Category: Violence

Originally published by Vera Files on January 23, 2021.

Senator Imee Marcos just has to butt in. She defended President Rodrigo Duterte’s low regard for women in politics only to remind us of her father’s similar, if not more atrocious view.

Just before 2020 ended, Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte emerged as the presidential frontrunner in a Pulse Asia survey conducted for the period November 23–December 2. The results also show that she is statistically tied with Senate President Vicente Sotto III and Manila Mayor Isko Moreno in the vice-presidential race.

Speaking at the inauguration of the Skyway Stage 3 project on January 14, 2021, Duterte advised his daughter against seeking the presidency. Right after saying that he would not fantasize about a term extension, he said, “And my daughter, niudyok man nila. I have told Inday not to run kasi naaawa ako na dadaanan niya na dinaanan ko. Hindi ito pambabae. Alam mo, the emotional setup of a woman and a man is totally different. Maging gago ka dito.” (My daughter, they are prodding her. I have told Inday not to run because I would pity her if she goes through what I experienced. This is not for women. You know, the emotional setup of a woman and a man is totally different. You’ll be made into a fool here.)

After two days, Imee Marcos, asked by DWIZ radio to respond to Duterte’s statement, mentioned Sara’s miscarriage in 2016, and said, “Kawawa nga ‘yan e, kasi hirap na hirap siya. Sabi nga niya napaka burned out na, ayaw na niya mag mayor e kasi hirap na daw siya.” (She’s pitiful because she’s having a difficult time. She said that she is burned out and that she does not want to be mayor anymore.)

Unprompted, she continued, “Pero ‘yung mga reaction na very misogynistic and chauvinist na ‘not a job for a woman,’ naintindihan ko ‘yun e kasi yung tatay ko ganun din e, sinasabi sa akin na si Bongbong ang dapat pumasok sa pulitika, period. Pero yung nanay ko, ako, parati siyang very protective kasi bakbakan ‘yan e, sabi niya. ‘Wag na nga ‘yung mga babae, kawawa naman.”

(But the reaction that [the statement] was very misogynist and chauvinist, that [the presidency] is ‘not a job for a woman,’ I get that because my father used to say the same thing. He used to tell me that it should be Bongbong who should enter politics, period. He was very protective of me and my mother because he says that [politics] is a down and dirty fight. Women should shy away from it. They should be pitied.)

“I think it’s not out of being chauvinistic, that you have inferior capabilities as a female, but more as a father who worries about pushing his daughter out to the brutish world of politics,” added Imee, who just has to conjure the ghost of her father, the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, whenever the opportunity presents itself. In her statement, Imee defended the idea that women should not be in politics, and that they should seek the protection of powerful men. According to her, this is not misogyny or chauvinism, but an act of love and concern.

First, Imee’s claim that her father shielded her from “the brutish world of politics” is untrue. At 21 years old, Marcos appointed her national chair of the Kabataang Barangay (KB), an organization for the youth to engage in politics. In other words, the late dictator gifted Imee with her own political network. In 1977, in order for Imee to qualify as a KB member and leader, Marcos signed Presidential Decree (PD) 1102, adjusting the age limit for members from 15–18 to 15–21 years old. Imee stayed as national chair until her family was forcibly removed from power by the 1986 Edsa Revolt. The decree was signed a day after Archimedes Trajano was tortured and killed for asking in a public forum why the president’s daughter had to lead the KB.

Meanwhile, a declassified diplomatic cable from the American Embassy in Manila to the Secretary of State in Washington DC dated August 9, 1978 revealed that Marcos was leveraging his daughter in pacifying “radical” KB members on the verge of conducting anti-US bases strikes and demonstrations in Clark, Subic, and other neighboring towns. One can reasonably say that Marcos did not protect his daughter from the “brutish world of politics.” She was long in on the family business.

And lest Senator Marcos forgets, or claims that she is too young to have remembered, her father unleashed a barrage of sexist remarks—from patronizing to utterly demeaning—against Cory Aquino during the 1986 snap presidential election.

