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Martial Law

Lest we forget: Duterte’s Crimes vs the Filipino people (Part 1)

in Countercurrent

Since the “unity” of the Marcoses and the Dutertes resoundingly shattered this year, their word wars and maneuvers have become increasingly messier. They throw mud at each other as if their rivals were much dirtier. But, even as we get entertained and disgusted by their spectacle, let us keep in mind that in our country’s semifeudal, semicolonial condition:

1. They are the same, though as rival bureaucrat capitalists themselves, they race with each other to take as much power and loot from government positions.

2. Occasionally they would “unite” for benefits, but this never lasts.

3. While in power, the ruling clique would top them all in exploiting and oppressing the people, serving the interests of the big landlords and compradors, and their imperialist masters.

4. When out of power, the former ruling clique would seek to protect its loot, evade liability for their crimes and abuses, and try their darn best to come back to power.

The ex-ruling clique of Rodrigo Duterte has yet to answer for his horrid crimes. Yet, his clique is aiming for a comeback not just in the mid-term 2025 elections but more so in the 2028 presidential elections. At the forefront are his children, the current vice-president Sara Duterte, and his two sons (a city mayor and a congressman).

Read: Gloves off in Marcos-Duterte circus

Duterte managed to score the presidency in 2016 by riding on the people’s discontent with the exiting regime of Benigno Aquino Jr. This time around, the Duterte clique is using the same game plan—riding on the people’s disgust with the incumbent US-Marcos Jr regime.

Read: Duterte: Portrait of a bureaucrat capitalist

The people owe it to themselves to remember that, among others, the Dutertes should be made accountable for the following:

1. Mass murder under the “war on drug” campaign

Duterte raised the culture of impunity in the country to a new level with thousands of extrajudicial killings. From 2016 to 2022, he shocked the country and the world with left and right vigilante killings coupled with his brash and profane way of shielding the police, the military and the paramilitary groups. The kin of the victims brought the case to the International Criminal Court (ICC). In 2018 Duterte removed the Philippines from the ICC to evade its probe on his war on drugs.

By 2024, the ICC has finished the first series of investigations confirming the “systematic and mass killings” under Duterte’s “war on drugs.”

While the Marcos 2 regime announced it is reconsidering re-entry into the ICC, it also said it is not honoring the ICC warrant of arrest. However, Marcos Jr’s minions in the House of Representatives went ahead to create a “mega-panel”, called the quad committee, to probe the interconnection between the extrajudicial killings, illegal drug trade and Duterte’s drug war, the Philippine offshore gaming operators (POGOs), and Chinese syndicates. Also, as of this writing, Marcos’ Justice Secretary Jesus Remulla said his Department “will not hinder the Interpol from executing its duties if the International Criminal Court (ICC) orders the arrest of certain individuals in the country.”

Two years after Duterte left office, there is little legal reckoning for the victims of his regime’s bloody killings, estimated to be tens of thousands. Only eight police officers (mostly low-ranking, never the mastermind) in only four cases were so far convicted.

Read: Solving the drug problem (Part 1)

2. Martial Law, whole-of-nation terrorism

Duterte was mayor of Davao City in Mindanao for decades before he assumed the presidency. Yet, it was Mindanao that he trampled on first and most grievously.

He pounded Marawi for 147 days with the excuse of hunting alleged fighters and allies of ISIS, and then declared Martial Law throughout Mindanao. He caused the evacuation of half a million Moro residents of Marawi and soon, of Lumad also. He ordered relentless killings and brutal military rule, including massacres and closure of Lumad schools, to force the Lumad to give up their right to their ancestral lands.

Duterte’s real purpose then was to clear opposition to the expansion of plantation and mining and logging operations in the mineral-and coal-rich Mindanao. Duterte shamelessly bragged about selling even the ancestral domains of the indigenous peoples to foreign investors.

Read: Marawi a year after: A people’s right to self-determination violated

With Martial Law in Mindanao, Duterte in November 2017, ordered through Executive Order No. 32 a more intense militarization of Negros, Eastern Visayas, and Bicol. He also launched Oplan Sauron and the Synchronized Enhanced Managing of Police Operations (SEMPO) that escalated killings, abductions, and attacks against the legal democratic movement and peasant communities. EO 32 came on the heels of the Duterte regime’s unilateral termination of the peace negotiations with the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) in August 2017.

