Mythos and Melodrama in the Philippines (Throwback)

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Rund Abdel Fattah
In the very beginning, the start of time, there were only three things. The ocean, the sky, and a single bird in constant flight.

Ramtin Arablouei
One day, the bird grew tired. It swooped down, flying over the sea, looking for a place to land.

Rund Abdel Fattah
Its wings stirred up the sea so much that the waves rose and crashed against the sky.

Desperate to calm the sea, the sky rained down boulders. These boulders became the islands of the Philippines.

Ramtin Arablouei
The sky told the tired bird to build its nest on one of these islands. Once on land, the bird was struck by a bamboo stalk that was blowing in the breeze. Annoyed, it pecked at the bamboo, and. Then the bamboo split. The first Filipinos emerged from these bamboo stalks.

Sheila Coronel
The first man, malakas, which means strength, and the first woman, Maganda, who was beautiful. And that's how the world began, with Malacass and Maganda, the first man and woman, according to Filipino legendary the legend. Was passed down for generations, from person to person, ear to ear. But in the 20th century, malakas and Maganda would come alive again, resurrected by two people. You know, Mister Maldes, if you will allow me, I'll marry you right now.

Ramtin Arablouei
Ferdinand Marcos and Imelda Romaldez. Marcos was very fond of sort of projecting the two of them in the role of the first man and woman of the Philippines emerging from these mythical bamboo stalks at the beginning of time. So he was the strongman and she was the beautiful one. And that's really how they saw themselves. Ferdinand Marcos ruled the Philippines for 21 years, first as a democratically elected president, and later as a brutal and oppressive dictator.

Rund Abdel Fattah
All the while with Imelda at his side. And they leaned hard into this legend. They even commissioned portraits of themselves emerging from the broken bamboo stalks of legend. Marcos, bare chested looking, chiseled with a knife in hand. Imelda swathed in white gauze, her black hair windswept, her gaze almost ethereal.

Sheila Coronel
This was part of their image making of the new society they were going to build. Mythical notion of power. They stood at the very origin of the nation and their for they were entitled to rule it. You know that they had a special calling to rule the nation. At this point, you might be wondering, why are we talking about the Marcoses.

Christina Kim
Romanes Marcos Junior, Ferdinand Bong. Bong Margos Junior, Ferdinand Romuldes Marcos Junior, or as he's more commonly known, Bong Bong Marcos, the sole son of dictator Ferdinand Marcos, was elected president of the Philippines in 2022, and he's bringing his legend back to life. Now the younger Marcos Junior is promising a return to the golden age of his father's rule. The Philippines shall continue to be a friend to all, an enemy to none. The United States has signed a deal allowing large numbers of its troops to return to the Philippines for the first time in three decades.

Talitha Espiritu
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin met Marcos in Manila on Thursday. Our alliance makes both of our democracies more secure and helps uphold a free Indo Pacific.

Ramtin Arablouei
Bong Bong Marcos pulled off a landslide victory, winning more than double the votes of his closest opponent when he was sworn in as president. It was almost as if history was repeating itself. A Marcos would once again rule the Philippines. Welcome to the epic of Marcos. In this tale of a family that's larger than life, one man lies at the center.

Rund Abdel Fattah
Ferdinand Marcos Sr. But the figures that surround him are just as important. Imelda, his muse, Bong Bong, his heir, and the United States, his faithful sidekick. By following the story of the Marcos family, we can see the blueprint for authoritarianism clearly. How melodrama, paranoia, love, betrayal, and a hunger for power collide to create a dynasty.

I'm Randabdel Fattah. And I'm Ramtin Arablouei. On this episode of Throughline from NPR, producer Christina Kim chronicles how Ferdinand Marcos orchestrated his rise and lamented his fall, and how the Marcoses that remain are engineering the family's resurrection.

Vicente Rafael
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To get your new phone plan for just $15, go to mintmobile.com. switch part one angban sang ito ay. Ma aring maging mahu sai muli this. Nation can be great again.

This is a story that starts with a murder. It's a dark and rainy night. Newly elected filipino congressman Julio Nalundassin, content and full after a dinner with friends, steps out to the washbasin on his porch to brush his teeth, when from the shadows, a single shot explodes, his body falls limp to the ground. Delondazan was murdered.