Under pressure from the United States to undertake sweeping political reforms, and amid growing frustration with his administration domestically, Marcos called for a snap election on November 3, 1985 in an attempt to prove his mandate. On December 5, 1985, Cory Aquino, wife of the slain opposition leader, Senator Benigno S. Aquino Jr., announced her candidacy. This came three days after Sandiganbayan acquitted Armed Forces of the Philippines chief of staff General Fabian Ver and 25 others in the murder of her husband at the tarmac of the Manila International Airport, a decision that enraged many.

In her first press interview after announcing her candidacy, Aquino declared she wanted a debate with Marcos on live TV. Initially, Marcos said he was willing to do so. A Tokyo-based media service quoted him as saying, “My conversations with ladies have always been pleasant and I don’t think that this will be different from others. I presume I will survive this encounter.” Two weeks later, Marcos publicly refused to debate with a woman but would only have a “friendly conversation” with her. Aquino responded with, “Why not, I am all for a friendly conversation.”

In January 1986, Aquino renewed her challenge, but Marcos refused once again. As carried in the US State Department Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) daily report on January 27, 1986, the government-run Maharlika Broadcasting System (MBS) had this to say:

Had the debate pushed through, Cory’s lack of government programs, her flip-flopping position on vital issues, and her abysmal ignorance of statecraft would have been exposed to full public view, embarrassing the lady no end. Mr. Marcos, a formidable debater, was too much of a gentleman to let such a thing come to pass.

It is on record that Mrs. Aquino, much like a woman changing clothes, has altered her own position on such issues as the U.S. bases, participation of Communists in her government, and recognition of independence of the Muslim regions in the south. With her shifting stance on these important issues, how can there be any meaningful debate?

The much-awaited debate took almost two months to happen. Veteran newscaster and host of the ABC News program Nightline Ted Koppel casted doubt that Marcos will ever accept the challenge, saying Marcos’s advisers “want him to duck the debate.”

ABC News had agreements with both candidates two and a half weeks before the scheduled debate on February 6. But just two days before this, Marcos said the confrontation should not take place on American TV, but on Philippine television, which could have happened had he accepted Aquino’s earlier challenges. A day before the interview, Donald M. Rothberg of Associated Press quoted Marcos as saying, “Let’s put this to bed. . . I’m glad I was challenged to debate with her.” And with a hint of sarcasm, added “I’m trembling all over because of this debate.”

Held on February 5, the “debate” was a buzzer-beater. The snap election was scheduled on February 7, and the Election Code forbids any type of campaign activity 24 hours prior to the polling day. Marcos opened the interview with an explanation as to why the supposed debate was not held on the 6th, saying he did not want to break the law. To which Koppel responded, “No one has yet explained to us how an interview on American television, not rebroadcasted in the Philippines, could violate any law. Furthermore, we offered to do the broadcast last night [February 4], Mrs. Aquino accepted, President Marcos did not.” Nightline ended up broadcasting two separate, recorded interviews of Marcos and Aquino. During his airtime, Marcos as usual drilled on Cory Aquino’s inexperience.

But the issue of inexperience is hardly the vilest of Marcos’s attacks against Cory. On January 23, 1986, the Associated Pressquoted Marcos as criticizing Aquino for “having the nerve to aspire for the presidency when she knows little about running the country.” Speaking in Filipino, he said that the ideal Filipino woman is “modest, does not challenge men, is intelligent but she keeps it to herself and teaches her husband only in the bedroom.”

Francis X. Clines of the New York Times followed up on this story in his article published a week after. Having no hint of remorse, Marcos complained about being vilified for his sexist remarks. He said, “Of course they belong to the bedroom, but in the sense of a woman’s being discreet. If she had something to say to her husband which might humiliate her husband.” Marcos further professed that Aquino “has not run anything in her life” and would govern the country using “cram courses” and “pious intentions. . . . A family tragedy simply cannot be the justification for leadership or for flirting with national destiny naively or carelessly,” referencing the assassination of Ninoy Aquino in 1983.