Subsequently, Duterte issued Executive Order No. 70 in December 2017 creating the notorious National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) and placing the entire government machinery with its resources “at the behest of Duterte and his military gang junta for their whole-of-nation terrorism,” said Ka Oris, the spokesperson of New People’s Army-National Operation Command in 2018. The “whole-of-nation” approach is patterned after the United States Counter-insurgency Guide of 2009, the same framework used by the previous regimes of Gloria Arroyo and Benigno Aquino Jr in their “counterinsurgency” campaigns against the revolutionary movement led by the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP).

In 2020, while the people were hard-pressed with lockdowns during COVID-19 pandemic, the Duterte regime railroaded the passage of the Anti-Terror Act. Under this law, anyone who dares to air protest or grievance against the regime is automatically tagged as a “communist terrorist” or “supporter of communist terrorists.”

Read: State terrorism normalized amid COVID-19 pandemic

Read: Killing of activists high priority of Duterte regime

The law contains provisions on arbitrary proscription and designation of individuals and organizations as “terrorist.” It removed safeguards on human rights such as warrantless arrests and detention. It violates even the reactionary state’s own Constitution. The “Anti-Terrorism” Law (ATL) became the most questioned law before the Supreme Court with 37 petitions for its nullity.

Using the law, the regime persecuted activists, leaders of people’s organizations, lawyers, human rights workers, even humanitarian organizations. The Philippine UPR Watch (Universal Periodic Review) cited 112 individuals charged with ATL and Terrorist Financing (Republic Act 10168) with 53 organizations/individuals whose Bank Accounts and Assets were frozen.

Read: “My Soldiers”: The Duterte regime’s backbone

Read: In between Duterte’s late night shows, who’s on the stage?

 

3. Corruption

Duterte has yet to answer for his regime’s militaristic rather than health-oriented response to the COVID-19 pandemic. On top of that, his clique has yet to be held accountable for the gargantuan fund mismanagement of the Philippine Health Insurance Corporation or PhilHealth, the agency co-financing Covid-19 testing and treatment. In 2021, illegal or invalid fund releases were estimated at Php15 billion.

Philhealth only comes second to the Pharmally scandal, Duterte’s biggest money-making venture during the pandemic through his long-time friend and former economic adviser Michael Yang. With less than Php 600,000 capital, Pharmally bagged 13 contracts from the government on Sept. 2, 2019 worth Php 11 billion for overpriced medical supplies.

Aside from Philhealth and Pharmally, there is no closure yet to revelations of mafia-like corruption in the Departments of Public Works and Highways, Health, Education, Transportation, Information and Communication, Bureau of Correction, and Bureau of Customs. A 2021 report by the inquirer.net (“COA red flags reach nearly every corner of Duterte bureaucracy”) said many government agencies have irregularities in finance handling.

Read: The anti-corruption hypocrisy

Read: Duterte piling up ways to score and hide more loot

Duterte gained favor from the military by intensifying the corruption here that were introduced by his predecessors, for example the so-called pabaon (pocket money) for retiring AFP officials. With Duterte’s NTF-ELCAC, AFP generals and police commanders have grown more addicted to war-and-profit. The NTF-ELCAC’s Barangay Development Program (BDP), called by the CPP as the money pit of corruption, is among the milking cows of military leaders with its billions of peso budget. Most projects were white elephants and unaudited. Military and police officials also line their pockets through the Enhanced Comprehensive Local Integration Program (E-CLIP), the regime’s “surrender” program that offers payment for every “surrenderer.”

Read: Duterte’s surrender program is a scam

Read: E-CLIP Briefer: It’s all about money

 

4. Rehabilitation of the Marcoses

Given that the Marcoses and the Dutertes are the biggest political dynasties contending in the upcoming reactionary elections, it seems ironic that among Duterte’s legacies is his regime’s contribution to the rehabilitation of the Marcoses.

