Category: Lies

Originally published by Vera Files on June 29, 2022.

Tomorrow, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. becomes the 17th president of the Republic of the Philippines.

Many of the so-called Marcos loyalists are, of course, ecstatic. Two of them, businessperson Serafia “Cherry” Cobarrubias and broadcaster/writer Rita Gadi, shared their joy—and pro-Marcos propaganda—on the livestreamed program of the latter, The Rita Gadi Hour, a few weeks after the May 9 elections.

Cobarrubias, who reportedly helped fund the December 1989 coup attempt against Corazon Aquino, insisted that Bongbong’s win was a miracle; that “the voice of God is the voice of the people”; and that members of the clergy who spoke against Bongbong should be ashamed of themselves and ask for forgiveness. Gadi, Marcos regime propagandist, insisted that there is no evidence that Marcos Sr.’s wealth came from the state’s coffers. Near the end of the livestream, Cobarrubias claimed that the former dictator, on his deathbed, said that only 3% of his wealth would be kept for his family and the rest of his assets worldwide “should go to the Filipino people.”

It seems safe to say, at least based on social media, that some who voted for Bongbong did so based on these claims, including the narrative that the family’s wealth would be used for the benefit of the entire country should a Marcos reoccupy Malacañang. Many loyalists believe that promise that was often repeated by Bongbong’s mother, Imelda.

Documents, however, show that Marcos  Sr. himself never made such a pledge. At best, he set up the Ferdinand E. Marcos Foundation (FEMF) that did appear to serve a charitable purpose, in contrast to several other Marcos “foundations” that clearly functioned to help the family retain wealth that is far beyond what they could have legally earned. Ambiguous claims regarding FEMF’s funding sources and purpose became a basis for the Marcos family’s improbable vow to share their wealth.  Such distortion of the truth then mutated into the scams that further propagated the myth of bounty for loyalty to the Marcoses.

THE FERDINAND E. MARCOS FOUNDATION

In 1970, at the start of his second term as president, Marcos Sr. publicly announced that he was putting all of his wealth in a foundation bearing his name. In a statement,  the chief executive said he was motivated by “the strongest desire and the purest will to set the example of self-denial and self-sacrifice for all [his] people.” Records of the Security and Exchange Commission show that FEMF filed its articles of incorporation and by-laws on January 21, 1970, but in her book Marcos Martial Law: Never Again, author Raissa Robles said that the foundation’ registration had already been revoked by 2015.

Marcos Sr.’s announcement made headlines even in foreign media, quoting his statement. A wire story published in the Miami Herald mentioned that in 1968, “Marcos was listed for the first time among the Philippines’ top 100 income taxpayers” with the equivalent of over $160,000 “mostly from legal fees earned before he became president in 1965” even though his annual salary” was only $15,000.  A 2003 decision written by former chief justice Renato Corona noted that Marcos Sr.’s income tax return just before becoming president “did not show any receivables from client at all” and there were “no documents showing any withholding tax certificates.”

A Manila Bulletin article discussed in the Philippine Weekly Economic Review noted that Marcos Sr.’s “properties, savings and investments [were to] go to the people through a foundation which will be used to advance education, science, technology and the arts,” but “did not specify” which assets or if these included conjugal properties with Imelda. In his 1970 statement and  other speeches, Marcos only said that  “[provisions] will be made for [his] children, so that they shall be assured of satisfactory education and be prepared to meet their lifetime duties and endeavors.”

The first couple poured millions of  dollars into their children’s education, money that courts have ruled could not have been legally obtained. Expenditures included tuition, allowances, housing, and donations.  Neither of the two Marcos children, Imee and Bongbong, who studied in universities abroad obtained scholarships. Both returned home without a degree.

After Marcos was deposed in 1986, it became clear that besides the money spent on their children’s education, properties purchased abroad, deposits made in U.S. banks as early as 1968, funds in Swiss bank accounts determined to be illegally obtained, among others, were not among the assets of the FEMF.  To reiterate, Marcos never stated outright that his countrymen would have a redeemable share in the wealth he purportedly donated to the Foundation.

The FEMF had its headquarters in the Goldenberg Mansion on 838 Gen Solano Street, San Miguel, Manila which was christened with the name  “Ang Maharlika.” In a 1979 speech, Marcos Sr. said the mansion was “bought by the Marcos Foundation and converted into a guest house and then donated to the government,” but the property was listed in  the 1979 Philippine Yearbook as the site of the Marcos Foundation Museum.

The Sandiganbayan declared in a partial summary judgment on December 19, 2019 that paintings found at the Goldenberg mansion were ill-gotten and were forfeited in favor of the government. It noted that the Marcos heirs admitted owning the paintings in the mansion and other locations that were valued at $23 million, more than the legitimate income of the Marcoses before they fled the country. A particular set of paintings by American artist Grandma Moses displayed at the Goldenberg Mansion was, according to a New York Times article, collectively purchased for more than $600,000, about twice the Court-declared legal earnings of  Marcos Sr. and his wife in their last term in office.

A list of science foundations certified by the National Science Development board as of January 30, 1972 included the FEMF, which was described as a funder of “research studies on behavioral and social sciences and the humanities; scholarships; professorial chairs; publication and dissemination of results of research studies.”  Perhaps its  best known project was the  UP Los Baños’s National Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology for which FEMF committed P20 million for the purchase of laboratory furniture.  A Supreme Court decision in  2004, however, pointed out that FEMF stopped paying the furniture supplier in early 1985 and its almost P1 million collectibles remained unpaid even after the fall of Marcos.

It appears that money from the Foundation was used for military research as well, although this is difficult to prove. An article published in April 1972 in the Far Eastern Economic Review mentioned that funding for the infamous Filipino-made missiles, one of which was nicknamed Bongbong, came “from the Marcos Foundation which the president said he would set up as his contribution to social amelioration.” It is unclear why no further progress was made in the local missile program beyond the first half of 1972.

Numerous government and non-state sources attest to the existence of FEMF-funded scholarships, but the number of scholars who benefitted from them appear to have been few. A Ministry of Education and Culture memorandum from April 1982 states that the Pangulo Scholarship Program was constituted by the Kabataang Barangay Foundation, Inc., and the FEMF in Oct. 1981. For the school year 1982-83, the program had 150 slots distributed in 13 regions.  Pangulo scholars had to take one of five courses in six universities with “a monthly living yearly allowance of P5,000, excluding tuition and book allowance. In the 1986-87 academic year, slots for the Pangulo Scholarship slots were unlimited but students had to be active members of the Kabataang Barangay.

The name “Marcos Foundation” were in the copyright pages of numerous books purportedly written by Marcos Sr., many of which were distributed free. Studies have provided evidence that these books were in fact produced by ghostwriters and that at times, the money spent to publish came from government offers, not the FEMF.  A statement of transactions in the files of the Presidential Commission on Good Government shows that the Foundation owed $31,120  to Prentice-Hall, Inc., publisher of “Marcos’s” book The Democratic Revolution in the Philippines,  as of December 31, 1974.

The Foundation also attempted to fund a professorial chair at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Based on the February 1977 Official Month in Review published in the Official Gazette, the proposal to set up the chair was submitted to Marcos by Nihal W. Goonewardene, director of the Asia Pacific teaching fellowship program of Fletcher School based in Manila.” As reported by the Harvard Crimson, the FEMF had donated $500,000 to Tufts by January 1981 to establish  the Ferdinand E. Marcos Chair for East Asian and Pacific Studies, and partly finance the construction of a school building. That same month, however,  Marcos canceled the funding without withdrawing what  had already been donated. Various explanations for this were given, but it was reported that numerous scholars declined the offer to fill the chair.

Lastly, the Foundation is also on record as a donor to at least one hospital and one university other than UP. These are the Mariano Marcos Memorial Hospital and Medical Center and the Mariano Marcos State University both name after Marcos Sr.’s father in Batac, Ilocos Norte.

From these snippets, it is quite clear that the  Foundation was well endowed, but there was no indication that it had sufficient assets to make every Filipino wealthy or significantly address the country’s economic deficits; it certainly did not help in paying the country’s foreign debt. Moreover, the known assets of the Foundation were dwarfed by the billions of dollars in the Marcoses’ ill-gotten assets kept separate from what the FEMF managed.

FERDINAND MARCOS’S LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT 

Not long after the EDSA Revolution, the PCGG focused on Marcos assets that were stashed abroad, in foundations that had the Marcoses as beneficiaries, or those kept for Marcos by dummies, some of which were recovered via compromise agreements. Based on the various versions of his last will and testament from 1980 to 1988, Marcos Sr. never had any other specified heirs besides his wife and children.

A portion of Marcos Sr.’s will from March 1982 was shown to journalists by his family in November 2016 to show what their patriarch said about his funeral and burial arrangements.

The PCGG has the full version of the will in its files and among the appendices of the book Marcos Legacy Revisited: Raiders of the Lost Gold by Erick San Juan, published in 1998. The portion not shown to the media contained details of his wealth that Marcos Sr. bequeathed entirely to his wife and their three children and adopted daughter Aimee. The FEMF is mentioned only as an executor in case of his wife’s “default or incapacity.”  The will also contained this provision: “I hereby revoke any and all my other wills, codicils, or testamentary dispositions heretofore executed, signed, or published, or alleged to have been executed, signed, or published by me.”

If Marcos ever willed any of his assets to go to other people other than his only son and wife after his death prior to March 1982, he had effectively withdrawn it.

That revocation clause (a standard feature of wills) was retained in another version of his will, made a month later. This one too appears in San Juan’s book and kept in PCGG’s files. The most glaring alteration in this version is the removal of the Marcos Foundation as secondary executor and in its place, Bongbong was designated as executor along with Imelda.

A 1988 version of Marcos’s will has been published at least twice:  in the October 7, 1992 issue of the Manila Standard, which noted that the document had been “acknowledged” by Imelda, according to former senator Rene Saguisag; and in San Juan’s Raiders of the Lost Gold. Substantively,the will remained similar to its earlier incarnation, again naming  Bongbong and Imelda as co-executors. Bongbong’s name was dropped in 1982 and reinstated in 1988. The 1988 will, or a later version of it, appears to have been Marcos Sr.’s  last.

Ferdinand Sr. died on September 28, 1989. Despite the government’s attempts to disqualify them from performing their duties, the Supreme Court, in Republic v. Marcos II, affirmed that Bongbong and Imelda were the co-executors of Marcos Jr.’s will but this did not give either of them a say on what to do with the billions recovered by the PCGG.     

FALSE PROMISES AND COMPROMISES

Not long after her husband’s death, Imelda began saying that she would use all of her family’s  wealth for the benefit of the nation as supposedly intended by Marcos Sr.  She said it in 1990 after she was acquitted of violating the U. S. Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, mail fraud, and obstruction of justice and a year later, in a press conference on her return from exile.  Imelda said she had wanted to release some of their money to support “typhoon victims, for earthquake victims, for [those affected by the eruption of Mt.] Pinatubo” but that “was not allowed.”

There is no known evidence to support this.

By that time, over five years had passed since the Swiss government had frozen the Marcos bank accounts in Switzerland after an attempted withdrawal of $200 million in deposits in March 1986, when the Marcoses were already in exile.  When Imelda returned to the country, a settlement had been made in which the government would drop a civil racketeering case against the former first lady “in California and all other pending or future suits against her in U.S. courts in return for an estimated $8 million worth of Marcos property” in that country, the Washington Post had reported.

The settlement did not include the dropping of lawsuits filed by private individuals, some of which were successful.

By saying at that time that they needed permission to access funds for disaster relief, Imelda was practically stating that beyond what was discovered by various governments, the Marcoses had relatively little else. Indeed, even the P27 million in freshly minted bank notes that they “unintentionally exported” to Hawaii when they landed there in February 1986 were seized from them and partly returned to the Philippine government, already demonetized, in 1992.

Perhaps this was why she did not make the distribution of her family’s wealth a highlight in her 1992 presidential campaign. Her 15-point platform did not mention it, but some of her most important loyalists did it for her. Among them was writer/educator Reynaldo T. Fajardo, a founding member of the organizationFriends of Imelda Romualdez Marcos or FIRM, also known as FIRM-24K.

Fajardo wrote a number of pro-Marcos books in the late 1980s and the 1990s, including The Acquittal, Homecoming, and Inevitable Rise to the Presidency of Imelda Romualdez Marcos, published in 1991.  In his book, Fajardo claimed that Marcos Sr. “wanted to use [his] stupendous wealth [purportedly hundreds of billions worth of gold] to turn the Philippines into a self-reliant and truly sovereign nation that would gain the respect of the rest of the world.”  He added that in fact, Marcos Sr. “said that he was also sympathetic with the miserable plight of the other underdeveloped and developing countries” and “planned to help them, too.”

One can’t help but wonder why the former dictator did not do that when he was president.

Fajardo also said the “vast wealth that the late President  accumulated and conserved” was intended to be used “to accomplish his vision for the country,” and that Imelda would “use effectively” this wealth “left with her by the President.”

Imelda would later echo this as a campaign promise. An article published in March 1998 in the Manila Standard with the headline “Imelda Reveals more Secret Bank Accounts,” stated that the Marcos widow, then a presidential candidate, claimed that her family had over $800 million “in secret bank accounts abroad that she would give to the poor Filipinos if she wins the May presidential election.” That amount supposedly excluded funds that were previously identified as ill-gotten in Swiss bank accounts. Imelda said that even she was “not aware of the extent of [their] wealth,” further claiming that her husband’s money was a product of “diligence, hard work, foresight, entrepreneurship and God’s blessing.”

The Standard reported that Imelda showed the press a photocopy of a purported handwritten will of Marcos Sr. stating that “his worldly goods have been placed in the custody and for the disposition of the Marcos foundations [sic] dedicated to the welfare of the Filipino people.” Another article, published in Sol Jose Vanzi’s Philippine Headline News Online on April 15, 2004, dates this alleged “handwritten legacy” as being executed on April 9, 1973.

If true, then the wills Marcos executed in the 1980 leaving all of his wealth to members of his immediate family, superseded the 1973 one.

Still, Imelda insisted her husband wanted to leave all his wealth to the people. In December 1998, months after she withdrew from the presidential race to support the eventual winner, Joseph Estrada, Imelda testified during a senate hearing that she wanted the chamber’s help to “implement the last will and testament of the late President Marcos, to enlist assets in the hands of trustees, to implement the Marcos Humanitarian Foundation, so that we can help the country in our economic crisis and help the Filipino people in their agony and suffering.”

Imelda made the appeal after claiming in a series of articles published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer that her family “practically [owned] everything in the Philippines.”  During her 70th birthday a year later, before a cheering crowd in a church, she declared in Filipino that she was convinced Estrada would find a way to settle with the Marcoses and this would lead to the establishment of a Marcos Foundation to help the country.

In 2004, she and her children threw their support behind presidential candidate (and Estrada ally) Fernando Poe Jr., because, as per Imelda, “FPJ [will help implement] the last will of Ferdinand Marcos, which is to help the people even if he [Marcos] is already gone.” According to an April 2004 Philippine Daily Inquirer article, Imelda said “that if Poe won, the Marcoses would willingly give [their assets] to the government so he could use it for the people.”

Over time, Imelda’s claims became wilder becoming not only about distributing money, but also promising a stake for Filipinos in the fictitious deuterium deposits in the Philippine Deep.

