Mythos and Melodrama in the Philippines (Throwback)

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Speaker 2 In the very beginning, the start of time, there were only three things:

Speaker 2 The ocean, the sky, and a single bird in constant flight.

Speaker 5 One day, the bird grew tired. It swooped down, flying over the sea, looking for a place to land.

Speaker 2 Its wings stirred up the sea so much that the waves rose and crashed against the sky.

Speaker 2 Desperate to calm the sea, the sky rained down boulders. These boulders became the islands of the Philippines.

Speaker 5 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 pecked at the bamboo.

Speaker 8 And when the bamboo split, the first Filipinos emerged from these bamboo stalks.

Speaker 7 The first man, Malakas, which means strength.

Speaker 8 And the first woman, Maganda, who was beautiful.

Speaker 5 And that's how the world began, with Malacas and Maganda, the first man and woman, according to Filipino legend.

Speaker 2 The legend was passed down for generations from person to person, ear to ear.

Speaker 2 But in the 20th century, Malakas and Maganda would come alive again, resurrected by two people.

Speaker 5 Ferdinand Marcos and Imelda Romaldez.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 3 So he was the strong man and she was the beautiful one.

Speaker 3 And that's really how they saw themselves.

Speaker 2 Ferdinand Marcos ruled the Philippines for 21 years, first as a democratically elected president and later as a brutal and oppressive dictator, all the while with Imelda at his side.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Imelda swathed in white gauze, her black hair windswept, her gaze almost ethereal.

Speaker 7 This was part of their image making of the new society they were going to build.

Speaker 8 A mythical notion of power. They stood at the very origin of the nation and therefore they were entitled to rule it, you know, that they had a special calling to rule the nation.

Speaker 5 At this point, you might be wondering, why are we talking about the Marcoses?

Speaker 13 Ferdinand Romaldez Marcos Jr.

Speaker 13 Ferdinand Bong Bong Marcos Jr.

Speaker 6 Ferdinand Romaldez Marcos Jr.

Speaker 5 Or as he's more commonly known, Bong Bong Marcos, the sole son of dictator dictator Ferdinand Marcos was elected president of the Philippines in 2022, and he's bringing his legend back to life.

Speaker 2 Now, the younger Marcos Jr. is promising a return to the golden age of his father's rule.

Speaker 7 The Philippines shall continue to be a friend to all, an enemy to none.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 3 U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin met Marcos in Manila on Thursday.

Speaker 11 Our alliance makes both of our democracies more secure and helps uphold a free Indo-Pacific.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 A Marcos would once again rule the Philippines.

Speaker 2 Welcome to the Epic of Marcos. In this tale of a family that's larger than life, one man lies at the center, Ferdinand Marcos Sr.

Speaker 2 But the figures that surround him are just as important: Imelda, his muse, Bongbong, his heir, and the United States, his faithful sidekick.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I'm Randandir Fattah.

Speaker 5 And I'm Ramteen Arab Louis.

Speaker 5 On this episode of Through Line 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.

Speaker 15 Hi, this is Lauren Scully from Chicago, Illinois. You are listening to Fruit Life.

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Speaker 17 Part 1.

Speaker 17 This nation can be great again.

Speaker 17 This is a story that starts with a murder.

Speaker 17 It's a dark and rainy night. Newly elected Filipino Congressman Julio Nalunda Sen, content and full after a dinner with friends, steps out to the wash basin on his porch to brush his teeth.

Speaker 17 When from the shadows, a single shot explodes.

Speaker 17 His body falls limp to the ground.

Speaker 7 The Londazan was murdered.

Speaker 17 The prime suspect was a young man named Ferdinand Marcos.

Speaker 17 It was 1935 in Ilocos Norte, a northern Philippines province.

Speaker 7 Ferdinand Marcos was then an 18-year-old student at the University of the Philippines. He was home for the elections.

Speaker 17 Elections that Ferdinand's father, Mariano, had just lost to none other than...

