A Genealogy of Marcos Children’s Sins (Part 3)
By: Karl Patrick Wilfred M. Suyat
Marcos-style extravagance
There’s a notorious video footage seized from Malacañang during Cory Aquino’s government that showed an ostentatious birthday celebration of the Marcos family and their closest friends aboard a presidential yacht. It was in 1985. While the young Negros kid Joel Abong suffered from severe malnutrition in the midst of Negros’ infamous famine, Bongbong Marcos was drinking. And belting out We Are The World.
This is an integral part of the unraveling of how the Marcos family lived off an overtly extravagant lifestyle while the rest of the Filipino citizenry wallowed in deep penury and hunger because of their gargantuan plunder — precisely because it was a stark comparison. Since We Are The World was then the worldwide theme against hunger, to see Marcos Jr sing that while people were dying in Negros is more than just shameless. It was utterly despicable, with all the trappings of an atrocious regime.
Manapat’s extensive documentation of the Marcos stolen wealth laid out the roadmap in ascertaining how the Marcos children milked the country’s wealth. In the last two years of the Marcos dictatorship alone (1984–1986), Manapat wrote, “Marcos, Imelda, and their children spent $68 million”: $6.8 million in 1984, $4.2 million in 1985, and $676,945 in the first two months of 1986. How much more could the Marcos family — especially their children — have spent before 1984 to 1986?
Take the case of Imee and Bongbong’s financial prowess when the two studied abroad. Manapat was adamant: in contrast to the Marcos regime’s mismanagement, waste of resources, and measly allocation of funds for the education sector, “… government funds were never lacking when it came to paying for the Princeton University education of Marcos’ eldest daughter, Imee.”
Unlike today’s scholar students, Imee Marcos was never one of them — but the government funded her Princeton education through state funds funneled from the Philippine National Bank (PNB). Manapat quoted Puerto Rico-based corporate lawyer Juan Saavedra Castro in affirming the point: the checks that paid for Imee’s tuition fees — pegged at $4,445/semester — came directly from government accounts, either from treasury warrants or the bank’s money itself. “The bank was literally paying for those checks as there were no funds behind them,” Castro testified.
Manapat then dropped a bombshell: “The Marcoses opened at least 15 bank accounts in the US […] under false names. Some of these accounts were used to fund Imee’s studies at Princeton and Bongbong’s studies at Wharton, each of whom received a monthly allowance of $10,000.”
In fact, while public school students suffered a 1:8 book ratio under the dictatorship, hundreds of books lined up Imee’s 18th century Princeton estate. Imagine this: students scrambled to have quality books to use in their education while Imee had never even read Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. Worse than that: Imee never finished her degree in Princeton, as did Bongbong.
The Marcos family did not stop with personal splurges, stashed bank deposits, and extravagance in lifestyle. Even real estate had their taste of the Marcos stolen wealth — including their children’s. “For their own personal upkeep,” Manapat wrote, “the Marcos family maintained houses by the dozens and spent by the millions each year.” Did this include the Marcos children? Yes.
Close to fifty — that’s a quick count of the Marcos family’s residential properties. Several of these houses stood in Baguio, in the city where the Marcos family and their friends alone had no less than 69 titles — both residences and real estate properties. Bongbong owned the Wigwam House, while Imee obtained the Fairchild House. Meanwhile, their youngest sibling, Irene, owned the Hans Menzi House. (On the same road as Bongbong’s mansion, a two-story residence called the Lualhati Residence was located; it was owned by Marcos crony Jose Y. Campos.)
Across Metropolitan Manila, where their mother ruled as governor, the Marcos children owned houses as well: Wack-Wack Subdivision (Imee), Forbes Park (Irene), and Seaside, Parañaque (Bongbong). The “construction, renovations, and maintenance of these houses” were paid directly by the Office of the President: the Palace spent $3.2 million in 1984 and $10.5 million in 1985 alone to sustain these houses — while “light, water, power, and gas” expenses alone amounted to $1.7 million in 1985. No wonder, 49% of the country’s populace lived below the poverty line in Marcos’ last years.
Even weddings have not escaped the wrath of the Marcos plunder. In June 1983, almost two months before the murder of Marcos’ chief rival Ninoy Aquino, the youngest Marcos child married a scion of another oligarchic clan: Greggy Araneta. For the Marcos-Araneta nuptials, Manapat wrote, the Marcos family spent $10.3 million. For the gowns of the Marcos women, the family spent $309,420, while the televised coverage of the wedding cost the regime no less than $6 million.
But that’s not yet the end: Marcos himself inaugurated a huge government-owned resort complex replete with a “126-room first-class hotel” and “constructed out of the Ilocos sand dunes to accommodate the privileged friends and guests.” The Marcos-inaugurated resort complex’s cost? $10.5 million.
