The ouster of Ferdinand Marcos Sr. in 1986 probably began when he did not give in to the extension of parity rights the Americans enjoyed under the Bell Trade Act. This expired in 1973. This was his first cardinal sin.
His second cardinal sin was cutting short the term of the military bases agreement from 99 years to 25. This was part of his strategy to obtain concessions from the US with regard to development funds; loans from the IMF-WB, which was the largest multilateral lender at that time.
You have to remember that the political environment at the end of World War II immediately shifted to the Cold War; democracy versus communism. World War II was fought to prevent the spread of fascism but in the interim between World War I and World War II, the Bolsheviks ascended to power in Russia in a triumph over the monarchy. Ironically, it was the Russians who got to Berlin first and not the Allied forces. Thus began the partition of Europe into the East and the West.
Along with the developments in Europe came the defeat of the constitutional democracy in China where the communists won over the invading Japanese and proceeded to overthrow the government of Chiang Kai Shek. The Korean peninsula, a Japanese colony, gained independence but was divided into the communist North and the democratic South.
America was installed as the only superpower during this period and it took it upon its own to shape the new world order. Thus was born the new financial system under Bretton-Woods with the gold standard and its status as the defender of democracy throughout the world, together with the British and the French.
The US, Britain and France also began reshaping the political environment in Asia. Colonial hegemony became passe’. Independence movements had been launched and it was useless to fight wars of independence coming off a long and costly global war. France did not immediately ascribe to this doctrine and fought with the Vietnamese, the Cambodians and the Laotians. The US became embroiled in this conflict and was defeated.
Prior to this, the Americans abandoned its colony, the Philippines, in favor of Japan. The Supreme Allied Commander in the Pacific, Douglas MacArthur, became the American Caesar. MacArthur presided over the democratization of the Japan but still under the aegis of the Emperor ableit sans the blind devotion and the striking down of its warrior class.
It was not easy because Japan was responsible for the Pacific War with its Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere strategy where it was to become the economic and military power in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. The Americans papered over the issue of reparations, monies which Japan had to pay for the damage it had caused during the war. The Americans took it upon itself to establish a new regional order. Japan was now its priority and from there, it would project power and influence over the region.
On May 9, should Ferdinand Marcos Jr. win the election, he will become the 17th President of the Republic of the Philippines. This despite being vilified most of his adult life for being the son of his father and namesake. This will also mark the end of one of the most tumultuous periods in Philippine history which began in 1965, when his father won the Presidency.
Bongbong continues to be haunted by the question of his family’s wealth. Magnanakaw at mamatay-tao. Thief and murderer are common words which Filipinos who so hate the Marcos’ use to describe them. But since Marcos Sr. made his mark on the country’s political landscape, no one has been able to answer the $64 question about the origin of his wealth.
Strangely enough, the Marcos family genealogy begins with Mariano Marcos and stops with him. There is no more information to be had about his forebears. Marcos’ Chinese features is dominant on his mother, the Edralin’s side. There are not that many Marcos’ and Edralin’s either.
They are unlike the Romualdez’s whose lineage can be traced back to a Spanish fraile. But there is also a dearth of information about the half-siblings of Imelda from her father’s first wife. It is as if they never existed. It is an open secret that Imelda never forgave her half-siblings for the pain and suffering she and her brothers and sisters went through under them.
Apo Lakay was no saint. He was charged with the murder of Julio Nalundasan. He was definitely guilty but then Supreme Court Chief Justice Jose P. Laurel had Marcos acquitted because he was in awe of his brilliance.
Julio Nalundasan
His war record was also spotty. Marcos would have been drafted into the Philippines Scouts because he was a member of the UP Vanguard. He was no stranger to myth-making. This was also why even if he already had four children with Carmen Ortega, he did not marry her. He was looking for the ideal political wife and that he found in Imelda who also needed a solution to the quandary she found herself in at that time. Columnist Joe Guevara carried this secret with him to his grave.
Marcos made it appear that his father was killed by the Japanese towards the end of World War II. But he was likely killed by guerillas who were close to the family of Julio Nalundasan and attached to the units of Col. Russel Volckmann’s guerillas under USAFFE-NL.
In mid-April, Ferdinand learned that his father Mariano Marcos, after months as a prisoner of Major Barnett, had been tried for war crimes and executed. It was not a simple execution. Barnett’s guerrillas—friends of Nalundasan—after interrogating Mariano and confirming that he had worked for the Japanese throughout the war, executed him by tying him to four carabao water buffaloes, which tore him limb from limb. They hung the pieces in a tree.
Mariano and Josefa Marcos with their children
Marcos entered politics by running for Congressman in the second district of Ilocos Norte. He served for three terms from 1949 to 1959. Marcos became chairman of the House Committee on Commerce and Industry and a member of the House Committees on Defense, Ways and Means; Industry; Banks Currency; War Veterans; Civil Service; and on Corporations and Economic Planning. He was also a member of the Special Committee on Import and Price Controls and the Special Committee on Reparations, and of the House Electoral Tribunal.
