Category: Lies

Originally published by Vera Files on October 24, 2024

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

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

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

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

Archimedes Trajano

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imee failed all of her courses in Princeton

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

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

Overage for KB

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imee as KB national chairman?

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

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

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

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

KB Foundation, not KB

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fake graduation ceremony

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

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

Nurturing patronage politics

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

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

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

Originally published by Vera Files on October 3, 2024

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

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

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

Burgeoning sex trade

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joe Aspiras, father of Philippine tourism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dollars at the expense of reputation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Proliferation of Japanese sex tours

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Filipino and Japanese women jointly campaigned to stop sex tourism

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plan for a nudist colony in Mindoro

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pedophile capital of the world

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally published by Vera Files on September 7, 2023

“Imelda Marcos’s nephew funds Harvard’s new Tagalog language course,” went the headline of The FilAm’s August 29, 2023 exclusive story on House Speaker Ferdinand Martin Gomez Romualdez’s $1 million secret donation to Harvard University. Which, as pointed out by Carmela Fonbuena of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, “amounts to around 10% of his declared total net worth as of 2016.”

At the end of The FilAm article it was mentioned that “in 1981, the Philippine government tried to donate money—also $1 million—to endow an academic chair at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy to be named the Ferdinand E. Marcos Chair for East Asian and Pacific Studies. The pledge for the donation was withdrawn after critical editorials and reporting in U.S. newspapers. As reported in the Harvard Crimson, citing sources at the Fletcher School, ‘Marcos withdrew the funds because he was dissatisfied with his treatment by both Tufts and the U.S. government.’”

The FilAm erred on this part. It was in 1977 and not 1981. The endowment pledged to Tufts University was $1.5 million. It was not the Philippine government that made the commitment; it was the Marcos Foundation. And “tried to donate” simply fails to capture the ill intent of the parties involved in setting up the Chair of East Asian and Pacific Affairs.

In the “Official Month in Review” of the Official Gazette (vol. 73, no. 15) , the entry for February 1, 1977 reads: “The President referred to the board of trustees of the Marcos Foundation a proposal to set up a chair at the prestigious Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University in Medford, Mass., US. The proposal was submitted to the President by Nihal W. Goonewardene, a Sri-Lankan who is directing the school’s Asia Pacific teaching fellowship program based in Manila.”

In an October 28, 1977 news report in the Tufts Observer, Tufts University’s student publication, Goonewardene broached the idea for the grant to Francisco Tatad, Marcos’s secretary of public information. The move was known to Edmund A. Gullion, dean of the Fletcher School.

Seven months later, on September 06, 1977, in a confidential cable from the United States Embassy in Manila to the Secretary of State in Washington, DC, it was mentioned that Gullion “departed Manila today after receiving a written commitment of the Marcos Foundation to provide an endowment of $1.5 million for the ‘The Ferdinand E. Marcos Chair of East Asian-Pacific Affairs’ at Fletcher.”

The Marcos Foundation

As he was about to start his second term as president and moved “by the strongest desire and the purest will to set the example of self-denial and self-sacrifice,” Marcos announced on December 31, 1969 that he had “decided to give away all my worldly possessions so that they may serve the greater needs of the greater number of our people.”

“I have therefore given away, by a general instrument of transfer, all my material possessions to the Filipino people through a foundation to be organized and to be known as the Ferdinand E. Marcos Foundation. It is my wish that these properties will be used in advancing the cause of education, science, technology and the arts,” Marcos said.

On January 21, 1970, formal papers of incorporation were filed before the Securities and Exchange Commission. In a Vera Files article, Miguel Paolo P. Reyes detailed the various uses that the Marcoses put their foundation into and how eventually the idea of dole outs from the Marcos Foundation “mutated into the scams that further propagated the myth of bounty for loyalty to the Marcoses.”

To go back to Gullion’s scheming with Marcos, according to the cable, on September 5, 1977, Gullion met with Marcos and Foreign Secretary Carlos P. Romulo. “Gullion opined that Marcos’ essential purpose in endowing the chair was to enhance his image in the U.S.,” it stated.

Gullion’s other concern was “how to handle the announcement of the endowment.” There were discussions that Romulo could do it when he attended the United Nations general assembly that October or Marcos himself in an official visit later that year.

The U.S. Embassy in Manila made a comment that they “did not encourage Gullion in his thinking about some sort of official visit by Marcos.”

It was Imelda, the other half of the conjugal dictatorship, who eventually went to the US. She headed the Philippine delegation to the UN general assembly and scheduled an event at Tufts University to announce the Ferdinand E. Marcos Chair of East Asian and Pacific Affairs endowment at Fletcher.

On October 26, 1977, a day before the announcement, the Boston Globe ran a report comparing the Marcos endowment with those that Harvard received in 1975, also $1 million from the Korean Traders Scholarship Association to put up a professorial chair in modern Korean economy and society. It was largely seen as a public relations effort to boost the image and encourage U.S. investments in South Korea, notwithstanding Park Chung-hee’s repressive regime.

The Boston Globe report foreshadowed Tufts’s justification for the Marcos endowment. “Harvard defended the $1 million Korean gift on the grounds that it was strictly for academic purposes and in no way ties Harvard to the controversial Korean government,” the article said.

Gullion was quoted as saying that “the money is from Philippine foundations and other organizations and not tied to the government . . . we shall be cooperating with the University of the Philippines in the studies. The endowment is from private funds, one of which is the Ferdinand Marcos Foundation, named after the president.”

The end part of the report noted Gullion’s “worldwide fundraising campaign . . . to support the school and its studies,” and “made several trips to the Philippines to discuss the grant with President Marcos and members of the foundations.”

There was, however, no other source for the endowment except the Marcos Foundation. But in the press accounts of the announcement, just like in the October 28, 1977 Associated Press (AP) report by Michael McPhee, “school officials and visiting dignitaries made several references that the money came from private sources and not from the Philippine government.”

