Today, Explained - Dictator Jr.

Episode Date: May 11, 2022

The son of repressive dictator Ferdinand Marcos was just elected president of the Philippines. All he had to do was rewrite his country’s history. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan and Victoria Dominguez, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Mounsey, and hosted by Noel King. CORRECTION: In a previous version of this story, our guest mistakenly said Ferdinand Marcos' body was flown from Hawaii to the Philippines in 2006. Marcos' body was returned to the Philippines in 2016. The incorrect date has been removed from the recording. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The last time a man named Ferdinand Marcos won a presidential election in the Philippines in 1986, there was overwhelming evidence that election was rigged. Filipinos were furious, they went out into the streets, and booted Marcos, who fled to Hawaii. 36 years later, Marcos redux. Unofficial results suggest Ferdinand Marcos Jr., widely known as Bongbong, will receive more than double the votes of his main rival, the outgoing vice president. Bongbong's father ran the Philippines as a dictator, rewriting laws, vanishing and torturing his opponents, stealing, among other things. Bongbong's running mate, Sarah Duterte Carpio, is the daughter of the current president, the volatile and some say unhinged, Rodrigo Duterte.

Coming up on Today Explained, how did these two win? Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Ashley Westerman, freelance reporter in the Philippines. You were covering that very big election this week. Who were the candidates that voters in the Philippines were choosing among? So, Noelle, it was actually a gigantic election. Good morning. It's May 9, election day here in the Philippines. Voting begins in an hour for more than 65 million registered voters. Everything from Senate seats, mayoral seats, and of course, the highest office in the land, the president.

And 10 people were running for president. It was quite a star-studded roster. It included an actor, a world-renowned boxer, and even, you know, a former Philippines police chief. But the two main frontrunners were current Vice President Lenny Robredo, commonly referred to as the opposition leader. Her party has not been in power over the last six years, and she has spent her time over the last administration constantly clashing with the current Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte. Her frontrunner competition was Ferdinand Marcos Jr., who's also known by his childhood nickname, Bongbong.

Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is the son of Ferdinand Marcos Sr., who was a dictator of the Philippines. What is his father's legacy in that country? Yeah, so it depends on who you ask, which is a new thing here in the Philippines. Huh? So Ferdinand Marcos Sr. was elected president in 1965, and he actually stayed president for over 20 years until he was ousted by the People Power Revolution in 1986. Now, how did he manage to stay president for so long? Well, in 1972, Marcos actually declared martial law. I have received hundreds and hundreds of telegrams from all corners of the Philippines

congratulating you, and incidentally me, for the proclamation of martial law, for the sudden cessation of anarchy. And that extended his rule beyond the at-the-time constitutional two-term limit. And this martial law was in place for years. And during the Marcos regime, you know, it's well documented that he abused his powers. He did things like detain political opponents and other dissidents. He curtailed and censored the press. Another sort of part of his legacy during this time was the economy.

This mostly agrarian nation is nearly bankrupt, losing not only money, but also its most valuable asset, its people. Where are you going tonight? I'm going to Dubai. Kuwait. You're going to Kuwait? Yeah, Saudi Arabia. Why can't you work here in Manila? It's the first purpose of going there, to this time, Marcos just racked up incredible debt. He was putting into place all these economic development projects, trying to pretend like he was, you know, doing something.

And the debt totaled like 30 billion U.S. dollars. And they're still paying it off today. So like more than 30 years later, it's crazy. Also, the family is accused of stealing as well from the Philippine people, 10 billion U.S. dollars. And so far, only about half of that has been recovered. In the end, Marcos was ousted on February 25th, 1986, which is a national holiday here. And that marks the day when millions, millions of Filipinos took to the street. And what is known as the People Power Revolution, like I said, or the Yellow revolution, overthrew the family and they went into exile. Ashley, did you talk to people during your reporting who remember the Marcos dictatorship? Yes, I did. I even have people in my own family who remember that time. Someone I did

