Inevitably, much of this book will be about Imelda Marcos and her highly visible shenanigans (e.g., her travels and trials, her material “artistic” acquisitions, her ostentatious lifestyle), and that is only a natural consequence of Imeldiana lore just being more visible than the boring, invisible scheming and financial shell-games that Marcos played with their stolen billions. As such, the visible appurtenances of Imelda make for greater press and more interesting copy.
Ultimate Indictment
Ultimately, in hindsight and given the perspective of time, there is no recourse but to indict the Marcoses and their accomplices for the crimes they perpetrated in the name of peace and order, staving off the so-called challenges of the “communists and anarchists” who were out to disrupt the capitalist system and old order—and so, a new oligarchic order instituted by Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos could then fill the vacuum.
This book will try to reveal dirty linen and many scandals previously unknown to the general population – and some previously exposed in two limited edition publications: The Conjugal Dictatorship by Primitivo Mijares, Union Square Publications, San Francisco, California, USA, 1976; and Some Are Smarter than Others by Ricardo Manapat, Aletheia Publications, New York, NY, 1991. They were “limited edition” publications set up primarily for the purpose of exposing and sharing these very anti-Marcos screeds to a few hundred or thousand readers. Conjugal Dictatorship, however, has suddenly become available in eBook format.
If I do seem biased and judgmental here, I do hope the reader will forgive me. This is the only way I know of fighting back against the destructive efforts of a massive, almost unstoppable gang that raped, pillaged and plundered the land where I came from, loved at one time and still feel for.
While I never personally suffered at the hands or because of the decrees of the Great Plunderer escaped just in time as the nation was led down a ruinous path, economically if not morally, by the crooks, I feel for those who were less lucky and am still outraged at how people who were supposed to be trusted with the care and leadership of a land fooled and betrayed the very people he entrusted to lead them. May we never forget the heinous crimes and plunder of unimaginable proportions foisted on an unsuspecting populace.
I tried to make this volume as complete and comprehensive on all the crimes and injustices perpetrated during the Marcos regime as possible. But due both to the enormous scope of criminalities committed during that time, and space limitations, it becomes possible only to pick and choose, of which I hope I have given a fair and representative sampling.
Operation Thought Control
The Conjugal Dictatorship was published by a San Francisco Bay Area opposition publisher and was available only via a post office box, generally not available in bookstores, unless a buyer special-ordered it. Remember, this was in the pre-Internet and pre-amazon.com days. Mijares was a former insider in the Marcos administration who became extremely dissatisfied with the wholesale corruption of the regime.
In retribution for the exposé, author Mijares' son was tortured, brutally mutilated, and killed; and Mijares himself was lured back into some trap, ostensibly on some hunting trip to a remote island and, rumor goes, taking a page from the Argentinian colonels and KGB operatives, was pushed overboard alive from a helicopter into the open ocean. (How he could have fallen for such a trap is quite mystifying, but a story for another day.)
Smarter than Others is a comprehensive, exhaustive listing and exposé on the wholesale rape of Philippine corporate structure during the dark years. It was initially based on a pamphlet nicknamed The Octopus Report and, like Dictatorship, was circulated underground in Manila while the Marcoses sat in power. The softcover edition became available in 1991, five years after the whole thieving cabal were booted out but while most of the loot had already fallen through the sieve.
Previous to the attempts to eradicate Conjugal Dictatorship from the public memory banks, the Marcoses had practice in damage-information and thought control. In 1970, The Untold Story of Imelda Marcos by Carmen Navarro Pedrosa first came out in Manila. It was a frank, intimately researched biography of the new Philippine first lady’s real past, humble beginnings and all. It did not sit well with the Asian Zeus and Hera who were now ruling with a solid mandate from their for-the-most-part honest 1969 re-election bid.
While there was no such thing as outright banning of publications then in 1970, the Marcoses first tried to discredit the biography by seeking retractions from three of the most intimate resources of the book: the maid who raised Imelda, her early music teacher, and Imelda’s own first cousin, who was not intimidated by her relation to the new, now powerful Evita Peron-copycat. When none of that worked, the Ruling Couple bought out all existing copies of the book from Manila bookstores and harassed the author to no end, so much so that Pedrosa ended up fleeing to London with her family.
Yet the power couple and their machinery failed to execute a clean sweep since hundreds of copies had already been bought, mostly by Manila’s intelligentsia. Once the book came out and its summary disappearance from the capital’s bookstore shelves, it turned into a hot, underground commodity and was cycled and recycled among educated Manilans. (A year after the Marcoses fell, an updated version was reissued and simply called Imelda Marcos: The Rise and Fall of One of the World’s Most Powerful Women. It is also one of the sources for this book.)
Cosmopolitan, You’ve Gone Too Far
When Cosmopolitan magazine came out with its December, 1975, issue naming Imelda Marcos as one of the planet’s wealthiest women, the couple who were this time overstaying occupants of Malacañang Palace by virtue of the unfounded declaration of martial law in 1972 sent out their agents, minions, and friends across the US to buy up as many copies of the magazine as they possibly could from US newsstands. To some degree they succeeded in denying casual buyers of the magazine the explosive information, but for the most part, it was a laughable Keystone Cops-type effort. In any case, this attempt at implementing damage control on foreign soil, served as a dry run for when The Conjugal Dictatorship came out.
And when the far more revealing and damaging tome by Mijares came out a few months later in mid-1976, the Marcos smother-machine went into overdrive and put in as many mail orders as they could to corner the market for new copies going into circulation. Next, the Marcos minions hit US public libraries that had copies of the book by either actually ripping the book off the shelves and/or borrowing the book under fictitious names and never returning the same. So it seemed like Krystal-nacht, Asian-Manila style, all over again but carried out half-a-world away from the crime scene.
By the very nature of those nefarious actions, lies the heart of the matter. Why would anyone go to such great, sneaky lengths to conceal, obliterate, smother, or delete those works if they obviously did not reveal even a grain of truth? Why hide something if there isn’t a kernel . . . a grain of truth to be ashamed of? Thus, even from the mid-1970s, the Marcoses knew the immorality of their actions, not to mention the severity, scope, downright betrayal of public trust. But did they care? Of course not.
About the Author
I spent the first twenty-four years of life in the Philippines. I am first and foremost a Manila boy (OK, the suburbs). As already mentioned, I grew up in the small, leafy Manila suburb of San Juan, Rizal—the same suburb where Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos made their Manila home, and which eventually five Philippine presidents (Elpidio Quirino, two Macapagals, Marcos and Joseph Estrada) also called home at one time or another.
As a matter of fact, so tied up with Philippine presidential history is the town that in 1965 (when I was still not eligible to vote), the three leading candidates for the presidency (whose surnames all happened to begin with the letter “M”) were all one-time residents of San Juan. There was the incumbent Macapagal; the challenger, Marcos; and the third, Senator Raul Manglapus, had lived there a few years before moving to Makati. Manglapus was the choice of Manila intelligentsia; but unfortunately, without an established