Category: Lies

Unlike Sara Duterte, Carlito Dimailig issued no threats and just did it.

Imelda hacked

Fifty-two years ago this month, with martial law eleven weeks in effect, at around five in the afternoon of Dec. 7, 1972, Carlito Dimailig lunged at then First Lady Imelda Romualdez Marcos with a 12-inch bolo.

Conspicuous in a dark suit, Carlito went up the stage where Imelda was awarding the winners of the 1971-72 contest of the National Beautification and Cleanliness Council at the Nayong Pilipino in Pasay City. Carlito went with the South Cotabato delegation that won the first prize as a model province. He was the last in line. When he was just about three feet from Imelda, Carlito pulled the bolo from his left sleeve and stabbed her.

Imelda parried Carlito’s attack until she fell on the stage. Carlito kept on hacking at Imelda as other people on the stage tried to subdue him while others were shielding Imelda and they tried to pick her up from where she fell and get her off the stage.

In that melee, Technical Sergeant Clemente Tadena of the Philippine Army shot Carlito first. He shot him in the cheek. The shot did not stop Carlito. Technical Sergeant Julio Jaymalin of the Philippine Marines tried to kick and tackle him. Jaymalin missed and landed on his back near Carlito. As Carlito was hacking at people surrounding him, Jaymalin shot him twice in the body. Carlito, 5 feet in height and of slight build, weakened by his wounds, was finally wrestled to the ground, facing down even as he was still holding his bolo. Several men pinned Carlito on the stage floor as he still struggled to let loose. Petty Officer 2 Bagnos Magno of the Philippine Navy drew his firearm, leaned on Carlito, and shot him in the head. In about twenty seconds, the assassination attempt was over. Carlito was dead.

It terrified the audience at Nayong Filipino and it was all caught on live television via the Kanlaon Broadcasting System, Channel 9. It was replayed so often in the succeeding hours.

It was also through television that Marcos, then playing golf at the Malacañang grounds, learned of the attack on his wife. “Fortuna [Marcos’s sister] and her children came running out of the Pangarap crying out in sobs that ‘Imelda has been stabbed in Nayon Pilipino’,” Marcos wrote in his diary on that fateful day.

A helicopter rushed Imelda to the Makati Medical Center.

As Marcos hurried to the hospital, he ordered that Nayong Filipino be put on lock down “and to apprehend all the participants (in the attack).” Imelda was already at the operating room when Marcos reached her after a ten-minute drive from Malacañang.

“She was on the operating table with ugly lacerations in both arms still oozing blood and her right hand cut on the second joint of the fingers so deep that I could see the bone and the cartilage of the middle finger severed. The tendon of the right forearm was obviously cut. It was a white protrusion in the bloody muscles that were being cleaned.”

Associated Press reported that “a team of surgeons took more than three hours to repair deep wounds in both hands and a one-and-one-half inch cut in her right arm which severed tendons. She also suffered several broken fingers shen she fell to the stage.” She had 50 to 75 stitches.

Shortly before 7:00 in the evening, Information Secretary Francisco “Kit” Tatad, in a press conference, announced that Imelda was out of danger according to her doctors. Tatad was with Dr. Constantino Manahan, the director of the Makati Medical Center. Dr. Manahan said that though Imelda lost a lot of blood, she was not in shock. Her wounds in her arms and hands were not serious but she would have to remain in the hospital.

Tatad also mentioned that two other people were wounded in the attack. Jose Aspiras, then congressman and eventually Marcos’s tourism minister, was hacked in the head, and Linda Amor Robles, secretary of the National Beautification and Cleanliness Council, was stabbed in the left side of her back, near her rib cage. Both were attended to by the doctors at the Makati Medical Center. They survived their injuries.

On Dec. 9, 1972, Dr. Robert A. Chase of Stanford University School of Medicine came to check on Imelda. When US President Richard Nixon called on Marcos and offered his commiseration right after the attack, he also told Marcos that he will be sending over Dr. Chase. He gave Imelda a neurology exam to see if her arms and hands were working after the surgery. Imelda passed the test. Dr. Chase admired the work done by Imelda’s physicians. He left the same day he arrived.

Imelda was released from hospital on the night of Dec. 10, 1972. She returned to Malacañang to recuperate.

Who Was Carlito Dimailig?

They never seem to get his name right—or simply did not bother to. Press reports right after the attack, once his name was released to the media, identified him as Carlito Dimaali, Carlito Dimmali, and Carlito Dimahilig. In Katherine Ellison’s Imelda: Steel Butterfly of the Philippines (1988), he was not even identified. Beatriz Romualdez Francia, in Imelda: A Story of the Philippines (1988), merely copied the name given to him by Remedios F. Ramos, E. Arsenio Manuel, Florentino H. Hornedo, and Norma G. Tiangco in Si Malakas at si Maganda (1980): Carlito Limailig.

James Hamilton-Paterson in America’s Boy (1998) is another example of these authors who do not let a name get in the way of their story. “His name was later given variously as Carlito Dimaali or Limaili, believed to be either a Moslem from the south with a grievance or a resident of Batangas with no personal motivation.”

But Marcos knew exactly who Carlito Dimailig was in less than 24 hours after his attempt on Imelda’s life.

When Marcos wrote in his diary about the assassination attempt on Imelda, he made a marginal note on the upper-left hand corner of his diary that he was writing the Dec. 7, 1972, entry “at 5:30 PM Dec. 8, 1972 at the Makati Medical Center, Room 904 where Imelda stays and where I slept.”

“While the assailant—a Carlitos [sic] Dimailig geodetic engineer of Calaca, Batangas, working in Davao may have been alone in the attack I believe he was only an instrument of vengeance or assassination.”

Marcos’s knowledge of Carlito could have come from Brig. Gen. Fabian C. Ver, the commanding general of the Presidential Security Command.

Among the digitized files of the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG) are Ver’s notes on Carlito written on the Presidential Security Command’s notepad.

Carlito’s sister, Dr. Thelma Dimailig, was a psychiatrist at the Veteran’s Memorial Hospital. She saw on television what Carlito did. Ver reported that she “rushed to Nayon Pilipino to identify the body” since “her brother had been under her care.” The Dimailigs were from Brgy. Puting Bato, Calaca, Batangas.

From Nayong Pilipino, Carlito’s body was brought to the NBI morgue. Found on him, according to Ver’s notes, were PHP 26.45, a St. Jude novena book, a 6 by 1 inches red ribbon bearing the marking “D’Originals-1971,” and some white pills (that Ver identified as “buenamin”).

In the PCGG files, next to Ver’s notes are two sheets of paper. The first one is a stationery marked “Office of the President of the Philippines.” It has these jottings: 1965 Mandaluyong—,

Hosp patient—, Geodetic Eng—, Godofredo Limbo—, Metrica, Sampaloc—. The second one is a torn slip of paper with the following notes: [possibly a four-digit number, a year, and a first name now unreadable for this was where the paper was torn] Dimailig, Carlito Dimahilig [the “h” scratched out], Calaca, Batangas—, Sister – a doctor working in Vet Memorial Hosp, schizophrenic. Written at the lower portion of the slip were possibly telephone numbers. These were scratched out. Both are in Marcos’s handwriting.

