Jena Deguzman, 64, owner of a restaurant in Cavite, on the southern outskirts of Manila, does not budge: Bongbong Marcos, known as “BBM”, the son of the ex-dictator and favorite candidate in the presidential election on Monday 9 May is “good for the country”. He will block the “leftists”, “at the NPA” (New People’s Army) – that is to say the armed communist guerrillas active for decades in the countryside but fleeing the fighting. The ” left “, it is “attacks, chaos”, believes this lady with graying hair. And then, the “left” are the “oligarchs”.
Mme Deguzman is no exception. Admittedly, politics in the Philippines is a matter of dynasties, which forge and untie alliances to stay in power. But associating them with the communist guerrillas which precisely fight the accumulation of wealth by a small elite is to say the least acrobatic. Mme Deguzman learns on YouTube. Or Facebook. The deaths of martial law under the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos (1972-1986), the billions of dollars looted that legal actions in the Philippines and the United States have linked to the Marcos family? “All of this is made up. There is no evidence, the Marcos were never thrown in jail,” she persists.
Disinformation in the Philippines has a hard time. Favorite in the polls, Bongbong Marcos, the son of the dictator who died in exile in Hawaii in 1989 after being driven out of the country three years earlier by the revolution of “power of the people” can hardly claim to have nothing to do with the reign of his father: he was appointed from 1980 to 1986 vice-governor then governor of the province of Ilocos Norte, the stronghold of the Marcos in the North. He also sat, for a fabulous salary, at the head of the country’s satellite operator, Telcomsat. Imee, the Marcos’ eldest daughter, a senator since 2019, was notoriously responsible under the dictatorship for carrying out an audit of the Marcos’ holdings in large companies hidden under nominees.
In 1986, in Hawaii, where the Marcos family welcomed by the Americans was under surveillance, Bongbong Marcos had been discreetly sent to the airport in order to use a public telephone booth to inform their Swiss banker that an intermediary had been appointed to carry out transactions on their behalf. But the banker had denounced the machination – which will lead to the blocking of Swiss accounts and the return to the Philippines of several hundred million dollars of looted money.
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