A Thousand Little Deaths

by Vicky Pinpin-Feinstein

  The omnipresent image of Marcos wherever we turned became invasive. We could not criticize him publicly, yet within the privacy of our homes, we cursed him when we saw him on TV or heard him on the radio. My aunt, Imang Dandy, a fiery, tomboyish woman who never married, was an influence on me regarding political matters when I was young. She was intensely passionate about politicians she liked or hated. If she liked a politician, she became his or her biggest fan and cheerleader. If she hated one, the politician might just as well be the devil incarnate. Marcos belonged to the ‘hate camp;’ her reason being that not only was he corrupt but he had cheated in the election against Diosdado Macapagal. Her loyalty to a fellow Kapampangan outweighed any attempt at a fair regard for the facts. In this, she was no different from the average Filipino voter whose allegiance to ethnic identity trumped the appeal of democracy. She was an avid radio listener but when she heard Marcos’ voice come on, she would grouse in her no-holds-bar manner of speaking, “Itak naiada na ning alang marine a yan. Aitu ne naman qng radyo. Macabuysit yang darandaman. Patdan mu ne pa at e me sisidian cabang magsalita ya ing animal a yan!” (May misfortune strike that shameless scoundrel. He’s on TV again and it is annoying to hear him speak. Turn the thing off and don’t turn it on again for as long as he is speaking.)

  Perhaps because we did not know any better, or perhaps it was our belief in her that us—her nieces and nephews—and willing converts, would quickly distrust politicians that she did not like and adore those she did. At a germinal level, we were beginning to learn our lessons in politics. But more than this overly simplistic tutelage, what she, and countless others were unleashing, I later realized, was their frustration and discontent, given the destructive, corrupt, and almost nihilistic version of government practiced by those in power.

  There were innumerable images of Marcos gracing the newspapers and television during this period. He was often seen wearing his crisp and formal Barong Tagalog. Perhaps because he was not a tall man, and therefore would not do justice to the “Americano,” as Filipinos referred to the western men’s business suits, he rarely wore one. But what he lacked in physical stature, he more than compensated for it in an over-abundance of confidence. Possessed of a stentorian voice, he was adept at modulating his tone and inflection at the appropriate moment, making people perk up and listen to him. Whether Marcos was aware of this or not, politics, for him, made great theatre, and he was a commanding actor on stage. He occupied the spotlight on the stage of Philippine political theater for more years than was comfortable for anyone. The political arena seemed custom-tailored for him given his penchant for manipulation. He was just as comfortable with crowds of poor farmers, reassuring them that their side was his side, while later he would dance the night away with the privileged class, many of whom were invited regularly at Malacañang. He might have been convincing had he invited these farmers to those fabled luxurious soirees and extravagant parties hosted by Imelda. But, of course, he never did. Mixing the two groups was not politically advantageous; keeping them separate would ensure his grip on political power, pitting each group against the other when it was convenient for him to do so.

  Though Marcos’ voice was firm and deliberate, it was his eyes that gave him away. He had Asiatic, crafty eyes that often, or deliberately, one might speculate, missed their target. In my recollection of those images of him on TV, he never looked straight at anyone. His were shifty eyes that conveyed his proclivity for falsehood.

  Marcos was also rumored to be a womanizer. It has been said that if politics is around the corner, libido is never far behind. The combination of sexual and political power has been the domain of politicians and public figures throughout history. Marcos as a politician was no exception. I remember well how I disliked the way he smiled, the crinkle on his lips, a gesture between a smile and a sneer. The smile was lecherous, a smile that replaced many an indecorous word when directed to the opposite sex. For that reason, his marital infidelities regularly greased the rumor mill. How could any Filipino of my generation, or the one before me, forget his affair with the American starlet, Dovie Beams? Her picture graced the gossip pages of periodicals at the height of their affair. We reveled at hearing this gossip and stories like it because there was not much we could say freely regarding fact in a repressive public arena. Inane as it may sound, there was much private humor we could derive in the image of a strong man with a penchant for dropping his pants. How about the Filipino actress who allegedly had acid thrown in her face by Imelda upon learning of her husband’s marital indiscretion? Unfortunately, his many affairs and conquests of women only served to incite traditionally chauvinistic Filipino men to beat their chests and boast their male virility, never apologizing for it because they believe it was their God-given right to behave that way.

