THE PLUNDERER
28 February 2025
By Mike Alcazaren
If there is a narrative that is being shoved down our throats about EDSA, it is this: that the Marcoses did not plunder our country. That the family’s wealth came from some ridiculous myth that he discovered Yamashita’s gold. There is a well-funded propaganda machine in operation, with the candidacies of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in 2016 and Imee Marcos’ senatorial bid proof positive that the revisionist plan is firing on all cylinders, aided in part by a backsliding democracy.
The Marcoses were stealing from the country since Ferdinand’s first term in 1967. That was the year Marcos first opened a Swiss bank account under the alias “William Saunders”. What other proof does the Filipino need when Imelda has already been convicted and that 170,447,347,523.52 pesos have been remitted to the Bureau of Treasury for the accounts of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program and for the Reparation of Victims of Human Rights Violations during the Martial Law regime, signed into law on Feb. 25, 2013? Billions of pesos recovered from various Swiss accounts and sales from properties/cash returned by Marcos dummies, not from some Japanese war criminal’s loot. Yet Imelda is out on bail thanks to the new order in the Supreme Court. Her daughter Imee is now aligned with the powerful party of another authoritarian’s daughter, along with 2 senators who have graft cases still pending in the courts and backstopped by Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, the woman who first sold us out to the Chinese but got a free pass from this administration.
EDSA will be commemorated year after year because we deposed a plunderer and won us back our democracy, no matter how imperfect and chaotic it may be. Many promises may have not been fulfilled and we can even count those from our first revolution in 1898 but that should not negate those victories because they came at a great price. To honour those who sacrificed their lives we have to continue what these revolutions started, sputtering at times but never, never to erase them from history. (*photos from Bayan Ko: Images of the Philippine Revolt)
