The Marcos Legacy

THE book is not only about the legacy of President Ferdinand E. Marcos but also the ignominious story of how two governments – and others – driven by a mixture of greed and vindictiveness, ganged up on him and his family, divested them not just of lawful power, but of honor as well as of possessions.

This is the story of how legal systems were manipulated for sinister ends, how God-given rights were wantonly violated by governments professing respect for human rights.

This book also consists mostly of official documents that are incontrovertible proof of the unjust punishments inflicted upon the Marcoses without them first being found guilty by the courts of law. These documents chronicled lies, frauds, flawed logic, anomalous processes and judicial partisanship that made adverse decisions against them possible in various courts.

The accusatory and punitive documents comprised a paper trail of shameful acts that their authors would regret come Judgment Day. What human law can justify, for instance, the desecration of the dead? What commitment to human rights can legitimize their sustained violation? What advocate of justice can glory in denying it from the accused?

Justices, lawyers, students and laymen would no doubt be amused or bewildered by the whirlwind allegations lodged against the Marcoses, and the maze of processes they went through. Legal systems are vulnerable to manhandling that frustrates justice. Most of the holdings against the Marcoses have been based on the discretion of officials of uncertain impartiality.

Both legal experts and laymen have to wonder, for example, why one American court cautioned that its decision was not to be published, and why the Supreme Court of the Philippines insisted in another decision that its ruling should not be construed as a precedent.

President Marcos’s vision and ideas about leadership, government and constitutionalism still remain fresh and timeless today. He believed in fair and transparent political competition, operated in the national interest, created more friends and widened his network of friendship throughout the world, including in hostile places where others feared to tread.

His enemies and critics saw almost everything he does as a threat to their political ambitions and economic interests. Strangely, they literally “hanged the wrong man” (Hubris 2000) at a time when he was fighting a deadly kidney disease that had emaciated his athletic body not in his homeland but in the United States, a country known for its liberal democracy and many of whose leaders had treated him with dignity and as a reliable ally only to be crucified and abandoned for political, security and economic expediency.

Even his wife, Imelda Romualdez Marcos, their children and grandchildren were not spared from all manners of indignity.

These tribulations befell the Marcoses, Imelda Romualdez-Marcos most of all. But despite the indignities, she has not crumbled and continued to fight their detractors. Before this book went to press, she has already suffered more than 31 years of persecution that have merely steeled her resolve to regain the family’s honor, and perhaps mothered or fathered what the hyenas of history have left of the Marcos fortune.

Already 88 when this book went to press, she continued her quest for justice, realizing that there is more at stake than her family’s name and material wealth: the unity of the Filipino people, their capacity for reconciliation and their willingness to outgrow the betrayal and conflicts of the past.

The Marcoses had been confronted originally with 358 civil and criminal cases (mostly against Imelda), of which some 100 were still current, the rest having been dismissed. Such an extended ordeal certainly adds deeper meaning to what the Irish writer William Butler Yeats penned many decades ago: “The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time.”

Dr. Cecilio T. Arillo, a veteran author-journalist-academician, was educated at the International Academy of Management and Economics (IAME) with a Ph.D. in Management; the Pacific Western University in LA with BSc in Mass Communications and Master’s Degree in Science, Major in Economics; the Harvard Law School-MIT-Tufts University (consortium) on Negotiation, Mediation and Conflict Management; and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government on effective Decision Making and Organizational Change for Senior Executives. He taught for many years undergraduate and postgraduate studies at IAME and was president of the Philcoman Council of Management and Research Institute. Arillo, who writes a column for BusinessMirror, is a member of the American Economic Association, the American Sociological Association, the Philippine Constitution Association, the National Press Club and other organizations.