With Ver’s and Marcos’s notes are other reports on Carlito’s profile.

A licensed geodetic engineer

Carlito was indeed a licensed geodetic engineer. A graduate of the Manuel Luis Quezon School of Engineering.

On March 21, 1969, he was hired as head surveyor at the Masara Project of Samar Mining Co. On September 1, 1969, a work supervisor reported Carlito to the main office of Elizalde & Co., Inc. as he was “acting very queer and it seems that he is mentally and emotionally disturbed” suggesting that “he be recalled to take a rest for about a month.” The supervisor feared that “he might hurt himself or others.” The following day, the supervisor noted in his report that Carlito had “returned to normal senses” and with a colleague was going back to Manila. Another supervisor attributed his “disturbance” to his “excessive drinking.” While in Manila by the end of September 1969, he promised “not to drink anymore . . . on his word of honor” and wanted to go back to work. Elizalde’s company refused. From then until that tragic day on Dec. 7, 1972, he was employed at Limbo Surveying at Metrica, Sampaloc, Manila.

Ver noted that Godofredo Limbo, his immediate employer, described Carlito as “a silent man, diligent, and weak-hearted.”

On Dec. 9, 1972, the Marcos-controlled press reported that authorities identified the assailant, but his identity was not to be mentioned in news reports yet. The foreign press was not as keen to follow this restriction. The next day’s Sunday Express almost bragged about a scoop as if it mattered in the censored press. “The Express learned from unimpeachable sources in the military the identity of the slain assailant and his other personal circumstances just a few hours after the attempt on the life of the First Lady was made.”

But just like the journalists and historians who wrote about the attempt on Imelda’s life, Marcos and his men proceeded to craft a more devious tale that made Carlito Dimailig’s identity irrelevant on who the Marcoses must punish and why.

Turning a threat into a tortured tale of conspiracies

Malacañang’s initial statement right after the attack on Imelda was matter-of-factly. In twelve sparse sentences it reported what happened, that “the president was shocked beyond words at the news.” It did not speculate on anything since “an investigation is in progress. The identity and motive of the assailant will be made known after the proper investigation has been made.”

In the morning of Dec. 8, 1972, after a thanksgiving mass at the Makati Medical Center, Marcos gave a few remarks to the press. He said he wished that he was with Imelda when the attack happened. That he should have been able to defend her.

“All I can say is that we are more determined than ever to remove all causes of criminality and disorder in our society.”

“I am all the more resolved, she and I, to proceed with the program to eradicate and eliminate all the threats against the stability of our society and to push through the reformation program.”

“When we undertook this experiment, we knew we would pay a price but I cannot forgive myself that it had to be her to pay such a price.”

 But a few hours later, Marcos would be writing in his diary that the attempted assassination on Imelda was, in fact, all about him.

“Carlito Dimaila [Dimailig] of Calaca, Batangas, the assassin, was reported to have asked his sister, ‘How is it to kill the President.’ So he must have been after me.”

Kit Tatad, his public information secretary, mirrored Marcos’s mental calisthenics.

In his press briefing on the night of Dec. 7, 1972, notwithstanding Malacañang’s official statement, Tatad started peddling the story that the assassin’s real target was Marcos and not Imelda.

“Tatad said telephone callers had asked the Presidential Palace if Marcos was to be at the ceremony, perhaps indicating that he might have been the intended target,” the United Press International wrote in its Dec. 8, 1972 dispatch. The Times Journal of the same date continued Tatad’s tale on why anonymous persons were calling Malacañang and were keen to know the Marcos’s itinerary for the day. Because “up to the hour of departure for the Nayong Pilipino yesterday, it was not known to Malacañang aides whether the President would attend the affair.”

In an interview given an hour later to that of Tatad, Lorenzo J. Cruz, assistant secretary of public information, rung again the telephone tale. “It can be said now that since 3:30 this afternoon the study room of Malacanang has been receiving inquiries as to whether the president was going to Nayong Pilipino, although it was clearly announced that only the First Lady was going there in connection with the award ceremony for the beautification project.” It must be mentioned also that a printed program and a brochure for the awarding ceremony were made bearing only Imelda’s name.

With the media sicced on its way, it was only a matter of time before they dug up stories that suspiciously resembled what Marcos wrote in his diary.

From the Reuter-United Press International, Dec. 8, 1972: “Government investigators said the assailant apparently attacked Mrs. Marcos as a substitute for the president. Authorities identified him as Carlito Dimaali and said he lived about 60 miles from Manila. Capt. Ricardo Villanueva, heading the investigation into the attack, said Dimaali’s two sisters and a man tentatively identified as a brother were arrested and being questioned. Dimaali made statements to his sisters before the attack, investigators said, which indicated that he wanted to kill President Marcos. Investigators said Dimaali apparently thought Marcos was going to hand out prizes at an outdoor ceremony near Manila. His wife went to the ceremony instead.”

In the martial law-era crony press, there was no mention of Marcos enjoying a game of golf in the palace grounds while his wife was getting stabbed. What it reported was more of what Tatad told them to. Bulletin Today, Dec. 8, 1972: “What appeared very clear, according to Tatad, was that the assailant was able to go up the stage. He said that for the assassin to reach close to the First Lady required ‘some sort of cover.’ This would indicate, according to Tatad, that the assailant was not alone.”

The facile conclusion was: if the assassin was not alone, then it’s a conspiracy. Or even better: conspiracies.

 In the same Dec. 7, 1972 evening press briefing, the Agence France-Presse reported that the government, through Tatad, “blamed a rightist conspiracy” for the failed assassination attempt. He “told newsmen this was borne out by confessions made by persons under martial law detention.” According to Tatad, these persons were “previously linked to an alleged plot to kill Mr Marcos ultimately leading to a rightist coup d’etat . . . the inclusion of Mrs Marcos as an object of assassination was not previously divulged . . . in order not to duly alarm the people.” The supposed confessions notwithstanding, “the plot continues, it is still active, and elements connected with this plot are still in Manila, Mr Tatad added.”

The next day, Dec. 8, 1972, Tatad delivered a speech at the opening of the conference on “Business Prospects” at the Plaza Restaurant in Makati. Here he laid out what the story must be. This mainly fed into the reports of the international press.

An assassin’s attempt on the life of Mrs. Marcos, the First Lady, put our nation on notice that we have not entirely subdued the political passion, the bitterness, and the violence that have long sought to claim the life of our President, in the hands of his enemies.

“The undertaking we began on September 21 will continue to mobilize the enemies. They will persist in the belief that their goals can be achieved by putting an end to the lives of our leaders. They will persist in the belief that their control of government can only be founded on the death of the President.”

“So until the conspiracy against the leadership—the conspiracy that began in December 1969—is fully liquidated, it can only be expected to continue. For we can dispossess all men of their weapons, but we can never completely purge all men of their hate. Seven times the

conspirators made an attempt on the life of President Marcos from early 1970 to this date; the plot not having succeeded and not having been fully terminated, continues.”

“Why then this attack on the First Lady at this time? . . . They perhaps believed that having been hurt where the essence of a man’s life lies, he would now be deranged as a leader, and would blindly loose an anger that would destroy everything in its path; that would ultimately make his life and office meaningless to the very people who have given him support. None of these will come to pass.”