The prime suspect was a young man named Fernand Marcos. It was 1935 in Il Locos Norte, a northern Philippines province. Ferdinand Marcos was then an 18 year old student at the University of the Philippines. He was home for the elections, elections. That Ferdinand's father, Mariano, had just lost to none other than Julio Nalundazan, a.

Sheila Coronel
Politician who was the rival of Mariano Marcos. That's Sheila Coronel, a professor and director of the Tony Stabil center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University. Nalundasan and his followers were seen parading around the town and in front of Marcos House with a coffin that said, Marcus is dead. And that really riled up the Marcuses, sort of pouring salt into wound that was still fresh.

Christina Kim
With Nella Dustin's body lying in cold blood, all eyes turned to Fernand Marcos. He was a champion marksman at the university rifle and pistol team. He was seen to be the most plausible suspect.

A smoking gun loomed with the young Fernand at the center of it all. But he didn't balk. Instead, as his case was appealed and sent up to the supreme court, his name became known across all the philippine islands. The myth, the legend of the Marcos name was in the making. He famously defended himself.

Sheila Coronel
He acted as his own lawyer in an all white suit. It was a well covered trial because he was. This young man who was studying to be a lawyer was about to take the bar. He was the top of his class, and the justices acquitted him of the murder. The main reason the justices acquitted him was that they said it would be a pity to have someone with such promise go to jail.

I think the myth there was he was a brilliant man who defended his family's honor and acquitted himself. So Marcos, instead of denying the murder, has made it, flipped it around and made it a myth about his brilliance and part of his inevitability that this man was saved for greater things. And the justices saw that, that this was part of his destiny. So that started the Marcos legend, propagating myths about himself and his family. Almost from the time that he came out in public life.

Christina Kim
Ferdinand Marcos never quite fit in. He was not modern or cosmopolitan. He was looked down upon by his classmates. But suddenly, with this trial, his name was known throughout the country. A gunshot had split the bamboo and begun to unlock his future.

Sheila Coronel
He believed that he was destined to. Rule the country, a destiny that seemed far off. So long as the Philippines remained a colony, first of Spain and then the. US, the United States has always been a looming presence in philippine life. In 1898, under the command of Admiral Dewey, the american fleet defeated the Spaniards, and the United States occupied the Philippines.

Philippines were a us colony for years. Our little brown brothers would need 50. Or 100 years of close supervision to develop anything resembling anglo saxon political principles and skills. William Taft, us governor of the Philippines colonial rule brought american education, american military, american democracy, influences that were forced upon the filipino people after losing a bloody conflict with the US. The Philippines was America's first democracy building project, way before Iraq or Afghanistan, because it was democracy introduced by empire.

Vicente Rafael
From the us perspective, colonization was not oppression. Colonization was a gift. This is Vicente Rafael, a professor of history in southeast asian studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. It was a gift that they were giving these benignant people currently experiencing disorder and so forth. For all Filipinos, there is a single political goal.

Ferdinand Marcos
Independence. Yet before the dream of independence could be realized came world War two and the bombing of the open city of Manila. On the 26 December 1941, when the. Japanese invaded the Philippines, 200,000 plus Filipinos fought for the US. Fernand Marcos was one of them.

In the fierce and hopeless battles that followed, there were four philippine soldiers. For every american soldier, the war was brutal, with estimates of civilian and military deaths ranging from half a million to a million. But not long after World War two ended, on July 4, 1946, the Philippines was finally granted that elusive thing they'd long hoped, independence. America keeps her pledge to free the Philippines, and the philippine flag is hoisted as a new nation is born.

Christina Kim
The destiny Ferdinand Marcos had dreamed up for himself was now within striking distance, and he wasn't about to let the opportunity slowly slipped through his fingers. So just like with the murder trial, he dialed up the drama. He claimed to have won so many medals during the war that he has more medals, 32 medals, more than Audie Murphy, who is the american World War two hero. Some of those medals are now suspected to be false, and his war record is disputed. He was not that heroic, larger than life hero of the second world War that he said he was.