  Aside from this, Marcos was a smart, shrewd and sly politician. He combined this with, as my husband loves to say of men who are so full of themselves, “an ego the size of Texas.” Before Ronald Reagan was dubbed ‘the great communicator’ when he became president of the United States, there was Ferdinand Marcos, who, by the late 1960s and into the 1970s and 1980s was adept not only at manipulating, but in controlling the media. He understood that communication networks were critical in his ability to tighten the noose around a people in an archipelagic territory composed of thousands of islands whose natives spoke a wide variety of languages and dialects. Twisting facts and then presented as truth was the rule rather than the exception across radio and television stations, newspapers, and magazines.

  Marcos was often conveyed via the media wearing his signature Barong Tagalog and making pronouncements about the new society. That was as much civil society one got in those days. He dispensed with the legislative assembly and muzzled the courts, thereby eradicating any branch of the government designed to balance his power. Silencing any opposition from other branches of the government meant his ability to trample the rights of citizens was unfettered. Goons, guns, and gold—all were at his disposal in a despotic reign that lasted close to a generation.

  Internal political opposition as well as Western scholars and writers later confirmed my youthful view of Marcos’ character. For one, Stanley Karnow, a journalist who spent many years working in Asia and knew some of the Philippine elite, described Marcos as a “grand master of manipulation.” In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines, he contends that as early as a year before Marcos declared martial law, the then US Ambassador to the Philippines, Henry Byroade, had known that Marcos was “jockeying to cling to power after his term expired in 1973.” Despite Marcos blaming the Communists for bombings, Karnow claims that some of these were actually his doing. One of these bombings destroyed the sewage system of suburban Quezon City. The author wrote that the CIA had been reliably informed that Marcos’ henchmen were responsible. He explained that Marcos enlisted the help of the “Rolex Twelve,” a dozen men who had been given this moniker because Marcos rewarded them with Rolex watches when his plans of mayhem were successfully executed. His aides and executioners were, over the course of his term, endowed with a zeal for persecution that sometimes put their Holy Inquisition counterparts to shame. As I got older though, I reflected whether the reason for this was because these men truly believed in what they were doing or rather that they dreaded Marcos’ retaliation had they refused.

  Among the plots staged by the Rolex Twelve was the assassination attempt on the then secretary of defense, Juan Ponce Enrile, the same man who defected and supported Corazon Aquino in the 1986 People Power Revolution, and who would, years later, admit that the assassination attempt was a scam. I remember this story particularly well because at the time, Enrile’s daughter, Christina, was at the secondary school of the college I attended before I transferred to the Jesuit-owned Ateneo de Manila University. At that time the nuns at the college circulated a memo to all the students to pray for Christina’s father. This incident and other similar stories were fodder for late-night whispers an
d gossip. We found it difficult to talk about them much except with immediate family. When we did, it was through jokes we invented based on these events, using humor as a release from the stifling atmosphere of politics.

  Marcos best played the game by playing it dangerously. He fabricated a Communist threat, which to this day, has not materialized, to stifle opposition in all its forms. He attacked his enemies with every intention of exerting deep psychological intimidation and long-standing degradation. In addition, he justified his use of unprecedented presidential powers, taking advantage of the severe flooding that devastated Central Luzon and claiming that the severe economic consequences of the floods required extraordinary presidential expediency. Experts on Philippine politics also believed that Marcos was emboldened enough to execute his brand of coercion and repression because he had the backing of the United States. If I remember correctly, it was not until Marcos’ final days in 1986 that Ronald Reagan sent a team with Senator Richard Lugar and diplomat Philip Habib to tell Marcos that it was time to go.

