed not by the Japanese as Ferdinand claimed, but by Filipino guerrillas possibly in late 1944 or early 1945.

The historical marker beneath a statue of Ferdinand’s father in the Mariano Marcos State University in Batac, Ilocos Norte states that Mariano died in March 1945.

Pages From the BIR Letter t… by VERA Files

Pages From the BIR Letter to Josefa and Josefa’s Response by VERA Files on Scribd

At least two of Mariano’s siblings also engaged in aiding the Japanese. His sister Antonia, a writer, had at least one piece of pro-Japanese propaganda published in The Tribune. His brother, Pio, was mentioned in the pages of The Tribune as a prominent member of his district’s Neighborhood Association or Tonarigumi, which assisted the Japanese in propaganda distribution and enemy surveillance, among others. Ferdinand, however, would claim that Pio was actually an intelligence officer of the Maharlikas.

THE RANCH THAT NEVER WAS

In the same 1953 communication regarding her taxes, Josefa declared that among her family’s assets before the war was a ranch in Davao, valued at over P1.2 million (about P4.7 billion today). Josefa stated that “the cattle [in the ranch] was registered in the name of [her] son, Ferdinand E. Marcos, because the original animal stock of the ranch was purchased with money left as a legacy for him by his grandparents.” She said that the cattle had been commandeered by the U.S. Armed Forces in the Far East, and that a claim had been filed with the U.S. Court of Claims.

There are indeed records of the claim, the most readily accessible being the decision, Marcos v. United States, granting Ferdinand standing to sue the U.S. government. The doctrine established by that case was later overturned, but even before that, based on a list of judgements of the Court of Claims submitted to the U.S. Senate in January 1957, the Marcos cattle claim was denied in January 1956.

Ferdinand was unable to convince the Court that the Marcos Ranch cattle existed.

Spence would lie about this failure in his book. “During the war,” he wrote, “the Japanese stripped [the ranch]; afterward, veterans squatted on it, and Ferdinand refused to claim it from them.” Spence made no reference to the Court of Claims filing, which was premised on the allegation that American soldiers requisitioned Ferdinand’s cattle.

Through Spence and a foreword to the book titled The Young Marcos by Victor Nituda, Pacifico later claimed that his family was so lacking in funds in the late 1930s—they were spending a lot on legal fees for the defense of Ferdinand and Mariano for the murder of the Marcos patriarch’s political rival, Julio Nalundasan—that he had to stop his medical schooling and become a constabulary officer in Mindanao to make money. Pacifico continued to serve in Sulu until the outbreak of the war. If his older brother was sitting on a million pesos worth of cattle at the time, why did Pacifico need to temporarily quit his studies and earn a salary?

The 1935 Nalundasan assassination figures into the claims of both Ferdinand and Josefa about the ranch. Mariano ran against Nalundasan to be the representative of Ilocos Norte’s second district in 1934 and 1935, then against Ulpiano Azardon in 1936. Mariano lost all those elections, but had to have been a resident of Ilocos Norte to even run. In 1935, Mariano was one of the lawyers of the first person suspected of killing Nalundasan, Nicasio Layaoen, who was acquitted.

In December 1938, Mariano, Ferdinand, Pio, and Ferdinand’s uncle, Quirino Lizardo, were arrested for suspicion of murdering Nalundasan. They would be preoccupied with the case until October 1940, when all three had already been acquitted.

In the three years prior to 1934, Mariano was Deputy Governor-at-Large of Davao where the ranch was supposedly located. The dates of Mariano’s term are stated in a memorandum by Vicente Francisco, defense lawyer of the Marcoses during the Nalundasan trial, which was reproduced in the 1965 book, Was Ferdinand Marcos Responsible for the Death of Nalundasan?

The undivided province of Davao started having elected governors only in 1935. But one affidavit among the files left behind in Malacañang after the Marcoses left which likely offered as evidence in the Court of Claims case states that Mariano was Governor-at-Large of Davao until 1936, and that the importation of cattle happened between 1934 and 1940. The first is clearly false, and the latter extremely unlikely.

Another affidavit states that “all papers [regarding the registration of the Marcos ranch cattle] and other pertinent documents to such registration were lost or destroyed during the war.” All Ferdinand had were affidavits that contained false or unverifiable information.

Although the Marcos ranch was a lie, all other claims about Josefa’s finances were apparently accepted by the BIR. She stated that her net worth actually decreased instead of increased between 1947 and 1953, and that the property she acquired within that time was bought using proceeds from the sale of her assets or from numerous loans. On the other hand, Ferdinand, who was also being hounded by the BIR for paying insufficient taxes, settled his deficiencies after negotiating a significant reduction of what he owed.

Both mother and son may have failed in several attempts to profit from false war claims, but Ferdinand’s election to the presidency—and his retention of power for two decades—ensured that they could at least direct how their family’s wartime activities were chronicled in state-approved narratives.

Within their lifetimes, the Marcoses had public structures named after them. By hook or by crook, they made sure their country would consider them honored heroes.

A MOTHER’S INFLUENCE

Josefa’s notoriety in helping her son with his corrupt practices did not end with war time claims.

Figure-One of the plaques found in the Marcos Museum in Sarrat

In the heyday of Ferdinand’s dictatorship, according to Ricardo Manapat in Some Are Smarter Than Others: The History of Marcos’ Crony Capitalism, Josefa “was quite active in business corporations and in other money-making ventures which capitalized on her special relationship with her powerful son.” During the ‘70s, she was already in her 80s.

“Doña Josefa,” Manapat continued, “headed the Doña Josefa Edralin Marcos Foundation, which was the financial holding group of the more than a dozen companies where she was chairman of the board. SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) records reveal that she was involved in many areas such as sugar, logging, shipping, and foods, Doña Josefa was helped by a core of close relatives who did the spade-work for her. By making contributions to her foundation, businessmen were able to ask her to intercede with various government officials for favors. All she had to do was to lend her name to corporations so that their business deals would be facilitated.”

An August 5, 1977 declassified cable from the US embassy mentions Josefa as the chair of the board of Intercontinent Minerals and Oil Corporation, “one of several small chromite producers presently trying to ride the crest of high chromite prices and short supply to promote foreign investment in its operations.” It adds that “Doña Josefa is often used in this capacity in the mining industry when marginal projects may benefit from ‘palace influence’.”

As early as 1967, with Ferdinand just in the second year of his first term as president, she started buying real estate in Cape Coral, Florida in the U.S. Josefa, as reported in the March 22, 1986 issue of the News-Press [Fort Myers, Florida], introduced herself as the widow of “a Supreme Court justice” and that her “family was obviously wealthy.” She is supposed to have said that her husband was “killed by a stray bullet when the Japanese fled Manila during the World War II.”

“I will know you by your fruits,”Josefa was quoted as saying in the July 14, 1978 issue of the Singaporean paper, New Nation. “The kind of children you give to the world shows the kind of mother you are.”

That statement, at least, is true — in her case.