Category: Marcos Regime Research

Marcos Lies
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Marcos Lies is a compilation of thirty-one research essays that discuss in detail the various lies that the Marcoses have either concocted or have done nothing to stifle, lies that aided them in pursuit of power and plunder. This book shows how the lies were crafted, who enabled the Marcoses to foster their falsity on their targeted audience or those who knew the truth but have chosen to be silent. Each chapter gives details on how institutions and individuals were corrupted by the Marcoses to ensure that the lies they have made would not easily unravel. If corruption fails, the Marcoses of the martial law years have no qualms in resorting to censorship and the silencing of contrary and critical voices. During the martial law years, the Marcoses had at their disposal the whole state apparatus for propaganda, ensuring that a Marcos lie would not only remain valorized and unchallenged but that it would be repeated in all mediums and avenues used for the dissemination of state information. Their lies were then documented. To prove the lies, the authors have relied on documentary sources, much of which remains untapped, ranging from recently digitized records in the custody of the Presidential Commission on Good Government to the mountain of Marcos apologia produced by the National Media Production Center during the 1970s up to the 1980s. Many of these underutilized sources have been digitized and have long been made freely available online by their custodians. Without access to university resources during the pandemic, the authors revisited these online archives for news reports and diplomatic cables, transcript of congressional investigations, and various fragments of data that when put together offer a clear view of the truth that the Marcoses have either hidden or twisted. A disproportionate amount of recent studies have focused more on the utilization of deception to help the Marcoses reclaim Malacanang than on their deceptiveness during the rule of Marcos Sr. This is also, unavoidably, among the concerns of this book. But in the writing of the articles comprising this volume, after being similarly animated by the fact-checking ethos of those in the media, the authors’ tendency has been to ask, “How far does this lie go? And for whom was the lie made?”  

Joel F. Ariate Jr., Miguel Paolo P. Reyes, and Larah Vinda Del Mundo

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Table of Contents

Front Matter (pp. i-iv)

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Table of Contents (pp. v-vi)

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List of Figures (pp. vii-x)

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Foreword (pp. xi-xii)

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Preface (pp. xiii-xiv)

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Acknowledgements (pp. xv)

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Introduction (pp. 1-5)

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Sample Chapter | Why Imee Marcos Is Not a Graduate of the UP College of Law (pp.151-153)

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Did A Marcos Lie Today?
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In September 2018, Did a Marcos Lie Today? (DAMLT) went live online on Twitter and on Facebook. DAMLT, self-classified as an education website, is an effort by the Third World Studies Center’s Marcos Regime Research group to tell the truth about the Marcoses. Since the accounts became active, the social media accounts have been uploading material from various sources—including, but not limited to, declassified communications and assessments from the United States Department of State, studies by international financial institutions such as the World Bank, recently digitized records on Philippine guerillas (fake and genuine) from the United States National Archives, and recently accessible digitized versions of documents taken from Malacanang after the EDSA Revolution—to counter the lies that the Marcoses and their sycophantic followers kept regurgitating online or through mass media. The documents are at times uploaded unadorned, but were often incorporated into videos or transformed into memes—i.e., made palatable to the social media consumer. Or public history for those who have to navigate through tons of online clutter.

The “Marcos Truths”: A Genealogy of Historical Distortions
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The project set out to examine the relationship of pro-Marcos disinformation disseminated online, the printed propaganda that preceded such disinformation, and, to a limited extent, the distorted memorialization of Ferdinand E. Marcos via physical museums and monuments. Our attempt to study these linkages started with gathering online disinformation in favor of the Marcoses as debunked by online fact checkers. Over a hundred distinct lies were gathered and entered into a database-in-progress. Concurrently, an attempt was made to understand the interconnections among those involved in the production of printed propaganda in favor of the Marcoses, with the intent of establishing links, if any, between “offline” and “online” propagandists. Network maps of these individuals/groups were constructed.

We found that 1) the heritage sites that the Marcoses built for their late patriarch in Ilocos Norte are built on propaganda books extolling Ferdinand Marcos’s greatness and that of his dictatorial regime; 2) the Marcoses, their loyalists, and other allies have been producing and reproducing propaganda all these years, with the intended effect of conferring a patina of well-researched scholarship to Marcos lies; 3) the verbiage produced by the pro-Marcos authors has a limited but important influence on the new forms of disinformation that pro-Marcos sites in social media are producing; and 4) the weak link between the current online disinformation and the supposed scholarly, or at the very least, journalistic reiteration of “Marcos truths” points to an important feature of Marcos propaganda production: the point is not to build on an existing lie or an outlandish claim but to saturate the audience with all sorts of information up to a point that the propaganda effort appears to be without an author, that the algorithm of the social media networks geared towards the new and the ridiculous hides the hands of the Marcoses themselves.

