The demand for President Marcos Jr. reminds me of the suffering in the Philippines

Victims of Filipino dictatorship Ferdinand Marcos are trying to keep up with their son, President Ferdinand. “Bongbong ”Marcos Jr., was not eligible to run in next year’s election.

The issue, although related to the legal expertise of a long-running tax evasion case, has sparked unresolved disputes among Filipinos over his memory of his father’s rule, which imprisoned and killed thousands of people and robbed state property.

“We do not want Bongbong Marcos or any of his family members to return,” said Bonifacio Ilagan, a playwright, survivor of torture and co-founder of the Campaign Against the Return of the Marcoses and Martial Law (Carmma). a banned case, the Financial Times reported.

“Marcos is returning to Malacañang [presidential palace] it will dramatically change our reputation. ”

Carmma has filed a petition with the country’s electoral commission to block the election of Marcos Jr., citing his failure to file tax returns between 1982 and 1985 when he served as a senior official in his father’s administration.

Opponents and supporters of the 64-year-old politician are now arguing over the extent to which he should answer his father’s case.

Marcos Jr. is the favorite to win the May 2022 election, according to the election, and his camp is outlawing a petition – one of the votes. five filed a complaint – as in “nonsense politics”. The running mate will be the leader of another political party: Sara Duterte, daughter of Rodrigo Duterte, one of the first to become president in 2016 was attending Marcos’ funeral in Manila.

According to compare U.S. historian Alfred McCoy, 3,257 people were killed indiscriminately in the ten years that Marcos enacted military law. Thousands more were imprisoned or tortured, before the dictator and his family fled to Hawaii during the 1986 People’s Power riots, when Bongbong was 28 years old.

Ilagan, now 70 years of age, still speaks candidly about her childhood experiences.

Ilagan, a former student at the University of the Philippines, fled the scene in 1971 and was arrested three years later for brutal treatment.

This included, he said, “San Juanico Bridge”, a torture in which prisoners were placed between cots and beaten in the abdomen. Ilagan also claimed that his prison guards rubbed hot flats on his feet and once inserted a stick into his penis.

Rizalina’s younger sister, another student student, was arrested in 1977 by soldiers. He was one of 10 people taken away in one of the biggest human rights abuses at the time, some of whom were later found dead. Rizalina’s body was not found.

Young Marcos was convicted by a district court in 1995 of failing to pay taxes and paying taxes between 1982 and 1985, when he was deputy governor, then governor of Ilocos Norte, whose family was north of Luzon Island.

Two years later, the appellate court acquitted him of one of his criminal charges, free of charge, and the lower court sentenced him to life in prison. The same court upheld his conviction for default, and Marcos Jr. paid 67,137 pesos (now worth $ 1,300) for what his lawyer described as a “leadership failure”.

“There is no case of tax evasion against incumbent Bongbong Marcos or being convicted of tax evasion, as his detractors have encouraged, brutally and aggressively,” Victor Rodriguez, his spokesman and chief of staff, told the Financial Times.

Philippine election law prohibits a candidate from being sentenced to more than 18 months in prison for “misconduct” – a requirement that could result in an appeal against Marcos Jr. moot as the court reverses its decision.

In a statement to the media, in addition to interviews with FT in 2018, Marcos Jr.

However, in 2018, the court he found Imelda Marcos, the first former mother, is guilty of seven counts of money laundering in Swiss on an illegal basis while serving in her husband’s government.

“Marcos was not his father, and the father’s sins should not be visited on the child,” said Carlos Conde, a Human Rights Watch researcher. “But he and his mother have been trying to deny all the charges in court.”

In addition to his political career, Marcos Jr. was the chairman of Philcomsat, one of the companies taken over by Corazon Aquino’s “People Power” government that seized power after the fall of a dictator while investigating “crony capitalism”.

Asked if Marcos Jr. had taken any action against his father’s tyranny, Rodriguez stated: “Marcos, Jr. could not answer politely. . . such a question because the people of the Philippines have established their belief that the sins of men, if any, [are] not given to children. ”

However, Ilagan, a Carmma activist, described Marcos Jr. as “a major part of the dictatorship.”

Ilagan said: “It is a very serious war for us.” I have given more than half of my life to this war for democracy in the Philippines. For me, in the darkest part of my life, I don’t think there is a turning back. ”

Additional reports by Guill Ramos in Manila