Media lapped up conspiracy angle feed

In Marcos’s diary entry for Dec. 9, 1972, there is a sentence fragment: “And the story of the confessions on the rightist coup d’etat.” Marcos did not become deranged with anger, he was back to his old calculating self, spinning tales that will enhance his dictatorial powers.

Tatad worked both the crony and the foreign press on the conspiracy angle.

The Associated Press posted on Dec. 9, 1972: “A joint military operation was also reported to have rounded up 85 persons in the greater Manila area in connection with the attempt on Mrs. Marcos, Tatad announced. No details about Dimaali were released and it was not reported if he was connected with the alleged conspirators, whose arrest was announced today. Tatad identified the conspirators as Eduardo Figuerras, Antonio Arevalo and Manuel Crisologo. Other than describing Crisologo as an ‘explosive expert,’ Tatad did not give any more details. Tatad said: ‘Because of incriminating evidence’ linking them to the conspiracy, the following were also detained by the military: Sergio Osmeña, III, oldest son of former Sen. and incumbent Cebu Mayor Sergio Osmeña Jr. The young Osmeña is a grandson of Philippine Commonwealth President Sergio Osmeña. Jesus Cabarrus Jr., executive vice president of the Marinduque Mining and Industrial Corp., who is married to the young Osmeña’s oldest sister. Eugenio Lopez Jr., publisher of the Manila Chronicle and president of its radio and television network. He is also a vice president of Meralco, the power company whose management is controlled by his family. He is nephew of incumbent Vice President Fernando Lopez.”

Not to be outdone, the blaring headline of the Dec. 10, 1972 issue of the Sunday Express said it all: “Osmeña, Cabarrus, Lopez scions held on slay-FM plot; Eddie Figueras, two others confess.”

In three days, Marcos and Tatad managed to shift the narrative away from Imelda and now almost solely on Marcos and those conspiring against him.

Marcos had been talking about threats to his life. On Dec. 27, 1969, a month after he won reelection to the presidency, United Press International quoted him as saying that death threats were “standard hazards of the presidency.” Yet after declaring martial law, Marcos’s propaganda harped on the attempts on Marcos’s life and how all these have failed. The important point being conveyed was the naming of enemies that the dictatorship must go after having threatened the president’s life. On Oct. 18, 1972, the Associated Press reported that “four attempts to kill President Ferdinand E. Marcos this year failed and a fifth was frustrated by alert security men.”

“I am amazed at the plot to assassinate me and its intricacies,” Marcos wrote in his diary on December 2, 1972. “They were even going to use a grenade inside a mike (microphone) I was going to speak through in public and a model plane loaded with liquid explosives to be bumped against me or my helicopter or plane. I attached copies of the sworn statements of Eugenio Lopez Jr., Sergio Osmeña III.”

No such verifiable statement was ever written and sworn to by either Lopez and Osmeña. Without a warrant and any charge, Marcos had the two of them arrested on November 27, 1972. Two years later, on November 18, 1974, they staged a hunger strike. On its ninth day, they were verbally informed by their jailers that in August 1973, charges were drawn against them for conspiring to assassinate Marcos. How could Lopez and Osmeña confess in writing about anything on December 2, 1972 when it was not until two years later were they informed on why they were taken into military custody?

The jailing of Lopez and Osmeña was a squeeze play by Marcos designed not only to do away with his political opponents, but more so to extract from them their wealth and give them away as bonanza to his cronies. This is particularly true in the case of the Lopezes.

But the attempt on Imelda’s life was not only made an excuse to go after the oligarch that he hated, Marcos also used it to implicate the communist insurgents. Marcos had a conspiracy on the right, a conspiracy on the left, and everyone in between was also fair game.

Ver, in his notes, mentioned that on “080825 Dec, Sgt Balmoha of the San Juan detachment received a tel call which was taped—‘Papatayin namin sila lahat.’ A similar call was received by Sgt Sta Cruz at Calixto Dyco detachment.” Ver recommended “that all members of the First Family and immediate relatives be cautioned to undertake precautionary measures and avoid unnecessary public exposure until the situation has stabilized.”

A Dec. 11, 1972, United Press International report had Tatad saying: “The conspiracy included a plan to kidnap Ferdinand Marcos Jr., to force the release of political prisoners and the resignation of President Marcos.”

In the “Eleventh Progress Report re Attempt Against the Life of the First Lady” by the CIS [Criminal Investigation Service] on Dec. 16, 1972, there was already an insinuation that there were people, if not a group, behind Carlito.

On 16 Dec 72, Mr Francisco Dimailig, with her two daughters, Dra Thelma Dimailig and Mrs Sonia de Ala, gave to the CIS an opened letter postmarked ‘Manila 12 Dec 72’ addressed to Mrs Josefa Dimailig in Calaca, Batangas, which they received by mail in Calaca on [15] Dec 72, the contents of which is a poem in Tagalog and Carlito Dimailig is the subject. Efforts will be exerted by the CIS, in coordination with ISAFP, to trace and arrest the author and sender of said letter.

The six-stanza poem tells Carlito’s mother to be proud of what her son did. “Huwag kang malungkot, pahirin ang luha / Itaas ang noo, huwag mahihiya / Ang iyong Carlito’y magiging dakila / Sa kasaysayan ng ating inang bansa.” The poem talks about killing not only Imelda, but also Marcos. “Si Imelda’t Marcos, ugat ng hilahil / Masakit man sa loob, dapat na putulin.” The poem concludes that with Carlito’s sacrifice, “Ang pakikibaka ay muling lalawak.” In between stanzas are crude rendering of the hammer and sickle. Opposite the name of the poem’s author “Commander Ruel Necy” is a raised arm holding an upturned rifle.

Assassination attempt story morphed into revolution in the making

On Dec.14, 1972, a United Press International report citing “official government sources” disclosed that the attempt on Imelda’s life “was part of a Communist urban guerilla plot to attack the presidential palace and other strategic installations. Sources said the plot fizzled out when the knife-wielding attacker failed to kill Imelda R. Marcos . . . Evidence gathered by government investigators, the sources said, indicated that Mrs. Marcos’ assassination was to have been the signal for simultaneous Communist attacks on Malacanang Palace, military installations and vital public utilities. They said the raids were mapped out to take advantage of the ensuing confusion after her killing.”

On Dec. 15, 1972, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, carrying another United Press International report, had it headlined: “Philippine revolution plot foiled.” “Sources said government evidence on the plot was bolstered by the discovery of a cache of more than 300 high-powered firearms, several rocket launchers, more than 65,000 rounds of ammunition, nine drums of fragmentation grenades and voluminous Communist propaganda materials. The arms, buried in strategic places in metropolitan Manila, were to be used by Communist urban guerillas ‘at a given signal from their leaders’.”

