“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.
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?
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.”
The U.S. National Archives in Washington, D.C. is home to the Philippine Archives Collection, a treasure trove of 1,401 files of the Guerrilla Unit Recognition series documenting anti-Japanese resistance in World War II.
Within that collection is File No. 60, which documents Ferdinand E. Marcos’s claim of being a guerilla leader and founder of a guerilla unit called “Ang Manga Maharlika” with thousands of men in its roster from 1942 to 1945 in Northern Luzon. Marcos himself later changed it to “Ang Mga Maharlika.”
Included in the file’s more than 400 pages are the findings made by the U.S. Army which, after repeated investigations, repudiated Marcos’ claim and called it a lie.
Capt. Elbert R. Curtis, who handled Marcos’s claim for recognition for the most part of July 1947 to March 1948, came to two conclusions.
One, that “Ang Mga Maharlika Unit under the alleged command of Ferdinand Marcos is fraudulent.” Two, that “inserting his name on a roster other than the United States Armed Forces in the Philippines, Northern Luzon (USAFIP, NL) roster was a malicious criminal act.”
“It is also known that Marcos has enough political prestige to bring pressure to bear where it is needed for his own personal benefit,” Curtis said.
Before the Second World War, Marcos was known for two things—his acquittal for the murder of his father’s political rival Julio Nalundasan, and topping the 1939 bar exam while in jail for the crime.
In an interview with writer Gregorio Brillantes in 1968, Marcos claimed that after becoming a lawyer, he had wanted to embark on a “teaching career,” dreaming to be a professor at his alma mater, the University of the Philippines College of Law, “lecturing on some complex point of law.” Whatever his post-graduation plans really were, the war altered them.
Marcos’s exploits in the World War II, real or imagined, became part of the narrative of his political career. In November 1941 he joined the army as a third lieutenant. He was with the Filipino forces in Bataan until their surrender in April 1942. With other prisoners of war, he was interred at Camp O’Donnell in Capas, Tarlac.
On August 4 the same year, he was released. There was a claim that it was due to failing health. But in his own commissioned biography, For Every Tear a Victory by Hartzell Spence, Marcos claimed that his mother Josefa “bribed the authorities to hasten her son’s freedom.”
Not much is known of Marcos’ activities from August 4, 1942 until December 12, 1944, when he joined the 14th Infantry, USAFIP, NL. If there was any indication of what he was up to, the records in File No. 60 point to one activity: taking advantage of the war times to line his pocket.
“Ferdinand Marcos was in San Quintin, Pangasinan, two or three months prior to the landing of the American forces, soliciting funds and guerilla help to construct a landing field in the vicinity,” the report said.
“The purpose of the landing field was to allow a plane to come in and evacuate General [Manuel] Roxas. Capt. Ray C. Hunt, commanding officer of PMD, LGAF placed Marcos under arrest for collecting money under false pretense. Gen. Roxas intervened on Marcos’ behalf and had him released to his custody,” it said.
The American forces reconquered Pangasinan in January 1945. Even before Marcos started his supposed activities in Pangasinan, on July 26, 1944 he sent a request to the returning American forces “for P100,000.00 Philippine currency and P500,000.00 Japanese war notes be sent his unit for maintenance.”
Marcos claimed to have 8,300 Ang Mga Maharlika members in North Luzon, Baguio, Zambales, and Manila. The investigator curtly noted that “this is entirely theoretical as no such unit ever existed.”
When Marcos ended his active service in 1946 he claimed to have gained the rank of major. Charles C. McDougald, in his book The Marcos File contested this claim, saying “The only promotion that Marcos could actually prove by official orders was his promotion to first lieutenant. All others, in addition to being contradictory and confusing, appear spurious.”
File No. 60 started with Marcos’s August 18, 1945 letter to the adjutant general of the Philippine Army requesting “that the complete roster of ‘Ang Manga Maharlika’ be approved and this organization be given recognition.”
