Imelda Marcos

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Imelda Marcos (2006)

Imelda Romuáldez Marcos (born July 2, 1929 in Manila , Philippines ) is the widow of Ferdinand Marcos , the 10th President of the Philippines . During his presidency from 1965 to 1986, she was the First Lady of the Philippines. After the dictatorial Marcos regime was overthrown in 1986, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos fled to Hawaii . According to Transparency International , the Marcos regime was the second most corrupt in the world after 1970 (and after the Suhartos ) . The former beauty queen Imelda Marcos stands out for her lavish extravagance and her exorbitant shoe collection. As an outspoken shoe fetishist , she owned what is probably the largest private shoe collection in the world with around 3000 pairs of shoes. It was popularly known as the “steel butterfly”.

After the death of her husband in 1989, she returned to the Philippines in 1991. From 1995 to 1998 it had a seat in the lower house . She was re-elected to the House of Representatives in June 2010 and has been re-elected twice since then. Imelda Marcos has four children, three of their own and one adopted daughter. Her daughter Imee and son Ferdinand Jr. also hold high political offices.

Life

origin

Imelda Romualdez comes from a subsidiary branch of the Romualdez family, one of the leading oligarchic families in the Philippines. The family, who live in the province of Visaya , originally comes from Manila and still has important connections there. She is the daughter of Professor Vicente Orestes Romualdez and the fashion designer Dona Remedios Trinidad. Her grandfather Daniel Z. Romualdez was the Speaker of the House of Representatives at the time. Another family member, Noberto Romualdez , was then a judge on the Philippines Supreme Court. Imelda Romualdez was born in Manila and grew up in the southern province of Leyte . She attended St. Paul's College, where she obtained a bachelor's degree in education. At 18, she won a local beauty pageant and the Rose of Tacloban title . She then took part in the Miss Manila election. After she had only won second place there, she complained so impressively to the then mayor of the city that he named her the “Muse of Manila”.

marriage

Ferdinand Marcos discovered her in May 1955 when she accompanied her younger cousin to the visitors' gallery of the Philippine Parliament . She and the aspiring politician then met in the Parliament canteen.

After only eleven days, the two married. A second wedding followed after Ferdinand Marcos converted from the Independent Philippine Church to the more influential Roman Catholic Church. The wedding thus united two influential Filipino clans, the Marcos themselves could count on support from their home provinces during their reign.

First lady

Marcos 1966

Ferdinand Marcos won the 1965 presidential election as a candidate for the nationalist party.

Martial law

In 1972 Ferdinand Marcos imposed martial law and established a dictatorship. His promise for the future was based on the maxim “Sa ikauunlad ng bayan disciplina ang kailangan” (discipline is necessary for national development) Ferdinand Marcos enforced his “discipline” by controlling the media, throwing opponents into jail, from them Hundreds of people disappeared without a trace, and even “spreading rumors” was a criminal offense.

Imelda became governor of Greater Manila, Minister for Human Settlement and Environment and “Ambassador Plenipotentiary and Extraordinary” shortly after martial law was imposed. A few weeks after martial law was imposed, a man tried to stab Imelda at a public hearing, which she said was her biggest Worry was the "ugly knife" he used for it.

After Marcos' two regular elections, he threatened to lose his office in 1973. The Philippine constitution at the time limited the presidential term to one re-election. The family planned, among other things, to have Imelda elected as the new president - a plan that led 163 of the then 311 delegates to a conference on constitutional amendment to sign a petition that former presidents, their spouses and other close relatives would not run for the Excluded office of presidency or prime minister; a point of view that was not able to prevail in the discussion. After the conference reached a result, the delegate Eduardo Quintero caused a scandal. The former ambassador from Leyte, Imelda Marcos' home province, said he had been bribed by Imelda Marcos on eighteen different occasions during the negotiations in the Malacañang Palace in order to vote in favor of the Marcos on the term of office of the president or the future form of government to decide. The so-called “Payola Scandal” fizzled out, not least because the Marcos themselves commissioned various people, including Primitivo Mijares , to collect as much incriminating information as possible about Quintero themselves.

lifestyle

Imelda Marcos played an important role in the Marcos dictatorship by performing highly representative tasks. Looking back, she said without any irony: “I was born a show-off. One day my name will be in the dictionary, then imeldific will stand for demonstrative extravagance. ”In her role as extraordinary ambassador, she met almost every head of government in the world in the following years, often without Ferdinand, who stayed in the Philippines. The world's leaders were often very impressed. She had a good personal relationship with Mao Zedong , Andrei Gromyko and Muammar al-Gaddafi . According to her own testimony, Fidel Castro told her that he had only ever personally chauffeured two women: his mother and Imelda Marcos. She counted Nancy and Ronald Reagan among her personal circle of friends.

