By Gerry Lirio
EACH time Sen. Imee Marcos opens her mouth on issues surrounding Malacanang, you get that feeling that not all is well with her, her brother President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., and his wife, First Lady Liza Marcos-Araneta, if not in the entire Marcos family.
We do not hear anything derogatory on Imee from the Palace, nothing from her younger brother, nothing from the First Lady. Well, nothing in public.
But the Palace and its rah-rah boys would always get a mouthful from Senator Marcos.
When sought for her comment about the plan of the House of Representatives to amend the 1987 Constitution, Imee Marcos minced no words to show her displeasure.
Said Imee: “Baka may gustong maging prime minister na hindi (mananalo) sa presidente?” Ouch! The President’s most trusted man, their cousin Speaker Martin Romualdez, must have felt slighted. Who else?
Cory Constitution
But we did not hear Imee say something in defense of the Cory Aquino’s 1987 Constitution. Nothing on the issues the House was supposed to tackle. Not that we care.
“(They are) so stubborn,” Senator Marcos was quoted to have said in response to the House plan. “(PBBM already said that it (was) not timely because we should focus on people’s livelihood and bring down the price of rice and other commodities. The Senate has rejected that twice, why insist?”
Tell that to Albay 1st District Rep. Edcel Lagman, the man who has seen so many administrations since Congress rose in 1987 from the dark years of her father’s dictatorship.
Lagman said the President has given his “covert assent” to the initiative in the House of Representatives despite his public pronouncement that charter change was not his priority. Would Congress push for it without the President’s nod? he asked. No, of course. Lagman knows better.
Cha-cha rolling?
The Cha-cha caravan is rolling in the House of Representatives, he told a morning TV interview.
But why did Imee sound so unkind? We do not believe it was about constitutional amendments. She was never in our list of defenders of the Cory Constitution. And she never paid attention to House leaders that they wanted economic reforms to alleviate poverty. Not that we believe them, this early.
Why? All Imee’s statements give credence to longtime suspicions that she and First Lady Liza Marcos-Araneta have long been at odds, that she had kept the senator out of the loop, out of her brother’s official affairs, beginning or even before the 2022 presidential campaign, and up until now that he is the country’s chief executive.
He said, she said
When President Marcos vetoed on his first day in office a bill that she sponsored that would have created a special economic zone in Bulacan, Imee showed she was willing to dicker with anyone, including her own brother, unmindful of the euphoria of the return of the Marcoses in Malacanang. Well, Imee is not the President, and the First Lady is the chief PSG at the Palace. Make no mistake.
“I do not know anything,” she said of her brother’s decision. “It is just that this administration is just new, so this may be just a hasty decision by someone who did not see the legislative process that the bill had to go through, all those hearings that studied the bill.”
Not that we agree with her. If anything, it only showed that brother and sister were not seeing eye to eye, to say the least. A phone call would have settled some issues.
Like it or not, Imee lives in a Glass House.
The young Imee
She is her father’s daughter, for all the tall tales surrounding her since birth. She is a Marcos. And until her brother dreamt and won the presidency, she was largely believed, beginning in the 1970s when she entered law school, to be the one to harbor presidential ambition. Whatever Imee wanted; Imee got.
That was how people saw her. That was the 1970s, the beginning of martial law. She did enter the law school, and inside the UP campus, everybody was staring at her in awe or in fear: She could then be the next president, they thought.
In a speaking engagement on campus sometime in August 1977, a student asked Imee about the family wealth. The question displeased her. In no time, the student later identified as Archimedes Trajano disappeared without a trace. He was later found dead, his skull broken. Imee denied any part in the killing.
Judge Manuel Real, who heard the Trajano case in the Class Suit filed in Hawaii after the Edsa revolution, allowed the remains of Trajano to be dug up and sent to Hawaii where they were examined by a forensic pathologist. The pathologist brought the remains during the hearing and displayed them, including Trajano’s cracked skull.
Trajano’s skull
Looking directly at Judge Real, the pathologist explained how violent blows shattered Trajano’s skull.
“As the blackened skull was lifted by the pathologist from a Tupperware container,” American human rights lawyer Robert Swift recalled, “there was an audible wailing from Trajano’s mother and relatives in the courtroom.”
Shocked, Real subsequently ordered Imee to pay the Trajanos more than $4 million in compensatory and punitive damages. But Imee managed to fly to Morocco and evade the hearing on damages. She never paid any part of the judgment, and Mrs. Trajano, the mother of the victim, died in poverty a few years later.
A few years back, the confidante of her mother, Cherry Cobarrubias, and Imee figured in a screaming match over Imee’s refusal to implement her father’s last will to give a huge portion of the Marcos wealth back to the Filipino people. She cried to her mother, but according to Cobarrubias, the mother ignored her. Mrs. Marcos wanted to implement the late President’s last will, too, she told this newsman.
Governor Imee
Sometime in July 2018, the House Committee on Good Government, then chaired by Rep. Johnny Pimentel, recommended the filing of administrative and criminal cases against Imee and other officials of Ilocos Norte for the alleged anomalous purchase of 110 units of Foton minicabs worth P64.5 million, the recommendation came after months of the House investigation on allegations of misuse of Ilocos Norte’s share of tobacco excise taxes.
Senior Deputy Speaker Aurelio Gonzales was among those who sought the investigation; the recommendation has since been forgotten, gone with the winds.
We wonder what the House leaders feel about her now. Congress has never been kind either to people who showed them boorishness. Since her father’s time, and Imee knows it, the House has been at Malacanang’s beck and call. Not a good time to quarrel with the brother-President and the First Lady? But then again, it may not be as simple as that.