Duterte is an unabashed fan of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who was notoriously known for plunder, puppetry, cronyism, and tyranny. Indeed, Duterte also imposed martial law in Mindanao and held the entire country captive through various executive orders and repressive laws

One of Duterte’s earlier “achievements” during his term was helping former chiefs of bureaucrat capitalists such as Ferdinand Marcos and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo evade punishments for corruption and war crimes. The Marcoses sought to grandly rehabilitate themselves during the Duterte presidency when the late dictator was buried stealthily at the Libingan ng mga Bayani. Also, decades-long graft and corruption charges filed against the Marcos heirs and beneficiaries were dismissed.

Read: Marcos burial is history’s reversal

Read: Rehabilitating the enemies of the people

Read: Marcoses political rehabilitation bodes more tragedy for the nation

 

5. Sellout of Philippine sovereignty and dragging Philippines to US-China conflict

As an editorial of CPP’s Ang Bayan once wrote in February 2021, Duterte is treating Philippine sovereignty like a commodity. Duterte smooched China to fund his Build Build Build (BBB) projects then looked the other way when fisherfolk reported China’s building of military facilities in the West Philippine Sea. This was in exchange for loans from which Duterte got bribes and favors.

Read: BBB building the road to perdition

Read: Duterte is exposed as a traitor and paid agent of China

Yet, Duterte’s puppetry also gave more benefits to the imperialist US. In 2017, Duterte promised then US President Trump he would terminate the peace negotiations with the NDFP; that he would crush the armed revolutionary movement; and he would push charter change to allow foreign capitalists to fully own landholdings, businesses, and other resources in the Philippines. He lifted the suspension of the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) and came out with a more pro-US proposal called EDCA (Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement) which, among other things, allows the US to store missiles and weapons in Philippine territories, in exchange for weapons and military aid.

Later that same year, the “Operation Pacific Eagle–Philippines” agreement with the US was set which considered the country as a second front of the US “war on terror”.

Read: Back in the claws of the American eagle

Read: Kill, kill, kill misuses people’s funds then harms them

 

6. Economic collapse

Arguably, each puppet president contributes and achieves the worst during his or her own time. But under Duterte, even without or before the pandemic, the economy was already on a downward trend, worsened by his epic failure of coronavirus pandemic response. Agricultural production went down even as rice importation reached 15 percent from 5 percent in 2016. When Duterte’s term ended, the number of unemployed Filipinos grew to 3.7 million from 2.4 million. Inflation was 4.9 percent in May 2022 compared to 1.3 percent in June 2016. Duterte ramped up borrowings, leaving behind almost Php 13 trillion in debt.

Duterte’s boasts could not erase the fact that he bankrupted and pushed the Philippines deeper into poverty. (Pinky Ang) ###

Read: Dutertenomics: The problem is fundamental

 

 

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Marcoses’ political rehabilitation bodes more tragedy for the nation

in Editorial

Three decades have gone by since February 1986, when the Filipino people’s unified will and action ousted the Marcos dictatorship. Ignominously, the US imperialists plucked the tyrant and his family—along with their loot—out of Malacañang by helicopters, subsequently flying them to safe exile in Hawaii.

Yet today the Marcos heirs are back in the high circles of power. And the dictator’s embalmed remains—publicly displayed in Batac, Ilocos Norte for over two decades—was deceitfully ensconced in the Libingan ng mga Bayani in November 2016, courtesy of President Rodrigo R. Duterte.

Yet they haven’t returned much of the estimated $10-billion they had stolen during their corrupt, abusive and repressive reign. With such a huge war chest that can only grow bigger over time (even at conservative interest rates in what Imelda Marcos flaunts as over 100 secret bank accounts), they are being served/protected by a platoon of lawyers. They have allies and toadies at various levels of the reactionary government, besides a fleet of PR people, false historians, and keyboard warriors.

They thus feel secure moving freely within the same bureaucrat capitalist system that nurtured them in power.

The rotten system enabled them to amass wealth at the cost of thousands of Filipino lives and the stunting of Philippines’ agricultural and industrial development. It allowed them to spend five years of lavish and vulgar exile in Hawaii. Upon their return, towing the embalmed body of their dictator patriarch, this system welcomed them back into the fold as they gradually carved anew their fiefdom.

Twice did Imelda Marcos attempt to run for President: in 1992 when she lost and in 1998, when she withdrew her candidacy. In between her two presidential bids, Imelda won a seat in Congress where she served as Leyte representative for three years (1995-1998). In 2010, she again won a seat in Congress, this time representing Ilocos Norte, the late dictator’s home province and political base.