The roster had 1,939 purported guerillas in active duty since December 1943. Guerillas recognized by the US Army received back pay for their efforts. The longer the period of their recognized participation in the war effort, the bigger their compensation.
On December 18, 1945, Marcos followed up on his original request for recognition. He also took the opportunity to provide additional materials to buttress his claim.
With this submission, listed as item number 6 in File No. 60, is the “Ang Mga Maharlika – Its History in Brief.” It was a history that not only chronicled the past and foretold the future but invented both points in time as well.
On June 7, 1947, a four-man military team told Marcos that based on the result of an initial investigation, his request for recognition was denied. The record of service he was claiming “was not substantiated by acceptable evidence.” The leadership, structure, effectiveness, and extent of the supposed guerilla unit were sketchy.
As for Marcos’s claim to leadership, the team said, “Performance of the unit did not indicate adequate control by its leaders because of the desertion of its commanding officer [i.e. Marcos] to join another unit.”
On July 16, 1947, Marcos, then in Washington, D.C. as member of the Philippine Veterans Commission, fired off a telegram to “strongly protest denial of recognition” and promised that he would file a formal petition.
It took him almost half a year to do this. The petition was filed on December 2, 1947. He tried to rebut the findings of the investigators point by point. His arguments ran for nine pages of single-spaced typescript with sixteen appendices. Ten of these were sworn and notarized affidavits of prominent and high-ranking military men in the newly established republic, a number of whom were also former leaders of well-known guerilla units during the war.
Listed as affiants supporting Marcos’s request for reconsideration were Brig. Gen. Macario Peralta Jr., commanding officer of the Panay guerillas; Maj. Gen. Rafael Jalandoni, chief of staff of the Armed Forces of the Philippines; Col. Vicente Umali and Col. Primitivo San Agustin Jr. of the President Quezon’s Own Guerilla; Maj. Leopoldo Guillermo, signal officer of the East Central Luzon Guerilla Area; Maj. Salvador Abcede of the Negros Guerillas; Consul-General Modesto Farolan of the Philippine Consulate at Hawaii; Col. Margarito Torralba, Armed Forces of the Philippines; and Narciso Ramos, minister-counselor of the Philippine Embassy in Washington, DC.
Life of Ferdinand Marcos mural by Botong Francisco. 1969.
In the rules of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, AFP Regulations G 161-375 to be exact, only two conditions disqualify deceased personnel from being buried at the Libingan ng mga Bayani. The first is dishonorable discharge from the service; the second is conviction by final judgment “for an offense involving moral turpitude.”
The second may yet apply to former president Ferdinand Marcos whose burial at the Libingan, 27 years after his death, was upheld by the Supreme Court in a decision on Nov. 8, to the anger of people who say he doesn’t deserve a hero’s burial.
Seventy-six years ago on October 22, 1940, the Supreme Court itself convicted Marcos for an offense that may be judged as involving moral turpitude. He and three of his relatives were found guilty of contempt of court for filing eight separate complaints against the principal witness of the prosecution in the murder of Julio Nalundasan, even before the conclusion of the trial.
Nalundasan was the rival of Ferdinand’s father, congressman Mariano Marcos. The story goes that Nalundasan was killed by a sniper’s bullet on the night of September 20, 1935, while he was brushing his teeth by the window of his home in Batac, Ilocos Norte. This was just a few days after he defeated Mariano in the congressional elections, and was declared the duly elected representative of Ilocos Norte’s second district.
Charged with murder were Mariano, his brother Pio, their brother-in-law Quirino Lizardo, and Ferdinand, then an 18-year-old University of the Philippines student and, by various accounts, a sharpshooter.
The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which recounts in G.R. No. L-47388, People of the Philippines v. Mariano Marcos et al., that the four filed eight separate complaints against Calixto Aguinaldo, the prosecution’s principal witness. They accused him of making false testimony against them during the preliminary investigation on Dec. 7, 1938, and during their trial.
