" Fall of a Dictator " by Ron Centeno

On December 30, 1965, Luneta Park would become the bastion of Marcos’ debut as he delivered his inaugural message “A Mandate for Greatness.” Across the grandstand, Rizal must have been turning and tossing from his grave whose revered iconic statue was built to honor his patriotic deeds when the forty-eight-year-old newly elected president Ferdinand Marcos boomed it out before thousands of spectators. Ka Pepe once said, “Ang kabataan ang siyang pag-asa ng bayan.” So it seemed.

Unmindful of the tropical muggy temperature, Marcos, cool in his barong tagalog, “delivered an oration that was a paradigm of hypocrisy. The man who soon had his hand in the public treasury and who within a few years had handed over practically the entire economy to his cronies for plunder on this day condemned public officials who combine with unscrupulous businessmen to defraud the government and the public- with absolute impunity."

Alongside the president was his wife Imelda whose insatiable desire for anything of great value would promise that “Every form of waste-or conspicuous consumption and extravagance, shall be condemned as inimical to public welfare.” Equally, Marcos who would soon plunge his country’s judicial system into irrelevance called “upon all to join hands with me in maintaining the supremacy of the law.". And with that, the applause was loud, interrupting Marcos nineteen times. “It was a tour de force”, indeed.

When all was delivered and done, Marcos stunned his foreign guests, Americans in particular. Captivated, they summed up Marcos oratorical speech as “perfectly timed, ingeniously shaped, in a voice that must tritely be compared only to an organ.” They added, Marcos was “enormously intelligent, he was, tough, and he had guts.”

Fastforward, Marcos and his American patrons would form a friendship that would flourish until the day he would be deposed from power.



References:

Waltzing with a dictator. (1987). Raymond Bonner. Random House, Inc. New York; Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto

TO BE CONTINUED…