Sheila Coronel
That was the basis of his election campaign when he ran for senator. But it didn't matter. Amid the sea of blood world War two had wrought, Marcos managed to emerge from the bamboo stalks as malakas, the mythical strongman, the original man. His transformation was nearly complete. The only thing he was missing was his maganda.

Christina Kim
He found her in a young woman Marcos would later call his secret weapon. Imelda. It is not expensive to be beautiful. It takes only a little effort to be presentable and beautiful. Beauty is a discipline.

Vicente Rafael
She was like a movie star, you know? She was like a celestial. She was beautiful. She had this incredible long hair. She was mestiza, mixed race, light skinned, very imposing figure.

Right? Despite being born into a political dynasty, Imelda grew up in poverty after her father squandered the family's fortunes, and so. She had to go to work. But she didn't have inheritance money. Imelda's big break came when she entered a beauty contest in Manila.

Christina Kim
She didn't win, but her presence made a splash, garnering the attention of many men, including Fernand Marcos. This guy is a future president. Guy is brilliant. This guy is everything. He is single and he is a real bachelor.

Ferdinand Marcos
He is brilliant. He's got all the potential. He's legendary. Whoever will not marry this guy is stupid. He immediately fell in love with her.

Vicente Rafael
And part of the Marcos myth is that they engaged in what he called an eleven day coup. Courtship. Eleven days. And with that, the 20th century. Malakas and Maganda set out to build the Marco Smith together.

Sheila Coronel
He and Imelda were quite a glamorous couple. They were likened to John and Jackie Kennedy. You know, they were like. They liked to promote themselves as the Philippine Camelot. Camelot, a fictional castle that King Arthur was said to have ruled with wisdom and benevolence.

Christina Kim
It was the word that captured the enduring mystique around JFK and Jackie Kennedy, a word that encapsulated their youth, their vitality and their charm. A model for Fernand and Imelda. JFK and Jackie knew that if you look wealthy and healthy, then people believe that you are, and believability is a politician's greatest asset. Marcos was around in his mid forties. Imelda was 36 in 1965, and they were a good looking couple, and they sort of represented the new Philippines.

Talitha Espiritu
He's the warrior orator, you know, the hero who reversed the Supreme Court conviction and said he had lots of war medals. This is talitha spiritu. She's an associate professor at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, and author of passionate the media and the rise and fall of the Marcos regime. People saw her as something like a star. She appealed to the most marginalized Filipinos.

Christina Kim
And like every star, Imelda needed a signature look. And Talithas dad, who was actually Imelda's personal dressmaker, helped her create a sartorial Persona that was both modern and traditional. He designed this silhouette that became her signature, which is the tall terrno long gown, full length, like empire waist and butterfly sleeves. These tall, poofy sleeves that went from shoulder to the bicep became the new symbol of modernity, of a new age. Coming to the Philippines, it looked like.

Talitha Espiritu
A Philippinized or an indigenized version of Jacqueline Onassis Kennedy. Fernand and Imelda were seen as a breath of fresh air after a devastating war and after so many years of being colonized. The strongman and the beauty. Capable and charming, stern, but loving. If you looked especially at the foreign coverage at that time, they were seen as, like these new leaders who were coming forward to lead this country and bring about, you know, the promise of philippine progress and democracy.

Christina Kim
The stage was set for Fernand Marcos to run in the 1965 presidential election. Fernand and Imelda campaigned with pizzazz. Fernand gave rousing speeches. There are still a thousand rivers to be crossed. Imelda serenaded crowds with love songs, and they even had a motion picture made.

Talitha Espiritu
Ignu Hithana. Drawn by Destiny is the english translation. Drawn by destiny. Destiny was a movie all about Ferdinand Marcos life that was, of course, heavily dramatized. And like most melodramas, it had a tantalizing love story.

Ferdinand Marcos
Miss Imelda Romuldes. The future misses Ferdinand. Margot. It really enhanced this idea of, if I vote for Ferdinand, I'm voting for this romance. At the end of the movie, which came out a few months before, before the actual election, Ferdinand is depicted as destined to become president.

The eyes of all Asia and the entire world are upon Ferdinand e Marcos, man of destiny. It's a very early version of the kind of blurring of the lines between politics and entertainment, a pseudo media event. And they were doing this in 1965, and it worked. I solemnly swear that I will faithfully and conscientiously fulfill the duties of President of the Philippines.