A Bilateral Anatomy of Plunder: Ferdinand Marcos and the Looting of Japanese War Reparations
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The study aims to definitively determine whether the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos profited from his involvement in the 1956 Reparations Agreement between Japan and the Philippines. The explores a bilateral anatomy of plunder—of how the Philippine dictator and his cronies, Japanese businessmen, and politicians colluded to loot Japanese war reparations—by revisiting the literature on kleptocracy, Marcos’s authoritarian rule, and issues of the reparations agreement, examining old and new sources that have recently become available (e.g., Philippine Reparations Commission reports, newspaper clippings, files from the Presidential Commission on Good Government, and declassified US intelligence reports), and consulting Filipino and Japanese scholars who previously worked on these subjects. Existing studies on Marcos and the reparations agreement did not reckon with the sources of information that this proposed research would like to examine, sources that will help untangle the complexities that the reparations agreement caused on both Japan and the Philippines. 

Reports and Feature Articles
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Journal Articles
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Rosette, Judith Camille E. and Miguel Paolo P. Reyes. 2022. “Dodged Bullet or Missed Opportunity? A History of Planned Monorails for Manila, 1961–1985.” Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints 70(1): 4-43. https://doi.org/10.13185/ps2022.70102 .

Masangkay, Christian Victor A. and Larah Vinda B. Del Mundo. 2016 [published 2020]. “Where to Bury Marcos? Dead Body Politics in the Marcos Playbook.” Kasarinlan: Philippine Journal of Third World Studies. https://www.journals.upd.edu.ph/index.php/kasarinlan/article/view/7264/6327.

Reyes, Miguel Paolo P. 2018. “Producing Ferdinand E. Marcos, the Scholarly Author.” Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints 66(2): 173-218. https://doi.org/10.1353/phs.2018.0017.

Vol 27, No 1-2-Vol 28, No 1-2 (2012-2013): Marcos Pa Rin! The Legacy and the Curse of the Marcos Regime

Presentations
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Atty. Edre Olalia (NUPL), Fides Lim (Kapatid), Fr. Benjamin Alforque, Jonathan de Santos (NUJP), and TWSC’s Joel Ariate discusses the human rights situation and prospects under the newly-seated Marcos administration. Organized by Move.PH, Karapatan, and the Ecumenical Voice for Peace and Human Rights in the Philippines, the webinar was streamed days ahead of the first Tate of the Nation Address of Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

Reyes discussed online pro-Marcos historical distortion from around the early 2000s to Facebook at the Human Rights Violations Victims’ Memorial Commission’s online conference “The Martial Law Dialogues – Perceptions and Engagement with Post-EDSA Generations” held on February 24, 2022. In his talk, he attempted to answer these two questions:

  • What are the antecedents of online pro-Marcos disinformation/ online pro-Marcos disinformation before the widespread use of social media in the Philippines?
  • Can we blame social media primarily for the current proliferation of disinformation in favor of the Marcoses?

Joel F. Ariate Jr. and Miguel Paolo Reyes presented the findings of the Marcos Regime Research group in the online conference “Where’s the Lie: Research Findings on Disinformation,” held online on December 9. 2020. The 3rd National Conference on Democracy and Disinformation was held virtually on February 22, 24, and 26 (the presentation was broadcast on February 24).

Ariate and Reyes presented the findings of the UP Third World Studies Center’s Marcos Regime Research project The “Marcos Truths”: A Genealogy of Historical Distortions in the Rappler program On the Campaign Trail with John Nery: The Mechanics of pro-Marcos Disinfo. Ariate and Reyes are joined by communications professor Cheryll Ruth Soriano, who is also a part of the Consortium for Democracy and Disinformation. Streamed on December 15, 2021, Nery asked: How do Marcos disinformation campaigns work? And how will they impact the 2022 elections?

Ed Lingao, Atty. Chel Diokno, Director Joel Lamangan, Kiri Dalena, and TWSC’s Miguel Paolo Reyes talks about the continuing violence, plunder, and divisiveness in Philippine politics in the online conference “Reality Check: Martial Law, Never again” streamed on September 19, 2020. The event was organized by Daang Dokyu in cooperation with Concerned Artists of the Philippines and Directos’ Guild of the Philippines.

Joel F. Ariate Jr. Miguel Paolo P. Reyes, Larah Vinda Del Mundo, and Judith Camille Rosette presented their papers in the panel “Interrogating Historical Revisionism and the Marcos Regime: New Sources on Age-Old Lies” at the 2019 National Conference of the Philippine Historical Association held on September 19-21, 2019 held in NISMED, UP Diliman.

About
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The Marcos Regime Research (MRR) program is the response of the UP Third World Studies Center (TWSC) to the unabated tide of historical revisionism in favor of the Marcos regime—a re-prioritization of research on the rule of Ferdinand Marcos and the continuing influence of the Marcos family and their cronies in the Philippines. Currently, the program mainly consists of funded and in-house historical research projects conducted by the Center’s Marcos Regime Research group. Among the outputs of this program are academic journal articles, conference presentations, and short articles released via online media outlets.