Speaker 7 Julio Nalondazan, a politician who was the rival of Mariano Marcos.

Speaker 17 That's Sheila Coronel, a professor and director of the Tony Stebile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University.

Speaker 7 Nalondazan and his followers were seen parading around the town and in front of Marcos' house with a coffin that said Marcos is dead.

Speaker 7 And that really riled up the Marcoses, sort of pouring salt into wound that was still fresh.

Speaker 17 With Nellodassin's body lying in cold blood, all eyes turned to Ferdinand Marcos.

Speaker 7 He was a champion marksman at the University Rifle and Pistol Team.

Speaker 7 He was seen to be the most plausible suspect.

Speaker 17 A smoking gun loomed, with the young Ferdinand at the center of it all. But he didn't bulk.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 7 He famously defended himself. He acted as his own lawyer in an all-white suit.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 And the justices acquitted him of the murder.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 I think the myth there was he was a brilliant man who

Speaker 7 defended his family's honor

Speaker 7 and acquitted himself.

Speaker 7 So Marcos, instead of denying the murder, has made it, flipped it around and made it a myth about his brilliance

Speaker 7 and part of his inevitability that this man was saved. for greater things and the justices saw that

Speaker 7 that this was part of his destiny

Speaker 7 so that started the Marcos legend propagating myths about himself and his family almost from the time that he came out in public life

Speaker 17 Ferdinand Marcos never quite fit in

Speaker 7 He was not modern or cosmopolitan. He was looked down upon by his classmates.

Speaker 17 But suddenly, with this trial, his name was known throughout the country. A gunshot had split the bamboo and begun to unlock his future.

Speaker 7 He believed that he was destined to rule the country.

Speaker 17 A destiny that seemed far off so long as the Philippines remained a colony, first of Spain and then the U.S.

Speaker 7 The United States has always been a looming presence in Philippine life.

Speaker 18 In 1898, under the command of Admiral Dewey, the American fleet defeated the Spaniards and the United States occupied the Philippines.

Speaker 7 Now, we were, the Philippines were a U.S. colony for years.

Speaker 4 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, U.S.
Governor of the Philippines.

Speaker 17 Colonial rule brought American education, American military, American democracy, influences that were forced upon the Filipino people after losing a bloody conflict with the U.S.

Speaker 7 The Philippines was America's first democracy-building project way before Iraq or Afghanistan, because it was democracy introduced by empire.

Speaker 8 From the U.S. perspective, colonization was not oppression.
Colonization was a gift.

Speaker 17 This is Vicente Rafael, a professor of history in Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Speaker 8 It was a gift that they were giving these benighted people currently experiencing disorder and suffering. So

Speaker 18 for all Filipinos, there is a single political goal, independence.

Speaker 18 Yet before the dream of independence could be realized came World War II and the bombing of the open city of Manila on 26 December 1941.

Speaker 17 When the Japanese invaded the Philippines, 200,000 Filipinos fought for the U.S.

Speaker 17 Fernand Marcos was one of them.

Speaker 11 In the fierce and hopeless battles that followed, there were four Philippine soldiers for every American soldier.

Speaker 17 The war was brutal, with estimates of civilian and military deaths ranging from half a million to a million.

Speaker 17 But not long after World War II ended, on July 4th, 1946, the Philippines was finally granted that elusive thing they'd long hoped for:

Speaker 17 independence.

Speaker 18 America keeps her pledge to free the Philippines, and the Philippine flag is hoisted as a new nation is born.

Speaker 17 The destiny Ferdinand Marcos had dreamed up for himself was now within striking distance, and he wasn't about to let the opportunity slip through his fingers.

Speaker 17 So just like with the murder trial, he dialed up the drama.

Speaker 7 He claimed to have won so many medals during the war that he has more medals, 32 medals, more than Audi Murphy, who is the American World War II hero.

Speaker 17 Some of those medals are now suspected to be false, and his war record is disputed.

