When the 65-year-old Fernando ‘Bongbong’ Marcos swept to power with 59 per cent of the vote last May, he rode in on a wave of disinformation. This included a falsified history of his dictator father Fernando, who was the first to dramatically undermine human rights in the post-independence island archipelago. Marcos Senior ruled from 1965 to 1986, pillaging an estimated $6 billion from the public coffers and imprisoning, torturing and killing his opponents under his martial-law regime.
Bongbong’s mother Imelda, meanwhile, gained infamy for her wardrobe of 3,000 pairs of shoes. By 1986 Filipinos had had enough. A revolution spearheaded by Corazon Aquino and the Philippine Democratic Party-People’s Power coalition (PDP-Laban), and eventually supported by disaffected Marcosites, forced the ruling family to relocate their sumptuous lifestyle to Hawaii. But people’s power was not to be: like much of the centre-left, the new government failed to turn words to deeds. Aquino’s oligarchical camp caved to neo-liberal orthodoxies that left the shantytown and small-farmer Filipino majority angry and alienated.
