Imelda tried in New York

In their desire to return to power, the Marcoses and their publicists have been changing history. The Opposition, called the Yellowtards are using their version as the true story. This is not true. There were enough evidence and direct witnesses in Imelda’s Trial in New York to disprove the Marcos version.

While I agree with the Supreme Court on its decision that there was nothing “illegal” about burying him in the Libingan ng mga Bayani, I symphatize with the many who suffered and died during the Marcos regime.

It is also unfair to drag in President Digong into the controversy. He is not to blame.  He may have personal reasons for going by the Supreme Court decision.

What is true is that Aquino and his supporters want to remove President Digong and save their skins from charges of graft and corruption which is said to be even worse than what the Marcoses did in their time. By attacking Duterte they want to divert from the issue of the true version of what really happened  It is politics as usual. What is to be deplored is how we are sucked into a culture of impunity and that is true of the Marcoses and Aquinos.

Since I was in the Imelda Marcos trial in New York here are some paragraphs from my book “The Verdict” which tells why Imelda was acquitted despite the overwhelming evidence against her and the Marcos regime.

“Some Filipinos, especially the young, are not aware that Imelda Romualdez Marcos was tried and acquitted in a New York Court. That was in 1990. I was the Aquino government’s spokesperson in the trial and had a front seat witness to the, at times, bizarre proceedings.

When critics ask why she had escaped answering for the crimes committed during the Marcos dictatorship, she has a ready answer – “I was acquitted.” And that she proudly adds was in America where justice cannot be bought. The suggestion is that having been acquitted by an American court wipes away her guilt for the crimes the Marcoses were accused of.

I am writing this last book of a trilogy of Imelda’s story so more Filipinos know what that trial was all about. There were many factors that decided her acquittal but the most important was the venue. This is explained in the chapter Imelda is tried in New York. There are five chapters to the book: The Lopezes, The Affair, Imelda - The “richest woman in the world,” Imelda is tried in New York and The Unsolved Murder.

The trial skirted the crimes she was being accused of when she was First Lady of the Philippines by the legal imperative that she could only be tried for crimes she committed in the US. The legal term for the charges against Imelda in New York was called RICO, short for Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. It was directed against her acts of racketeering and the transfer of money from the Philippines to the US and how it was moved from state to state. The prosecution worked hard and presented as thorough a case as possible with some 360,000 documents and dozens of witnesses, some of whom were even flown from Manila. The prosecution’s task was two-fold. It had to prove that the money was the fruit of corruption in the Philippines before it could go to the issue of RICO in the US.

It might have taken nearly 50 years for me to put together the story of her trial in New York and the events that led to it but it was well worth the wait.

Her private and public personae were so interwoven it was not easy to separate the two obsessions and which of these should be blamed for her unhappy story. I tried to separate the two but in the end, I had to give up doing that. It was not possible to do so. The young girl from the impoverished province of Leyte remained in her even when the western press referred to her as “the richest woman in the world.” The money and the power were not enough for her to forget the hurt of her childhood in Leyte.

As she often said after the book had been written, that although she was prepared to accept she had once been poor, what she could not accept were the sordid details of the poverty. She could not bear remembering the details that she would have to relive so she tried to stop the Untold Story of Imelda Marcos. Most people thought of the book as nothing more than a Cinderella story. Only later did I realize that what never really left her was the memory of the failed marriage between her father and mother. Because of that bitter marriage, Imelda had to live in a garage with her mother until she died. This all happened when she was at the sensitive age of ten years old.

 The second book, Imelda Marcos: Her Rise and Fall, was written after the February peaceful revolution of 1986 that banished the Marcoses from Malacanang.

Imelda’s Cinderella-like story remained the spine of the story with a few chapters added to update the book for publication by St. Martin’s Press in New York. It tells of how she was destroyed by power and wealth to become a hated figure as the First Lady of the Philippines. She became known as the conjugal partner of the Marcos dictatorship.

 In this third book I have put together some facts and events that led to that fall.  Her media image of being “one of the richest women in the world” and coming from one of the poorest countries was the scandal.

The Untold Story of Imelda Marcos that became a cause célèbre before the declaration of martial law was almost an accident. I was led to it as if blindfolded not knowing what the consequences of writing it would be. It would change my life as it also did my husband’s and children’s. In the next 20 years we would live in exile in London.