The Protests

In the afternoon of October 27, 1977, as Imelda arrived at Tufts University under strict security measures, demonstrators hounded her on campus. AP reported that upon hearing the chant, “We don’t want your blood money,” university officials and members of Imelda’s entourage, including Romulo and Tatad, were “visibly annoyed.”

The Tufts Political Action Group and the Friends of the Filipino People led the protest that lasted throughout Imelda’s two-hour visit. Yet when news of Imelda’s visit appeared in the Marcos-controlled Daily Express on October 29, 1977, they were lumped together as “anti-Marcos elements . . . including many picket-for-hire-to-chant ready-made protest slogans.” The article was quick to add that there were no Filipinos among them and that Imelda’s visit lasted a full five hours.

Both details were lies.

Tufts University President Jean Mayer, said to be a personal friend of the Marcoses, hosted a luncheon for Imelda after a meeting with members of the faculty.

Protestors shouting “Who’s taking a beating while you’re in eating?” were heard by those taking part in the luncheon.

For Mayer, the Marcos endowment was a “sacrificial gift from a country struggling in its development.” He awarded Imelda a citation of distinction and said:

“By her determination, persistence, and ingenuity, Mrs. Marcos has succeeded in advancing the cause, not only of her people, but also the cause of the developing world in every corner of the globe. In partnership with her husband, Mrs. Marcos has been instrumental in establishing the Republic of the Philippines as a leader in the Third World and as an eloquent spokesman in the New Economic Order.”

“By her support of the artistic creativity, including revitalization of traditional and rural arts; her concern for ameliorating the problems of rapid urban development; her leadership of the Nutrition Foundation of the Philippines; and her support for UNICEF, Mrs. Marcos has demonstrated deep humane concern.”

“By her act of coming to Tufts University to inaugurate the Ferdinand E. Marcos Chair of East Asian and Pacific Affairs at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Mrs. Marcos has highlighted her interest in the continuation of the best possible relationships between government, business, and education, in the Philippines and the United States of America.”

During the luncheon ceremonies, the October 28, 1977 issue of the Tufts Observer reported that Imelda spoke briefly, expressing what she hoped the Marcos endowment could achieve. That it should “foster international understanding,” address the “poverty of accumulated literature on the Philippines,” which for her, were “largely one-sided and prejudiced.” Lastly, she hoped that the Marcos Chair would gain students who will espouse a “sensitivity to stand above bias and prejudice and appreciate the meaning of alternative existence.” A not so veiled way of saying that their effort should serve the Marcos autocracy.

As Imelda was whisked away in a white limousine from the campus to the airport (the Tufts Observer counted ten limousines for her entourage), Marian Christy of the Boston Globe, in an October 28, 1977 report, wrote that scores of demonstrators, “students and Filipino expatriates,” were shouting, “Marcos go home! Marcos go home!”

Another report from the Boston Globe estimated the number of demonstrators at about a hundred that included members of the faculty. The newspaper managed to get the reaction of Eugenio Lopez Jr., who had just settled in Boston after his daring escape from a Marcos prison with Sergio Osmeña III on October 1, 1977.

Lopez told the Boston Globe that he “cannot understand how a prestigious university like Tufts can award a plaque for humanitarianism when, in fact, she and her husband have done nothing but debase the humanity of the Filipinos.” He added that the endowment had been “expropriated by blackmail from the people and I would say that this is blackmail money that she has given Tufts University.”

Lopez’s criticism was echoed by the Tufts Observer’s  editorial in its October 28, 1977 issue. “The grant, given yesterday by Imelda Marcos, wife of the dictator of the Philippines, comes from gifts of private citizens and corporations in the Philippines. It is these people who have profited from Marcos imposition of martial law on the island, from imprisonment of over 20,000 persons for political dissidence, from the suppression of political parties, and basic civil and constitutional rights. Justice is granted by military tribunals and freedoms of the press, speech, and assembly are virtually nonexistent.”

In soliciting and accepting the grant, “Tufts officially condones the actions of Marcos by not rejecting the grant. The object of the grant from the foundation’s point of view is to bolster the reputation of Marcos throughout the world. By taking the money, therefore, Tufts tacitly publicizes Marcos as a generous human being, a side of his personality he has rarely shown to his own citizens.”

On November 5, 1977, as Imelda returned to Manila, the Tufts board of trustees approved the terms of the Marcos grant.  They consisted of an annual payment of $500,000 for three consecutive years from the inauguration of the grant and a one-time administrative fee of $75,000.

Saul A. Slapikoff of the Get Marcos Off Campus Committee and an associate professor of Tufts University, with 97 others, wrote to the Boston Globe on November 9, 1977 to denounce the acceptance of the Marcos grant. They argued that “the Ferdinand Marcos Foundation has the money to give to Tufts because the Marcos family and other wealthy Philippine families have enriched themselves by their dictatorial rule at the expense of the Philippine people.”

“We find it ironic,” Slapikoff’s group wrote, “that Tufts University, an institution purportedly committed to humane values, would accept money from the family of the Philippine dictator. This appears to be the worst sort of expediency and can only be a source of shame to the university.”

In Manila, Imelda, in her arrival statement said that she “found it opportune to be present at the formal inauguration of the Ferdinand E. Marcos Chair for East Asian and Pacific Studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.”

“Through this Chair, Tufts University hopes to make a more significant contribution to serious scholarship on Asia and the Pacific, and to raise the level of understanding of Asian affairs throughout the world, particularly in the United States. The Marcos Foundation has arranged to endow the Chair and support its program out of contributions from the private sector and its own.”

Imelda’s statement finally made clear that it was only the Marcos Foundation which was behind the endowment. What the Marcos Foundation can give, it can also take away—which it did.

The Fallout

The blowback from the acceptance of the Marcos Chair raged in the American press for some more months. The Tufts Observer kept track of the controversy. On December 2, 1977 it released a four-page “Marcos supplement” highlighting the university’s contrasting responses to the Marcos grant.

