During the 20 years Ferdinand Marcos spent as president of the Philippines, his official salary never rose above $13,500 a year. Nonetheless by 1986, when the “people power” revolution prompted him and his wife to flee into exile in Hawaii, they had amassed a fortune. Imelda Marcos left behind her shoe collection, but her husband brought with him jewelry, gold bricks and freshly printed Philippine currency, together worth around $15 million. In all, he and his cronies are thought to have plundered perhaps $10 billion.
What is more, during his time in office, thousands of Filipinos were tortured, jailed without due process or murdered by the regime’s thugs.
Marcos died in Hawaii, and since 1993 his embalmed remains have been displayed in a glass box in his home province of Ilocos Norte. President Rodrigo Duterte, the erratic strongman now running the Philippines, believes that the dead dictator deserves better: He has approved the Marcos family’s long-standing request to bury their patriarch in Manila’s National Heroes’ Cemetery with full military honors—an idea all Marcos’s previous successors rejected.
Duterte has insisted that Marcos is entitled to such a burial not because he is a hero—“the issue about his heroism is political” is Duterte’s baffling deflection—but because he was a soldier. Never mind that Marcos’s claims to military valor during World War II were largely fabricated.
He also said that the battle over Marcos’s burial has divided the nation, which is accurate: Many older Filipinos do recall Marcos fondly, and a petition supporting his reburial garnered 1.1 million signatures. That isn’t much, though, in a country of 100 million where the median age is 23 or so. Most Filipinos do not remember Marcos’s regime at all.
Duterte may spy a political opportunity. He comes from the southern island of Mindanao, and is the first president not drawn from the elite of Manila. His victory owes as much to voters’ disenchantment with the dozen or so families that dominate Philippine politics as it does to his tough-talking image.
Winning as an outsider is much easier than governing as one, though, and the Marcos family remains powerful. Imelda serves in the House of Representatives, and two of their children are politically active: Imee is governor of the province of Ilocos Norte, while Ferdinand Jr., universally known as “Bongbong,” is a swaggering senator who came within a few thousand votes of the vice presidency. Appeasing the family gives Duterte a political boost in Ilocos, and a favor to call in when he needs it.
Duterte’s plan is not universally popular. A coalition of Jesuit groups said that interring Marcos in the heroes’ cemetery “buries human dignity by legitimizing the massive violations of human and civil rights…that took place under his regime.” Opponents tried to get the Supreme Court to block the burial, arguing that the law reserves the cemetery for those “worthy of admiration.” Recently, however, the Court approved the burial and urged the country to “move on.”
© 2016 Economist Newspaper Ltd., London (November 12). All rights reserved.
Reprinted with permission.