“MARCOS TRIED BRIBING WITNESS”

WASHINGTON — President Ferdinand Marcos, the Philippines’ strongman, offered a

witness a $50,000 bribe the other day not to testify on Capitol Hill about corruption and tyranny in the
Philippines. The witness, Marcos’ former press censor Primitivo Mijares, was prepared to tell the
uncensored story of the Marcos regime to a House international relations subcommittee.

ON THE EVE of his testimony, Mijares received a personal call from Marcos in Manila urging him
not to testify. Then an aide got on the phone and offered him the $50,000.
The money actually was deposited in a San Francisco branch of Lloyds Bank of California in the
names of Primitivo Mijares and Ambassador Trinidad Alconcel, the Philippines’ consul general. Thus
Mijares couldn’t withdraw the $50,000 until the consul general counter-signed the check. Mijares not
only went ahead with his testimony but informed Chairman Don Fraser, D.-Minn., of the bribe attempt.
Fraser’s office notified the Justice Department, which is investigating.
WE HAVE confirmed that $50,000 was deposited in the names of bothMijares and Alconcel in
savings account No. 0662-46062 at Lloyds Bank of California. The bank’s records show that Alconcel
removed Mijares’ name from the joint account on June 18, the day after Mijares testified.
By Mijares’ account, he simply became disgusted with Marcos and sought asylum in the United
States. An approach was made in May to persuade him to come home. A colonel in Marcos’ presidential
guard, Romeo Ochoco, looked up Mijares in San Francisco.
OVER COFFEE and doughnuts in a 24-hour restaurant, they talked about a book that Mijares is
writing about the Marcos dictatorship. He plans to call it “The Conjugal Dictatorship of Ferdinand and
Imelda.”
The colonel was soothing. “He said Marcos would talk to me about my complaints,” recalled
Mijares. But the former press censor felt he knew Marcos too well to trust him.
The colonel’s visit was followed by a series of telephone calls from Ambassador Alconcel, who had
heard that Mijares would be a star witness at Fraser’s hearings on U.S.-Philippines problems. The consul
general tried to persuade Mijares not to testify and, when Mijares refused, to “pull the punches.” In
return, the former censor was promised that Manila would “help” him.
HE FLEW TO Washington, nevertheless, to testify and checked into a downtown Washington
motel. Not long afterward, on June 16, he received a call from Manila.
“EX-AIDE REVEALS MARCOS’ CORRUPTION’’
WASHINGTON — Yesterday we reported that Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos offered a
former confidant, Primitivo Mijares, a $50,000 bribe not to tell the U.S. Congress what he knows about
corruption in thePhilippines.
Today we can reveal the story that Marcos tried to cover up. It is another Watergate scandal,
Philippine version — a story of highcrimes and misdemeanors, ranging from abuse of power to misuse of
government funds.
The story is told in a 24-page memo, which Mijares submitted to the House International
Organizations subcommittee. In the memo, he freely confesses his own dirty work for Marcos.
 The memo details how Marcos won reelection in 1969 using some of the same tactics that Richard
Nixon picked up in 1972. Mijares describes the Marcos campaign as “the dirtiest election ever held in the
Philippines.”
Marcos used “goons, guns and gold,” his former confidant charges, to win the 1969 election. The
strategy was to create an atmosphere of disturbance, which called for Marcos’ strong hand to control.
The Philippine President, according to the memo, “had military personnel infiltrate the ranks of
demonstrators to explode bombs in their midst and to instigate the demonstrators into committing acts
of violence.”
Philippine air force infiltrators allegedly lobbed “heavy explosives in front of the (U.S.) consular
offices,” and “armed forces psychological warfare units’ conducted bombings on Manila’s water system,
city hall and the bathroom of the Constitutional Convention.” The violence was “later blamed by Mr.
Marcos on the Maoist People’s Army.”
The incidents that Marcos secretly encouraged, Mijares alleges, had their innocent victims. When
a bomb exploded inside a department store, for example, “a family man who was buying a gift for a child
observing its birthday was blown to bits.” A conscience-stricken police sergeant later confessed he had
planted the bomb on superior orders, claims Mijares.
To improve his press notices, Marcos allowed “heavy borrowings from the Philippine Bank,”
according to the memo, so a toady could buy up a “media empire.” Allegedly the pro-Marcos media even
collected “part of their salaries . . . from the President’s contingent fund.”
These tactics worked so well, charges Mijares, that the reelected Marcos continued using them to
take over dictatorial power. Under the Philippine constitution, Marcos was limited to two terms, but he
had nointention of retiring.
He continued to whip up a crisis fever. He staged “a supposed landing of combat weapons,” for
example, “along the coast of Digoyo.” Mijares claims the weapons were planted by “a special operations
groups of trusted military men,” but Marcos loudly blamed “a foreign power” and “Maoist guerrillas.”
There was also a faked ambush, Mijares charges, involving a
Philippine official's car. By exploiting these incidents, Marcos had the country psychologically ready
for his proclamation of martial law on September 21, 1972.
With a great show of benevolence, he proclaimed a so-called “smiling martial law.” He quickly
restored order and gave the citizenry respite from turmoil. But he also closed down opposition
newspapers and jailed recalcitrant editors and rivals. Marcos asked a Constitutional Convention to put a
stamp of legitimacy upon his dictatorship. But when the delegates showed a little independence, the
memo states, he “caused the arrest and detention in military stockades of delegates” and “bribed floor
leaders of the convention with money and favors.”To make doubly sure the convention gave Marcos the
powers hewanted, alleges Mijares, the results “were manufactured by a group headed by the President’s
favorite brother-in-law, Gov. Benjamin Romualdez.”
Mijares had personal knowledge that the convention vote was rigged, he writes, because “I was a
member of that group.’’ Just as John Dean later confessed his role in the Nixon scandals, Mijares
describes how he ordered the takeover of a newspaper, investigated an Associated Press reporter,
prepared phony stories on revolutionaries and committed other outrages on Marcos’ orders.
The Mijares memo then tells how Marcos’ “military regime has gone absolutely corrupt.” The
dictator parcelled out to his cronies the licenses to smuggle in luxury goods and to smuggle out sugar,
copra, lumber and cement, charges Mijares. Military supporters have been given fabulously lucrative
rackets in Manila to run as they please, he adds.
Through front men, according to Mijares, Marcos has taken over agricultural lands in northern
Luzon, the Visayas and Mindanao. He also allegedly controls oil concessions, a huge export business, a
free trade zone in Mariveles and even a claim on some buried World War II Japanese treasure in the
Sierra Madre.
Mijares also claims that Marcos has misused some of the $100
million in U.S. aid he gets each year. The greatest part of U.S. medical aid, for example, “goes to
the United Drug Company, the biggest pharmaceutical firm in the country which is owned by a front man
of the President,” alleges the memo.
Yet the U.S. State Department, swears Mijares, has thwarted Marcos’ democratic opponents by
supporting “the Philippine martial regime.”
ORIGIN OF THE MARCOS WEALTH
The December issue of the glamour magazine Cosmopolitan is making the rounds of Filipino
circles here.
The issue has struck the fancy of its dazzling article on “The Ten Richest Women in the World” in
which Mrs. Imelda Marcos — hail! — was voted as one of the walking gold mines.
The inclusion of Imelda in the fabulous list was indeed judicious considering that the yardstick
used, apparently, was ostentatious wealth.
Writer Richard Baker, however, appeared to have deliberately spun a veil of mystery as to how the
fabulous Imelda and her consort came to their fortune which Cosmopolitan gingerly estimated at
“multimillions,” and with a question mark, at that.
All Baker did was to hint at it by using the apt verb “amassed.” If he probed any further, then, he
might have decided to place Imelda in another list — that one for “the world’s top women of ill-gotten
wealth.”
Of course, Imelda has a very naive way of denying that they only found their treasure chest right
at the doorsteps of Malacanang Palace.
Imelda is very vocal about the fact that when she met and married Mr. Marcos after a whirlwind
courtship, Ferdie — then a congressman — was already a millionaire in his own right.