In the supplement, the Tufts Observer reported that “several members of the Board of Trustees indicated . . . that they voted to accept the $1.5 million grant from the Marcos Foundation without being fully or accurately informed about faculty opposition to the gift and about the political situation in the Philippines.”

Other members of the board, like its vice chairperson Warren Carley, denied this saying, “We didn’t spend a couple of weeks investigating the thing . . . I was told that there were understandable reasons for the so-called repressive activities. The Filipino government is under attack by guerillas, terrorists and communists who are trying to disrupt the government with violence . . .  I don’t think as trustees we have to resolve the tribulations of another society.”

Gullion once again issued a defense on why the Fletcher School accepted the grant. He harked back to the Thomasites in the days of America’s colonial conquest of the Philippines and on how they “laid the foundations for higher secular education in the Philippine islands,” hence the grant from the Marcos Foundation should be seen “in gratitude and token repayment of a spiritual obligation.” He added that there were “no strings to this gift.”

Members of the faculty strongly disagreed with Gullion. Peter Dreier, an associate professor of sociology, asked: “If the Fletcher School appoints a scholar critical of the Marcos Regime, will installments two and three ever arrive? Isn’t this method of allocating the $1.5 million a subtle ‘string?’”

“Tufts University,” he continued, “by actively seeking out and then accepting the Marcos Foundation money has lent its name and prestige to a dictator trying to wash his bloody hands and bolster his image with philanthropy.” Dreier called on the leadership of Tufts University to “rescind the ‘citation for distinction’ [given to Imelda]. Return the Marcos Foundation money.”

The Tufts Observer Marcos supplement also reproduced in full the Daily Express report mentioned earlier. But instead of the original headline, “US school opens special FM Chair,” it became “Demonstrators called ‘pickets-for-hire’.”

Included was a copy of a letter that Sergio Osmeña III and Eugenio Lopez Jr. wrote to the dean of the Harvard Business School. In condemning the acceptance of the Marcos grant, they pointed to the “widely known fact that Mr. and Mrs. Marcos have enriched themselves while in public office through corruption and extortion. One can only conclude that what was given to Tufts on the pretext of philanthropy was in fact ‘blood money’ of the Filipino people.”

A month later, on January 20, 1978, the Tufts Observer gave an update on the controversy that by then had spilled over to the broader national U.S. media.

It reprinted the December 18, 1977 lead editorial of the New York Times criticizing Tufts.   It read: “The proposed chair is to honor and bear the name of a man whose values no university should honor, certainly not with his money during his lifetime. What the university is here selling became instantly clear when Mrs. Marcos came to deliver the money and received a university citation honoring her for ‘deep [humane] concern’.”

On December 29, 1977, a column in the Washington Post by Hobart Rowen verged on the grotesque when it suggested that Tufts’s fawning attitude towards the conjugal dictators in contrast to the “oppression, poverty, and slums” in the Philippines, was “enough to make anyone who knows the Philippines . . . throw up.”

Responses from university officials and other scholars, for or against the Marcos grant, continued to eat up space in various publications all throughout 1978. Then the debate died. It seemed everybody but Marcos had just been had.

The Dissolution

On November 9, 1978 the AP broke the story that Marcos was “four months past due on paying a $500,000 installment” for the chair. AP quoted Harry Zane, Tufts director of public information, as saying that Marcos’s people “were unable to get the money together.” Hence, no money, no Ferdinand E. Marcos Chair of East Asian and Pacific Affairs.

A November 10, 1978 report in the Tufts Observer, citing information from Zane, stated that the “Marcos Foundation sent $75,000 in place of interest on the entire $1.5 million promised, bringing the total already paid to $150,000 . . . The foundation paid a similar $75,000 in 1977.”

Unsigned copy of the December 20, 1979 letter to Mr. Rolando C. Gapud, senior executive vice president, Bancom Development Corporation from Jeffrey A. Sheehan, assistant dean, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Roll 171, images 141-42, PCGG Digitized Files.

A year later, on November 19, 1979, Rolando C. Gapud, senior executive vice president of Bancom Development Corporation and executive director of the Marcos Foundation, wrote to Jeffrey A. Sheehan, assistant dean at Fletcher School, that the Marcos Foundation would be unable to honor the full amount of the grant. The $500,000.00 due for the first year of the Marcos Chair plus $50,000.00 was all the Fletcher School would receive.

In Sheehan’s reply to Gapud on December 20, 1979, he enumerated the points that they had agreed on in their previous conversations.

First, the reason why the Marcos Foundation was reneging on its commitment:

“You have fully briefed and disclosed to me the tax and regulatory problems which the Foundation now faces. As indicated to me, this will prohibit the Foundation from soliciting further donations at this time to fund your commitment to us. Thus, the foundation may have to stop its solicitations, which to date amount to over $500,000.”

There was money enough to fund the second year of the Marcos Chair but the Fletcher School would not receive any of it.

The second and third points were all about saving face as it was agreed that the endowment would be dissolved.

Sheehan agreed that “there would be no announcement of your current inability to fund the remaining commitment to complete the requirements for the Chair.” And if by “the middle of 1980, if you are still inhibited from further solicitations, you will propose to Tufts University that the Marcos Foundation be released from any further commitments and that the Chair be transformed into an alternative use to be determined at that time.”

Before this discussion towards dissolution between Sheehan and Gapud, a curious news article appeared in theTufts Observer with this headline: “Marcos grant paid; bonus for patience.”

“Philippine President Ferdinand E. Marcos personally delivered a check for $2.5 million to the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy Tuesday afternoon, according to Assistant Fletcher Dean Jeff Sheehan. Sheehan said that Marcos entered his office disguised as a delivery boy from a bakery and nonchalantly withdrew the check from a seven-layer fudge ripple cake.”

It was Tufts Observer’s April Fools’ Day edition.

Finally, in January 1981, in an announcement well circulated in the U.S. media, Tufts University announced that there would be no academic chair in the Fletcher School named after Marcos since he failed to produce the $1 million necessary to complete the $1.5 million pledge to the university.

