Juan Ponce Enrile

With his appointment by Ferdinand Marcos Jr. as chief presidential legal counsel in 2022, Juan Ponce Enrile (full name: Juan Valentin Purugganan Ponce Enrile) comes full circle serving a Marcos administration and being in government.
He entered public service in 1966, when he was appointed undersecretary of finance by president Ferdinand E. Marcos, father and namesake of the current Chief Executive. Before that, however, he was already the personal legal affairs liaison of Marcos Sr. when the latter was Senate president.

At 100 (as of 2024), Enrile is the oldest member of the younger Marcos’ Cabinet. In his nearly six decades in public office, he has served in the Cabinet of two other presidents (Marcos Sr. and briefly Corazon Aquino), heading various departments, and was a member of Congress, either as district representative or assembly man of his home province of Cagayan or his region (elected in 1978, 1984, 1992) or as senator (elected in 1987, 1995, 2004, 2010).
Marcos Jr., who hosted a luncheon on Enrile’s birth centenary, called him an “icon in the pantheon of Philippine history.” The President also said, “to have him in my corner allows me to sleep better at night.”
In response, Enrile said, “The happiest moment of my life was when I served the first presidency of a Marcos president. and the second time is now that I’m serving the son of that president, our President BongBong Marcos.”
Enrile, the son of former Cagayan congressman Alfonso Ponce Enrile with lover Petra Furagganan, was a topnotch student. He earned his associate of arts degree cum laude from the Ateneo de Manila University, his law degree cum laude from the University of the Philippines, and his master of laws from Harvard University, where he was a scholar.
Enrile was the architect of the senior Marcos’s martial law, implemented for practically 14 years until February 1986, when a coup attempt led by Enrile himself turned into a civilian revolution that ousted Marcos. Decades later, Enrile’s daughter Katrina said in a TV interview in 2023 that his father had sought forgiveness for withdrawing support from the older Marcos and that he “never really betrayed” the dictator.
While newly installed president Corazon Aquino appointed him defense secretary after Marcos’s ouster, the stint lasted less than 10 months. Enrile failed to have Aquino’s ear on security issues, and often clashed with left-leaning members of the Cabinet on certain policies. Enrile was forced to resign in November 1986 after a fact-finding committee implicated him in a coup attempt, code-named God Save the Queen.
While Enrile was mostly remembered in his stints as defense minister or secretary in various periods, he actually also took on justice- and finance-related portfolios. His known specialization is in mercantile and tax laws.
As a lawmaker, he combined his expertise in these fields to push laws on consumer welfare, industry competition, sin taxes, expanded value added tax, and against terrorism.
He had an image makeover of sorts as Senate president in 2012, when he presided over the impeachment trial of Chief Justice Renato Corona. A new generation of political observers and news consumers, far removed from the years of horror and human rights violations during martial law, considered him a “rockstar,” impressed by how he handled the hearings that eventually found Corona guilty of betrayal of public trust and culpable violation of the Constitution when he failed to disclose certain properties in his statement of assets, liabilities, and net worth.

It was Enrile’s second time being elected as Senate president; the first was in 2008, when he replaced SP Manuel Villar. Enrile stepped down as Senate president in 2013 after he was criticized by four colleagues to whose offices he did not give additional operating expenses in December 2012: Miriam Santiago, Antonio Trillanes IV, and siblings Pia and Alan Cayetano.
Enrile’s new-found popularity as senator waned after it was revealed in 2013 that he was one of the senators whose pork barrel was channeled to dubious non-government organizations in exchange for kickbacks amounting to P172 million. He was detained starting July 2014, but was allowed by the Supreme Court to post bail in August 2015 on humanitarian grounds, considering his age and frail health.
He tried to return to the Senate in 2019, but lost in the election.
Enrile was married to Cristina Castañer, with whom he has a daughter, Jackie, and a son, Jack, who had also served as representative of the 1st District of Cagayan.