But it turns out that they filed those eight complaints when only Lizardo’s trial had commenced. The trial of the three Marcoses had then not even begun. The rules of court require a judgment to be rendered before a charge of false testimony can be filed against a witness.
Ilocos Norte’s Court of First Instance found Quirino Lizardo, Mariano Marcos, Pio Marcos and Ferdinand Marcos guilty of contempt of court.
The Supreme Court said, “It is evident that the charges for false testimony filed by the four accused above mentioned could not be decided until the main case for murder was disposed of, since no penalty could be meted out to Calixto Aguinaldo for his alleged false testimony without first knowing the extent of the sentence to be imposed against Lizardo and the Marcoses (Revised Penal Code, art. 180).”
“The latter should therefore have waited for the termination of the principal case in the lower court before filing the charges for false testimony against Calixto Aguinaldo. Facts considered, we are of the opinion that the action of the Marcoses and Lizardo was calculated, or at least tended, directly or indirectly to obstruct the administration of justice and that, therefore, the trial court properly found them guilty of contempt,” the High Court said.
The Court of First Instance of Ilocos Norte had convicted Ferdinand Marcos and Lizardo of murder and contempt. Ferdinand, then a law student, brought the case to the Supreme Court and asked that it overturn his and Lizardo’s conviction. Mariano and Pio, meanwhile, appealed their conviction for contempt.
Justice Jose Laurel penned the decision acquitting Marcos and Lizardo of the murder charge. But it sustained the Ilocos Norte Court of First Instance’s decision that all three Marcoses and Lizardo were guilty of desacato (contempt). The Court of First Instance ordered them to pay a fine of P200 or, in case of insolvency or non-payment, the corresponding jail time. Laurel’s decision for the Supreme Court lowered the fine to P50. But the conviction stayed.
Hence, the first element in the AFP provision for disqualification is met. For the contempt of court offense, after Marcos was afforded due process by the Court of First Instance and heard on appeal by the Supreme Court, a final judgment was reached. He was guilty.
But does a guilty for contempt of court verdict necessarily mean having committed an act involving moral turpitude? What is moral turpitude in the first place?
Until 1940, the Supreme Court made only two rulings involving moral turpitude. In the first case, a lawyer was convicted of abduction with consent, and the petitioner asked that he be suspended or disbarred. The Supreme Court issued a one-year suspension to be served after he was released from prison.
In his decision on that case, In Re: Basa (December 7, 1920), in what is considered the first decision involving the issue, Justice George A. Malcolm used Bouvier’s Law Dictionary to define it.
“Moral turpitude, it has been said, includes everything which is done contrary to justice, honesty, modesty, or good morals,” Malcolm said.
Detail from Botong Franciso mural on Marcos.
“The inherent nature of the act is such that it is against good morals and the accepted rule of right conduct,” Malcolm continued.
Another pre-1940 case In Re: Isada (November 16, 1934), also penned by Malcolm, maintained that the crime of concubinage involves moral turpitude. The respondent, also a lawyer, after serving his conviction for the main crime, was suspended also for a year.
Succeeding Supreme Court rulings have either adhered to the law dictionary definition of moral turpitude as established in In Re: Basa (though they have moved on from Bouvier’s to Black’s) or have done particular refinements on how to determine if moral turpitude is concomitant with certain offenses.
The court now holds that “not every criminal act, however, involves moral turpitude” (dela Torre v. Comelec, G.R. 121592, July 5, 1996). What evolved in practice is “the way for a case-to-case approach in determining whether a crime involves moral turpitude” (Brion concurring in Teves v. Comelec, G.R. No. 180363, April 28, 2009), and “as to what crime involves moral turpitude is for the Supreme Court to determine” (A.M. 1162, A.C. 1163, A.M. 1164, August 29, 1975).
In recent cases involving moral turpitude, the Supreme Court employs three approaches in making its determination (Brion concurring in Teves v. Comelec, G.R. No. 180363, April 28, 2009).