These did not exactly jibe with statement made not only by her husband when  was still alive but also those made by Bongbong, especially when the family wanted to make compromise agreements with the  government. Before the Marcos patriarch died, according to various news accounts, the family, through alleged intermediaries, offered to give anywhere between $2.1 billion to $5 billion to the government so they could return to the Philippines. Former vice president Salvador Laurel maintained that the elder Marcos was willing to give 90% of his wealth which could have left the family $550 million.

But Marcos Sr. was a notoriously unreliable source regarding his wealth. In 1987, he was still outrightly denying that he had any Swiss bank accounts or hidden wealth. In the same year, in the infamous “Marcos Tapes” in which the exiled dictator was secretly recorded talking about a plan to invade the Philippines, Marcos Sr. mentioned that he had billions of U.S. dollars worth of gold, and that Bongbong knew where part of that hoard was. During a hearing on the Marcos tapes at  the Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs of the U.S. House of Representatives, Representative Jim Leach said that the Marcos gold, “while representing a monstrous theft, cannot possibly be of such monumental proportions.”

For his part, Bongbong has repeatedly asserted that his father made his money partly by trading in precious metals although this has never been judicially acknowledged in the Philippines. More importantly, Bongbong deviated from his mother’s claims by insisting that compromising or sharing their wealth with the government was not a means to fulfill some philanthropic final wish of his father but a way for their family to be rid of their remaining cases in one fell swoop.

A November 2, 1997 article published in the Filipino Express stated that Bongbong, then on hiatus from politics after failing to win a senate seat in 1995, wanted to compromise only to give his family immunity. That was the whole point, he stated; “Kaya namin ginagawa ito para malinis na ang lahat, mawala na ang kaso, maayos na ang hatian sa alleged Marcos assets.” He also insisted that there was no more hidden wealth beyond what had already been identified in the frozen Swiss bank accounts. If anyone could find more, it’s theirs, he effectively said.

An earlier settlement try in 1993 was junked by the Philippine Supreme Court for several reasons, including the impossibility of granting the Marcoses immunity (since they were the principal defendants in numerous cases and would not stand as  witness against other defendants) and the fact that then president, Fidel Ramos was not a signatory to the agreement between PCGG and the Marcoses.

By 1997, Ramos, with support from the majority of the senate, asked Congress for a law allowing him to enter into a compromise with the Marcoses following a proposal from Bongbong, according to an October 1997 South China Morning Post article.  While the senate, based on a Manila Standard article published that same month, was willing to do that or provide, in the words of the late senator Miriam Defensor Santiago, a (limited) special power of attorney, it did not happen.

Soon after Estrada became president, he reiterated his campaign trail declaration that he wanted to give executive clemency to Imelda, but as reported in a January 1999 Xinhua News Agency article, the family must have a united voice. Perhaps Estrada noted the disconnect between Imelda’s claims of unfathomable wealth for the people and Bongbong’s more pragmatic stance. He was mainly talking to Bongbong and no agreement was reached.

Bongbong made it seem that it was only through a compromise that the government could get its hands on the Swiss funds, but a condition for the transfer of the money was a final judgment of conviction on  the Marcoses. By the early 2000s, this  had not been met technically but  all that was really necessary for the transfer was the 2003 Supreme Court decision, written by Chief Justice Corona, declaring the wealth in excess of the Marcoses’ legitimate income as ill-gotten. By then, the funds had reached over $650 million.

THE BASIS OF LOYALIST LOYALTY?

While Bongbong’s ultimately unsuccessful attempts to reach a compromise with the government appealed to decision makers, especially those frustrated with a supposedly underperforming PCGG and the Marcoses’ legal maneuverings, it was Imelda’s more fantastic claims that drew many die-hard loyalists to the family’s side. FIRM 24-K would hold on to Imelda’s promise of wealth distribution even through the last decade, when their president, Artemio Lachica, claimed that the share of its members in the Marcos wealth would only be given once the Marcoses get what they are fighting for. Apparently, some FIRM 24-K’s  members were promised a million pesos for participating in the organization’s tree-planting program where they had to pay for the seedlings,  according to a 2022 article published in the Philippine Star after the elections.

There are other groups like FIRM 24-K. In a November 2017 Facebook post, popular pro-Marcos vlogger Maharlika said she was not connected to what she labeled a scammer group, Maharlika Marcos Loyalist, Inc., which, like FIRM 24-K, collected fees while promising to give money or wealth. Photo/video evidence show that this group, Inc. was among the organizers of Imelda’s ill-fated 90th birthday celebration in July 2019 at the Ynares Stadium in Pasig where hundreds suffered food poisoning.

Both groups are recognized by the Marcoses. One of FIRM 24-K’s Facebook pages uploaded two videos showing that they can legitimately claim to have pushed Bongbong to run for national office again in the 2010 elections where he won a seat in the Senate, and another one that had Imelda pledging a P1 million seed fund to its “Anima Foundation.”  Such Marcos-sanctioned groups have spun off into other organizations claiming to help give people a stake in the Marcos wealth but whose direct ties to the family, if any, are not readily apparent. An example is the scammer group Bullion Buyer Ltd., which organized an event in 2017 where thousands flocked to UP Los Baños to claim—unsuccessfully—a few thousand pesos allegedly from the Marcos’s coffers.

It is difficult to ascertain how many voted for Bongbong with the belief that he would pave the way for mass wealth distribution. Based on Google Trends, there was a spike in search interest on the late dictator’s last will and testament days after Bongbong’s win became a certainty. FIRM 24-K alone claims millions of members nationwide. The program at the UPLB event claimed that Bullion Buyer Ltd.  already had over 281,000 beneficiaries. And no matter how many times these are debunked, sometimes by the Marcoses themselves, claims that the family would give away either a share in their “Tallano gold” or help people monetize their claims to “deuterium deposits” under a Bongbong Marcos presidency remain popular.

But what if this does not happen?

In 2002, according to a November 10 Inquirer article, several long-time loyalists claimed that they were severing ties with the Marcos widow — and preparing a book that would show the “real Imelda”— after it was said that she had settled with the Cojuangcos on the ownership of the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. for a staggering P2 billion. Among these loyalists were surprisingly, Cobarrubias, and Gadi. Their gripe? Imelda was, as mentioned by a loyalist, “in a position and has the means to fulfill” her promise of “setting up a Marcos foundation to benefit the poor.”

Gadi was quoted by the Inquirer as saying that Imelda was “in a position to help her loyalists, but I see no sign on her part.” Things were so bad between Imelda and her former “groupies,” as a November 2002 Arab News article called them, that they started calling Imelda a liar, or “a master of acting and deception.” They were still angry at Imelda a year later, with no indication that the incredibly wealthy Antonio Vialogo, who funded Imelda’s 70th birthday bash in 1999, would throw another birthday party for the former first lady again.

But in the year before Bongbong became a senator, Imelda reconciled with Cobarrubias and company. All of them became the staunchest of Marcos supporters again, and their tell-all anti-Imelda book did not materialize. According to a Rappler report, Oscar Violago, Anthony’s father, contributed P15 million to Imee’s successful senate campaign in 2019. Cobarrubias, during her recent guesting in Gadi’s online program, happily talked about funding the production and publication of the pro-Marcos books of the Katarungan at Katotohanan (Truth and Justice) Foundation, Inc., such as Hubris: When States and Men Dare God – The Persecution of the Marcoses.

For some, money probably does help fuel loyalty to the Marcoses. Marcos “inheritance” or “biyaya/ayuda” scams persist to this day. Some are relatively unsophisticated, such as a recently debunked claim circulating online after the elections that Bongbong was giving aid in exchange for personal information. Others are utterly bizarre, such as at least two recent videos, with hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube alone, claiming that Marcos Sr. is still alive, and that the man himself, and not Bongbong, would bring prosperity to all.

Even Cobarrubias, in conversation with Gadi, said that the former president metaphorically rose from the dead (“bumangon tuloy si Ser”) and campaigned in the last election. Indeed faith, partly disinformation-driven, in a dead man who supposedly gave up his wealth for his people—all evidence to the contrary— is probably also difficult to shake off for many who had already invested so much in the Marcos cause. Millions, scammed or otherwise, are probably ecstatic about the Second Coming of Ferdinand Marcos –  Senior or Junior.

They helped put a Marcos back in Malacañang; will the Marcos heirs reward their faith?

Originally published by Vera Files on May 7, 2022.

If surveys on the fast-approaching elections hold, the Philippines will soon have a president who has difficulty discerning fact from pseudoscience — the way his mother also does.

On March 19, 2022, Martin Andanar, acting presidential spokesperson, asked Bongbong Marcos in an interview if he, like his mother, former first lady Imelda, “really believe[s] that there is deuterium in our country.”

This was his full reply:

Ah that, that’s not question, ep . . . people it’s been established that ah . . . especially, kasi ‘yung sa malalim, ah . . . nand’yan ‘yung Marianas Trench sa atin, nand’yan ‘yung sa . . . what—seven kilometers deep. Ah, that, that’s established that it, it belongs there—ah it belongs there—ah that it exists in those places. But it is something na, for, that, that, we will use for a hydrogen-based econ—ah energy economy. Ah . . . it will take time. Eh, for the future siguro p’wede nating tingnan nang mabuti ‘yan. Ito’y kasi ah . . . eh hydrogen is very clean, very green. Ah, ang ang ang ah . . . waste ng ng deuterium, pagka gumawa ka ng hydrogen, ginamit mo ‘yung hydrogen, ginamit mo ginawa mong fuel cell, ang lumalabas dyan, lang dyan is tubig. So walang, walang carbon ah . . . emissions ah . . . kaya’t malinis. But that’s for the future kasi it will require the same infrastructure that we now have for gasoline and for, ah . . . ano, for diesel, and for PNG, and LPG. All of these systems now took, what, over a hundred years to establish. Ah . . . kailangan magrere-adjust tayo. But I think because of the concerns with global warming, du’n ta . . . du’n talaga tayo papunta. At uhm . . . the time will come that we will start to shift to other alternative fuels, the greener fuels, and become a greener economy, we will have a greener system of energy. Nagsimula na, mula nung COP 26 na nagmeeting sa Edinburgh, na ang pinag—, binawasan ‘yung ah . . . pag ah . . . paggamit ng coal. Ang problema walang kapalit na renewable. Kaya tumaas ang presyo bigla. Kaya bumalik na naman ng kaunti dinagdagan na naman ng coal-fired, nga ga, ng kuryente na galing sa coal-fired at ah . . . kaya kailangan talaga natin babalansehin lahat ‘yan. That’s why deuterium is still very attractive ah . . . ah . . . attractive resource . . . ah para sa atin because hydrogen is, has been established, as a clean ah . . . as a clean alternative, a greener alternative to fossil fuels. So, yes, ah . . . ‘yung mother ko talaga malayo mag-ano ‘yan eh, malayo talaga mag-isip ‘yun, she’s very forward-thinking. So that’s, that was her thinking when she ah . . .  started to show an interest in the deuterium deposits that have been established around the Philippines.

Bongbong erred when he said that the Marianas Trench is seven kilometers deep (it’s 11.034), that COP 26 was held in Edinburgh (it was in Glasgow), or that the pursuit of a greener economy began with COP 26 (as quite clear in the name, it was the 26th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), and there is no mistaking his admiration for his “very forward-thinking” mother.

The son’s admiration for Imelda’s supposed prescience seemed to equal the intensity of his belief in deuterium. While a senator from 2010 until 2016, Bongbong filed two bills: Senate Bill 2593 on November 15, 2010  and SB 408 on July 3, 2013. These were identical bills for a Hydrogen Research and Development Center. Both died at the committee level.

The bills failed in their primary objective but succeeded in putting into the Senate’s legislative record, through the explanatory notes, this particular claim regarding deuterium: “Hydrogen is being processed from deuterium which is heavy water or hydrogen water without oxygen. This is obtained from the deep trenches of the world and the world’s largest deposit of deuterium is in the Philippines.”

Bongbong, while running for vice president in 2016, referenced SB 2593 in a press release  to burnish his credentials as an advocate of alternative energy sources.

Mother and son’s conviction that the country has access to unparalleled deuterium deposits goes against peer-reviewed scientific research.  At least one public historian, scientists, and journalists, have used that research to cure those who suffer from what is called “deuterium delirium,” but debunking does not always work in this age of disinformation.

THE SCAM BEGINS

When the first claims on deuterium deposits in the Philippines appeared in local media after the 1986 EDSA Revolution, the naturally-occurring hydrogen isotope was touted to be the resource that would solve the country’s economic woes.

At the time, everyone was aware of the enormous debt that the Marcoses burdened the country with before they were deposed. In a series of online articles about the deuterium hoax, the late historian Bob Couttie found an article released in August 1987 by the Media Mindanao News Service.

The article featured a local “scientist,” Cesar Escosa, who believed the “Philippine Deep in Surigao [del] Norte holds the largest deposit of deuterium.” He said this could be mined to “pay all [the country’s] foreign debts,” allow overseas Filipino workers to come home to “higher paying jobs,” and provide the world with an inexhaustible source of fuel. Escosa supposedly claimed that Washington and then president Cory Aquino was discussing the “deuterium project” as early as March 1986.

Escosa’s claims have not been backed by any reliable source.

Before he was declared a nuisance candidate when he tried to run for senator in 2001, Escosa said he was an accountant.  He was also declared a nuisance when he filed his certificate of candidacy in the 1998 presidential race.

But there were other deuterium believers, notably in the House of Representatives. In August 1987, Rep. Mario S. Ty of Surigao filed House Resolution No. 98 requesting the “Departments of Environment and Natural Resources and Other Concerned Agencies of the Government to Conduct Feasibility Studies and Surveys to Determine the Presence of Deuterium Off the Coast of Surigao in Aid of Legislation.” In the same month, Glenda Ecleo of Dinagat filed HB 483 establishing the Philippine Deuterium Development Authority. Not to be outdone, Ty filed a similar bill.

Both died at the committee level.

In response to “numerous inquiries,” likely stemming from Escosa’s claims and these legislative filings, the Nonconventional Resources Division (NCRD) of what was then called the Bureau of Energy Development, Office of Energy Affairs (OEA), released a backgrounder entitled “Deuterium Explained” in the April-September 1987 issue of the NCRD newsletter Energy Alternatives.

In fairly accessible language, the NCRD affirmed that deuterium, “in combination with hydrogen, is already a recognized source of energy,” and that hydrogen was at the time “already being used as fuel for rockets and spacecrafts” and was “a feasible alternative to hydrocarbon (oil) fuel.”

But the NCRD cited a number of caveats: deuterium extraction can be done through electrolysis, but the process is expensive; and nuclear fusion, the process through which deuterium can become a “tremendous source of energy,” was (and still is) “very much in the research phase.”

The NCRD also revealed what scientists had determined after the discovery of deuterium in 1931: all water has deuterium.

“Deuterium exists in all types of water such as seawater, river water, ground water, rain and snow,” it said, adding that in water, “there is one deuterium atom for every 6,700 atoms of hydrogen.”

In NCRD’s view, deuterium production was not a bad venture—if very expensive and likely impractical—for the Philippine government to go into, but this should not be done on the belief that there is more deuterium in Philippine waters than anywhere else.

The NCRD made this more explicit in an article titled “OEA Paper Debunks Deuterium Myth” in the October-December 1988 issue of Energy Alternatives. Citing OEA Energy Research Laboratory chief Zalson Espino and Nonconventional Resources Division chief Conrado Huruela, it stated that “scientific facts make it impossible for deuterium deposits to be lodged in the Philippine Deep.”

