It’s a Lot of Loot

Past claims of near-poverty forgotten, Ferdinand E. Marcos now proposes to pay handsomely for the privilege of returning to the Philippines, the land he ruled for 20 years as elected president and martial-law dictator before fleeing to exile in Hawaii almost 2 1/2 years ago. President Corazon Aquino’s response, while apparently stopping short of outright rejection, was not encouraging. She suggested that as a show of good faith Marcos might first want to hand over some money--an aide thought that $500 million would be an appropriate amount--”and then we’ll talk.” At that point Marcos seems to have dropped the matter, at least for the time being. Just as well. Whatever he may now solemnly promise about abjuring politics and behaving himself if he’s allowed back, the record shows that Marcos’ word is not something to be believed or trusted.

Still, he has made what must have been a very tempting offer. By credible accounts Marcos was prepared to buy his way back into the Philippines with $5 billion “from my current assets.” That’s a lot of money by any measure, particularly to a country desperately in need of funds as it struggles to recover from the mismanagement and plundering that it suffered at the hands of the Marcos family and its cronies. The Aquino government could buy a lot of relief from chronic unemployment and malnutrition for $5 billion. The other side of the ledger, of course, is that Aquino and those who support a return to democracy would also be buying themselves a lot of political trouble if Marcos were again permitted to become the symbol and domestic rallying point of right-wing opposition.

The $5-billion offer again raises the question of how much the Marcoses were in fact able to steal through their systematic looting of the national economy. Some Filipino investigatorshad earlier estimated up to $10 billion. Perhaps now that figure will have to be revised upward, since it surely seems unlikely that people as demonstrably greedy as the Marcoses would be willing to part with a full half of their ill-gotten fortune, for whatever reason or cause. In any event the $5-billion proposal now makes it impossible for the Marcoses to go on claiming that they are forced to live on the very edge of penury. Not that they were ever believed, but at least now that lie has finally been laid to rest.