The then first lady Imelda Marcos, once touted as Marcos’s “secret weapon” in his previous electoral campaigns, and who held multiple high-ranking government positions, shared her husband’s misogyny and chauvinism. The Los Angeles Times reporter Mark Fineman quoted Imelda saying that Aquino is the “complete opposite of what a woman should be because she is challenging the power of a man.”

The former first lady also managed to criticize Aquino‘s appearance whilst implying the shallowness of an entire community, “[o]ur opponent, she does not wear any makeup. She does not have her fingernails manicured. How else, Imelda wondered, can Aquino capture the large Manila gay vote? You know gays. They are for beauty,” a United Press International report quotes. This is the same Imelda who expressed grave concern that her daughter Imee was hanging out with “faggots” in Princeton University, as revealed in a diplomatic cable from the American Embassy in Manila dated November 4, 1974.

Marcos was indeed fixated on the fact that his opponent is a woman. In a campaign speech in Malolos Bulacan on December 27, 1985 (as transcribed by FBIS), he said:

I have said we are having difficulty because our adversary is a woman. As you know, to me all women are beautiful. So I should say she is beautiful. You can see the dilemma I am in. As I have told some people, I do not know what I should do. If we criticize her, we get attacked; so perhaps it is best not to say anything about her. So you see, we are damned if we do, we are damned if we don’t. In the past it was not so bad. Perhaps I should just keep quiet, but she is the one making all the noises. As you know, I am not used to quarreling with women. I do not like to provoke women.”

Marcos’s (and apparently his running mate Arturo Tolentino’s) bigotry, in full view of the public, only went from bad to worse. So much so that the public information chief of Cory’s Crusader, Narzalina Lim, decried the “blatantly sexist and often obscene language employed [by] the two KBL candidates in their provincial sorties.” She said in a statement quoted in the Manila Times Journal, “[t]he constant harping on the ‘woman on top’ and ‘hamon ng babae’ [challenge of women] theme is an insult to Filipino womanhood worthy only of male chauvinist pigs.”

But for a man who had seemingly infinite ways of insulting women, Marcos appealed to them the only way he knew how: by extolling their good looks and that of his wife. In an FBIS transcript of his campaign rally speech in Iloilo on January 27, Marcos insulted both his opponent’s intelligence and rationality, all the while pandering to the Ilonggo women:

That Cory Aquino is something else, she does not have Ninoy’s intelligence. Look at her, what has she been saying? “The moment I win as president, I will have Marcos arrested”. . . But as you can see I am accompanied by a beautiful woman. I am surprised here in Iloilo—all the women are beautiful. [cheers] All the beautiful women, more so especially the older ones. [laughter]

Juxtaposing women and pitting them against each other was Marcos’s strategy for wooing their votes.

But for Marcos and his campaign machinery, women were not only potential voters who would blush at his flattery. They were also deemed as tools for entertainment. The Associated Press reported on January 23 that “hundreds of bar girls and prostitutes marched through Manila’s red-light district” chanting Marcos’ campaign slogans as they were escorted by a marching band and cops in motorcycles. Several bar operators and employees said they received veiled threats that their licenses would not be renewed if they did not take part in the march, the report added.

The 1986 election was Marcos’s most crucial electoral campaign, and yet he was at his most vulnerable. Among the main issues thrown at Marcos was his failing health and his falsified war records. For someone who has dedicated almost his entire life (and a ton of public funds) creating a myth out of his purported manly prowess and vitality, these two issues might have delivered the worst blows to his public image, and more importantly, his ego. In fact, in the February 5 debate-cum-interview with Ted Koppel, when asked a follow up question regarding his falsified war records, the Filipino dictator snapped. With visible clues of scorn in his face, he said, “now look, I don’t want to talk about this anymore. If you do, I’m gonna walk out.”