Four years later, on March 29, 1977, Marcos decreed it a crime punishable by death to “attempt on, or [conspire] against the life of the chief executive of the Republic of the Philippines, any member of his cabinet or their families.” Which he further expanded on Nov.11, 1980 to include members of “the Interim Batasang Pambansa, the Supreme Court, the Constitutional Commissions, general officers of major services and commands of the Armed Forces of the Philippines or any member of their families, or who uses any firearms or deadly weapons against the person of any of the government officials enumerated herein, or any member of his family.” Cory Aquino repealed these Marcos edicts saying that the “crime of Lese Majeste has no place in a democratic society.”

It was never proven that Carlito Dimailig was part of any conspiracy.

Originally published by Vera Files on November 19, 2024

There is something oddly appropriate about relatives of President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr.—namely his cousin, Philippine ambassador to the United States Jose Manuel Romualdez and his sister, Sen. Imee Marcos—expressing concern about their undocumented countrymen being deported from the US under another Trump presidency, given that the American government once wanted a US-based Bongbong to return to his homeland following, of all things, a traffic violation.

In his congratulatory message to US president-elect Donald Trump, President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. said he had “personally met President Trump as a young man, so [he knows] that his robust leadership will result in a better future for all of us.” When that meeting happened is unclear, but Bongbong was definitely based in the US twice between his 20s and early 30s. He was there, in exile, with most of the members of his family after the EDSA Revolution; he met his wife-to-be Liza Araneta in New York City, where she worked as a lawyer, while his mother, Imelda Marcos, was on trial there for bank fraud and racketeering. He was in the courtroom when Imelda was acquitted.

Even earlier, between late 1979 and the early 1980s, Bongbong was also based in the US, being a student at Trump’s alma mater, the Wharton School in the University of Pennsylvania. While in the US at that time, he lived in a house in Cherry Hill, Camden County, New Jersey—about a 20-25-minute drive from Wharton—purchased, with international banker and former American Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines head Tristan Beplat as ostensible owner, and maintained using the Marcoses’ ill-gotten wealth.

When his mother was in town—on official business, or for her state-funded shopping sprees—she preferred staying at the Waldorf Towers in New York City. As Bongbong relayed during his first visit to the US as president on September 19, 2022, he would travel through the New Jersey Turnpike when he visited New York from Cherry Hill at that time.

Bongbong’s statement calls to mind these overseas dealings of the Marcoses a few years before the ouster of Ferdinand Sr. It also makes one think about how little Bongbong has publicly said about that time in his life. His profile in his official website simply says that after his time in Oxford University (1975-1978), he “subsequently enrolled at the Wharton School of Business for a Master of Business Administration. It says his stay in Wharton was eventually cut short after he was elected in 1980 as Vice Governor of his home province, Ilocos Norte”—a factual error, as records and news accounts show he was apparently in the US for most of 1980 until about early 1982.

So, what exactly did young Bongbong do in the US during that time (most of 1980 until about early 1982)?

Forty-two years ago, a well-syndicated story from the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service brought to light an incident that is intriguing, to say the least—criminal, to be more accurate—involving a twentysomething US-based Bongbong. Looking back at the incident and the circumstances connected to it highlights how little Bongbong has publicly disclosed about his activities during his father’s dictatorship.

The story was first published by the Los Angeles Times under the title “Accused Korean Diplomat Gives Protocol a Workout” on November 15, 1982. Written by Doyle McManus, the article focused on Nam Chol Oh, a member of the North Korean observer group at the United Nations, who had been accused of attempting to rape an American woman at a park in New York State. Though a warrant for Oh’s arrest had been issued, diplomatic immunity shielded him from American authorities as long as he holed up inside the apartment where the North Korean mission maintained their offices and residences. The delegation refused to surrender Oh to the police. McManus gave a few other instances of foreigners abusing diplomatic immunity, including “the son of the president of the Philippines.”

Guns found in Bongbong’s car

According to McManus, in 1981,

“Ferdinand Marcos Jr….was stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike for driving well over the speed limit. The state trooper who pulled over young Marcos, a student at the University of Pennsylvania, was startled to see a semiautomatic rifle on the back seat and a revolver strapped to the leg of the young woman in the passenger seat.

“Marcos showed a diplomatic passport and the trooper waved him on. ‘Standard procedure,’ said the spokesman for the New Jersey State Police.

“Except, the State Department says, that young Marcos was not registered as a diplomatic agent of his country. He did not really have diplomatic immunity — just a foolproof way to beat a speeding ticket.”

Engagement with Belgian model

The identity of the “young woman” has not been disclosed. Earlier that year, in April, the Agence France-Presse, in articles published in newspapers such as the South China Morning Post and the Straits Times, reported that Bongbong was engaged to marry a Belgian model named Dominique Misson-Peltzer, as announced by her family. The South China Morning Post version of the story said that she was the daughter of a retired lieutenant-colonel, and that she and Bongbong met 18 months prior, or around November 1979, a few months after Bongbong started attending Wharton.

In a May 1981 issue of Asiaweek, Ferdinand Sr. said that the engagement was untrue. Quoting his son, he told Asiaweek that Bongbong “has no plans to marry anybody right now,” but confirmed that Ferdinand Jr. “dated the girl.” But a July 1982 communication from Saudi Arabian businessman Khalid A. Alireza to Bongbong—among the digitized files of the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG)—mentions Marcos Jr.’s “fiancée, Dominique,” and a trip to Lake Tahoe they apparently all took together.

At least five other newspapers in the US carried McManus’s article. The Marcos crony-controlled press in the Philippines likely did not say anything about the revelation that Bongbong had a brush with the law in the US. However, readers of the opposition-aligned We Forum, specifically the newspaper’s November 26-28 issue, were treated to the entire section on Bongbong in McManus’s article through a column by publisher Jose Burgos.

In his article, titled “An Interesting Item on ‘Bongbong’ Marcos,” Burgos explained that that tidbit about Bongbong came from an LA Times clipping that he received two weeks after it was published. Burgos did not make any further comment on Bongbong’s New Jersey incident; if he had intended to do a follow up investigation, he would not have had an outlet to publish his findings, as We Forum was shut down on December 7, 1982 for publishing articles that supposedly discredited, insulted, or ridiculed the president “to such an extent that it would inspire his assassination.” Chief among these were the serialized version of a story on Ferdinand Sr.’s fake wartime heroism and medals, which was written by Bonifacio Gillego. We Forum resumed publication only in January 1985.

Even if news about Bongbong being pulled over in the US reached Philippine shores, it seems that nobody here thought to make much of it. It was probably not surprising to anyone in the Philippines that the extremely privileged son of the dictator violated traffic laws abroad with impunity. Perhaps indicative of the opinion on Bongbong at the time is this excerpt from a declassified airgram from the United States Consulate in Cebu, subject “Students in Cebu: Non-Revolutionary Critics of the New Society,” dated June 27, 1979:

“Perhaps the sharpest criticism is aimed at Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. (Bongbong), who is widely seen by Cebuano students as being groomed by the President to be his successor. It is common to hear comments among students in Cebu about the ‘Marcos Dynasty’. Bongbong’s recent brief tour of duty with the Philippine Army, his immediate designation as a second lieutenant, the special award bestowed on him by the Philippine Military Academy, his earlier appointment as a ‘Special Assistant’ to his father, and his receiving a ‘special diploma’ from Oxford — suggesting incomplete studies — all provide opportunities for sharp criticism and sarcastic comments.”

