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<img loading="lazy" src="https://cdn.kahimyang.com/resources-2/cruelty-on-marcos-sm.webp" alt="Cruelty on the Marcoses" />
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(Imelda Marcos blinks away tears as she listens to her husband Ferdinand read a brief statement in 1986 after EDSA)
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<p>
Worse, their side of the whole story was never printed on how and why they subjected them to prejudgment of guilt, deprived them of their worldly possessions, restricted their movements and charged President Marcos and Mrs. Marcos with racketeering, obstruction of justice and mail fraud involving billions of dollars in that trial of the century in New York.
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<p>
The recent Supreme Court (SC) decision that finally allowed President Marcos to be buried at the Libingan ng mga Bayani was actually the third case that reached the High Court involving him over three decades.
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<p>
Before President Marcos died on September 28, 1989, he pleaded in a petition with the SC to allow him to come home and confront his accusers, but the Court denied his plea. When Mrs. Marcos petitioned the same Court to allow his body to be brought home after his death in Hawaii, the Court also refused for security reason.
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<p>
The question is, who were the people behind the cruelty on the Marcoses?
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<p>
Records of the New York trial and other research materials showed that they were not only individuals; they were governments and superpowers who systematically destroyed the Marcoses using greedy politicians and elite businessmen, backed by 16 foreign propagandists and hundreds of misguided local journalists.
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<p>
After they conspired to oust the Marcoses from power and accused them of stealing money from the people, the Aquino regime and US government prosecutors presented in court 95 witnesses and 350,000 documents, including those they claimed came from their private chambers in Malacañang purportedly showing that they embezzled billions of dollars or billions of pesos from the Filipino people.  There were varied estimates of the so-called loot. One estimate says the wealth was within the vicinity of $356 million. Other estimates, although sourced from rumors and guesswork, had it that the Marcoses had Swiss accounts ranging from $7 billion, to $13.4 billion to $35 billion, and a gold horde worth more than $250 billion stashed in Swiss banks and other overseas banks.
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<p>
Whatever the figure or amount, however, it simply doesn't make sense at all, for how could they have stolen such a huge amount when the total accumulated official budget of the Marcos regime in 20 years was only P486.2 billion?
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<p>
Besides, Victor Macalincag, the national treasurer and deputy minister of finance at that time, also admitted that there was P28 billion in the National Treasury when President Marcos was forcibly exiled to Hawaii, debunking claims by President
Corazon C. Aquino's supporters that the Treasury was empty.
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<p>
By comparison, the presidents who succeeded President Marcos in 30 years spent more than P35 trillion in accumulated budgets, including President Aquino's P1.6 trillion in six years and four months; President Ramos's P2.237 trillion in six years; President Estrada's more than P1 trillion in less than three years; President Arroyo's more than P11 trillion in nine years; and President Benigno S. Aquino III's more than P10 trillion in six years.
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<p>
The point here is this: None could compare, or all of them combined, President Marcos's accomplishments in terms of social justice and economic development, despite their huge budgets, which were supposed to spur economic progress.
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<p>
Besides, in the post-Marcos years, the country saw a trail of plunders, corruptions, economic deprivation, gruesome human-rights violations, insurgencies, hundreds of killings involving journalists and serious problems of brownouts, flooding and horrendous traffic.
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<p>
A US senator and a congressman from New York claimed the Marcoses have also stolen foreign aids, including Japanese funds, prompting local and international media to call the Marcoses plunderers and thieves of the highest order.
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<p>
Because of the tremendous publicity, the Marcoses were also tried in court on the issue of foreign aids and investigated at the US Senate, at the US General Auditing Office, at the Japanese Diet and at the Japanese Internal Revenue Bureau.
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<p>
They found nothing to support their claims, and the Marcoses were cleared.
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<p>
The tragedy was that the media, the same biased media that prejudged them as thieves, just ignored the findings of the court and the investigative bodies that found the Marcoses innocent. Only the est-selling book A Country Imperiled, authored by this writer and published in 2011 by Amazon, one of the world's largest publishing houses, came out with the details of their acquittal.
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<p>
Before the trial began, the prosecution attempted to convince Mrs. Marcos to plead guilty to a lesser offense so that she could be convicted and jailed lightly. Perhaps, they reckoned that with President Marcos gone, she would feel forsaken, vulnerable and helpless.
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<p>
She stood her ground and told them:
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<div class="article-comment">
<p>
"No plea bargain. To plead even to a minor malfeasance is to admit guilt, and I know we did not steal. Sacred honor, good name, principles and belief are non-negotiable. I shall defend myself and this man whose lips are now sealed by death."
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<p>
On July 2, 1990, Mrs. Marcos's 61st birthday, the 12-man jury unanimously acquitted her on all counts. In this era of "televoting", "telesurvey" and "telepolling", people are wondering why they did that to her and President Marcos?
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<p>
There is a litany of reasons. A prosecution witness, Timothy Khan, provided one, a reason that was fraught with political, social, economic and national security implications: Khan said: "Mrs. Aquino said, 'No prosecution'; 'No bases,'" referring, of course, to the American military bases in the Philippines.
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<p>
At that time, the retention of the American military bases in the Philippines was under negotiation.
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<p>
What happened was that President Aquino got the prosecution; America lost the bases; and the Marcoses were acquitted. It was not only ironic, but the incident also established the motive as to why the Marcoses continued to be prosecuted. Or was it not persecuted?
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<p>
<strong>Sources</strong>: 
</p>
<ol class="article-sources">
<li>
Cruelty on the Marcoses  by  Cecilio Arillo, November 10, 2016, <a href="https://goo.gl/4vTdOW" class="news_link source-visit-count" target="_blank" title="Source">Business Mirror</a>
</li>
</ol>
<div class="source-notes">
<p>
(This article is adapted from the source listed above.  We are unable to grant permission for any kind of reproduction other than social media shares.)
</p>
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Who are the people behind the cruelty on the Marcos family?