The article further stated that breaking up deuterium oxide or “heavy water” to obtain deuterium gas “requires electric current [i.e., electrolysis] and cannot be initiated in water simply by high pressure [i.e., at the bottom of the Philippine Deep].”

“Even if, by some natural process, deuterium gas gets isolated from water, its natural tendency would be to rise and escape into the atmosphere [not, say, stay in the ocean depths] because it is much lighter than water,” it continued.

“The claim, therefore, that deuterium can be mined from the Philippine Deep and used to generate electricity is utterly fallacious and without basis,” the piece concluded.

“Oceanographic hallucinations.” That was how Roger Posadas, a PhD in physics and former dean of the College of Science at the University of the Philippines, characterized Escosa’s deuterium claims in a March 15, 1988 report in the Manila Standard. He called Escosa a “pseudo-scienfic swindler.”

As noted by Rappler in a January 19, 2021 fact check, all this lines up completely with peer-reviewed papers published well before Escosa started appearing in the news, such as “Deuterium Content as a Parameter of Water Mass in the Ocean” by Yoshio Horibe and Nobuko Ogura in 1968. Another one published in 2012, “Isotope Composition and Volume of Earth’s Early Oceans,” affirmed that hydrogen isotopes actually rise — not sink – in the ocean.

Despite all this —and the much-publicized debunking of an alleged breakthrough “cold fusion” experiment involving deuterium conducted by American chemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons in 1989 — the scam went on.

In 1989, Tarlac Rep. Herminio Aquino accused Escosa of defrauding some 10,000 applicants in a deuterium mining project. The congressman said that Escosa’s firm charged P5 “for application forms” and P10 for notarization when it had “already been established that there are no deuterium deposits in the Philippines.”

ENTER THE MARCOSES

There is no credible proof that the Marcoses were already attached to deuterium claims while the family patriarch was still president. In the last book attributed to him, A Trilogy on the Transformation of Philippine Society (1988), the dictator very briefly mentioned deuterium as a possible energy resource.   In the portion on planned programs, Marcos Sr. said “oil exploitation and other indigenous energy deposits like coal, uranium and deuterium shall also be looked into.”

The deuterium dream was still alive in the early 1990s.  A story in the textbook Growing Up Gracefully (Rex Book Store, 1991) partly used the deuterium hoax to illustrate the value of the country’s natural resources. It said that deuterium was “like diesel oil and is used for cooking, lighting, and for transportation.”

“With our big deposit of deuterium,” a character in the story said “the Philippines could be one of the richest countries in the world.”

But by the late 1990s, deuterium was no joke to Imelda. Before withdraing from the 1998 presidential derby, she talked about deuterium as a possible solution to the country’s economic troubles. It is unclear where Imelda picked up this advocacy, but Escosa’s discussion on deuterium in his continued public appearances may have contributed to her “education” on the topic.

According to Couttie, “the deuterium scam was firmly affixed to the Marcoses and Imelda promoted it heavily through amenable media people” by 2004 as Imelda often talked about this in interviews with both local and foreign media.

Over time, Imelda and her allies started to claim that she owned the deuterium deposits or the rights to them.

HYDROSPHERE RESOURCES FOR MOTHERING, INC. 

What can be ascertained is that on March 31, 2005, a firm named Hydrosphere Resources for Mothering, Inc. applied for an offshore exploration permit in Davao Oriental. The following day, it also filed an application for a permit for the “exploration and development of gold, copper and other base metal resources” in the town of Gen. Luna, Surigao del Norte.

The firm’s address was 204 Mariano Marcos Street corner P. Guevarra Street, San Juan, Metro Manila— the main residence of the former first family before Marcos Sr. became president. The two documents are on display at the Batac World Peace Center/Marcos Photo Gallery, a museum Imelda set up near the Marcos Presidential Center/Mausoleum.

Both applications were denied, but another one was filed by Hydrosphere on April 5, 2005.  This time  it was for an exploration permit for  “gold, copper, platinum, tungsten, etc.” in Guian, Eastern Samar.”  This too was rejected because of the company’s failure to submit by the May 22, 2013 deadline the minimum capital requirements for mining applicants.

In short, Hydrosphere does not currently have any valid mining exploration permits on any of  these sites along the Philippine Trench on the country’s Pacific coast.

A map of the Philippines adorns the “Twin Mansion” in Cabuyao, Laguna, one of the Marcos properties sequestered by the Presidential Commission on Good Government but is curiously still sometimes used by the family. Online pictures show that the map depicts the Philippines’s GOD — Gold, Oil, Deuterium, with the “D”  located the “Phil. Trench, Deepest Part of the World.” Similar imagery can be found in Imelda’s Batac World Peace Center.

In Imelda: Mothering and Her Poetic and Creative Ideas in a Troubled World (2012), which is in many ways a rehash of Imelda’s other book Circles of Life, the former first lady tells the author, Cecilio Arillo, that deuterium is “the strategic energy of the future” and that “some people are already calling the Philippines as ‘God:’ gold, oil and deuterium.”

In a 2013 with Norman Pearlstine of Bloomberg Businessweek, Imelda claimed that she spent “millions of dollars a year to maintain her exclusive right to extract water from [the Philippine Trench] in the hope that having an abundance of deuterium can speed the development of advanced nuclear fusion reactors.”

Imelda’s Statements of Assets, Liabilities, and Net Worth when she was a member of Congress from 2010 to 2019 does not show any such payments.

The former first lady likewise said she had known about the deuterium deposits as early as the 1970s when Edward Teller, known as the Father of the Hydrogen Bomb, “persuaded her to develop her country’s deuterium in a 1971 visit to the Malacañang Palace.”

The register of Edward Teller Papers in the Hoover Institution Library & Archives in California shows that Teller, who died in 2003, visited the Philippines in 1981 to discuss matters such as nuclear fusion in conferences held in the country.

In later years, Imelda would drop Teller from her deuterium soliloquy and replace him with Harold Urey, “the discoverer of deuterium.” By this time, she claimed that it was Urey, who died in 1981, who informed her of the deuterium deposits in the Philippines.

Imelda, a notoriously unreliable narrator, repeatedly insists that Irving Berlin wrote the song “Heaven Watch the Philippines” specifically for her. The American composer himself denied this, according to a note in the interview of the Marcos couple published in the August 1987 issue of Playboy.

In the documentary The Kingmaker, Imelda says with a straight face that she visited the Calauit Safari Park after she returned from exile in 1991 and was saddened at what it had become. A caretaker interviewed in the documentary flatly denies this.

By 2015 Imelda and her son began doubling down on their deuterium claims.

In a video posted in one of the Facebook pages of the Marcos loyalist group Friends of Imelda Romualdez Marcos (FIRM), Imelda is seen hawking deuterium in, of all places, the wake of one of her most ardent supporters.

“[Mayroon] akong produkto na deuterium,” she says before the mourners that included the husband of the deceased. “Siya and magiging ating pang-gasolina . . . 20 centavos of deuterium is your fuel per month.”

Imelda said she would be meeting someone about deuterium the next day (the wake took place around late April-early May 2015).  She added that FIRM would be the “foundation of the mission for mothering world peace” and that they would bring peace on earth using deuterium.

Shortly after, Bongbong, in an interview in the June 29-July 6, 2015 issue of BizNews Asia, said that his “mother had access to deuterium deposits,” which had “bequeathed” to her grandchildren.

Imelda found new partners in deuterium ventures within the last seven years, including one with groups such as the MHLK (M for Maharlika) Foundation and the Official Maharlika Association (OMA) where she is “Chairman – Emeritus.”

A photograph of an OMA board meeting with Imelda at the helm can be seen on its website. In one video of an OMA event held in late 2019—shortly before the pandemic, and about a year after Imelda’s conviction for graft by the Sandiganbayan—she claimed that the “vision” of the deuterium project was “paradise regained unto infinity” and that, contrary to her earlier claims, she had been involved in deuterium, “for several decades, even before [she] was first lady.”

Beside her while she delivered her speech—where she also claimed that she seeded the money that gave birth to Silicon Valley—was businessman Paul Monozca, chairman and CEO of OMA and related firms Formula Green Corporation and Formula Green Foundation. In recent years, Monozca made the news—before actually making the news via OMA’s “affiliate,” Maharlika TV— because of his involvement in the controversial planned Coral World Park in Palawan.

A document titled “Maharlika Crypto Whitepaper 2020-2021: An Asset-Backed Cryptocurrency Issued by the Formula Green Foundation for Humanity” discusses yet another venture of the Maharlika/Monozca group: Maharlika Crypto, once also called Maharlika Coin or the MHLK-IRM (presumably Imelda Romualdez Marcos) crypto.

The white paper claims that this cryptocurrency—perhaps closer in description to a toke—is backed up by the “Global Assets and Resources” of the “Maharlika Trust,” “the second largest philanthropic fund in the world,” and the “raw material of fusion and its futures.” These “futures” refer partly to Formula Green’s “concessions of the world’s largest deposit of the raw material of fusion energy called ‘Deuterium’ and stakes in the industry verticals including hydrogen economy.”

OMA is supposed to be a “movement of 10 million followers.” Among its “eight key groups” is the “Talleano Estate (direct heir).” While the Marcoses have repeatedly denied having ties to the Tallanos and the Tallano gold claim, the tale of the Kingdom of Maharlika ruled by the Tallanos, purported owners of the entire Philippine archipelago, appears on the website of the Marcos-affiliated party Kilusang Bagong Lipunan.

A further online search leads to a central document of the Tallano myth, the alleged Original Certificate of Title of the whole Philippines. An annotation in this “OCT-04”—several times proven fake—shows another connection of the myth to deuterium fakery: purportedly made in 1941, ten years after the discovery of deuterium.  The annotation states that “Dr. H. F. Bain, Mining Affair Adviser to the Philippine Commonwealth” found “in the area 75 kilometers Southeast of Mindanao, a large undeterminable volume of Deuterium.”

It appears that practically every major Marcos-related group—from FIRM, which claimed in 2019 to have eight million members to the supposedly 10-million strong OMA— are closely linked to Imelda’s deuterium claims.

The Marcoses are also connected to other groups giving away deuterium share certificates: the Royal Alpha Omega Ring Trading Corporation and Philippine Deuterium Development Management Corporation. In April 2018, then Ilocos Norte governor Imee Marcos attended the birthday of the group’s founding chairman, Mahal na Hari (MNH) Filemon O. Reambonanza.

Even one of Imelda’s closest supporters and founder of Marcos Loyalists for God, Country and People, Serafia “Cherry” Cobarrubias, is listed as a board member of the MHLK Foundation. Yet another staunch Marcos defender, Rita Gadi, in the June 9, 2020 episode of her online program The Rita Gadi Hour, claimed that in the middle of the pandemic, Imelda was “finishing” (“tinatapos na”) the deuterium project which had a permit from the government.

Gadi said Imelda already had the instrument needed to extract deuterium from the Philippine Deep and only needed investments “na kanyang inaayos ngayon.”  She repeated Imelda’s line about “paradise regained unto infinity,” and expressed belief that Imelda may be able to finish her deuterium project within that year and then, “maibibigay na niya sa atin sa Pilipinas ‘yang deuterium, the fusion of water and the energy.”    

Of course, 2020 came and went, but deuterium from the Philippine Deep remains a pipe dream.

WHAT’S IN IT FOR THE MARCOSES

Peddling the lies about deuterium have served the purpose of the Marcos family which has been clawing their way back into power over the last three decades.

After returning from exile, Imelda seemed to have latched on to Escosa’s deuterium claims. The imagined deuterium riches of the country would effectively undo the two most damaging legacies of the Marcos dictatorship: a plundered economy and a generation of Filipinos sent into a diaspora to earn a living.

From a propaganda point of view, the deuterium hoax has detracted from public discussions the Marcos plunder — that it is permissible to abandon the effort to recover their ill-gotten wealth since deuterium’s promised bounty would replenish what was stolen from the country’s coffers. Imelda said as much in a February 25, 2006 feature on her by The Independent.

“Our problems are temporary. All I am waiting for is for my lawyers to end these cases against me and I will bring about a new economic order,” she declared.

Barely questioned by media and scientists on this, both Imelda and Bongbong continue to use the deuterium hoax in projecting themselves as advocates for a green environment and hope for the country.  The promise of bounty —be it the Yamashita treasure, the Tallano gold, or deuterium in the Philippine Trench — calls for the surrender of the people’s trust to the machinations of the Marcoses.

It is the ultimate mother-and-son scam.

Originally published by Vera Files on September 29, 2019.

VICENTE AND FERDINAND

Sino sa inyo ang nagsuporta sa akin? Ilan lang? Sino? One or two. Ilan lang? Four, five six? Wala akong barangay captain, wala akong congressman, wala akong pera. Si Imee [Marcos] pa ang nagbigay. Sabi niya inutang daw niya. Si Imee supported me.

Pres. Rodrigo Duterte
Oct. 4, 2016

These statements by President Rodrigo Duterte, made during a meeting with local
officials of Luzon at the Dusit Thani Hotel in Makati City on October 4, 2016, are puzzling. For one, Duterte seems to have forgotten that one of the earliest “Duterte for President” groups was launched by barangay captains from Davao City in October 2014. For another, as reported by various media outlets, Imee Marcos is not listed in Duterte’s Statement of Contributions and Expenditures. However, as pointed out by Vera Files, the biggest contributor to Duterte’s campaign was Antonio “Tonyboy” Floirendo Jr., who was “among the prime movers of the Alyansa ng Mga Duterte at Bongbong (ALDUB), a
group that campaigned for a Duterte-Bongbong Marcos tandem.”

Antonio Sr., Floirendo’s father, was a known Marcos crony. He was chairman of the
Marcos administration party Kilusang Bagong Lipunan in the Davao Region, a position that, based on other files in the custody of the Presidential Commission on Good Government, he used to lobby for appointments of local officials in his domain.

Antonio Floirendo Sr. with Ferdinand Marcos, from Notes on the New Society II: The
Rebellion of the Poor by Ferdinand Marcos, 1976

Are there any available documents or accounts showing the Dutertes and the Marcoses
had a very close personal relationship prior to the leadup to the 2016 elections? In an academic workshop last year, a former journalist claimed that he had never known Duterte to praise Marcos when he was mayor of Davao City in the 1990s. What do we really know
about the purported ties of these political families?

There is adequate evidence to show that the political fortunes of the Dutertes have
been intimately tied with those of the Marcoses for decades, but insufficient evidence to show that the former were loyal to Ferdinand Marcos well before he became president. Among the few who seem to have the authority to claim the contrary is President Duterte. In his above-quoted October 2016 address, Duterte also said:

“I do not know if because you know my father was a Cabinet member of President
Marcos during the first term of his presidency. My father was one of the two who stood by Marcos in his darkest hours. Everybody was shifting to the Liberal at that time, kay Diosdado Macapagal. And it was only [Zamboanga del Sur Governor Bienvenido] Ebarle and my father who stood by Marcos.”

Again, the president’s meandering way of speaking aside, those claims are
confusing, given the facts of Philippine political history.

Vicente Duterte. from the 1967 Philippine Officials Review

Then Senate President Ferdinand Marcos defected to the Nacionalista Party in
1964, after it became clear that President Diosdado Macapagal would not honor the well-documented promise he had made to let Marcos be the standard bearer of the Liberal Party in 1965. There were, indeed, defections from NP to LP between 1964 and 1965, but the switching at that time did not result in only two incumbent governors from
Mindanao staying with the NP. The mass switching that led to that happened earlier, within the first year of the Macapagal administration, a development in keeping with the political
traditions practiced in the Philippines until today.

