-Caveat Lector- an excerpt from: The Marcos Dynasty Sterling Seagrave©1988 Harper & Row, Inc ISBN 0-06-015815-8 out-of-print --[1]-- Prologue A DISEASE OF THE HEART BROKEN MASTS of sunken ships stuck up out of Manila Bay like a burned-out pine forest when I first arrived in the Philippines as a boy at the end of World War H. Ferdinand Marcos was then a young lawyer with a reassuring grin preparing to make his first run for Congress and his first million dollars, and Imelda Romualdez was a barefoot high school girl on the island of Leyte. Manila had been flattened by American artillery at the bitter end, but the fine old Manila Hotel on the bayfront seemed miraculously intact, some said because General Douglas MacArthur was a director of the hotel and had a penthouse on its roof; and over on the banks of the muddy Pasig River, where the bloated bodies of dogs drifted by on their way to the South China Sea, Malacanang Palace was unscathed, a sprawling Spanish colonial hacienda in the midst of its own walled park. I made many other visits as a journalist over the years while Ferdinand and Imelda rose to power, secured the beginning of a dynasty, became arguably the richest couple on the planet, then in 1986 took what used to be called French leave, climbing tearfully aboard American helicopters with suitcases full of dollars in the time-honored tradition, heading-without yet realizing it-for exile in Honolulu, as mobs outside worked up the courage to storm the gates. The phenomenon of "People Power" took the overthrow of Ferdinand and Imelda out of the hands of ludicrously incompetent rival military factions; nuns stopped armored personnel carriers (everyone thought they were tanks) by kneeling in their path to say rosaries; and pretty girls blocked soldiers in battledress to poke flowers down the muzzles of their assault rifles. There was a lot of weeping and singing, and in the midst of this great passion the knees of the renegade defense minister Juan Ponce Enrile were shaking so badly he could hardly stand up. Although he wore a flak jacket and carried an Uzi, and had a bodyguard of colonels and majors, when he passed through the crowds his real security was provided by a flock of nuns. Under the Marcoses, Malacanang Palace had changed. Beneath its shady balconies there was now a "Black Room" where very special political prisoners were tortured. In addition to the three thousand pairs of shoes Imelda left behind, Filipinos searching the palace basement found her bulletproof brassiere, which could bring a tidy sum in auction at Christie's. Manila also had changed. It was once a gracious city and may be again. But along the bayfront in the five-star tourist hotel district of Ermita facing the U.S. Embassy, little boys and girls age six or seven now plucked at the shirttails of tourists, offering to perform oral sex for a dollar. Among the most popular tours of the Marcos era were sex junkets for pederasts. As novelist P. F. Kluge observed, the Philippines had become "America's fellatrix. >From the heights of power-when they were fawned over by diplomats, bribed by an American president, paid off by the Pentagon, and indulged by the World Bank-Ferdinand and Imelda crashed into a public plight so demeaning it was pitiable. Under what amounted to modified house arrest in Honolulu, they appeared before television cameras like King Lear and his clown, wringing from the audience equal parts of sympathy and astonishment. In his humiliation, launching one desperate plot after another to regain the throne, only to have his most secret conversations taped and made public by men with fewer scruples than he, Marcos and his dynasty became a joke. Why, then, were we persuaded to take him seriously for more than twenty years? Was there some kind of game being played in which we ourselves were the unwitting fools? The answer, unfortunately, is yes. Despite the blizzard of stories and TV interviews that followed the Marcos downfall, the public airing of Imelda's black lace underwear, and the revelations of grand larceny on both their parts, I found the Marcos saga deeply unsatisfying. What the Marcoses had done was clear-at least in broad outline-but not why they did it, what drove them to such extremes, and who helped them gain power and hold on to it so long. Among the press disclosures there were hints of Marcos' ties to underworld figures from America, Europe, Australia, China, and Japan; and there were reports that Ferdinand had been involved in peculiar gold bullion transactions with reputable bankers, statesmen, military men, and gold merchants. The sums mentioned totaled hundreds of tons of bullion, perhaps thousands of tons, far more than the Philippine gold reserves. Had Marcos actually found Yamashita's Gold, the legendary Japanese booty from World War 11 stolen from a dozen countries? As I began to trace the secret bullion transactions, the real story of Yamashita's Gold unfolded in a totally unexpected manner. The facts and personalities were radically different from the legend and far more sinister, if that is an adequate word. Backtracking the trail of Ferdinand's