Speaker 7 He was not that heroic, larger-than-life hero of the Second World War that he said he was, that was the basis of his election campaign when he ran for senator.

Speaker 17 But it didn't matter. Amid the sea of blood World War II had wrought, Marcos managed to emerge from the bamboo stocks as Malakas, the mythical strongman, the original man.

Speaker 17 His transformation was nearly complete. The only thing he was missing was his maganda.

Speaker 17 He found her in a young woman Marcos would later call call his secret weapon, Imelda.

Speaker 19 It is not expensive to be beautiful.

Speaker 20 It takes only a little effort to be presentable and beautiful.

Speaker 19 Beauty is a discipline.

Speaker 8 She was like a movie star. You know, she was like a celebrity.
She was beautiful. She had this incredible long hair.
She was mestiza, mixed race, light-skinned. Very imposing figure, right?

Speaker 17 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 she didn't have inheritance money imelda's big break came when she entered a beauty contest in manila she didn't win but her presence made a splash garnering the attention of many men including fernand marcos

Speaker 20 this guy is a future president guy is brilliant this guy is everything

Speaker 20 He is single and he is a real bachelor. He's brilliant.
He's got all the potential. he's legendary is this is this whoever

Speaker 20 will not marry this guy is stupid he immediately fell in love with her

Speaker 8 and part of the marcos myth is that they engaged in what he called an 11-day coup courtship 11 days and with that the 20th century malakas and maganda set out to build the Marcos myth together

Speaker 7 he and Imeldo were quite a glamorous couple. They were likened to John and Jackie Kennedy.

Speaker 7 They were like, they liked to promote themselves as the Philippine Camelot.

Speaker 17 Camelot, a fictional castle that King Arthur was said to have ruled with wisdom and benevolence. It was the word that captured the enduring mystique around JFK and Jackie Kennedy.

Speaker 17 A word that encapsulated their youth, their vitality, and their charm. A model for Ferdinand and Imelda.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 7 Marcos was around in his mid-40s. Imelda was 36 in 1965.

Speaker 7 And they were a good-looking couple. And they sort of were

Speaker 7 represented the new Philippines.

Speaker 3 He's the warrior, orator, you know, the hero who reversed the Supreme Court conviction and said he had lots of war medals.

Speaker 17 This is Talitha Spiritu. She's an associate professor at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, and author of Passionate Revolutions, The Media and the Rise and Fall of the Marcos Regime.

Speaker 3 People saw her as something like a star.

Speaker 3 She appealed to the most marginalized Filipinos.

Speaker 17 And like every star, Imelda needed a signature look. And Talitha's dad, who was actually Imelda's personal dressmaker, helped her create a sartorial persona that was both modern and traditional.

Speaker 3 He designed this silhouette that became her signature, which is the tall terno, long gown, full length, like empire waist and butterfly sleeves.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 3 Looked like a Philippinized or an indigenized version of Jacqueline Onassis Kennedy.

Speaker 17 Fernand and Imelda were seen as a breath of fresh air after a devastating war and after so many years of being colonized. The strong man and the beauty, capable and charming, stern but loving.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 17 The stage was set for Ferdinand Marcos to run in the 1965 presidential election.

Speaker 17 Fernand and Imelda campaigned with pizzazz.

Speaker 17 Fernand gave rousing speeches.

Speaker 22 There are still a thousand rivers to be crossed.

Speaker 17 Imelda serenaded crowds with love songs.

Speaker 17 And they even had a motion picture made.

Speaker 3 Drawn by Destiny is the English translation.

Speaker 17 Drawn by Destiny was a movie all about Ferdinand Marcos's life that was, of course, heavily dramatized. And like most melodramas, it had a tantalizing love story.

Speaker 6 Miss Emelda Romaldez, the future Mrs. Ferdinand Marcos.

Speaker 3 It really enhanced this idea of if I vote for Ferdinand, I'm voting for this romance.