These were all choice committees and reflected Marcos’ close ties with the Ilocano President, Elpidio Quirino. It was easy to earn from being on these committees at the time when the Philippines had just been granted independence and was in the process of rebuilding the country fromt the ravages of Word War II.
To be sure, there were all the obvious sources. Among journalists, it was generally understood that some of the Marcos wealth came from the crooked sale of import licenses; from countless murky business deals; from his tobacco monopoly and other partnerships with Harry Stonehill and various international operators; from deals with Japanese and Chinese tycoons; from multinational kickbacks; from smuggling and racketeering with Chinese syndicates and Japanese Yakuza; from deals with American mobsters; and from a lion’s share of Philippine gambling proceeds. A large part certainly came from the U.S. government in the form of misdirected aid funds, detoured war reparations, inflated military base rent, sidetracked World Bank and IMF millions, and secret grants made by the White House as a means of high-level bribery. Another sizable portion came from confiscating the wealth of others and seizing businesses and properties. Every journalist could tick off other examples, such as land grabbing from hill tribes, then selling the land to multinationals, but nobody could rationalize more than $1 or $2 billion.
Let us face it. Politicians make money from government posts, one way or the other. It just depends on how much they want to make. Remember how GMA’s NEDA Secretary-General Romulo Neri reminded Jun Lozada to tell those involved in the NBN-ZTE deal to moderate their greed? As you can see, it is not only Filipino politicians who are corrupt as evidenced by the records unearthed in the Panama and Pandora Papers expose’.
Marcos was not the only politician who took advantage of the opportunities available at that time. Most of the rich families were focused on rebuilding what they lost during the war. Manila was the second most devastated city after Warsaw but the Americans still had the gall to blackmail the government officials into amending the 1935 Constitution to grant parity rights to Americans who still controlled the economy. The US was the in control of the whole region, together with the British and the French. There was no Marshall Plan for the Philippines similar to what the Americans put in place for the rebuilding of Europe. In fact, the Americans even dictated what the Japanese would pay in war reparations. The claim was for $8B. When the Treaty of San Francisco was signed in 1957 formally ending the Pacific War, the Japanese were only mandated to pay $800M.
So where did Marcos’ wealth actually come from?
What was tantalizing about Ferdinand Marcos was not whether he had $10 billion or $20 billion, but that most of it could not be accounted for. This was attributed to an enormous secret hoard of gold bullion. There were persistent reports that he had vaults full of diamonds and gold; stories of a gold Buddha weighing over a ton; rumors of incredible secret bullion deals in London, Hong Kong, Sydney, and elsewhere – the clandestine sales of 10 metric tons of illicit gold bullion at a time, much greater in aggregate than the known gold reserves of the Philippines. Periodically, the London gold market, the biggest in the world, stirred with fresh rumors of secret transactions called “Marcos Black Eagle deals.” The term Black Eagle originally referred to Nazi gold spirited out of the Reichsbank in Berlin just before the fall of Hitler’s Third Reich. Over $2.5 billion worth of gold and currency vanished, stolen by Russians and Americans and former Nazis, some of it trickling back later into the gold market. The deals of Ferdinand Marcos were also called “Black Eagles” because they were understood to originate similarly with Axis war loot— Yamashita’s Gold—and the loot was being marketed surreptitiously. Ferdinand had first become involved in the search after the war, when he claimed that he was called in by two Filipino laborers in a dispute with two former Japanese officers over a pit full of gold bars. Later, as part of President Quirino’s llocano political machine, he worked closely with the Japanese-American investigator, Fukimitsu, when he interviewed Japanese sources and dug through the Imperial Army archives—only to claim that he found nothing.
With the Japanese conquest of East and Southeast Asia had come loot beyond dreams. Gold and gems were confiscated from private citizens, churches, temples, monasteries, banks, corporations, and fallen governments—and from the gangster syndicates and black-money economies of each nation. After Korea and Manchuria, loot came from China, Indochina, Thailand, Burma, Malaya, Borneo, Singapore, the Philippines, and the Dutch East Indies; a vast hoard of jewelry, gems, gold Buddhas, bullion, public and personal treasure. Speculation over the years on the total worth of this war loot ranged up to 3 billion 1940s dollars—the equivalent of over $100 billion today. According to various postwar estimates, the amount of gold bullion alone was between 4,000 and 6,000 tons. These estimates were probably far too conservative, made at a time in the late 1940s when little was known and much was being covered up. We might arrive at a more accurate total if 6,000 tons was considered to be only the amount stolen or seized from legitimate sources including banks, adding to it a bigger sum in illicit or black gold, perhaps two or three times as much. What few people in the West grasped in the late 1940s was the amount of illicit funds, unreported assets, illegal earnings, criminal profits, black market proceeds, secret hoards of gems and precious metals, and other forms of black money that existed in Asia. After 1942, comparatively little of this loot actually reached Tokyo, perhaps less than a third. Most of it was thought to have gone no farther than the transshipment point of Manila, where its journey was interrupted by the war’s changing fortunes, and had to be hidden.