involvement with the buried treasure, I was led eventually to a group of American generals, admirals, and former CIA officials operating as a shadow force of Paladins in world affairs-some of the same superpatriots identified with the Iran-Contra arms scandal, the Nugan-Hand Bank scandal, and other CIA misadventures. This tracing of Yamashita's Gold also led to a cabal of powerbrokers in Tokyo known as the kuromaku, the men behind the black curtain, whose wealth and leverage mysteriously survived Japan's defeat in World War II, emerging even stronger than before. These men-the Japanese kuromaku, the CIA Paladins, and Ferdinand Marcos—were all interlocked. What puzzled me most about the Marcos story was the way Ferdinand was consistently portrayed as just another Third World politician, cleverer than most, who clawed his way up and then went bad-as if he suddenly appeared in the world at age forty-three. Everything before that was uncertain. Nobody knew much about Ferdinand Marcosabout his real origins, where his money came from, who his backers were, how he came to have an iron grip on America's only colony, and what made him so attractive to the White House, the Pentagon, and the CIA. Over the years, Marcos avoided such questions and provided a selfflattering version of his life to biographers. They portrayed him as the superbright child of a poor but honest family in the north, a brilliant young lawyer who became the greatest Filipino resistance leader of World War II and the most decorated soldier in the U.S. armed forces, next to Audie Murphy. Unless you read several of these books about Marcos closely and noticed the discrepancies, there was no way to tell that his life was an ingenious work of fiction. To be sure, his campaign biographies were written by respectable journalists, including the Filipino editor and publisher Benjamin Gray, and the bestselling American author Hartzell Spence, who for many years had been the editor of the armed forces journal Stars and Stripes and was widely admired in the Pentagon. It was Spence more than anyone else, with his military background, who gave the heroic Marcos legend a ring of validity when his biography For Every Tear a Victory was published in New York during the Philippine presidential campaign of 1964-65, which first carried Ferdinand and Imelda into Malacanang Palace. The Spence book was widely distributed to American newspapers and magazines, to embassies, and to U.S. government agencies. It was not clearly recognized that Marcos had tailored some information for the occasion. While some readers may have been suspicious, the mood in New York and Washington at the time was preconditioned to support Marcos, as the latest proxy brought forward in years of CIA manipulation in Manila, and as part of LBJ's desperate maneuvers to save face in Vietnam. Soon the most respected journals in America were repeating the gospel according to Spence, quoting long passages or summarizing his assertions as if they were palpable facts. After that, who was to challenge the authenticity of the Marcos legend? Ferdinand learned a lot about presidential politics from Lyndon Johnson's example, as he had learned much from Douglas MacArthur about enhancing a military career. While MacArthur kept a public relations team busy full time identifying him as the hero of Bataan (to the private disgust of Dwight Eisenhower), President Johnson invented a grandfather who died heroically at the Alamo. Johnson then had no difficulty enlarging a minor incident in the Gulf of Tonkin into an excuse to escalate the Vietnam War. The same President Johnson had no problem praising President Marcos for faked heroics in Bataan, and did not hesitate to offer Marcos an open purse to back his Vietnam policy. Many years later, several journalists finally gained access to longhidden documents in the National Archives that exposed the fakery of the Marcos war record. They discovered that his claims had been investigated by the U.S. Army after World War 11 and were found to be false and "criminal." But these U.S. Army findings were tucked away for thirty-five years by the Pentagon, which resisted every effort to exam me them, quite possibly with the approval of the White House or even at its instigation. Three presidents of the United States-Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan-publicly commended Marcos for wartime acts of valor that had been denounced repeatedly in the Philippine Congress over the years as sheer fabrication. The Marcos war hero fraud was ignoble enough, but Washington's apparent readiness to cover it up and capitalize on his vanity was far more cynical. For these and many other reasons, the truth about Ferdinand Marcos is all the more interesting for what it reveals about others. It was easy to ridicule him after he fell from power, but he was really only a reflection; the insincere smile, the false heartiness, the watery mollusk eyes, the jaundice and puffiness of kidney decay, all looked disturbingly familiar. "While he lasted," a U.S. military attache in Manila told me, "he was our boy. He was us. Maybe he still is." Only after