Philippine Poor Gape at Marcos Palace Riches

For 20 years, Remedio Tolentino and her family have lived in a ramshackle hut of scrap wood and tin in a squatters’ colony on the fringes of Manila.

For 20 years, as her teeth fell out, her children fell ill and her income fell below the poverty line, Tolentino had heard stories about the fabulous palace of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos; about the lavish parties with movie stars and fancy dresses and the dinner tables with so much food that some actually was left uneaten.

At dawn Friday, Remedio Tolentino and thousands of other Filipinos stood for hours in a sweaty crush of humanity outside that palace to see for themselves.

“This is the one thing I want to do before I die,” Tolentino said, beaming with pride as she entered the Marcoses’ Malacanang presidential palace Friday morning. “I want to see the real projects of the First Lady--the diamonds and the pretty dresses and the earrings and the gold. I want to see how well she spent the money of the Filipino people.”

10,000 See Riches

By the day’s end, more than 10,000 of “the poorest of the poor” had seen for themselves the elegance and extravagance of a palace that Corazon Aquino, now the Philippines’ president, had promised she would return to her people if she ever took office.

Aquino also had promised to guide them through the palace herself Friday, but, as word of the public tour spread around Manila and nearby provinces, the crowd grew so large and so vast that it threatened to topple the giant wrought-iron gates surrounding the palace. Aquino’s security guards allowed her inside for just two minutes--long enough to pose for photographs shaking an impoverished woman’s hand--and let her give a brief speech outside.

“You will see everything that has been left by the people who once lived here,” Aquino told the squatters from a makeshift stage outside the sprawling, Spanish-style mansion. “So you can see with your own eyes why this happened to our country. So you can see how these rulers who lived here thought only of themselves.”

Once inside, the Filipino masses were nothing short of awe-struck. They gaped at the marble walls and half-ton crystal chandeliers.

Marcos’ Medical Room

“Oh my God,” many of them gasped when they spotted the six-foot portrait of a bare-chested Marcos in the jungle. And they stared in disgust through the doorway of a sophisticated hospital room, complete with computerized diagnostic equipment and sterilizing machines.

“They should have let him die,” said one man in the crowd, who added that his is one of the 34,000 Philippine villages still without a primary health care center.

It was the bedroom of Imelda Marcos, complete with her once-secret wall vault and a separate 10,000-square-foot “walk-in closet,” that drew the sharpest reactions from the visitors. These were people, after all, who sleep on floor mats and live so close together that, in the barrios they call home, 50 familes could live in the space in which Imelda Marcos kept her extra silk dresses and mink coats.

Norma Ancheta, 44, a jobless mother of seven whose husband died of tuberculosis two years ago, spotted the First Lady’s 7-by-12-foot bed and said it was like the bed of the Queen of England.

“Did she sleep alone?” another woman wondered in passing.

When the crowds reached the downstairs closet dubbed “Imelda’s Department Store” by the 80 volunteer women who acted as guides Friday, jaws dropped and tongues clicked with awe.

1,000 Gowns, Stoles

The room is filled with 37 clothes racks packed with more than 1,000 gowns and mink stoles. More than 2,600 pairs of the First Lady’s shoes had been put out on display. Two giant racks were needed for Imelda Marcos’ hundreds of imported leather purses. Even her imported underwear was displayed in a heap nearly four feet high in the middle of the room. And along the wall, an entire shelf was covered with fine French dolls.

“Mama,” a young girl in a soiled T-shirt whined, tugging her mother’s sleeve. “Can I have just one doll?”

The mother apologized to a volunteer guide nearby. “My girl is 10 years old. She has never had a doll. We don’t have any money even to eat three times a day.”

Another frail old woman wailed as her niece led her through the “closet”:

“That is all the money of the Filipino people that she spent on all these clothes. She forgot about us--her people.”

Her niece, who said the family had been staunch Marcos supporters, added, “The fairy tales we heard about Imelda were true all along.”

Among the largely middle-class palace guides who watched and listened to the reactions as the steady procession of poor shuffled past the First Lady’s riches was Aquino’s sister-in-law, Maur Aquino Lichauco, who quickly explained: “This is nothing. You should have seen it before the real wealth was carted away.”

Activist Volunteers

Lichauco was one of the women volunteers belonging to Aquino’s activist group, Cory’s Crusaders, who had been assigned by Aquino to help government auditors unearth and catalogue the hidden riches the Marcos family left behind in Malacanang Palace.

“You know, when we were rummaging around cleaning out the shoes in the First Lady’s bedroom, we found this tangled mass of gold on a closet floor, just thrown in with some of her dirty clothes,” Lichauco recalled.

“We started untangling it, and you know what it was? It was 300 imported, 18-carat gold Italian necklaces, each of them worth more than the average Filipino makes in a year. She just got fed up with it, threw it on the floor and forgot about it.”

That was not all. Other members of the Crusaders’ cleanup crew found a receipt for a $2.6-million sapphire and diamond necklace that Imelda purchased from Van Cleef & Arpels in Manhattan in 1981. Together with the receipt were two color photographs of the jewelry.

‘Lost Sense of Value’

“These people just lost all sense of the value of money and the value of life in this country,” Lichauco said.

Bea Zobel, another Aquino aide who supervised the cleanup, said volunteers filled scores of boxes with hundreds of pieces of jewelry, gold coins, art treasures and cash. The valuables were sent to the government’s Central Bank. Many more boxes were packed with documents relating to the Marcos’ wealth and sent to a Commission for Good Government that Aquino created to untangle the complex web of Marcos’ riches.

The commission’s chairman, Jovito Salonga, who is now in Washington to meet with lawyers and U.S. congressmen to plan strategy for the government’s efforts to seize Marcos’ assets in the United States, has said such litigation will be difficult. The only certainty, he added, is that the Filipino people will know that they have the possessions of the palace and the contents that the Marcoses left behind.

Seaman Is Satisfied

Camile Bahon Jr., a merchant seaman who waited for four hours in the broiling sun and then pushed and elbowed his way inside the palace grounds Friday, said he really does not care whether Marcos’ foreign assets are ever recovered.

As he waited in the long line, roped off by yellow streamers--the color of Aquino’s presidential campaign--Bahon said all that matters is that the Filipino people now own their president’s palace again.

That was not enough, though, for Msgr. Luciano Canonoy. The priest was leading a few hundred protesters in a march on the palace. The demonstrators, he explained, were squatters, and the day before, police had forcibly bulldozed the shacks of 30 families.

“We do not blame President Aquino. She did not even know it was happening,” Canonoy said. “That’s why we came here today.”

Did his group plan to visit the palace, as well?

“No, we don’t want to go inside,” he added. “For us, simple justice is enough.”