Some or others say most, of these war booty, never made it to Japan. Japan’s transition from the shogunates of the Samurai after it opened its doors to the outside world created a vacuum in the social structure. Samurai without masters were called ronin who were mercenaries. They were ostracized as dregs of society but were extremely nationalistic and devoted to the Emperor. They would become the Yakuza.
Descendants of the shoguns were the elite in Japanese society. They were largely responsible for Japan’s modernization and militarization because they went to the best universities and guaranteed places in government. Japan’s military was filled with yakuza members from different factions. One of them was Yoshio Kodama.
Towards the end of the Pacific War, Kodama was promoted to Rear Admiral in the Imperial Japanese Navy.
In March 1946, Kodama was arrested by the United States as a suspected Class A war criminal. He was held in Sugamo Prison with Ryoichi Sasakawa, where the two formed a long friendship. Kodama also formed a close relationship with fellow suspected Class-A war criminal (and future prime minister) Nobusuke Kishi. Since he had a lot of time, Kodama was able to keep himself up to date on current events and far-reaching political changes in East Asia in all available daily newspapers. He realized that the new democratic forces in Japan were weak, observing that “in the midst of all this rapid change, there is one thing which is lagging behind. This is parliamentary power.” While imprisoned, Kodama wrote Sugamo Diary (a chronicle of his experience in prison) and I Was Defeated (an autobiographical work).
Like many other alleged Japanese war criminals, Kodama was recruited by the US G-2 (Intelligence) under Charles A. Willoughby while in custody. In 1948, the US intelligence community was able to drop all charges against him on the condition that he would support all anti-communist activities of the G-2 CIC division in Asia. On December 24, 1948, he left Sugamo Prison as a free man and was never imprisoned again for the rest of his life. Kodama spent a total of six and a half years of his life in prisons. Kodama, being a right-wing ultranationalist, eagerly fulfilled his end of the bargain, using his fortune and network of contacts to quell labor disputes, root out Communist sympathizers and otherwise fight socialist activities in Japan. In 1949, the CIA paid him to smuggle a shipment of tungsten out of China. The shipment never arrived but Kodama kept the money.
In 1955, Kodama’s Sugamo Prison acquaintance Kishi Nobusuke, with the covert backing of the CIA, engineered the formation of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party with the merger of the Liberal Party and the Democratic Party. The new party’s leader and Prime Minister, Ichiro Hatoyama, owed his rise largely to Kodama. In the 50’s through the 60’s the CIA spent millions to support the LDP for intelligence gathering and make Japan a bulwark against communism in the region. Kodama was the “kuromaru” or fixer who served as the conduit for funds channeled to the political party’s from the CIA.
Sterling Seagrave’s posits the premise that Marcos got his hands on the maps by way of his encounter with the the two officers on the staff of Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi, the officer Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita left in Manila to ensure order after Yamashita declared it an open city to protect residents and the city itself from being the site of battle.
The two posed as the Filipino driver and errand boy of Gen. Yamashita but were actually Japanese and members of the Yakuza. It was likely that Marcos encountered Kodama in the mid-50’s after he became a “kuromaku” or fixer for the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan. It was an open secret that MacArthur employed Japanese “ultranationalists” or yakuza, to prevent the spread of communism in Japan after the war. The power structure still had the Emperor as the main figure in society but the military class was replaced by members of the the new political party’s which were organized with MacArthur’s approval and could be dictated upon by the Americans.
The Treaty of San Francisco, which marked the formal end of the Pacific War, was only signed in 1957. Marcos would become President eight years later in 1965. Japanese reparations were set at $550M as per the treaty and payable in installments of both cash, services and official development assistance.
Marcos developed close ties with the Japanese through his appointment of his UP Law classmate, Roberto Benedicto, as Philippine Ambassador to Japan. It was also at this time that Kodama was at the height of his power as kuromaru, controlling the LDP and determining who would become Prime Minister. One of Kodama’s trusted lieutenanants was Kakuei Tanaka who became Prime Minister in 1972.
Imagine how after the declaration of martial law in 1972, Marcos could finally move with the freedom and all the resources he needed to unearth the war loot the Japanese buried in the country. There may be a semblance of truth to the story that this is another reason why the Amercians wanted Marcos out. They wanted part of the gold as their share to use in financing covert activities against communism but I have it on good authority that the bulk of the gold was shipped out to China for safekeeping. It was to serve as the foundation of Deng Xiao Ping’s one country, two systems strategy for China’s industrialization.
Marcos with metallurgist Robert Curtis
But that, as they say, is another story.
In the meantime, the hunt for what many believe to be unrecovered treasures continue.
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