the fall was it generally agreed that there was something fishy about him all along. The answers to Ferdinand Marcos are bound up in the secrets of his childhood. There had always been rumors that he was illegitimate, but after centuries of Spanish colonial rule illegitimacy was not unusual among prominent people in the islands. The identity of Ferdinand's real father was well hidden and, in a place where tempers can be fatal, the persistent rumors were difficult and dangerous to verify. It was commonly accepted in Manila that his biological father was a wealthy judge in the province of Ilocos Norte, a man of Chinese descent who had paid the boy's way through law school, identified only as Ferdinand's godfather and friendly benefactor. Whenever Ferdinand mentioned such matters in his biographies, he assigned a name to his godfather that was completely misleading. Nobody realized that the identity of the judge was of special significance. According to Ilocano sources close to the family, as well as respected journalists in Manila whom I have put to a lot of trouble, and several members of the old Marcos inner circle, Ferdinand's real father was not just a Chinese magistrate but a leading member of one of the six richest and most powerful clans in the islands, a billionaire clan involved in the daily financial, commercial, and political transactions that are the lifeblood of the islands. Because of their clannishness and their control of the economy, Chinese in the Philippines are both despised and envied. The leading clans (mostly natives of Fukien Province on the mainland opposite Taiwan) were traditional and conservative, and maintained close ties over the decades to the Chiang regime in Nanking and later in Taipei. Once the stature of Ferdinand's father was confirmed, a number of other riddles were solved: How young Ferdinand eluded a murder conviction in his schooldays. How a place came to be waiting for him in a brotherhood Filipinos referred to as the Ilocano Mafia, whose prewar enterprises were said to include smuggling, extortion, black marketeering, and murder-for-hire. And how, after the war, Ferdinand became a young congressman with extraordinary connections in the Chinese financial world, using his position in Congress to extort large sums from Chinese businessmen. The leverage of his father's clan enabled Ferdinand to ally himself secretly with agents of the Chiang regime, with Japanese underworld syndicates, and with some big-time American operators. His constituency soon floated like a huge jellyfish through the islands, trailing its tentacles everywhere. Seen as a literary character rather than as a politician, Ferdinand Marcos occupies the rare and engaging role of the arch swindler, con man, survivor, and poseur, a role that has fascinated writers from Homer to Thomas Mann. For such men discovery is the unkindest cut, so some compassion is in order. In Asia, lying to strangers bears none of the social stigma attached to it in the West. When Chinese are asked about their background, they usually invent one to suit the occasion. So do the Burmese, the Thais, and the Malays. It is a venerable tradition to lie to protect the truth, to protect one's ancestors, one's family, and one's fragile psyche, not to mention one's neck. It is not lying, but the creation of a fiction that will gratify the interrogator, which-on reflection-is really an act of courtesy. Borrowing freely from others, the young Ferdinand Marcos created an entirely different identity for himself, a much happier one than his own, in which he was the hero, the boss, and the driving force. When he decided to go into politics, he went public with this fanciful legend, and used it to build a remarkable international career. In doing so, he was different from other charlatans only in the matter of degree. His success grew out of his resourcefulness, the gullibility of his audience, and the venality and opportunism of Washington. When she married Ferdinand, Imelda did not suspect that she was tying herself to a consummate actor whose backstage life was drastically different. She did not know, for example, that he already had a common-law wife, and that he was already the father of three. A simple provincial naif, Imelda suffered at his hands a string of nervous breakdowns that transformed her into a relentless Filipina Medea, the enchantress who helped Jason gain the Golden Fleece but whose methods were frowned upon in polite society. Once Imelda grew used to the idea of falsification, she plunged vigorously into reconstructing both their histories. In his mother's hometown of Sarrat, Imelda rebuilt the Marcos "ancestral home" to create a museum. The original house was only a simple storefront. When she was finished, it was a fine hacienda complete with air conditioning and exhibit cases containing Ferdinand's shortpants from preschool days and assorted medals he never earned, including a U.S. Congressional Medal of Honor adorning a Marcos mannikin. She did the same for herself, buying and remodeling one of the grandest houses in Manila, referring to it thereafter as her childhood home. In