Remembering more than the shoes: The real legacy of the Philippines’ Marcos family

A little more than 36 years ago, before the Arab spring and even before the wave of popular uprisings that accompanied the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, the people of the Philippines took to the streets and overthrew a brutal, corrupt western-backed dictator who had tortured thousands and stolen billions.

But all many of us remember of the 1986 People Power Revolution is the vast shoe collection of Ferdinand Marcos’s wife, Imelda.

The former beauty queen, now 92 years old, had amassed a vast collection of more than 1,000 pricey shoes in a country where poverty was rife, democracy had been crushed by her husband, and security forces jailed, tortured, disappeared and murdered dissidents.

Journalists are always looking for cute or interesting angles to engage readers and viewers, and the shoe collection has all the trappings of a delicious international news story. But as the late Ferdinand Marcos’s son and namesake takes over the Philippines as president following this week’s elections, the family’s legacy – beyond the matriarch’s passion for footwear – merits attention.

The older Ferdinand Marcos, who died three years after his ouster, began his career as a liar and cheat. He claimed heroic feats against Japanese invaders during the Second World War that were dismissed as blatantly fabricated by United States military officials. Though convicted and later acquitted of a politically motivated murder in his youth, he won election to the parliamentary seat of his father, who had been executed by Filipino guerillas for collaborating with the Japanese occupiers.

As soon as Marcos won the presidency in 1965, he began taking steps to expand his own power and destroy his nation’s lively democracy. Facing social unrest caused by his failing economic policies, he put the nation under martial law in 1972, initiating a horrific period of human rights abuses and political assassination that culminated in the 1986 uprising.

The Marcos family holds the distinction of being in the Guinness Book of World Records for having carried off the largest-ever theft from a government, stealing up to $10bn from the central bank.

The 64-year-old UK-educated son, nicknamed Bongbong, had reportedly urged his father to open fire on his opponents. After returning from exile in 1991, he relaunched his political career by taking up the same parliamentary post as his grandfather and father.

His political ascent has been marred by accusations of pilfering public funds. More disturbingly, his vice president is the daughter of outgoing authoritarian leader Rodrigo Duterte, and he has vowed to continue the hardline, anti-democratic policies of the departing leader, who is constitutionally barred from running again.

But while it is unfair to visit the sins of the father upon the son, Bongbong has yet to atone or account for his family’s many transgressions and appears poised to repeat them. That merits at least as much attention as his mother’s shoe collection.

Yours,

Borzou Daragahi

International correspondent