Was Vicente Duterte ever strongly identified with Ferdinand Marcos, who appointed
him Secretary of General Services on December 30, 1965? Tom Sykes, in his 2018 book The Realm of the Punisher: Travels in Duterte’s Philippines, writes: “Vicente didn’t take to national politics [after his appointment as General Services secretary] and soon went
back to practicing law in Davao. On 21 February 1968, he collapsed in court from heart failure and died.” Sykes’ information on Vicente’s date and manner of death appear to be correct. However, Vicente did not leave Marcos’ cabinet simply to return to private
practice.

In June 1967, President Marcos signed Republic Act No. 4867, splitting the undivided Province of Davao into Davao del Norte, Davao del Sur, and Davao Oriental. An election was held on November 14 of the same year for the representatives of Davao del Sur and Davao Oriental, coinciding with the 1967 midterm election. Vicente ran against two
other Nacionalistas for the congressional seat of Davao del Sur. Artemio Al. Loyola, the official Nacionalista candidate and long-time member of the Davao Press Club, won; Vicente, who was still a member of the NP but ran as an independent, trailed the winner by over 8,000 votes.

The loss—his first and only—must have been devastating to Vicente. Four years earlier, he won his second elected term as governor of the Province of Davao, beating two LP candidates.

But if Vicente had enjoyed Marcos’ support, why was he not an official NP candidate in 1967? If the account of Rodrigo’s sister Eleanor “Baby” Duterte, in the I-Witness documentary “People Power sa Davao” is to be believed, Vicente actually did not leave Marcos’ cabinet in the best of terms. According to Eleanor, her father was fed up with the corruption he had witnessed in Malacañang under Marcos.

But Marcos must have trusted Vicente, who as Secretary of General Services would have
had to deal with government suppliers and contractors constantly as well as sensitive communications that went through his department. Vicente’s association with Davao may have also played a role in the decision to bring him to Malacañang. The first two who occupied that position before Vicente came from Mindanao, and the appointment arguably had been seen as one for Mindanawon politicians. Vicente’s replacement was Salih Ututalam from Sulu.

But even with the power and trust he was given, was Vicente ever personally loyal to
Marcos? In his profile in the 1967 Philippine Officials Review, Vicente is described thusly:

During his incumbency as Davao governor, he was once cited as one of the
“Outstanding Governors” of the Philippines. Twice offered study-travel grants to observe the progress of community development in Thailand and Israel, he declined both as a matter of conviction and principle for he was then in the opposition party. At the height
of the Liberal Party power, it was his distinction to be the only Nacionalista governor in Mindanao who did not change party affiliation for personal, political convenience or even in the face of presidential pressure.

Based on this, it can be surmised that the loyalty President Duterte was alluding to in
October 2016 was not tantamount to allegiance to Marcos, who was still a Liberal when that party was dominant. Vicente was, unlike his many flip-flopping compatriots, a true Nacionalista stalwart, who, either because of his own political ambitions or because he did not see eye to eye with his party’s turncoat leader, decided to return from Malacañang to Davao, where he probably thought that he was still, according to his 1967 profile, seen as someone who “rendered personalized service to his constituents” and had “humble, modest and unassuming self-qualities” that “endeared him to his legion of friends and admirers.”

While campaigning in Batac, Ilocos Norte in February 2016, Rodrigo was quoted as
saying, “Speaking of loyalty and friendship, I am proud to say that my father was a close ally of President Marcos until his death.” Why did Rodrigo decide to package Vicente as a true-blue Marcos loyalist, despite evidence to the contrary? Were the votes of those who love the Marcoses worth bending the truth about Vicente?

THE YELLOW-LOYALIST-LEFTIST CANDIDATE

Davao City was where Rodrigo Duterte cut his teeth as a politician, seeing up close conflicts ranging from squabbles in the local judiciary to bloody urban warfare to the movements that led to the overthrow of the Marcos dictatorship.

His involvement in the last one has not been extensively discussed. Various sources note that he was identified with anti-Marcos forces because he is the son of Soledad “Soling” Duterte, a known leader of the opposition in Mindanao.

Soledad Duterte, Mr. & Ms. January 6, 1984

In 1977, according to historian Macario Tiu in the book Davao: Reconstructing
History from Text and Memory, church leaders in Davao “dared [to] initiate open protest actions” against the Marcos regime. The protests gradually intensified and became much more frequent after the assassination of Ninoy Aquino in August 1983. Soon after, there
sprung what was called the United Opposition of Region XI. According to Tiu, among the leaders of organizations forming the alliance was Soling Duterte of Kalikuhan alang sa Tawhanong Kagawasan, or KATAWHAN.

Ana Maria Clamor, in the monograph entitled NGO and PO Electoral Experiences: Documentation and Analysis, notes a major activity of this alliance was the almost weekly non-violent “Yellow Friday” marches in Davao City’s major thoroughfares, which “drew inspiration from the yellow confetti rallies in Makati.”

After the dust of the EDSA Revolution settled, President Corazon Aquino appointed
Zafiro Respicio officer-in-charge of Davao City. Soling Duterte’s son, Rodrigo, was appointed OIC vice mayor. There are sources who say that, at the time, Rodrigo was a logical choice for the position, even though he was a member of the Marcos-era bureaucracy.

Clamor, writing in 1993, says that Rodrigo was “one of the few city fiscals who actively supported the Cory-Doy [Laurel] ticket and joined the February 1986 revolution.” Adrian Chen, citing Luz Ilagan, in an article published in November 2016 for the New Yorker, wrote that “Duterte was able to help dissidents without compromising his position in the government” by ensuring that activists arrested in Davao City were not abused while under custody.

Davao-based journalist-turned-academic Jose Jowel Canuday, in an interview published in the September 2016-March 2017 issue of Social Transformations: Journal of the Global South, recalled that Rodrigo was always in the “parliament of the streets” in Davao, and that there were even claims he “arranged for meetings between foreign journalists and the [communist rebels, the New People’s Army].” Canuday, however, noted that older Davao journalists “initially failed to notice Duterte,” as he was “just in the sidelines” of the opposition.

Picture of Yellow Friday rally in Davao City, photographs by H.V. Paredes, from Mr. &
Ms., Nov. 4, 1983.

An interesting claim about Rodrigo during those times was made by presidential
sister Baby Duterte. In a documentary broadcast by GMA Network, she says Ferdinand Marcos himself called up Rodrigo to try to silence Soling, but the dutiful son refused. Historians Lisandro Claudio and Patricio Abinales took it as fact, stating in their chapter in the book A Duterte Reader that “the dictator believed he could call on Rodrigo to quell anti-government sentiment in Davao City, even if these protests were being led by the former’s own mother.”

It seems more likely that Rodrigo and Ferdinand Marcos never interacted after the
death of Rodrigo’s father. During the San Beda Law Grand Alumni Homecoming in November 26, 2016, while discussing Ferdinand Marcos’ recent burial in the Libingan ng mga Bayani, Duterte claimed that he had thrice tried to tender his resignation as a Davao City prosecutor because of his mother’s anti-government activities, but his requests were denied by his superior. He then segued into his family’s relationship with the Marcoses, stating that “there’s nothing close, we [himself or the Dutertes] did not have any dinner together [with the Marcoses] except one or two.”

SUPPORTED BY MARCOS’S POLITICAL ALLIES

Nevertheless, various sources note that he was supported by influential pro-Marcos
individuals when he ran for mayor of Davao City in the 1988 elections. David Timberman, in A Changeless Land: Continuity and Change in Philippine Politics, notes that Duterte won the mayoralty in 1988 because he was “backed by many of Davao’s traditional
politicians.” Clamor, citing a Mindanao Daily Mirror source, and a November 2005 article published in Davao Today name some of these politicians: former representative Manuel Garcia; Elias Lopez, KBL mayor of Davao City before the EDSA Revolution; and Alejandro
Almendras, Vicente’s cousin. Almendras’ friendship with Ferdinand Marcos blossomed while both of them were first-term senators between 1959 and 1965.

Almendras organized a political party called Lakas ng Dabaw for the 1988 elections. Clamor speculates that Rodrigo was chosen by the party as its candidate for mayor because “he had serious rifts” with Respicio, and also because of “personal ambition and consanguinial affinity with Almendras.” Davao Today states that Almendras “supported” Rodrigo’s candidacy, something that Soling initially did not; “one politician in the family is enough,” she said. Cory Aquino also did not support Rodrigo, endorsing Respicio
instead.

Rodrigo won in 1988, his first in an uninterrupted series of electoral victories. In addition to backing from pro-Marcos elites, Rodrigo, Clamor claims, won partly because of an “unholy alliance” between Rodrigo’s supporters and those of Jun Pala, another mayoral candidate and a key figure in the violent anti-communist rebel militia called Alsa Masa. To synthesize Clamor’s and Davao Today’s narratives, theirs was a divide-and-conquer tactic: Pala, secretly funded by Alemendras’ group, would take some of the votes that would have gone to Respicio, who supported Alsa Masa; Duterte, who was running with pro-Marcos
people but had a “leftist” reputation because of his mother, would take both pro-Marcos and anti-Marcos votes, as well as votes from areas under the control of the New People’s Army.

Clamor claims that the NPA’s support for Rodrigo came about due to its resentment
of Respicio’s alliance with Alsa Masa. Jonathan Miller, however, in his biography of Rodrigo, highlights the role in the would-be mayor’s 1988 campaign played by Leoncio “Jun” Evasco, an ex-NPA member detained for rebellion in North Cotabato and incarcerated and tortured in Davao City. Rodrigo was the public prosecutor who
succeeded in getting Evasco a five-year sentence, but, according to Miller, throughout his time in prison, Evasco was visited by Rodrigo. As with many other detained rebels, Evasco was freed after the EDSA Revolution. He became a key member of Samahan ng Ex-Detainees Laban sa Detensyon at Aresto, or SELDA, which later played an important
role in efforts to ensure that human rights violation victims of the Marcos regime are recognized and compensated. Rodrigo enticed Evasco to become his campaign manager in 1988; certainly, he continued to have some pull with the NPA at that time.

If Rodrigo (with Evasco) and Pala (with Almendras) did enact a vote division strategy, it worked like a charm: Rodrigo obtained 100,021 votes; Respicio, 93,676; Pala, 71,355; while two independent also-rans trailed behind. Clamor also reads the immediate concession of Pala—only a day after the then-manual elections—as further evidence that he ran for Rodrigo’s benefit.

THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY MAY BE MY FRIEND

According to a declassified United States Department of State cable dated May 8, 1992, then Mayor Rodrigo Duterte was among Davao City’s “most vocal” backers of 1992 presidential candidate and Marcos crony Eduardo “Danding” Cojuangco. That was even if Rodrigo was not a member of the Nationalist People’s Coalition, Cojuangco’s party.

Apparently, by 1992, Duterte did not see the need to stick close to the Davao-based Marcos loyalists who helped him win his first term as Davao City mayor in 1988. The 1992 cable highlighted how majority of Davaoeños “agree that Duterte’s Lakas ng Dabaw party is the best political machine in the city and will probably reelect the mayor.” But the presidential candidate that he backed lost. Cojuangco placed a respectable third in a seven-cornered fight, not only nationally, but also in Davao City.

In the 1998 elections, Duterte supported the presidential bid of Joseph Estrada,
long an ally of the Marcoses, who also had the backing of Cojuangco. The support was mutual; reportedly, Estrada even considered including Duterte in his senatorial line-up as early as in February 1997.

Ever the pragmatist, Duterte eventually allied himself with Gloria Arroyo, who succeeded Estrada after his “constructive resignation” in January 2001. In mid-2002, Duterte was appointed Arroyo’s anti-crime adviser. Apparently, the president wanted Duterte to have a bigger role in battling crime nationwide, but as reported by Philippine Star, Duterte said, “I don’t want to do anything other than [be an adviser] because I do not want to jeopardize my primary task as city mayor.” He was also quoted as saying that “I am only good in my
city or in the region but not in the entire country. I’m afraid I’d fail because I am not really cut out for it.”

Perhaps Duterte, already well-attuned to the volatility of Philippine politics, knew
that closely associating himself with any Philippine president might hinder the continuation of his dominance in Davao. Indeed, during the 2004 elections, Duterte’s association with Arroyo, who was gunning for a full elected term, was apparently severed and reconnected
numerous times.

During her elected term as president, Arroyo had become exceedingly unpopular, hounded by allegations of cheating in the 2004 elections, human rights violations, and corruption. Duterte once again did what a pragmatic politician would do. According to Grace Uddin of Davao Today, in April 2010, instead of endorsing Gilberto “Gibo” Teodoro Jr., Arroyo’s former secretary of defense and anointed successor, Duterte publicly declared his support for Senator Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III of the Liberal Party, who, through fortuitous circumstances, had become one of the most visible faces of the
anti-Arroyo political opposition. Uddin quoted Duterte as saying that “Aquino is easy to talk with. He is a principled man and clean.”

Carlos Isagani Zarate, then secretary general of the Union of Peoples’ Lawyers in Mindanao, told Uddin that Duterte chose the candidate likeliest to win, even if it meant supporting someone he had not been previously associated with over a friend like Estrada. Estrada at the time was attempting a Malacañang comeback. Indeed, the nationwide outpouring of grief for Noynoy’s mother, Cory Aquino, after her death on
August 1, 2009, made it clear that Noynoy was a viable contender for the presidency in 2010.

Even before Cory Aquino’s death, Duterte had already resolved to throw his lot with
the Liberal Party, which counted among its members Peter Tiu Laviña, one of his most trusted men. In a March 2015 article, Edwin Espejo stated that it was Duterte who took over as Davao City’s LP chair after Laviña bowed out in April 2009. In a November 18, 2009, press release from then Senator Mar Roxas’ office, Duterte was described as giving Roxas “the royal treatment” when the latter visited Davao City that month. The statement relayed that Duterte personally endorsed Roxas’ vice presidential bid because “limpio
ini”—“[Roxas] is clean.”

And so, for a brief moment in Philippine history, Duterte seemingly went full yellow, the color associated with the Aquinos and the non-violent protestors who fought against the Marcos dictatorship. Duterte even ran in 2010—for the position of vice mayor because of term limits—as a member of the Liberal Party. In an article posted on her blog in 2011, Raissa Robles pointed out that Duterte’s running mate, his daughter Sara, ran under PDP-Laban, whose vice presidential candidate, Jejomar Binay, was running with the Partido ng Masang Pilipino’s standard bearer, Estrada. Binay and Estrada were the top vote-getters in Davao City. In a way, the Dutertes were still shrewdly supporting a pro-Marcos presidential candidate while appearing to be very close to an anti-Marcos one.

THE 2016 DUTERTE-MARCOS CONVERGENCE

Besides having presidents of the Philippines as members, the Marcos and Duterte
families have many other things in common. For one, both families have patriarchs who had high positions in the undivided Province of Davao.

