Marcos Philippines

While some $3 billion has been recovered since the family fled the country in 1986, about two dozen lawsuits are still pending to obtain another $2 billion.

For Ferdinand 'Bongbong' Marcos Jr, the frontrunner for Monday's Philippine presidential election, a reframing of the country's…

If there is to be a second President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, it will offer history a second opportunity to pass judgment. A friend in a largely opposition province says his wife is horrified by the prospect of another Marcos in power – but that her much younger siblings barely believe what she tells them about the earlier regime. As a child he played himself in a propaganda feature film, The Ferdinand E. Marcos Story, in which he spoke of his political dreams. He looks younger than his 64 years and wears his hair a little long without going the full Michael Fabricant. He has run on a message of ‘national unity’, though critics suggest that requires establishing goodwill by returning stolen wealth, acknowledging human-rights violations by his father and paying the taxes his family owes – all pretty unlikely concessions. Most of the family’s fortune is still unaccounted for and no Marcos has been jailed. Last week, he reminded a television audience what a ‘political genius’ his late father, the dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr, was.

Bongbong Marcos, the 64-year-old son of former Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos and wife Imelda, is poised to become the next president of that country ...

“She’s a little frustrated,” Bongbong said last week. “I understand,” he said last month. “The last 10 years, he still has the same clothes,” Sandro said with a shrug, subtly denying his family’s hidden riches. “Let the courts do their work,” he added. Bongbong claims not to mind the snubbing. “A majority of voters today were born after the 1986 EDSA revolution,” Yusingco noted. Last fall, before Marcos announced his candidacy, polls showed him with just 15 percent of the vote. “If you don’t like what I’m saying, then don’t watch me,” he told Business Mirror last year. “I really like my anonymity,” she said in March. I only know the hurricane floated out to a 50-mile radius surround and didn’t return for 24 hours.” The 1983 assassination of opposition leader Benigno Aquino, widely blamed on Ferdinand, led to his downfall. Meanwhile, he ran up massive foreign debts that tanked the economy and siphoned borrowed cash to pay off relatives and cronies.

Filipinos don't long for the Marcos era. Why is his son in the lead? Many voters have grown disenchanted with democracy, my research finds.

The illiberal turn is a reckoning with the soured promises of democracy’s third wave, after the Philippines and dozens of countries transitioned to democracy. Disenchantment with democracy — and the desire to renovate it — is hardly unique to the Philippines. The citizens of developing economies from India to Indonesia have been complaining about the conduct of democratic politics for several decades now. This string of leadership failures led many Filipinos to turn away from the promise of liberal democracy and reject people power as a means of achieving it. In other words, it was not just the case that attitudes toward democracy prefigured Duterte’s election, but that these attitudes were reconfigured in light of Duterte’s administration. The Marcos family’s return to power would mark the end of an era, and the evaporation of faith in the promise of liberal democracy. This is not backsliding but disenchantment with the liberal vision of democracy, which Filipinos have known only as elite democracy. A giant fiesta kicked off the end of martial law and the beginning of the modern democratic era in the Philippines, as the ouster of Ferdinand Marcos brought dancing in the streets. But people have become increasingly frustrated at the failure of liberal measures to transform the country’s dysfunctional democracy. There have also been repeated attempts to realize the promise of 1986. Mass protests led to the toppling of another president, and the near-removal of his successor by an even more massive protest movement. In the country’s past 36 years of democratic rule, there have been a dozen coup attempts, dozens of corruption scandals, three impeachment attempts and one impeachment trial. And, of course, they note the country’s history of dynastic politics.

As the Philippines prepares for national elections, victims of torture and abuse during the reign of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr. are trying to ...

The call had gone out on Facebook for supporters of Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos to come out for their presidential candidate. “I hope he will vindicate the ...

It will also be a headache for America—and an opportunity for China—as they compete in the Pacific. The Marcos name is rising again. That will be bad for governance, and for the economy. Attempts to disqualify Mr Marcos are making their way through the elections commission, and will probably get sent to the Supreme Court. Whatever it decides, there will be uproar. It is an American treaty ally with a niggling territorial dispute with China, lying within cellphone-signal distance of Taiwan. It will be on the front line in any conflict between those powers. For example, he promises to cap the price of rice at about half the current rate. “This campaign did not start six years ago”, when Mr Marcos lost his bid for the vice-presidency, says Julio Teehankee of De La Salle University in Manila, but in 1986. Descriptions of him by supporters, critics and foreign observers are variations on a theme: “easy-going”, “laid-back”, “not very energetic”, “lazy”. Barring an earth-shattering surprise or an unprecedented polling error, Mr Marcos, the son of the Philippines’ former dictator of the same name (minus the bongs), will win by a landslide in an election on May 9th. Supporters of Leni Robredo, Mr Marcos’s closest rival for the presidency, were there to show their disdain for Bongbong. “We want a clean and honest government,” says Gina Ramos, 52. The Marcoses fled to Hawaii—along with at least 24 bars of gold and 22 boxes of cash—where the deposed dictator died three years later. The slogan of his and Ms Duterte’s campaign is an airy-fairy “Unity”. (The pair call themselves “Uniteam”.) Despite 30 years in public life—as congressman, senator and provincial governor—he has little to show for it. Marcos’s wife, Imelda, ran for president the following year, and lost.