Speaker 17 At the end of the movie, which came out a few months before the actual election, Ferdinand is depicted as destined to become president.

Speaker 13 The eyes of all Asia and the entire world are upon Ferdinand E. Marcos, man of destiny.

Speaker 3 It's a very early, you know, version of like, you know, the kind of blurring of the lines between politics and entertainment, a pseudo-media event. And they were doing this in 1965,

Speaker 17 and it worked.

Speaker 17 I solemnly swear that I will faithfully and conscientiously fulfill the duties of President of the Philippines.

Speaker 7 When he was inaugurated president in 1965, Marco said this nation can be great again.

Speaker 7 There came at a time when people wanted to believe that the Philippines was a rising star, the Asian region,

Speaker 7 and that it had a bright future ahead of it and that the Marcuses were going to lead them to that future.

Speaker 17 President Ferdinand Marcos strengthened the relationship with the U.S., which was caught up in the Vietnam War and needed the Philippines' nearby bases.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 17 And with the money from the U.S., he invested in the Philippines. He built more roads and schools and helped the country produce enough rice to feed itself.

Speaker 17 Everything was clicking. The Philippines seemed to be entering a new era.

Speaker 17 But everything wasn't what it seemed.

Speaker 17 Coming up, the Marcos myth is tested.

Speaker 23 Hi, this is Delphine Salom from Rancho Co Camunga, California, and you are listening to Through Line from NPR.

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Speaker 12 Part 2.

Speaker 17 For national development, what we need is discipline.

Speaker 24 I often wonder what I will be remembered in history for.

Speaker 13 Scholar, military hero, the new constitution, strong rallying point, or weak tyrant.

Speaker 7 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

Speaker 7 and there were the right police were

Speaker 7 battling with protesters. And I remember having to duck under the car

Speaker 7 because there was so much chaos all around.

Speaker 7 Things started stirring up in Marcos's second term.

Speaker 17 After his re-election in 1969, Marcos's Camelot quickly devolved into chaos.

Speaker 7 There were protests for land reform.

Speaker 17 The country was swimming in debt.

Speaker 7 There were protests for workers' rights.

Speaker 17 Oil prices were up.

Speaker 7 There were protests for student rights.

Speaker 17 And a growing communist movement promised to shake up the elite rule that had never gone away.

Speaker 7 Suddenly, the tectonic place was shifting because all the things that had been building up underneath

Speaker 7 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 plate in society.

Speaker 17 People were beginning to question Marcos' rule and the man behind the myth. Because for the average Filipino, life was not getting any better.

Speaker 17 Despite the changes being made, the money wasn't trickling down.

Speaker 17 Watching all this, Marcos decided he needed to double down on the idea that he was the Philippines' destiny.

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 24 I have that feeling of certainty that I will end up with dictatorial powers if the situation continues. And the situation will continue.

Speaker 17 And in 1972, after months of protest and unrest in the Philippines, President Fernand Marcos finally made his move.

Speaker 25 My countrymen,

Speaker 25 as of the 21st of this month,

Speaker 25 I signed Proclamation No. 1081, placing the entire Philippines under martial law.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 17 Overnight, streets that have been filled with the sounds of protest turned silent.

Speaker 7 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

Speaker 7 thriving, bustling place it used to be.

Speaker 26 I am confident that with God's help,

Speaker 26 we will attain our dream of a reformed society, a new and brighter world.

Speaker 17 A new sound filled the air.

Speaker 3 There were songs associated with the martial law regime that we were all supposed to know by heart.

Speaker 17 Bagong Paxilang, also known as the March of the New Society, heard here, is a song Talita remembers singing as a child.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 7 A lot of the myth-making really happened when they had absolute power already.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 7 There was nothing else on television. There was nothing else on the radio.
Everywhere you looked, was fed animal.

Speaker 27 I've always claimed to be some kind of a soldier for duty and a soldier for love.

Speaker 7 Marcos literally had a bust of himself carved on a mountainside.