Under the Marcos dictatorship, a new phenomenon of economic monopoly emerged: crony capitalism. But apart from the names such as Herminio Disini, Antonio Floirendo, or Danding Cojuangco, the names Imee Marcos and Greggy Marcos-Araneta (the dictator’s son-in-law) also appeared in the list of Marcos’ cronies.
“The Marcos children were also active in business,” Manapat himself said. He attested to the following ties that bind: for instance, the eldest Marcos daughter controlled BBC (Channel 2), RPN (Channel 9), IBC (Channel 13), and a 10-kilo-watt radio station called DWNW. Marcos sequestered these television stations upon martial law’s proclamation. Imee also headed the Experimental Cinema of the Philippines, organized two garment firms under her tutelage — De Soleil Apparel Manufacturing and American Inter-Fashion — and “took over the export quotas” of another garment firm, the Glorious Sun Fashion Garments Manufacturing. Imee did all of these while she sat as Kabataang Barangay’s chairperson — and oversaw the brutal murder of Archimedes Trajano.
Meanwhile, the Marcos son-in-law — in whose name a newspaper article appended the appellations “greedy” and “having a penchant for larceny” — had a predilection for acquisition of assets. One example that Manapat cited was Araneta’s acquisition of Pantranco North Express through inner maneuverings within PNB — including an “undated promissory note” involving $1.6 million for the Marcos-controlled Security Bank, the same financial institution that funded through a $1.3 million loan the Araneta-run Irene Marcos Export Co (Imexco). Through a “paper corporation” (another name for bogus) under his name, North Express Transport Inc (NETI), Araneta coveted Pantranco’s ownership.
Does this trail of stolen wealth and a vulgar, ostentatious lifestyle exclude the Marcos grandchildren? Not really, as Manapat’s documentation included in its scope Alfonso Marcos-Araneta and Borgy Marcos-Manotoc, sons of the Marcos daughters: “[Imelda] gave, for example, $6,600 and $6,000 to grandchildren Alfonso and Borgy during the Christmas of 1984.” Where did this money come from? Apparently, from “the private vaults” of the Marcos conjugal dictators.
Washing hands off criminal stain
Now, the Marcos children strive their best to sweep all these traces of complicity and benefit from their conjugal dictators-parents’ crimes — and force the public to forget their own crimes during the dictatorship. All details which were threshed out in this documentation involved the Marcos children, not their parents.
The eldest of the Marcos children, who was convicted for Trajano’s murder and wallowed in a government-funded Princeton education but without accomplishing a degree, is now claiming that she’s “baffled” by discussions about their family’s 14-year dictatorship. The late dictator’s only son and namesake is now gunning to win the 2022 presidential race, in a shuddering dovetail with Proclamation 1081’s golden anniversary, using what is remaining of their clan’s stolen wealth.
A well-coordinated, massively funded social media campaign has been on the works for quite some time already to wash the stains of martial law’s crimes off the hands of the unconscionable Marcos family, while the Marcos children are traipsing between denial and remorselessness in dealing with the ghosts of their patriarch’s twenty-year regime rife with huge tracts of plunder and a horrid human rights record. On the other hand, the Marcos matriarch — Imelda — is huddling with a conviction by the Sandiganbayan for seven counts of graft involving $200 million from the Marcos family’s illicit Swiss bank deposits, in connection with the Marcos dollar deposits in Swiss banks that Supreme Court had declared ill-gotten in Republic v Sandiganbayan.
William Shakespeare said it best: the sins of the father are to be laid upon the children. But more than that, in the gut-wrenching and infuriating case of the Marcos children, the three of them had criminal actions on their own whether by complicit participation, self-initiative, or direct benefit. The courts have affirmed the Marcos children’s own roles during the dictatorship, while an entire literature of documentation about the Marcos family’s crimes is in existence.
But how do you explain such a “stunning reversal from ill fortune” for the Marcos children?
In 2015, Robles answered her own question in a separate commentary for Philippine Daily Inquirer: “The 1986 People Power Revolution did chop down the Marcos political tree. But its intricate roots that spread far and wide across the state bureaucracy and Philippine society remained intact. All the Marcoses had to do was nurture the roots and wait for the tree to grow back.”
Marcos Jr now stands on a cusp of another presidential gallop — almost 50 years since 1972. Maria Imelda is now a senator. But the victims of the Marcos dictatorship, from the kin of the murdered like Trajano to the generations who are paying off the billions in Marcos’ debts (which were also stolen), are pushing back in the battle of memory. As the people fought Marcos in 1986, so should the people fight his revisionist family today, even if another murderous dictator had conferred to him the fraudulent honor of a “hero’s burial” that was not carried out without a single show of defiance.
End.