In a post-Edsa inventory of Malacañang by the Presidential Commission on Good Government, there is an item listed, M02-0176-1A1: Plaque for IRM [Imelda Romualdez Marcos] in a plastic frame from Tufts University.

At least Imelda got a plaque in a plastic frame. Ferdinand never got his chair.

Originally published by Vera Files on February 28, 2021

There are at least seven false claims, misrepresentations or elements requiring context in Bongbong Marcos’s latest vlog, BBM Vlog 148, titled “Bringing Back Transparency to the Election System” posted after the Supreme Court (SC), sitting as the Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET), dismissed Marcos’ protest of Vice President Leni Robredo’s victory last Feb. 16.

Contentwise, Marcos’s Vlog 148 it is a revised version of his Vlog 145, “Hybrid Election System for 2022,” which was uploaded on January 30, 2021. The “new” entry adds a title card, portions—largely from trailers, it seems—of the 2020 HBO documentary Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America’s Elections, and other additional visuals, such as a list of updates regarding the hybrid election bills filed in Congress. Marcos did not record new material for BBM Vlog 148.

These are the vlog’s false claims or misleading contents:

1. The vlog’s title card states that the Tribunal’s announcement on February 16 concerned only “the dismissal of the recount,” not Marcos’s third cause of action (the annulment of votes due to alleged fraud in three provinces in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, or BARMM). This claim—initially made by Marcos’s lawyer Vic Rodriguez, in a statement dated February 16, 2021 and released via social media—has been debunked numerous times over the last few days by the SC spokesperson Brian Hosaka (by stating in a press briefer that the “entire electoral protest” of Marcos had been junked), Chief Justice Diosdado Peralta, and independent fact-checkers.

2. Marcos says, “sa 227 na bansa sa mundo na nagkakaeleksyon, 209 ang gumagamit ng manual voting” (in 227 countries in the world where elections are held, 209 use manual voting). This is different from what appears in the animated text accompanying Marcos’s narration: “209 out of 227 countries still use paper ballots.”

Based on the likely sources of these numbers, the latter is the factual statement. The vlog does not disclose the source for these seemingly similar but significantly different statements, but they were most likely quoting an October 30, 2020 article uploaded on the Pew Research Center website titled “From Voter Registration to Mail-in Ballots, How Do Countries Around the World Run Their Elections?” There, one will find this sentence: “Votes are cast by manually marking ballots in 209 of the 227 countries and territories for which the ACE Electoral Knowledge Network has data.” A link is provided in the article to the website of the ACE Electoral Knowledge Network (https://aceproject.org/), where one can generate the following map showing the 209 countries that manually mark ballots:

Source: ACE Electoral Knowledge Network

Unlike what Marcos is insinuating, the Philippines is in fact clearly among the 209 countries that still mark ballots manually, as opposed to using online or e-voting or direct recording electronic voting machines. The Philippines does not use “completely/purely electronic voting,” a phrase that Marcos repeatedly uses in his vlog.

3. Marcos’s vlog suggests that “manual voting” excludes voting that uses paper ballots but counts votes electronically, i.e., the system currently used in the Philippines. Again, the ACE Electoral Knowledge Network (https://aceproject.org/epic-en/CDCountry?country=PH) describes the Philippines as a country wherein voters manually mark ballots and use electronic voting machines.

4. To further bolster his partial de-automation advocacy, in the vlog, Marcos claims that some countries are discarding automation, returning to manual processes. This is true. However, among the accompanying news articles that the vlog shows while Marcos is talking, only one, “Fearful of Hacking, Dutch will Count Ballots by Hand” published by the New York Times recalls the Philippine case. The rest are about online or direct electronic entry elections.

Marcos quotes from an article regarding elections in Finland, stating that it is about “completely electronic elections.” “Sabi nila yung risks ay masyadong malaki para sa benefits” (They say that the risks far outweigh the benefits), Marcos says. However, the article is about a very particular form of automated elections: online voting. Even the highlighted text from the article—titled “Security Fears Delay Roll-out of National E-voting in Finland,” which first appeared on Computer Weekly—that Marcos is supposedly quoting from only talks about online voting: “‘Our present position is that online voting should not be introduced in general elections as the risks are greater than the benefits,’ said [Johanna] Suurpää [chair of the e-voting working group of Finland’s Ministry of Justice].”

The Philippines has never utilized any form of direct electronic vote entry or online voting for national or local elections.

5. Marcos says, “Nung 2013 ay nasa 76% lamang ang boto na natransmit o nabilang” (in 2013, only 76% of the votes were transmitted or counted). Again, this does not tie up completely with the text being flashed on screen: “[in 2013,] only 76% of the votes were transmitted.” By adding the word “nabilang,” Marcos is stating that votes that were not transmitted were not counted at all, effectively disenfranchising (hundreds of) thousands of voters. However, according to former Smartmatic lawyer (later two-time Duterte appointee) Karen Jimeno and the Comelec, votes that are not transmitted are still counted because the SD cards where the votes are recorded will be physically delivered to canvassing centers. The Center for People Empowerment in Governance (CENPEG) confirms that these contingency measures have indeed been in place since the first automated elections in the Philippines in 2010, though it noted that there were cases wherein such physical transportation lacked security measures.

Marcos also highlighted the 961 defective vote-counting machines and 1,000 SD cards that needed replacement during the 2019 elections. He did not mention what was widely reported: the defective machines were also replaced.

6. After discussing the glitches in other automated elections in the Philippines, Marcos says, “At naman nung 2016 ay siguro alam na natin ang nangyari” (And then in 2016 we suppose we know what happened), implying that he was a victim of the flaws of and fraud in the election system. In BBM Vlog 145, he said this without any related visuals.

