Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. top bills the reboot of his family’s Malacañang series, after fed-up Filipinos canceled his father’s original run in 1986. Even in their earlier years, historians say that Marcos Jr. played more than a bit role in Martial Law.

Many of the youth do not have enough knowledge on the Marcos dictatorship, more so of the role of Marcos Jr. and his sisters during Martial Law. They have expressed their interest in finding more about out this part of Philippine history.

Enter concerned youth like Karl Patrick Suyat and his group with initial solutions in accessing historical accounts about the Marcos dictatorship.

Memory will carry on

Suyat, a member of the Institute for Nationalist Studies (INS) in the University of the Philippines, wasted no time after Marcos Jr. led the results in the 2022 elections. Like many other concerned Filipinos, have been exhausting all means to oppose the reprisal of the Marcoses.

Suyat, together with his team, have released their Martial Law digitization project, which is an online archive of over 100 texts and related materials spanning the entire Marcos regime. Launching took place exactly two months since they started the project on May 10, or the day after the elections.

“How do you fight the Marcos historical distortion? Unearth the facts straight from the [past],” Suyat posted on social media.

Known as “Gunita,” the archives comprise of books, old newspapers, as well as documentaries and other films. The bulk of these were published between 1981 toward the end of the 1990s.

Such works serve to humanize the cold numbers: how 7,000 people were imprisoned, 34,000 were tortured, and 3,240 were killed during the Martial Law period, based on Amnesty International estimates.

In between buying and safekeeping the archive’s contents, the tedious process involved manually scanning each material from cover to cover.

“The project had an initial target of just preserving copies of Martial Law archives in case the incoming Marcos regime tries to obliterate them,” Suyat told Altermidya.

Former Bayan Muna rep. Satur Ocampo wrote in a June column that Martial Law archives may be in danger. This was after The Guardian reported how the Human Rights Violations Victims’ Memorial Commission is racing to preserve Marcos Sr.’s records of atrocities, namely personal accounts of the thousands of victims.

At first, Suyat only had books in mind. He was aware that the Bantayog ng mga Bayani earlier this year released their own similar archive with mainly publications.

“Through the course of this project, however, we also found ourselves procuring a lot of mosquito press publications and other archival material discussing the Marcos dictatorship, enriching both the preservation and the discussion of our archives,” Suyat said.

They’ve initially released the Gunita archives through Google Drive, which they will further disseminate through online networks and circles. However, they are still open to include more materials into the archives.

Write sins, not tragedies

Their fight in the digital front extends to more than just archiving Marcos-era works.

Suyat has also been participating in educational initiatives in other avenues like Twitter Spaces to continue the Martial Law discourse. This includes “A Genealogy of Marcos Children’s Sins,” an educational discussion organized by the INS. The institute similarly published a three-part online article series of the same name to more lengthily discuss the topic.

Through this effort, the INS offers a counterresponse to the dominant narratives planted by the ruling family. Although the new president was just a side character in his father’s dictatorship, he certainly had his own role to play, according to the educational discussion.

“The huge extent of Marcos Jr.’s active participation in his family’s criminal web is undeniable,” Suyat declared, narrating how the father’s crimes extend to his children. “Far from his repeated insinuation that he had no knowledge of the abuses under his father’s dictatorship, Ferdinand Marcos Jr. was a willing accomplice and beneficiary to the Marcos crimes.”

He mentioned how Marcos Jr., on top of being a tax convict himself, admitted that he had a hand in an attempt to withdraw $216 million from his parents’ illicit Swiss bank accounts in order to hide their stolen wealth.

Suyat added how Marcos Jr. sat in the board of the Philippine Communications Satellite Corporation (Philcomsat), a dummy for the Marcoses, and became the country’s biggest ghost employee. There, the dictator’s son earned a salary of $9,700 to $97,000 per month “even without official duties or reporting for work.”

In a separate interview, Ateneo de Manila University history professor Francis Gealogo said that we should relate Marcos Jr.’s participation in the Martial Law experiences of the Philippines with his other family members, “just to establish a pattern of familial consolidation of power.”

The mother, Imelda, was governor of Metro Manila. She was also Minister of Human Settlements, which deals with housing, food, health, sports, education, and many more. And not to mention, she was assemblywoman at the Batasang Pambansa, as well as many other unofficial functions like de facto top diplomat, cultural head, and dealmaker.

Meanwhile, his sister Imee was Kabataang Barangay chair, assemblywoman of Batasang Pambansa representing the youth, and eventually head of experimental cinema and other film-related activities.

“Bongbong was governor of Ilocos Norte and had several board memberships in some commercial entities, the most notable of which was Philcomsat. As a military reservist, he was also expected to participate in special operations, as evidenced by his fatigue-wearing stint when the family was ousted in 1986,” Gealogo said.

“We should consider this as part and parcel of dynastic rule entrenching itself and that prepared the family beyond martial law.”

Feel good inc.

The history professor said that Marcos Jr. ultimately took a cue from his father’s political playbook.

“He rode on the Marcos narrative and mythmaking strategy that started when Marcos Sr. was starting as a young politician. He also made use of historical distortions about his father’s regime that presented false narratives about the past,” Gealogo explained.

Unlike his father, however, Marcos Jr. “’campaigned’ without presenting any details on his platforms and programs of government.”

Suyat also quipped that the father was more brilliant than his son and had an actual degree, but not much was different in terms of their rise to power. He mentioned how the late dictator commissioned Hartzell Spence to write a “propaganda of a ‘biography’ for the 1965 elections, which was riddled with lies.”

The INS member likened this to Marcos Jr. using an army of propagandists consisting of the likes of Darryl Yap and Sangkay Janjan.

He agreed that the father and son both effectively used disinformation and propaganda as their “launching pads.” This was by all means allowed by Facebook’s “lax regulations on right-wing propaganda and disinformation [that] enabled the Marcos family to whitewash their criminal record.”

Aside from communication platforms, they also benefited from real-life events like former President Rodrigo Duterte permitting the dictator’s burial at the Libingan ng mga Bayani.
“But more than that: the system had always been rigged in their favor, as it was during the Marcos dictatorship,” Suyat analyzed.

“The Commission on Elections allowed itself to be a tool of the Marcos Jr campaign by dismissing his disqualification cases even when the cold facts are set. Lies laced with false nostalgia and hatred, as well as a rotten sociopolitical system, allowed the two Marcos men to brazenly steal the elections in their favor.”

In the end

Through “A Genealogy of Marcos Children’s Sins,” the INS hoped to drive home a single point.

This was that the Marcos children have a demonstrated history of denying and distancing from the very Martial Law they perpetrated.

“It allowed them to disassociate themselves from the Marcos dictatorship’s atrocities and plunder and to peddle themselves as the ‘reformed’ Marcoses. Their claim of not knowing anything about the dictatorship’s crimes pushed them to distort history without enraging much people—because, as old adage says, ‘the sins of the father are not the sins of the children,” Suyat said.

However, the INS posited that ironically, the reverse is true.

“Marcos’s crimes were his children’s, too, especially since they’re as remorseless and unapologetic today as their matriarch, the graft convict Imelda Marcos,” Suyat said.

Gealogo, meanwhile, only expects more injustice under the current Marcos regime. “We can anticipate more attempts at cover-ups and impunity given the systematic modes of historical distortion, increasing and intensifying consolidation of dynastic rule of his and his allies’ families, and more programs for the consolidation of foreign and dynastic rule in the Philippines,” Gealogo said.