speak with, she's a political scientist at University of Philippines, Diliman. Her name is Maria Ella Atienza. She was actually born the year martial law was declared. And she grew up in this province outside of Metro Manila called Batangas. I remember March where we did not have electricity. I also remember very poor roads at that time. And this is because the Marcos government was was not doing anything for the people. So it's probably no surprise that she thinks that the election of another Marcos is really, really bad for the country. But there's, you know, another take on the Marcos regime. Ferdinand Loretta, he's a businessman in Metro Manila and he runs a popular pro-Marcos Facebook group. If you were already alive during the time of Marcos, you wouldn't agree that there was

an abuse of authority or there was an abuse rule of Marcos. He spoke with my assistant, Bernard Couturio. Marcos is for peace. I don't see him as like the Hitler or I know. So he wouldn't let blood shed, no? What ends up happening then to Ferdinand Marcos Sr.? Well, as I mentioned before, his family was overthrown in 1986. They fled to Hawaii.

And you have to remember, Bongbong, his son, was not a child at the time. He was actually 28. You know, the former dictator, the father, ultimately died in 1989 in Honolulu after nearly a year of being in the hospital. He had various complications. It was several hours after Ferdinand Marcos died of a cardiac arrest before Imelda Marcos, tears streaming from behind her sunglasses, left the hospital with her daughter Irene and son Bongbong. His body was actually eventually flown back to the Philippines and he was buried in the Cemetery of Heroes here in Manila.

Bongbong returned in the early 1990s and he actually got back into politics. He's elected as a congressman. He was elected as a governor again. And he later, you know, became a senator. And he was a senator until he chose to run for vice president in the last election, so 2016. And he actually lost that race to the one and only Lenny Robredo. Okay, the woman who ran against him in this presidential election. So let's talk

about how he redeems himself, if at all. Is he a different kind of politician than his father? Yes, he is a very different type of politician from what I understand from the experts that I've spoke with. When he came back to the Philippines after exile, there was, you know, I've heard there was like no arrogance in him. He was just a politician. He didn't make a lot of noise. He really couldn't because the family, you know, had just been through everything it had been through. But he was also, you know, Noel, not a very effective politician. He had no real major accomplishments during his time in Congress. When he decides to run for president, what's his platform? So when Bong Bong declared his intention to run for president in October of 21, he said he wanted to unite the

leadership to lift the country out of the economic slump caused by the pandemic. I know that it is this manner of unifying leadership that can lead us through this crisis, get our people safely back to work, for all of us to begin to live our lives once again. But what is his platform? That's a really good question. And even though the election is over, we're still sort of asking that. So he had this message of unity, but it had very, very few specifics. I've done a lot of research. I've talked to a lot of experts. I've talked to a lot of people.

And, you know, there's just very few things that people can pinpoint that he actually like wanted to do, like a policy or a rule or a law or whatever. But somehow this very amorphous message of unity played well with millions of disillusioned Filipinos. I think the best way to sort of compare this, Noel, is Trump's make America great again message, right? Like it was very amorphous. There weren't a lot of details in it. And people could just like make up whatever they thought would make America great again. And I think that's exactly what happened here in the Philippines is there were no specifics to this unity message. Right. And so people could just imagine what he could do to to unite everybody and bring everyone together. What's been going wrong in the Philippines that would make a guy without a real platform, but with a vague message so appealing. Yeah, so the last six years have been very, very divisive.

Hitler massacred three million Jews. Now, there is three million, there's three million drug addicts. There are. I'd be happy to slaughter them. President Rodrigo Duterte is a loose cannon. He's crass. I would kill all your a**es, making the life of the Filipino miserable. He made a bunch of policy changes that a lot of people were just not on board with.

And it divided the country pretty badly. And I guess all Filipinos want is just to be united again. And the whole idea with Bongbong Marcos and his running mate, Sarah Duterte, who's the daughter of the current president, is that you have a family from the north, the Marcoses, and a family from the south, the Dutertes, and they're going to unite the country, right? And we're all going to get along again, and we're all going to get past COVID and get out of this economic slump, because we can all come together again under this, under the banner of this, of these two political dynasties.