This is reminiscent of a recent outburst of our current Commander-in-Chief. In the wake of scathing criticisms on his typhoon response encapsulated by the viral hashtag #NasaanAngPangulo (Where is the president?), Duterte spewed sexist innuendos, lies, and threats towards Vice President Leni Robredo, who was at the time being lauded for her efficient and timely rescue and relief efforts in typhoon-ravaged areas.

In the commemoration rites of another deadly typhoon back in 2016, he teased Robredo about her short skirt, and basically reduced the second highest elected public official to a nice pair of legs.

To soothe their bruised egos when challenged by women in politics, Marcos and Duterte resort to the same crude tools in the machismo bag: patronize and demean their women opponents, beat them back to the home and hearth, toy with them as sex objects. And their daughters are not exempt from their machinations.

With one sexist remark Duterte generated a strand of public opinion that welcomes his daughter’s entry in the presidential derby. That’s not Duterte taking pity on his daughter. Marcos did not shield Imee either, contrary to Imee’s spin. These misogynist fathers were not, in fact, protecting their daughters from the rough and tumble world of politics. They treat their daughters as political merchandise that they can sell to voters to expand their political control.

Originally published by Vera Files on August 30, 2020.

As we celebrate this year’s National Heroes Day, the issue of who should be a hero continues to kindle patches of heated arguments. Or, at the very least, it remains fodder for propagandists wanting to spew rehashed vitriol against one particular member of the pantheon, Ninoy Aquino.

Last August 21 a Twitter hashtag saying that Ninoy is not a hero trended, supposedly shared more than twenty-five thousand times. As declared by Republic Act 9256, signed into law on February 25, 2004 by then president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, August 21 is a national special nonworking holiday “to commemorate the death anniversary of former Senator Benigno “Ninoy” S. Aquino, Jr.”

On August 21, 1983, an assassin’s bullet pierced Ninoy’s skull as he stepped out of a plane in the airport that now bears his name. At least for now. The naming of the airport after the slain senator is now the subject of a court petition and a House bill filed last June, both seeking to expunge any association between Ninoy Aquino and the tarmac where he spilled his blood.

The efforts to strip Aquino of his “hero” status are not recent.

On November 26, 1978, Panorama, the Sunday supplement of Bulletin Today, disappeared from the newsstands. Marcelo B. Soriano in The Quiet Revolt of the Philippine Press mentioned that “more than 300,000 copies of the 68-page magazine for that date were ordered withdrawn from circulation.” The curt explanation given by Bulletin, one of the Marcos-controlled dailies then, was that the copies were recalled “because of printing defects.” But as reported by the Honolulu Advertiser, “Sources said the magazine withdrew the issue from circulation ‘on orders from above’.”

“Orders from above” was executed through a raid conducted by the military at the Bulletin office on Saturday night, November 25, 1978. Writing in the 2019 edition of Press Freedom under Siege: Reportage that Challenged the Marcos Dictatorship, Bill Formoso, then Bulletin’s assistant provincial news editor recalled:

It must have been between 10:00 and 11:00 p.m.when someone ran into the near empty newsroom on the second floor shouting that the military was in the compound. I stood up, turned to the window behind me, and saw that two 6×6 military trucks had entered the compound, stopped in front of the main entrance to the separate printing press building, and soldiers had begun jumping out and running into the building. I knew what they had come for.

For several days, there had been talks that Imelda Marcos was furious over an article in that Panorama issue that was written by Chelo Banal and edited by Letty Jimenez Magsanoc that said that in a university polls of students’ heroes, Ninoy Aquino, who was in jail, had rated higher than Imelda Marcos. We had also heard that copies of Panorama that had already been distributed to subscribers in Parañaque and Las Piñas had been retrieved by soldiers going door to door.

The copies were “impounded and burned,” according to Leonor Aureus Briscoe, when she wrote about this event in Press Freedom Under Siege.

But some copies did survive. We (later on We Forum), in its December 9-15, 1978 issue reproduced the survey and a couple of articles that went with it in the disappeared Panorama issue. (We left out the article “Heroes to Heroes,” an excerpt of which was reprinted in Press Freedom Under Siege.)