Sheila Coronel
When he was inaugurated president in 1965, Marco said, this nation can be great again. There came at a time when people wanted to believe that the Philippines was a rising star of the asian region and that it had a bright future ahead of it and that the Marcos were going to lead them to that future. President Ferdinand Marcos strengthened the relationship with the US, which was caught up in the Vietnam war and needed the Philippines nearby bases. That is why I compliment the leaders of the Philippines in playing a role in asian cooperation, economically, politically, and otherwise, to bring about the peace that we all seek. And with the money from the US, he invested in the Philippines.

Christina Kim
He built more roads and schools and helped the country produce enough rice to feed itself. Everything was clicking. The Philippines seemed to be entering a new era, but everything wasn't what it seemed.

Coming up, the Marcos myth is tested.

Sheila Coronel
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I often wonder what I will be remembered in history for scholar, military hero, the new constitution, strong rallying point or weak tyrant?

Sheila Coronel
In the late 1960s, I was still in grade school when there were student demonstrations. I was completely oblivious to what was going on. But I do remember being picked up from school and there were the right police were battling with protesters, and I remember having to duck under the car because there was so much chaos all around. Things started stirring up in Marcos second term. After his reelection in 1969, Marcos Camelot quickly devolved into chaos.

There were protests for land reform. The country was swimming in debt there. Were protests for workers rights. Oil prices were up. There were protests for student rights.

Christina Kim
And a growing communist movement promised to shake up the elite rule that had never gone away. Suddenly, the tectonic place was shifting, because all the things that had been building up underneath were coming out to the surface, and the ground was moving, and there was a political system that was unable to contain all of this moving tectonic plates in society. People were beginning to question Marcos rule and the man behind the myth, because for the average Filipino, life was not getting any better. Despite the changes being made, the money wasn't trickling down. Watching all this, Marcos decided he needed to double down on the idea that he was the Philippines destiny.

In his diary, he wrote, this is. Your principal mission in life. Save the country again from the Maoists, the anarchists, and the radicals. This is the message that I deduce. I have that feeling of certainty that I will end up with dictatorial powers if the situation continues.

Capital One
And the situation will continue. And in 1972, after months of protest and unrest in the Philippines, President Fernand Marcos finally made his move.

Ferdinand Marcos
My confidence. As of the 21st of this month, I signed proclamation number 1081, placing the entire Philippines under martial law. Marcos goal was to stay in power. The only way he could stay in power was to declare martial law and make himself dictator, which is what he did in 1972. Overnight, streets that had been filled with the sounds of protest turned silent.

Sheila Coronel
It was quiet. There were armed guards manning the barricades. The entry to the presidential palace was very restricted, and it was a very, very big difference from the kind of thriving, bustling place it used to be. I am confident that with God's help, we will attain our dream of a reformed society, a new and brighter world. A new sound filled the air.

Talitha Espiritu
There were songs associated with the martial law regime that we were all supposed to know by heart. Pagan Paksilan, also known as the march of the new society. Heard here is a song Talitha remembers singing as a child in it, a new society, the one Marcos promised to bring, is heralded as a new birth, with the Marcoses as the country's all powerful saviors. A lot of the myth making really happened when they had absolute power already. I remember as a child, like my mother telling us, like, you know, if you did something wrong, she would actually say, don't do that.

The president would get angry with you. There was nothing else on television. There was nothing else on the radio. Everywhere you looked was Ferdinand. Imelda said, I've always claimed to be some kind of a soldier.

Sheila Coronel
For beauty and a soldier for love. Marcos literally had a bust of himself carved on a mountainside.

Christina Kim
The Marcoses controlled everything people saw. Anything that showed Marcos weak or sick was censored. Anything about the family wealth was censored. Any critical news was censored. Anything that showed Imelda's double chin, for example, even photographs were censored.

Political opponents were jailed and silenced. The message was clear.

Sheila Coronel
When I was growing up. That was over and over on the radio and tv. What it meant was that for the country to progress, we need discipline. And that discipline meant, you know, they had to obey the ruler. The rulers were benevolent and benign, and that would lead them to greatness.

