Unrepentant

Sen. Bongbong Marcos had an artful answer when asked about the Presidential Commission on Good Government’s recovery of the remaining $29 million (about P1.3 billion) of the multimillion-dollar Swiss bank deposits stashed away by his father, the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

“These cases about the recovery of the so-called ill-gotten wealth, hindi na kami nag-aappear na riyan because it’s really between the claimants and the Philippine government. Sila ngayon ang nag-uusap riyan. We have not really been involved in those cases for many years already.”

From a legal, technical standpoint, of course that’s true. Once the Swiss Federal Supreme Court decided in 1997 to return some $680 million from the Marcos accounts to the Philippine government provided the government was able to comply with two conditions, the Marcoses were effectively out of the picture. In the intervening years—as the money became stuck in bank vaults due to the competing claims of rights abuse victims during martial law, Marcos’ dummy foundations, and the Philippine National Bank, which the Philippine government had designated as the trustee of the fund—the welter of convoluted legal maneuverings seemed to have only helped the Marcoses distance themselves from the bank accounts marked by their fingerprints.

The Swiss court’s two conditions were that a Philippine court should rule with finality that Marcos’ Swiss funds were ill-gotten, and that part of any money recovered from the accounts should compensate martial law victims. Both have been complied with. In 2003, the Supreme Court ruled that everything in excess of the Marcoses’ total legal income from 1965 to 1986 was ill-gotten. And in 2013, President Aquino signed the Human Rights Victims Reparation and Recognition Act; last Thursday, after a year’s delay, he finally constituted the Human Rights Victims’ Claims Board that would administer the money for the claimants.

The Singapore court’s decision to release the $29 million to the Philippine government makes particular mention of Marcos victims who had won a 1990s US court ruling awarding them nearly $2 billion in damages from the Marcos estate—that while the court rejected their claim to the money, awarding it instead to PNB, the decision would “not in any way deny the moral claims of the human rights victims,” and that they “deserve redress for the grievous wrongs that they suffered.”

To put it another way, no matter how hard the Marcoses may now wash their hands of this issue, the fundamentals of the case go back to one incontrovertible truth: Their family is guilty of presiding over the plunder of the nation’s coffers and the death and maiming of tens of thousands of Filipinos. While the money from the Singapore bank in fact represents the last tranche recovered from all known Marcos Swiss accounts (around $687 million in total), some $6 billion more of the strongman’s estimated ill-gotten wealth remain unrecovered.

The Supreme Court had pegged the Marcoses’ total legal income for 21 years, from 1965 to 1986, as not going beyond $304,000. Anything else above that is considered ill-gotten. And yet, no forfeiture case against the family has so far prospered, outside of the Swiss accounts that were litigated in foreign courts. All local cases against the Marcoses have resulted in dismissal, or years of immobility in the often corrupt, labyrinthine byways of the justice system.

The extended reprieve the Marcoses have enjoyed, their moment of accountability postponed for over two decades now, has resulted in grievous damage to the nation. A new generation of Filipinos has grown up ignorant of the excesses and brutalities of martial law; worse, quite a number of them now trumpet the idea that the Marcos era was an idyllic time of clean streets, glamorous edifices, a crime-free society and a prosperous economy. Who can blame them? They see the Marcoses back in power—preening, unrepentant, unruffled by the occasional denunciation by this or that angry remnant of a bygone time—and what idea do they get?

That if the Marcoses’ thievery were indeed true, then it pays to steal big. Successive governments would make incompetent spectacles of themselves trying to recover the money for decades, and they wouldn’t even get half of it. The Marcoses, meanwhile, and everyone else who take to heart their example, can live off their amassed wealth with neither regret nor apology—thanks to a public that so easily forgives and forgets.