Wilson Leon Godshall, in the article “Can the Philippines Maintain Independence?,” published in Social Science in October 1935, says Mariano Marcos, Ferdinand’s father, was appointed Deputy-Governor-at-Large of Davao in 1931 by Governor-General Dwight F. Davis. Mariano’s duty, according to Godshall, “was to procure reliable and direct information concerning the state of affairs and to prepare a program to correct evils.” However, Godshall says when the acting governor was replaced, the new governor did not act upon Mariano Marcos’ intelligence or recommendations. Mariano eventually returned home to the Ilocos region, where he died during the Second World War. Thus, it was unlikely that he ever interacted with Vicente Duterte—appointed governor of Davao from 1958-1959 and elected to the same position from 1959-1965—as Vicente and his family were still in the Visayas before, during, and immediately after the war. Vicente was even appointed as acting mayor of Danao, Cebu—his birthplace—from January 1946 until July 1947, when Manuel Roxas appointed a fellow LP member in his place

Both the Marcoses and the Dutertes also have links with the wealthy Villar family and the Nacionalista Party, whose long-time president is former senator Manny Villar. To cite one instance of such ties, the 2019 senatorial campaign of Imee Marcos was partly financed by Manny Villar and his brother, Virgilio Villar, based on her Statement of Contributions and Expenditures. Duterte’s 2016 campaign was not personally financed by a Villar, but a stockholder in one of Villar’s companies, Marcelino C. Mendoza, was a top contributor.

Then President-elect Rody Duterte met with Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr., who lost in the vice-presidential race, in Davao City June 11, 2016.Photo by Kiwi Bulaclac of Davao City Mayor’s Office. From Mindanews.

During the 2016 campaign, Duterte said that if he failed to curb criminality and corruption in the country within three months of becoming president, he would let Bongbong Marcos take over. He might have been playing to the crowd; Duterte made these remarks while campaigning at the Mariano Marcos State University in Batac, Ilocos Norte. Still, many
latched on to the Duterte-Marcos tandem, even if they were not running mates. Even the influential Iglesia ni Cristo went for the pair, officially endorsing them only a few days before the elections.

The results of the exit poll conducted by TV5 and Social Weather Stations, as reported by Mahar Mangahas in his Philippine Daily Inquirer column on May 14, 2016, suggest that the unofficial tandem was beneficial to both Marcos and Duterte. According to Mangahas, of Duterte’s 40 percentage points of the vote, “only 13 came from voters of his co-candidate Alan Peter Cayetano; the bulk of 18 came from Marcos voters, and another 6 from [voters of Leni Robredo, running mate of administration candidate Mar Roxas].” If the exit poll was representative of the actual vote, then of the 16.6 million or so votes obtained by Duterte, about 45 percent, or nearly 7.5 million, came from those who also voted for Marcos.

The results of the 2016 elections show that the Duterte-Marcos tandem was truly
formidable. Why, then, did they not formally run together? A member of Bongbong Marcos media team told VERA Files during the 2016 election campaign that Bongbong’s first choice as presidential candidate was Duterte. But he got impatient with Duterte’s dilly-dallying on whether to run or not so he teamed up with former senator Miriam Santiago, who was already very sick at that time.

There are other explanations. One may be because some who wanted to vote for Marcos did not like Duterte. Anti-communists, for instance, did not seem keen on supporting someone with known ties to the left. When Duterte controversially permitted a hero’s burial in Davao City for New People’s Army leader Leoncio “Ka Parago” Pitao in July 2015, for example, he received condemnation from anti-communist lawmaker Pastor Alcover of the Alliance for Nationalism and Democracy.

Perhaps some in the Duterte camp also considered themselves fundamentally opposed to
the Marcoses. As previously discussed, Duterte had ties to the Liberal Party, even becoming the party’s chairman in Davao City at one time. There was even talk that Duterte might become the LP’s standard bearer before Mar Roxas was formally proclaimed the party’s candidate in July 2015.

Moreover, though Duterte-Marcos seemed like a logical combination—strongman from the
south, son of a strongman from the north— there is no indication that Rodrigo Duterte and the Marcoses were an “item” before 2015.

It is hard to identify people within the inner circle of Duterte’s 2016 campaign—excluding financial contributor Antonio Floirendo Jr.—who have a long history with the Marcoses. Many in that circle are identified with post-EDSA Revolution administrations such as Angelito Banayo, Jesus Dureza, Emmanuel Piñol, Carlos Dominguez III, and Jose
Calida. Of that group, Calida is known to have supported a Duterte-Marcos tandem during the 2016 campaign, and, being the son of Ilocano settlers in Davao, also has ties to the ethnolinguistic group most closely associated with the Marcoses. But he had also been
linked to Ramos and served under the Arroyo administration at a time when the Marcoses considered themselves members of the opposition.

One who may have been a link between the Dutertes and the Marcoses during the 2016
election season is Salvador Panelo, currently Duterte’s Presidential Legal Counsel and spokesperson. Panelo actually ran for senator under Imelda Marcos’ Kilusang Bagong Lipunan ticket in the 1992 elections. He placed 125th among 164 candidates. A United Press International report, dated August 2, 1995, names Panelo as “a lawyer for the Marcoses” at the time Bongbong Marcos had been convicted of tax evasion by the Quezon City Regional Trial Court. Much later, Panelo would also include the Dutertes among his clients.

In March 2015, Panelo was quoted by Rosalinda Orosa of Pilipino Star Ngayon as saying that he knew a presidentiable willing to give way to Duterte in 2016. The would-be candidate was not named, but Panelo said that he/she wanted to be Duterte’s running mate. One wonders if this was Panelo brokering a Duterte-Marcos pairing.

A few months later, on June 15, 2015, the country finally saw Duterte and Bongbong
Marcos together, as the latter was a guest in the former’s weekly television program Gikan sa Masa Para sa Masa. While the focus of the interview was largely federalism, they also talked about the 2016 elections. At one point, Marcos said, “sumusunod lang ako kay
Duterte. He is my mentor in politics. Ako’y tagahanga lang.” Duterte jokingly replied, “hindi ko tuloy malaman kung ako ba ang presidente o siya.”

That interview was sufficient to fuel talk of a Duterte-Marcos tandem. Alas, it was not meant to be. Panelo, one of the few in Malacañang who has unmistakable ties to both the Marcoses and the Dutertes, may have failed as matchmaker.

Imelda Marcos greets President Duterte after his State-of-the-Nation address in July 2016. Malacañang photo.

The double issue of Kasarinlan: Philippine Journal of Third World Studies, entitled “Marcos Pa Rin! Ang Mga Pamana at Sumpa ng Rehimeng Marcos,” notes that there may be two extremes among current Marcos loyalists: “(1) those who literally worship former president Ferdinand E. Marcos as a divine entity (absolute loyalty), and (2) those who at least appear loyal to him for electoral purposes (contingent loyalty).” The Dutertes seem to be closer to the latter. Duterte may have been the president who finally had Ferdinand Marcos buried in the Libingan ng mga Bayani, but that may not be a reliable indicator of who he is personally loyal to, given that he also allowed a hero’s burial for an NPA commander in 2015.

How long will the Dutertes see the Marcoses as politically useful? How long until the Marcoses fully reassert their continuing dominance in Philippine politics? Perhaps, while they are figuring out who will run as what in 2022, the rest of the electorate can find out if there are alternatives to political elites, whether from the north or the south, who have long worn out their welcome.

Originally published by Vera Files on November 27, 2020.

On November 9, 2020, between two destructive typhoons and amid a raging pandemic, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. filed a motion for inhibition against Supreme Court Associate Justice Marvic Leonen, who is tasked with writing the decision on Marcos’ poll protest against Vice President Leni Robredo.

Former senator Ferdinand Marcos, Jr.files a motion for the immediate inhibition of Associate Justice Marvic Leonen from his electoral protest, Nov. 9 2020. Photo from Bongbong Marcos FB page.

Leonen was biased against his family, claimed Marcos, whose petition was seconded by an allegedly unrelated one filed on the same day by Solicitor General Jose Calida, a known Marcos supporter. The Supreme Court, sitting as the Presidential Electoral Tribunal, disagreed, junking both petitions eight days after they were filed.

Marcos started to claim that he was being cheated even before the 2016 race for the vice presidency was officially called. It was only Bongbong’s second electoral loss; he handily won whenever he ran for executive or legislative positions in Ilocos Norte, for decades a Marcos bailiwick. He placed seventh in the 2010 senate election, giving him his first and thus far only national position.

His 1995 senate run was far less successful. He placed in the bottom (losing) half of a thirty-person race. The winning circle was dominated by candidates of the Fidel Ramos administration’s Lakas-Laban coalition, including Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, the election’s topnotcher. Nikki Coseteng, Gringo Honasan, and Miriam Defensor Santiago were the only opposition candidates who won seats in the Senate.

Honasan and Santiago supported Bongbong’s claim that the 1995 polls were tainted with “widespread fraud and trending,” as reported by the Manila Standard on May 9, 1995, the day after the elections. The article quoted Marcos as claiming in a press conference that a “highly placed cabal has been orchestrating a bogus quick count and propagating election results based only on tallies favorable to the administration candidates.” He reportedly said there would be “social unrest” if the Ramos administration “succeeds in defrauding the electorate and frustrating the will of the people.” Marcos formally asked the Commission on Elections to stop what he called an “unauthorized and unofficial quick count.” The same article quoted the administration coalition’s spokesman Ruben Torres, who thought that “young Marcos was seeing ‘ghosts’ of his father’s election machinery,” and who noted that pre-election surveys showed Bongbong was never a popular choice of the electorate at the time.

As reported on May 20, 1995 by the Standard, Marcos later asked for a suspension of the official Comelec canvass, citing irregularities such as “point shaving,” incorrect tabulations, and vote buying. He claimed to have lost many votes to two candidates in particular: topnotcher Macapagal-Arroyo and third placer Ramon Magsaysay, Jr., and that the cheating was within the precinct and provincial levels. The report said Bongbong “insisted that ‘two or three people’ were involved in the conspiracy to ease him out of the winners circle [but] he could not name them at [that] point as his group was still gathering evidence.” By then, only six out of 98 certificates of canvass had yet to be tallied, and Marcos was in 16th place.

Nothing came of Bongbong’s complaints, and the unrest he foresaw did not materialize. He was elected Ilocos Norte governor in 1998, a position he held for nine years.

Bongbong was not the first Marcos to cry fraud after losing an election for the first time under the 1987 Constitution. Imelda, his mother, was confident that she would win the seven-way race for the presidency in 1992. When it became evident that she would become an also-ran after the counting of votes was under way, she cried fraud. As reported by the Standard on May 17, 1992, Imelda held a press conference at the Philippine Plaza Hotel, during which she alleged “systematic and widespread cheating in the Philippine presidential elections” and that she planned to “boycott all court proceedings against her” as a form of “personal civil disobedience.”

A Reuters article published on May 16, 1992 in American and Canadian newspapers quoted Imelda as also saying: “Deep in our hearts we know we won, although subsequent events indicate that many of the ballots were not credited to me.” About a month later, an Associated Press story carried by various American papers reported that Imelda finally conceded and “threw her support behind the front-runner,” Fidel Ramos.

A few years later, she won her first post-EDSA Revolution position. According to a Reuters article that came out in the Standard on May 13, 1995, when Imelda was on the cusp of officially winning as representative of the first district of Leyte, her home province, she reportedly declared, “We received an overwhelming, undeniable majority. We won.” But, with her son’s chances of becoming senator at the time growing slimmer by the day, she also stated, “There are those who will stop at nothing to keep the people from electing the Marcoses.”

Interestingly, there have been times when the Marcoses claimed outright that elections in the country were tainted with fraud—committed by people on their opponents’ side and, by their own admission, their own—but they accepted the results without contest because the results were seemingly in their favor.

In January 1978, President Ferdinand Marcos announced that an election for the members of an Interim Batasang Pambansa, or IBP would be held in April that year. The election for the IBP’s regional representatives was held on April 7, 1978. Marcos’ Kilusang Bagong Lipunan (KBL) coalition won the overwhelming majority of IBP seats. The opposition coalition Lakas ng Bayan (later the “Laban” in PDP-Laban), whose leadership included the then-detained Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, Jr., did not win a post, even after their decision to contest only the twenty-one seats available in Metro Manila.

That votes were cast for opposition candidates, however, bothered Marcos. As the ballots were being tallied, he ordered a survey “to determine why votes were cast against the administration,” according to an Associated Press article. In the same news conference, Marcos claimed that electoral fraud “was done on both sides,” adding, however, that such fraud was “on a small scale and certainly not on a scale to affect the election.” The same AP article said Marcos critic Jovito Salonga disagreed with this assessment, noting that people did not visibly celebrate KBL’s victory because they felt “like they’ve been cheated.”

After the 1978 elections, Marcos became “President-Prime Minister” until 1981, the year he lifted martial law, but retained his power to issue decrees. That year, Marcos was elected to serve as president with a six-year term, in accordance with the amended 1973 Constitution. The opposition boycotted the polls.

Another election, this time for members of the Regular Batasang Pambansa, was held in 1984. Again, KBL became the majority party, though the opposition, strengthened in no small measure by Ninoy Aquino’s assassination the year before, won a third of the available seats. Among the winning candidates was Imee Marcos, the president’s daughter, elected representative of Ilocos Norte’s second district. She held that seat until the EDSA Revolution.

Days before her father’s ouster, member of parliament Imee claimed that “there was fraud on both sides” during the 1986 snap presidential election, of which the Comelec declared Marcos the winner against Corazon Aquino. (The count by the Comelec-accredited monitor, the National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections, said otherwise). Imee said this while still insisting to the Straits Times in Singapore that the election was a “clean and relatively peaceful one.” She said fraud occurred “because [the] election was such an emotion-charged and keenly contested one,” but that “only fraud on the part of the administration was given full media treatment.”

Imee’s father echoed her statements over a year later in an interview he and Imelda gave to Playboy while they were in exile in Hawaii. The August 1987 U.S. issue of Playboy quoted Marcos as saying: “There was fraud on both sides. But mine was not massive.”

However, Marcos and his subordinates had, by then, been linked to significant electoral fraud. In a press conference on February 22, 1986, at the height of the EDSA revolt, then Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile admitted that, in his own region, he knew “that we cheated the elections to the extent of 350,000 votes.” This was preceded by the famous quick count walkout on February 9, 1986 of 35 Comelec programmers, whose tallies of reported returns did not match what was displayed on the tally boards being broadcast on national television.

As reported by Seth Mydans of the New York Times on February 10, 1986, a delegation of 44 election observers from 19 countries noted that “electoral anomalies which we have witnessed are serious and could well have an impact upon the final result,” and that these anomalies included “vote-buying, intimidation and lack of respect for electoral procedures.” According to Mydans, the observers “had seen no instances of fraud committed by Mrs. Aquino’s supporters.”

Ferdinand always claimed that he won legitimately. In a press conference in Malacanang on February 11, 1986, he parried a claim made by a foreign journalist that the closeness of the vote showed that he was, in fact, losing his mandate.

“Voters that supported me are the poorer classes of our people, and those are the people who will do the fighting against the communists,” he said. “It’s not the elite, the elite that seems to have supported my opponent.”

It was widely reported, in articles of the Associated Press and the New York Times, that on the eve of the elections, bags of rice, marked “Gift From the President,” were being handed out by Marcos supporters. On the same day, according to the AP, “Pro-Marcos newspapers ran full-page announcements that said the government food market was offering big discounts on items ranging from ketchup to laundry soap.”