Though We was undoubtedly courageous for piercing the censorship, its account of the vanished Panorama made no mention of the raid. Its report hewed to the line that because of printing defects “the magazine was withdrawn by the newspaper management from circulation. Whether the suspension of the distribution was voluntary on the part of the publishers or was influenced by outside forces could not be ascertained.”

But what was it in the survey that forced the hand of those concerned to disappear an entire issue of a magazine?

The Panorama survey that angered Imelda Marcos

Panorama conducted the survey for its November 26, 1978 special Heroes Day issue. The magazine “polled at random eight colleges and universities in Metro Manila—namely, University of the Philippines, Ateneo de Manila, University of Santo Tomas, De La Salle, University of the East, Assumption, Manuel Luis Quezon University, and Mapua Institute of Technology—to find out who the heroes of today’s college students are and why; a hero to mean anyone, living or dead, who is greatly admired and worthy of emulation. The random survey of 72 students (40 males, 32 females), a representative cross-section of the college student population, yielded a total of 58 heroes.” The heroes were then ranked “according to how often they were named (frequency) and the reasons for their selection.”

Chelo R. Banal, then Panorama staff writer, presented the findings of the survey in the accompanying article “Heroes to Campus Crowd.” In Banal’s short introduction to a reprint of her piece in Press Freedom under Siege, she wrote that “It really started as a harmless little survey but because one of the campuses we tapped was the University of the Philippines, it turned up more interesting results. Malacañang said the survey was biased from the get-go because we knew that UP was the bedrock of activism (at the time, at any time). In that regard, we were guilty as charged. But it was also true that we hadn’t the foggiest who the students would name as their heroes. In fact, Panorama editor Letty Jimenez Magsanoc and I found it hilarious that some students had not understood the context of the survey and named Jesus and Mary as their heroes. Jose Rizal, too. Unfortunately, Ninoy Aquino ranked higher than Imelda Marcos in the survey.”

It appeared that the conjugal dictator then occupying Malacañang can so be easily rattled by what Banal found in the survey as the college students’ “ambivalent attitude toward authorities who have been efficient at maintaining peace and order and those persons who are supposed to have threatened the national security.”

Analyzing the survey, Banal offered the following instances as proof of this ambivalence:

Ferdinand Marcos topped the contemporary heroes, followed by Benigno Aquino Jr, an interesting study of contrasts because the former is the founder and the preserver of the New Society and the latter is believed to be against the present political order.

Of the top four living heroes, two (the President and the First Lady) are prime movers of the New Society while the other two (Benigno Aquino and Jose Ma. Sison) are identified with the opposition. It would seem that students are divided pro and con the validity and achievements of the New Society.

President and PM Marcos was voted the Number One here-and-now hero for being “a revolutionist who uses no arms” and for “sticking his neck out in declaring Martial Law to realize his vision of a disciplined, progressive and truly Filipino society.”

As many students who favored Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile also considered the political detainees their heroes. Even the religious leaders admired—Jaime Cardinal Sin and Fr. James Reuter—are identified with political detainees or known to have sympathies for the detainees’ human rights.

Perhaps the Marcoses saw what then Panorama editor Letty Jimenez Magsanoc saw. In her brief article, “A Question of Heroes” that went with the survey result, Jimenez Magsanoc claimed that the “Panorama‘s random survey on who are the heroes of today’s Filipino college student would seem to indicate in sum, that he is highly politicized.” The ambivalence and almost incongruous choices for a hero is an assertion that “they’re no cultish followers.”

Arguably, for Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos nothing will do but absolute adulation, nothing better than unthinking acquiescence. If those cannot be had they would settle for an overwhelming electoral victory. In April 7 of that year, Marcos’s Kilusang Bagong Lipunan won 187 seats in the elections to the Interim Batasang Pambansa. Only 13 oppositionists won. In Metro Manila, the ticket led by then still in jail Ninoy Aquino were all defeated, 21-0, by the ticket headlined by Imelda Marcos. Notwithstanding that fact that the night before the election Metro Manila erupted in a noise barrage in support of the opposition. The Panorama survey carried a faint echo of this protest. Autocrats, fascists for that matter, desire a populace that will not, or cannot make a distinction except those sanctioned by the dear leader. How dare these college students prefer heroes other than the Marcoses?

