MOMENTS IN PHILIPPINE HISTORY: THE MARCOSES’ IGNOMINIOUS FLIGHT FROM MALACANANG PALACE
By: Jay de Leon

At the United States’ invitation and offer of a safe haven, the Marcoses fled the Philippines in American helicopters on February of 1986, bound for Hawaii. Thus ended one of the darkest chapters in Philippine history.

The first gate crashers entered the Malacanang Palace gates that very evening. It must have been an eerie, surreal feeling not only being inside the Palace itself, but finding it abandoned and unprotected.

In a documentary on Imelda Marcos shown on public television, part of the footage touches on this event. A camera crew actually captured scenes of the first occupiers of Malacanang Palace right after the Marcoses fled.

There are camera shots of young men and women just gleefully running about the palace rooms and halls, like children at an amusement arcade. Occasionally, they would pause to gawk at some curiosity, like some painting, art object, and of course, Imelda’s wardrobe.

Imelda Romualdez Marcos’s shoes have now entered the realm of folklore. To be exact, Imelda Marcos had five thousand pairs of shoes in her closet. What is not common knowledge is that the shoes were simply matching accessories for thousands of dresses, gowns, suits and formal ternos that were specially tailored for Imelda, mostly by her favorite couturier, Pitoy Moreno.

President Ferdinand Marcos and wife Imelda
at Pres. Marcos’s first presidential
inauguration in 1965.

The few hours before they were picked up by helicopters, Imelda and family spent several hours feverishly packing. But of course they did not pack what ordinary mortals like you and me would pack for an overseas trip. They had to pack rooms filled with cash, jewelry, art objects and important documents.

Many of the jewelry and art objects were still in their original cases, so to maximize the packing space and lighten their load, they had to extract the jewelry and art objects from their original cases and throw them into luggages. The camera crew actually found piles of these discarded cases on the floor of the Palace bedrooms.

One of the most eerie finds was in the presidential bedroom itself. There they found a dialysis machine and some medication for Marcos’s kidney condition, called lupus.

The Marcos bedroom in Malacanang Palace.

I remember taking a trip to the Philippines not long after this. Malacanang Palace was open to tourists, and you could actually view Imelda’s shoes, clothes, handbags and other accessories. I thought that bordered somewhere between the comedic and the macabre. I remember wrestling with the decision to go on that tour or not. As a historian, I thought that I had to personally experience and see proof of one of the most wasteful and incongruous consumption in the world.

Visitors view a portrait of Ferdinand Marcos in a
Tarzanesque pose, after Malacanang Palace was
opened to the public after the Marcoses fled.

My tourist urges won over my historian calling, and I probably went shopping at one of the mini-malls with my nephews. As a result, I am now unable to give you an eyewitness view of Imelda’s shoes and clothes.

Ironically, many years later after returning
to the Philippines, Imelda Marcos opened a
fashion boutique that included, of course, shoes.

Imelda’s extravagance was not limited to clothes, shoes, jewelry, art objects and various knickknacks. Imelda also built many buildings in her avowed goal to further the cultural agenda of the New Society, leading several Filipino pundits to accuse her of suffering from an “edifice complex.”

The US helicopters deposited the Marcos party in Honolulu, Hawaii. The US Customs Service actually detailed an inventory list of the loot the Marcoses actually brought with them on that flight.

The sad part was that all this extravagance was but a drop in the bucket for the tab for the Marcos New Society. In addition to looting the national treasury, Marcos saddled the Philippines and future generations of Filipinos to come with approximately thirty billion dollars of debt. The money was funneled to Marcos cronies and family members.

As of this writing (2005), almost twenty years after the Marcoses’ ignominious flight from Malacanang, the court cases against the Marcoses are still winding down the Philippines’ Sandigan Bayan as well as several international courts.

Ferdinand Marcos died on Sept. 28, 1989 in Hawaii.
His remains were buried there for a while, returned to
the Philippines and is now buried in a refrigerated
crypt in his home province of Ilocos Norte, Philippines.

A second generation of Marcoses is now in political power. Several clichés come to mind. Does the fruit fall far from the tree? Along the same vein, though, is it too much to hope that the children inherited their father’s political genius, and might actually do some good for the Philippines?&

Just as when the Filipino people elected Ferdinand Edralin Marcos as the 11th President of the Republic of the Philippines way back in 1965, hope springs eternal.

Questions:

Where do you think is the Marcos loot?

Do you expect the Marcos children to do political good?

Where were you and what do you remember about this particular event?