Butcher in a boxDURING the 20 years Ferdinand Marcos spent as president of the Philippines, his official salary never rose above $13,500 a year. Yet by 1986, when the “people power” revolution prompted him and his wife Imelda to flee into exile in Hawaii, they had amassed a fortune. Mrs Marcos left behind her shoe collection, but her husband brought with him jewellery, gold bricks and freshly printed Philippine currency, together worth around $15m. In all, he and his cronies are thought to have plundered perhaps $10 billion. What is more, during his time in office thousands of Filipinos were tortured, jailed without due process or murdered by the regime’s thugs.
Marcos died in Hawaii; since 1993, his embalmed remains have been displayed in a glass box in his home province of Ilocos Norte. Rodrigo Duterte, the erratic strongman now running the Philippines, believes the dead dictator deserves better: he has approved the Marcos family’s long-standing request to bury their patriarch in Manila’s National Heroes’ Cemetery, with full military honours—an idea all Marcos’s other successors rejected.
Mr...Continue reading
from Asia http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21710015-philippine-government-offers-heros-burial-murderous-kleptocrat-hail-thief?fsrc=rss
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