Starting from their Ilocos Norte base, the two elder Marcos siblings took turns being the province’s governor and congressional representative from 1992 to 1998. It was 24 years since dictator Marcos was ousted when Bongbong Marcos entered the Senate in 2010. Imee Marcos took longer entering the national scene. She came into the Senate in 2019.

It was in Bongbong Marcos’s first stab at the vice-presidency in 2016 that the family tasted their first defeat in what some accounts call their “spectacular comeback.” Unaccustomed to setback, Bongbong lodged an electoral protest he wouldn’t let go even after three years.

The family has now repositioned itself back as close as possible to Malacañang. But for Bongbong’s defeat at the 2016 national polls, he would have been just a heartbeat away from the presidency, a very real threat to the Filipino people considering Duterte’s multiple acknowledged illnesses. Had Marcos Jr “won” the vice-presidency, Duterte would have—as he has publicly expressed a number of times—opted to yield the presidency and thus pave the way to the Marcoses’ total political rehabilitation.

Undoubtedly, the Marcoses are a veritable example of bureaucrat capitalism. To this day articles are being written about how the dictator Marcos and his wife “smartly” looted the national coffers, put up opaque companies and seized stakes in strategic businesses, and how he “transformed” the military and the police into a unified armed forces to back up his fascist rule, rendering the armed services deeply partisan (for him) and more corruptible than ever.

Throughout that process, the US imperialists propped up his dictatorship. They armed, trained and guided the establishment of the armed forces for their own imperialist ends and those of their puppet tyrant. Marcos, “our ‘son-of-a-bitch’” (as then President George Bush referred to him) only became a “problem” to them when the people began protesting against the dictatorship in evergrowing number and frequency. The armed communist-led revolution was growing by leaps and bounds and had led the fight against the dictatorship and its imperialist master.

Marcos’ ouster will always be a historical triumph of the Filipino people’s collective power— both armed and unarmed, in the underground and in the open democratic arena of struggles. The ongoing turbo-charged rehabilitation of the Marcoses under Duterte, however, is as loud a reminder as we all can get that, no, the people cannot stop at merely ousting the current, abusive tyrant. The system that breeds such ilk needs also to be smashed. This system has proven to have merely continued the puppet presidency and imperialist domination of the country.

A corrupt system is bound to rehabilitate the Marcoses

The Communist Party of the Philippines, in a 2018 statement, sharply pointed out that the “successive reactionary regimes failed miserably to address the clamor of the Filipino people for swift justice.” “Every ruling regime allowed the Marcoses to return stage by stage,” it said. “None carried out a decisive act of justice, fearing this will rouse demands for the same measures to be meted against them over the same crimes they themselves commit while in power.”

At the outset, Cory Aquino, responding to insistent public demand, established the PCGG (Presidential Commission on Good Government) to go after the Marcoses’ ill-gotten wealth. But her administration emasculated the PCGG by ordering it to seize nothing directly and work instead through the courts. What the agency recovered, of course, was peanuts for the dirty-moneyed Marcoses.

The US imperialist’s rescue of their once serviceable puppet continued even after the Marcoses returned to the Philippines. The US government redacted transactions involving US organizations in their records. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) refused to disclose what they knew, reportedly prompting a veteran of PCGG to call the US and Marcoses “partners in theft.”

Most probably, the US possesses loads of damning information on the kleptocracy and rights abuses of the Marcoses. Not only does it exercise control of the Philippine state forces, it’s also been known to keep tabs on even its “allies,” according to a declassified report on the CIA’s eavesdropping on conversations of government leaders such as those of the Philippines.

With clues from the US and their latest puppet on how the Marcoses were to be cossetted since the late 1980s, Marcos died in Hawaii without being punished by the Filipino people, through their supposed government’s justice system. His widow, Imelda, returned to the Philippines with her three adult children in 1992. She was greeted by an avalanche of graft cases. But with their political allies regaining government posts, she never had to worry about jail time or threats of warrants of arrest.

