Category: Corruption

Originally published by Vera Files on September 25, 2017.

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

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

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

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

‘BAGONG LIPUNAN’ IN BICOL

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

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

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

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

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

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

PROPAGANDA PAMPHLET

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PYRAMIDING SCHEME?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TRAFFICKING FALSEHOODS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally published by Vera Files on May 1, 2022.

Epic fail of a political machinery

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

No verifiable proof to these claims were offered, except photos of 31 governors (or their representatives) and one gubernatorial aspirant seated around a table with Bongbong on April 3, 11, and 28. But for Quezon Governor Danilo Suarez, it’s all over but for the counting. “Right now we have a new President,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

03 Ople Campaign Plan Memo … by VERA Files

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bureaucracy and Local Governments as Campaign Machinery 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Campaigning Armed Forces

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally published by Vera Files on May 21, 2021.

Signing of an agreement for the PGH expansion and rehabilitation project, 1982.

In the wake of the fire that hit the Philippine General Hospital (PGH) on May 16, Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro “Teddy Boy” Locsin Jr. thought it relevant to tweet about the relationship of former first lady Imelda Marcos with the government-owned medical facility.

“One of the best things Imelda did was rebuild PGH better. She had no authority but she did it. That was one of the charges against her. I think it is still there. Technical malfeasance is impossible to get dismissed or no one bothered to thank her,” Locsin said in response to a tweet by Demontitang Aczar of Manila. The Twitter user was calling on the Duterte administration to “step up and do what needs to be done to repair [PGH] and renovate it.”

The Secretary’s tweet was picked up in a story published by the Manila Bulletin which, according to the social media monitoring tool CrowdTangle, resonated with at least a dozen pro-Marcos Facebook pages and got more than 2,300 interactions on Facebook alone.

But Locsin’s claims need further examination, especially with regard to the beneficence of Imelda who was convicted for graft in 2018 for her role in the expansion and rehabilitation of PGH during her husband’s term as president. The Sandiganbayan ruling, which concluded that ill-gotten funds were funneled to foundations whose ultimate beneficiaries were the Marcoses, remains under appeal.

The PGH project is often described as an initiative of the former first lady but whatever Imelda did for the hospital is tainted, at the very least, with financial mismanagement or worse, outright fraud.

Given her power and influence at the time —she was both chief executive of the Metro Manila Commission and head of the Ministry of Human Settlements — Imelda overhauled PGH using bizarre and infeasible ways to pay for the debt that funded the project.

Locsin claims that although Imelda “had no authority,” she still went ahead with the upgrading of PGH. According to the Official Week in Review: August 3 – August 9, 1981, published in the Official Gazette, Imelda authorized the construction of a 21-story hospital building to replace the existing PGH structure, apparently in her capacity as Minister of Human Settlements. The entry noted that Imelda approved the plan in a meeting with then University of the Philippines President Edgardo Angara and hospital department heads of the UP College of Medicine and several cabinet ministers. During that meeting, it was also agreed that the PGH project would be financed by the Social Security System (SSS).

Less than three months later, on November 1, Imelda set up the PGH Foundation Inc. (PGHFI) with herself as chair to make PGH “a premier hospital for all kinds of people, rich and poor,” according to the Official Week in Review. No accounting for the funds received by PGHFI has ever been publicly produced.

PGHFI was the foundation involved in the “technical malfeasance” case that Locsin may have been alluding to in his tweet. He may have forgotten that in 1998, Imelda had been acquitted of all but one charge related to the foundation. Details of that case show that a lot remains unresolved regarding Imelda’s use of PGHFI for “creative financing.”

According to Dr. Gloria Aragon, PGH director from 1979 to 1983 in her memoir The Road I Travelled, the UP Board of Regents approved the planned SSS loan in July 1982. The following month, a contract was signed in Malacañang by Imelda, Angara, and the contractors for the project which was to be funded by a 25-year SSS loan and completed within 1983.

An article in the October 1983 issue of the National Economic Development Authority periodical Philippine Development noted that a P450 million SSS loan would finance a “new seven-story main building” of PGH which would begin construction in 1985.

