The Fabulous Mythmaking of Imelda Marcos

On her 94th birthday in July, Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines, was feted with song and dance at the presidential palace in Manila. Social media buzzed with chatter about her attire (a red embroidered gown featuring her iconic butterfly sleeves), the guest list (an array of friends and family), and the music (her beloved Tagalog love songs).

Imelda Marcos is conspicuously absent from most of the pages of Go’s deftly written novel. Still, she pervades the narrative. The story unfolds in the form of letters Lito Macaraeg, the terminally ill protagonist, writes to his estranged son. Lito was once the chauffeur for a real historical figure, former Philippine President Corazon “Cory” Aquino. Aquino’s husband was an ex-senator who was slain in 1983 for opposing the Marcos dictatorship. Three years later, she was catapulted to power once the Marcoses had been ousted.

At the heart of the book is a long drive: Lito recounts a time when Aquino, retired and very ill, enlisted him to take her to Baguio, a city nestled in the Cordillera mountains. Lito suspects he is driving Aquino to a clandestine meeting during which she planned to forgive her long-standing adversary, Imelda Marcos.

In his missives, Lito, an autodidact well versed in history, grapples with his role in facilitating what he perceives as a morally ambiguous mission. He believes the Marcoses have done the country wrong and Aquino would err by pardoning the former first lady. At the same time, he thinks that forgiveness on Aquino’s part would be personally transcendent and cathartic. Forgiveness, he muses, is an “amazing quality that makes [Filipinos] so warm and openhearted, but also allows us to be abused, to be tricked, to be hurt, over and over again.”

The meeting between the two women never took place in real life. But through this imagined encounter, Lito contemplates his own failings, especially toward his son. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that Lito is not just questioning the morality of Aquino’s mission; he is also wondering whether he is worthy of his son’s forgiveness and hoping for his own redemption.

Go is a master storyteller who seamlessly threads Lito’s life story with the country’s history. Yet he sometimes stretches the limits of our credulity. Though Lito describes himself as a “poor, bumbling, bald high school dropout,” he casually uses words such as “synecdoche” and recites from memory verses penned by a 19th-century Jesuit poet.

And in using Aquino as the lens for reflecting on forgiveness, Go fails to acknowledge Aquino’s ambivalent legacy. In Go’s rendering, Aquino is a saintly woman seeking grace, but in real life, she was a more complex figure: She was both a democratic icon and heir to a vast sugar cane plantation whose family had resisted land redistribution. She also endorsed a brutal counterinsurgency campaign during which armed vigilantes terrorized communities believed to be sympathetic to communist rebels.

Yet memory—and trauma—cannot be completely erased. Some Filipinos have yet to forgive or forget, and I thought of them while reading Go’s novel. One such person is Jose Duran, a photojournalist whom I first met when we were both working as journalists after Marcos’s fall.

When Duran, now 70, was an aspiring 25-year-old painter studying at the University of the Philippines, he was deeply involved in the anti-Marcos underground. One night in 1978, intoxicated soldiers with assault rifles stormed his residence. This intrusion came on the heels of an election in which Imelda Marcos had led a slate of candidates to win seats in a newly created parliament. Marcos and her running mates triumphed over former Sen. Benigno Aquino, Corazon’s husband—then languishing in jail on political charges—and candidates from both the moderate and radical opposition. The election, tarnished by accusations of fraud, sparked protests. The regime’s response was a sweeping military crackdown, with many radicals, including Duran, imprisoned.

Duran was brought to the headquarters of the Military Intelligence and Security Group, notorious for the regime’s most brutal interrogators. There, he endured a week of nightly interrogations, where his unyielding silence prompted his captors to wind electric wires around his thumbs. The wires, connected to a field phone, sent shockwaves through his body with each crank. At times, the torturers would run wires across his forehead and face while amplifying the phone’s current. They played a game of Russian roulette with a gun pointed at his head. When forced to ingest excrement from a toilet bowl, Duran implored, “I can’t; just beat me up instead.” The interrogators obliged, their fists raining down on his abdomen, ribs, and head.