Ferdinand Marcos
Now everybody seems to be involved in the destiny not only of himself, but of the entire country and of the entire nation. And this is what we have been hoping and praying for. He saw himself as the culmination of the long struggle to build an independent and proud country. And so he commissioned historians to write history books that said his new society was the inevitable end of this striving for national greatness. Fernand and Imelda made themselves seem like the past, the present, and the future of the Philippines.

Sheila Coronel
I grew up blinded by this monumentality, by this pageantry. All that I do, and we in government must do is for the republic and for you.

Talitha Espiritu
But what was actually happening was that he was replacing the old elite, right, like the old elite families. He was replacing it with his own network of crony families. But at the time, no one knew the extent of the corruption. And so while some Filipinos opposed Marcos declaration of martial law, others believed it was a necessary step to rein in the instability that had seized the country. For the most part, it was tolerated, including by the United States.

Ferdinand Marcos
If the United States now were to throw in a towel and come home, and the communists took over South Vietnam, then all over Southeast Asia, all over the Pacific, in the Mideast, in Europe, in the world, the United States would suffer a blow. Remember, this was the time that the US was fighting wars in Vietnam. This was the time of the domino theory, when Americans didn't want any of the dominoes to fall. Marcos knew this, so he played up the communist threat in the Philippines. Marcos could not have survived without active us support.

Christina Kim
And just like he promised the filipino people stability at home, he promised it on the global stage as well. He was creating a narrative. So he's saying that there's this threat and I'm in power, and while I'm in power, I'm not going to let this overcome. I'm going to be the strong man jump on my horse and save the day. He got american support also because the Americans needed their bases in the Philippines, and Marcos would guarantee that access to military bases in the Philippines.

It was an offer the US couldn't refuse. And president after President recognized Marcos rule. Mister President and misses Marcos. The United States deeply values its close friendship and alliance with the Philippines.

But Fernand and Imelda weren't just interested in winning over the filipino people or the US. They had their eyes on the whole world. They understood that the most important ingredient in their recipe for power, beyond rewriting history books, building monuments, or having friends in high places, was to put on a good show. And that's exactly what they did.

Ferdinand Marcos
The Miss Universe beauty pageant. In 1974, they hosted the Miss Universe pageant. And now, competing for the 1974 title and crown with an honor guard from the Philippine Military Academy, here are the. Most beautiful girls in the universe and. The famous thrill it in Manila.

Christina Kim
Fight between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. Muhammad Ali Ali. It was like they put a spell on the world, especially Imelda. She was everywhere. As the de facto global diplomat of the Philippines, visiting with heads of state in China, I am happy to report.

Sheila Coronel
That we return from this, my third visit to the People's Republic of China with another mission accomplished. Addressing the United nations. For too long have we been divided. By selfish materialist drives, all while still looking the part. As first lady, I have to flaunt, practically flaunt, love and beauty so that the 50 million Filipinos will see what is to love and what is to positively feel and what is perfection.

Talitha Espiritu
Imelda Marcos may have used millions of dollars of taxpayers money to purchase what. She thought were italian masterpiece paintings. Imelda reportedly spent $3 million in a single shopping trip in New York City, as many in the Philippines faced poverty. Using the philippine intelligence budget as the equivalent of an American Express gold card, Imelda Marcos traveled to such places as Kenya, Iraq, and New York City. The total cost of the trips listed in these documents exceeds one and a half million dollars.

Christina Kim
What the world was seeing was a shiny veneer that the Marcoses had constructed to conceal the underbelly of the regime. It was common for the military to come in, burn villages.

Capital One
There was one instance where they inserted. Wires in my genitals, gather the women and the children, and put them in naval shifts where the women were routinely raped. I know personally so many people who had been tortured. I know people who had disappeared. I know people who had been throughout.

Christina Kim
The 1970s and early eighties, the two faces of the Marcos regime. The spectacle of opulence and the violent suppression were in a constant, delicate dance. But the growing communist insurgency, which actually grew strength under Marcos and the growing middle class discontent, were once again turning the Philippines into a powder keg. All it needed was a spark.