Ferdinand Bongbong Marcos splashes cash at eight-hour rallies to distract voters from his family's notorious legacy.

Should the Marcoses win, I think they’ll be in a position to do that.” Many were teenagers and young adults, jumping on the Bongbong bandwagon after an excruciating two years in which schools and universities have been closed for face-to-face learning and for a long time children were ordered to stay indoors. Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Marcos has also forecast a more targeted approach while continuing Duterte’s war on drugs, which rights organisations estimate has led to as many as 30,000 extra-judicial killings, focusing on kingpins rather than street dealers. Long after Marcos Snr’s death in Hawaii in 1989, he permitted his burial at the Manila National Heroes Cemetery. If the polls are right, Marcos is headed for an historic majority when as many as 67 million voters cast their ballots next week. “They [Marcos and Duterte] help a lot of us people here”. “We are promising you we will work to the best of our ability so that we can rise again.” Marcos’ candidacy has for victims revived distressing memories of martial law under his father, a period during which groups say 34,000 people were tortured and over 3000 were killed or disappeared. Senators and congressmen often fulfil ultimate karaoke fantasies by taking to the microphone and belting out tunes themselves. “It was a good time, very progressive. “I don’t think bad things about martial law.

MANILA, Philippines -- Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Sara Duterte smile and chat of their love of burgers and mango shakes on the election trail in a carefree ...

“People are fascinated, not of him per se but of the memory of his father's rule,” Wong said. With the median age in the Philippines of about 25, Marcos has taken advantage of the fact that many voters have no personal memory of his father's rule. “They want to visit the golden age of the Philippines — and that's what Marcos is propagating.” The funeral with full military honors was condemned by human rights and left-wing groups. The petitions against his candidacy remain on appeal and could reach the Supreme Court. That has never been paid, which could complicate any future possible visits to the United States if he is elected. For many, good education is unaffordable and decent jobs found abroad. But rather than apologize for his father's excesses, Marcos Jr., who goes by his childhood nickname “Bongbong” or “BBM” in campaign posters, embraces his image. A 2018 graft conviction remains on appeal. The Presidential Commission on Good Government, created to recover ill-gotten gains, says it has so far collected more than $3.3 billion. “His message really is very well crafted with this avoidance strategy,” Webb said. The rehabilitation of the Marcos name started decades ago, with the family returning to the Philippines — and politics — only a few years after Marcos died in 1989 in exile in Hawaii.

VALENZUELA CITY, Philippines — In the final stretch of the Philippines' pivotal presidential election, the underdog campaign is mobilizing public flash mobs ...

In one house, an elderly woman asked for Robredo campaign materials, even while her husband tried to shoo the volunteers away. Video blogger Marcos Santos Gamboa, who backs the presidential run of Manila Mayor Francisco Domagoso, explained that content creators are incentivized to produce pro-Marcos content because there is so much of it on the site, guaranteeing a following and viewership. The answer, said Anton Lim, Robredo’s campaign manager for the southwestern region of the southern island of Mindanao, is an army of volunteers that he hopes can combat a rampant culture of vote-buying with trips to far-flung communities. The challenge will be how to sustain this popular movement after the election. “If we have another six years of [disinformation], the damage will be permanent.” “We’re the quick-response team,” Carranza said. In office, she became embroiled in a combative relationship with President Rodrigo Duterte. (The Philippines elects its president and vice president separately, and Duterte and Robredo are from different parties. “YouTube is where brainwashing happens,” Gamboa said. A lawyer and social activist who entered politics after her husband’s death, Robredo defeated Marcos to win the vice presidency in 2016. “We have not really established how we talk to each other about our common problems.” But although Robredo was still a distant second last month in polling by Pulse Asia, her numbers were up eight percentage points from earlier in the year. Robredo has faced a tough fight from the start.