First, to determine whether “the act itself must be inherently immoral”; second, “to look at the act committed through its elements as a crime”; and the third, “essentially takes the offender and his acts into account in light of the attendant circumstances of the crime: was he motivated by ill will indicating depravity?”
In deciding Garcia v. De Vera (A.C. No. 6052. December 11, 2003), the Supreme Court had occasion to rule on whether or not indirect contempt of court can be an offense involving moral turpitude. But following the Supreme Court’s own prescription for determining involvement of moral turpitude in a case, that decision does not automatically preclude all contempt of court cases—both direct and indirect—as free of moral turpitude.
In that case, the respondent had been previously found guilty of indirect contempt by the Supreme Court itself for having made a statement in public that in the court’s appreciation, was “clearly made to mobilize public opinion and bring pressure on the Court.”
For that very specific act alone, the Court said, “the act for which he was found guilty of indirect contempt” does not involve moral turpitude because “it cannot be said that the act of expressing one’s opinion on a public interest issue can be considered as an act of baseness, vileness or depravity.”
In the Philippines, contempt can be considered criminal or civil. According to the Supreme Court in People vs. Godoy (G.R. Nos. 115908-09, March 29, 1995), “the real character of the proceedings is to be determined by the relief sought, or the dominant purpose, and the proceedings are to be regarded as criminal when the purpose is primarily punishment, and civil when the purpose is primarily compensatory or remedial.”
In Lorenzo Shipping Corporation, et al. v. Distribution Management Association of the Philippines, et al. (G.R. No. 155849, August 31, 2011), the Supreme Court stated that “proceedings for contempt are sui generis, in nature criminal.”
The Court said that a criminal contempt “consists in conduct that is directed against the authority and dignity of a court or of a judge acting judicially, as in unlawfully assailing or discrediting the authority and dignity of the court or judge, or in doing a duly forbidden act.”
Meanwhile, it stated that a civil contempt “consists in the failure to do something ordered to be done by a court or judge in a civil case for the benefit of the opposing party therein.”
The Court continued: “Where the dominant purpose is to enforce compliance with an order of a court for the benefit of a party in whose favor the order runs, the contempt is civil; where the dominant purpose is to vindicate the dignity and authority of the court, and to protect the interests of the general public, the contempt is criminal.”
In the final decision on the Nalundasan case, Laurel said, “The inherent power to punish for contempt should be exercised on the preservative and not on the vindictive principle (Villavicencio vs. Lukban 39 Phil., 778), and on the corrective and not on the retaliatory idea of punishment.” Based only on this statement, it would appear that the contempt committed by the Marcoses was construed by the High Court as being indirect and civil in nature.
However, in the same decision, the Supreme Court described the action of the Marcoses and Lizardo as “directly or indirectly [obstructing] the administration of justice,” which could mean they committed “a duly forbidden act.”
While there is currently no jurisprudence in the Philippines that states that obstruction of justice involves moral turpitude, what Marcos and his relatives did was to harass the main witness in their murder trial with legal action. They filed eight separate complaints alleging that the principal witness for the prosecution, Calixto Aguinaldo, committed false testimony while the Nalundasan murder trial was still ongoing.
At the very least, this demonstrates a lack of faith on the judge trying the case, insinuating he is incapable of discerning the veracity of the testimony of witnesses before his court.
In American jurisprudence (see Padilla v. Gonzales, 397 F.3d 1016), obstruction of justice is considered a crime involving moral turpitude.
Since the possible sentence for Marcos and his kin for the murder of Nalundasan ranged from 12 to 20 years imprisonment to death, the Revised Penal Code provides that had they been convicted and Aguinaldo proven to have committed false testimony, then Aguinaldo would be in jail from six to 20 years. The cost of defending himself against eight lawsuits would have also been prohibitive.
Marcos and his relatives may not have committed an act that is evil in itself, but there is no doubt malice, the ill will that was inherent in their action to corrupt legal avenues for redress for their own self-serving ends.
