![]() George Hamilton twirled Imelda to the tune of “I Love the Nightlife.” Gina Lollobrigida photographed Ferdinand. We watched the Marcoses party with Brooke Shields and Cristina Ford. Muhammad Ali beat Joe Frazier in the “Thrilla in Manila.” We had beauty pageants, the Bolshoi Ballet, Van Cliburn, international film festivals. Most of us didn’t know that while we were growing up, thousands of dissenters had been tortured, killed, or jailed that in faraway villages, the army had been let loose to pillage, rape, and murder that the Marcoses were stealing our money and squirreling it in Swiss banks and Manhattan real estate. My generation had reached adulthood with no memory of any other president. He continued to issue decrees from his barricaded palace while I went off to college, graduated, and got my first job. Marcos was still president when I finished high school. The neighborhood - the entire country - was hushed. I was barely in my teens when martial law was declared. On Thursdays, hundreds flocked to the church nearby to pray to St. I remember that in the 1960s, the streets around the presidential mansion were busy, filled with traffic and commerce. I studied across the street from Malacañang, in a school for girls run by the Sisters of the Holy Ghost. I was in first grade when Marcos was first elected president. We didn’t call it “fake news” then but it was vintage 1970s propaganda-obvious and crude. There were only five TV channels and three newspapers, all owned by Marcos cronies. I would have preferred to watch “Zombie Apocalypse'' but that wasn’t an option. Remember this was the 20th Century, long before YouTube and Netflix. My generation grew up watching the unending spectacle of Ferdinand and Imelda. And how, from one generation to the next, the word is passed. Today I will talk about memory, about fathers, sons, and daughters. The Marcoses had been expunged from our lives. On the evening of February 25, 1986, I thought, like so many others, this is the end. Everywhere were signs of a hurried retreat: documents tossed out of a window, emptied jewelry cases, bullets scattered on the floor. I remember being swept in a giant wave of people that crashed through the gates of the now abandoned palace. We had all heard that the dictator had fled the country and wanted to see for ourselves whether that was true. Thousands of others were at the palace gates, too. I was then a reporter for The Manila Times, a newspaper just reopened after having been shut down when Marcos declared martial law. It was Day Four of the popular uprising against the Marcos regime. I HAVE A VIVID memory of this evening 36 years ago, when I was standing outside the massive iron gates of Malacañang Palace. ![]() 26, 2022 for the 2022 Adrian Cristobal Lecture Series. 2003 Ramon Magsaysay Awardee and PCIJ founding executive director Sheila Coronel delivered this lecture, Marcos and Memory: The Past in Our Future, on Feb.
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