The obsession with the absolute courses through the collective memory of the Marcos loyalists, that only the good, the true, and the beautiful Marcoses and their golden autocratic years matter. Yet this unquestioning fealty to the legacy of a dead dictator comes with a suppurating insecurity that every now and again the Marcos loyalists would whisk and fling all over, poisoning the public discourse on heroes and heroism. If Marcos cannot be great again, no one else should be.

The core argument of those vituperating against Ninoy is this: he came home in pursuit of his presidential ambition fully aware of its possible fatal consequence. He sought martyrdom for political effect. The sinister implication is that harboring a political ambition not in the interest of those in power is reason enough for them to do you in. It is not so much a denigration of a person’s sacrifice for freedom as much as a justification for murder.

With imprisonment and a muzzled press, Marcos tried then to deny Ninoy public honor, sympathy, and recognition. Marcos is gone but he is not lacking of supporters to continue his vicious pursuit.

Originally published by Vera Files on March 10, 2020.

With six deaths and hundreds injured, the bloody opening salvo of the First Quarter Storm in January 1970 both riled and excited President Ferdinand Marcos. But he cannot appear to give in to both sentiments. His plans for a one-man rule restson how well he handled himself in public and capitalized in the ensuing chaos.

The first impulse was to lie. Marcos had to put up a facade that his government was unrattled and magnanimous in the face of the hostility of youth activists.

On March 5, 1970, Marcos’s interview with Nick Joaquin, aka Quijano de Manila, came out in the Philippines Free Press. Marcos admitted that on January 26, 1970, after delivering his State of the Nation Address, a cardboard coffin and a papier-mâché crocodile were thrown his and Imelda’s way on the steps of Congress. But what of the bottles and stones? “[I]t was originally not intended against the First Lady or me but against the police.” As their car sped away, “students were waving their hands at us. I was therefore surprised when I learned that there was a riot after we left.”

Marcos “was booed by demonstrators as he emerged from the [C]ongress building.” He was also booed when he came in, as noted by the journalist Hermie Rotea in I Saw Them Aim and Fire.

Had Marcos written the history of that fateful day, there would have been a lovefest and an adoring crowd as he and the first lady came out of Congress, instead of protest by up to 50,000 demonstrators (according to media accounts).

“The First Lady was … busy shaking hands with everybody, including the students. I was also shaking hands with students, first in the lobby, then on the stairs, then on the sidewalk. We were hemmed in by students; we were shaking hands with them. Everybody wanted to shake hands with us.”

A United Press International photo published in the January 27, 1970 issue of the Honolulu Advertiser makes one wonder when all the glad-handing could have happened as a phalanx of policemen immediately surrounded the First Couple as they exited Congress.

Photo by United Press International

From Rotea:

[A]s President Marcos and the First Lady were being escorted by security aides to their waiting limousine, stones, empty bottles, sticks, placards and other projectiles were thrown at their direction.

Alert security men immediately formed a human cover to protect the First Couple from the “flying missiles.” Fearing an assassination, Col. [Fabian] Ver pushed them into the car. His men covered the limousine from top to the sides and practically hid it from sight.

Fabian Ver, Marcos’ confidant and chief of praetorian guards, may have instinctively thought it was an assassination because that was what his boss often had in mind.

In a January 23, 1970 entry in his diary, Marcos cited Ver’s idea to “meet force with force and that the conspirators be eliminated quietly before they prejudice our country and democratic institutions.”

THE BACKLASH OF THE 1969 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

Ver and Marcos were not referring to the student demonstrators who in a week’s time would breach Malacañang’s Gate 4. They were talking about partisans of Sergio Osmeña Jr., the losing presidential bet in the 1969 election who they suspect to be planning a coup, if not the president’s assassination.