Speaker 17 The Marcoses controlled everything people saw.

Speaker 7 Anything that showed Marcos weak or sick was censored. Anything about the family wealth was censored.
Any critical news was censored.

Speaker 7 Anything that showed Imelda's double chin, for example, even photographs, were censored.

Speaker 17 Political opponents were jailed and silenced. The message was clear.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 And that discipline meant they had to obey the ruler, the rulers who are benevolent and benign. And that would lead them to greatness.

Speaker 28 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.

Speaker 7 He saw himself as the culmination of the long struggle to build an independent and proud country.

Speaker 7 And so he commissioned historians to write history books that said his new society was the inevitable end

Speaker 7 of this striving for national greatness.

Speaker 17 Ferdinand and Imelda made themselves seem like the past, the present, and the future of the Philippines.

Speaker 7 I grew up blinded by this monumentality, by this pageantry.

Speaker 25 All that I do,

Speaker 25 and we in government must do is for the Republic and for you.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 17 But at the time, no one knew the extent of the corruption.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 For the most part, it was tolerated, including by the United States.

Speaker 11 If the United States now were to throw in the 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.

Speaker 7 Remember, this was the time that the U.S. was fighting wars in Vietnam.
This was the time of the domino theory when the Americans didn't want any of the dominoes to fall.

Speaker 17 Marcos knew this, so he played up the communist threat in the Philippines.

Speaker 8 Marcos could not have survived without active U.S. support.

Speaker 17 And just like he promised the Filipino people stability at home, he promised it on the global stage as well.

Speaker 3 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 us.

Speaker 3 I'm going to be the strong man, jump on my horse and save the day.

Speaker 7 He got American support also

Speaker 7 because

Speaker 7 the Americans needed their bases in the Philippines and Marcos would guarantee that access to military bases in the Philippines.

Speaker 17 It was an offer the U.S. couldn't refuse.

Speaker 17 And president after president recognized Marcos' role.

Speaker 6 Mr. President, Mrs.
Marcos, the United States deeply values its close friendship and alliance with the Philippines.

Speaker 17 But Ferdinand and Imelda weren't just interested in winning over the Filipino people or the U.S.

Speaker 17 They had their eyes on the whole world.

Speaker 17 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

Speaker 17 And that's exactly what they did.

Speaker 31 Live via satellite from the beautiful new book arts center of the Philippines in the city of Manila, the Miss Universe Beauty Pageant.

Speaker 17 In 1974, they hosted the Miss Universe pageant.

Speaker 31 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.

Speaker 17 And the famous Thrilla in Manila fight between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 29 I am happy to report

Speaker 29 that we return from this my third visit to the People's Republic of China with another mission accomplished.

Speaker 17 Addressing the United Nations.

Speaker 20 For too long have we been divided by selfish materialist drives.

Speaker 17 All while still looking the part.

Speaker 27 First lady, I have to flaunt, practically flaunt love and beauty so that

Speaker 27 the 50 million Filipinos will see what is to love and what is to positively feel and what is perfection.

Speaker 33 Himalda Marcos may have used millions of dollars of taxpayers' money to purchase what she thought were Italian masterpiece paintings.

Speaker 17 Imelda reportedly spent $3 million in a single shopping trip in New York City, as many in the Philippines faced poverty.

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 32 The total cost of the trips listed in these documents exceeds one and a half million dollars.

Speaker 17 What the world was seeing was a shiny veneer that the Marcoses had constructed to conceal the underbelly of the regime.

Speaker 8 It was common for the military to come and burn villages.

Speaker 17 There was one instance where they inserted wires in my genitals.

Speaker 8 Gather the women and the children and put them in naval ships where the women were routinely raped.

Speaker 34 I know personally so many people who had been tortured. I know people who had disappeared.
I know people who had been killed.

Speaker 17 Throughout the 1970s and early 80s, the two faces of the Marcos regime, the spectacle of opulence and the violent suppression, were in a constant, delicate dance.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 All it needed was a spark.