In Vlog 148, this statement is followed by a quick flash of a claim posted on Facebook showing two partial and unofficial results purportedly of a barangay in BARMM where Leni Robredo was the only vice presidential candidate to receive votes, followed by brief flashes of what seem to be photographs of the wet/damaged ballots and ballot boxes that were found when the ballots in the three provinces identified by Marcos were undergoing revision.

Regarding the Facebook post, besides the pictures showing only partial and unofficial results, it is not proven how getting zero votes in a barangay is an indication of fraud. A Rappler article dated May 17, 2016 pointed out that based on partial unofficial results, there were more zero-Robredo vote precincts than zero-Marcos vote precincts, and Marcos “got more votes from precincts that gave Robredo zero votes.” Considering the 2019 senatorial election results, which have not been formally contested, it is also not unimaginable that in several areas in Mindanao, members of the Marcos family are unpopular among voters. Among the three provinces that are contemplated in Marcos’s third cause of action, based on the partial and unofficial results of the 2019 elections, Imee Marcos entered the “magic 12” in only one: Basilan. In Maguindanao, Imee placed 13th, and in Lanao Del Sur, she placed 17th.

Regarding the wet ballots, on pages 42-43 of the October 15, 2019 resolution of the PET on Marcos’s protest, one will find the following: “In the course of the revision [of ballots], the Tribunal observed that the paper ballots in several clustered precincts were wet and unreadable, or their integrity was compromised such that it rendered revision using paper ballots impossible. For these clustered precincts, the Tribunal directed the use of the decrypted ballot images provided by the COMELEC for purposes of revision. The parties registered their claims and objections thereto.” The PET then found that there were no decrypted ballot images for three clustered precincts, and thus excluded them from the revision. However, when added up, the total votes in these precincts were only 910 votes.When the revision was completed—disregarding the wet ballots issue when decrypted ballot images were available—according to the PET, the lead of Robredo over Marcos increased from 263,473 to 278,566 votes.

7. Finally, in the first minute of the video, Marcos says, “Ang sinasabi, yung manual counting ay masyado raw matatagalan. Hindi po totoo ‘yan. Hindi po ito mas matagal kaysa purely electronic na voting” (They say that manual counting takes too long. That’s not true. It’s not true that it takes longer than that in purely electronic voting). Later on, Marcos claims that the manual counting of the votes in a (clustered) precinct, or about 600-800 votes, may be done within 1-2 hours.

This is impossible; in a ballot during a presidential election year, one will have to vote for a president, a vice president, twelve senators, a district congressional representative, a partylist, and local government positions (e.g., governor and vice governor and/or mayor and vice mayor and provincial board members and/or municipal/city council members). During midterm elections, the only positions absent from the ballots are president and vice president. Reading and manually recording the votes in one ballot and verifying if the ballot was appreciated correctly, to the satisfaction of all precinct poll watchers, will obviously take much longer than a few seconds (800 ballots counted in two hours means around 6-7 ballots counted per minute).

Moreover, according to a 2004 document titled “CEPPS Philippines Election Observation Program – Strengthening the Electoral Process” by Peter Erben, Beverly Hagerdon Thakur, Craig Jenness, and Ian Smith of the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, available at the ACE Project website, before automation, “an average of 20 votes were counted per hour with each precinct counting approximately 200 ballots.”

Marcos—or his vlog’s scriptwriters—may have misunderstood what hybrid election system advocate Gus Lagman said regarding his projected timeframes. Lagman, in an article dated March 13, 2013, titled “Does Smartmatic’s PCOS Add Value or Problems to our Elections?” posted at The Movement for Good Governance website, “manual precinct counting only takes 5-12 hours.” According to Lagman, it’s the “printing, the visual checking, the re-encoding, and the iteration” of the steps of transmitting PC/laptop encoded election returns—done after counting—that “might take 1-2 hours.” When Lagman’s proposed Patas system was tested in Bacoor, Cavite on June 27, 2015, multiple news outlets reported that only 20 ballots, covering only the votes for national positions, were counted in 41 minutes.

The system proposed by the Marcos siblings bear similarities to Lagman’s PATAS system. According to then Election Commissioner Christian Robert Lim, as discussed in a Philippine Daily Inquirer article dated July 10, 2015, “Patas’ manual procedure is time-consuming, taxing and prone to human error.”

Perhaps, given all of the above, the eighth misrepresentation in the vlog is Marcos appearing to know what he is talking about.

The vlog strongly suggests that Marcos lost only because of fraud and a flawed system. He notes that the youth are apparently losing interest in elections, claiming that he believes this to be largely due to the defective election system. For visual support, the vlog flashes an article titled “Philippine Youth Losing Faith in Political System.”

The article, posted in the Deutsche Welle website, in fact highlights youth being disheartened by the loss of opposition senatorial candidates in 2019 to candidates such as “a former dictator’s daughter,” i.e., Imee Marcos. Another accompanying visual is a screenshot of the results of a survey which asked one multiple choice question: “Bakit hindi ka pa nagpaparehistro?” The majority in this survey indeed answered “Walang Tiwala Sa Sistema” (No trust in the system). But despite bearing what looks like an infographic with the Comelec logo, it does not appear to have any connection to the election agency. The full survey results, which can be viewed here, indicates that the survey was conducted online between February 6 and February 12, and had only 626 respondents, and restricted responses to three: besides “Walang Tiwala sa Sistema,” one could answer with “Covid, Takot Pa Lumabas” (Covid, scared of going outside) or “Hindi Ko Alam Paano” (I don’t know how [to register]). But the mismatched visual and the clearly unscientific survey may be excused in this instance, since Marcos couched his claims about the youth losing enthusiasm in elections as opinion rather than fact—something Marcos should have done for several other claims in his vlog.

Originally published by Vera Files on October 18, 2023

A whole book, Marcos Lies, has already been written documenting in copious detail the Marcoses’ penchant for making untrue statements mythologizing themselves. But at least one Marcos, the president himself, Ferdinand “Bongbong” R. Marcos Jr., is still constantly giving material for future volumes, undermining his own administration’s anti-misinformation drive.