As pointed out by William Rempel in Delusions of a Dictator, Marcos was “troubled” by the “American rumor. The one suggesting that the U.S. embassy was secretly supporting advocates of a coup attempt” against him.

Still, Marcos demurred on Ver’s plan, insisting they instead “obtain evidence to prosecute them in court.” He feared that if he went with Ver’s plan, they “may unleash a wave of violence [that they] may not be able to control and do greater damage to our freedoms.”

Then the First Quarter Storm broke. Entries in his diaries and his public statements indicated a Marcos enticed by the violence he helped unleash, lusting to implement his “final solution,” the imposition of martial law. Which he almost did during the January 30, 1970 siege on Malacañang.

In Dead Aim, Conrado de Quiros credited Brig. General Rafael Ileto, then commanding general of the Philippine Army, for dissuading Marcos from imposing such draconian measure, explaining how unprepared the armed forces were to execute such a plan.

Marcos himself noted in his February 22, 1970 diary entry that he and his top military men were of the “unanimous assessment . . . that the subversives have no capability of mounting an attack of company proportion [a fraction of the total number of state enforcers around Malacanang during the Battle of Mendiola] and will not but are capable of small unit harassment.”

What he did not mention, but were brought up by de Quiros and Rempel, was that besides the police and the military, there was the immediate presence in the palace of armed Ilocano warlords and their bodyguards. Congressmen Roque Ablan Jr. and FloroCrisologo, Rempel surmised, did not only offer moral support, but “machine-gun support” as well.

Marcos may have the loyalty of the Ilocano politicians but not the full support yet of the military. Despite his fear for his life, Marcos could not give himself emergency powers just yet. Until then, his pretense at keeping faith with the country’s democratic institutions must be kept. In public, he conjured confidence and contrition; in private he wrote of spies and saboteurs—including the very ones he claimed to have fielded to sabotage the opposition.

This was the mind of a man who just a month earlier achieved a unique feat in the country’s postwar history. He got himself reelected as president. He bested Osmeña with 1.8 million votes. On December 30, 1969 he was sworn in at the Quirino Grandstand for a second term.

Two years into his first term as president, Marcos started planning his 1969 re-election campaign. It was to be a violent and expensive campaign. So violent that during the election campaign, assassins lurked in Marcos’s mind. At election’s eve, Marcos confided to Joaquin that a Huk commander is after him. Before that, a group of 60 Muslims in Cebu. At that point, Marcos could simply have conjured enemies, both to show bravado and justify the violence inflicted on his opponent.

What was not imagined was how Marcos pillaged the public treasury for his reelection. As recounted by Raymond Bonner in Waltzing with a Dictator:

Two weeks before the election Marcos’s campaign manager, Ernesto Maceda, withdrew 100 million pesos (roughly $25 million). Then, with an air force plane and military security, he hopped around the islands, dispensing peso-filled envelopes: Barrio captains received 2,000 to 3,000 pesos, mayors up to 100,000 pesos, and favored congressional candidates as much as a million pesos. “We were prepared to cheat all the way,” Maceda said in an interview many years later.The election cost Marcos a staggering $50 million, which was $16 million more than Nixon had raised for his successful presidential bid the year before . . . . What votes Marcos couldn’t buy, he stole . . .

Marcos had the special forces of the Philippine Constabulary do the dirty work for him. They were under the command of Brig. Gen. Vicente R. Raval. The same police general would figure in the bloody events of January 1970. The flagrant electoral violence they committed put into question the legitimacy of Marcos’electoral victory.

Raiding the nation’s coffers tanked the economy. As he started his second term, Marcos stopped all government infrastructure projects as his government had almost ran out of money.

A month later, on January 26 and 30, activists, mostly university students, were to lay siege to Malacañang. Their protests exposed Marcos’ venality and sheer greed for power. In Marcos’mind, wrote Condrado de Quiros, “. . . when the students attacked Malacañang, they ceased to be only students . . . Behind them, he saw variously the NPA, Sergio Osmeña’s assassination squads, Ninoy Aquino’s private army, the Liberal Party, and the communist-infiltrated media, all carrying out a preconceived plan of action.”

