Imelda Marcos

Imelda Marcos: The Woman Who Built the Backdrop

On the afternoon of 25 February 1986, with two rival inaugurations under way in Manila and the army splitting apart, the First Lady of the Philippines stepped onto the balcony of Malacañang Palace and sang to the loyalist crowd below. By midnight she was on a plane to Hawaii with roughly eighty relatives and associates, gold kilobars in the luggage, one of them inscribed "To my husband on our 24th anniversary." The performance and the inventory are the two halves of Imelda Marcos, and neither can be understood without the other.

The Rose of Tacloban

Imelda Remedios Visitación Trinidad Romuáldez was born in San Miguel, Manila, on 2 July 1929, into the Romualdez clan of Leyte — prominent, political, and, from about 1932, broke. Her mother died of double pneumonia in 1938; her father moved the family to Tacloban that November as his law practice failed. She grew up speaking Waray, attended the Benedictine-run Holy Infant Academy, and later described the humiliation of apologising for late tuition. She graduated in 1948 with an 80 percent average, took an education degree at St. Paul's College in Tacloban in 1952, and studied music at Philippine Women's University on scholarship. In 1953 she entered the Miss Manila pageant and lost.

What she had learned by then was that beauty was a form of capital in a country that had very little other social mobility to offer a provincial girl with no money and a famous surname.

Eleven Days in Holy Week

On 6 April 1954 she met Congressman Ferdinand Marcos during a budget hearing; she was visiting her cousin Daniel, the House Speaker. The courtship lasted eleven days. He deluged her with flowers and pressed her to sign a marriage licence. On Good Friday, after a journalist teased her about becoming First Lady one day, she signed. They married secretly the next day and in church at San Miguel Pro-Cathedral on 1 May 1954. Ferdinand's common-law wife, with whom he had three children, was quietly removed from public view.

The One Million Vote Margin

Her political value became apparent immediately. She personally worked the 1,347 delegates to the Nacionalista Party convention until Ferdinand secured the presidential nomination on 21 November 1964, and by his own account she delivered "the one million vote margin he needed to win" in November 1965. Working-class Filipinos came to rallies, campaign strategists conceded, largely to see her; the signature terno gowns were a deliberate part of the image.

The Dovie Beams affair, in which an American actress produced recordings of her encounters with Ferdinand, humiliated Imelda publicly around 1970. Cabinet ministers who served through it — Cesar Virata and Gerardo Sicat among them — recalled that she used the humiliation as leverage to build an independent power base. As Ferdinand's lupus worsened, that base grew. She became first chairperson of the National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women in 1975, Governor of Metro Manila by presidential decree the same year, and Minister of Human Settlements from 1978 to 1986. When martial law was lifted in January 1981 and Ferdinand's health declined further, she effectively ruled in his place.

The Edifice Complex

Her instrument of government was construction. Critics named the habit the "edifice complex": grandiose, often Brutalist public buildings raised in impossibly short order as propaganda made physical. The Cultural Center of the Philippines, created by executive order in 1966 with Imelda as board chairman, rose on twenty-one hectares of reclaimed land along Roxas Boulevard; its initial ₱90,000 budget ended at ₱50 million. She called it "the sanctuary of the Filipino soul." The Folk Arts Theater went up in under three months so that Manila could host Miss Universe in 1974, for which she is reported to have spent ₱40 million renovating the city. Under the Ministry of Human Settlements came the Philippine Heart Center, the Lung Center, the Philippine International Convention Center, the Coconut Palace, the Manila Film Center and the Calauit Safari Park. The San Juanico Bridge linking Samar to her native Leyte, built with US$22 million in Japanese loans and completed on her birthday in 1973, was promptly tagged a white elephant built decades too soon.

Ambassador Plenipotentiary

Because Ferdinand hardly left the palace, she became something close to a de facto vice-president abroad. In 1966 Lyndon Johnson released US$28 million in Philippine war damage claims to her, US$3.5 million of it earmarked for the Cultural Center. She attended the Shah's 2,500-year celebration of the Persian Empire in 1971. In 1972 she opened "cultural missions" to the Soviet Union that ended in full diplomatic relations. After King Faisal's assassination she became the first woman honoured as a guest at the Saudi court. Appointed Ambassador Plenipotentiary and Extraordinary in 1978, she cultivated Richard Nixon, Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro and Tito, travelling to Iraq to secure oil and to Libya to broker terms with the Moro National Liberation Front. Of martial law, declared on 23 September 1972, she said it was "martial law with a smile."