Imelda was convicted at least twice for graft, once in 1993 for a fraudulent land deal and in 2018 for illicit financial dealings with Switzerland-based NGOs. But she remains free to this day. In her 2018 conviction, under Duterte’s watch, she was asked to put up bail of only P300,000, despite the gravity of the case and the amount of what’s been stolen. The conviction is turning out into a ploy to fast track the movement of the case.

After more than five administrations (including two Aquinos), more than 90 lawyers and personnel of PCGG placed at the increasingly frustrating trail of seeing signs of billions of hidden wealth — only for these to be whisked away before their eyes — and the precious length of time that’s gone by, the Marcoses still harbor much of the ill-gotten wealth. Some of it was divulged in the upheaval of disclosures regarding what are called the Panama papers, where the ultra-rich keep their money away from taxes and prying eyes.

By now it’s clear the graft cases against the Marcoses have been filed only to placate the angry masses.

Dictator’s final rehab under a Marcos clone

The impact of the people’s victory in ousting Marcos and the underlying desire for genuine democracy was such that it took the Marcoses more than three decades before bureaucrat capitalism could ease them back into Malacañang as “honored” guests. The Marcoses managed to do it under another imperialist puppet president they financially supported as candidate, who publicly claims he idolizes Marcos and looks back at his father’s political career as one that had benefited from the Marcoses.

And, yes, before we forget, a president who evidently wants to be another dictator and tyrant. He himself has already reprised many Marcosian tactics.

Despite his anti-corruption posturing, Duterte early into his term stunned the nation by allowing Marcos’ embalmed remains to be buried, after at least two postponements due to public protests, at the Libingan ng mga Bayani in November 2016. The most brazen of post-Edsa puppet presidents at helping the Marcoses, he nevertheless balked at personally witnessing the undeserved public pomp reserved only for a hero’s and former president’s burial. It took him a year before he set out again to glorify Marcos: commemorated him in postage stamps. The Duterte regime has timed its actions idolizing Marcos on the last quarter of the year.

Under Duterte the corruption cases against the Marcoses that dragged on for more than three decades are being thrown out one by one.

In August and October 2019 several ill-gotten wealth cases against the Marcoses, 27 to 31 years in court, were dismissed allegedly for lack of probative evidence (government lawyers only submitted photocopies of documents, whose originals are supposedly kept in the Bangko Sentral vaults), or for the lawyers’ failure to attend court hearings.

The bulk of their massive loot remains beyond reach of the government and the people from whom they stole it. Estimates of what the PCGG managed to recover ran from just one to two billion dollars. The precious works of arts bought with stolen money inadvertently would show in Imeldific photographs in her posh digs, but they always disappear whenever the investigators come knocking.

The billions they extorted from coconut farmers were partially recovered but each succeeding administration has made it difficult for the coconut farmers and real owners of the fund to fully recover it.

People must clip the Marcoses’ greed

Thus, looking at the Marcoses’ rehabilitation into power, it is not true that horror repeats itself. It gets more horrendous in Part 2.

Unapologetic, flushed with their success, the Marcoses are greedy for more. They’re spoiled believing they can get away with it, again and again. They’re coming back to do more of the same on a vehicle much bigger and ratcheted up by their original loot; oiled by the blood, sweat and tears of injustices of those they had oppressed; and covered by the same imperialist power that continues to lord over the country as long as their puppets dutifully run it to the ground for the benefit of their businesses and military interests.

More than three decades since the world applauded the Filipino people’s uprising that booted them out, the Marcoses have not been made to account for the thousands of human rights violations and humanitarian crimes they committed to maintain the dictatorship.

Now the maturing children, beneficiaries of the Marcos loot and their network of allies and cronies, are hovering about for another chance to take over Malacañang. They are intent as well in whitewashing their family’s crimes; Imee Marcos chose to head the Senate committee on culture. Like father like daughter, as he had faked his wartime medals, she faked her academic achievements (so did Bongbong, too). Whenever confronted about their family’s crimes, Imee perfunctority tells the Filipinos: “Move on.”

Against the Marcoses’ rehabilitation and whitewashing, against the current president’s desiring to be another Marcos, the CPP 2018 statement declares that theFilipino people “have no other recourse but to take revolutionary action and overthrow the ruling system and class rule of big bourgeois compradors, big landlords and bureaucrat capitalists.”

