Ferdinand Marcos built a political career on war medals he never earned
Campaigning in 1962, Ferdinand Marcos billed himself as the most decorated Filipino veteran of the Second World War. Researchers later found most of his combat stories inaccurate or false, and his own party admitted many medals were handed to him that year to help him win. The man behind the myth went on to rule by martial law.
Born in Ilocos Norte in 1917, Marcos was a gifted student: a national rifle champion, debater and top scorer on the 1939 bar exam. That same period brought a murder conviction. In 1935 his father's political rival, Julio Nalundasan, was shot dead the day after beating the elder Marcos at the polls, and Ferdinand, then studying law, was found guilty and sentenced to 10 to 17 years. The Supreme Court acquitted him in 1940, in a decision written by a justice who had himself once been acquitted on appeal of a violent crime.
His war was real but modest. Marcos served with American forces until the Japanese captured him at Bataan in April 1942, survived the Death March and was released that August. Later claims that he commanded a guerrilla force of nine thousand were contradicted by US Army investigators. After independence he leveraged his inflated record into politics, winning a House seat in 1949, then the Senate, where he served as its president from 1963.
Elected president in 1965 and re-elected in 1969, he initially won popularity with vast infrastructure projects financed by foreign loans. Debt, inflation and unrest followed, and in 1972 he declared martial law, ruling as a dictator until 1981. The constitution was rewritten to empower him, media and opponents were silenced, and his regime used violence against political opposition. His wife Imelda's lavish excesses were so notorious that they gave rise to the adjective Imeldific.
The end came quickly. An economic collapse and the 1983 assassination of opposition leader Ninoy Aquino eroded support, and reporting on his family's overseas fortune and false war records added pressure. After a disputed 1986 snap election against Aquino's widow, Corazon, the People Power Revolution drove him out. Advised by Ronald Reagan, the family fled to Hawaii, where he died in 1989. His rule is widely described as a kleptocracy, with the family accused of taking up to 10 billion dollars from the central bank.
Source: Ferdinand Marcos
