No family has caused greater damage to a nation and its people with far-reaching implications like the Marcoses. For over twenty years, Ferdinand Marcos plundered the country’s coffers, sucking it dry of all that can be stolen and borrowing money from other countries without end, all while raising his family to be his conspirators in such plundering. All who spoke against them were abducted, tortured, and/or brutally murdered. For over twenty years Marcos and friends lived luxuriously as the rest of the country suffered. They had no intention of giving up power, and the killings and disappearances simply did not stop. After the People Power Revolution, the family and their cronies were disgraced and exiled, restoring democracy in the Philippines. But it was their return that posed a brand-new threat to society.
Upon the return of the Marcoses in the nineties, Bongbong Marcos immediately ran for and won a seat in Congress, representing Ilocos Norte. Imelda eventually won a seat in Congress for Leyte. Not long after, almost all members of the Marcos family and even some of the Romualdez family from where Imelda comes were holding public office, proving that the clan still has its loyal supporters. But the family was unsatisfied. Their desire since being deposed has always been for the Marcos name to be restored to its former glory, and this will never happen – not while the Marcos atrocities are vivid in the collective memory of the rest of the country.
In 2020, a former executive-turned-whistleblower from political data company Cambridge Analytica revealed that Bongbong Marcos himself approached the company a few years back in order to rebrand the Marcos family image on social media. Prior to this, an investigating team from online news outlet Rappler found that a network of Facebook pages were being created on a regular basis, whose purpose is to create and share false information about Marcos and Martial law, by downplaying the events that transpired and atrocities that were committed, as well as exaggerating the achievements and even the family history of the Marcoses. These moves are only part of a more complex scheme that is being orchestrated for years where the end goal is for another Marcos to be elected to the highest seat of power as was the late dictator some fifty years ago.
Some of these lies which continue to be propagated include Marcos Sr.’s military record, the source of the family’s wealth, school records of the Marcos children, better living conditions during the Martial Law years, and even a reimagined version of Malakas at Maganda. All these lies used to be told in hushed tones but are now being spread across all of social media for the uninformed to consume.
One of the most prevailing absurdities that has kept on being talked about is that the Marcos wealth is attributable to their having receipt of gold bars from the Tallano-Tagean Family, the supposed Maharlikan Royal Family that controlled the Philippines before World War II. As the story goes, the Tallano family were the signatories of the Treaty of Paris, which was the formal cessation by Spain of the Philippines to the United States, and that said family paid gold bars to Marcos at the time. However, this is easily debunked by several historians across their respective works. What is true is that the national debt of the Philippines ballooned to more than 400 billion pesos by 1986, but most of the public works done during that time were underutilized. Further, think-tank IBON Foundation pegs the Marcoses’ ill-gotten wealth to be around P1.87 trillion, assuming the family just had $4 billion in 1989.
And even though it has long been established that the economy during Marcos had severely plummeted, there remains to be a claim that is still believed by many, that being the exchange rate at the time was $1 was equivalent to P1. This, of course, is blatantly false. At the time Marcos came to power in 1965, the exchange rate was already at P3.91 per dollar. When he left in 1986, the dollar was worth P20.46. The last time the peso was at P2 was in 1945. It has only since then increased and began to skyrocket at the time of Marcos.
Along with the Marcoses to have an image repackaging was the nutribun – the bread donated by the United States government to the Philippines to combat soaring levels of child malnutrition. Even then the Philippine Government took credit for its conceptualization and distribution, when it was actually a laboratory in the U.S. which developed it. What really happened was, by the end of Marcos’ first term, child malnutrition had soared, and the country no longer had the funds to feed the poor, on top of the fact that elections was nearing and all expenses were diverted to campaign purposes. The Marcos administration had no other choice but to distribute cheaply produced bread in order to prevent mass starvation, and managed to capitalize on this tragedy.
The truth is, the Philippines became the sick man of Asia during Marcos and because of Marcos. When he took office, the country was in good standing with the rest of the world, its economy was among the fastest rising, and we were at the brink of fully recovering from the effects of the Second World War. After the family’s ouster, the country was deep in debt, the government could not take out loans due to its bad credit, and poverty was at an all time high. Our Supreme Court as well as other foreign courts have even ruled that the Marcoses had accumulated ill-gotten wealth in the trillions but continue to block all efforts to reacquire them.
To deny that Marcos ever plundered our country and oppressed our people would be the greatest travesty. And because of all these, the Marcoses now only want to rewrite history in their favor.
therizalene.com
READ: Five Heroes Who Taught Us To Give Everything To Our Nation