FALSE: Ferdinand Marcos appeared in a 1983 world leaders’ meeting in Canada

At a glance

• Claim: Former president Ferdinand Marcos appeared in a world leaders’ meeting in Toronto, Canada, in 1983.
• Rating: FALSE
• The facts: The list of presidential foreign trips appearing in the Official Gazette does not show any trips to Canada made by Marcos in 1983.
• Why we fact-checked this: The claim was made in YouTube videos from the channels “Jevara PH” and “KAPATID AVINIDZ,” which have 861,215 and 133,652 views, respectively, as of writing. Videos from the Facebook pages “Jevara PH,” “Viral Video,” “Kapatid Avinidz,” and “Maharlikan atin toh” also made the claim.

Complete details

Videos on the YouTube channel “Jevara PH,” dated December 31, 2019, and “KAPATID AVINIDZ,” dated December 15, 2020, claimed that former president Ferdinand Marcos appeared in a meeting of world leaders that took place in Toronto, Canada, in 1983. As of writing, the videos have 861,215 views and 133,652 views, respectively.

The video from the YouTube channel “Jevara PH” can be seen in posts on the Facebook pages “Jevara PH” and “Viral Video.” The video from the YouTube channel “KAPATID AVINIDZ” can be seen in posts on the Facebook pages “Kapatid Avinidz” and “Maharlikan atin toh.”

The claim is false. 

There is no record that Marcos attended a world leaders’ meeting in Toronto in 1983. A list of the presidential foreign trips in the Official Gazette up to February 2016 shows no records of any foreign trip by Marcos in 1983. The list also shows no records of any trip by Marcos to Canada. 

Downloadable data from data.gov.ph on foreign presidential trips made up to May 2014 also do not show any foreign trips by Marcos in 1983 or to Canada.

Also, in the Official Gazette, two speeches by former president Corazon Aquino on November 4, 1989, and November 6, 1989, both say that she was the first Philippine president to visit Canada. This was also stated in an article on the website New Canadian Media on April 30, 2015, titled “Filipino President’s Impending Visit to Canada Sparks Mixed Reactions” and in the issues of the Philippine Canadian Inquirer on April 30, 2015, and May 6, 2015. 

Searching through the archives of publications like the New York Times or TIME Magazine do not return any news reports or documents about a meeting of world leaders that took place in Toronto in 1983.

Furthermore, the photos used do not support the narration pertaining to a meeting of world leaders in Toronto in 1983. The photos used instead were taken from the the Manila Summit Conference held in Manila on October 24 to 25, 1966, which can be verified by a reverse image search. In one of the photos used in the video from “Jevara PH,” the logo of the Manila Summit Conference can be seen above Marcos’s head, and the words “MANILA SUMMIT CONFERENCE,” “1966,” and “7 NATIONS” can be discerned. 

One of the photos used in both videos from “Jevara PH” and “KAPATID AVINIDZ” during the narration is the same as a photo from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library website, which shows the name of the event as the “Manila Conference of SEATO (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization) nations on the Vietnam War: Nations leaders.”

The YouTube videos from the channels “Jevara PH” and “KAPATID AVINIDZ” also contain other claims about the so-called “Marcos gold,” a topic that has been the subject of many Rappler fact-checks before. – Percival Bueser/Rappler.com

This article was written by a volunteer of Rappler’s fact-checking mentorship program, a 5-week exclusive and hands-on training on detecting, investigating, and verifying online misinformation and disinformation.

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