During this time Imelda stylized herself as the “mother of the nation”, who spread an ideology of “love and beauty”. She staged herself excessively, in her opinion, in order to set an example for the Filipinos. In 1980 she remarked in an interview "I am the star and slave of the common people" and pointed out that it takes far more work and time to prepare for a visit to the slums than for a state visit. Because “people want someone they can love, someone who sets an example.” At the same time, she tried to give Manila an international flair in order to represent her vision and that of her husband.

In 1974 she brought the Miss Universe competition to Manila, which was only the second time it took place in a country other than the USA after Greece in 1973. She created several art museums and tried to bring the art scene of the Philippines under her control. Notorious for their approach were the "love buses" - the name inspired by the television series Love Boat - air-conditioned luxury buses that were used in the city traffic of Manila, were provided with multi-colored heart logos and charged a multiple of the regular fare. Together they built several luxurious buildings such as the Philippine International Convention Center, the Philippine Heart, Lung, and Kidney Centers, the Manila Film Center, museums and the Coconut Palace

In 1975 she founded the Metropolitan Museum of Manila within a few weeks . Housed in an old US military building and initially mainly loaned from the Brooklyn Museum , the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the private collections of Armand Hammer and Nathan Cumming , the museum opened just in time for a meeting of the International Monetary Fund in Manila and was intended to impress the attendees who had traveled. On the occasion of the meeting, she also ordered the construction of the Folks Arts Theater, the Cultural Center of the Philippines and 18 new luxury hotels.

In 1975 Ferdinand Marcos established the National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women (NCRFW) with guideline 633 as a reaction to the “Decade of Women” proclaimed by the UN. Imelda Marcos took over the chairmanship and carried out mainly national programs within the framework of UN projects. Attempts to involve women's organizations in the work largely failed, as many of them refused to be associated with the Marcos government. She was also the patroness of the Commission on Population, which issued the birth control pill in the strongly Catholic Philippines to prevent further population growth.

From 1982 she organized several film festivals in Manila with the aim of creating an “Asian Cannes”. To do this, she had a new film center built on a piece of land that had been reclaimed from the sea . Construction was delayed, mainly due to their constantly changing requirements, and construction work finally ran day and night. In time pressure, a scaffold with construction workers fell into a pit with fresh concrete. 169 of the workers are said to have died in the concrete. In order not to endanger the opening of the festival in the new cinema center, the bodies were never recovered.

The government declared long hair in men to be decadent. The military arrested long-haired people on the street and forcibly cut them, and photographs of rock stars were reworked to have short haircuts prior to publication.

Imelda Marcos' circle of friends and acquaintances spanned the whole world. Her co-attorney on several money laundering charges was billionaire arms dealer Adnan Kashoggi . In interviews she willingly reported on friendships with Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein and numerous Hollywood stars of the old days.

Elections 1978

After martial law was declared, Marcos had held several referendums to confirm his course, which were internationally and by the internal opposition as manipulated and the results of which were viewed as falsified. In 1978 he finally set up elections for the 1973 constitutional interim national assembly ( Interim Batasang Pambansa - IBP). Most of the opposition decided to boycott, as a nearly fair election was not to be expected. In addition to some groups in the traditionally troubled provinces of Visayas and Mindanao , the only opposition group that declared running for elections was the Laban party led by Benigno Aquino , which ran in Greater Manila. For the first time, she relied on candidates outside the traditional Filipino power elite, such as student activist Gerry Barican, union activist Alex Boncayo and organizer of the homeless in Manila, Trinidad Herrera.

Imelda Marcos ran in Greater Manila as a rival candidate at the head of the ruling party Kilusan ng Bagong Lipunan (KBL). The media was under complete Marcos control at the time, so Aquino only got one chance to appear on television. In the run-up to the election, Marcos increased insurance and pension benefits for civil servants. Teachers overseeing the elections received a raise of 100 pesos and Marcos promised them 250,000 new homes. The elections took place in the Easter break, so that the students and schoolchildren, who had a tendency to opposition, were on vacation in their home provinces, while the Marcos government asked government employees not to go on vacation but to vote in Manila. Manila residents who were registered in Ilocos Norte , Ferdinand Marcos 'home, and from Leyte or Samar , Imelda Marcos' home, could vote in Manila without any problems. Even Ferdinand Marcos admitted that there were "irregularities" during the election. Independent observers spoke of 11,500 electoral districts in which ballot boxes had been rigged, voters reported that the ballot boxes were already full when they entered the polling station that morning. The electoral commission itself was entirely appointed by Marcos. Reports of police officers overseeing the count were frequent. Unsurprisingly, the KBL provided all MPs in Manila after the election. After the election, police arrested hundreds of Laban leaders and protesters who were on the streets for them. There were cases of torture, and a confidante of the Jesuit regime critic Romeo Intengang died in custody. Although the autopsy clearly showed signs of torture, his prison guards were not punished.