“Only by wielding revolutionary power—democratic people’s power—can they subject the biggest criminal and fascist oppressors to just punishment with full decisiveness and dispatch,” the CPP statement concludes. ###

#NeverAgain
#NeverForget

—–
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STATE TERRORISM ON THE PRETEXT OF ANTI-TERRORISM

in Statements
by Jose Maria Sison, NDFP Chief Political Consultant

27 February 2020

The Philippine Senate, now dominated by an overwhelming number of pro-Duterte senators as a result of the rigging of the 2019 mid-term elections, has approved Senate Bill 1083, otherwise known as the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020, seeking to amend the Human Security Act of 2007.

The bill aims to legalize and aggravate the already rampant state terrorism of red tagging, arbitrary arrests and extrajudicial killings on the pretext of anti-terrorism. It is meant to further entrench the de facto fascist dictatorship of Duterte without need of any formal declaration of martial law as Marcos did in 1972.

Like the term subversion during the Cold War and martial rule under Marcos, terrorism is vaguely defined to make it a catch-all term for any concerted action or any common crime and for taking punitive measures against the broadest range of opposition, critics and social activists in violation of basic democratic rights and fundamental freedoms.

The bill seeks to penalize those presumed by the authorities to propose, incite, conspire, participate in the planning, training, preparation, and facilitation of a “terrorist” act; as well as those presumed to provide material support to “terrorists”, and recruit members for a “terrorist” organization.

It enables the police or military personnel to arbitrarily place individuals and organizations under surveillance; compel telcos to divulge calls and messages; arrest these people without warrant, and detain them for an extended period up to 14 days.

It allows the preliminary proscription of suspected “terrorist” organizations prior to their being given an opportunity to be informed of the charge and avail of counsel and judicial review.

It lowers the standard for warrantless arrest and detention.

It removes from the Human Security Act of 2007 the compensation for persons wrongfully detained. Without any liability, the hounds of the state will violate human rights with impunity and on a wider scale than ever before.

Regional trial courts can outlaw individuals and organizations as “terrorists” on the mere say so of the regime, the police or military as well as upon the request of foreign or supra-national agencies. The imperialist masters will also benefit from the state terrorism of the Duterte puppet regime.

We can be certain that the regime and its military and police agents will engage in surveillance, warrantless arrests and arbitrary detention, cruel and disproportionate punishments, and violations of the right to freedom of association, free expression, right to privacy, mobility, and to due process.

The Lower House of Congress, also dominated by the pro-Duterte supermajority united by pork barrel corruption, is also in the process of passing a so-called anti-terrorism bill like that of the Senate. Such bill is synchronized with bills for changing the charter and extending the terms of elective government officials.

The Duterte regime and its followers know no limits in their escalation of the oppression and exploitation of the broad masses of the people. They are closing every possibility for peace negotiations with the NDFP.

They are inciting the people to wage all forms of resistance in defense of their national and democratic rights.

As did the Anti-Subversion law in the past, the current “anti-terrorist” legislation by the running dogs of Duterte in Congress will not deter the people’s revolutionary movement but will persuade more millions Filipinos to take the road of armed revolution in order to achieve their national and social liberation from the semicolonial and semifeudal conditions that have been made more intolerable than ever by the the tyranny of the Duterte regime. ###

#PHstateterror
#JunkTerrorBill
#OustDuterte

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Why the Marcoses’ comeback is more tragic than ‘Shame on you’

in Editorial

Forgive and forget. Move on. Really?

As years go by—after the Filipino people finally ousted the Marcos dictatorship in 1986—it gets better and better for the Marcoses. They haven’t returned the estimated $10-billion they stole while Ferdinand Marcos was dictator and tyrant, and Imelda Marcos and two of eldest children, Imee and Bongbong, have occupied various government posts.

With a huge war chest that can only grow bigger with time, they are being served by a platoon of lawyers, allies at various levels of reactionary government, PR people, false historians, and keyboard warriors, and most of all, by the same bureaucrat capitalist system that nurtured them in power.

It lets them amass wealth at the cost of thousands of lives and the Philippines’ genuine agricultural and industrial development. It helped to pluck them out of reach of People Power and allowed them to spend five years of lavish and loud exile in Hawaii. Upon their return, towing the embalmed body of their dictator patriarch, this system welcomed them back into the fold as they slowly carved back their fiefdom.

