Ferdinand Marcos: The world's biggest “thieving po
"In the early hours of a February morning in 1986, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos flew into exile. After 21 years as president of the Philippines, Marcos had rigged one too many elections. The army had turned against him, and the people had come out on to the streets in their thousands. The Marcoses had seen the crisis coming and been able to prepare their escape, so when they landed that morning at the Hickham USAF base in Hawaii, they brought plenty of possessions with them.The official US customs record runs to 23 pages. In the two C-141 transport planes that carried them, they had packed: 23 wooden crates; 12 suitcases and bags, and various boxes, whose contents included enough clothes to fill 67 racks; 413 pieces of jewellery, including 70 pairs of jewel-studded cufflinks; an ivory statue of the infant Jesus with a silver mantle and a diamond necklace; 24 gold bricks, inscribed “To my husband on our 24th anniversary”; and more than 27m Philippine pesos in freshly-printed notes. The total value was $15m.
This was a fortune by any standards, easily enough to see the couple through the rest of their lives.
Yet the new government of the Philippines knew this was only a very small part of the Marcoses’ wealth. The reality, they discovered, was that Ferdinand Marcos had amassed a fortune up to 650 times greater. According to a subsequent estimate by the Philippine supreme court, he had accumulated up to $10bn while in office.
Since his official salary had never risen above $13,500 a year, it was blazingly clear this was stolen wealth on the most spectacular scale. Some of his closest allies also stole billions. As their victim was a nation in which 40% of the people survive on less than $2 a day, the Republic of the Philippines decided urgently to try to retrieve its money.
Even amid the chaos of the revolution, the very first executive order issued by the new president, Cory Aquino, established the Presidential Commission on Good Government, the PCGG. It was to recover “all ill-gotten wealth accumulated by former president Ferdinand Marcos, his immediate family, relatives, subordinates and close associates” and given the power to sequester any assets believed to be the proceeds of crime.
Thirty years later, the PCGG is still working, its 94 lawyers, researchers and administrators housed proudly in a building recovered from the Marcos family. The government gives it an annual budget of $2.2m. Its staff have traced money through jurisdictions all over the world and fought their way through hundreds of court cases. And yet something has gone terribly wrong: to date, the PCGG has recovered only a fraction of what was stolen by the Marcos network; no one has served a prison sentence for their part in the crime.
The PCGG archive tells the inside story of the biggest theft in history, and of the master criminal who organised it: skilful, arrogant, cruel. It also opens a door into the offshore world revealed by the Panama Papers. Marcos was one of the first to exploit the rats’ nest of secret jurisdictions and hidden ownership then in the early stages of being built beneath the floorboards of public life.
But what is most important about Marcos is that he committed his crimes as a politician.
His career starts with a cynicism that now seems familiar – manipulating electorates, using money to buy power and power to make money. But he went one big step further in merging politics and finance, converting the instruments of government into one vast cash machine. A handful of other autocrats were also busy stealing from their people in that era – in Haiti, Nicaragua, Iran – but Marcos stole more and he stole better. Ultimately, he emerges as a laboratory specimen from the early stages of a contemporary epidemic: the global contagion of corruption that has since spread through Africa and South America, the Middle East and parts of Asia. Marcos was a model of the politician as thief."
(Cont'd in Comments section)
Comments (13)
Ronald Reagan dances with Imelda Marcos, while President Marcos dances with Nancy, during a state visit to Manila in 1969.
Once again Thanks Bud,
It seems that the legacy of Ferdinand Marcos's corrupt politics still persists even in the recent elections in the Phillipines.
“Just 3 hours before the proclamation of the newly elected president and vice president on Monday, May 30, self-proclaimed whistleblowers spoke to journalists at the Senate on how they allegedly manipulated election results for Liberal Party (LP) candidates.”
See full article at:
I share your sentiment.
History should never ever forget what type character Marcos really was.
I second your statement.
“the others candidates were also corrupt so it's like voting between the devil and the deep blue sea...very sad, frustrating and just plain stupid politics there”
Perhaps the continuing corruption in Phillipines' politics is a legacy of the Ferdinand Marcos's era.
As usual, it is the poor people who suffer the most from such corruption.
According to the article:
“40% of the people survive on less than $2 a day”
In some cases, Marcos, in turn, had paid bribes to senior politicians and made illegal contributions to election campaigns, including those of US presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. (When this surfaced in 1986, they said they had not known where the money came from.)
In the UK, Margaret Thatcher’s government said it was “not our business”.
From what I've read, that escape to Hawaii wasn't what the Marcoses intended to do. Otherwise why would they bring money in peso bills if their intention was to go to Hawaii? Iam not their spokesperson nor received any favor from them but I do believe when a person is good at least 51% of the time then, he is good. I can't provide data nor be more factual than what your blog has just stated but I do admire the man's brilliance and vision. Just allow me to have that simple happiness. Peace to you brother!
Good interesting blog...such a shame politicians can be so corrupt...
What is so sad is that others in powerful positions aided him and his wife and the poor Philippine citizens were ignored...