Is the current president eligible for estate tax amnesty? He is not eligible according to law, the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) replies. The hashtag #NeverForget is advanced yet again, but this time by the government itself in a House of Representatives hearing last Monday. 13 months ago the BIR confirmed that they sent out a written demand letter to the Marcos family to settle the estate tax.
The propaganda for the Marcoses has been run for decades and it seems that it is more of the same in the coming years. Even if another Marcos won the Philippine presidential election in 2022, there is no stopping the revisions of Marcos’ history of bad governance, poor economics, abysmal human rights records, and historical distortions that go with it. (Amnesty International, 2022)
Fortunately, though not enough, fact-checkers and the business of truth-telling are very assisting. Courageous journalists from the tri-media and the top 3 broadsheets in the Philippines – Inquirer, Bulletin, and Star – continue to let their readers know what transpired during the Marcos dictatorship, the Imeldific lifestyle of the Marcoses then and now, and how their PR manipulators distort history. Nobel laureate Maria Ressa and Rappler followed suit, leading the international print and online media in unearthing more lies about and from the Marcoses in the last decade.
That the Marcoses stole money from the Filipino people is an understatement. The Filipinos suffered economically, and emotionally, and even lost lives as a result of the almost non-stop and notorious 20-year rule. Unluckily for the Marcoses, the international community does not buy the idea that the Marcoses are “just humans born to make mistakes” like anybody else. In the course of some 50 years, they lied in order to perpetuate themselves in power. There is truth to the saying that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely (Lord Acton, n.d.). Marcos loyalists abound and that critically hurts the democratic processes, institutions, and law and order. Even Jovito Salonga’s votes were smaller than Imelda Marcos’ in the 1992 presidential election. Ferdinand Marcos Jr. may have lost twice – in the Senate in 1995 and in the VP derby in 2016 – but he continues to tell people that the Marcoses have just been judged unfairly and did not even concede his defeat with Leni Robredo, but instead filed a very costly electoral protest eventually to add to his list of defeats. The Supreme Court, like any other unbiased institutions, had other things in mind: “He who comes to court must come with clean hands. Otherwise, he not only taints his name, but ridicules the very structure of established authority.” That’s “FERDINAND R. MARCOS II, PETITIONER, VS. COURT OF APPEALS, THE COMMISSIONER OF THE BUREAU OF INTERNAL REVENUE AND HERMINIA D. DE GUZMAN, RESPONDENTS” in the SC decision on June 5, 1997.
Another significant legal defeat the Marcoses encountered here (here, meaning, there were court defeats abroad) was in an SC decision which read in part, “The admission of respondent Imelda Marcos only confirmed what was already generally known: that the foundations were established precisely to hide the money stolen by the Marcos spouses from petitioner Republic. That’s “REPUBLIC OF THE PHILIPPINES, PETITIONER, VS. HONORABLE SANDIGANBAYAN (SPECIAL FIRST DIVISION), FERDINAND E. MARCOS (REPRESENTED BY HIS ESTATE/HEIRS: IMELDA R. MARCOS, MARIA IMELDA [IMEE] MARCOS-MANOTOC, FERDINAND R. MARCOS, JR. AND IRENE MARCOS-ARANETA) AND IMELDA ROMUALDEZ MARCOS, RESPONDENTS” on July 15, 2003.
Marcos Jr., by the way, ran a successful presidential campaign last year via massive dis/misinformation, according to scholars. Simply put, the academe is entirely Anti-Marcos per the incisive analysis of a DLSU professor/columnist who was not a Robredo supporter anyway.
Without telling some backgrounder knowledge of the Marcoses in the narrative above, it would be quite difficult to enlighten people – the Filipino people – what historical revisionism is and what historical distortions are.
Historical revisionism is not entirely wrong – that “the earth is flat” is a thing of the past thanks to that kind of revisionism. Most of the time, however, historical revisionism is an effort exerted by individuals so that they get benefited from it, never mind social consequences, including the common good. Ferdinand Marcos Sr. and Jr., Imelda, Imee, and Irene, and their supporters, including the so-called Marcos cronies and loyalists, and lately their troll armies, are widely perceived to be utilizing historical revisionism. Marcos Jr.’s absences in presidential debates are a proof he and the Marcoses have so many things to hide.
Which now leads us to the more accurate term, historical distortion. Movie and press people can, in one way or another, distort history. Maid in Malacanang, for instance, was written and directed by a movie director who gets a lot of funding from Imee Marcos, the movie executive producer. What is entirely wrong in this “art,” according to historians, lies in the control of the narrative. It rests on the idea that when movie people are out to destroy others’ reputations and/or spin-doctor a family’s image, chances are that some may believe in them. All in the name of the art of the one who backs and produces it.
Dale Russakoff wrote in 1986: “Other preconceptions about the Marcos era also crumbled under the weight of the documents. While Philippine observers had said corruption began in earnest when Marcos declared martial law in 1972, the documents dated it earlier.
“In 1968, two years after he took office on a vow to fight corruption and capital flight, Marcos and his wife had set up Swiss and U.S. bank accounts to hide assets, according to documents obtained by Salonga and others.
“’They were depositing money in Swiss banks using code names such as Jane Ryan and William Saunders,’ Salonga said in an interview. ‘They authorized the practice under the signature of both Imelda Marcos and Ferdinand Marcos.’”
Russakoff’s “The Philippines: Anatomy of a Looting” hit the nail on its head in Filipino parlance: “Ang sinungaling ay kapatid ng magnanakaw.” Fast forward to 2023, the lies and deceptive historical revisionism and historical distortions continue; the tax evasion conviction is nothing but a suggestion, not something to be paid nor executed legally; and the ill-gotten wealth are all upon us no thanks to the very influential and dynastic families, particularly that of Ferdinand E. Marcos.
The scripture says that the truth shall set us free, which also means that it will be beneficial for our generation and generations to come if we value our sense of history and fight for it, rather than doing nothing or being on the safe side of neutrality.
(I thank a group of students from Liceo de San Pedro for interviewing me last April 21, 2023. Everything I believed and felt during the interview is summed up above.)
DC Alviar
Professor DC Alviar serves as a member of the steering committee of the Philippine International Studies Organization (PHISO). He was part of National University’s community extension project that imparted the five disciplines of a learning organization (Senge, 1990) to communities in a local government unit. He writes and edits local reports for Mega Scene. He graduated with a master’s degree in development communication from the University of the Philippines Open University in Los Baños. He recently defended a dissertation proposal for his doctorate degree in communication at the same graduate school under a Philippine government scholarship grant. He was editor-in-chief of his high school paper Ang Ugat and the Adamson News.
