The proliferation of alternative stories in favor of the former dictator and his children hit the bull’s eye with an uninformed and gullible electorate.
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Jena Deguzman, 64, patron of a restaurant in Cavite, in the southern outskirts of Manila does not budge: Bongbong Marcos, known as “BBM” the son of the ex-dictator and favorite candidate in presidential election From Monday, May 9, is “good for the country”. He will block the “leftists”, “to the NPA” (new People’s Army)-that is to say the communist guerrillas active for decades in the countryside but fleeing the fighting. The “left” is “chaos,” believes this lady with graying hair. And then, the “left” is the “oligarchs”.
M me Deguzman is not a contradiction near. Admittedly, politics, in the Philippines, is a matter of dynasties, which tie and resolve alliances to stay in power. But associating them with the communist guerrilla warfare which precisely fights the accumulation of wealth by a small elite is at least acrobatic. M Me Deguzman inquires about YouTube. Or Facebook. The deaths of martial law under the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos (1972-1986), the billions of dollars robbed that legal actions in the Philippines and the United States linked to the Marcos family? “All this is invented. There is no evidence, the Marcos have never been thrown into prison,” she persists.
Disinformation in the Philippines has a hard life. Favorite in the polls, Bongbong Marcos, the son of the dictator who died in exile in Hawaii in 1989 after having been hunted from the country three years earlier by the revolution of the “power of the people”, can hardly claim to have nothing to do with the Reign of his father: he was appointed from 1980 to 1986 Vice-Governor then governor of the province of Ilocos Norte, the stronghold of Marcos in the North. He also sat, for a staggering salary, at the head of the country’s satellite operator, Telcomsat. IMEE, the eldest daughter of the Marcos, senator since 2019, was notoriously charged under the dictatorship to carry out an audit of the participations of the Marcos in large companies hidden under nominees.
In 1986, in Hawaii, where the Marcos family welcomed by the Americans was under surveillance, Bongbong Marcos had been discreetly sent to the airport in order to use a public phone booth to warn their Swiss banker that an intermediary had been appointed to carry out operations on their behalf. But the banker had denounced the scheme – which will lead to blocking Swiss accounts and the restitution in the Philippines of several hundred millions of dollars of spoliated silver.
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