Who is ferdinand marcos

The son of the Philippines' former dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, has announced that he will run for president in next year's election. Ferdinand Marcos Jr, popularly known as Bongbong, announced his candidacy in a video post on Facebook. The year-old, who is an ally of current President Rodrigo Duterte, pledged to bring "unifying leadership" to the country.

His father ruled the Philippines for 20 years until he was overthrown in Marcos Sr seized dictatorial power in , a year before his second term in office was due to expire, by placing the Philippines under martial law. He padlocked congress, ordered the arrest of political rivals and ruled by decree. His rule was characterised by widespread extrajudicial killings and the torture of opponents.

He was finally ousted by an army-backed "people power" uprising. The Church sponsored volunteers to monitor the vote; for a period it seemed that once again he would take the presidency until thirty employees of the state-run Commission on Elections COMELEC quit, citing election fraud, and were taken into hiding by the Church.

COMELEC announced the victory, which the Church immediately decried as fraudulent, instead issuing an official statement that Corazon Aquino had won and prompting massive public protests. On February 25, , American helicopters airlifted Marcos and his family to Guam, then into exile in Hawaii, where he died in in Several of his family members, including his wife Imelda, have since returned to the Philippines where they have served as elected leaders.

Luis H. Trikosko for the Library of Congress, from Wikimedia Commons. But he went one big step further in merging politics and finance, converting the instruments of government into one vast cash machine.

A handful of other autocrats were also busy stealing from their people in that era — in Haiti, Nicaragua, Iran — but Marcos stole more and he stole better. Ultimately, he emerges as a laboratory specimen from the early stages of a contemporary epidemic: the global contagion of corruption that has since spread through Africa and South America, the Middle East and parts of Asia. Marcos was a model of the politician as thief. A single document in the Manila archive marks the start of the detective story.

In a sworn deposition, a young civil servant named Chito Roque describes how, on the night the Marcoses flew into exile, he worked his way through the crowds outside the presidential palace to the gates where anxious soldiers were posted.

There, they could see the signs of hasty flight: food still warm on the dining table, empty boxes, papers scattered on the floor, shredding machines stuffed with more paper. Those documents now sit in the offices of the PCGG, along with thousands more retrieved from the palace and the 50 or so other properties the Marcoses and their allies owned in the Philippines, and from homes and offices in the US.

As the years have gone by, hundreds of thousands of pages have been added from other sources, all now sitting, neatly ordered, in a white, two-storey building near the centre of Manila. Outside, a six-lane highway is jammed with traffic, bellowing and belching fumes. Inside, all is calm and cool. A notice asks visitors kindly to leave their firearms at reception.

By February , the Swiss accounts were so loaded, the couple added an extra layer of concealment, transferring their ownership to foundations registered in Liechtenstein. Then Marcos started to get really clever. On 21 September , he declared martial law. As his diary records, the Nixon administration consented as he shut down congress, arrested his political opponents, took control of the media and courts, and suspended all civil rights. On the same day — as a PCGG worker pointed out to me with some passion — he took time off to open another Swiss bank account.

Over the following nine years, an estimated 34, trade unionists, student leaders, writers and politicians were tortured with electric shocks, heated irons and rape; 3, men and women were dumped dead in public places; others simply disappeared. This was no longer just about kickbacks. Marcos started to steal whole companies, using the crude tactics of a gangster.

Martial law allowed him, literally, to write his own law: his decrees passed straight on to the statute book. He then created a Philippine Exchange Company, decreed it should handle all foreign sugar sales and used its monopoly position to buy from farmers at rock-bottom prices and sell at vast profit.

This allowed him to buy Northern Lines, which had the contract to ship the sugar overseas. The PCGG archive shows how, in the same way, Marcos used his own companies to take over the three other key areas of agriculture: coconuts, tobacco and bananas.

Granting himself government contracts, monopoly deals and tax exemptions, he levered his way into dominating industries across the whole economy — logging and paper, meat, oil, insurance, shipping and airlines, beer and cigarettes, textiles, hotels and casinos, newspapers, radio and TV. His was an early and particularly rapacious version of privatisation. Of course people would observe that the Marcoses were suddenly very wealthy — they could live with that.

What mattered was to ensure that there was no evidence. Repeatedly, he set up his companies so that outwardly they belonged to other people. Marcos deployed dozens of cronies: relatives, golf partners, political allies, anybody who shared his greed. Marcos would hold the deed and leave the space blank. Marcos stole, then stole more. The Japanese paid reparations for the second world war; he skimmed it and put the profit into his Swiss accounts. He stole international aid money, gold from the Central Bank, loans from international banks and military aid from the US.

He had already issued decrees to gift most of the coconut trade to one of his own companies; now he stole great chunks of the levy fund, all the while taking kickbacks on government contracts. All this theft created a logistical problem: how to handle the tidal flow of money.

The PCGG archive shows how Marcos set up his own banking system, using cronies to buy private banks and others to control the state banks. Later governments have documented 75, cases of torture, illegal detention and disappearances in those years.

The rule by the senior Marcos and his wife Imelda has been called a kleptocratic "conjugal dictatorship". The government has recovered just under a tenth of the wealth that the Marcos family and their associates are accused of plundering. During martial law, 70, people were imprisoned, 34, were tortured, and 3, were killed, according to data from Amnesty International. Marcos filed his candidacy on Wednesday, ahead of the Oct. Marcos said his party had planned to adopt President Duterte as the vice presidential running mate.

But Duterte did not file his candidacy, saying he would retire from politics.