Less well-known today are the reported shenanigans during the 1978 IBP elections. Reuben Canoy, in his book The Counterfeit Revolution, mentioned, among others, a claim that during the 1978 polls, Las Piñas mayor and Marcos loyalist Filemon Aguilar’s men pointed their guns at the LABAN poll watchers in his territory and sent them home. The Citizens’ Report on the First Election Under Martial Law in the Philippines by the Ecumenical Crusade for a Conscienticized Electorate detailed claims that both LABAN and Kilusang Bagong Lipunan watchers were kept from entering precincts in Las Piñas, and that after the polls closed at 5:00 PM, Aguilar himself stuffed the ballot boxes with prepared ballots for Marcos’ KBL.

Despite such alleged irregularities, according to Agence-France Presse, on April 8, 1978, a day after the election, Marcos had announced “a clean government sweep in the parliamentary elections in Manila and a swift crackdown if violent opposition protest demonstrations should occur.” Comelec had not even finished their official canvass by then. So intent was he in securing a win and projecting at home and abroad that the opposition had little to no influence.

Regardless of the outcome of Bongbong’s poll protest, he will likely still have the support of entrenched political dynasties with members in the highest tier of the Philippine political hierarchy—including the Dutertes and the Aguilars, among whom are Filemon’s daughter, Senator Cynthia Aguilar Villar—come 2022, when Bongbong says he will run for another national position. But will such support translate to a resounding electoral victory if Marcos’ loss to Robredo is confirmed with finality?

The sizable Marcos loyalist forces will not care. They believe that Ferdinand Marcos legitimately won all elections held while he was president, including the 1986 snap election. They joined Imelda’s protests in 1992 and Bongbong’s complaint in 1995. They echo on social media whatever the Marcoses say about his ongoing electoral protest, including claims about Justice Leonen. They find a Marcos loss unimaginable—all other evidence to the contrary.

Campaign letter of Mariano Marcos, 1936 (In Ilocano) (from the digitized PCGG files)

Indeed, before Ferdinand Marcos launched his political career in 1949, his father Mariano Marcos was known for losing in elections—badly. Mariano was twice elected representative of the second district of Ilocos Norte in the pre-Commonwealth House of Representatives, but lost a bid for a third term to Emilio Medina. In 1934, Mariano tried to win back the congressional seat, but lost to Julio Nalundasan. In 1935, Mariano and Nalundasan ran against each other to be the representative of Ilocos Norte’s second district in the Commonwealth-era National Assembly. Again, Nalundasan won, handing Mariano a third successive electoral loss. Nalundasan was murdered days after winning, and another election was held in 1936 to determine the successor. Mariano lost a fourth time; the winner, Ulpiano Arzadon, won by a landslide—over 7,400 votes to Mariano’s 2,507.

According to Arzadon in an article published in the Tribune on September 13, 1936, nearly two months after he was elected, certain accusations made by Mariano against him that were published in Manila dailies “constitute a series of insults to the electorate” of Ilocos Norte. Arzadon said that his “decisive triumph in each and every municipality within the second district of Ilocos Norte,” including Marcos’ home town, “is an unequivocal expression of the will of my province that Mr. Marcos has completely been repudiated by the electorate.”

Mariano did not run in the 1938 elections, the year he and three of his relatives, including his son Ferdinand, became prime suspects in Nalundasan’s murder. All were eventually acquitted upon appeal, although Ferdinand would keep fending off accusations of involvement.

Left, Marcoses in court, 1940. From the Sunday Tribune, 13 October 1940 (downloaded from Trove/National Library of Australia). Right, cover of “Was Ferdinand Marcos Responsible for the Death of Nalundasan?” book published in time for the 1965 elections, written by Marcos’s lawyer, Vicente Francisco (Third World Studies file)

According to guerilla leader Jose Llanes, in the May 14, 1945 supplement to his May 3, 1945 Report on Ilocos Norte to the Secretary of the Interior, “Ilocos Norte has always been in political turmoil before the outbreak of the [Second World War]. Politicians there kill one another, e.g. the unsolved murder of the late Rep. Julio Nalundasan. Political elections are characterized by defamations and mud-slinging.” Llanes added: “Men involved in such gains do not hesitate to resort to any means to achieve political ends, even murder, as shown in the murder of Rep. Nalundasan. One better proof is the collaboration of political lame ducks.” Among these collaborators, Llanes labeled Mariano Marcos as a “pro-Jap spy.” Ferdinand would insist after the war that Mariano in fact defied the Japanese and was killed by them.

The roundly rejected candidate Mariano now has a university with a sprawling campus named after him in his hometown in Batac, Ilocos Norte, thanks to his son Ferdinand, who decreed the creation of the Mariano Marcos State University on January 6, 1978. Many more streets and institutions were named after Mariano during his son’s rule, as if to ensure that Mariano’s previous ignominy would be buried under steel and concrete.

One wonders if Bongbong’s insistence that he won the vice presidency is intended to help ensure that he could someday do for Ferdinand what Ferdinand did for Mariano.

Originally published by Vera Files on August 20, 2021.

Fact-checkers this year have had to repeatedly debunk claims that President Rodrigo Duterte had approved proposals to rename the Ninoy Aquino International Airport back to Manila International Airport.

VERA Files alone has had to do so thrice this year for uploaded videos making the erroneous claim that the airport has been renamed. All have hundreds of thousands of views, and seem to have been designed to be “clickbait” for the anti-“Dilawan” crowd, promising an honor conferred to “fake hero” Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr.— at the behest of his wife, the alleged presidential usurper—had finally been rescinded, somehow paving the way for a Marcos Restoration.

Looking at the history of how Republic Act No. 6639—“An Act Renaming the Manila International Airport as the Ninoy Aquino International Airport”—came to be, however, shows that MIA did not become NAIA because of a post-revolution whim. It was relatively uncontroversial; the law went through the entire post-EDSA legislative process, and was the fulfillment of proposals to rename the airport shortly after Senator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. was assassinated on its tarmac on August 21, 1983.

How RA No. 6639 became law

RA No. 6639 was among the first laws enacted during the Eighth Congress, the first elected legislature under the 1987 Constitution. It started out as House Bill No. 47, authored by Representative Raul S. Daza of Northern Samar. The bill was approved on second reading on August 4, 1987. According to the first volume of the Journal of the House of Representatives covering the 1987-1988 session, Daza described his proposal as “self-explanatory.”

It was not the first proposal to rename MIA as NAIA. Francisco Tatad, Ferdinand Marcos’s former Minister of Public Information, as a member of the Interim Batasang Pambansa representing Bicol, claimed to be the first to propose the renaming. He reiterated this claim on the Senate floor in 1993, while the Senate was tackling a resolution—the coauthors of which included current Senate President Vicente “Tito” Sotto III—to formally declare Ninoy Aquino as a national hero of the Philippines. That resolution was ultimately approved as one “expressing the sense of the Senate that the late Senator Benigno S. Aquino, Jr. be declared as national hero of the Philippines” a few days shy of the tenth anniversary of Aquino’s death.

In the Regular Batasang Pambansa (1984-1986), Cecilia Muñoz-Palma of Quezon City filed Resolution 36, “Naming the Manila International Airport as the ‘Ninoy Aquino International Airport’ to honor the memory of the late senator and Opposition leader, Benigno S. Aquino, Jr.” Like the earlier Tatad proposal, this resolution was not approved by the largely Marcos administration-allied legislature.

HB 47 was given far more attention than these Marcos-era proposals. One of the interpellators during the bill’s second reading was Representative Dante O. Tinga of Taguig-Pateros. According to the House Journal, Tinga’s main issue with the bill was the use of Benigno Aquino Jr.’s nickname, stressing that “laws are not for this generation alone and heroes are remembered by their full Christian names” to be more respectful and reverential. The Journal states that Daza “replied that heroes should be seen in the context of the times in which they lived”—he was known best by all, supporters and opponents alike, as Ninoy Aquino.

There were also questions raised by Representative Hernando Perez of Batangas, to which Daza gave the following responses: “1) that after the EDSA Revolution, international pilots, whenever they land in the Manila International Airport, announce that they are about to land at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport; 2) that in recognition of the martyrdom of the late senator, airline pilots submitted a petition to the then Secretary of Transportation and Communications that requested the renaming of the airport as Ninoy Aquino International Airport; and 3) that as the then Secretary of Transportation and Communications, Mr. Perez drafted an Executive Order renaming said airport as Ninoy Aquino International Airport but the President [Corazon “Cory” Aquino] reprimanded him on the ground that renaming airports is legislative and not an executive function.” The Journal added that Daza agreed to “accept the foregoing facts as added justifications and consider the Bill appropriate legislative approval.”

Representative Antonio Abaya of Isabela was worried about the “bad name” of the Manila International Airport at the time, resulting from “inadequate facilities” and poor management. Representative David Tirol of Bohol wondered if there was another place that could be renamed to “give more honor to Ninoy Aquino,” such as Tarlac, the late senator’s home province. According to the Journal, Daza replied that “he has not given the matter serious thought but that he would seriously consider supporting the bill Mr. Tirol should see proper to file.”

After these interpellations, amendments were suggested. Tinga was insistent that Benigno Aquino, Jr. International Airport was the appropriate name, but his amendment was not accepted. Parañaque Representative Freddie Webb only wanted to remove the specification “Parañaque, Metro Manila” as NAIA’s location, given territorial issues at the time involving his district.

On August 10, 1987, the House was ready to vote on the passage of the bill on third reading. By then, the bill had 90 other co-authors besides Daza. There were 156 lawmakers who voted to approve the measure, two rejected it, and two abstained. Tirol was one of those who voted in the negative. According to the Journal, Tirol explained his vote by saying that “renaming the Manila International Airport in Ninoy’s honor is not honoring him enough,” believing that “something more important and meaningful should be named after him.” The other representative who voted not to approve the measure, Mariano Nalupta Jr. of Ilocos Norte, did not give an explanation for his vote. Nalupta would later file renaming bills of his own, including one in 1989 to restore the name of Batac General Hospital to Mariano Marcos Memorial Hospital.

After the House vote, the NAIA proposal also breezed through the Senate. The Senate’s counterpart bill was principally authored by Heherson Alvarez. The bill was then transmitted to President Corazon Aquino on August 20, 1987—a day before the fourth anniversary of Ninoy Aquino’s assassination. However, the president did not sign it. It lapsed into law on November 27, 1987—Ninoy’s birthday. Like RA No. 6793, the text of the NAIA law did not contain the justifications for the renaming, which were already discussed at length in Congress.

The editorial of the Manila Standard on August 15, 1987, reflected some of these discussions. It noted that the murder of Ninoy Aquino “triggered off a chain of events that led to the toppling of a dictatorship that has gone down in history as outstanding in brutality and debauchery.” However, it also pointed out that “renaming the airport as it is now would be tantamount to besmirching the memory of the man whose singular act gave a new meaning to the word ‘courage,’” given the airport’s reputation as a “haven of all manner of thieves and hustlers.” The editorial hoped that, after a “drastic overhaul,” the airport could be rid of its ills in order to be “worthy of the name of the man whose death made so many things possible, and whose memory this nation aspires to immortalize.” Legislators and pundits were not concerned that Ninoy was unworthy of having the country’s main international gateway named after him—they believed the deteriorating principal airport was unworthy of being named after him.

It is not known whether Ninoy Aquino’s nemesis, Ferdinand Marcos, still alive and in exile in Hawaii at the time, had any publicly conveyed reaction to the renaming. He did not mention it in his various post-EDSA Revolution interviews nor in the last book he authored, A Trilogy on the Transformation of Philippine Society, nor is it tackled in books about the Marcoses in exile.

Proposals to rename NAIA under Duterte

There have not been any formal legislative proposals to restore NAIA to MIA. The call to revert the name has mostly been made outside the halls of Congress by Marcos loyalists, including those who erroneously claim the airport was only constructed during the Marcos regime. Some loyalists have even been clamoring to rename it the Ferdinand E. Marcos International Airport. There have been at least two Change.org petitions seeking to turn NAIA into MIA again: a closed petition with 8,984 supporters, and a still open petition that, as of this writing, has 143,522 signatories—about 7,700 more than last year. Within two weeks after being filed by lawyer and Marcos loyalist Larry Gadon, a petition to nullify RA 6639 was junked by the Supreme Court on September 9, 2020 for lack of merit.

On June 25, 2020 in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, Representatives Paolo Duterte of the 1st District of Davao City, Lord Allan Velasco of Marinduque, and Eric Yap of ACT-CIS partylist filed HB 7031, “An Act Renaming the Ninoy Aquino International Airport as the Paliparang Pandaigdig ng Pilipinas.” According to the bill’s explanatory note, “NAIA is the international gateway of the Philippines, being the biggest and largest international airport in the country. As such, there is a need to identify the same as belonging to the Philippines.”

In a statement, Yap further explained that he and his fellow proponents “deem it more appropriate for our international airport to bear the name of our country,” reflecting not “just one hero,” but also “our everyday heroes.” The renaming was not meant to discredit “the heroic contributions” of Ninoy Aquino, Yap claimed. He also believed that the rebranding was necessary to “let go of [NAIA’s] negative image,” in an inversion of the most resonant among the renaming issues back in 1987.As of this writing, the bill has been pending with the Committee on Transportation since July 28, 2020.

It is unclear whether President Rodrigo Duterte shares the same sentiments about renaming NAIA as his allies in Congress or those of Marcos loyalists, even if he is the president who finally ordered the internment of Ferdinand Marcos’s remains in the Libingan ng mga Bayani. Annually, the president still issues a commemorative message on Ninoy Aquino Day. Last year, he exhorted Filipinos to “emulate Ninoy’s courage and patriotism so we may all be heroes through acts of discipline, goodwill and social responsibility.”

Moreover, President Duterte does not seem averse to officially naming things after Ninoy Aquino, or even Cory Aquino, who appointed Duterte as OIC vice mayor in 1986, giving him his entry point into politics. On June 29, 2018, President Duterte signed into law RA No, 11041, “An Act Renaming the Montevista-Cateel National Highway Traversing the Municipality of Compostela, Compostela Valley Province into the Benigno S. Aquino Jr. National Highway.” In the explanatory note of the House bill that became the law, HB 833, filed by Representative Maria Carmen S. Zamora, reference is made to Compostela Valley Municipal Resolution No. 2011-2041, wherein the Sangguniang Bayan of Compostela expressed the desire “to honor the late national hero whose role and involvement in nation-building and dedication to public service greatly affected our people.”

Also on June 29, 2018, the president enacted RA No. 11045, “An Act Renaming the Kay Tikling-Antipolo-Teresa-Morong National Road in the Province of Rizal, Traversing through Barangay Dolores in the Municipality of Taytay up to Barangay Maybancal in the Municipality of Morong, as Corazon C. Aquino Avenue.” This law states that the renaming was being done to recognize Cory Aquino’s “public service rendered to the people as the 11th President of the Republic of the Philippines, and of her legacy in the restoration of political democracy and constitutional rule in the country.”

Both laws were passed unanimously in the House during the immediately preceding Congress. One wonders if the tide has truly changed, given an Aquino-less Senate, a second Senator Marcos after the EDSA Revolution, and allies of the president who seemingly want to divert people’s attention away from the ongoing health crisis by occasionally bringing up and amplifying decades-old partisanship and rivalries.

Originally published by Vera Files on April 17, 2021.

President Rodrigo Duterte’s frequent public disappearances followed by staged photos to dispel rumors about his health recall the waning years of the dictator, Ferdinand Marcos.

