Government Spares Huge Marcos Bust

President Corazon Aquino rejected Friday a plan to blow up a Mt. Rushmore-type monument to deposed President Ferdinand E. Marcos on Sunday.

People of the village of Tuba, 140 miles north of here, had planned to dynamite the 100-foot-high bust, which Marcos had artisans fashion on the side of a mountain.

The new Philippine government said no, but it will permit a group representing 81 tribal families to gather below the bust Sunday for a tribal ritual called lambakan.

A high priest of the Ibaloy tribe will slaughter a pig, chant ancient rites of exorcism and examine the animal’s bile for signs of the future--omens that may tell whether the Ibaloy people of Tuba will ever get back the land Marcos took from them a decade ago.

“We have decided not to destroy the statue,” Aquino’s new minister of tourism, Jose Gonzales, told nine of the Ibaloy women who were summoned to Manila on Friday when Aquino heard of their plans. “Before, this was a monument to a dictatorship. Now it is a symbol of injustice. It should remain there so we never forget how this one man ruined a nation.”

Hard to Forget

Bust or no bust, Rose Labotan and her neighbors are not likely to forget. A decade ago, Marcos’ government seized more than 500 acres of their prime farmland and paid them each a few cents an acre. Over the next 10 years, artisans and workmen scurried about the face of the mountain sculpting the bust.

According to the government, the bust cost the people 3 million pesos, about $150,000, but opposition leaders put the cost at 10 times that.

Labotan, whose mother and father lost 35 acres of fertile rice land to the government, said: “We have a joke we tell to explain why our roads are not paved in Tuba. It’s because the president was sick and they kept using more and more concrete to fill in his cheeks.”

For the most part, though, the Ibaloy women who came to Manila were dead serious about using 10 cases of dynamite to demolish the centerpiece of a vast government development called Marcos Park, which includes a rarely played 18-hole golf course, an all-but-abandoned luxury hotel and the giant bust, which they refer to as “monstrous,” “spooky,” “satanic.”

A Reminder of Pain

“Imagine living with this huge Marcos head staring down at you for the next many years--long after he’s gone,” Labotan said. “All it reminds us of is the damage and the pain he caused to all of us.”

To Aquino and her minister of tourism, the bust and the park are just one of the dozens of lavish “white elephant” projects built with government funds by Marcos and his wife, Imelda. They are all losing money, and Gonzales said Friday that he is trying to sell as many of them as he can to private management firms--a process, he said, that will take time.

“Look, this head is almost 10 years in the doing,” Gonzales said to the Ibaloy women. “We can’t clean it all up in 10 minutes.”

The women heard the minister out, and at the end they agreed they would not dynamite the bust as planned. Instead, they said, they will carry out their “purifying” ceremony.

After Gonzales left the room, Rose Labotan and the others looked at one another and burst out giggling.

“We’ll still defame it,” Labotan said softly, with a smile. “Maybe we’ll crush the nose a little bit. Maybe we’ll put two horns on it. Maybe we’ll chop out an eye. But certainly, on Sunday, each and every one of us will spit on it.”