Tacloban, on the island of Leyte, she built a monument to herself, christening it the Santo Nino Shrine. Everyone in Tacloban called it "the Imelda Shrine." Set in a formal garden shaded by royal palms, the $30 million pink concrete palace looked like the box her shoes came in, furnished by someone who thought the Romanovs ordered Faberge eggs by the dozen. The guest suites contained elaborate dioramas, creche scenes depicting immortal moments in the First Lady's life: Imelda bestowing the wonders of modern technology on her "little brown people"; Imelda with Mao Tse-tung; Imelda with Muammar Khadafy. These miniatures were how she wanted to be remembered, not for three thousand pairs of size 8-1/2 shoes, five hundred size 38 brassieres, and two hundred size 42 girdles. On the second floor was a grand ballroom for imperial receptions. Silver his-and-her thrones sat before a faintly erotic floor-to-ceiling oil painting of Imelda rising from the sea like a Botticelli Venus. Beside the thrones stood the celebrated Santo Nino of Pandacan, a two-foot-tall ivory figure of Baby Jesus, dressed in the gold brocade damask cape and seven-league boots of a Spanish conquistador. On a more curious note, by the entrance to the throne room there was another shrine, tucked away in a corner, celebrating the mysterious origins of Ferdinand Marcos—a life-size statue of the Chinese pirate Li Ma-hong, who tried to establish his own dynasty in the Philippines in the sixteenth century. Ferdinand often hinted darkly that he was a direct descendant of Li Ma-hong. Since nobody knew he was 75 percent Chinese, they thought he was admitting to having the morality of a pirate. To understand the peculiar grip Ferdinand had on the Philippines, it is first necessary to see why the Chinese occupy such an important position there. Chinese had been coming to the islands in small numbers since before the tenth century, while the Vikings were sacking monasteries in Europe. A few traders settled along the coast of Luzon, bringing with them silks, ceramics, metals, and mirrors to exchange for gold with the lowland Malays and mountain tribes like the terracefarming Igorots. They maintained a modest trading link with Amoy, Canton, and Hainan, which were only a few days away by junk. When Ferdinand Magellan anchored off Cebu in 1521, he found a scattered world of Malay stilt villages and fisherfolk living in aquarian harmony. Each community consisted of a few hundred people headed by a datu, or chief. Magellan was slain by warriors led by Datu Lapu-Lapu, and his crew completed the first circumnavigation of the world without him. It was not long before a flood of Spanish priests and conquistadors arrived in the islands to put matters right. The Philippines grew rich on New World silver from Mexico. A small number of Spaniards in Manila (rarely more than a thousand) sent galleons filled with Chinese goods to Acapulco, where these luxuries were eagerly received, and the galleons returned to Manila laden with precious metals. After the Spanish traders in Manila took their cut, the rest of the silver and gold went to China to pay for its products, through Chinese middlemen in the islands. In this way, Manila became an important Chinese financial center as early as the sixteenth century. Around each Spanish settlement grew a support community of Chinese, who provided everything needed in the tropics, including energy. The way the Chinese handled their gold and silver and moved it around the Orient from Amoy to Hanoi and the Indies was never fully understood by the Spaniards, or any Westerner who has come to the islands since. But merchants were not the only Chinese attracted to the islands. In 1574, three years after the Spanish moved their base from Cebu to Manila Bay, a squadron of Chinese corsairs—sixty-four war junks and three thousand men under Li Ma-hong—assaulted Manila and torched the town. Unable to drive the Spaniards out of their fortress, Li sailed north to Sual Bay, where he built a fort of his own and started a Chinese colony. A few months later, along came the Spaniards in what amounted in those days to hot pursuit. Three hundred angry conquistadors and twenty-five hundred easygoing Malays laid siege to Li Mahong's fort, burned his fleet of junks, and kept the Chinese bottled up for months till their provisions ran out. Li was no fool. He had his men dig a tunnel to the sea, and one moonless night he slipped away, leaving the islands to the Spaniards. Or so it seemed. The Philippines, like other Spanish colonies, became a theocracy. Its administrators were less interested in heavenly estate than in real estate. As friars arrived and set about converting Malays, they acquired immense landholdings. In time, priests controlled twenty-one gigantic haciendas around Manila. These Spaniards were fearful of the Chinese because of their incomprehensible language and customs, their greater numbers, their ambition, their financial acuity, their capacity to endure hardship, their secretiveness, and their clannishness. They put a ceiling on Chinese immigration, restricted their movement, confined them to Manila