History

The work of the Third World Studies Center’s Marcos Regime Research program can be linked to a research thread running back to the Center’s origins. In 1977, TWSC was established as a non-degree granting program within what was then called the College of Arts and Sciences in UP Diliman, providing researchers a space to articulate scholarly dissent against Ferdinand Marcos’s authoritarian rule. In the immediate aftermath of the Edsa Revolution, the Center continued to engage in or propose research that analyzed the ousted regime while exploring the limits and interstices of the post-dictatorship democratic space. The Center’s director at the time, Prof. Randolf David, even briefly took over and oversaw the closure of the Marcos regime think tank in UP, the President’s Center for Special Studies.

Over time, TWSC increasingly became more focused on democracy and democratization, social movements and civil society, political economy and globalization, peace and human security, and culture and identity in the context of the post-Edsa administrations; research on the Marcos regime was largely relegated to the background. Dr. Teresa Encarnacion Tadem, during her directorship of TWSC (2004-2010) was involved in the oral history project titled “Economic Policymaking and the Philippine Development Experience, 1960-1985,” interviewees for which were technocrats of the Ferdinand Marcos administration. The Center housed the project and provided staff support to its researchers.

It became evident, however, within the 2010s that a Marcos resurgence was in the offing. The Center’s first serious effort to understand and analyze the almost untrammeled march of the Marcoses toward new political heights came in 2013. In UP Diliman, an entire college was renamed in honor of the Marcos regime’s “chief technocrat,” Cesar E.A. Virata. Thus, TWSC researcher Joel F. Ariate Jr. contacted Dr. Eduardo Tadem of the UP Asian Center to discuss the possibility of organizing a public forum to challenge what was seen to be an effort toward unwarranted historical revisionism. The TWSC research staff then wrote a concept note for the forum, which was discussed in June 2013 during a meeting of the staff and then newly appointed TWSC director Dr. Ricardo Jose with Dr. Tadem and Dr. Amado Mendoza Jr. of the UP Diliman Department of Political Science. The forum became the first in a series titled “Marcos Pa Rin! Ang Mga Pamana at Sumpa ng Rehimeng Marcos,” which ran from July 2013 to February 2014. 

In July 2016, TWSC held a protest-forum on the then impending burial of Ferdinand Marcos at the Libingan ng mga Bayani. Titled “Ang Bangkay ni Duterte,” it was the first of TWSC’s efforts that year to counter giving state-sanctioned honors to the late dictator. This was followed by a series of articles published by Vera Files that tried—unsuccessfully—to highlight reasons, historical and legal, why Marcos’s remains should not be interred at the Libingan ng mga Bayani. These were the first of many research outputs of the MRR group published by Vera Files, at times syndicated by other media outlets, which were written in response to Marcos-related developments or in commemoration of Marcos-related anniversaries.

Also in 2016, while the Center and its researchers were involved in the research program titled “The Mass Transit System in Metro Manila: From Tranvia to MRT, 1879-2014,” Dr. Meynardo Mendoza of Ateneo de Manila University gave the Center access to select digitized files in the custody of the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG) that were related to mass transit during the Marcos regime. Realizing the value of this cache of files as a largely untapped source for historical research, then TWSC director Ricardo Jose requested a complete set of the PCGG files digitized as of September 2017 from one of the cache’s official repositories, the National Historical Commission of the Philippines (NHCP). The refinement of the file catalogs and cataloging of uncategorized files was initiated as an in-house project of the MRR group, after the inclusion therein of Larah Vinda Del Mundo, in late 2018.

Late 2017 saw the publication of a seven hundred-page issue of Kasarinlan: Philippine Journal of Third World Studies containing the proceedings of the “Marcos Pa Rin!” public forum series and relevant appendices. The volume was co-published by NHCP.

In September 2018, in reaction to the deluge of pro-Marcos narratives borne out of lies that have colonized social media, the Facebook and Twitter pages called “Did a Marcos Lie Today?” were established by Ariate to swiftly counter the lies that the Marcoses often resort to to advance themselves in politics; lies from the Marcoses themselves serve as prompts for the pages’ posts. “DAMLT” thus serves as the MRR group’s social media fact-checking platform.

In late 2019, under the term of TWSC director Joseph Palis, the MRR group secured funding for two research projects: “The ‘Marcos Truths’: A Genealogy of Historical Distortions,” co-headed by Miguel Paolo P. Reyes and Ariate, funded by the Consortium on Democracy and Disinformation; and “A Bilateral Anatomy of Plunder: Ferdinand E. Marcos and the Looting of the Japanese War Reparations,” led by Reyes, funded by the Office of the Chancellor of UP Diliman through the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Development. The former was concluded in October 2020.

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