Residents Fear Reprisals : In ‘Imelda Country,’ Signs of Good Old Days Linger

Most of the Philippines is still celebrating the departure of President Ferdinand E. Marcos and his wife, Imelda. But in Tacloban, the provincial capital on the island of Leyte, there is little joy. There is uncertainty, even fear.

Leyte is the home ground of Imelda Marcos. “Imelda Country,” they used to call it.

The Marcoses put up a 21-bedroom shrine on the old family property here and filled it with an array of expensive antiques. There is the Price Mansion, owned by Imelda, where Gen. Douglas MacArthur stayed after his famous return in World War II. And there is the spectacular Marcos family retreat in nearby Tolosa, a beach resort decorated with hundreds of stone statues of Hindu gods and demons and pedestals topped with arrangements of plastic fruit.

In the two decades of Marcos rule, Imelda Marcos, nee Romualdez, managed to make her family the richest and most powerful in the area.

A brother, Alfredo Romualdez, is the principal stockholder in the island’s two largest banks. He owns an island beach resort and Tacloban’s largest shopping center. In the early days of Marcos’ political career, Alfredo drove the car. At the end, he controlled the offshore casino and the jai alai gambling operations.

Brother an Ambassador

Another brother, Benjamin, doubled as governor of Leyte and ambassador to the United States. He had a controlling interest in two local banks.

Much has been made of the wealth accumulated abroad by the Marcos family--bank accounts and real estate in a number of countries. Here in the Philippines, Leyte is the most blatant example of the personal enrichment, nepotism and hometown chauvinism that characterized the Marcos regime in its waning years.

When Marcos and most of the Romualdez clan fled the country last month, they left behind a trail of abandoned wealth and privilege and any number of people who had grown accustomed to the benefits that trickled down.

“We are all a bit confused now,” Joe Baula, 25, a hotel manager and nightclub singer, said the other day. “We don’t know what the new government is going to do. Maybe they will want revenge on the people here who were left behind by Marcos.”

There is widespread resentment, particularly in neighboring provinces, of Leyte’s privileged status under Marcos.

Disparity Between Provinces

“Our place has been neglected for 20 years,” Pedro Singzon, an attorney from Samar province to the north of here, told a reporter. “The concentration of government projects has been in Leyte, not in Samar, even though Samar and Leyte are called sister provinces because we speak the same dialect.”

The bitterness was reflected in the Feb. 7 presidential election. Many places in Samar, traditionally a Marcos stronghold, voted for challenger Corazon Aquino even though Marcos organizers reportedly offered up to 100 pesos ($5) a vote, a substantial amount here.

Leyte’s voters went overwhelmingly for Marcos. But now that Marcos and the Romualdez brothers are gone, there are rumblings even here against the island’s benefactors, particularly as the extent of the family holdings becomes known.

Ted Marcos, a journalist in Tacloban and a distant relative of the deposed president, said: “In this district they projected the image of being benevolent. But mainly they confined these gestures to buildings and shrines and such--showcases.”

Probably the most lavish of the showcases is the Santo Nino Shrine, built by Imelda Marcos in the center of town, not far from where her family’s Quonset hut stood when she was growing up here.

A Shrine to Imelda

Indeed, there is a shrine in the impressive two-story building. About a third of the ground floor is taken up by a chapel, with a statue of the child Jesus at the center. The rest of the building is more of a shrine to Imelda or, perhaps more accurately, a grown-up’s doll house, with 21 bedrooms, two formal dining rooms that will accommodate 50 guests, a throne room with two silver chairs, countless tapestries, intricate ivory carvings, Chinese porcelain, dozens of chandeliers and candelabra, and paintings that represent various periods in the Marcos marriage.

Everywhere there are photographs and paintings of Imelda--Imelda with Fidel Castro, Imelda with Moammar Kadafi, Imelda rising out of a seashell, Imelda at the top of a 20-foot family tree. It is always a slim, high-cheekboned Imelda; never the jowly, frightened-looking woman seen at the palace in Manila in the last hours of the Marcos era.

“It is primarily a display of wealth by the First Lady,” the journalist Marcos said. “She wanted to make it appear that from the very beginning she was from an aristocratic family of great wealth. Maybe she also wanted to erase the memory that she was not.”

Since Marcos’ fall, the provincial constabulary has posted guards outside the shrine to prevent looting. Guards have been posted too at the mansions of Alfredo and Benjamin Romualdez, at the Price Mansion, at Benjamin Romualdez’s 140-foot yacht and at Alfredo Romualdez’s Dio Beach Resort.

Marcos Property Guarded

Guards also watch the Marcos property in Tolosa, the seacoast town where Imelda’s parents are buried. These are men of the old Marcos Presidential Security Command, disarmed by the constabulary but left to watch over the resort.

“Halt; this is private property,” a guard named Wenceslao Beltran said. But a pass from the constabulary colonel satisfied him. “I am a military man, a sergeant,” he said. “But for the past 12 years I have been playing here like a civilian.” After he leaves the Marcos estate, he said, he plans to open an auto repair shop.

The Tolosa estate, only a few miles from the beach where MacArthur waded ashore in 1944, was the Marcos family’s private retreat, a secluded hideaway with a spectacular black sand beach. Imelda decorated the grounds with stone statuettes of the sort found in the ruins of Cambodian temples.

They may have used the place for intimate family gatherings, but the main house and the large guest lodge and the six guest cabins and the four guest dormitories provided room for larger parties.

Scattered Seashells

Imelda Marcos, a former beauty queen, once invited all the Miss Universe contestants to stay here, and there was room to spare. When a guest complained that there were no seashells to be found on the volcanic sand beach, Imelda instructed security guards to drive to Tacloban, to buy shells and scatter them on the beach where they could be found.

According to Vicente Veloso, who was installed as governor days after Marcos fled, the government pays all the utility bills at the estate. Marcos liked to describe these places as private holdings, but they were never private by any measure. The guards were members of the Presidential Security Command; the sod for the nine-hole golf course was flown in on C-130 cargo planes of the Philippine air force.

“There was a blur in the distinction between public and private,” the journalist Marcos said. “They thought they could get away with it, and they did, right up to the end.”

Despite what seem to be blatant abuses of public trust, the Marcos family members, particularly Imelda, were immensely popular here. Even today, it is difficult to find anyone in Tacloban who will speak ill of them.

‘Sorry They Are Gone’

“We are so very sorry they are gone,” Vice Gov. Simeona Apostol said. “They were so good to us and helpful to the people of Leyte.”

Soledad Amargo, a teacher at Leyte National High School, said of Imelda: “We can’t help but love her. We used to play together. She would pass by on her way to school. She always wore her hair long and a white dress.”

Filomelo Amargo, her husband and a local politician, interrupted to say: “She gave us plenty of improvements--the new bridge, roads. Tacloban is different than it was 20 years ago.”

Tacloban may have been blessed with plenty under Marcos, but other towns did without, sometimes with serious results.

On a recent morning, a small store caught fire in the central market of Catbalogan, the capital of Samar about 100 miles north of Tacloban. Catbalogan has an antiquated firefighting system, and by the time more sophisticated equipment could get there from Tacloban, the fire had spread and gutted most of the center of town. Hundreds of people were left homeless.

“The big trucks had to come all the way from Tacloban,” Gilbert Eamiguel, a colonel of the National Police, said. “Meantime, the whole downtown burned.”