The Once and Future King

For a foreigner who has taken a liking to the Filipino people, poking around in their politics isn’t a good idea. Decades of appalling corruption have turned this democracy, founded on July 4, 1946, into an unfunny and unedifying farce. It was the term “kleptocracy” – "rule by a class of thieves," first coined in 1819 in reference to Spain – that American Congressman Stephen Solarz used to characterize the Philippine system of government in 1986. His 2010 obituary states: 

His most well-known battle was in 1986, when Solarz held highly publicized hearings to prove that Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos had looted the Philippine treasury of millions of dollars to buy real estate in the United States. He led the congressional movement to withhold military aid to that country until Marcos could be driven out and Corazon Aquino installed as president. During the hearings, Solarz accused Marcos of running a "kleptocracy" and enriching himself and his wife at the expense of his country's citizens. Solarz said in March 1986 after a visit to Manila that Versailles, the palace of French King Louis XVI, looked like an "Appalachian hovel" in comparison to Malacanang Palace, where the Marcoses lived.(1)

On May 9 Filipinos will go to the polls to elect their 17th president and, barring a seismic shift in popular opinion in the next 10 days, the winner will be: Ferdinand Marcos. Again. Of course, not the former dictator who made off with somewhere between five and ten billion dollars when his family was airlifted out of the country in 1986. That man died of cancer in Hawaii three years later. Ferdinand Marcos, Jr, who now goes by the nickname of Bongbong,(2) is the only son of the man who remains the personification of poltical corruption and he is way ahead in the presidential race. Bongbong, his mother Imelda (now 92) and his sister Imee returned to the Philippines in 1992 after Cory Aquino’s term as president ended. Cory had spent much of her time in office taking revenge on the Marcos family by going after some, though not all, of the money Marcos had salted away in international banks during his twenty years as president.(3) Cory’s vengeance was also personal: her husband, Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, Jr. was murdered at Marcos’s behest. 

It is well to refresh our memories of exactly what happened in 1986. After mass protests in February of 1986 – now known as People Power – the Marcos family had to be evacuated from the presidential palace by four US Air Force helicopters. The entire evacuation operation was at the direction of US president Ronald Reagan, who was a “personal friend” of the family. The helicopters transported the family to Clark Air Base north of Manila where they were transferred to a C-9 and a C-141 – two enormous transport aircraft. Fifty-five people were among the Marcos retinue. The aircraft landed first in Guam, where Ferdinand Sr underwent a medical exam, and then flew on to Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii. It took US Customs agents in Hawaii five hours to inspect 278 crates that had been transported with the family. Of the 278 crates 22 contained more than 27.7 million Philippine pesos in newly minted bills (more than a million dollars at the 1986 exchange rate). There was also a Gucci briefcase with a solid gold buckle that contained 24 1-kilo gold bars. The briefcase was labelled “To Ferdinand Marcos from Imelda on the Occasion of our 24th Wedding Anniversary.” (The anniversary was in 1978.) Customs impounded everything, allowing the family to keep $300,000 in gold and another $150,000 in bonds because these items were carried in their personal luggage and were declared on their customs cards. 

Bongbong was 28 years old at the time of his family’s exile and he, as his family’s representative, immediately got involved in the moving of their fortune which was secreted in banks in thirteen countries – Vatican City among them. Cory Aquino’s very first executive order was the establishment of the Presidential Commission on Good Government. Agents were appointed to locate the Marcos’s ill-gotten wealth and were authorized to get it back. Since Marcos was the world’s expert on corruption, he knew exactly what to do to block the Aquino government’s efforts to sieze his assets. Aquino’s 2nd executive order was to freeze all of Marcos’s assets in the Philippines. 

The Philippine government contacted Marcos’s Swiss bank directly about the retrieval of a portion of their stolen fortune. The banks, even without the permission of Marcos, froze the account and began the process of transferring more than $200M to accounts of the Philippine government. Out of an estimated total of $7.5B. I won’t go into the truly incredible details about what became of the $200M+. Let it suffice that other actors in the Philippine government stole it from the Philippine people once again. In 1998, Imelda Marcos told the Philippine newspaper The Inquirer: 

“We practically own everything in the Philippines—from electricity, telecommunications, airline, banking, beer and tobacco, newspaper publishing, television stations, shipping, oil and mining, hotels and beach resorts, down to coconut milling, small farms, real estate and insurance.”

Imelda subsequently served nine years in the Philippine House of Representatives (2010-2019), filling the seat vacated by Bongbong, who moved on to the Philippine Senate. Bonbong ran for Vice President in 2016 but lost by a narrow margin to Leni Robredo. Robredo is currently running second behind Marcos for the office of president in opinion polls. Hoping to block Marcos’s victory on May 9, other candidates have bowed out of the race and moved the support of their parties behind Robredo. During Bongbong’s terms as senator, the Marcos family has brought their resources to bear on a campaign to rewrite Philippine history and whitewash his father’s crimes. 

I have written on this blog before about the antics of this quite mediocre family, about Imelda’s shoes, about the efforts to move Ferdinand Sr’s corpse, which had been embalmed in a glass case [see above] into a Manila cemetery where former Philippine presidents are buried. Those efforts were rewarded when President Duterte, who claims that Ferdinand was the Philippines’ best president, removed the last obstacles and the body was moved, with full state honors, to the Cemetery of the Heroes in 2016. 

Bongbong could've let himself entirely off the hook by simply proclaiming that he is not his father. Instead he has insisted, contrary to historical record, that his father acted all along in good faith in order to lead the nation to prosperity, but that his enemies had prevented him from succeeding. Since, as George Orwell wrote, “history is written by the winners,” there is a good chance that the history of Ferdinand Sr’s notorious administration will be rewritten. 

It’s difficult to gauge what the average Filipino wants from their elected officials in return for their votes. All we can tell for certain is that what they got from every one of them in the past probably wasn’t what they expected. The current president, Rodrigo Duterte, was elected by a landslide (in a country where actual landslides are practically endemic) on the promise of slaughtering every single drug user and drug dealer in the country. Duterte failed to uphold that promise, thank God. He will leave office with an investigation into his possible crimes against humanity being conducted by the International Criminal Court. Filipinos, however, seem indifferent to international affairs and tribunals. 

Could Bongbong possibly be out for revenge on a country that drove his father out of office and allowed him to die in exile, and a government that harried his family from court to court for the retrieval of by now untold sums of money? 

(1) The Cleveland Plain Dealer Nov. 30, 2010.

(2) Filipinos are fond of sometimes childish nicknames. For instance, there is a popular actor and former underwear model who goes by the name Dingdong Dantes. His wife refers to him simply as “Dong.” 

(3) According to the Philippine constitution, amended during Cory Aquino's term, an elected president can serve only one six-year term.