‘I arrived in Manila in 1977 with a backpack, a typewriter, and a burning ambition to be a foreign correspondent. What I stumbled into was a jarring, exhilarating era of political volatility which upturned the fabric of Philippine society and realigned the nation’s political trajectory.’
Reinventing Marcos
In the Philippines, I found a country dominated by a dictator, President Ferdinand E. Marcos, who politically gutted and economically plundered the country. I found Marcos at the peak of his martial law powers. But by 1986, he was gone – ousted by a People Power revolution.
In the decade I was there, I reported on Marcos’s stranglehold on power, the corruption, the military abuses, and the victims caught up in his power grab. Through despotism, nepotism, and corruption, Marcos’s ‘empire of greed’ was responsible for more than 100,000 deaths, imprisonments, torture, and ‘disappearances’.
Marcos was toppled in a People Power revolution in 1986 and died in exile three years later. Now, decades after his death, social media disinformation has rewritten history, mythologised Marcos, ‘reinvented’ him as a hero who presided over a ‘golden’ age. Not so! Marcos was a dictator who ushered in a ‘bloody’ age. I know, because I was there.
