Ferdinand Marcos
Ferdinand Marcos ruled the Philippines for twenty-one years and left with an estimated ten billion dollars. He was a lawyer's son from Ilocos Norte who was convicted at twenty-one of murdering his father's political opponent and argued his own appeal to the Supreme Court, which acquitted him. He claimed a war record of extraordinary distinction leading a guerrilla unit against the Japanese, and American army records later showed most of it to be fabricated. He was elected president in 1965 on infrastructure and rice self-sufficiency, and re-elected in 1969 in the most expensive and violent campaign to that date. Barred from a third term, he declared martial law in September 1972 on the pretext of a communist insurgency and a staged ambush of his own defence secretary. Congress was closed, the press shut down, and some 70,000 people were imprisoned, 34,000 tortured and 3,200 killed by the later reckoning of Amnesty International. The economy was run as a system of monopolies handed to friends — sugar, coconut, tobacco, construction — financed by foreign borrowing that took the debt from under a billion dollars to 28 billion. Imelda Marcos built hospitals and cultural centres and collected property in Manhattan. The murder of Benigno Aquino on the airport tarmac in 1983 began the end, and the People Power demonstrations of February 1986 finished it. They were flown out by the Americans to Hawaii, where he died in 1989. His son was elected president in 2022. The recovery of the money has been running since 1986 and has retrieved perhaps a third of the estimate. The family returned to Philippine politics within a decade of the exile, and the historical argument about martial law is now conducted largely on social media by people born after it.
- Lived: 1917 CE – 1989 CE
- Nationality: Filipino
- Roles: dictator, president, head_of_state