Sheila Coronel
The turning point came in 1983, when Ninoy Aquino, a former senator, was killed. Benigno Ninoy Aquino was one of Marcos loudest critics and political opponents. After spending eight years in prison, he and his wife, Gorathon Cory Aquino, were exiled to the US to receive medical treatment. Aquino returned to the Philippines with the hopes of restoring democracy. He was shot right on the tarmac Manila airport.

And many people believed it was Marcos or his wife or one of somebody in the Marcos camp who was responsible for his killing. An independent investigation of the murder would later find that it was filipino military personnel who planned and carried out the assassination plot. But for the filipino people, it didn't matter who pulled the trigger. Aquino's death became a clarion call for change. It really showed the brazenness of the Marcos regime and the impunity with which they ruled.

That really dramatized, especially for the middle class, that, you know, this regime was no longer tolerable. Beginning in 1983, political opposition to Marcos became more and more open. Buckling under pressure, including from the US Marcos promise to hold elections. Ninoy Aquino's widow, Corey, ran against Marcos. She billed herself as a housewife without political experience.

Talitha Espiritu
I admit that I have no experience in cheating, stealing, lying, or assassinating political opponents. It resonated. Filipinos can see that, oh, I can really identify with that housewife. Because she suffered. Marcos won in what many knew was a stolen election.

Christina Kim
But even if he was able to strong arm the polls, he lost the narrative battle. The Marcoses had lost control of the story that they had been telling for more than a decade. The terms of melodrama kind of like shifts on them, right? They can't control the melodrama anymore. Marcos was no longer the legendary malakas, Imelda no longer Magonda.

Talitha Espiritu
She's become sort of like the opposite of that. She is like a monstrous figure that's difficult to identify with. After the sham elections, the opposition to Marcos was at a fever pitch. By late February, marches were being held every day on Ipifanio de los Santos Avenue, or Edza, escalating to what is now called the people power revolution. One morning, like, my father just woke everyone up and said, we're going.

Christina Kim
Talitha's father, Imelda's famous dressmaker, had already severed ties with the marquesses. And after years of cultivating Imelda's image, he was ready for a change. My father, like, dragging us out of bed, packing us into the family car, my mom handing out, like, washcloths in case there was tear gas, you know, and then just, you know, going, I'm getting emotional because it was like, it was, you know, imagine I'm, I'm 15 at this point, so I remember, like, being home and, like, trying. Just trying to keep up with homework, not knowing if. If we were going back to school, if not knowing what was going to happen.

Sheila Coronel
And then. And then an amazing thing is, like, we didn't know what to expect. But once we got to EdSA, which is this main thoroughfare, right, like, we saw all the cars. I ask you now to become and to be prepared to express again your power as a people. It was a peaceful protest.

Talitha Espiritu
It was just everyone was there, like, you know, like, there was a lot of prayer going on. And when I mean prayer, I mean praying the rosary, like so. So, you know, like nuns with megaphones leading the rosary. Sheila Coronel was also there. By this time, she was a journalist working for the Manila Times, a newspaper that had just reopened after being shut down during martial law.

Sheila Coronel
On that fourth night, I was at the gate of the presidential palace, and there was already an angry, a big angry cry crowd gathered there. And I remember, I don't know if I'm imagining it, but I remember hearing the whir of helicopters. Those were the helicopters that were taking the Marcos family out of the presidential palace.

Christina Kim
The Marcoses were airlifted by us security forces to Hawaii. And when the Marcoses left, nobody manned the barricades anymore or the palace gates. So the crowd just surged in, and I was part of that crowd. It was like a giant wave that crashed through the gates of the palace.

Sheila Coronel
We walked into the dining room, the bedroom, the closet with Imelda's thousand plus pairs of shoes. It was unbelievable. It felt really unreal to me that this could happen. Fernand and Imelda Marcos 21 year reign as the leaders of the Philippines had come to an end. Marcos Legacy as a dictator was set in stone, or so it seemed.

Christina Kim
Coming up, the return of the Marcos family.

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Sheila Coronel
Part three Samasama Taiung Bumagun Mulay together. We shall rise again.

I have.

I have the responsibility of upholding integrity, of holding our dead sacred by burying the late President Marcos in the Philippines, his motherland. It was my father's fervent wish that when he came to the end of his days that he be buried in the cell. Simple soldiers ceremony. It was quiet. The family was there, all dressed up.