That article was not principally concerned with the PGH project. It was actually a feature article about the first line of the Light Rail Transit (LRT) system under constructed in Manila at the time. The PGH-SSS deal was mentioned because “[that] early, the government [had] decreed that income from the commercial centers at each of the LRT stations will be used to pay off the loan for the expansion of the [PGH] and to maintain the hospital.”

It was a curious scheme.

To pay off a massive debt that PGH would be saddled with, the income of another government facility, the LRT— itself built through even more massive loans from foreign creditors —would be directed to service the loan of the non-profit public hospital. This arrangement was approved despite the fact that, besides the loans it had to pay, the Light Rail Transit Authority (LRTA) also needed to pay a guaranteed income to a private operator contracted to run the line. As stated in the Philippine Development article, the LRTA (rightly) expected that costs would “exceed revenues in the first few years of operation” of the rail line.

The PGH debt was going to be paid off from the income of a mass transit system operating at a loss.

The deal was a head scratcher, but not difficult to facilitate with Imelda in charge of PGHFI as well as chair of the LRTA, established by President Ferdinand Marcos via Executive Order No. 603 on July 12, 1980.

In June 1984, about half a year before the LRT started to service the public, PGHFI and the LRTA made the deal official. The LRTA leased to PGHFI two vacant lots adjacent to the LRT stations in Pasay and Manila. According to Dans v. People, promulgated by the Supreme Court on January 29, 1998, the lease on the two properties were P102,760 and P92,437.20, respectively. Within the same month, PGHFI subleased the lots. The Manila lot was rented out for P199,710 a month to Joy Mart Consolidated Corporation, owner of the Isetann Department Store building that used to stand on the very same lot before it was demolished to give way to the LRT. The Pasay lot went to Transnational Construction Corporation, whose president was Marcos crony Ignacio Gimenez, for a monthly rent of P734,000.

After the EDSA Revolution, in 1992, Imelda Marcos and former transportation minister Jose Dans were charged separately for holding top positions in both the PGHFI and the LRTA and entering into lease agreements that had “‘terms and conditions manifestly and grossly disadvantageous to the government.’”

Both were acquitted of the first set of charges because they were not given “adequate notice of the acts for which [they] could be held liable under the law.” The Sandiganbayan also found nothing wrong with Imelda and Dans entering into the LRTA-PGHFI lease agreement even if they were, as per the Supreme Court, “playing both ends.”

But on September 24, 1993, the Supreme Court declared Imelda and Dans guilty of entering into the grossly disadvantageous sublease agreements, noting that even conservative evaluations showed that the properties could have been leased out for at least P 500,000 more. The High Court concluded that Imelda “generated a situation where the LRTA, a government corporation, lost out to the PGHFI, a private enterprise headed by Marcos herself.”

On appeal, the Supreme Court acquitted Dans of all charges in January 1998 as his signature did not appear in any of the sublease agreements, buttressing his claim that he did not even know about the sublease deals where these were sealed. Imelda, on the other hand, was only acquitted of the charge on her involvement in the Manila sublease contract because she did sign for PGHFI in all the subject lease deals.

On further appeal, Imelda was cleared of all charges nine months later. The Court ruled that notwithstanding her numerous roles in government, Imelda only entered into the agreements in her private capacity as chair of PGHFI and that there was a “fatal” procedural flaw” in the case.

Lost in the discussions on property valuation and procedural technicalities was the matter of whether any funds from the lease agreements actually went to PGH. No evidence was ever presented to prove that funds generated from the lease agreements were ultimately for charitable purposes as claimed by Imelda.

There is likewise no proof that any of the funds received by PGHFI were ever utilized to pay off PGH’s loan to SSS. In a 1990s interview with a journalist, a former hospital director said that PGH never received any funds from PGHFI. Another PGH director and other UP officials claimed, through a congressional representative during a 2015 budget hearing at the House of Representatives, to have no knowledge of PGHFI and its contributions to the PGH. They did know about the PGH Medical Foundation which was founded in 1997 without the participation of Imelda Marcos. This is the same foundation referred to by more recent headlines talking about donations to and activities of a “PGH Foundation.”