Along the way during his candidacy, did Bongbong Marcos ever just say, I'm sorry for what my father did? No, he's never offered an apology. And if anything, he and other members of the family say they're being accused of things unfairly. There's no reason to answer these questions or address these accusations

because they're based on things that happened in the past. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Thank you. unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, R-A-M-P dot com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC, terms and conditions apply. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long.

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in which there are some people who always supported the Marcos family, and there are some people who always remember the time of the dictatorship and would never, ever support the son of the dictator. There are also people in the middle, people who are waiting to be convinced by a candidate. How does Bongbong Marcos go about convincing those people?

So it has been a decades-long effort for the Marcos family. They have been working on revamping their image ever since they were ousted. And, you know, over time, Noelle, this effort has evolved with technology and social media has helped them spread their message. Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, they're all over it. Marcos Jr. avoids journalists, preferring vloggers like Ruben Helio, who livestream, comment and post only positive messages about him. Do you think you're more powerful than the mainstream media following the campaign? I think so, because some of the media is so biased about Marcos.

And you have to remember that the internet in the Philippines is social media. It is Facebook. Everybody is on Facebook, period. It is their internet. And giving the Marcos's such a platform to write, distort, justify, and even straight up deny well-documented claims against them really, really changed the game for them. You've been living in the Philippines. Can you tell me what you've seen as part of the rewriting of history? There is a lot out there. Facebook posts, TikToks, YouTube videos. And what's crazy is that it's also written,

created, and pushed by a lot of different people. So I can't tell you exactly who is doing this for them. And to be clear, the family has never denied that they were trying to reshape their image. So there's that. But, you know, it's everyone from, you know, PR firms to freelance designers to click farms to people who were just like passionate Marcos supporters. The fact checkers rounded up the most shared disinformation and the results show that among the top disinformation narratives are about martial law. Mainly that no critics were jailed during martial law. Details of martial law victims are nothing but rumors.

That Marcos ushered in the country to the modern world. The ecosystem of this campaign is very piecemeal and very horizontal. So you can't point your finger at one person and be like, stop doing that, because a lot of people are doing it. Some of the posts, you know, seem believable. There's this image on Facebook that's gone around, and I found it in a group called Marcos Legacy. It's an image of Ferdinand Marcos looking thoughtfully, and the text says, if I stole money from the people, why the Philippines is richest country next to Japan during my,

it says regimen, but it means regime. So, like, if you don't fact check that, you know, it could be believable. I'm looking at the picture. It's very compelling. Right. But then it's like not really about whether the Philippines was as wealthy as Japan during his regime. That's not what it's about. Right. It's about denial of stealing some 10 billion dollars from the Philippine people. And it's about misdirection. And so you have stuff like that, and then you have straight-up conspiracy theories. And one of the most popular ones that I have heard over and over and over again is Ferdinand Marcos Sr. did not steal $10 billion from the government, from the Filipino people.

But that Ferdinand Marcos was given tons of gold from some secretive royal family. The Philippines is the richest nation on earth. The wisest royal bloodlines on earth. I've heard people in the street tell me this theory, which of course has been debunked by multiple experts and fact checkers. But the story exists out there. It's out there and people are repeating it and repeating it. And then on the flip side, you know, you see lots of posts and videos slamming or peddling misinformation about Bongbong's rival, Vice President Lenny Robredo. She's been red tagged as a communist and has, you know, virtually had her

very real political record somehow erased in all of this. Ashley, you mentioned that you have family in the Philippines and that you've talked to them about the election. I mean, this was only 35 years ago or so, the dictatorship. Why is this misinformation working so well on a population that surely has some memory of Ferdinand Marcos Sr. and the terrible things that he did? That is a question that journalists like me are still trying to answer. One really interesting thing is that Marcos seems to be drawing supporters from both ends of the age spectrum. So Marcos drew in a lot of young people, and that was also showing in the polling before the election. And when I say young people, I mean like 18 to 40.

