Imelda Marcos

First Lady

• Born: July 2, 1929
• Place of Birth: Tacloban City, Philippines

FIRST LADY OF THE PHILIPPINES (1965–86)

Early Life

The daughter of an aristocratic family in the Philippines, Imelda Marcos attended St. Paul’s College, where in 1949 she won a beauty contest. In 1954, she met and married Congressman Ferdinand Marcos after an eleven-day courtship. A girl who grew up in the provinces, Imelda was initially shunned by wives of other politicians.

Political Career

In 1959, Ferdinand ran for the senate, taking Imelda with him on his campaign trail. She proved to be an asset, and he was elected. In 1965, she courted votes in exchange for pesos to gain for her husband a party nomination for president, and he was again elected, in part because of her campaigning.

As president, Ferdinand told his first lady to attend to the trimmings while he set the main course. Accordingly, she embarked on a beautification program for run-down Manila, distributed seeds for backyard gardens, provided free medical care for some of the poor, and commissioned the construction of orphanages, old people’s facilities, and day care centers. Imelda also settled scores with those who had snubbed her earlier. She required rich guests to bring checkbooks whenever they were summoned to a party at the presidential palace. She also demanded stock from corporations.

In 1972, Marcos declared martial law and then had presidential rival Benigno Aquino arrested. He also had the son of Vice President Fernando Lopez arrested, demanding that the Lopez family surrender the Philippines’ largest utility and an influential newspaper. Imelda’s brother Benjamin then headed both businesses. Crony capitalism accelerated as government regulations ruined certain businesses, which were then bought by friends and relatives of the Marcoses.

In 1973, Ferdinand introduced a new constitution that replaced the Philippine congress with a National Assembly and extended the president’s term of office, with no limit on the number of terms. In 1974, Ferdinand appointed Imelda governor of Metro Manila. Soon shanties were bulldozed, an air-conditioned bus transit system began, and several multimillion-dollar Manila projects blossomed. When Ferdinand set up an Interim Legislature in 1978, Imelda was elected, and he appointed her minister of human settlements. Many Filipinos claimed election fraud, notably Aquino, who was released in 1980 for medical treatment abroad. In 1981, after lifting martial law, Marcos was reelected president in rigged voting. Aquino was assassinated when he returned to the Philippines in 1983.

As Ferdinand’s health deteriorated, Imelda ran the government. When he ordered snap presidential elections in 1986, Imelda campaigned more widely than could the sickly Ferdinand. Aquino’s widow, Corazon, ran against Marcos, who again attempted election fraud and then tried to retain control of the country by force. He announced a state of emergency and sought control of all media outlets and public utilities. With thousands in the streets, Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile and chief of staff Lieutenant-General Fidel Ramos announced they were switching loyalties and backing Corazon Aquino as president. In the face of the army mutiny, the Marcos regime was toppled. American aircraft evacuated the Marcoses to exile in Honolulu. Ferdinand died in Hawaii in 1989.

In 1991, Imelda returned to the Philippines and unsuccessfully campaigned for the presidency the following year. In 1995, she won election to the House of Representatives from her home province. In 1998, she again ran for the presidency, promising to share her husband’s wealth with the Filipino people through the Marcos Foundation. After her defeat, she admitted that her husband virtually controlled the entire country’s economy before parceling out corporations to cronies. In 2002, she again ran for president and lost, though she remained in the Philippines.

Legal Action and Outcome

The first action against Imelda was the seizure of cash, gold, jewelry, and other assets upon her arrival at the Honolulu International Airport in 1986. She agreed to return the assets to the Philippine government shortly after Ferdinand’s death in 1989. Once in office, President Corazon Aquino set up a commission to determine how much the country had been plundered during the Marcos years.

In 1987, a lawsuit alleged that the Marcos family confiscated private property, awarded contracts to cronies and relatives, embezzled government funds, extorted money from businesses, and routed the wealth to local and offshore bank accounts. After appeals in the case, the Philippine Supreme Court in 2003 agreed to award the amounts in frozen bank accounts, including $500 million in Switzerland. Specific assets involved were not identified fully until December 2005, when a $10 billion case was finally remanded for trial.

In 1990, Imelda was cleared by a federal grand jury in New York of embezzling funds, and she was also exonerated in a Philippine court for misappropriation of public funds. In 1993, a Philippine court convicted her on corruption charges, sentenced her to eighteen to twenty-four years in prison, and fined her $5.1 million in damages. The judgment was overturned on appeal in 1998.