If the PGHFI never actually helped to pay off the loan for PGH’s expansion and rehabilitation, then where else was the payment for that debt supposed to come from, besides other existing sources of PGH funds? Among the documents seized from Malacanang after the Edsa Revolution are those regarding a plan to turn PGH into an “independent corporation,” submitted to President Ferdinand Marcos by then PGH director Salvador Salceda. Essentially, the plan would have made PGH financially and administratively independent from UP—Salceda wanted it “attached to the Office of the President, Republic of the Philippines”—but contractually kept it the teaching hospital of the UP College of Medicine. Being independent would mean that it could name facilities after donors without the approval of the UP Board of Regents. Angara opposed the plan; in a letter to President Marcos dated September 20, 1985, Angara said that this move would “seriously jeopardize the quality of patient care in PGH” and that relying on an agreement would not “effectively preserve the current synergistic relationship [of the proposed PGH Corporation] and the [UP] College of Medicine”, even potentially becoming “the cause of deterioration in the long run.” Had the plan been implemented, perhaps PGH would have been able to diversify its funding sources, but at the cost of further making it subject to the whims of the Marcoses, and potentially those of private interests.

Letter of Angara to Imelda by VERA Files

Letter of UP President Edgardo Angara opposing a Marcos-era plan to turn PGH into an independent corporation.

One could say that all’s well that ends well in this case since the seven-story building—now known as PGH’s Central Block — was operational by 1989, and renovations of other PGH facilities were completed the following year. Aragon noted in her memoir, however, that much of the rehabilitation project was not realized. Several other infrastructural additions and renovations were made after the Marcos regime, including the Out-Patient Department building constructed in 1989.

But the SSS debt continued to haunt PGH. According to a 1987 issue of Philippine Development, the PGH expansion and rehabilitation project was supported by a P200 million SSS loan — less than half of what Imelda and company wanted—and “a government grant through the Department of Public Works and Highways,” a much more reasonable funding source. The interest and penalties on the loan, which had ballooned to P534 million, were condoned by SSS after lengthy negotiations in the early 2000s.

According to the July-September 2000 issue of the UP Gazette, former president Joseph Estrada approved the condonation in September of that year. By that time, the outstanding principal balance of the P200 million loan had reached a whopping P190,633,488.92 and less than P9.4 million had been remitted to SSS by UP-PGH, millions less than what PGHFI should have earned prior to the ouster of the Marcoses in 1986.

The Imelda and PGH saga is a cautionary tale. The PGH is a vital institution, a fact made even more apparent by the pandemic. It cannot rely on harebrained financing schemes, the whims of first ladies, or discretionary funds of chief executives. As Aragon noted, “inadequate financing and logistic support under which the hospital had been functioning on [during the Marcos regime]” should have been corrected.

The current PGH director, Dr. Gerardo Legaspi, has said that it would take three to four months to restore the operating room supply area of the hospital that was hit by the May 16 fire. Surely, if the PGH regularly had adequate funds to meet such contingencies, it would not take that long.

What then do we have to thank Imelda Marcos for?

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.

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.

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.”

Originally published by Vera Files on January 28, 2021.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ALMOST A THREAT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RIGGING STUDENT COUNCIL ELECTIONS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UNDERMINING CAMPUS PRESS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EXPANDING CONTROL

Then the drive for control turned institutional.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BEST CPP-NPA RECRUITER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally published by Vera Files on February 19, 2021.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fast forward to present day.

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

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

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

Originally published by Vera Files on July 18, 2021.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FERDINAND BUYS A HOUSE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IMELDA MAKES A HOME

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

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

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

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

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

CAMPAIGN/ DROP-OFF HEADQUARTERS

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

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

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

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

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

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

TO MALACAÑANG AND BACK

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

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

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

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

A HOUSE OF SECRETS AND LIES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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