ICHRP Marks 5th Anniversary Of The Internment Of Dictator Ferdinand Marcos In The National Hero’s Cemetery

Read the full statement here: https://ichrp.net/ichrp-marks-5th-anniversary-of-the-internment-of-dictator-ferdinand-marcos-in-the-national-heros-cemetery/

November 18, 2021

Today marks the 5th Anniversary of the re-burial of Dictator Ferdinand E Marcos remains in the National Hero’s Cemetery. The controversial reburial approved by Rodrigo Duterte is an affront to Marcos’ victims, an affront to human rights, and an affront to the Filipino people who suffered through 14 years of dictatorial rule. Marcos remains a specter on the political landscape, and his crimes and those of his family continue to reverberate through the nation decades after his 1989 death.

Marcos used the national treasury as a personal bank account, looting an estimated US$10 billion from the Filipino people in what was the crime of the century. The political careers of his wife and children are built on this stolen wealth. The Panama Papers have shown that the family continue to hold vast sums of plundered wealth in offshore accounts. The fruits of this plunder now support the presidential aspirations of Marcos’ son Bongbong. The entire family should be locked up by the Sandigbayan for their theft from the Philippines treasury.

The Marcos dictatorship sentenced the Filipino people to a life of servitude and exile through its labour export policy. Rather than develop jobs and economic growth in the Philippines, Marcos maintained the semi-feudal, semi-colonial economy and devised a strategy for the mass export and exploitation of millions of its people. Today more than 10 million Filipinos work overseas and prior to the COVID pandemic people were departing at a rate of nearly 6,000 per day for low-wage, low-skilled jobs abroad, often forced to work in slave-like conditions.

Marcos was a serial human rights violator. His regime tortured tens of thousands, there were 3,257 known extrajudicial killings, and 70,000 incarcerations of political opponents. Some 2,520 of the 3,257 murder victims were tortured and mutilated before their bodies were dumped in various places for the public to discover – a tactic meant to sow fear among the people, which came to be known as “salvaging”. This is not the record of someone who should be considered a hero, these are crimes against humanity and his regime should be condemned in perpetuity.

To maintain his reign of terror Marcos built up an extensive network of security forces, police, paramilitary and military. Under the US-Marcos dictatorship, there was a significant expansion of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, which grew from a force of 57,100 in 1971 to a 97.89 percent increase of 113,000 personnel in 1976. The Marcos regime at the same time corrupted and politicized the military giving them an ever-expanding independent role in civilian affairs which served US imperialism, making it impossible for elected officials to govern without the support of the AFP and Washington. This is evident today in the fact that in the Duterte’s de facto dictatorship nearly every strategic government department is led by an ex-military or police official, there is no longer any guise of civilian control.

In whitewashing Marcos’ crimes, Duterte is looking to his own future, hoping his extensive human rights crimes, currently under investigation by the International Criminal Court and extensively documented by Investigate PH and the UN Human Rights Council, will fade with time.

The 5th Anniversary of the Marcos reburial reminds us that designating the dictator as a national hero is an affront to democracy, an affront to the 100,000 plus victims of the regime and to the millions of Filipino people who continue to suffer under his labour export regime. Clearly Duterte, having failed to learn the lesson of this history, was doomed to repeat it.

The International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines (ICHRP) calls for:

• the Philippine government to continue the case against the Marcos family and to recover all the plundered wealth plus interest.
• the Philippine government to provide full restitution of recovered wealth to the victims of the Marcos dictatorship.
• the incarceration of convicted plunderer Imelda Marcos.
• reburial of the Dictator Marcos in an unmarked grave.

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