Christina Kim
Imelda was clad in all black bong bong. Marcos, Ferdinand's only son and namesake, wore a crisp white barang Tagalog, the national Filipino shirt his father always wore. It was a burial with a 21 gun salute with all the ceremony.

Sheila Coronel
And it was filmed in a very theatrical fashion. It was kind of the kind of epic propaganda that was prevalent during the Marcos era.

Christina Kim
Fernand Marcos had died in exile in Hawaii in 1989, nearly three decades before this moment when he was finally buried in Manila. Yes, you heard that right? For almost 30 years, Marcos body was preserved above ground, unburied. And this moment in 2016, when he was finally laid to rest, was no ordinary funeral for Imelda and for the family. I mean, clearly just vindication.

Ever since returning from exile in the early nineties, Imelda had made it her rallying cry to bring Fernand Marcos body back to the Philippines. She used that corpse precisely to forge, to continue this melodrama. A story about deprivation, a story about loss, a story about disrespect.

By casting herself as a grieving widow, Imelda could distract attention from the countless charges of cruelty, corruption she and her family faced and continue to face, by the way, for reportedly embezzling billions of dollars from state coffers. So she pumped up the drama and the spectacle. She refused to bury Marcos and instead kept his body on display, albeit with a wig and wax face. According to the mortician, they built this. Huge mausoleum in Eloquis around it.

Vicente Rafael
And if you go there, you sort of enter, and it's very somber, and there's classical music and so forth. And it was right beside this building called malakanyang of the North. Malakanyang being the name of the presidential palace, right? So they built a kind of replica. Like a venerated saint or holy man.

Christina Kim
Marcos corpse waited.

Sheila Coronel
After previous presidents had refused Marcos a burial in the National Heroes Cemetery, Duterte allowed it. President Rodrigo Duterte, the strongman populist, known for silencing journalists and extrajudicial killings. We thank President Rodrigo Duterte for his recognition of my father's service to the nation. The burial wasn't just a symbolic act. It was a rewriting of history.

Officially, Marcos is now a hero. And so that reversed what we thought was already the judgment of history, that Marcus was not a hero, that Marcus was a dictator who plundered the country. Let us be the heroes that my father asked us all to be. And finally bring the filipino nation together, and finally bring the Filipinos to greatness. The same year Fernand Marcos was buried, his son, Bong Bong, ran for vice president.

Christina Kim
The Marcos family was back and ready to play a big role in the Philippines again.

Ferdinand Marcos
This is a historic moment for us all. I feel it deep within me. You, the people, have spoken, and it is resounding. In 2022, Ferdinand Bong Bong Marcos became the president of the Philippines. Years of drumming up nostalgia paid off.

Vicente Rafael
You could say that the current presidency of Bong Bong Marcos is the culmination of this melodrama.

Ferdinand Marcos
It is my father's birthday, so we are celebrating also Marcos Day. The Marcos family knows the power of history. And while Bong Bong hasn't employed historians to rewrite history books, he's using the tools of the 21st century to recast his father's regime as a golden age. He's on YouTube and TikTok. My father had a vision, a dream for our country, and he wanted to reach that dream by building this nation up.

Let us return. There's even a full length feature movie called made in Malakanyang about the Marcos's last days in the Philippines before they were exiled. Get them out of the Philippines. Executive produced by Senator Aimee Marcos Bong Bongs sister.

Christina Kim
The content is over the top, emotive, and like any good story, easy to get wrapped up in. But in this version of events, theres no mention of the billions of dollars the family is accused of stealing, the thousands tortured, or the more than 2000 people killed during the regime. What you're getting now is this struggle, this real struggle between historians who, you know, are concerned about the historical record versus, you know, propagandists who are more intent in creating this image of Marcus, this myth of Marcus. It's all part of the reason why the hero's burial was so important to the family. It tied a bow on the story.

They've been selling. You know, people just have fuzzy memories of the Marcoses. The relationship between the United States and. The Philippines state, the obvious, has very deep roots. I mean, the Americans have conveniently forgotten that they supported Marcos.