Despite widespread talk that Marcos was terminally ill, this was never confirmed by Malacañang Palace. But proof of the strongman’s grave illness was there for all to see when the first family fled the country in 1986.Discovered in Malacañang were five dialysis machines, emergency oxygen equipment, and a hospital bed. Among the luxury vehicles in the Palace garage was a 40-feet long, air conditioned, rainbow-colored hospital-on-wheels furnished with a kidney dialysis machine, x-ray equipment, a bed, and a kitchen.

American journalist Sandra Burton also found there a telltale sign: a copy of the “Handbook for Renal Transplant Outpatients.”

Duterte’s recent week-long absence from public view once again sparked speculation about the 76-year-old president’s health. Unlike Marcos, Duterte has never said he is free from any affliction, but insists he has no serious illness which the Constitution would require him to publicly reveal.

In truth, Marcos’ health problems trailed him to the presidency.

In Ferdinand E. Marcos: Malacañang to Makiki (1991), the strongman’s long-time military aide, Arturo Aruiza detailed almost all the maladies that tormented Marcos. Aruiza had access to the medical history of his boss, culled from reports of attending physicians to Marcos’s lawyers.

To begin with, Marcos had hemolysis (which destroys the body’s red blood cells) and hyperuricemia (high levels of uric acid in the blood).By 1979, his blood pressure was shooting up to alarming levels and he was showing signs of renal dysfunction as well as problems with his heart, lungs, stomach, and prostate.

“The president’s first hemodialysis was on September 24, 1979. This soon controlled his hypertension,” Aruiza said. “He kept a full schedule, however, interrupted occasionally with emergency dialysis because of pulmonary infections.”

What would eventually finish Marcos off were “his failing kidneys” as he suffered from lupus erythematosus.

Marcos, avid golfer. Photo from The Marcos Revolution: A Progress Report on the New Society of the Philippines (National Media Production Center, 1980).

STATE SECRET

Aruiza said Marcos’s true state of health “was the most closely-guarded secret in the Palace.” Cesar Virata, Marcos’s prime minister, confirmed this in a November 23, 2007 interview for the oral history project, “Economic Policymaking and the Philippine Development Experience, 1960-1985” (a.k.a. “The Technocracy Project”):

“(Marcos) did not want us to find out about his health condition. Although we had suspicions because in certain afternoons when we called him by phone, Malacañang would say that he was not available. I think he was having dialysis at those times. He would call back maybe at eight or nine in the evening when the (dialysis) session was finished. It became more frequent, maybe twice a week or something like that.”

Officials who worked in the Palace like Adrian Cristobal, Marcos’s lead speechwriter, claimed they were simply oblivious to the strongman’s condition. Cristobal told James Hamilton-Paterson in America’s Boy (1998): “You may find it hard to believe, but I think I only noticed he was really ill as late as 1984. We were all so busy. Then one day I did notice a patch of fresh blood seeping out on the inner sleeve of his barong. I didn’t know it then, but he’d obviously just come off the dialysis machine.”

Then there were others, like Rafael Salas, who had a strong sense that Marcos was covering up a serious illness and would eventually find a way to confirm his suspicion but shared it only with the people he trusted.

Salas was Marcos’s executive secretary during his first term as president, until they had a falling out and Salas left and worked for the United Nations. Having spent long hours with Marcos, Salas initially believed that “genetically,” Marcos “had a weak intestinal system. He was prone to vomiting and indigestion, which he did his best to hide from everybody.”

In The World of Rafael Salas (1987), he told his biographer, Nick Joaquin, that “there was already something farcical” about Marcos’s health. “He was completely a teetotaler: no alcohol and no coffee or tea. He drank only water and juice. He exercised daily and had as rigid a regimen at table . . . This strict program of diet and exercise did not, however, keep him from falling sick.”

When Salas met Marcos again in 1981, “he was already puffed up from Lupus. He tried to cover up his illness but it was visible to me.”

After almost 2 weeks of presidential absence, Senator Christopher Go released this photo on April 11, 2021.

SI MALAKAS AT SI MAGANDA

Then there were those who altogether denied that Marcos was sick.The charade was led by the strongman himself who put to work an entire bureaucracy to boost his image as the Ilocano Leviathan, the Malakas to Imelda Marcos’s Maganda.

“Whenever Marcos was asked about his health, his ready reply was that he was having a ‘bout of flu’ or was just ‘a little bit under the weather’ or his ‘asthma’ was bothering him again. During press conferences, whenever his health came up, his standard jest was to challenge anyone in the room to a few rounds of boxing,” Aruiza recalled.

Several pages of Marcos’s 1964 biography For Every Tear a Victory, which helped propel him to the presidency, explain that his previous ailments—including a supposed tumor detected in 1961 and removed without anesthetics in New York —were linked to injuries and ailments he suffered during the Second World War. The book portrays him as otherwise healthy, and capable of almost miraculous recovery.

This image of Marcos as an avid golfer and a physical fitness buff was maintained by the Marcos propaganda machine which released shirtless photos of the president displaying a “physique that a man half his age might envy.”

THE TRUTH OOZED OUT OF CRACKED WALLS

But the truth had a way of oozing out of cracks in the wall.

On September 13, 1979, the State Department sent a confidential cable to its embassy in Manila regarding press queries in the United States asking if “Marcos had kidney problems requiring twice-weekly dialysis.”

Two months later, the embassy received another cable informing them of another rumor from anti-Marcos groups in the US: that Marcos was seeking kidney treatment at the Stanford Medical Center. A December 13, 1979 cable followed saying the State Department “welcomes the embassy’s proposed plan to prepare a contingency plan” should Marcos die or be incapacitated since “Marcos’s health is of current concern.”

Burton in her book, Impossible Dream: The Marcoses, the Aquinos, and the Unfinished Revolution (1989), mentions ‘A-1’ information from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that Marcos had lupus.

Marcos lasted a full decade after his first dialysis, but the period was marked by the steady decline of his health as evidenced by episodic absences from public view — andludicrous excuses for them offered by Malacañang.

In August 1983, Marcos announced he was taking a three-week vacation, supposedly to finish writing several books — despite persistent rumors that these were actually ghoswritten by the likes of Cristobal.In an article in Ang Pahayagang Malaya a week after the announcement, the First Lady said her husband was just “allergic” to dust particles coming from renovations of their house and was on “self-imposed privacy.”

She described loose talk about Marcos’s failing heath as the “wishful thinking” of his opponents who were “like vultures feeding on rumor.”

“I should be the best barometer of the President’s health, especially since I am quite devoted and intensely in love with my husband,” Imelda insisted.

TWO KIDNEY TRANSPLANTS

Marcos persisted with the lie. In an interview with foreign correspondents on September 9, 1983, he said, “I can tell you I have not been operated on. I’ve had no dialysis. I have not undergone any unusual operations like strapping myself to a machine, utilizing a mobile dialysis machine.”

In reality, Marcos was feeling the after effects of the first of the two known kidney transplants that he secretly underwent.

Juan Ponce Enrile, Marcos’s minister of defense, wrote in his 2012 memoir that the strongman had a kidney operation on August 7, 1983 citing a Filipino doctor who treated him, and Imelda Marcos in a luncheon at the Palace a week after the surgery. Enrile said he and other visitors were ushered into the guest house and saw Marcos, looking “pale and very weak” from a distance.

Virata learned about the operation two weeks later when he was summoned to Malacañang.In a conversation that followed, Viratas said Marcos admitted that “something went wrong with his system so he had to be operated on,” but concluded that his boss was “misleading us because I think he had a kidney transplant.”

Aruiza said that transplant was the first of two and was performed by a select medical team led by Dr. Claver Ramos at the Philippine Kidney Center. The kidney which, according to Aruiza was donated by Marcos’s only son, Bongbong, was rejected by Marcos’s body and removed 48 hours after the operation.

A second transplant was scheduled on November 26, 1984, with a kidney donated by a “distantly related nephew from the North.” This time, it was successful. Former health secretary Enrique Ona, then a director at the National Kidney and Transplant Institute, confirmed to the media that when Marcos had both operations done by American doctors, the government closed the hospital to the public for three weeks.

When Marcos disappeared from public view again, Imelda tried to dispel the rumors about her husband’s health once more.In an interview with Radyo Veritas she said, “The president is overworked. He is only sick with colds and bronchitis.”

Malacañang then published a photograph of Marcos sitting upright, smiling, and holding up a copy of Bulletin Today with the headline “Marcos stresses he is healthy.”

On December 8, 1984, then 67-year old Marcos lifted his shirt in front of his cabinet in a television program aired on a state-run network in an effort to prove that he did not undergo major surgery. Marcos invited photographers to come closer and take shots of his bare, scar-free chest, but foreign newspapers that published the picture carried the caveat from kidney specialists that scarring from a transplant “could be below the belt (area) or out of view of the camera.”

A syndicated photo of Marcos showing his scarless torso; “proof” that he had no kidney transplant. The media made a caveat in the caption.

In his book The Marcos Dynasty (1988), Sterling Seagrave wrote that Marcos ordered his Armed Forces Chief Fabian Ver to find out who leaked confirmation on the second transplant to the CIA and to “silence it.” Media reports linked the death of Dr. Potenciano Baccay on November 2, 1985 to the interview he and Ona did with the Pittsburgh Press on Marcos’ transplants. Baccay was stabbed 19 times while tied with a nylon rope inside his car.

Author Raymond Bonner in Waltzing with a Dictator (1987) offered a clue on how the information was obtained and validated: “A CIA officer succeeded in locating the immigration official at the airport who stamped the passports of two American doctors each time they arrived. With enough money, the agency persuaded the immigration officer to divulge that the doctors were from New York and their names.”

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SUCCESSION CONCERNS

As Marcos’s bouts with illness became often and severe, people in the military became concerned. Burton would learn later on that then General Fidel Ramos had formed a “crisis committee” that met daily during periods when Marcos got sick “to ensure that the constitution would be followed if something happened to the president.”

“Ramos’s aim,” according to Burton, “was to prevent a takeover by the First Lady, with the help of the Ver faction of the military, and to install in power instead Assembly Speaker Nicanor Yñiguez.”

This was in keeping with the 1973 Constitution which provided that “In case of permanent disability, death, removal from office, or resignation of the President, the Speaker of the National Assembly shall act as President until a successor has been elected for the unexpired portion of the term of the President.”

With the country in severe economic and political crises and the legitimacy of his 20-year rule in question, Marcos called a snap presidential election on February 7, 1986.

Journalists who covered the campaign for the December 19, 1985 poll reported that Marcos had to be carried by his aides from a helicopter to his car, and to the stage.

Marcos admitted to “a little” limp because of an old shrapnel wound from his purported war exploits. His aides, on the other hand, claimed they had to carry the president because so many people wanted to shake his hand. Marcos used the same excuse when a plastic strip was ripped from the back of his hand, causing blood to ooze out.

“In Pangasinan, the people love me (so) very much that they scratched my two hands,” he said.

Eventually, his own body betrayed Marcos. Blood from needle wounds in his arm seeped through his shirt, a urinal became a necessary companion as he fought for his political survival, and on the eve of his exile to Hawaii, as angry Filipinos massed up towards Malacañang, “Mr. Marcos had shitted in his pants.”

A fitting end to his rule, Nick Joaquin wrote in The Quartet of the Tiger Moon (1986). “It seems all too proper that one of the last things Mr. Marcos did in the Palace was to defile it.”

DEJA VU?

And now there is Rodrigo Duterte, who was elected at the age of 71, just a few months younger than Marcos when he died in 1989.

Duterte’s laundry list of ailments and the treatment he uses for them are public knowledge because the president himself talks about them, although varying their severity on different occasions.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Duterte confessed that he had the typical ailments of people in their 70s, mentioning Buerger’s disease and Barrett’s esophagus. Although he often downplayed the severity of these conditions, Duterte has acknowledged that his Barrett’s esophagus could progress to cancer.

But not once did he offer medical evidence to any of his claims.

In fact, Duterte and his underlings sometimes did not even bother to explain his no-shows and sudden disappearances. When president elect Duterte did not show up for the 2016 Independence Day rites in Davao, the media quoted city administrator (now palace undersecretary) Jesus Melchor Quitain as saying that the mayor was probably still sleeping.

During his April 12, 2021 pre-recorded public address, in response to public criticism about his week-long disappearance, Duterte shrugged off the concern, simply saying, “Sinadya ko yun. Ganun ako e.” By nature like a petulant child, he explained.

In light of the President’s penchant for ghosting and the incoherence of his public addresseses, lawyer Dino De Leon filed a petition before the Supreme Court in April 2020 seeking to force the Chief Executive to release his medical records and citing Section 12, Article VII of the 1987 Constitution.

The provision states that “in case of serious illness of the President, the public shall be informed of the state of his health.” The High Court dismissed the petition outright, ruling that more trust should be placed on the Office of the President to know the “appropriate means” to release information about Duterte’s health.

In issuing the ruling, the Supreme Court cited Blas Ople, a member of the Constitutional Commission that drafted the 1987 charter who introduced the provision. In December 1984, Ople, who was labor minister, was among the first in the Marcos cabinet to publicly acknowledge that the strongman’s health was “undergoing certain vicissitudes.”

It now seems that the health disclosure provision of the 1987 Constitution is difficult to operationalize, with leeway given to the president to determine if his illness is serious. It smacks of a decades-long deceitful game Marcos played with the public. A déjà vu, if you will.

The more forceful legacy of the Marcos regime is the absolute ban on re-election of a sitting president, as contained in Section 4, Article VII of the 1987 Constitution. This and another provision clearly specifying the line of succession in case of “death, permanent disability, removal from office, or resignation” of the president, are among the constitutional safeguards against another Marcos, or an incumbent chief executive holding on to power despite an inability to effectively govern because of illness.

Some may argue that Duterte’s health is not especially concerning, given that he has only a little over a year left in his term. Or that he is indeed quite well for his age and this is just his style of dispensing public office — with utter sloth and habitual distaste for the public he is sworn to serve.

Two things are clear, however: if Duterte is forced to step down due to grave illness, Vice President Leni Robredo – who is from the political opposition – must take over as mandated by the Constitution; and, in this time of a raging pandemic, an absent president fond of keeping the public guessing about his true health condition is the last thing the country needs.

Originally published by Vera Files on August 21, 2022.

August 21, 2022 is the first Ninoy Aquino Day to be observed under the administration of  President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.  Based on social media posts, Marcos loyalists are, of course, not keen on commemorating the legally declared holiday which marks the assassination of the former senator and main political rival of the Chief Executive’s father.

They echo claims long made by supporters of the former dictator: Aquino was a power-hungry communist; Marcos Sr. had nothing to do with his death 39 years ago; and that Aquino’s widow and son, who both became presidents, should have sought the truth behind the murder but, for some conspiratorial reason, did not.

When Aquino was shot dead while being escorted by uniformed men at the airport after returning from the United States in 1983, Marcos and some of his military men were put in a defensive position. The crime committed in broad daylight triggered a torrent of protests condemning the regime, especially from the business sector and the Church hierarchy, and deeply impacted its credibility at home and abroad.

The former dictator did everything in his power to ensure that he and some of his most loyal men would appear to be free of any culpability for the crime. Marcos put Gregorio Cendaña, his  information minister and chief propagandist, to work.

Three days after the Aquino assassination, Marcos created a fact-finding commission to investigate the crime. But the five-member panel, led by then Supreme Court Chief Justice Enrique Fernando, was short-lived as its members resigned due to public outcry over the composition of the commission.  By virtue of Presidential Decree No. 1886, another fact-finding team led by the retired associate justice of the Court of Appeals Corazon Agrava was constituted to investigate the murder.