Though he received a “Special Diploma in Social Studies” from Oxford University, he was able to enter the Master of Business Administration program at Wharton. As explained in a VERA Files article published in 2021, it was through the intervention of Filipino diplomats and business connections that Bongbong started studying at Wharton in August 1979. He was expected to finish his studies between 1980-1981, even after he was elected vice governor of Ilocos Norte in January 1980.

Being a (non-functional) local elected official would not have automatically conferred upon him diplomatic immunity. Being an attaché to the Philippine Mission to the United Nations—which was from 1979-1980—did. It is possible that Bongbong flashed an expired diplomatic passport, acquired from the time he was purportedly a “military adviser” to the Philippine UN Mission, in front of the officer that pulled him over in 1981.

When, exactly, did the incident happen? The exact date can be found in a declassified US Department of State cable, with the subject “Weekly Status Report – Philippines,” dated August 19, 1981. Item number one in the cable is the arrival of first lady Imelda Marcos in the US on August 14. The cable noted that she was apparently seeking appointments with Vice President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State Alexander Haig, but at that time, “she and her entourage are still essentially on their own vacation in New York and have done very little except in a social way since arrival.” The second item is titled “Marcos’ Son to the West Indies.” The item is reproduced here in full:

“Ferdinand (“Bong Bong”) Marcos, Jr. left New York August 18 for a visit of unknown duration to the island of Guadeloupe in the West Indies. Bong Bong has had discussions with his father and, presumably, with his mother since her arrival in New York in the wake of the August 12 New Jersey Turnpike episode” (emphasis added).

This information was attributed to James Nach of the US Embassy in Manila’s political section. The cable, sent by US state department Country Director for Philippine Affairs Frazier Meade, was addressed to John Holdridge, Assistant Secretary of State of East Asian and Pacific Affairs. At the time, the US did not have an ambassador to the Philippines; days before the turnpike incident, on August 5, 1981, Ambassador Richard Murphy bade goodbye to Ferdinand Sr. at Malacañang.

The son ‘was a problem’

The next US ambassador, Michael Armacost, started his tenure in March 1982. According to a 1999 interview with him by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training,

“My initial contacts with him [Ferdinand Sr.] as ambassador were a little rocky. The first instruction—or one of my earliest—was to go to see Marcos to tell him that his son was a problem. He had been arrested for speeding on one of the interstates in the East while working in the United States. The police also found contraband—drugs or guns—in the car. The officials in the States (United States) were obviously not interested in publicizing this event; on the other hand, they could not let the matter go unnoticed. So, I had to go see the father to ask that he bring his son home. That was not a pleasant task under any circumstances; it was particularly unhelpful as a new ambassador’s first act.”

If his recollection was correct, then Bongbong was still based in the US seven months after the turnpike incident, and he was apparently “a problem” not only because of a speeding violation.

What was Bongbong still doing in the US at that time? His Wharton transcript indicates that he last enrolled at the school during the fall term (around August-December) of 1981, though he did not earn any course credits. That meant that he was not a student anymore in 1982. Jose Burgos, in his column for We Forum’s November 29-30, 1982 issue, noted that Bongbong became acting governor of Ilocos Norte that month, after the incumbent governor, his aunt Elizabeth Marcos-Keon, went on “indefinite sick leave”; Bongbong would succeed his aunt as governor about four months later. What he was preoccupied with between December 1981 and November 1982 remains unclear.

US investigates flow of guns through diplomatic channels

Another news item, an exclusive of Camden, New Jersey’s Courier-Post, both provides a possible explanation for the guns he was found with when he was pulled over in August 1981 and what he may have been involved in before he became primarily based in the Philippines again in late 1982. Written by the Courier-Post‘s Bob Collins, the August 2, 1982 article noted that the US was investigating “the flow of American-made weapons out of the country through diplomatic channels,” which involved at least two residents in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.

“The Cherry Hill men are bodyguards to Ferdinand ‘Bong Bong’ Marcos, son of the president of the Philippines,” Collins wrote. “Marcos has lived in Cherry Hill since he became a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business in 1979, although he no longer attends the school,” he continued.

The two bodyguards were identified as Carlos Paredes and John Velasco. A John Francis Velasco is included in the US Department of State’s Diplomatic List from 1984 to 1986, identified as an attaché of the Embassy of the Philippines in Washington, D.C. An article in the November 12, 1986 issue of National Midweek, written by Bonifacio Gillego, says that Velasco was actually a military intelligence officer, with AFP serial number 0-5867, listed as an attaché since 1980, and that he “commuted between Washington, D.C. and New York, with New York as his area of intelligence jurisdiction.”

Gillego added: “When Bongbong Marcos was studying at Wharton, Velasco and Charlie Paredes, another army man, provided him with security, drawing personnel from the Philippine Embassy in Washington. It seems that these enlisted men-bodyguards were amply rewarded for their canine servitude to the dictator’s son. Most of them [as of November 1986] are still in Washington, D.C. and New York.”

The Americans knew all about these intelligence-gathering “diplomats.” Among the files in the Digital National Security Archive is a document labele” [FBI Lists Philippine Intelligence Officers in the United States along with Their Diplomatic “Covers”].” It is a confidential cable from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, dated August 17, 1981. Several persons are described therein as falling “under headings of ‘Area of Operation: PH [Philadelphia, where Wharton is] and New Jersey,’” including “Capt. Johnny Velasco” described as a “P.S.C. Officer,” and “son of former Gen. Segundo Velasco,” whose “cover is an attaché (at the A.F.A.O., Phil. Embassy in Washington).” The list does not include a Charles or Charlie Paredes, but does include a “Major Arsenio Paredes, also described as a “P.S.C. Officer” whose “cover is a civilian employee in the Consulate-Chicago.”

The FBI cable also mentions “Major Julian Antolin (National Intelligence and Security Officer, N.I.S.A. [National Intelligence and Security Authority, then headed by General Fabian Ver]” whose cover was “an attaché to the United Nations.” Antolin is listed with Bongbong In the December 1979 edition of the Permanent Missions to the United States: Officers Entitled to Diplomatic Privileges and Immunities. Another Cherry Hill house—in Capshire Drive, a short walk from the Pendleton Drive one—where Bongbong’s bodyguards stayed was purchased in Antolin’s name, before it was transferred to Irwin Ver, Fabian’s son. Both houses have since been sold.

Besides guarding Bongbong, the main mission of Velasco and Paredes, among others, was to gather information about and disrupt the anti-Marcos opposition in the United States. Gillego, a former military man himself, described how these men operated in his Midweek article: “In the language of their clandestine trade, these military personnel masquerading as diplomatic or consular officials were case or project officers. Each developed his own network of agents and informants recruited from among the members of various anti-Marcos organizations in the United States.” The penetration agents were “assigned to obtain critical information; to sow discord and promote intrigues; to sabotage operations of these organizations and compromise them with US authorities,” Gillego wrote.