Speaker 7 The turning point came in 1983 when Ninoy Aquino, a former senator, was killed.

Speaker 17 Benigno Ninoy Aquino was one of Marcos' loudest critics and political opponents. After spending eight years in prison, he and his wife Goraton Corrie Aquino were exiled to the U.S.

Speaker 17 to receive medical treatment. Aquino returned to the Philippines with the hopes of restoring democracy.

Speaker 7 He was shot right on the tarmac of 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.

Speaker 17 An independent investigation of the murder would later find that it was Filipino military personnel who planned and carried out the assassination plot.

Speaker 17 But for the Filipino people, It didn't matter who pulled the trigger. Aquino's death became a clarion call for change.

Speaker 7 It really showed the brazenness of the Marcos regime and the impunity with which they ruled. That really dramatized, especially for the middle class,

Speaker 7 that, you know, this regime was no longer tolerable.

Speaker 17 Beginning in 1983, political opposition to Marcos became more and more open.

Speaker 17 Buckling under pressure, including from the U.S., Marcos promised to hold elections. Ninoy Aquino's widow, Corey, ran ran against Marcos.

Speaker 17 She billed herself as a housewife without political experience.

Speaker 35 I admit that I have no experience in cheating, stealing, lying, or assassinating political opponents.

Speaker 17 It resonated.

Speaker 3 Filipinos can see that, oh, I can really identify with that

Speaker 3 housewife because she suffered.

Speaker 17 Marcos won in what many knew was a stolen election. But even if he was able to strong-arm the polls, he lost the narrative battle.

Speaker 17 The Marcoses had lost control of the story that they had been telling for more than a decade.

Speaker 3 The terms of melodrama kind of like shifts on them, right?

Speaker 3 They can't control the melodrama anymore.

Speaker 17 Marcos was no longer the legendary Malakas.

Speaker 17 Imelda, no longer Maganda.

Speaker 3 She's become sort of like the

Speaker 3 opposite of that.

Speaker 3 She is like a monstrous figure. It's difficult to identify with.

Speaker 17 After the sham elections, the opposition to Marcos was at a fever pitch.

Speaker 17 By late February, marches were being held every day on Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, or EDSA, escalating to what is now called the People Power Revolution.

Speaker 3 One morning, like my father just woke everyone up and said, we're going.

Speaker 17 Tolita's father, Imelda's famous dressmaker, had already severed ties with the Marcoses.

Speaker 17 And after years of cultivating Imelda's image he was ready for a change.

Speaker 3 Father like dragging us out to bed, packing us into

Speaker 3 the family car, my mom handing out like washcloths in case there was tear gas, you know, and then just you know going.

Speaker 3 Getting emotional because it was like it was

Speaker 3 you know imagine I'm I'm 15 at this point.

Speaker 3 So I remember like being home and like trying just trying to keep up with homework, not knowing if we were going back to school, school if not knowing what was going to happen and then and then and an amazing thing is like we didn't know what to expect but once we got to Edza which is this main thoroughfare right like we saw all the cars

Speaker 11 I ask you now to be calm and to be prepared to express again

Speaker 3 your power as a people it was a peaceful protest it was just everyone was there

Speaker 3 There's like, you know, like, there was a lot of prayer going on. And when I mean prayer, I mean praying the rosary.

Speaker 3 Like so so you know like nuns with megaphones leading the rosary.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 7 On that fourth night, I was at the gates of the presidential palace and there was already an angry, a big angry crowd gathered there.

Speaker 7 And I remember, I don't know if I'm imagining it, but I remember hearing the whir of helicopters.

Speaker 7 And those were the helicopters that were taking the Marcos family out of the presidential palace.

Speaker 17 The Marcoses were airlifted by U.S. security forces to Hawaii.

Speaker 17 And

Speaker 7 when the Marcoses left, nobody manned the barricades anymore or the palace gates.