INCHING THEIR WAY BACK TO POWER

Imelda Marcos twice attempted to run for President—in 1992 when she lost and in 1998, when she withdrew from candidacy in the middle of the campaign. In between her two presidential bids, Imelda won a seat in Congress where she served as Leyte representative for three years from 1995 to 1998. In 2010, Imelda again won a seat in Congress, this time representing the province of Ilocos Norte.

Starting from their base at Ilocos Norte, the two elder Marcos siblings took turns being governor or Ilocos Norte Representative from 1992 to 1998. It was 24 years since dictator Marcos was ousted when Bongbong Marcos entered the Senate in 2010. It took longer for Imee Marcos to enter the national scene via a Senate seat in 2019.

It was only in Bongbong Marcos’s first stab at vice-presidency in 2016 that they tasted their first defeat in what some reports call their ‘spectacular comeback.’ Unaccustomed to setback, Bongbong lodged an electoral protest he can’t let go of even after three years.

Since their inglorious, forced exit in 1986, the family of deposed dictator Ferdinand Marcos has now positioned itself back as close as possible to Malacañang.

But for Bongbong Marcos’s defeat at the 2016 national polls, he would have been just a heartbeat away from the presidency, a very real threat to the Filipino people considering Duterte’s illness. If Marcos Jr had “won” the vice-presidency, Duterte would have had added to his legacy the Marcoses’ total rehabilitation. As things stand now, two of the Marcos siblings are running among the pack that’s circling Malacañang.

The Marcoses is one big example of bureaucrat capitalism.

To this day articles are being written about how the dictator Marcos ‘smartly’ looted the national coffers, put up companies and seized stakes in strategic businesses, and how he ‘transformed’ the armed forces and the police to make it partisan and more corruptible than usual. US propped him up and let him use the state forces it had established, trained and armed for their own imperialist ends, facilitated by its favored local puppet. Marcos, their ‘son-of-a-bitch’ as then President Ronald Reagan said, only became a ‘problem’ to imperialist US when the people were protesting in millions. The local armed communist revolution was growing by leaps and bounds and had led the fight against the dictatorship and its imperialist master.

IT TAKES A CORRUPT SYSTEM TO REINSTATE THE MARCOSES

Marcos’ ouster will always be a historical triumph of the Filipino people’s collective power— both the armed and unarmed, those in the open and underground struggles. The ongoing turbo-charged rehabilitation of the Marcoses under Duterte, however, is as loud a reminder as we all can get that, no, the people cannot stop at just ousting the current, most abusive tyrant.

The system that breeds such ilk needs also to be smashed.

This system has proven to have merely continued the puppet presidency and imperialist domination of the country.

The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), in a statement issued in 2018 pinpointed that the “successive reactionary regimes failed miserably to address the clamor of the Filipino people for swift justice. Every ruling regime allowed the Marcoses to return stage by stage. None carried out a decisive act of justice fearing this will rouse demands for the same measures to be meted against them over the same crimes they themselves commit while in power.”

At the outset, Cory Aquino, responding to insistent public demand, established the PCGG (Phil. Commission on Good Governance) to go after the Marcoses’ ill-gotten wealth. But, her administration emasculated it by ordering it to seize nothing and work instead through the courts. This was of course peanuts for the dirty-moneyed Marcoses.

The US imperialist’s rescue of their once serviceable puppet continued even after the Marcoses returned to the Philippines. The US redacted transactions involving US organizations in their records. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) refused to disclose what they knew, reportedly prompting a veteran of PCGG to call the US and Marcoses “partners in theft.” The US likely has loads of damning information on the kleptocracy and rights abuses of the Marcoses. Not only does it enjoy control of the local state forces, it’s also been known to keep tabs on even its “allies,” according to a declassified report on the CIA’s eavesdropping on conversations of government leaders such as that of the Philippines.

With clues from the US and their latest puppet on how the Marcoses were to be cossetted since the late 80s, Marcos died in Hawaii without being punished by the Filipino people. His widow, Imelda, returned to the Philippines with her three adult children in 1992. She was greeted by an avalanche of graft cases. But with their political allies regaining government posts, she never had to worry about jail time or threats of warrants of arrest.