Marcos limited his movement to the presidential palace in February that year, though Joaquin claimed “he traveled to Ilocandia to face another kind of demonstration: a public avowal of Ilocano affection” on the last week of that month.

Marcos’s ego seemed to be in need of constant tending. On February 6, when he started receiving visitors again, the Official Gazette said the first one was a large delegation of veterans who formally pledged support, “reiterating their faith in the leadership of President Marcos.”

The next visitor was former ambassador Amelito R. Mutuc “who, along with seven of his nine children, staged a ‘demonstration’ at the Freedom Park in front of Malacañang.” Mutuc told Marcos that he “was just showing my children, Mr. President, how to conduct a peaceful demonstration.” The day of adulation ended with Marcos receiving “500 copies of the book Ferdinand Edralin Marcos,” written in Ilocano by [Placido] Real.

In March 1970, Marcos went out of the presidential palace six times, spending its last week in Baguio City and the Ilocos region to observe the Lenten Season. He seemed to have gotten hold of himself.

In his interview with Joaquin, he portrayed himself as the calm, cool, and collected commander-in-chief, giving instructions on the telephone to palace guards while eating his supper at the height of the January 30, 1970 siege of Malacañang.

Maybe to keep this composure, he fortified the palace to fend off any military incursion. “All the windows of the Palace facing Aviles,” observed Joaquin, “have been paneled up with plywood.” There was a sepulchral quality to the place. “In the hall of the chandeliers, lights burn before the Santo Niño enshrined on an altar.”

On February 5, 1970, the Manila Times published a photograph of earth mounds being piled up along the fences of Malacañang. Joaquin asked him about it. Marcos showed him pictures, claiming the diggings “were for power-line pipes. Since the rioters had cut all the wires along the fence . . . there has been no putting up of unusual constructions for the defense of the Palace.”

Manila Times photo, February 5, 1970

This was belied by his press secretary, Kit Tatad, who recalled seeing: “a machine-gun nest.” Tatad made the disclosure to William C. Rempel in Delusions of a Dictator. What Marcos denied, Rempel debunked:

Emergency remodeling projects were launched throughout the palace. The president’s basement gymnasium was converted into a bunker, a fully stocked shelter with baffled walls to withstand mortar attacks. Outside, armored gun emplacements were constructed at the gates. The lawn west of the veranda was cleared and lights were installed, making it a helicopter landing zone. Overnight, new fences went up. Instant foxholes pockmarked the lush grounds.

For security reasons, it was understandable that Marcos downplayed the fortification of Malacañang. The changes, however, offered a clear view to the bunker mentality that had set in on his mind. His February 28, 1970 diary entry said the “cement shelter in the ground floor [of Malacañang] has just been finished,” and that it was built to withstand “any possible mortar or grenade attack.”

Arturo Aruiza, one of Marcos’s closest aides, said in his book Ferdinand Marcos: Malacañang to Makiki that on the night of the Battle of Mendiola, he led a convoy of trucks from Malacañang “loaded with papers, guns, ammunition, and money” to Baguio, where he set up a contingency seat of government. Aruiza said Col. Fabian Ver summoned him back to Manila weeks later.

Even the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency saw through Marcos’ attempts to project himself as a fearless leader. In an intelligence memorandum titled “Philippine Student Agitation,” dated April 3, 1970, the CIA noted that “Marcos’ fearful concern for his personal safety, reinforced by the influence of soothsayers who have predicted his assassination, have caused him virtually to barricade himself in the presidential palace.”

However, the ghosts of those who died in the January 30, 1970 Battle of Mendiola cannot be kept at bay by the new fortifications in Malacañang. Marcos had to devise a political ploy to give his administration a facade of compassion for atrocities he himself was partly responsible for. (To be continued. Part II: Of Pillboxes and Firearms)