MANILA, Philippines—The Makati Business Club is strongly opposing all attempts to bury deposed President Ferdinand Marcos at the Libingan ng mga Bayani (Heroes’ Cemetery), saying his legacy to the country is nothing heroic.
In a letter addressed to Vice President Jejomar Binay, MBC chairman Ramon del Rosario Jr. said the business group opposes the passage of House Bill No. 1135 “and any other proposal to give the disgraced leader any such honor.”
“House Resolution No. 1135, which urges the Aquino administration to let the Libingan ng mga Bayani be the final resting place of the former President Ferdinand Marcos, exemplifies historical revisionism at its deceitful worst in an attempt to recast the image of a disgraced leader,” the group said in a statement accompanying the letter.
“We especially take exception to HR 1135’s statements that ‘as the longest-serving president of the republic, Ferdinand Marcos built the modern foundations of the Philippines’ and that he ‘remained a Filipino patriot to the end of his life and in death deserves to be honored as such,’” it added.
MBC noted that Marcos only became the longest-serving president because of his declaration of martial law in 1972 and the “sham” of a presidential election in 1981. Even in 1986, if not for People Power, Marcos also “tried to steal the vote.”
The claim that Marcos built the modern foundations of the country was also unsubstantiated and a “gross distortion of the late dictator’s true legacy of autocracy, ruined democratic institutions, violent political repression, unprecedented wholesale corruption, shameless nepotism, crony capitalism, a crushing debt burden, and widespread social inequity and marginalization.”
Also under the Marcos regime, MBC noted that the country almost went bankrupt and had to stop debt payments due to “the burden of unpaid crony loans and the gross mismanagement of the economy, in general.”
Loans taken out during the Marcos time were still being paid for up to now, MBC said, long after the late president’s deposition and death.
“In the end, titles and medals – especially those of dubious provenance – do not a hero make. No hero would deliberately bring suffering upon his people and ruin to his country. For these reasons, the MBC believes that, by virtue of his profoundly tainted record as the leader of our country, Marcos forfeited whatever rights he had to being buried at the Libingan ng Mga Bayani,” the group said.
MBC said its opposition was not being lodged out of sheer vindictiveness, but to tell all Filipinos, especially the youth, that “only those who uphold truth, justice and human rights, and freedom and democracy can be rightly called Filipino heroes.”