Trying to destroy Duterte; Laughing stock if Marcoses win

I received an anonymous text from somebody which said “Chit  what you done? You have put up a monster (referring to Duterte) and if he dies we will be the laughing stock of the world when the Marcoses return to power. Obviously the sender is a yellowtard. Duterte is not a monster. He is the only one among the candidates for real change through constitutional reform that will shift the Philippines to parliamentary federal government. That is what we need and should be the priority of a Duterte government.

* * *

My book on Imelda’s trial in New York answers many questions whether we should return the Marcoses to power.

“Some Filipinos, especially the young, are not aware that Imelda Romualdez Marcos was tried and acquitted in a New York Court. That was in 1990. I was the Aquino government’s spokesperson in the trial and had a front seat witness to the, at times, bizarre proceedings. Although facts, laws, and evidence were brought in in abundance, it was primarily a political drama.

When critics ask why she had escaped answering for the crimes committed during the Marcos dictatorship, she has a ready answer – “I was acquitted.” And that, she proudly adds, was in America, where justice cannot be bought. The suggestion is that having been acquitted by an American court wipes away her guilt for the crimes she had been accused of in the Philippines.

I am writing this last book in a trilogy on Imelda’s story so that more Filipinos will know what that trial was all about. I was the Cory government’s spokesman and I had access to the documents of the court proceedings and was present almost every day during the trial. There were many factors that decided her acquittal, but the most important was the venue. This is explained in the chapter “Imelda is Tried in New York.” Besides the prologue and epilogue, there are five chapters to the book: “The Lopezes,” “The Affair,” “Imelda, ‘the Richest Woman in the World,’” “Imelda is Tried in New York,” and “The Unsolved Murder.”

The trial skirted the crimes she was being accused of when she was First Lady of the Philippines by the legal imperative that she could only be tried for crimes she committed in the US. The legal term for the charges against Imelda in New York was called RICO, short for Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. It was directed against her acts of racketeering and the transfer of money from the Philippines to the US and how it was moved from state to state. The prosecution worked hard and presented as thorough a case as possible with some 300,000 documents and dozens of witnesses, some of whom were even flown in from Manila. The prosecution’s task was two-fold. It had to prove that the money was the fruit of corruption in the Philip- pines before it could go to the issue of RICO in the US.

So I did not believe a law professor from Harvard who predicted that she would be acquitted even before the trial began. He said this after the prosecution and defense gave their statements.

He was seated next to me during the trial in New York and we heard the same witnesses. We saw the same documents and other evidence, mostly receipts from Imelda’s shopping in New York, Hong Kong, Lon- don and Paris. Despite the overwhelming evidence, he said I should not be optimistic about the results.

But this would be going ahead of the story. It might have taken nearly 50 years for me to put together the story of her trial in New York and the events that led to it, but it was well worth the wait.

Her private and public personae were so interwoven that it was not easy to separate the two obsessions and which of these should be blamed for her unhappy story. I tried to separate the two but in the end, I had to give up doing that. It was not possible to do so. The young girl from the impoverished province of Leyte remained in her even when the Western press referred to her as “the richest woman in the world.” The money and the power were not enough for her to forget the hurt of her childhood in San Miguel and Tacloban.

As she often said after the book had been written, that although she was prepared to accept she had once been poor, what she could not accept were the sordid details of the poverty. She could not bear remembering the details that she would have to relive so she tried to stop The Untold Story of Imelda Marcos. Most people thought of the book as nothing more than a Cinderella story. Only later did I realize that what never really left her was the memory of the failed marriage between her father and mother. Because of that bitter marriage, Imelda had to live in a garage with her mother until she died. This all happened when she was at the sensitive age of 10 years old. Moreover, she had no choice but adjust to a new life with her stepsisters when they moved to Leyte. Those memories of what it meant to have a mother sobbing in the dark had sunk deep, never to be forgotten.

The second book, The Rise and Fall of Imelda Marcos, was written after the peaceful revolution of 1986 that banished the Marcoses from Malacanang.

Imelda’s Cinderella-like story remained the spine of the story with a few chapters added to update the book for publication by St. Martin’s Press in New York. It tells of how she was destroyed by power and wealth to become a hated figure as the First Lady of the Philippines. She became known as the conjugal partner of the Marcos dictatorship.

In this third book I have put together some facts and events that led to that fall. Her media image of being “one of the richest women in the world” and coming from one of the poorest countries was the scandal. Sadly, the newly acquired wealth and its display were not enough to erase the memory of the child who once lived in a garage with her dying mother.

The Untold Story of Imelda Marcos that became a cause célèbre before the declaration of martial law was almost an accident. I was led to it as if blindfolded, not knowing what the consequences of writing it would be. It would change my life as it also did my husband’s and children’s. In the next 20 years, we would live in exile in London.