Balance sheet of the Marcos regime

Marcos' main promises to justify martial law were order and economic development. While the armed conflict in the Philippines increased and not decreased during his tenure, the military, which was previously largely insignificant, has also become an important political actor since Marcos' time. In 1965 the Philippines was still one of the economically most prosperous nations in Southeast Asia, but in 1986 it fell further behind other countries in the region and has not been able to catch up since then. The gap between low and high incomes widened further in the Marcos years. Statistics saw the proportion of the population below the poverty line between 39% ( USAID ; 1984) and 64%.

Between 1971 and 1979, the income of the 60% poorest in the country fell from 25% to 22.5% of total income, while that of the richest 10% rose from 37.1% to 41.7%. According to studies by the National Economic Development Authority (NEDA), the official economic planning authority, as well as the private think tank Center for Research and Communication (CRC) from 1984, the required expenditure for the subsistence level was 50% above actual income.

The average calorie intake was 84% ​​of the official recommendations, only 47% of the population had access to running water. Malnutrition rose from the seventh leading cause of death in 1973 to third place in 1977, only beaten by typical poverty -related diseases such as pneumonia and gastrointestinal flu . Medical care was so poor that 60% of deaths went without the slightest medical attention.

The real wages of white-collar workers in 1980 were only 93.2% of the 1972 base, and that of blue-collar workers was 86.7%. In 1980, unskilled workers in Manila earned only 53.4% ​​of what they had received in 1972. At the same time, unemployment rose, with conservative estimates suggesting 30% of Filipinos as unemployed or marginally working.

The gross national product , which rose steadily in the 1970s, slowed the rise in the early 1980s from an average of 6.5% to 1.4% in 1983. But above all, poverty rose dramatically during the Marcos years.

Inflation rose to 10% by 1980 and was between 20 and 30% by 1984. With a budget of about $ 5 billion a year, the deficit was a billion or about 20% of the budget a year. The balance of payments deficit rose from $ 86 million in 1978 to $ 2.1 billion in 1983, and the foreign trade deficit in the same period from $ 1.3 billion to $ 2.4 billion. The $ 2 billion deficit in 1980 was the same as the combined deficits for 1960-1974. The foreign debt rose from US $ 2.66 billion in 1972 to US $ 26 billion in 1984. In 1983, the Philippines could not pay its debts, so the IMF forced the state to introduce stricter control measures, tax increases and currency devaluation.

The Marcos political system, which was heavily based on patronage and nepotism, lacked the money to keep the system running. The government was barely able to pay for the excessive bureaucracy, and funds that were being paid out of the bureaucracy into sympathetic sections of society began to dry up.

The fall of the Marcos regime

In 1983, strangers shot and killed Benigno Aquino , the then best-known opposition politician, at Manila airport when he entered the country for the first time in three years. As a result, a broad movement of protest against the government developed.

Finally, the EDSA revolution in February 1986 led to the overthrow of the Marcos dictatorship. The largest demonstrations took place on Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (EDSA) in Manila. The rural population as well as socialists or communists were not the driving forces. The actors came primarily from higher officer ranks and the church class, were business people, intellectual bureaucrats and the traditional opposition, which was still anchored in the political system of the pre-Marcos period. They rebelled because Marcos hadn't kept any of his promises. The internal order had become more unstable, and the economic crisis had reached all levels of society in the 1980s. On February 25, 1986, the Marcos fled in a US government helicopter.

exile

The Marcos arrived in the United States with $ 9 million in cash, jewelery and stocks in their luggage.

In the Philippines, Marcos 'successor Corazon Aquino founded the Presidential Commission on Good Government to track down the Marcos' assets. Ferdinand died on September 29, 1989.

Return to the Philippines

In 1991 Imelda Marcos returned to Manila. In 1992 she ran unsuccessfully for president. In 1995 she succeeded in being elected to the Philippine House of Representatives for her home district of Leyte . In 1998 she reapplied for the presidency, but then withdrew her candidacy to support the eventual winner Joseph Estrada . In the parliamentary elections on May 10, 2010, she was re-elected to the House of Representatives. She succeeded her son Ferdinand Marcos Jr. , who successfully applied for a seat in the Senate . During her first term from 2010, she chaired the Millennium Development Goals Committee . She was re-elected in May 2013 and May 2016.

