America's Boy: The Marcoses and the Philippines

0/5 ( ratings)

He was 'the world's greatest thief'; now he lies unburied in a transparent coffin, while she is treated as an international joke for her singing and her shoes. This is all we seem to remember of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. The Marcoses presented themselves as the reincarnation of a primal couple from Filipino mythology. Ferdinand reinvented himself as matchless fighter against the Japanese, and Time magazine hailed him as a hero. People were happy to believe this, even those who knew it was a lie: he was the strongman, the dictator, welcomed by Lyndon B. Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan at the White House - America's Boy. He and Imelda were surrounded by hard-faced soldiers, and by courtiers who claimed magical powers. Everything was at once farcical and very serious, at once an exercise in brute power and a parody of it; their lives intertwined politics and fantasy. For twenty years they dominated the Philippines. In the end, a 'democratic revolution' replaced them with Cory Aquino, a feudal landowner. Nothing changed: the world applauded, the shadow-play went on. The author has gathered astonishing information from senators, cronies and rivals of the Marcoses; and from family members, including Imelda. He cuts through the Western caricature of the Marcoses as a pair of exotic clowns. Hamilton-Peterson sets his narrative brilliantly in the context of the wide Asian tragedy of the Marcos era: the vast cruelties of the war in Vietnam, the rise of the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia, and the transformation of every local issue into a drama of the Cold War. His intimate knowledge of the Philippines allows him to view events in the capital, Manila, from the apparently changeless, but in fact complex shifting reality of the remote provinces. His peasants and fishermen, brought to life movingly and unsentimentally, pay the price of dictatorship and American strategic arrogance. This is a highly original biography of a dictatorship. -- from inside book's cover