Sheila Coronel
They supported torture and human rights violations. After meeting with President Bong Bong Marcos in 2022, President Biden tweeted, quote, our nation's relationship is rooted in democracy, common history, and people to people ties. But missing from the tweet, the importance of filipino military bases. Right now, as us tensions with China continue to rise, and even within the Philippines, the historical record has never been fully sealed. The Philippines didn't do a good job of revising tax books to show the next generation would really happen during the Marcos era.

Christina Kim
The majority of the filipino electorate doesn't have any personal memories of martial law. Instead, they've only witnessed the instability of the government to combat poverty, tackle corruption, or build more infrastructure. Which is why, according to Sheila Cornell, for many Filipinos, the nostalgic idea that the Philippines was once great and could be again with the Marcos family at the helm, is so appealing. The new generation of Filipinos have profound alienation from democratic politics. Unlike my generation that lives with dictatorship and had seeded and believed in the transformative power of democracy, this generation is disillusioned with democracy.

Sheila Coronel
They connect it with incompetence, gridlock, ineptness, with an inability to do anything about the problems of society. So Filipinos have fresh memories of the disappointments of democracy, and so maybe they're much more open to other fantasies. So the marcuses have capitalized on that, and they're saying, look, we are not elites. They're still saying that these liberal elites have fooled you, have deceived you. They have not lived up to their promises.

Vicente Rafael
What's at stake is, you know, a particular understanding of the way power works. I can't say it enough. It's like, we can't think that dictatorships happen in the third world. We have this false sense of security. If we think that we've been saved, we've been spared from it.

Sheila Coronel
History is being written everywhere. Vladimir Putin is revising history to show that Ukraine has always been part of Russia. Narendra Modi is recasting indian history as primarily as hindu history. So the use of history, even here in the United States, the use of history to justify autocracy, the suppression of dissent, to mythologize certain rulers, and to demonize certain political, religious, or ethnic groups, is prevalent around the world. In the Marcus are part of what's an emerging and very dangerous global trend.

Rund Abdel Fattah
That's it for this week's show. I'm rund Abdel Fattah. I'm Ramtin Arablouei. And you've been listening listening to throughline from NPR. This episode was produced by me and.

Ramtin Arablouei
Me and Lawrence Wu, Julie Cain, Anya. Steinberg, Yolanda Sanguine, Casey Minor, Christina Kim. Devon Kadayama, Yordanos, Tis Fazion. Thank you to Miele Gonzalez, Lenny Gonzalez, Carla Estevez and Phil Harrell for their voiceover work. Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Volkle.

Rund Abdel Fattah
This episode was mixed by Robert Rodriguez. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band drop Electric, which. Includes Anya Mizani, Navid Marvy Sho Fujiwara. Also thanks to Micah Ratner, Johannes Durgi, Michael Sullivan, Vincent Knee, Kathleen Gutierrez, Richard Francis, Nick Smith, Brett Neely, Jerry Holmes and Anya Grundmann. And as always, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us@throughlinepr.org dot before.

Ramtin Arablouei
You go, we want to let you know about another story that takes place in the Philippines. It's from our colleagues over at the Sunday Story on the UP first podcast. Since 2016, more than 8000 people have been killed as part of former President Rodrigo Dutertes infamous war on drugs. When Ferdinand Marcos junior took office in 2022, he made a bold claim. He said the Philippines would end this spree of state sanctioned killings of alleged drug users and focus on rehabilitation instead.

NPR's Emily Feng recently visited the Philippines to see how things are going, and she found that things have not changed as much as she expected. Hear her reporting on the Sunday Story on NPR's up first podcast. Wherever you listen. This message comes from NPR's sponsor, ACorn TV. Acorn TV is brilliant television told brilliantly, from charmingly cozy mysteries to daringly dark dramas.

Christina Kim
Visit Acorn TV for a 30 day free trial with promo code. NPR Acorn TV brilliant this message comes. From NPR sponsor Rosetta Stone, an expert in language learning for 30 years. Right now, NPR listeners can get Rosetta Stone's lifetime membership to 25 different languages for 50% off. Learn more@rosettastone.com NPR last year, over 20,000.

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Mythos and Melodrama in the Philippines (Throwback)

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