In 2001, she opened a shoe museum in Manila, the exhibits of which are mainly her former shoes. It also shows the shoes of other famous Filipinos. It is located in the Marikina district , which is mainly characterized by its shoe industry, from which around 200,000 people live there. In November 2006 she presented the jewelry brand "The Imelda Collection" in Manila. According to her own statements, she used objects from her own jewelry collection and acquisitions from flea markets and combined them again. The jewelry should only cost around $ 20 to $ 100.

Marcos complains bitterly about the treatment she received after 1986. She continues to take the position that she has nothing to blame. As recently as 1998, she claimed that there had not been a human rights violation in the Philippines during her reign. She believes she is being betrayed of the truth, but: “I believe the truth will prevail. The truth is God and if you are on the side of the truth and of God, who can stand against you? ”In 2007 she said that there is no real poverty in the Philippines.

Today she lives in one of the most expensive tenement houses in the Philippines and has several servants. The works of Gauguin , Michelangelo and Picasso that adorn her walls are the last remnants of the Marcos art collection, which she complains bitterly about. However, she complains about poverty, with her lawyer explaining that she evaluates this in relation to her previous wealth.

On September 7, 1993 the body of Ferdinand Marcos was transferred from Hawaii to Ilocos Norte . Since then, Imelda Marcos has tried to get her husband to have a state funeral in Manila alongside the other Filipino presidents. Their request sparked strong protests and a protracted dispute that divided the population and in which several presidents were involved. On November 8, 2016, the Supreme Court finally ruled in favor of a burial in the Heroes Cemetery in Taguig City , Metro Manila . Ferdinand Marcos' honorary funeral took place there on November 18th.

Their eldest daughter Imee Marcos and their son Ferdinand Marcos Jr. , called "Bong-bong", also became successful politicians. Imee Marcos has been the governor of Ilocos Norte , the traditional power base of the Marcos , since 2010 . Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has been a Senator since 2010 .

Legal proceedings

In total, plaintiffs commenced 901 legal proceedings against Imelda Marcos in various countries, mainly for corruption and fraud. The only case she has lost so far is a class action lawsuit in 1995 by 9,539 Filipinos in the US against the Marcos property for torture, murder and dissident disappearance. Imelda will then have to pay $ 2 billion, which has increased to $ 4 billion by 2006, including interest, but has not yet paid any of it. The only sums of money that have changed hands so far are $ 1.5 million from the forced sale of a Marcos home in Hawaii and the sale of a Picasso. In 1997, the highest federal court in Switzerland ruled that the USD 570 million found in Swiss bank accounts was due to criminal activity and must therefore be paid out to the Philippines.

In the mid-1990s, the Sandiganbayan Anti-Corruption Court of the Philippines sentenced her to twelve years in prison in a single corruption case, which the Supreme Court of the Philippines overturned. In 2001 Imelda Marcos was charged again, sentenced to nine years in prison and acquitted in a higher instance.

capital

The exact amount and the origin of Imelda Marcos' assets are still partly unclear. According to a conservative estimate by the World Bank and Transparency International , the Marcos squeezed $ 10 billion out of the country, making them the most corrupt regime since 1970, after the Suhartos and before Mobutu Sese Seko . According to other estimates, the Marcos and their confidants have squeezed 20 to 30 billion US dollars out of the country. Imelda alone used her position as Governor of Greater Manila and Minister for Human Settlements to extort a personal share in 30% of government contracts.

In 1987, an inventory of the new Philippine government numbered the private items they had left behind in the Malacañang Palace: 15 mink coats, 65 parasols, 508 floor-length dresses, 888 handbags and 71 sunglasses. The most famous part of the fortune was her shoe collection of 1,060 pairs in size 8½ from designers such as Ferragamo , Givenchy , Chanel and Christian Dior . Her jewelry collection was valued at between $ 12 million and $ 20 million in 1996, including a Persian necklace with pink and yellow diamonds and a bracelet with a 31-carat centerpiece. Some of the pieces were found in their palace, some were tried by a friend of the family to take them abroad, and some US customs took them from them when they escaped. At times the jewels were lying open on a table because no one at customs could believe that such exorbitant pieces were real. According to her own statements, she lost 175 works of art by European masters after the flight, including works by Michelangelo , Botticelli and ten Canalettos .

While she herself insists on living on a $ 90 a month pension for the widows of war veterans, she also promised to donate $ 800 million from her private wealth to the Philippines in the 1998 presidential election.

