Media : Filipinos Can’t Get Enough of Their ‘Iron Butterfly’s’ Trial : The Imelda Marcos case makes for spicy reading in scandal-starved Manila. But Washington is a target too.

This sprawling capital boasts 34 newspapers, and on any given day recently, most have featured Imelda Marcos’ remarkable rags-to-stolen-riches trial and tribulation on their front pages.

Day after day, too, Manila’s columnists and cartoonists have focused on the federal trial in New York City of the former first lady of the Philippines, charged with looting her country of $168 million through racketeering, embezzlement, bribery and extortion.

“Anything on Imelda, people just gobble it up,” said Teodoro L. Locsin Jr., a columnist and publisher of the Daily Globe.

One reason is that trials of the rich and famous--the emotional courtroom drama that is the daily stuff of U.S. newspapers--are almost unknown here. Wealthy and powerful people are almost never charged, or brought to trial, in the Philippines’ inefficient and often corrupt legal system.

And no Filipina was as rich or as famous as Imelda Marcos. She was the ever-singing, ever-shopping, ever-preening “Iron Butterfly” who helped her late husband, Ferdinand E. Marcos, rule--critics say ruin--this impoverished nation for two decades until they fled in 1986.

Unlike Marcos, who retained a hard core of political followers until his death in exile in Honolulu last September, it is difficult to find strong support for his widow as she sits weeping in the distant dock.

The Manila Chronicle, for example, applauded the New York trial recently and said Imelda Marcos was lucky she had not suffered the fate of Romania’s Elena Ceausescu, who was summarily executed with her deposed husband, Nicolae, last December.

“Imelda Marcos should be thankful that she is being called to account not by a lynching party but by a court of law in a civilized society,” wrote the Chronicle, which usually supports Marcos’ successor, President Corazon Aquino.

But former Marcos followers use the case to vent their anger at what they consider the perfidy of Aquino and the United States.

“Both Washington and the Aquino regime are on trial here,” columnist Francisco S. Tatad, a former Marcos spokesman, wrote recently in Manila’s Newsday. “Washington, for its coldblooded betrayal of the Marcoses. The regime, for the way it has thrown away the national sovereignty in exchange for U.S. help in handling a problem it does not have the competence to deal with.”

It has escaped no one’s attention, after all, that Imelda Marcos is being tried in New York City, not Manila. Aquino’s government has named the Marcoses in more than 30 civil suits, accusing them of stealing up to $10 billion, but no criminal charges have been filed against them in a Philippine court.

One reason is that Philippine law bans trial in absentia. Government officials said they had feared that the Marcoses would invoke their right to return to the Philippines if they were criminally charged--and thus become a security threat. In reality, few of the Marcoses’ associates who were charged have been tried either.

Given the expense, only one Manila paper, the Philippine Daily Inquirer, has sent its own reporter to New York. One of Manila’s five TV stations, ABS-CBN, has also sent a correspondent and crew. Others use free-lancers or rely heavily on U.S. papers and wire services.

For now, editors and readers alike relish the latest episode in a soap opera that has seen its longtime beauty queen and heroine turn into a chubby villainess. And few who knew her seem to accept the defense argument that Imelda Marcos was ignorant of her husband’s affairs. “They’ve painted a picture of her that nobody believes here,” said Locsin, whose weekly magazine was once closed by Marcos. “We know better.”