DepEd asked to review books’ depiction of martial law years

MANILA, Philippines — It’s about time the Department of Education (DepEd) reviewed history books to ensure that they accurately depict the atrocities under then authoritarian President Ferdinand Marcos, a group of martial law (ML) survivors said on Tuesday night.

The Campaign Against the Return of the Marcoses and Martial Law (Carmma) said DepEd should resist pressure to rehabilitate the image of the late strongman after his son, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., claimed that his family had been cleared of wrongdoing and that history textbooks should be revised accordingly.

“Any revision to the role of the dictator Marcos and his family in our nation’s history is a blatant injustice,” Carmma said in a statement.

There was no immediate comment from DepEd officials.

Speaking at a National Press Club forum on Friday, Marcos Jr. called on history professors and political scientists to rewrite books that, he claimed, have peddled the “false” accusation that his family stole from the country’s coffers.

The Marcoses have been accused of plundering the country’s coffers during the Marcos patriarch’s 20-year rule.

Despite being ousted by a peaceful people’s revolt in 1986, the family has consistently denied the charges.

Since Marcos died in self-exile in 1989, his family has made a political comeback.

While the Marcoses have recently been cleared in several cases by the Sandiganbayan antigraft court, mainly due to technicalities such as the use of photocopied, instead of original, documents as evidence, they have been found guilty in similar cases in local and international courts.

Most notably, the Supreme Court ruled in 2003 that millions of dollars in Swiss accounts that purportedly belong to the Marcoses were beyond their lawful income.

The Sandiganbayan convicted Imelda Marcos of seven counts of graft in 2018.

Congress itself acknowledged their wrongdoing through the passage in 2013 of the Human Rights Victims Reparation and Recognition Act, which redirected P10 billion in ill-gotten wealth to victims of human rights violations under Marcos.

“The Marcos fascist dictatorship caused the plunder of the nation’s coffers (and) buried our economy under a billion-dollar debt,” Carmma said, calling for vigilance “against these repeated attempts to revise our history.”