Many of these false statements are being circulated—in the form of press releases, transcripts, and audiovisual recordings—by offices under the Presidential Communications Office (PCO). On August 14, 2023, the Marcos Jr. administration launched a Media and Information Literacy Campaign, popularly billed as the government’s anti-fake news initiative. The PCO is the lead agency of the campaign. At launch, some found the campaign to be, at the very least, tinged with irony, given various evidence-based claims that Marcos partly relied on massive disinformation during his presidential run. During the recent 2024 budget deliberations in Congress, the PCO, based on its own reportage, “earned the approval and support of the House of Representatives on its Media and Information Literacy (MIL) campaign,” after proposing the allocation of ₱16.899 million for the program. Will some of that money go to correcting false or inaccurate statements even if they are made by the president himself, or help in further propagating them?

Rice price

An October 7, 2023 news release from the PCO bore the headline: “Price Cap Stabilized Rice Prices – PBBM.” The article does not explain how the president, concurrently secretary of agriculture, determined that the price ceilings he set on regular millied and well-milled rice (via Executive Order no. 39, issued on Aug. 31, 2023, which took effect on Sept. 5, 2023) directly led to rice price stabilization. The order lifting the price cap, Executive Order no. 42, issued on Oct. 4, 2023, simply states that the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Trade and Industry “have jointly recommended the lifting of the mandated price ceilings in view of the decreasing rice prices in the domestic market, increasing supply of rice stock, and declining global rice prices”; again, no causal relationship between the price cap and price stabilization is established. Critics have pointed out that rice prices have in fact been increasing, and is the main driver of recent food inflation; indeed, the Philippine Statistics Authority stated that the “uptrend in the food inflation [in September 2023] was mainly due to the higher annual increment in rice with inflation rate of 19.8 percent during the month from 9.1 percent in the previous month.”

In March this year, rice industry monitor Bantay Bigas also called out the president for stating that his promise of lowering the price of rice to 20 pesos per kilo was close to becoming a reality (“Kaunti na lang, maibababa na natin ‘yan,” were his exact words). Clearly, rice prices are still nowhere near 20 pesos per kilo. That for months now, Marcos has seemed unable to be truthful about the price of rice should not be surprising to those who know the various falsities that he has propagated both about himself and his family, ranging from false claims about his educational attainment to characterizations of his father’s dictatorship. Well into the second year of the Marcos Jr. administration, dishonesty still readily attaches to the Marcos name.

Relocated birthplace

Some recent false information circulating about Marcos may be in the nature of clerical errors. For instance, in his official website, pbbm.com.ph, the president’s biography states that he was born “in the town of Batac, Ilocos Norte.” Marcos was born at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Santa Ana, Manila. He did not even grow up in Ilocos Norte (by his own admission, he can hardly be considered fluent in Ilocano), though he had to claim residency there during the times that he was either an elected executive (with a reputation for being an absentee governor) or a congressional representative.

The “error,” if indeed inadvertent, has been reproduced in mainstream news outlets and state-run media and in government websites such as those of the Philippine Consulates General in San Francisco and New York and the Climate Change Commission. It seems unlikely that Bongbong ordered that his place of birth be changed to that of his paternal grandfather, since such information can be easily verified. However, one wonders if he has not noticed the relocation of his birthplace on his website, which superseded bongbongmarcos.com after he became “PBBM.” The profile is otherwise fairly factual, even stating at least one truth that Bongbong himself does not accept: the fact that he was defeated in the 2016 elections.

“Historic Visit”

There are other lies, also easily verifiable, that Marcos has recently echoed and amplified himself. On September 23, 2023, Marcos was in Iriga City, Camarines Sur to distribute sacks of seized smuggled rice to 4Ps beneficiaries. Both the PCO and the Philippine Information Agency reported on a claim made by Marcos that because of that visit, he is the first president in 55 years to come to the Rinconada (5th) District of Camarines Sur, which is made up of Iriga City and the towns of Baao, Balatan, Bato, Buhi, Bula, and Nabua; purportedly, the district’s last presidential visitor was Marcos’s father, Ferdinand Sr. The alleged source of the claim repeated uncritically by Marcos is Camarines Sur 5th District Representative Migz Villafuerte, who first entered politics in his early 20s in 2013. Both the young Villafuerte and senior citizen Marcos appear to have forgotten about a 2016 visit to Iriga by President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino. That the visit was in line with the campaign of the Roxas-Robredo tandem endorsed by Aquino should be a non-issue, given that Bongbong mentioned that his father’s first visit to Iriga, back in 1965, was also for electoral purposes.

If any and all visits count, Noynoy also went to Iriga in 2012 to visit two wakes—that of then Secretary of Justice Leila de Lima’s father and that of Private First Class Arwin Martirez, who was killed in action in Basilan. If only working visits are counted, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo went to Iriga on Sept. 4, 2008, as part of a tour of projects being done for Camarines Sur. She attended a briefing on the Bicol River Basin Development Project there. Only President Duterte appears to have never visited the Rinconada district while he was in office, though he did conduct an aerial survey of areas in Camarines Sur hit by Tropical Depression Usman in January 2019, which included Iriga, Nabua, Bula, and Baao. Even that should be sufficient to challenge Marcos’s claim that only presidents named Marcos have visited the district or Iriga in particular (“Marcos lang ang bumibisita sa inyo na pangulo [dahil] malapit kayo sa puso namin”).

“Founding Figure”

Charitably, Marcos’s fib about his “historic visit” was simply an attempt to endear himself to a captive audience. But one questionable claim he recently made may have been designed to suggest that he had political clout independent from being a Marcos or being a close associate of another political juggernaut, the Dutertes. On Aug. 24, 2023, an oathtaking of new members of Marcos’s political party, the Partido Federal ng Pilipinas (PFP), was held in Malacañang Palace. Marcos gave a speech, stating that the party was “Headed of course — who has been helmed really since the beginning of the campaign by Governor Jun Tamayo. But of course the origin of this goes back to my first run as vice president with General Tom Lantion that he – siya ang nauna that proposed this.” Marcos ran for vice president in 2016, while he was a member of the Nacionalista Party.