Speaker 7 crowd just surged in. I was part of that crowd.
It was like a giant wave that crashed through the gates of the palace.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 Coming up, the return of the Marcos family.

Speaker 15 Hi, my name is Kevin Dillon from Cicero, Indiana, and you're listening to Through Line via NPR.

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Speaker 17 Part 3.

Speaker 16 Samasamataing Bumangun Muli.

Speaker 17 Together, we shall rise again.

Speaker 17 I have the responsibility of upholding the integrity of holding our dead sacred by burying the late President Marcos in the Philippines, his motherland.

Speaker 37 It was my father's fervent wish that when he came to the end of his days

Speaker 37 that he be buried in a simple soldier's ceremony.

Speaker 7 It was quiet, the family was there, all dressed up.

Speaker 17 Imelda was clad in all black. Bangbang Marcos, Ferdinand's only son and namesake, wore a crisp white barangtagalog, the national Filipino shirt his father always wore.

Speaker 7 There's a burial with a 21-gun salute,

Speaker 7 with all the ceremony.

Speaker 7 And it was filmed in a very theatrical fashion.

Speaker 7 It was

Speaker 7 the kind of epic propaganda that was prevalent during the Marcos era.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 8 For Imelda and for the family, I mean, clearly, just vindication.

Speaker 17 Ever since returning from exile in the early 90s, Imelda had made it her rallying cry to bring Ferdinand Marcos' body back to the Philippines.

Speaker 8 She used that corpse precisely to forge, to continue this melodrama, a story about deprivation, a story about loss, a story about disrespect.

Speaker 17 By casting herself as a grieving widow, Imelda could distract attention from the countless charges of corruption she and her family faced, and continue to face, by the way, for reportedly embezzling billions of dollars from state coffers.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 8 They built this huge mausoleum in Ilocos around it. And if you go there, you sort of enter and it's very somber and there's classical music and so forth.

Speaker 8 And it was right beside this building called Malacanyang of the North, Malacanyang being the name of the presidential palace, right? So they built a kind of replica.

Speaker 17 Like a venerated saint or holy man, Marcos's corpse waited.

Speaker 7 After previous presidents had refused Marcos a burial in the National Heroes Cemetery, Duterte allowed it.

Speaker 17 President Rodrigo Duterte, the strongman populist known for silencing journalists and extrajudicial killings.

Speaker 22 We thank President Rodrigo Duterte for his recognition. of my father's service to the nation.

Speaker 17 The burial wasn't just a symbolic act. It was a rewriting of history.

Speaker 7 Officially, Marcos is now a hero.

Speaker 7 And so that reversed what we thought was already the judgment of history that Marcos was not a hero, that Marcos was a dictator who plundered the country.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 17 The same year Fernand Marcos was buried, his son Bong Bong ran for vice president. The Marcos family was back and ready to play a big role in the Philippines again.

Speaker 4 This is a historic moment for us all.

Speaker 4 I feel it deep within me.

Speaker 4 You, the people, have spoken, and it is resounding.

Speaker 17 In 2022, Ferdinand Bong Bong Marcos became the President of the Philippines.

Speaker 17 Years of drumming up nostalgia paid off.

Speaker 8 You could say that the current presidency of Bong Bong Marcos is the culmination of this melodrama.

Speaker 36 It is my father's birthday,

Speaker 36 so we are celebrating also Marcos Day.

Speaker 17 The Marcos family knows the power of history.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 30 My father had a vision, a dream, for our country.

Speaker 30 And he wanted to reach that dream by building this nation up. Let us return.

Speaker 17 There's even a full-length feature movie called Made in Malacanyang about the Marcos' last days in the Philippines before they were exiled.

Speaker 17 Get them out of the Philippines. Executive produced by Senator Aymi Marcos, Bong Bong's sister.

Speaker 17 The content is over the top, emotive, and like any good story, easy to get wrapped up in.

