Instructive picture

VP HOPEFUL Controversial politicians (from left), former first lady and now Ilocos Norte Rep. Imelda Marcos, Manila Mayor Joseph Estrada and Sen. Juan Ponce Enrile (right), raise the hands of Sen. Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos. Bongbong declared his vice presidential bid during a proclamation rally in Intramuros, Manila, on Saturday. RAFFY LERMA/INQUIRER

THAT THE Philippines is the land of the strange and the surreal—of women who give birth to fish and lawmakers who propose laws to ban typhoons—is once again reaffirmed with that truly remarkable picture of Sen. Bongbong Marcos joined onstage by former president and now Manila Mayor Erap Estrada, Sen. Juan Ponce Enrile, and his mother, former first lady Imelda Marcos, as they endorse his bid for the vice presidency in the 2016 polls.

The truly discerning would have heard some odd cosmic noises rising to the surface when that picture first began making the rounds of social media—first, the snickering of the rest of the world at the incredulous spectacle of the family that, not too long ago, ran the Philippines to the ground being allowed to make a comeback of any sort on the political stage, and apparently without having to bat a single remorseful eyelash; and, second, the mass disruption that must have occurred underground as Ninoy Aquino, Jose Diokno, Edgar Jopson and some 30,000 other victims of the Marcoses’ martial law collectively turned in their grave and gnashed their teeth at the sight.

The sheer breadth of the plunder, corruption and official wrongdoing represented on that stage by the assembled foursome would appear to have no equal in the world’s annals. There, first of all, are the Marcos mother and son, heirs to an estimated $10 billion of illegal wealth looted from the treasury of the Philippines, which they have continued to flaunt with their high living and repeated runs for office, but for which they have, time and again, refused to apologize. Imelda herself has claimed that a raft of local business institutions from Meralco to PLDT to virtually whole industries of the economy are hers and her family’s; but she has yet to stay a day in prison for such willful, on-record admissions of unexplained wealth.

The Marcos son, meanwhile, has invariably feigned ignorance about the excesses of his father’s rule, denying not only the documented deaths and/or disappearances of tens of thousands of people who were cut down by Marcos’ military machine—in 1999, he even called them greedy and only after the money (“Basta’t  may  pag-asang  magkapera,  nagaaway-away  na  sila,” as he put it)—but also the billions stashed in Swiss bank accounts in his parents’ names. But, as Raissa Robles had reported in the South China Morning Post in 2011, Bongbong “had a direct hand in trying to withdraw $200 million from a secret family bank account with Credit Suisse in Switzerland.”

Which means the son’s protestations of cluelessness are hogwash. He remains committed not only to perpetuating the whitewash of the dark, violent chapter his father had visited on the country, but, more sleazily, he has no compunction wallowing in the money his family had robbed from the Filipino people, whom he now thinks are dense and bovine enough to forget—so soon—the crimes associated with his surname, and thereby make him their VP.

There’s Erap, too, raising Bongbong’s right hand—the first president impeached from office and convicted of plunder, who should have been expiating in prison for his crookedness while in Malacañang but for the Machiavellian pardon granted him by another widely perceived corrupt president.

And there was, wonder of wonders, Juan Ponce Enrile by Bongbong’s left side, the man who had instigated the rebellion leading to the People Power Revolt that would drive the Marcos family, his former bosses, out of the country. But that’s getting ahead of the story. Enrile was also the defense minister reported to have faked his own ambush to give Marcos another pretext for declaring martial law. Enrile was among the Marcos cronies seen to have amassed extensive hidden wealth, but, unlike them, he could switch sides at opportune moments to ensure that he survived.

And so he has—even now, just recently getting eight Supreme Court justices to release him from incarceration on plunder charges because he is supposedly too old and too sick to be in prison. A joke, of course—he marched back to the Senate upon release, and is now back not only on the campaign hustings, but also in the bosom of the Marcoses.

Everything you need to know about our greatest fault as a people is in that picture—principally, our inability to be angry for long at wrongdoing and wrongdoers, and to levy justice on them so that others of the same stripe would know that crime does not pay. That picture is an indictment of Marcos et al.’s sense of impunity—and of our own hand in enabling them.