The most shop-worn joke in Manila was that the Philippines had spent “three hundred years in a convent, fifty years in a brothel.” The oligarchy kept the keys.
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When asked about the enormous wealth that she and Ferdinand had amassed, Imelda once quipped, “Some are smarter than others.” It was more than just a catch phrase. Ferdinand Marcos was beyond question a genius.
As a man who understood what Washington wanted, he and the White House had a courtship of favors. With America’s blessing, Manila under the Marcoses became a center for money-laundering, arms trafficking, narcotics, amphetamines, gambling, white slavery, and the world center for child prostitution. The false specter of a Communist takeover, always made to seem imminent, and the exaggerated threat this posed to U.S. bases, were used to maintain a dictator who equally served American business and international organized crime. The Pentagon once added $300 million to its $500 million base rent merely to placate Imelda. The American general who negotiated this bloated deal then became the head of the Manila branch of the CIA-backed Australian bank where the Marcoses illegally deposited some of their money, including what may have been a sizable tranche of Yamashita’s Gold.
Ferdinand Marcos may yet earn a place in history as an extraordinarily gifted politician who gave his countrymen what they really wanted in a leader, and still had the energy and the cunning left to swindle the people who helped put him there. If his kidneys had not failed him, the dynasty he founded might have become a permanent fixture.
What urge compelled him to keep accumulating wealth beyond any possible use for it? After $10 or $20 billion, what was the point? Unlike Imelda, who could always find some bibelot on which to lavish a few hundred million, Ferdinand seemed completely disinterested in spending it. He never missed a chance to extort a few million more, even from the transhipment of sardines that were well beyond their shelf life. Perhaps the act of getting away with it gratified some burning need to prove that he was a superman of Nietschean proportions. But was he the organ grinder or the organ grinder’s monkey?
Hernan Cortés, in the midst of looting the Aztec civilization, melting down its marvelous objects in gold, burning its books, and demolishing its temples stone by stone, paused to offer Moctezuma a word of explanation. “I and my companions,” he said, “have a disease of the heart which can be cured only by gold.”
Perhaps Li Ma-hong could explain. His tunnel is still there, and it leads to strange discoveries.