Looking for the silver bullet
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By Luis V. Teodoro
Everyone by now knows Imelda Marcos, and we don't mean only in the Philippines.
In 1986 the overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos and the subsequent exposure of his as well as her excesses-and then President Ronald Reagan's giving them sanctuary in Hawaii-put Ferdinand and Imelda's name on everyone's lips, and even on the comedy circuit map in the United States. Mostly the jokes were about her shoes, with the American comic Robin Williams at one point referring to most of the 3,000 designer pairs in her collection as never having been used.
Excess was what made her and Ferdinand funny, but the Marcos excess was tragic, too, at least for the Filipino people who had to pay for it in treasure as well as suffering. That excess was in evidence everywhere, and not only in those shoes and or in the gallon jugs of Chanel No. 5 Imelda Marcos once kept in her living quarters in Malaca–ang.
There was, first of all, the Marcos fortune, estimated at anywhere between $10 to 30 billion, or roughly the size of the (still growing) Philippine national debt to foreign lending institutions. Second was the cost in terms of the poverty rampant in the Philippines, the result of the immense and systematic looting of the country's treasury that went on during the almost 20 years of the Marcos period (1965-1986). Third was the violence against the people, mostly from the government, that, to cope with protests, it unleashed and rapidly escalated in 1972.
The poverty grows worse every day, and the violence haunts Filipinos still, as it haunts the 100,000 men, women and even children Marcos' police and military detained, and in most instances tortured, and in others murdered. But it haunts Filipinos, too, in the form of violent crimes such as kidnappings and murders, the perpetrators of which are usually police and military men, as well as in the violations of human rights that go on in every police precinct where suspects are habitually tortured, and in every village where the military holds operations.
Among Marcos' legacies was indeed the unleashing of a police and military that, though created during United States colonial rule to preserve an unjust social and economic order, had been, prior to 1972, grudgingly kept in check by the law, and by a people slowly growing in militancy.
By placing the country under martial rule in 1972, however, Marcos ripped off the country's democratic mask and exposed the law for what it was: a creation of the ruling elite and therefore something it could ignore. Through Proclamation 1081 Marcos also declared war on the people-with the support of a police and military to which he had assured a share of the spoils.
Marcos did not limit himself to the police and military, however. He corrupted them all: the bureaucracy, to which he demonstrated new and ever more creative ways of self-aggrandizement; and the men and women of the elite who ran the country's institutions, including its courts, to whom he revealed through his acts the secret that only honesty and dedication, not the law, stood in the way of uncommon wealth and unbridled power.
In 1986 the only Philippine president to have ever had the gall to make himself absolute ruler of the Philippines was overthrown. But that event neither swept away his evil legacy, nor did it bring him to account for his crimes.
Twelve years later, the biggest injustice in the recent history of the Philippines-
Marcos' having robbed it of both its freedom as well as its fortune-is yet to be redressed. The Marcos billions (in dollars), extracted from the people and stashed away in banks all over the world, is still unrecovered, and the men and women he tortured and killed still unrecompensed and certainly unavenged. Yet very recently has his widow been crowing to the heavens that not only she herself, Imelda, but also he, Marcos, were being vindicated only a little more than a decade after they were thrown out of the country they had plundered.
She has reason to gloat. Like the undead, the Marcoses can't be kept down; they rise still under cover of darkness.
For reasons that can indeed only be described as shadowy, the Philippine Supreme Court, by a vote of eight to five, last October 6 acquitted Imelda Marcos of corruption charges, reversing a graft court conviction sentencing her to 12 years in prison in the only case in which she had been found guilty.
Although she faces several other criminal and civil suits in connection with her late husband's rule, the lawyers are not optimistic that these will prosper, primarily because, since July this year, things had only too dramatically changed for the Marcoses.