  For years, never a day would pass without us seeing Marcos’ picture in the newspapers, hearing his voice on the radio, or seeing his image on TV as he went about his day at the presidential palace, Malacañang, with the best video clips reserved for the nightly TV news. His images and those of his wife, Imelda, dominated on-air television. There was hardly any speech or meeting given by Marcos that was not broadcast. Switching to another channel was an exercise in futility given that all of the stations showed the same thing.

  There were unforgettable TV moments, for sure, those that one dared not watch because they were either too shocking to be true but were true nonetheless, or those that simply made one sick because of their untruths and fabrications. Or yet again, those that made it look as though Marcos was winning the war against his enemies—those faceless Communists, leftist rebels, subversives, and radicals he kept talking about but whom we rarely saw except as bloodied corpses on the same nightly news.

  One of these stories was the capture and arrest in 1977 of one of the principal founders of the Communist Party of the Philippines, Jose Maria Sison, or “JoMa” as he was known. This was reality TV, Philippine style. Marcos milked the event for all its worth. There was Marcos, seeming to stand tall despite his diminutive stature, affecting gestures to show everyone he was boss, speaking to dozens of reporters with military men swarming all around him, recounting how the communist leader was captured. It was an image not easily forgotten. No one I know, or for that matter, few of my fellow countrymen included, knew what the most wanted man in the Philippines looked like before his capture. It would be fair to say that some even doubted whether he was a real person of if he was simply a figment of Marcos’ imagination. His capture proved of course that there was such a man. This event might have been the beginning of the end for the underground movement, though history would prove this not to be the case.

  As I watched the spectacle of this broadcast, I did not know whether to feel sad or disappointed. The face of JoMa Sison, the one every freedom loving “aktibista” in the Philippines revered, could not have been more disappointing. Watching him on TV, I wanted him to look big. I wanted him to look masculine. I wanted him to look as menacing as possible because I needed such an image to counter the overwhelming image of Marcos the tyrant. I needed to see a Rambo-like figure that would stand in contrast to the defeat and disappointment we experienced daily, someone that would lessen the sense of defeat and humiliation I felt when I was taken prisoner. But Sison was the complete antithesis of Rambo. There he stood, flashed across the TV screen: a wiry, lanky, and bespectacled figure. He was more like an intellectual than the shaggy bearded Che Guevarra-like fellow in combat fatigues with an AK-47 at his side. I carried this disappointment with me for a long, long time.

  This disappointment rivaled my dismay a year earlier, when I watched the capture of Bernabe Buscayno, the alleged chief Supremo of the New People’s Army in August 1976, which took place in a town called Mexico, just a few short miles from my parent’s house. Kumander Dante was born and raised in Tarlac, a province to the north of Pampanga where the natives also spoke Kapampangan. Tarlac had once been part of Pampanga and therefore it was not surprising that the two provinces shared common agrarian and linguistic traditions. He grew up in a peasant family, with a father who had abandoned them when he was young. I remember the whispers and hearsay in San Fernando when he was captured. Mexico was only a ten-to fifteen-minute drive from where I lived. It was a topic of conversation among Kapampangans when he was captured and detained in Camp Olivas before he was sent to Camp Crame in Manila. I remember my surprise in learning that one of the government’s most wanted rebel had been sleeping a few short miles from us. I did not even know that he was Kapampangan. Television, newspapers and radio had a field day with his capture. To some degree and despite his capture, I felt pride in him being a Kapampangan.

  Marcos’ utilization of the media continued for as long as he was in power. But not to be upstaged by his constant media presence, his wife, Imelda, became an even bigger example of media’s power and influence. For every media feature of Marcos, there was one of Imelda. There was Imelda in her brightly colored terno, often being ushered through a crowd of well-wishers with a bouquet of flowers in her arms as she reached out to shake hands. She smiled, she waved, she shook hands—all gestures of a celebrity, a role she performed with such drama and aplomb. She, in her heavily made-up face, her perfectly coiffed hair, and brightly colored ternos, did justice to the Filipino formal attire, using it as a necessary appurtenance in her charm toolkit, so like the beauty queen she had been. The Marcos crony-controlled media also made it look as if people could not get enough of Imelda.