Imelda was convicted at least twice for graft, once in 1993 for a fraudulent land deal and in 2018 for illicit financial dealings with Switzerland-based NGO’s.

But she remains free to this day. In the 2018 conviction, under Duterte, she was asked to pay bail of only P300,000, despite the gravity of the case and the amount of what’s stolen. The conviction is turning out into a ploy to fasttrack the movement in the case.

After more than five administrations (including two Aquinos), more than 90 lawyers and personnel of PCGG at the increasingly frustrating trail of seeing signs of billions of hidden wealth, only to be whisked away before their eyes, and the precious precious length of time that’s gone by, the Marcoses still have much of the ill-gotten wealth. Some of it were divulged in the upheaval of disclosures regarding Panama papers, where the ultra rich keep their money away from taxes and prying eyes. By now it’s clear the graft cases against the Marcoses were only to placate the angry masses.

MARCOSES’ FINAL REHABILITATION UNDER A MARCOS CLONE

The might of people’s victory in the ouster of Marcos and the underlying desire for genuine democracy is such that it took the Marcoses more than three decades before bureaucrat capitalism can ease them into Malacañang as ‘honored’ guests.

The Marcoses managed to do it under another puppet president they supported as candidate, who publicly claims he idolizes Marcos, and who looks back at his father’s political career as one that had benefited from the Marcoses.

And, before we forget, a president who evidently wants to be another dictator and tyrant. He himself has reprised many Marcosian tactics.

Despite his anti-corruption posturing, Duterte early into his term stunned the nation in allowing Marcos’ frozen remains to be buried, after at least two postponements due to protests, at the Libingan ng mga Bayani in November 2016. The most brazen of post-Edsa puppet presidents at helping the Marcoses, he nevertheless balked at having the requisite public pomp expected for a true heroes’ and former president’s burial. It took him a year before he set out again to glorify the Marcoses. The Philippine government commemorated Marcos in postage stamps.

Under Duterte the corruption cases against the Marcoses that dragged on for more than three decades are being thrown out one by one.

In August and October 2019 several ill-gotten wealth cases against the Marcoses, 27 to 31 years in court, were dismissed for lack of evidence from government lawyers, or for their failure to attend court hearings.

The bulk of their massive loot remain undisclosed to the people they stole it from. Estimates of what the PCGG managed to recover ran from just one to two billion dollars. The precious works of arts bought with stolen money inadvertently would show in Imeldific shots in her posh digs, but they always disappear when investigators come knocking. The money they extorted from coconut farmers were partially recovered but each succeeding administrations made it difficult for the coconut farmers and real owners of the fund to fully recover it.

PEOPLE MUST CLIP THE MARCOSES’ GREED: FROM ILOCOS NORTE TO MALACAÑANG

Looking thus at the Marcoses’ rehabilitation in power, it is not true that horrors repeat itself. It gets more horrendous in Part 2.

Unapologetic, flushed with their success, they are greedy for more.

They’re spoiled believing they can get away with it, again and again. They’re coming back to do more of the same on a vehicle much bigger and ratcheted up by their original loot, oiled by blood, sweat and tears of injustices to those they had oppressed, and covered by the same imperialist power that continues to lord over the country as long as their puppets dutifully run it to the ground for their businesses and military interests.

More than three decades since the world applauded the Filipino people’s uprising that booted out the Marcoses, these Marcoses have not been taken to account for the thousands of human rights violations and humanitarian crimes committed to maintain the dictatorship.

Now the maturing children, beneficiaries of dictator Marcos’ loot and network of allies and cronies, are out and about for another chance in Malacañang. They are intent as well in whitewashing their family’s crime, Imee Marcos chose the committee on culture in the Senate. Like father like daughter, she faked her academic achievement and when confronted about their family’s crimes, she tells the Filipinos to ‘Move on.”

Against the Marcoses’ rehabilitation and whitewashing, against presidents desiring to be another Marcos, the Filipino people “have no other recourse but to take revolutionary action and overthrow the ruling system and class rule of big bourgeois compradors, big landlords and bureaucrat capitalists. Only be wielding revolutionary power—democratic people’s power—can they subject the biggest criminal and fascist oppressors to just punishment with full decisiveness and dispatch,” the CPP said.###

#NeverAgain
#NeverForget

—–
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