So some of these people never went through martial law or his father's regime. And the image that he portrays on social media is that he's, you he's a cool guy he's like the cool dad who like doesn't get into politics because like how can you get into politics if you don't attend any presidential debates or do any media interviews and so if you don't get into politics and you can't be blamed for anything right and it's sort of like set him up for this image that he's somehow like above it all and he's just like super cool. Are you really the real Bongbong Marcos? And then I don't know if this is you or your staff. Somebody said, no, actually, I am Thor. And that social media campaign to bring back the family's image that

I spoke about. It doesn't help young people understand what really happened during the dictatorship. It actually works against a real understanding of it. Now, what is sort of like nobody has quite figured out is why older people seem to have changed their mind about what happened during the dictatorship. No one's really sure if it's just like cognitive dissidence or if they're just not using their personal experiences when filtering in all this information that they see on social media. I mean, it is truly bizarre, and no one has quite figured out why that happened. But there is one other thing that is important here, Noel. The Philippines is a very familial place. Young people listen to their elders. Families live together for a really long time.

There are generational households here. Family is very important to Filipinos. And so when an older person says, oh, well, you know, the Marcos regime wasn't that bad. When they tell that to younger people, the young people are going to believe that. And so it's like a perfect storm of all of these things that seems to have, you know, propelled Marcos to the presidency. So crucially, the Philippines is a democracy. Was this a democratic election? So far, we have no reason to think that it was not a democratic election. People are buying the results. Obviously, the people who didn't want him to win are the ones making the most noise. So for example, there was a small rally near the Commission on Elections.

And, you know, people there were upset about, you know, various things. How much Marcos seemed to have beaten Lenny by. The thousands of votes that didn't get counted because of the malfunctioning voting machines. And they were also, you know, upset about how quickly the votes came in because they were talking about how bad the internet is here in the Philippines. And there were also other smaller protests around the country, but nothing major yet. So again, it's a little bit too early to tell. And, you know, the votes for president are still being officially counted and they won't be certified by the Senate, at least until the until the end of the month. Is there credible fear that he might take the country back to what it was under his father, where there was martial law, where the rulers opponents could be imprisoned, detained, tortured?

What's the real fear here? Bongbong Marcos is a very, very different politician than his father. It's a different world. The Philippines democratic institutions, while comparatively young to like a country like the United States, you know, they have been building and improving over the last 30 something years, right? So he's operating in like an entirely different world than his father. And there are predictions about what Bongbong Marcos will be like as a president. Experts believe that there might be more corruption, there might be more nepotism. A big fear is that he'll put all of his friends and

cronies into high positions in the government and potentially get rid of all of the investigations into his family because nobody has really been brought to justice yet when it comes to what happened during his father's regime, right? People are also afraid that he is going to, and he has said that he said as much, he's going to continue President Duterte's controversial and deadly drug war. It's killed thousands of people. I think really what's at the heart of this, you know, Noel, is why are people so afraid of Bongbong Marcos whenever they've had six years of Duterte. And really the way that it's been explained to me is that Duterte had six years. Six years to roll back things here in the Philippines and six years to cause trouble.

The Marcoses had 20. Their influence goes well beyond President Duterte's, and that scares people. And if you think about the collaboration between those two political dynasties, you could potentially get something that we've never, never seen before. And that's what people are very, very afraid of. The rest of our team includes Halima Shah, Hadi Mawagdi, Victoria Chamberlain, and Avishai Artsy. Welcome, Avishai. Also, my co-host, Sean Ramos-Firm. Our supervising producer is Amina El-Sadi. Vox's vice president of audio is Liz Kelly Nelson. We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder and Noam Hassenfeld, and we are distributed to public radio stations across the U.S. in partnership with WNYC. I'm Noelle King. Today Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. you