  There she was again, Madame Iron Butterfly, as she was by then called by the Western media, this time, in a yellow sequined and embroidered affair, shown leading a group of luminaries to some garish building she had just built. She had a certain fascination for constructing all kinds of buildings. One of the first was the Philippine International Convention Center, or PICC, a structure built on reclaimed land on the banks of Manila Bay. Then there were the Heart Center, the Lung Center, and then the Kidney Center, displaying a strange fondness for internal organs. More Filipinos, however, were familiar with the Cultural Center of the Philippines. In an interview for a documentary, Imelda, sparkling in her diamonds, wearing a formal blue and yellow affair and a coiffed hairdo, sat on an expensive-looking sofa and a gilt-edged console filled with family photos and a bust of Ferdinand Marcos behind her, spoke these words in Tagalog about the CCP.

  “Iyong Cultural Center, iyon ang parang…. [This Cultural Center, this is like] our monument to the Filipino soul and spirit. Doon natin ilalagay and lahat ng kagandahan ng ating [this is where we put all of the beauty of our…], the good, the beautiful, the right of whatever we have through the course of centuries….

  I remember the fanfare that ensued when she inaugurated the CPP. She invited many international celebrities and public figures to the event. Her propensity to live big and spend big became unquenchable. It was parties galore in the streets of Manila for the rich and famous. But there was a dark side to this type of glamour, Imelda-style. She hated for her privileged friends to see the city’s poverty, so she erected fences around squatter areas, preventing her and the city’s privileged caste, the bold and the beautiful, from seeing the disagreeable sights and smells of poverty-stricken Tondo or other slum settlements. Beauty and ugliness always shared equal space on Manila’s streets, but Imelda insisted on only acknowledging the former. Her mania for surface beauty seemed to grow in proportion to her phobia of destitution, hardship, and deprivation, pushing her into creating an artificial and contrived world in which the Philippines was a paradise of beautiful women (and at times for sale) and physical structures built from a growing national debt. She spoke about this again in the interview for the same documentary and said,

  “I remember when he became president. I asked him. Ferdinand,
now that you are president, what is my role as First Lady? He said you are the First Lady and the mother of the country, while I Ferdinand is the father who builds the house. You make it a home and so I had to reflect what makes a home. Love. Now what is love made real? Beauty….”

  For all the beauty that she relentlessly tried to showcase by building structures that will signify economic progress in a poor country, she had simply been reduced to one thing today and it is what the world knows about her: her shoes.

  It had become common knowledge in those days that the Marcoses used the country’s treasury as if it was their own personal bank account. Years ago, I heard a story about Marcos’ extravagant spending from a fellow passenger on a plane. I was leaving the Philippines and sitting next to a well-traveled American man who once worked for the United States Information Agency. As we introduced ourselves and started talking, he recounted to me a story about Marcos. He began by saying that he had a friend who had established his name and reputation in public relations. This man became quite popular among politicians and purportedly advised President Nixon on communication strategies during Watergate. Ferdinand Marcos had apparently heard about him and hired him to help improve Marcos’ PR image in the Philippines and abroad. The man did his job and Marcos was reported to be very satisfied with his work. Shortly before boarding his plane, and upon his departure from the Philippines, four men carrying machine guns, all strangers to him, approached the PR man.

  “Sir, you forgot your briefcase. Here it is,” one of the strangers said and tried to hand him a briefcase.

  “No, I didn’t,” the PR man answered. “I have it right here,” he continued and proceeded to show them his briefcase.

  “No, sir, this is your briefcase,” insisted the stranger carrying the other briefcase. “Sir, this is your briefcase. Take it,” he said more firmly.