AN ATTEMPT AT MANIPULATING PUBLIC OPINION

Approaching the first anniversary of the assassination, Cendaña had outlined a government communications strategy to match the planned activities of the political opposition as the Agrava Board, which the fact-finding commission came to be known, was about to release its reports.

In a memorandum, the minister informed Marcos that the National Media Production Center (NMPC) and the Philippine News Agency (PNA) would field photographers and video teams to cover public demonstrations from August 17-22, 1984. PNA would write a calendar story on the “official version” of the assassination, which meant the military version that it was a lone civilian assassin, Rolando Galman, who shot Aquino as part of a communist conspiracy.

The plan further stipulated, “[w]e are preparing column feeds on the Aquino statue and the ‘eternal flame’ in Makati, generally ridiculing efforts by anti-government groups’ effort to cast Ninoy prematurely as a national hero” (emphasis from the original document). Cendana said that his agency had been “coordinating with private TV networks to ensure that commercial programming for August 20 and 21 will be particularly interesting—to induce people to stay at home and watch, instead of going out on the streets.” Utilizing the state’s intelligence machinery, the information agency also prepared to circulate “black” leaflets during this period.

The Manila Sun by VERA Files

Cendana’s memorandum included an attachment, the first issue of “our own tabloid,” The Manila Sun. Nowhere in the paper, however, did it say that it was published by the Office of the Media Affairs (OMA), NMPC , or any government-controlled agency.  Cendaña wrote that “the first issues carries (sic) lead stories on the Agrava case and the clandestine foreign funding for opposition demos and riots.”

The Manila Sun headlined that according to “intelligence sources,” a certain group was forcing the Agrava Board “to recommend that it was not Galman who killed”  Aquino and was waging “one big smear campaign to discredit the body here and abroad.”

The article included statements from three lawyers who worked under the Office of the Government Corporate Counsel. Manuel M. Lazaro, Virgilio C. Abejo, and Expedito D. Tan reportedly said that the memorandum sent by the fact-finding board indicated that it was Galman who killed Aquino on orders by the New People’s Army (we know now that the Board unanimously rejected this theory). The lawyers were also reported to have said that “the government exhausted all measures to protect the life of the late senator from persons bent on harming him,” that “the groups aiming to liquidate Aquino included persons who wanted to take revenge on him for the ‘killings of their relatives by you [Aquino] and your [Aquino’s] men.’”

Lazaro, Abejo, and Tan also listed several instances when Marcos Sr. and his wife, Imelda, showed mercy and saved the former senator’s life — the reopening of Aquino’s case after he had been convicted of criminal offenses, their “timely intervention” when Aquino went on a hunger strike in his military cell, and the health care provided him at the Philippine Heart Center for Asia when he was suffering from a heart ailment.

The headline story was bolstered by an opinion piece with the title “The Task At Hand.” The anonymous writer said, “The pressures brought on the (Agrava) board are therefore malicious, tantamount to obstructing the board from its sworn task to flush out the truth, with substantial evidence as the only yardstick.”

Another article entitled “Demos for Dollars” claimed that a “foreign-based” group connected with Kilusan ng mga Demokratikong Pilipino was responsible for the slew of protests in the country at the time. Citing “intelligence reports,” the article said that “student ranks and those of the labor groups were infiltrated by elements from the dissident movement and other radical groups which seek to sow terror and spark an unarmed urban warfare in order to topple the present government.”

Highly-conscious about his image in the United States, Marcos Sr.’s state machinery closely monitored the negative publicity that his administration was receiving abroad.  In a memorandum dated August 22, 1984, Cendaña updated his boss about the reportage in U.S. media about the Aquino affair. The information minister shared that major publications (New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Newsday, and Boston Globe) as well as TV and radio stations mentioned the assassination and reported about the demonstrations in Manila.

He also alluded to an article written by opposition leader Raul Manglapus in the New York Times on August 21, 1984 entitled “To Honor Aquino, Drop Marcos.” In response to the piece, Cendaña told Marcos that “our New York information staff prepared a rejoinder signed by Amb. Rey Arcilla of the U.N. (United Nations) Mission.” The response signed by the Filipino diplomat noticeably focused on poisoning the well, calling Manglapus a “discredited politician,” a “steak commando” and a “political has-been.”

The Marcos regime was also in the business of spying on opposition leaders in order to monitor and influence the narrative on the Aquino assassination in the U.S. In a memorandum to Marcos with the subject line “Butz Aquino’s Appearances in the U.S.” dated March 15, 1984, Cendaña briefed Marcos on the highlights of the remarks of the former senator’s younger brother before the Ninoy Aquino Movement (NAM) in Chicago and the National Press Club in Washington.

In his speeches, Butz, who had by then become a prominent opposition leader, reportedly declared that the Aquino family did not recognize the Agrava Board. He also cast doubts on the integrity of the upcoming election and advocated a boycott. As relayed in the memo, Butz reportedly said that “even before the people cast their votes, the results are already known.” Cendaña then told Marcos that “based on the information material we furnished them, our attaches abroad have prepared materials to counter (Butz) Aquino’s claim. The rejoinder will be sent to Filipino civic organizations in the areas.”

THE AGRAVA BOARD FINDINGS

After almost a year into its probe, the Agrava Board submitted its reports to Marcos in October 1984. The five-member panel was unanimous in rejecting the version blaming Galman for Aquino’s murder, concluding instead that the assassination was the result of a military conspiracy.  But the panel members disagreed on the extent of the plot.

The majority report, which represented the opinion of four Board members (Luciano Salazar, Dante Santos, Ernesto Herrera, and Amando Dizon) accused 26 people, including then Armed Forces Chief Gen. Fabian Ver and two other military generals of plotting and killing Aquino.  Agrava, however, argued that there was insufficient evidence to implicate Ver.

Since the Agrava Board was not a court of law,  Marcos forwarded its findings to the Tanodbayan (ombudsman) “for final resolution through the legal system” and trial in the Sandiganbayan.

The Sandiganbayan Verdict Sum by VERA Files

On December 2, 1985, the Sandiganbayan acquitted Ver and 24 other military men as well as a civilian (Hermilo Gosuico) from all liability in the case. The court fully embraced the military version of events, which was the same position that Marcos took shortly after Aquino was killed, and disavowed the testimony of the prosecution’s main witness, Rebecca Quijano (a passenger on Aquino’s flight and popularly known at the time as the “Crying Lady”).

This was noted in a telegram from the United States Ambassador to Manila Stephen W. Bosworth to Secretary of State George P. Shultz where he wrote that “the court merely glossed over without refuting the ‘concrete’ photographic, audio and video evidence adduced by the Agrava Board, and ignored altogether the evidence indicating a high-level conspiracy behind the assassination.”

The envoy went on to say, “As we reported in our August analysis of the Aquino trial . . . very little effort was made to disguise the orchestrated nature of the Sandiganbayan proceedings. It is clear that the real purpose of the trial was to mount a slow but relentless attack on the Agrava Board’s findings under the guise of legality and to condition the public to expect the eventual outcome.”

“It is of record that the Tanodbayan, Bernardo Fernandez, blocked efforts to introduce potentially crucial evidence which surfaced during the course of the trial,” the telegram added.

The Tanodbayan filed the case that would be known as People v. Custodio, et al.(referring to BGen. Luther Custodio, commander of the Aviation Security Command) before the Sandiganbayan. Ver and Maj. Gen. Prospero Olivas, then commander of the Philippine Constabulary Metropolitan Command, were among the eight who were indicted only as accessories.

Shortly after Marcos was deposed, the courts were urged to reopen the case. In March 1986, Deputy Tanodbayan Manuel Herrera, one of the prosecutors in Aquino’s case wrote a statement (and in June 1986 testified in court) that there had been a “failure of justice” in the criminal proceedings.

Herrera told a special Supreme Court commission (formed to determine if the Aquino case should be reopened) that on January 10, 1985, Marcos summoned him, Sandiganbayan Justice Manuel Pamaran (presiding justice), Justice Bernardo Fernandez (Tanodbayan) and other prosecutors to a meeting in Malacañang. Also present in the meeting were Justice Manuel Lazaro and then first lady Imelda. Herrera said that in the two-hour long meeting, Marcos induced them to undertake a sham trial on Aquino’s case.

In his comment dated April 14, 1986, Herrera narrated how Marcos was at some points angry and then calm and pragmatic throughout the meeting where he made it clear that although it was politically expedient to charge the defendants in court, the endgame had to be a dismissal of the case.

Herrera relayed Marcos’s sentiments, “Politically, as it will become evident that the government was serious in pursuing the case towards its logical conclusion, and thereby ease public demonstrations; on the other hand, legally, it was perceived that after (not IF) they are acquitted, double jeopardy would inure. The former President ordered then that the resolution be revised by categorizing the participation of each respondent.”

The Supreme Court G.R. 72760 further detailed Herrera’s testimony on how the men accused of conspiring to kill Aquino were acquitted.  A part of it reads:

Herrera further added details on the “implementation of the script,” such as the holding of a “make-believe raffle” within 18 minutes of the filing of the Informations with the Sandiganbayan at noon of January 23, 1985, while there were no members of the media; the installation of TV monitors directly beamed to Malacanang; the installation of a “war room” occupied by the military; attempts to direct and stifle witnesses for the prosecution; the suppression of the evidence that could be given by U.S. Air Force men about the “scrambling” of Ninoy’s plane; the suppression of rebuttal witnesses and the bias and partiality of the Sandiganbayan.

By the end of the conversation, “after the script has been tacitly mapped out,” Herrera said that  Marcos told the prosecutors: “Mag moro-moro na lang kayo.”

His parting words, according to Herrera, were “Thank you for coming. Thank you for your cooperation. I know how to reciprocate.”

The Commission found that “the only conclusion that may be drawn therefrom is that pressure from Malacanang had indeed been made to bear on both the court and the prosecution in the handling and disposition of the Aquino-Galman case.”  This was in turn given credence by the Supreme Court, and on September 12, 1986, ordered a re-trial of the Aquino murder case.

Adea to Ver by VERA Files

Documents left by the Marcoses in Malacañang after they fled at the height of the 1986 People Power Revolt can give us a closer look into how Marcos’s henchmen helped create a spin for Ver and the others accused of Aquino’s murder.

Coming into the criminal proceedings in February 1985, the military defendants who, like Olivas, were caught red-handed trying to mislead the Agrava Board about the firearm that was used by the gunman.

During the hearings, Olivas forwarded the “Magnum theory,” which alleged that Galman used a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum to shoot Aquino. The firearm was supposedly retrieved by Sgt. Arnulfo De Mesa, a member of Aquino’s supposed close-in security unit, from Galman. Olivas used as basis for his theory Chemistry Report No. C-83-872, which was an examination of fragments from a standard Magnum bullet, not the bullet fragments recovered from Aquino’s head.

The minority report found that Olivas excluded from the report he submitted on December 19, 1983 and his testimony on June 27, 1984, the second chemistry report (No. C-83-1136) which was the analysis of the two fragments from the actual bullet that killed Aquino. This document revealed that the murder weapon was either a .38 or a .45 caliber pistol, not a .357 Magnum.

The minority report said that the reason for exclusion was clear, “the first report supports his [Olivas’s] theory, but the second overthrows it.”

In response to Olivas’s misstep, Presidential Secretariat Ed Adea wrote a memorandum to Ver dated February 1, 1985 (coursed through Col. Balbino Diego) proposing a strategy for the trial of the military defendants (and one civilian) before the Sandiganbayan. On this same day, the defendants were brought before the court for the arraignment on the criminal proceedings.

Adea’s memorandum was connected to their “little talk last Saturday in the Study Room,” reffering to Marcos Sr.’s office in the presidential palace. He suggested to Ver: “We can give a break to the respondent soldiers by changing a minor aspect of the defense theory as framed by Gen. Olivas. How: By admitting the supposition that the fatal caliber .38 was fired from the .357 Magnum of Galman.” (Emphasis from the original)

He continued, “But we need a witness, preferably an expert expert (sic) on firearms, to demonstrate this.” Adea believed they could still change their position at that stage because the Sandiganbayan trial had “not yet begun.”

Cendana’s Information P… by VERA Files

The Marcos propaganda machine shifted gears nearing the release of the Sandiganbayan verdict. Three weeks before the decision came out, Malacañang was already preparing to condition the public on the acquittal. In a memorandum entitled “Information Program Re: Sandiganbayan Decision” (presumably addressed to Marcos) dated November 12, 1985, Cendaña wrote about a media plan to “prepare people’s mind for a verdict favorable to the accused; and then justify the decision, once”—not if—“it is handed down.”

The campaign was divided into two phases: the “pre-decision phase” and the “post-decision information program.” The pre-decision phase is further divided into four platforms: print media, national radio, television, and the international audience.

For print media, one plan was to publish a four-part series “only carr[y]ing the byline of the Bulletin reporter covering the Sandiganbayan.” The strategy was to emphasize the “sterling records” of the judges and to recap some of the “key characters” in the trial. The reporter was to make references to the “sordid personal life” of the Galman family’s counsel, Lupino Lazaro, and “the Quijano woman’s legal and psychiatric profile.”

The same narrative would be rehashed in a 30-minute special to be produced by the news department of the Maharlika Broadcasting System, and aired on government-controlled television networks.

Another “special-report type program is to be prepared for showing over the Pilipino station, Channel Two,” Cendaña said in the memo. For the international audience, the same program would be aired “on existing NMPC TV outlets in Chicago Los Angeles, and Honolulu, which are beamed to the Filipino communities in these U.S. cities.” The information minister even proposed “buying time in San Francisco and New York local stations” for this “special report.”

To maintain a veil of credibility, Cendaña noted that “the two programs are to be low-key, ‘objective’ in tone and non-argumentative. They will be made up mostly of clips from the Sandiganbayan proceedings.”

As for the post-decision media plan, the program starts on the day the decision was handed down. Day 1 was all about making sure that the OMA had control over the framing of the news regarding the verdict. As early as 20 days before the verdict, Cendaña said that a PNA report would be prepared “to ensure that we hit the right tone for the Pamaran statement and the reactions from General Ver and the president.” The OMA would also take charge of drafting statements for Marcos and Ver, coordinating with Pamaran about his talking points explaining the court’s decision, and shepherding how Filipino diplomats were to respond to questions from the foreign press.

Day 2 of Cendana’s plan dealt with the herding of “friendly” reactions to the decision, while Day 3 was about running “friendly analyses.” The PNA, Cendaña said, could “commission a noted criminal lawyer to write his own assessment of the case.” In this phase, the minister suggested that the OMA produce a “Where are they Now?” series “to give our side a chance to point out that the crying lady now lives in the United States with all her family—including three brothers whose applications for visas had initially been denied.”

Before he concluded the proposal, Cendana said that a separate information program was being prepared by his agency “to deal with the issue of Gen. Ver’s reinstatement as Chief of Staff.”

Within November 1985, before and after Cendana submitted his information strategy memo, Marcos publicly stated that he would reinstate Ver if he was acquitted, at one point stating that the reinstatement would be “automatic.”

But their renewed relationship as president and armed forces chief was brief.  In a little over two months, these two ruthlessly powerful men and their families were fleeing the Palace from civilian crowds and defecting soldiers that they had hoodwinked far too many times.