MANILA, Philippines – Information gap is among the many reasons why the Marcoses remained prominent even after 36 years had passed, according to the head of Human Rights Violation Victims Memorial Commission. 

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Carmelo Victor Crisanto, director of the memorial commission, said the Marcoses have invested much in rehabilitating their names. As of September 2021, the Presidential Commission on Good Government is still running after P125.9 billion ill-gotten wealth from the Marcoses. 

“Why has there been a rehabilitation of the Marcos brand? Because the Marcos family is very resilient and with the resources they still have at hand, they invested in trying to tell their side of the story, their narrative, their interpretation of history,” Crisanto told Rappler in an interview. 

The memorial commission official also pointed out the information gap was caused by the lack of formal Martial Law education in Philippine schools. 

“The average age of most of our teachers have not experienced martial law, that’s the problem. They have little confidence in teaching it, and the materials available to them are very scarce,” Crisanto said. 

For the 2022 polls, three decades after dictator Ferdinand Marcos was toppled down from power, his son, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., is seeking the presidency. This is the second time a Marcos attempted to run for president after Imelda Marcos’ bitter loss in the 1992 presidential election. 

As a response to the issue of information gap, the memorial commission has partnered with different organizations to strengthen Martial Law education, especially among educators. However, Crisanto still worries that with the huge number of teachers nationwide, their plans may fall short. 

“The Memorial Commission wants to pick up on that gap to provide materials and to create training programs for these teachers. But if you noticed, that’s more than 1.5 million teachers around our country, the scale is so big and we’re doing so little in terms of [reaching] the teachers who could explain to their students,” the memorial commission head added. 

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In 2020, Marcos, Jr. called for the revision of history books containing the atrocities and grim accounts of the Marcos dictatorship, but several groups slammed the proposal of the late dictator’s son.

The same year, political data company Cambridge Analytica revealed that Marcos Jr.  approached them to “rebrand” their family’s image on social media. – Rappler.com