“They used me as a plaything, taking pleasure from my pain,” Duran reflected from his home in Long Island, where I visited him in August. (He immigrated to the United States in 2006.)

Following his release from prison, Duran and three other detainees testified in a 1978 court-martial. Although the officers who tormented them were initially discharged and sentenced to hard labor, two of them returned to service within a year, and were accused shortly thereafter of once more mistreating detained students.

After the regime fell in 1986, Duran became a lead plaintiff in lawsuits filed in Hawaii by some 10,000 victims of Marcos’s human rights abuses. In 1992, he stood proudly before a Honolulu court, offering evidence of the regime’s excesses and feeling a profound sense of relief on recounting his experiences. The court awarded the victims $2 billion from the Marcos estate. However, the Marcos family declined to pay, leaving the victims’ legal team to spend the next 30 years tracking their assets globally, a search that is ongoing.

During a friend’s wedding some 20 years ago, Duran unexpectedly found himself in the presence of one of his former tormentors, who was then a general. Approaching the man, Duran was inclined to think the past is past, and that maybe reconciliation would be possible. As their eyes met, Duran perceived a flicker of recognition, but the general promptly summoned his aide and exited.

Perhaps, Duran mused to me in his living room, he could find the grace to forgive the general. What about the Marcoses? “Unless they seek forgiveness, it’s hard to forgive someone who shows no remorse,” he said. “They stole money; they made us suffer. We need justice.”

Two generations have come of age since the era of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. They have no memory of the brutality of the dictatorship, only of the failings of the democratic regimes that followed. They are cynical about democracy and liberal elites who talk about good governance, human rights, and fighting poverty but have often failed to deliver any of these things.

Today, the Marcos name is etched into the fabric of the Philippines, adorning schools, highways, and museums. A town in Ilocos Norte bears the name of Mariano Marcos, Ferdinand Jr.’s grandfather. In Ferdinand Sr.’s birthplace, a statue of the deposed president stands alongside those of anticolonial heroes. In 2016, the dictator’s body was interred in the national heroes’ cemetery in Manila. Meanwhile, monuments built by the couple—brutalist structures that embody the grandeur of their “New Society”—are cited as their lasting legacy by supporters who believe the Marcoses were toppled by a U.S.-funded and Catholic Church-supported conspiracy of liberal elites.

Imelda has largely retreated from public view. She spends most of her time in a luxurious apartment in a Manila high-rise, partaking in Sunday luncheons with her son in Malacañang, the Spanish colonial-era presidential palace from where she and her husband ruled for 20 years.

When I visited a new presidential museum near Malacañang Palace in July, I was greeted by an outsized image of the Marcos family ascending the palace staircase in 1969.

“Take a look at that little boy,” the guide said cheerily, pointing to the young Ferdinand Jr. in the photograph. “He was only 12 years old at that time. Who would have thought that after 50 years, that young little boy would ascend the same grand staircase as the 17th president of the Republic of the Philippines?” She guided the visitors to his baby photos. “So cute and adorable,” she cooed, and the crowd oohed. The tour ended at the museum shop, where visitors purchased Ferdinand Jr.-branded memorabilia—umbrellas, T-shirts, clocks, tote bags, and hand sanitizers.

Few recall that in 2018, after a trial that took 27 years, a Philippine court found Imelda Marcos guilty of seven counts of graft and sentenced her to a minimum of 42 years in prison. She is out on bail, released by the judge on humanitarian grounds on account of her age, while her case is being appealed. She has not spent a day in jail, and it’s unlikely she ever will.

Justice, let alone remorse, seems a distant prospect. “Ours is a history of sorrow without clear redemption in sight,” Lito reflects.

Efforts to recover that history are up against decades of Marcos propaganda, the erosion of democratic institutions, and the shrinking of democratic space. But the still-fledgling effort to shed light on the dark era of dictatorship—of which works of fiction like Forgiving Imelda Marcos are an important part—should not be discounted.