ghettoes, and barred them from citizenship or direct ownership of land. Periodically, Chinese were massacred. Most Spaniards, like the Chinese, came to the islands without women and made temporary arrangements with Malay girls, producing prodigious numbers of illegitimate mestizo children. Fortunately, Chinese mestizo children were not considered Chinese. Raised as good Catholics by their Malay mothers, they could come and go at will, own land, and engage in business, more or less as Malay Filipinos did. However, since they had access to Chinese credit and often inherited their fathers' business sense, Chinese mestizos were in a much better position to buy property, and to act as middlemen or moneylenders, which gave them exceptional leverage. Ordinary Malays foolishly but naturally tried to emulate their Spanish rulers by throwing pig roasts on feast days, christenings, confirmations, weddings, or any other occasion that came along. Without cash, in a rice and fish subsistence economy, they had to borrow money from the Chinese, using their traditional land as collateral. When the debt could not be paid, the land was forfeited. By this indirect form of extortion, more and more land came under the ownership of Chinese mestizos. The original Malay landowners became mere tenant farmers in their own country. For Spanish mestizos there was a different path to wealth and power, Lacking the business sense, energy, and credit system of the Chinese, they turned to the professions, primarily to the law. Using the law, they enlarged their personal landholdings by entangling the original Malay owners in costly litigation. Any native Malays who had not already forfeited their land to the grasping Iberian friars were soon caught between the money squeezing of the Chinese mestizos and the legal squeezing of the Spanish mestizos and were turned gradually into a nation of serfs. In 1896, the mestizos turned on their pure-bred Iberian masters and plotted revolution. The Spaniards responded by arresting and executing the wrong man-the celebrated poet and novelist Jose Rizal, who had remained aloof from the conspiracy. His barbaric execution drove the whole country into rebellion. The rebel general Emilio Aguinaldo waged an effective military campaign against the Spaniards. Treachery always proving to be more effective than combat, the Spaniards offered Aguinaldo 800,000 pesos, to be paid in three installments, if he would leave the islands. Planning to trick the Spaniards and use the money to buy arms, Aguinaldo accepted the first installment and went off to Hong Kong, where the Americans found him the next year in somewhat shortened circumstances. He had spent all his money to buy weapons from a Japanese agent provocateur named Toyama Mitsuru, founder of the secret ultranationalist Black Ocean Society. After taking the money, Toyama claimed that the shipload of weapons from Japan had sunk. The intervention of America at this point was less than praiseworthy. The United States now stretched from coast to coast, its frontiers were settled, a depression was eroding confidence, and politicians were looking for a diversion. A crusade against Spanish colonial oppression in Cuba and elsewhere seemed convenient. Chronic meddlers and robber barons went to work with the help of legions of Potomac jingoists. War became inevitable with the sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana in February 1898. In Hong Kong, Yankee agents struck a secret deal with Aguinaldo, returned him to the islands, and supplied him with weapons. They carefully avoided putting any commitments in writing. While Aguinaldo resumed fighting the Spaniards, President McKinley sent Admiral George Dewey and the Pacific Fleet into Philippine waters, followed by a convoy with ten thousand Yankee soldiers. On May 1, 1898, Dewey defeated the weak Spanish fleet in Manila Bay without the loss of a single man. Onshore, Aguinaldo's rebel forces gained control of all the countryside except Manila, and he declared independence on June 12, 1898. Filipinos became the first Asians to throw off European colonialism. It was instantly replaced by American colonialism. Aguinaldo was tricked by the Americans into yielding his positions around Manila to Yankee soldiers. This enabled the Yanks to stage a sham battle with the Spaniards and to accept the surrender of the city for themselves, as an American war prize. Only then did Aguinaldo realize that the ten thousand Yankee soldiers offshore were not there to help him. In Vice President Teddy Roosevelt's view, Manila would become an American Hong Kong. Others at home feared that Yankee blood would be mingled with that of "Malays and other unspeakable Asiatics." Admiral Dewey also advised keeping only Manila, and giving the rest back to Spain. But President McKinley insisted on having all the islands, describing his decision to Methodist churchmen: I got down on my knees and prayed to Almighty God for guidance. And one night late it came to me: we could not give [the Philippines] back to Spain- that would be cowardly and dishonorable; we could not turn them over to France or Germany ... that would be bad business; we could not leave them to themselves-they were unfit for self-government. There was nothing left for us to do but to take them all ... then I went to bed and slept soundly. The successful Filipino revolution lay directly in the path of that irresistible American force called "benevolent assimilation," composed of equal parts Springfield rifle and apple pie. The Treaty of Paris ceded the entire archipelago to the United States. Although Washington claimed it had won the islands by conquest, no conquest had taken place and $20 million was paid to Spain as part of the Paris settlement. Independence had been sold out. Meanwhile, the U.S. Army was fighting Filipinos instead of Spaniards. Many American officers were veterans of the Civil War and the Indian Wars. To them Filipinos were "Niggers" or "Goo-Goos." By 1900, two thirds of the entire U.S. Army was tied down fighting in the Philippines. The My Lai of this first U.S. guerrilla war in Asia occurred on Samar Island. Back home, President McKinley had just been assassinated and a company of U.S. soldiers in Samar was holding a memorial service when guerrillas disguised as women entered the church and attacked the Yanks with bolo knives, killing fifty-nine and wounding twentythree. General Jacob Smith vowed to turn Samar into "a howling wilderness," and proceeded to do so. (It has never recovered.) Said he, "I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn: the more you kill and burn the better you will please me." His men went on a rampage, with orders to "kill everyone over the age of ten," burning whole towns, torturing and slaughtering unarmed men, women, and children. Major General Adna Chaffee advised reporters not to be sentimental about the death of "a few Goo-Goos." It was an ugly war and American soldiers wrote home about it: Last night one of our boys was found shot and his stomach cut open. Immediately orders were received from General Wheaton to burn the town and kill every native in sight, which was done to a finish. About one thousand men, women and children were reported killed. I am probably growing hard-hearted for I am in my glory when I can sight my gun on some darkskin and pull the trigger.... Tell all my friends that I am doing everything I can for Old Glory and for America I love so well. As we approached the town the word passed along the line that there would be no prisoners taken. It meant we were to shoot every living thing in sight-man, woman or child.... Dum dum bullets were used in the massacre, but we were not told the name of the bullets. We didn't have to be told. We knew what they were. On top of war, by 1902 the Philippines was crippled by famine. Wealthy landowners decided that some things were more important than independence, and threw their support to the Yankees. When America passed a law that any Filipino who continued to resist would be ineligible for a job in the colonial civil service, the middle class defected. Fighting ceased. Washington claimed victory and the American public put the whole unsavory affair out of mind. The war had lasted three years; only 883 Americans died in battle, 3,349 more of disease. Of the 1 million dead Filipinos (out of a population of 6 million), 16,000 were guerrillas, 984,000 civilians. In place of Yankee soldiers came missionaries and teachers. Benevolent assimilation entered its apple-pie stage. William Howard Taft, weighing in at 300 pounds, was sent to head the first civil government in America's sole colony. This unique colonial experiment began with a declaration of principle, in language recalling the oratory of Tom Paine: ... the Commission should bear in mind that the government which they are establishing is designed not for our satisfaction or for the expression of our theoretical views, but for the happiness, peace and prosperity of the people of the Philippine Islands ... that the people of the Islands should be made plainly to understand, that there are certain great principles of government ... essential to the rule of law and the maintenance of individual freedom ... and that these principles and these rules of government must be established and maintained in their islands for the sake of their liberty and happiness, however much they may conflict with the customs or laws of procedure with which they are familiar. Other great principles of government soon interfered, however. Taft was instructed to investigate the titles to large land tracts held by individuals or religious orders, and to correct any abuses. But the White House had to take into account the Vatican's influence on Catholic voters in America. Church lands in the islands were not seized after all. As a compromise, the Vatican agreed to substitute non-Spanish and Filipino priests for the hated Iberian friars, a rotation that posed only a minor inconvenience to the Church, and in return America purchased seventeen of the twenty-one friar haciendas around Manila from the Vatican for over $7 million. In a single grand public display intended to put the whole land reform issue to rest once and for all, these haciendas were sold in