Speaker 17 But in this version of events, there's no mention of the billions of dollars the family is accused of stealing, the thousands tortured, or the more than 2,000 people killed during the regime.

Speaker 8 What you're getting now is this struggle, this real struggle between historians who are concerned about the historical record versus propagandists who are more intent in creating this image of Marcus, this myth of Marcus.

Speaker 17 It's all part of the reason why the hero's burial was so important important to the family. It tied a bow on the story they've been selling.

Speaker 7 You know, people just have fuzzy memories of the Marcoses.

Speaker 9 The relationship between the United States and the Philippines, to state the obvious, has very deep roots.

Speaker 7 I mean, the Americans have conveniently forgotten that they supported Marcos, that they supported torture and human rights violations.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 But missing from the tweet, the importance of Filipino military bases right now, as U.S. tensions with China continue to rise.

Speaker 17 And even within the Philippines, the historical record has never been fully sealed.

Speaker 7 The Philippines didn't do a good job of revising textbooks to show the next generation what really happened during the Marcos era.

Speaker 17 The majority of the Filipino electorate doesn't have any personal memories of martial law.

Speaker 17 Instead, they've only witnessed the instability of the government to combat poverty, tackle corruption, or build more infrastructure.

Speaker 17 Which is why, according to Sheila Coronel, 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.

Speaker 7 The new generation of Filipinos have profound alienation from democratic politics.

Speaker 7 Unlike my generation that lived with dictatorship and had seed and believed in the transformative power of democracy, this generation is disillusioned with democracy.

Speaker 7 They connect it with incompetence, gridlock, ineptness,

Speaker 7 with

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 So, the Marcoses have

Speaker 7 capitalized on that.

Speaker 7 And they're saying, Look, we are not elites. They're still saying that.

Speaker 7 These liberal elites have fooled you, have deceived you. They have not lived up to their promises.

Speaker 9 What's it think?

Speaker 8 It's, you know, a particular understanding of the way power works.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 7 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

Speaker 7 as primarily as Hindu history.

Speaker 7 So the use of history, even here in the United States,

Speaker 7 the use of history to justify

Speaker 7 autocracy, the suppression of dissent,

Speaker 7 to mythologize certain rulers

Speaker 7 and to demonize certain certain political, religious, or ethnic groups is prevalent around the world, and the Marcuses are part of what's an emerging and very dangerous global trend.

Speaker 2 That's it for this week's show. I'm Rand Abdir Fattah.

Speaker 5 I'm Ramteen Ramteen Arabloui, and you've been listening to Through Line from NPR.

Speaker 2 This episode was produced by me and me and Lawrence Wu.

Speaker 33 Julie Kane.

Speaker 17 Anya Steinberg, Yolanda Sanguini, Casey Minor, Christina Kim, Devin Katiyama, Yordanos Tisfazion.

Speaker 2 Thank you to Mial Gonzalez, Lenny Gonzalez, Carla Esteves, and Phil Harrell for their voiceover work.

Speaker 6 Back-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vokel.

Speaker 2 This episode was mixed by Robert Rodriguez. Music for this episode was composed by Ramteen and his band Drop Electric, which includes Anya Mizani.

Speaker 12 Naveed Marvy.

Speaker 6 Show Fujiwara.

Speaker 5 Also, thanks to Micah Ratner, Johannes Durkee, Michael Sullivan, Vincent Nee, Kathleen Gutierrez, Richard Francis, Nick Smith, Brett Neely, Jerry Holmes, and Anya Grundman.

Speaker 2 And as always, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at throughline at npr.org.

Speaker 5 Before you go, we want to let you know about another story that takes place in the Philippines.

Speaker 9 It's from our colleagues over at the Sunday Story on the Up First podcast. Since 2016, more than 8,000 people have been killed as part of former President Rodrigo Duterte's infamous war on drugs.

Speaker 5 When Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 Hear her reporting on the Sunday story on NPR's Up First podcast.

Speaker 6 wherever you listen.

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