Sometime around the late 1980s, I traveled to the island of Calauit in Palawan. Ferdinand Marcos had gifted the island to his only son, Bongbong, and had populated the island with exotic animals from Africa.
After the People Power uprising deposed Marcos and the US airlifted the family to Hawaiâi in 1986, there was some concern about the zebras, gazelles and giraffes that had been abandoned there, and an ecological preservation project was underway.
But the island still reminded me of the excessiveness of the Marcos family, who had all but turned the entire country into their personal playgroundâa kingdom they would rule forever.
When I learned that Bongbong Marcos had won the Philippine presidential elections, I felt a flood of confusing emotions wash over me. Anger and depression, mixed with overwhelming nausea. I felt helplessâfor something that was out of my control. I felt a sense of failureânot mine alone, but shared with my entire country.
To understand how traumatic Bongbongâs victory is for those of us who lived through his fatherâs dictatorship, imagine a Spain with Francoâs family or Chile with Pinochetâs progeny winning national elections.
Jose Rizal famously warned us that âthose who refuse to look at where theyâve been will never move forward.â We studied his works in school ad nauseum but time and again, when I see whatâs been going on in our country, I realize his words have hardly sunk in. I have always suspected that our country is caught in an endless loop, a sinister MĂśbius strip where we are doomed to relive our nightmares over and over.
I am only 11 months older than Bongbong Marcos, so we belong to the same generationâthe lost generation whose formative years were spent under his fatherâs repressive regime. I knew of Bongbong as the privileged son who could easily receive an entire island to serve as his own private safari, while the rest of us struggled to make ends meet. But that was all he was, the countryâs spoiled but not especially bright brat. No one ever imagined him following his fatherâs footsteps. Today, some people imagine that Marcos 2.0 would be a benevolent, enlightened version of his father.
That may be wishful thinking. Bongbong has been quoted as saying that his fatherâs dictatorship was the âgolden ageâ of the country. Golden for whom? His family, no doubt, whose reign had the political and military support of the United States, and who are still alleged to have siphoned nearly 10 billion dollars off the countryâs coffers to their private accounts. Or their cronies, who benefited from his fatherâs largesse and the culture of corruption he had led. But not for the hundreds of thousands whose lives were destroyed, who were incarcerated, tortured, assassinated, or disappeared. Not for the millions of Filipinos who wallowed in deeper penury while his family hosted lavish festivals, mingled with celebrities, and lapped up mansions across the globe.
By denying his familyâs culpability and showing no remorse for the suffering the people had endured, he appears as deluded as his own mother, one-half of the rapacious couple who ruled by fear and terror during the martial law years, who had said, without a hint of irony, that she wanted her epitaph to read, âHere lies love.â
We can blame this landslide victory on voter ignorance, or a naĂŻve nostalgia for the past, or a desire for radical change. I understand when our political analysts say this is the result of decades of exclusion, of unkept promises, of frustration with the countryâs entrenched oligarchism. But to choose a dictatorâs son and hope he would make us ârise again,â as his campaign promised, contradicts everything our revered national hero had told us. We have moved backwards fifty years.
I have been researching on some of the major events that had shaped our country since the beginning of the 20th century and through the 21st for a new novel, and I am amazed at how resilient we always were, if not simply lucky. Our great-grandparents lived through the cholera epidemic of 1902, where over half a million died. World War I left us practically unaffected, and we quickly bounced back from the Great Depression, thanks to a thriving middle class. The Japanese Occupation was possibly the most traumatic episode in our history, three long years of excruciating suffering under a fascist power. This was followed, a couple of decades later, by the dark years of the Marcos dictatorship. We endured all that, and proudly picked up the pieces after. We remained hopeful that we would see the last of Rodrigo Duterte after his term (a hope that has proven false, alas), and we appear to be somehow managing to contain Covid 19, despite shoddy resources.
But another Marcos presidency? Led by a man who has shown no inclination to correct the wrongs done by his family? Who continues to delude himself and his followers about a fabled âgolden ageâ? Would he revisit his private safari in Calauit, and would it remind him of that golden age when his family was virtually omnipotent, their opponents either jailed or dead, their bank accounts awash with the billions they had bilked from us?
The Marcos dynasty might rise again, as Bongbong has promised during his campaign. I donât believe he will âsaveâ the country, but he will certainly save his fatherâs dubious legacy and continue to rewrite it until we get used to the lies, just as his father once tried to do.
It will be another dark chapter of our sad republic.