Both Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and his sister Imee are back in government, he as provincial governor, and she as a congresswoman. But that's not all. Joseph Estrada had not yet assumed the Presidency when he announced a plan to permit the burial of Ferdinand Marcos in Makati City's Libingan ng Mga Bayani or Heroes' Cemetery, as well as a compromise settlement with the Marcoses on the recovery of millions of dollars stolen from the national treasury during the Marcos period. Estrada backtracked on the second in the face of large-scale protests, but stubbornly still insists on the second, which would mean the withdrawal of all the cases the government has filed against the Marcoses.
Once in power, Estrada also very quickly saw to the return to San Miguel Corp. of his patron Eduardo Cojuangco, an act that would not have been too noteworthy were it now for the fact that Cojuangco was one of Marcos' closest business and political associates-or, as is universally known in the Philippines, a "Marcos crony."
The Imelda Marcos acquittal thus shows that not only has the silver bullet that will finally call the Marcoses to account not been found-or is rapidly turning into brass-it is even likely that they'll be back for blood with a vengeance.
The acquittal, after all, was puzzling in its being based on the supposed lack of "moral certainty required for conviction," as the justice who wrote the decision so quaintly out it.
Yet the case against Imelda Marcos was simple enough, and few save Supreme Court justices would argue the absence of moral certainty about it.
In 1984 Imelda Marcos leased several thousand square meters of land owned by Metropolitan Manila's Light Rail Transit Authority (of which she was head) to the Philippine General Hospital Foundation (of which she was president) for P102,000 a month for 25 years.
A few weeks later she subleased the same property to a private group for P743,000 a month, or P632,000 more than what the PGHF was paying the LRTA. PGHF thus made P189 million while the lease was in effect-meaning, the government LOST that much from the deal.
Imelda Marcos' lawyers contended that she used the P189 million to renovate the University of the Philippines-Philippine General Hospital in Manila. That claim has been denied by its former director, who recently pointed out that the renovation was achieved through a Social Security System loan obtained with UP property as collateral.
Imelda Marcos' foundation was supposed to repay the loan, but did not, and the SSS would have foreclosed on UP sometime after 1986, had not then President Corazon Aquino's administration agreed to repay the loan. The out-patient department of PGH, for which Imelda Marcos is also taking credit, was, on the other hand, paid for, not by her foundation, but by a Japanese loan Ms. Aquino obtained during a visit to Japan.
Imelda Marcos still insists, despite the evidence, that her foundation paid for the PGH renovation, including the construction of its out-patient department, whereas it is clear that it was the Aquino government which paid for it. Asked if she would apologize for this as well as other hi-jinks, Imelda Marcos insisted that hers had been "a godly act" for which she need not apologize.
In the terror lore of all countries, the ungodly always pretend to be otherwise. In this instance it is clear that the P189 million her foundation made did not go to the godly act of renovating the PGH, which raises the question of where it really went. But the more interesting question is why the Supreme Court, despite the apparently cut and dried issues in the case, anyway went ahead and acquitted Mrs. Marcos supposedly because of procedural infirmities in the way the case was prosecuted.
What is laughably-or is it tragically?-becoming apparent as the days after the acquittal wore on was that, as former Senator Jovito Salonga pointed out, the Court used the procedural infirmities in previous other cases against Imelda Marcos in which she was acquitted in deciding on this one. Are the justices who voted for acquittal just plain incompetent, or were they being creatively incompetent?
Where, oh where, is that silver bullet that will put an end to these abominations against humanity, to this mockery of justice, these insults to the injured?
Wherever else it may be, it certainly isn't in the Supreme Court, among whose eight pro-acquittal justices only one had not been appointed previously by Marcos in some other capacity. At least one, in fact, had at one time directly served under Imelda Marcos' lawyer. So, how's that for coincidence?
Luis V. Teodoro is a professor of journalism and currently dean of the College of Mass Communication, University of the Philippines in Diliman, and managing editor of thePhilippine Journalism Review. An award-winning fictionist, he has been a magazine editor and newspaper columnist. He also writes a weekly news analysis forPhilippine News and Features, a Philippine news syndicate.