Collins, in his Courier-Post article, described another suspected activity of Velasco and Paredes in this manner: “one federal investigator said it involves ‘a sort of sophisticated form of gun-running’ in which foreign nationals take advantage of legitimate loopholes in federal and state firearms laws….[the investigation] is believed to center on the purchase of an estimated 75-80 handguns over a two-year period. Federal government agents believe the Filipinos may have been black-marketing the guns in their homeland, using profits from the sales to finance frequent trips to the Philippines.”

According to Collins, Paredes and Velasco in particular were “believed to have made a series of gun purchases” in a store in Pennsylvania, about 16 kilometers from where Bongbong studied, “each time relying on a letter from the Philippine consul general’s office as the authority needed to obtain the weapons.” They preferred buying in Pennsylvania because the gun laws there were more lax than in New Jersey and New York. The deputy consul at the Philippine consul general’s office in New York explained that they were only permitted to “take up to four weapons out of the United States at one time.”

Collins further noted that from available information, “several of the guns acquired by Marcos’ men are the type specifically preferred by police, particularly undercover agents who require weapons that can be easily concealed.” Collins tried to reach Paredes, Velasco, and Bongbong for comment, but these efforts were “unsuccessful.” According to Collins, no charges were filed “because of the immunity granted by the United States to visiting foreign dignitaries” and “the long history of friendly relations between the United States and the Philippines.”

It seems likely that the story did not gain more traction, partly because of the state visit of Ferdinand Sr. to the United States in September 1982. Bongbong, along with his sister Irene, apparently also a student at the University of Pennsylvania at the time, accompanied their parents during the state visit. As reported by the Associated Press, on the last day of their US tour, Imelda headed to Philadelphia to visit the University of Pennsylvania where two of her children “attend the Wharton School of Finance.”

Could 2nd Lieutenant Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. of the Presidential Security Command, AFP serial number 0-113885, have also been a “case or project officer” who engaged in gunrunning on the side? Although Bongbong infamously failed to file his income tax returns back when he was vice governor and governor of Ilocos Norte in the 1980s, among the digitized files of the PCGG is an ITR filed in 1981 for salaries and allowances that he had received as an AFP officer in 1980. He received over PHP 4,550.00—over PHP 120,000.00 today. Was he “on duty” then while ostensibly an attaché and a graduate student?

At the very least, it seems unlikely that he did not know about the activities of his fellow “attachés.” He knew about the people they were monitoring. Businessman and opposition leader Steve Psinakis, in his book Two Terrorists Meet, recounted a brief encounter with Bongbong during his infamous December 19, 1980 meeting with Imelda at the Waldorf in New York. After Psinakis had discoursed with Imelda for almost two hours, Bongbong entered the lavish suite where the meeting was taking place. Psinakis made light of rumors that Bongbong was being targeted by the anti-Marcos opposition in the US, which he denied. Psinakis later learned that, while Bongbong was still outside the suite, upon learning that Psinakis was talking to his mother, the young Marcos said, “Oh! This is the fellow who is going to kill me. I want to see him.”

Bongbong has repeatedly distanced himself from abuses and atrocities committed during his father’s time. But has he really explained what he did for his father during the dictatorship?

Originally published by Vera Files on November 11, 2024

President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. was spinning a tale when he talked about his father’s Bicol River Basin Development Project during a situation briefing on Oct. 26 in Naga City on the massive floods unleashed by severe tropical storm Kristine.

“Itong mga lugar, mga Batangas, mga Cavite, nawala kaagad ang tubig. Dito, hindi nawawala ang tubig. But that’s the proverbial problem of the Bicol River Basin,” he said. “So, we have to find the long-term solution.” (In Batangas, Cavite, the water was gone quickly. But here, the flood has remained)

Marcos said he is studying the problem and found that in 1973, during his father’s presidency, there was the Bicol River Basin Development Project (BRBDP) funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Asian Development Bank, and Japan’s then Overseas Technical Cooperation Agency, with the European Union included in the planning.

He said he read a study by someone from the University of the Philippines which found that despite some challenges, the project helped a lot. “Iyon lamang hindi natapos. In 1986, when the government changed, nawala na iyong project, so basta’t natigil. So, we have to revisit it now,” he added. (But it was not completed. In 1986, when the government changed, the project disappeared, it just stopped.)

Bongbong repeated his line concerning the BRBDP’s demise in a media interview after the briefing, saying the project helped in flood control, but that it was abandoned after the change in government in 1986.

In response to Bongbong waxing nostalgic about the BRBDP during his father’s time, Manuel Bonoan, secretary of the Department of Public Works and Highways, noted during the briefing that the Philippine-Korean Project Facilitation project -the  Bicol River Basin Flood Control Project- was updated only this July 2024 including the feasibility study for the flood control program. “So, by early next year, we will be doing the detailed engineering design,” he said.

Bonoan’s response may have been intended to assure the president that there were still big-ticket Bicol River Basin projects today, just like the time of Marcos’ father. Still, it did not exactly refute Bongbong’s claim that the BRBDP was abruptly stopped after the 1986 People Power Revolution. Nobody during the briefing challenged the president’s assertion.

Flowing with the President’s fiction

So far, neither has any mainstream news outlet. The Philippine Daily Inquirer published an article titled “Marcos Draws Focus to Bicol River, Recalls Father’s Halted Project,” on October 27. It noted the exchange between Marcos and Bonoan but did not counter the claim that the program was discontinued after Marcos Sr. was deposed. Philstar.com uncritically quoted Bongbong’s claims regarding the BRBDP verbatim. An article published in GMA News Online went a step further: it fully supported Marcos’s claim, citing an interview with Bonoan. According to the article, “Launched in the 1970s under the administration of late President Ferdinand Marcos Sr., the BRBDP was a geography-based development initiative for the Bicol Region. However, it was halted in 1986 when the Corazon Aquino administration took over.”

The closest to a counterclaim by someone from the media came from investigative journalist Raissa Robles, who tweeted, “Kung natigil man ang BRBDP, hindi dajil sa Cory govt, which is what MJr is implying. Blame the Villafuertes who have been in power there.” (Had the BRBDP been stopped, it was not because of the Cory government)

Decentralization and reorganization

Factually, Cory Aquino’s Executive Order no. 374 on Oct. 30, 1989 shut down the BRBDP Office along with integrated area development (IAD) offices in Bohol, Cagayan, and Mindoro. But not simply because it was a Marcos project; Aquino’s order stated that the closure of these offices was due to the reorganization of regional development councils (RDCs) and the strengthening of local governments in line with the 1987 Constitution. “[S]pecific elements of decentralization now render feasible the shift in the institutional arrangements for the IADs, where the RDCs and LGUs concerned may now assume active responsibility and authority over the same,” said one of the order’s “whereas” clauses.

The order creating the BRBDP, Executive Order no. 412, dated May 7, 1973, established a national-level Bicol River Basin Council that was under NEDA; Presidential Decree no. 926, dated April 28, 1976, turned over the program to an office under the Cabinet Coordinating Committee on Integrated Rural Development Projects, still under NEDA. Cory’s order turned over the tasks of that national office to the RDC of the Bicol Region and the governors of Camarines Sur and Albay.

