Powerful ally for Marcos’s hero burial
THE torture was more than 40 years ago, but Loretta Rosales remembers it vividly. Twice during the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos she was arrested by his henchmen for leading street protests. During her detention, she said, she was sexually molested, choked with a belt, given electric shocks and subjected to Russian roulette.
So the news that President Rodrigo Duterte wants to transfer Marcos’ remains to a heroes’ cemetery in Manila hit her in the gut.
“Now they want to make him a hero,” Rosales, a leftist politician who is now 77, said in a recent interview. Doing so would betray Marcos’ victims, she said, and whitewash the past.
“We have a right to the truth,” she said, “and so, too, do the generations after us.”
The debate over the reburial of Marcos, 30 years after he was ousted in the People Power uprising, has forced a national reckoning over a wrenching period of Philippine history.
Protesters on both sides have taken to the streets, and several groups opposed to the reburial have petitioned the Supreme Court to block it.
The court is expected to rule on the petition on Tuesday.
Marcos, whose two-decade rule was notorious for its brutality and extravagance, fled the country in 1986 and died in the United States three years later. His government is believed to have killed more than 3,000 political opponents, tortured tens of thousands more and plundered up to $10 billion in government funds.
But his reputation has softened over time, and his burial in the Cemetery of Heroes would mark the latest step in a posthu- mous political rehabilitation.
His widow, Imelda, best known for the more than 1,000 pairs of shoes she left behind at the presidential palace in 1986, is now a member of Congress. His daughter Imee is the governor of Ilocos Norte province, and his son, Ferdinand Jr, is a senator who came within a hair of winning the vice presidency in elections in May. Supporters portray the Marcos era as a time of economic growth and low crime, despite increasing poverty.
The family has found a staunch ally in Duterte, who has expressed admiration for Ferdinand Marcos and first promised to allow his reburial in May, before Duterte even took office. “I will allow the burial of Marcos in the Heroes’ Cemetery, not because he was a hero but because he was a Filipino soldier,” he said then.
In a trip to the family’s stronghold of Ilocos Norte last month, Duterte again argued that Ferdinand Marcos’ military service made him eligible. “That is the law,” he said. “It is very clear to me that my decision is right.”
The government’s lawyer in the case, Solicitor General Jose Calida, said the reburial would provide the country muchneeded closure.
“As the father of this nation, President Duterte desires to begin the long overdue healing of our nation and to exorcise the ghost of enmity and bitterness that prevent us from moving forward,” Calida told the Supreme Court.
Since his family was allowed to repatriate Ferdinand Marcos’ remains in 1993, they have been kept on public view
in a glass coffin in a refrigerated crypt at the Ferdinand E Marcos Presidential Center in his hometown, Batac, in Ilocos Norte. Fidel Ramos, the president at the time, denied Imelda Marcos’ request for a hero’s burial, and all presidents until now sought to avoid touching a highly charged issue.
But Duterte has close ties with the Marcos family, possibly including financial dealings, that have raised questions of motives beyond national healing.
Duterte has acknowledged receiving a campaign contribution from Imee Marcos. He has not said how much the contribution was, nor reported it publicly. She has denied giving him money, saying Duterte “likes to make jokes.”
Another murky transaction has also raised eyebrows. In August, Duterte attacked a billionaire casino magnate, Roberto Ongpin, as an oligarch and publicly promised to destroy him. Ongpin quietly resigned from his own company and ended up selling his shares to Gregorio Araneta III, the husband of another Marcos daughter, Irene.
Ongpin has not publicly commented on the sale, but critics see the deal as a favour by Duterte to the Marcos family.
The Coalition Against the Marcos Burial at the Cemetery of Heroes, one of seven groups that sought to block the burial, said the former dictator’s family had “bought and paid” for the privilege of his transfer to the Philippine equivalent of Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.
“It’s all about a private transaction. It’s all about the money,” said Hilda Narciso, 70, a coalition member. “Heroism is not bought. It is earned.”
Narciso, then an unemployed teacher, was arrested in 1983 and was raped and tortured for six months inside a military camp in Davao City. She was kept in a small, dark room, she said, and fed a soup of worms and rotten fish. The person who did this to her is no hero, she said.
“We will not allow this travesty to pass unchallenged,” she said.
Duterte has not further explained the campaign contribution. And the Marcos family and the government have not spoken publicly about the sale of the casino business.
There is potentially far greater money at stake, however. Of the estimated $10 billion the government says the Marcos family stole, the presidential commission charged with recovering it has recouped only $650 million.
Ferdinand Marcos Jr has filed a protest at the Presidential Electoral Tribunal contesting his narrow loss, alleging voterigging. If he succeeds and becomes vice president, he could work to eliminate the commission, potentially leaving his family with more than $9 billion in ill-gotten gains.
Duterte has backed Marcos’ election appeal.
In a state visit to China last month, Imee Marcos and her brother were part of Duterte’s entourage, and the president introduced Ferdinand Marcos Jr as his potential vice president.
At a pro-Marcos demonstration in October outside the Supreme Court, Ferdinand Marcos Jr said that he expected a favourable ruling, even though the family’s patience was wearing thin.
“We have been patient for 23 years,” he said.
“We can be patient for a few days more.”