Torture fighters from the Marcos date are shaken.
Survivors of the late Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos’ brutal regime have described his son’s apparent landslide presidential election victory as the result of deception and disinformation, warning that the billions stolen by his family are unlikely to be recovered, and that human rights will be weakened in the country.
According to an unofficial tally, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr won more than 30.8 million votes in a fractious presidential election on Monday. His vote total is more than double that of his closest rival, Leni Robredo, a human rights lawyer and current vice president who ran on a platform of transparency and good government.
Marcos has promised to heal the country’s political differences, pushing people to “judge me not by my forebears, but by my actions.”
Survivors of his father’s 20-year rule who were tortured, imprisoned, or had family slain have not been convinced by his message. It’s also unlikely to win over critics who want the family to repay the state for the large money it seized. A total of $10 billion was stolen.
The Marcos family and its allies have tried to portray Marcos Sr’s administration as a golden age of peace and prosperity. False statements about the family and its opponents have inundated social media, forcing journalists and academics to launch fact-checking projects.
Marcos Jr.’s demands for unity, according to Bonifacio Ilagan, coordinator of the Campaign Against the Return of the Marcoses and Martial Law, are “empty and self-serving as long as he does not address the essential problems about his father’s dictatorship, of which he was very much a part,” As a student, Ilagan was tortured and imprisoned, and his sister vanished.
“I, for one – and I believe I speak for many – will never accept a president who remains the head administrator of a plundering estate,” Ilagan added.
Crowds gathered in front of the Commission on Elections office in Manila on Tuesday to protest the Marcoses’ return, alleging wrongdoing and questioning why the results had appeared so soon.
Activists claim that Marcos did not run a fair campaign in each case. “He inundated social media with historical inaccuracies and refused to engage the media to answer the difficult questions that we wanted him to answer,” Ilagan said.
Despite the fact that Marcos Jr has denied any organized internet effort, he has been the primary benefactor of misleading claims floating on social media. According to an investigation by the fact-checking alliance Tsek.ph, which tracked misinformation in the run-up to the election, the majority of disinformation was either aimed to harm Robredo’s reputation or to enhance the Marcoses’ image.
Marcos and his running mate, Sara Duterte, daughter of President Rodrigo Duterte, “represent the worst brand of conventional politics and governance in our nation’s history,” according to Cristina Palabay, secretary general of Karapatan, a human rights NGO.
“The human rights crisis has spiraled under Duterte, with extrajudicial executions, arrests and detentions, forcible evacuation, and other human rights breaches, including violations of press freedom and freedom of association,” Palabay said in a statement.
Marcos has stated that international criminal court prosecutors will not be allowed to visit the Philippines to investigate Duterte’s “war on drugs,” therefore insulating him from prosecution.
Survivors of the Marcos era are concerned that the public’s perspective of the period would be further warped by online falsehoods. “Although there are now initiatives to try to put the proper version in the textbooks of the children,” said Doris Nuval, who was imprisoned for nearly five years under Marcos, the longest period of any female political prisoner at the time. “It’s just a sad fact that the young Filipinos won’t know what happened until after his tenure is through.”
“This [Marcos Jr] man has no sense of human rights,” Nuval stated. “I believe the human rights community will suffer the most,” she said of a Marcos presidency.