tiny parcels to former tenants, at a ruinous 8 percent interest rate far beyond their means. To meet interest payments, the Malay purchasers again had to borrow from Chinese moneylenders, soon forfeiting their land once more. Corrupt local officials helped divest unschooled farmers of their property, and by 1946, after half a century of enlightened and democratic American rule, the tenancy rate in the Philippines was actually higher than it had been under the feudal Spaniards. A Jesuit priest who spent thirteen years in the dehumanizing poverty of pre-revolutionary China came then to the island of Negros, the sugar capital of the Philippines, and was horrified to find it worse. "I never saw [in China] the exploitation of man by man," he said, "that I have seen in the Philippines." The government in Manila became a genial collaboration between ambitious Americans and rich Filipino landowners. Four hundred mil lionaire families controlled 90 percent of the wealth. At their center were forty billionaire families who rivaled the great fortunes of Paris, London, and New York-the Rothschilds, the Mellons, the Rockefellers. Sugar generated many of these fortunes in a perverse way. Philippine sugar, so inefficiently produced that it could not compete on world markets, was allowed to enter the United States duty free. In return, Washington was guaranteed the support of a powerful political-economic bloc in Manila which mediated all issues with Filipino peasants and the middle class. Sugar barons held political power while Chinese clans controlled high finance. Of the top ten Chinese clans in this inner group of forty billionaire families, Ferdinand's clan ranked number six. Outside Manila, provincial dynasties developed-such as the Laurels in Batangas, the Aquinos and Cojuangcos in Tarlac, the Quirinos and Crisologos in Ilocos Sur, the Lopezes in the Visayas—which formed temporary alliances to further their political ends. Unlike America, where the great industrial monopolies were broken up in the 1930s and "trust busting" has continued ever since, these corrective measures were never dispatched across the Pacific and implemented in America's colony. So the wealth of the Philippines remained in the tight grip of a few hundred families. In concept, this oligarchy was rigidly medieval in the Spanish model, but under America they became masters of insincerity. Democracy was only a well-oiled pretense. The most shopworn joke in Manila was that the Philippines had spent "three hundred years in a convent, fifty years in a brothel." The oligarchy kept the keys. When asked about the enormous wealth that she and Ferdinand had amassed, Imelda once quipped, "Some are smarter than others." It was more than just a catch phrase. Ferdinand Marcos was beyond question a genius. As a man who understood what Washington wanted, he and the White House had a courtship of favors. With America's blessing, Manila under the Marcoses became a center for money-laundering, arms trafficking, narcotics, amphetamines, gambling, white slavery, and the world center for child prostitution. The false specter of a Communist takeover, always made to seem imminent, and the exaggerated threat this posed to U.S. bases, were used to maintain a dictator who equally served American business and international organized crime. The Pentagon once added $300 million to its $500 million base rent merely to placate Imelda. The American general who negotiated this bloated deal then became the head of the Manila branch of the CIA-backed Australian bank where the Marcoses illegally deposited some of their money, including what may have been a sizable tranche of Yamashita's Gold. Ferdinand Marcos may yet earn a place in history as an extraordinarily gifted politician who gave his countrymen what they really wanted in a leader, and still had the energy and the cunning left to swindle the people who helped put him there. If his kidneys had not failed him, the dynasty he founded might have become a permanent fixture. What urge compelled him to keep accumulating wealth beyond any possible use for it? After $10 or $20 billion, what was the point? Unlike Imelda, who could always find some bibelot on which to lavish a few hundred million, Ferdinand seemed completely disinterested in spending it. He never missed a chance to extort a few million more, even from the transhipment of sardines that were well beyond their shelf life. Perhaps the act of getting away with it gratified some burning need to prove that he was a superman of Nietschean proportions. But was he the organ grinder or the organ grinder's monkey? Hernan Cortes, in the midst of looting the Aztec civilization, melting down its marvelous objects in gold, burning its books, and demolishing its temples stone by stone, paused to offer Moctezuma a word of explanation. "I and my companions," he said, "have a disease of the heart which can be cured only by gold." Perhaps Li Ma-hong could explain. His tunnel is still there, and it leads to strange discoveries. pp.1-15 --[cont]-- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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