The Conjugal Dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos “Lest we forget: “It was during his incumbency, as early as 1966, when documented rake offs from public works contracts reached into the millions, when he encouraged the proliferation of private armies and the smuggling by his political henchmen of high-powered weapons with impunity, when 26 Muslim ‘Jabidah’ volunteers were murdered in cold blood in Corregidor, when our Republic nearly got embroiled in a foreign adventure with a neighboring state to secure a ‘power of attorney’ granted by the heirs of the Sultan of Sulu to Mr. Marcos. “It was during his incumbency when our currency was debauched and devalued by an unprecedented 58% as a result of wanton election spending ‘overkill’ in 1969. Mr. Marcos squandered almost P900 million to reelect himself as per the findings of the Senate committee on finance. We are still hurting from that disastrous devaluation. “It was during his incumbency when despairing youth took to the streets to denounce his abuses and misrule, when several idealistic young demonstrators were mowed down in cold blood while some others were picked up during the night by agents of the law and disappeared forever. “It was during his incumbency when the prestige of the House of Representatives hit rock bottom with the revelation of scandalous fund transfers from Malacanang to finance and rig the elections of handpicked Marcos-type Constitutional Convention delegates. “It was during his incumbency that a Constitutional Convention was openly, flagrantly and shamelessly subverted with fat ‘payola’ envelopes, triggering a massive expos^ of lurid pay-offs in the very precinct of Malacanang. And when his Con-Con manipulations began to falter, Mr. Marcos declared martial rule, jailed the independent and opposition leaders who opposed his wishes in the Convention and rammed through a Marcos Constitution in record time. “It was during his incumbency when a few favored presidential cronies cornered billions of loanable funds of government financing institutions while the rest of the business community starved for capital, when the national economy teetered on the rink of near-total collapse as a result of massive graft and gross mismanagement and when, finally the Filipino lost his freedoms and the flame of liberty was snuffed, x x x”
Chapter IV A Dark Age Begins Along dark night for the Philippines was what Senator Benigno S. Aquino, Jr. perceived in the early dawn of September 23, 1972, as he was arrested by martial law enforcers at the Manila Hilton. The long dark night that descended on the Republic has now disgorged its monstrous two-headed offspring in the dictatorship of Ferdinand E. Marcos made conjugal by the consuming personal ambition of his No. 1 wife, Imelda Romualdez-Marcos. Marcos baptized the conjugal dictatorship as the “New Society,” and Primitivo Mijares
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