Based on archived versions of the party’s currently inaccessible website, PFP’s president when Marcos joined the party back in 2021 was indeed South Cotabato governor Reynaldo “Jun” Tamayo Jr. PFP’s first leaders/founders include former Land Bank of the Philippines director Jayvee Hinlo and former Department of Agrarian Reform secretary John Castriciones. Castriciones was also the founder of the Mayor Rodrigo Roa Duterte-National Executive Coordinating Committee (MRRD-NECC). In October 2018, PFP was formally accredited by the Commission on Elections. Bongbong back then was a private citizen, having lost his bid for the vice presidency. Even during the 2019 elections, with a Marcos (Imee) running for a national position, PFP was associated with Duterte, not Bongbong. Marcos’s entry into PFP in October 2021 was not without controversy; Castriciones was among those booted out of the party’s leadership before Marcos became the party’s standard bearer. Also preceding Marcos’s entry into the party was the designation of his legal counsel and later short-lived executive secretary Victor Rodriguez as PFP’s executive vice president; in November 2022, Rodriguez was also kicked out of PFP for “acts inimical to the party” and being an “undesirable civil servant.”

A few months after Marcos won, an article in the Manila Times gave the longer version of the PFP’s (revised) history, as told by Lantion and Atty. George Briones, who were indeed with the party from the beginning. Hinlo and Castriciones are not mentioned by name, nor is Rodriguez given any mention. Lantion describes himself as Bongbong’s security when the latter was studying in La Salle Greenhills, as well as a former close-in security of Ferdinand Sr. Briones called Bongbong a “political genius” responsible “for making the PFP what it is today.” But even this Marcos-focused narrative does not state that they had anything to do with Marcos’s vice presidential campaign, though in another twist (contradicting all previous claims and publicly available documentation), Lantion told the Daily Tribune back in July 2023 that Marcos in fact became a member of PFP on October 5, 2018, the day the party was accredited.

During the Malacañang oathtaking, Marcos also claimed that PFP was the “majority party.” Either Marcos does not understand what a majority party is, or he is overselling the strength of his party, which still seems slow in attracting newcomers, even if PFP’s most prominent members currently include himself and his son, Ilocos Norte First District Representative Sandro Marcos. Sandro, along with a little over a dozen governors and a few presidential appointees, became the newest members of PFP during the August oathtaking. A Manila Bulletin article on the father-son joining correctly states that the “dominant political party in the House” is Lakas-Christian Muslim Democrats (party president: Marcos’s first cousin, Martin Romualdez), but notes that that party is “closely linked” to PFP. Perhaps Bongbong is simply being truthful about the state of party politics in the Philippines.

Youth Act author

There is a grain of truth in another false claim that Marcos recently reiterated: that he is the main author of Republic Act No. 8044, or the Youth in Nation-Building Act. In a recorded message for the commemoration of the establishment of the National Youth Commision, uploaded on August 12, 2023, Marcos said that “in [his] time as congressman,” he authored RA no. 8044, “the law that created [the commission].” He also said that when he was senator, he also authored RA 10742, or the Sangguniang Kabataan (SK) Reform Act of 2015, a slightly less (but still) controversial claim.

Since 2017, after the legislative histories of post-EDSA Revolution laws became accessible online through the House of Representatives’ Legislative Information System or LEGIS, Marcos’s role in the development of the Youth in Nation-Building Act has been fact-checked or contextualized several times. Records clearly show that Marcos was the principal author of one of several bills seeking to create a youth body during the Ninth Congress (1992-1995), and that these bills were substituted by House Bill no. 11614, whose principal author is Jaime C. Lopez of the City of Manila’s second district; Marcos is listed as second co-author, after Zamboanga del Norte’s Artemio Adasa. Lopez was one of the first members of Lakas-NUCD, President Fidel Ramos’s coalition.

LEGIS further shows that Marcos was not the first to file a Youth Commission bill during the Ninth Congress. First was HB no. 15, filed by Lopez in June 1992; second was HB 2872, “An Act Establishing a Permanent and Continuing Youth Leadership Development Institute, and Appropriating Funds Therefor,” filed by Adasa in September 1992; third was Marcos’s HB 4660, filed on November 16, 1992; and fourth was HB 4936, filed on November 23, 1992 by Dante Liban of Quezon City. Even earlier, in February 1988, during the Eighth Congress, Adasa had already filed HB 5400, “An Act Creating the Philippine National Youth Commission, Defining Its Powers, Functions and Responsibilities, and Appropriating Funds Therefor.”

During the consolidated bill’s second reading, it had six sponsors. Ramon Durano III, as chair of the House Committee on Youth and Sports Development, gave his sponsorship speech first; Marcos was fourth in line. Voting unanimously, the bill was approved on third reading by the House on March 21, 1994. The bill was soon transmitted to the Senate. Numerous revisions were made to the Senate counterpart bill, SB 1977.

There is no readily available evidence that Marcos actively participated in the reconciliation of SB 1977 and HB 11614. Reportage of his activities in May-June 1995 suggest that the legislator was mainly preoccupied with protesting his electoral defeat and the ultimately unsuccessful attempts to keep his mother, Imelda Marcos, from occupying the congressional seat that she won. Thereafter, in July 1995, citizen Bongbong also had to deal with his conviction for several tax cases.

Moreover, news articles regarding the Youth Commission bill within the year of its enactment stated that Jaime Lopez was the bill’s principal author, or mentioned Bongbong as being key to the law’s finalization or enactment. Lopez appealed for the Senate to pass the measure, which, again, had been through numerous revisions in the upper chamber.