In 1992, nearly ten thousand victims of human rights abuses (including torture, illegal detention, disappearances, and summary killings) and their heirs were awarded $1.2 billion in exemplary damages and $766 million in compensatory damages in Hilao v. Estate of Marcos. Marcos’s assets in the United States were then identified and ordered frozen. In 1995, however, Marcos and her son, Ferdinand Jr., were found in contempt of court for using the assets and assessed a fine of $100,000 per day. Together with interest and other investments from the frozen money, the amount of the settlement to be awarded reached $3.7 billion by 2006 but remained unpaid while appeals were pending in various courts.

In 2001, Marcos was arrested on new charges of corruption and extortion, specifically stemming from the disappearance of $684 million from the Filipino treasury during the Ferdinand Marcos presidency. In 2003, the missing money was awarded to the Philippine government. Lawsuits and appeals continued, while Imelda Marcos avoided prison and was known to have retained funds in the Marcos Foundation. In March 2006, Marcos’s lawyer reported that the former first lady was open to a compromise agreement in the interest of ending years of fruitless litigation over Marcos assets.

In 2007 and 2008, Imelda Marcos was once again acquitted of tax violations and corruption charges—the latter time she was acquitted of thirty-two counts of illegal money transfers. However, an unclear number of charges still remained. In 2010, she returned to politics after winning a seat in the House of Representatives for the province of Ilocos Norte. In her eighties, she then went on to win a second consecutive term in that district in 2013. As her son, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., made a bid for the vice presidency and looked like a frontrunner in the race by early 2016 (he ultimately narrowly lost), the Philippine government began to feel pressured to sell some of the assets that had been confiscated from the Marcoses upon their flight to Hawaii decades before. Along with the many pairs of shoes that had been recovered, authorities had also amassed a large collection of jewelry worth at least 1 billion pesos ($21 million); among this collection was a rare 25-carat pink diamond. It was announced in early 2016 that the collection would be put up for auction. Additionally, a website had been created to help aid the effort to find hundreds of valuable missing pieces of artwork that authorities believed the Marcoses had purchased with state funds; these included works by Vincent van Gogh, Picasso, and Rembrandt.

In November 2018, a court in the Philippines finally delivered a sentence of at least forty-two years in prison for seven counts of graft. However, it was considered unlikely due to Imelda Marcos's age and the length of time her appeal would take. Furthermore, her family remained a powerful force in the Philippines. Her son, nicknamed Bongbong, was elected president in 2022.

Impact

Imelda Marcos’s admirers have benefited from her largesse or have derived vicarious satisfaction from the way in which she became so powerful and rich. To those who did not believe the good intentions that she had articulated over the years, she was the most infamous woman in the world.

Marcos's story has been told in various forms. Musicians David Byrne and Fatboy Slim released a concept album, Here Lies Love, in 2010. It was adapted for the stage in 2013 and opened on Broadway in 2023.

Bibliography

Coronel, Sheila S. "Marcos, Martial Law and Memory: The Past in Our Future in the Philippines." Pacific Journalism Review, vol. 28, no. 1/2, 2022, pp. 54-66, doi: 10.3316/informit.592038361194364. Accessed 29 Aug. 2024.

De Guzman, Chad. "How Cultural Fascination with Imelda Marcos Has Obscured Her True Legacy." Time, 27 July 2023, time.com/6298212/here-lies-love-imelda-marcos-legacy/. Accessed 29 Aug. 2024.

Ellison, Katherine. Imelda: Steel Butterfly of the Philippines. McGraw, 1988.

Flores, Mikhail. "Philippines Former First Lady Imelda Marcos Set to Leave Hospital." Reuters, 13 Mar. 2024, www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/philippines-former-first-lady-imelda-marcos-set-leave-hospital-2024-03-14/. Accessed 29 Aug. 2024.

Pearlstine, Norman. "Imelda Marcos Has an $829 Billion Idea." Bloomberg Business, 24 Oct. 2013, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-10-24/imelda-marcos-backs-deuterium-off-philippines-for-clean-energy. Accessed 11 Mar. 2016.

Perry, Juliet. "Philippines to Sell Imelda Marcos's 'Ill-Gotten' Jewels, Worth Millions." CNN, Cable News Network, 16 Feb. 2016, www.cnn.com/style/article/imelda-marcos-jewelery-auction/index.html. Accessed 11 Mar. 2016.

Psinakis, Steve. Two "Terrorists" Meet. Morgan, 1981.

Romula, Beth Day. Inside the Palace: The Rise and Fall of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. Putnam, 1987.