In fact, Aquino’s order hewed closely to a principle stated in Marcos Sr.’s presidential decree: “the success of the program requires that the management and planning of the basin area be comprehensive, decentralized, and framed within regional and national plans.”
Decentralization was a governance buzzword at the time the decree was issued. In a book chapter they wrote, scholars G. Shabbir Cheema and Dennis Rondinelli noted that in the 1970s and the 1980s, “globalization forced some governments to recognize the limitations and constraints of central economic planning and management.” This led to what Cheema and Rondinelli called the “first wave of post-World War II thinking on decentralization,” which “focused on deconcentrating hierarchical government structures and bureaucracies.” The Marcos Sr. administration apparently tried to latch onto this trend—in the same way that it tried to adopt other buzzwords such as “human settlements”—but, being a dictatorship, did not fully commit to decentralizing power.

A May 1985 USAID paper, “Integrated Rural Development Projects: A Summary of the Impact Evaluations,” written by Cynthia Clapp-Wincek, explained the BRBDP command structure: “Individual ministries took the lead in implementing activities in their scope of responsibility but coordinated with other ministries where appropriate. There was an advisory committee for private sector involvement, a coordinating committee for provincial governors and regional directors of line agencies. At the local level, there were Area Development Teams with mayors, representatives of the line agency staffs, city legislative councils and BRBDP staff.”

This complex top-down structure resulted in what Clapp-Wincek referred to as impeded momentum: “High political commitment got [the program] moving early on—but momentum was slowed by the elaborate institutional arrangements.” Lost in this bureaucratic quagmire was the voice of the program’s supposed beneficiaries. Clapp-Wincek said that “mayors did not seem to have an intimate understanding of their constituents’ concerns. . . . [there was] little correlation between the ‘issues raised in the minutes of Area Development Team meetings with the issues raised by farmers in their conversations [with USAID’s Bicol IAD evaluation team].’”

Victoria Bautista, in a 1986 Philippine Journal of Public Administration article titled “People Power as a Form of Citizen Participation,” mentioned a 1981 survey that found “only 41 per cent of the respondents [e.g., farmer beneficiaries] acknowledged having participated in deciding the main components included” in the BRBDP; “most physical infrastructure projects chosen for inclusion in the feasibility analysis were taken from inventories of capital projects submitted by the local government for national funding.”

Such were the administrative assessments of the BRBDP Office before it was dissolved. During the Naga City briefing, Bongbong did not specify whose BRBDP study he cited (while speaking about the study, he was holding a few stapled sheets that were separated from a pile of documents by Anton Lagdameo, Special Assistant to the President). If he was referring to Jeanne Frances Illo’s “Models of Area-Based Convergence: Lessons from the Bicol River Basin Development Program (BRBDP) and Other Programs,” published between 2012-13, it’s indeed a paper that has some—not entirely—positive things to say about the program.

Illo noted that the BRBDP was “an early experiment in geography based planning, one that was independent of political administrative boundaries [as planning] and programming were focused in a ‘river basin,’ or a hydrologic area.” Illo affirms that the BRBDP was funded by foreign agencies—tens of millions from USAID and European Economic Community grants and ADB loans. A 1982 article published in Horizons, a USAID publication, said that by that time, the aid agency had “made two grants and five loans totaling $30.4 million to the Philippine government which, itself, has invested about $75 million.”  Bruce Koppel, in a 1987 article titled “Does Integrated Area Development Work? Insights from the Bicol River Basin Development Program,” noted that “The total direct costs of the Program approximate $100 million, but the complete costs are certainly higher.”

Loans dry up, costs balloon but still no flood control

Illo wrote that the “USAID funding for the BRBDP ran for a decade (1973-1983), but the Program itself, or at least some of its components, went on for at least another decade.” Providing another context for Cory Aquino’s closure order, Illo continued: “When the grants and loans dried up, the Program Office was closed”; “[completed] infrastructure projects, however, were maintained and, later, rehabilitated or repaired by technical agencies [the National Irrigation Authority or NIA and DPWH] while the agrarian reform projects were subsumed under the succeeding Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program.” So, “basta’t natigil” is patently false.

If Bongbong insists that he is right, perhaps he can continue his studies, reading in particular a report on the Formulation of Integrated River Basin Management and Development Master Plan for Apayao-Abulug River Basin, produced by Woodfields Consultants, Inc. for the Department of Environment and Natural Resources in October 2014. The report’s executive summary states,

“From 1973-87, the [Bicol River] basin had been the subject of initiatives for management and development [BRBDP]. Then, from 1989-94, a Bicol River Basin Flood Control and Irrigation Development Program was implemented. A grant from the World Bank (WB) to undertake a master plan was conducted in 2002-03 which led to the creation of a Project Management Office (PMO). The PMO did not survive after the WB support had ceased. The national government, through the National Economic Development Authority (NEDA), had re-activated and has repackaged the program and in 2007, the approved program has received national government funding for DPWH and DENR projects. The proposed river basin management council has not seen fruition.”

Funding is a perennial challenge. Writing in 2004 about the Macapagal-Arroyo era efforts, specifically the World Bank-funded Bicol River Basin Watershed Management Project, Juan Escandor of the Philippine Daily Inquirer noted that the Marcos Sr.-era BRBDP “failed to achieve its major output: a huge reservoir in the middle of the Bicol river basin area”; “The national government was forced to abandon the project in 1989 because of the ballooning costs of the infrastructure component estimated in 1992 at $274 million,” Escandor added.

Not that that “major output” was anywhere close to completion before 1986; a 1977 JICA report on the establishment of flood forecasting systems in the Agno, Bicol, and Cagayan River Basins, noted that at that time, “[the] only project under construction is ‘Cut-off No. 3’ which is intended to alter meandering in the vicinity of Naga City.” The “future programs” JICA mentioned, such as “drastic projects such as the dyke system in the lower course, direct drainage from Lake Bato to Ragay Gulf through diversion channels dams in the upper Sipocot river,” were pipe dreams. And they remained so come 1979: the “Bicol Biennial Evaluation” of the Government of the Philippines and BRBDP-USAID, released in August of that year, noted that “projects packaged and funded so far are capital construction infrastructure development, principally roads and irrigation with some institutional development”—not flood control. Concerning the existing efforts, USAID noted that “the overall picture of the Bicol Program test case in Integrated Area Development is mixed.”

Poor engineering design, other project woes

 Moreover, Illo notes that “[poor] engineering design had reportedly plagued the Libmanan IAD Project,” a major USAID-funded BRBDP project that “involved the construction of a 4,000 hectare irrigation and drainage system plus flood control, salt water intrusion protection facilities, and farm access roads in an economically depressed area in the lower Basin that was considered to have high growth potentials.” Other issues that hampered that particular project include “inadequate coordination between the NIA and the BRBDP, environmental damage, and poor institutional development.” Thus, Illo said that “by the end of USAID funding in the mid-1980s, the constructed system was serving only half of the irrigable area.”

Illo also noted that for another BRBDP initiative, the Bicol IAD II project, “NIA installed an electric pump irrigation system in the area, neglecting to consider the cost of electric power that has been consistently much higher than in Metro Manila. The [farmer’s] cooperative ran huge electric bills, and decided to return the pumps to NIA and buy its own crude-oil-powered pumps.” Clearly, the BRBDP was hardly a flat-out success even before “the government changed” in February 1986.