A Philippines Free Press article, dated July 29, 1995, states that “the [youth] commission’s creation was a hard-won battle” as “youth leaders had vigorously lobbied the 8th and 9th Congresses for its creation.” Indeed, it seems that the only times Bongbong’s role in the creation of the National Youth Commission was highlighted before the RA no. 8044’s enactment were in articles specifically about Bongbong. For instance, an article in the Sept. 18, 1993 issue of the Manila Bulletin, titled “Philippine Youth Commision: Let the Young Voice be Heard,” is accompanied only by four photos of Bongbong, with captions “A body like PYC is urgently needed,” “They oppose it because of who I am,” “I was a rebel teenager too,” and “I want a peaceful life for my son.” The article said that he was “making the rounds of youth groups to collect suggestions, recommendations and needless to say support for the PRC bill,” but there were accusations that he “will just use this as a vehicle for [his] own political ambitions.” Again, Marcos was one of many (and never principal) proponents, authors, and co-sponsors of a youth commission law. Another article, in Asiaweek‘s July 7, 1993 issue, says that his pet bill “is one to create a Philippine Youth Commission,” but that the definition of youth for him were those ages 15-40; the law that was passed limited the youth to those ages 15-30.

In the same article, Bongbong reportedly stated that he obtained the equivalent of a master’s degree in Oxford, but Asiaweek included a parenthetical fact check: “Oxford says he was granted a non-degree Special Diploma in Social Studies in 1978.”

Given that Marcos was far from the first to come up with a law establishing a Philippine Youth Commission, can he at least claim that he was the most influential legislator in the development of the Youth in Nation-Building Act? In his infamous 1995 interview with Kris Aquino (where he says that he turned seven during his birthday in Malacañang; he actually turned eight) despite a portion where they discuss the youth and the congressman giving a closing statement directed to young Filipinos, Marcos never discussed the pending bill. In his 1994 interview with Jun Urbano (as his “Mr. Shooli” character), despite discussing a range of subjects (and lying about his educational attainment), Marcos did not say anything about the creation of a youth commission. His profile in the July 1992-April 1993 issue of Congressional Highlights, which devoted to the first ten months of the Ninth Congress, does not list the Philippine Youth Commission bill as among his priority bills (among those of neophyte representatives, only the profile of Nicetas Panes of Iloilo lists “An Act to Establish the Philippine Commission on Youth Development and for Other Purposes” among his legislative priorities; Panes was listed as a co-author of both Lopez’s HB 15 and Marcos’s HB 4660). In an opinion column in the Manila Standard, dated April 10, 1995, the late Nelson Navarro noted, “Despite the hoopla generated by his 1992 election to his father’s old congress seat, he has not created any waves in legislation or public debate.” Even a long-time ally, Joseph Estrada, found him unremarkable; in September 1994, the Standard quoted the then vice president saying, “I think Bongbong Marcos still needs more experience; I would advise him to seek one more term in Congress” rather than gunning for a Senate seat. Based on some accounts, such as the editorial of the February 6-12 issue of WE Forum, Congressman Marcos was best known for filing a resolution urging President Ramos to allow Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s body to lie in state in Malacañang and to give the long-dead dictator a state funeral; with less than half voting “yea,” the House did not adopt the resolution.

(Dis)information Center

After Bongbong, perhaps the most vocal propagator of the myth that the current president “founded” the National Youth Commission is Ronald Gian Cardema, current chairman of the NYC and leader of the Duterte Youth and the Kabataan for Bongbong Movement. Inside the Bahay Ugnayan, one of the Malacañang Heritage Mansions made accessible to the public in May this year, is a framed photo-collage of pictures showing Cardema with Bongbong (and Imee), emblazoned with the words “Salamat, Mahal na Pangulo! Principal Author of Republic Act No. 8044, the law that created the National Youth Commission.”

This is one of many lies inside what is essentially a Bongbong Marcos museum administered by an Advisory Board chaired by the president’s Social Secretary, as per Executive Order no. 26, s. 2023. The whole heritage project, which also includes a museum for past Philippine presidents in the Teus Mansion, is attributed to the First lady, Liza Araneta Marcos. Part of Bahay Ugnayan took material from Bongbong’s defunct website (some of which, including school-related records, can still be accessed via Bongbong’s Flickr account). Among these are evidence presented or summaries of claims made by Bongbong to bolster his claim that he was cheated during the 2016 elections, including a crate marked “Iriga City, Cam Sur” and a large poster highlighting undervotes.

The museum also claims that Marcos graduated from Oxford University, and the reason he discontinued further studies at the Wharton School of Business was his election as vice governor of Ilocos Norte—both proven untrue by documentary evidence (including the Wharton transcript on display at the museum). Besides such tired claims, there is a bit of fudging done by a huge poster titled “Support Groups,” which features photos and a 786-entry list. Entries 365 to 675 are all “Solid BBM Worldwide Movement” followed by a number in sequence from 2022 to 2023; entries 141-203 are all Kasapi followed by a number from 101 to 141. Entries 717-725 all appear to be chapters of TEAM BBM 2022, while 773-779 are all chapters or reiterations of We Love Marcos Global BBM Forever. The last two entries are both Zambales Solid BBM Supporters. Among many similar entries, entry 141, 258, 267, 275, 285, 351, 765, 705, 706, 781 are “Individual,” “Member,” “Motorcycle riders,” “N/A,” “Number 3,” “Selected team leader,” “Student,” “Suffix,” “Vlogger,” and “Womens,” respectively. Marcos’s party, PFP, is simply entry 298 among other “support groups.” After cleaning up the list of bloat, it can be significantly shortened (by more than half), and make one ask exactly who were the “grassroots” supporters of the 2022 Marcos campaign.

All these (among others), Bongbong unleashed within less than a year and a half of his presidency, alongside various other supplementary actions that help give life to the myth of Marcosian greatness—from uploading a copy of the propaganda film that helped elect Ferdinand Sr. in 1965, Iginuhit ng Tadhana, in the Philippine News Agency’s YouTube channel, to removing the anniversary of the People Power Revolution from the official list of 2024 holidays only because Feb. 25, 2024 falls on a Sunday.