Documents from the offshore leak published in April 2013 show that Imelda Marcos is the beneficiary of at least one trust in the British Virgin Islands .

Film and musical

In 2004, director Ramona Diaz published a film portrait called Imelda . The film gives Imelda Marcos long interview times. Marcos initially worked enthusiastically but later tried to get the film banned, both inside and outside the Philippines. He won the documentary award at the Sundance Film Festival ; the New York Times called it "a devastating account of how power leads to self-deception".

Completely without politics, however, and focused on the international jet set, David Byrne and Fatboy Slim produced a song cycle about Imelda Marcos entitled Here Lies Love . The concept album was released in 2010, and a rock musical based on it premiered on Broadway in 2013.

Web links

Commons : Imelda Marcos  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: Imelda Marcos  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Imelda Marcos, the bizarre shoe fetishist
  2. ↑ "The oppressed people will rise"
  3. ↑ In Manila the dictator widow is permanently present
  4. ↑ LA MARIPOSA DE ACERO
  5. ^ Ed Leibowitz: Her greatest admirer ( Memento of November 5, 2012 in the Internet Archive ). TIME , July 5, 2004 (archived website)
  6. ↑ Albert F. Celoza: Ferdinand Marcos and the Philippines. The Political Economy of Authoritarianism. Praeger, Westport, Connecticut, 1999, p. 23 f.
  7. ↑ Celoza, p. 126.
  8. ↑ a b c Imelda: down to her last billion Times on Sunday, April 9, 2006
  9. ↑ a b c Celoza, p. 45.
  10. ↑ "I was born ostentatious. They will list my name in the dictionary someday. They will use imeldific to mean ostentatious extravagance. ”Interview with Associated Press 1998, cited from http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/imelda/words.html
  11. ↑ a b c Eric Gamalinda : Language, Sedition, and Censorship ( Memento of February 15, 2010 in the Internet Archive ). Retrieved December 13, 2009.
  12. ↑ Interview in the Los Angeles Times, quoted from http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/imelda/words.html
  13. ^ Carol Duncan: Art museums and the ritual of citizenship in: Ivan Karp, Stephen D. Lavine (eds.): Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991, pp. 88-103.
  14. ↑ Proserpina Domingo Tapales: Gender Policies And Responses Towards Greater Women Empowerment In The Philippines (PDF)
  15. ↑ Barbara Supp: “Sex is getting pregnant ” Der Spiegel, September 20, 1999
  16. ↑ The island of the bloody plantations taz, March 7, 2007
  17. ↑ Celoza, p. 62 ff.
  18. ↑ All figures from Celoza, p. 126 ff.
  19. ↑ Philippines' Marcos fights to get wealth back reuters.com, May 13, 2010
  20. ^ Elections in the Philippines NZZ, May 16, 2013
  21. ↑ Homage to Imelda's Shoes BBC News, February 16, 2001
  22. ↑ Imelda Marcos to launch gems collection chinadaily.com, November 7, 2006
  23. ↑ Pictures from the presentation of the "Imelda Collection" in Manila Associated Press, November 18, 2006, YouTube video (2:08 min.)
  24. ↑ From the film "Imelda", quoted from http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/imelda/words.html
  25. ↑ a b c The Weird World of Imelda Marcos The Independent, February 25, 2006
  26. ↑ Imelda Marcos Talkasia Transcript CNN, 24. February 2007
  27. ↑ Manila Standard: "20 years after uprising, Imelda still living it up"
  28. ^ Suharto, Marcos and Mobutu head corruption table with $ 50bn scams The Guardian, March 26, 2004
  29. ↑ James Roumasset: The Political Economy of Corruption; Working PaperNo. 97-10R, July 1997 http://www.economics.hawaii.edu/research/workingpapers/88-98/WP_97-10R.pdf
  30. ^ TIME: World Notes Investigations, February 23, 1987
  31. ↑ BBC: Imelda's 'crown jewels' to go under the hammer, May 13, 2003
  32. ↑ Austria's most powerful banker resigns. In: sueddeutsche.de. April 4, 2013, accessed May 26, 2018 .
  33. ^ Film review in the New York Times, June 9, 2004, quote: a devastating portrait of how power begets self-delusion .
  34. ^ Daniel Koch: David Byrne and Normann Cook find love and Imelda Marcos , in: Rolling Stone, January 13, 2010; Christiane Rebmann: Musical for a dictator's wife, in: Der Sonntag, April 25, 2010, p. 9.
personal data
SURNAME Marcos, Imelda
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Romuáldez Marcos, Imelda
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Filipino first lady
DATE OF BIRTH July 2, 1929
PLACE OF BIRTH Manila