MikeLigalig.com

Then he adopted other oligarchs, like Benedicto, Floirendo, Cojuangco, and Tan. Marcos fed the oligarchy and amassed his megafortune with their help. My source is Ricardo Manapat’s 615-page book, “Some Are Smarter than Others: The History of Marcos’ Crony Capitalism,” published in 1991 by Aletheia Publications, NY. The New York Times described the book as “impressively documented.”

I reviewed Manapat’s work in my book, “Never Again (To Martial Law),” published in 2019. To quote from my book: “The Manapat book is based on 11 years of research and writing and is the authoritative source on the economic plunder of the Philippines under Marcos. He was harassed and persecuted for his work and spent three years as a semi-hermit and recluse in the US to finish the book.

“The major cronies, as documented in Manapat’s meticulously researched book, were: Roberto Benedicto who controlled the sugar industry, Antonio Floirendo who cornered the banana industry, Danding Cojuangco who monopolized the coconut industry, Hans Menzi who lorded over the mining and paper industries, Juan Ponce Enrile, Manuel Elizalde, Lucio Tan, and the Romualdez and Marcos families, who took over the rest of the country.

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“How massive and humongous a loot Marcos took can be deduced from the losses he left behind. The known losses he left behind at the Central Bank included $1.2 billion in missing reserves and $6 billion in special accounts, as documented in the Manapat book. On Feb. 15, 1986, Marcos fled the Philippines, leaving behind a foreign debt of $27 billion and a bureaucracy gone mad.”

As for President Duterte being a minor incident in history, I am inclined to agree with my friend. The way I see it, the President’s health is not good and might even be deteriorating. His claim to history might just be his failed antidrug campaign, the Philippines becoming a vassal of China, and the fact that he allowed former president Ferdinand Marcos to be buried in the Libingan ng mga Bayani.

As for the current ABS-CBN, I think the company and its owners are better than the cronies of Marcos under martial law. The Marcos oligarchs were the greedy capitalists. ABS-CBN, with its public service projects, may be an oligarch, but it is an oligarch with a conscience. By dragging their feet on its franchise renewal, the Duterte minions in Congress are trying to stifle press freedom. Let us not skirt the issue.

https://opinion.inquirer.net/

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