Other sources affirm this. Koppel, in his 1987 article, and Doracie B. Zoleta, in another 1987 article titled “From the Mountains to the Lakebed: Resource Problems and Prospects in Buhi Watershed, Camarines Sur, Philippines,” noted a concerning incident in a project involving the BRBDP called the Buhi-Lalo Upland Development Pilot Project. It initially started well, with farmers undergoing University of the Philippines-led training and participating in local reforestation efforts. However, due to the mishandling of funds, payments to rural workers involved in building the project’s training facilities were delayed by eighteen months. The wage-deprived workers engaged in arson, culminating in the burning down of one of the major facilities in April 1985.

Zoleta’s article, and another source, “Lessons from EIA for Bicol River Development in Philippines,” written by Ramon Abracosa and Leonard Ortolano, also took note of the adverse environmental effects of the BRBDP Lake Buhi water control structure project. Citing a 1983 USAID Report, Abracosa and Ortolano stated that the project resulted in “increasing the frequency of sulphur upwelling and the continuing denudation of the lake’s watershed.” Zoleta noted that this “killed fish, especially those trapped in fish corrals and cages.”

Investigative journalists have also noted how the USAID grants for the BRBDP can in certain instances be considered a form of “tied aid.” According to a 1991 article titled “US Grants: How Free are They?” by Marie Avenir, Lucia Palpal-Iatoc, and Ma. Lourdes M. Reyes of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, USAID provided a grant/soft loan in 1979 to the BRBDP to train “400 barangay health aides in Camarines Sur and Albay to help improve health and nutrition among residents, maintain population growth at a desirable level, and achieve local governments’ self-reliance in health services.” But the financial assistance was not driven entirely by altruistic motives. The journalists noted that the project “virtually became a market for US goods through stipulations that vehicles be bought from the US and drugs and health kits procured for the program be subject to approval of USAID.”

C.P. Filio, in an article published in Manila Standard on Sept. 7,1987, wrote that the BRBDP caught the interest of Americans “because of their desire to showcase their highly successful experience in the Tennessee Valley Authority” in the 1930s. Filio noted the USAID’s 1983 assessment of the program’s agricultural contributions was favorable (and self-serving), but the farmer beneficiaries thought otherwise; Filio claimed that 1985 regional indicators showed that poverty incidence—“73.2 percent of families living below the poverty line”—was highest in the Bicol region, “no thanks to the Bicol River Basin Development Program.”

According to a declassified US State Department cable from 1982, titled “Ambassador’s Visit to the Bicol Region, November 15-16,” officials of the Philippine government—including the BRBDP director and the governors of Albay and Camarines Sur—“were especially receptive to [US Ambassador Michael Armacost’s] proposal that the scope for possible U.S. agribusiness investment in the Bicol provinces be explored.” But this possible penetration of the Philippine agricultural market was seen to be hampered by the “peace and order situation” in Bicol, i.e., the communist insurgency. Another cable, dated Sept. 17, 1982, implied that the insurgency was less present in the “lowland area between Naga and Legaspi” that was covered by the BRBDP, but the “Quezon-Bicol Triangle” between Lucena City and Naga, including the entirety of Camarines Norte, was a hotbed of insurgency and criminality. In short, the US’ focus on the “Bicol River Basin experiment” contributed to uneven development in the region, possibly exacerbating the insurgency in underserved areas right beside the priority areas.

BRBDP did not fold up simply because Marcos Sr. was deposed

Again, even if there were numerous reasons to discontinue the BRBDP after the program’s main sources of funding dried up, or at least to reevaluate it, it definitely did not fold up simply because Marcos Sr. was deposed. In fact, the continuation of the BRBDP after the EDSA revolt was crucial to the political career of Jesse Robredo, husband of former Vice President Leni Robredo, twice a political rival of Bongbong.

According to Takeshi Kawanaka, in his article “The Robredo Style: Philippine Local Politics in Transition,” Jesse Robredo was appointed as Program Director of the BRBDP after the EDSA Revolution. Kawanaka noted how being in the BRBDP helped Robredo gain political capital, with the development planning of Naga City as his last project as director. Robredo rose to become Naga City mayor in 1988.

PIA plagiarizes Jeanne Frances I. Illo 

Again, did Bongbong really have to lie about the BRBDP? It is interesting to note that on the same day as the Naga City briefing, the Philippine Information Agency published an article titled “PBBM’s Bicol Visit Injects Fresh Ideas into Old Dev’t Project.” Without citing any sources, it described the BRBDP as a “$46.8-million [foreign-funded] package” that was criticized because of “its heavy focus on physical infrastructure,” but resulted in “notable development of rural organizations and institutions.” Benefits were supposedly noticed during the “mid-1980s,” specifically because of BRBDP road projects, “as manifested in greater mobility, travel time savings, improved access to markets as well as to medical, educational, and recreational facilities, and trade.” The article noted that despite these long-term benefits, “certain problems linked to the program and the natural geography of the river basin still persist.” It then listed three IAD projects in Camarines Sur—without detailing their current status—closing with a call for better project design, transparency, and people’s participation in decentralization. PIA asserted that BRBDP needs to discard its “centralized, top-down approach, which limits local input and ownership, affecting sustainability.”

All of these are traceable to Illo’s article. The “greater mobility, travel time” line is lifted almost word-for-word from Illo. PIA’s article plagiarizes Illo’s work, down to the recommendations. As can be gleaned from the title of the article, PIA even lies about when these recommendations came about. “The discussion on the BRBDP has drawn out some reflections, ideas, and recommendations from Cabinet Secretaries present during the Camarines Sur briefing,” the government information agency stated. Absolutely not—these were Illo’s “reflections, ideas, and recommendations,” written over a decade ago, citing sources as far back as the 1970s.

Thus, while the PIA article does not reiterate the claim that the BRBDP ended in 1986, it still supports it, first by copying the claims of a credible source without attribution, making sure to exclude content from that source that refutes the president; then by making it appear that Marcos Jr.’s statements were the only reason for stirring up the program’s “revival.”

Since Bongbong took office, government propagandists have a track record of amplifying his and his family’s line that all went downhill after 1986, so it is necessary for a Marcos to course-correct the country. For instance, they publish articles claiming that Marcos Sr. pushed for genuine land reform, and that Bongbong will fulfill that dream; or that Marcos Sr. himself conceptualized a subway for Metro Manila in the early 1970s, and that Bongbong is now, finally, turning that plan into a reality. It is as if the time between 1986 and 2022 was a dark age, best forgotten, when absolutely no developments related to these programs and projects happened—contrary to fact.

Distorting history, cherry-picking and plagiarizing sources to support a false claim—why do they have to lie? This is how Marcos myths are formed and sustained. Falsities are, with a straight face, presented as facts, affirming the Marcosian Grand Narrative—all was well, golden even, until the Edsa “power grab.” A government propaganda agency supports the claim, while mainstream media uncritically reiterates it.

The lie can be uttered in various settings, such as political rallies or post-disaster briefings. Perhaps the lies are even particularly effective during tragic situations: should we not rejoice, actual competency and commitment to fact-based decision-making aside, that a Marcos is in Malacañang during trying times?

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.