The Fall, the Shoes, the Courts

After the family fled, journalists inventoried what she left in the palace: 15 mink coats, 508 gowns, 888 handbags and a shoe collection variously reported at 1,060, 3,000 or 7,500 pairs. It became the most durable image of kleptocracy in the twentieth century. Estimates of what the couple took range from the US$5–10 billion cited by the American ambassador in 1985 and by Presidential Commission on Good Government chair Jovito Salonga, to far higher figures from other economists; the Guinness World Records entry for "Greatest Robbery of a Government" is theirs. By 2018 the PCGG had recovered roughly ₱170 billion, about US$3.6 billion.

She was indicted in Manhattan in 1988 on racketeering and fraud charges over US$103 million allegedly used to buy New York real estate and art, and acquitted in July 1990 after presenting herself as a widow who knew nothing of her husband's affairs. Back in the Philippines she ran for president twice, served three terms in Congress for Ilocos Norte, and on 9 November 2018 was convicted by the Sandiganbayan on seven counts under the Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Act for funnelling roughly US$200 million into seven private Swiss foundations — Maler, Trinidad, Rayby, Palmy, Vibur, Aguamina and Avertina — created between 1978 and 1984 while she was Governor of Metro Manila. She was acquitted on three further counts, sentenced to six years and one month to eleven years on each of the seven, disqualified from public office, and had an arrest warrant issued. She posted ₱300,000 bail on 5 December 2018 and remained free pending an appeal that, two years later, had produced no reported Supreme Court ruling. The Commission on Human Rights called the verdict "a triumph for the Filipino people."

Why Imelda Is Called a Genius

The genius attributed to Imelda Marcos is genuinely a form of intelligence, and it is worth naming exactly, because flattening it into "the shoe lady" has been convenient for everyone. Her gift was for reading and capturing individual human beings — one at a time, at scale. She worked 1,347 convention delegates personally to win her husband a nomination. She talked a rival into accepting the vice-presidency. She extracted US$28 million from Lyndon Johnson, opened relations with Moscow, and was received at a Saudi court that did not receive women. In 1990 she persuaded a Manhattan jury that she was an ignorant widow, and walked. Very few people in twentieth-century politics have that instrument, and none of the men around her had it.

She also had a coherent, if grotesque, theory of rule: that a poor country could be governed through spectacle, that beauty was a public good, and that buildings could stand in for institutions. It was not stupid. It was a genuine idea about power, executed with formidable stamina.

The counter-case is simply the accounting. The Cultural Center overran its budget by orders of magnitude. The San Juanico Bridge served traffic that did not exist. The Sandiganbayan found seven counts proved on Swiss foundations she had established while running Metro Manila. Whatever one calls the faculty, it was used to move money out of one of Asia's poorest treasuries and to decorate an authoritarian government that jailed and killed its critics. Persuasion of that order is a talent. Applied as hers was, it is not a distinction.

Legacy

She outlived the revolution that expelled her. Her son Ferdinand Marcos Jr. was elected president of the Philippines in 2022; her daughter Imee sits in the Senate; her grandson governs Ilocos Norte. The 1995 US federal court award of US$1.96 billion to 9,539 victims of human rights abuses under the dictatorship remains unenforced in the Philippines. Parts of the shoe collection are on display at the National Museum and at a museum in Marikina — exhibits about a woman whose family is back in power, which is the more interesting fact about them. Asked in 2009 to answer a listing among the greediest people of all time, she replied: "I plead guilty. For me, greedy is giving."

Achievements

• member of the House of Representatives (1995–1998)
• First Spouse of the Philippines (1965–1986)
• member of the House of Representatives (2010–2013)
• minister (1976–1986)
• Order of Friendship of Peoples — 1979
• anniversary medal at the occasion of the 2500th anniversary of the founding of the Iranian Empire
• Order of Gabriela Silang
• Order of the Precious Crown, 1st Class
• Educated at Philippine Women's University