There is a story she apparently loves to recall to friends which she did tell one time (before martial
law) to Malacanang reporters.
 In her child-like, excited way, when she married Ferdie she was brought to his private bank vault.
And there it was before her eyes: piles and piles of cold cash!
Immediately, she got in touch with her aunt, the wife of the late former Speaker Daniel R.
Romualdez. She described to her aunt how many rows and how high the rows of bills in various
denominations were.
At her aunt’s computation, she recalled, the vault money would have run to two or three million
pesos! And what about Ferdie’s other assets such as huge tracts of land during that time?
But Imelda, quite prudently, did not go through the length of describing how then-Congressman
Ferdinand E. Marcos arrived at such wealth. Suggestions that she and her husband accumulated money
through kickbacks make her openly furious.
Why should they go through such degrading method, she would ask, when there were other ways
available through the presidency?
She once told Malacanang reporters — which included myselt and disenchanted former martial
law propagandist Primitivo Mijares — that in their positions she and her husband could easily borrow
money from any bank in the world or from rich personal friends in the international jet set.
Why, if she’d only run for the presidency, she said, she’d easily have $100 million as pledged by
Cristina Ford!
And she tried to drive home her point by saying that through the presidency, they could
legitimately make money since they could have advance information on government actions and
decisions which are useful in business.
To borrow a phrase from the Cosmopolitan, “the cat is out of the money bag.”
ABUSE OF POWER AND CORRUPTION
With a stroke of the pen, President Marcos wrote a gory finis to the heyday of the "freest press" in
Southeast Asia.
By the stroke of the very pen that imposed martial law in the Philippines on September 21, 1972,
the one-man ruler paved the way for the dubious meteoric rise - from a slavish and lapping errand boy of
Manila's elite political writers to a "noveau riche" newspaper oligarch — of his brother-in-law, former
Ambassador to the United States and now absentee Leyte Governor Benjamin 'Kokoy' Romualdez .
The entry into the Philippine media field of Kokoy, the favorite brother of the First Lady, Mrs.
Imelda R. Marcos, was at once an indelible blot on the once shining shield of a martial regime that
Marcos imposed ostensibly as an instrument, among others, of reform in a “sick” society.
Either by design or plain subsequent acquiescence on the part of President Marcos, Kokoy
Romualdez forced his way into the country’s media industry clearly with a corrupt and vindictive motive.
The sly insertion of Gov. Romualdez into the area of big time publishing, with his overnight
ownership of a daily newspaper, the Times-Journal (which unashamedly copied the logo of the defunct
Manila Times), spotlights the perversion of the instruments of power at once made available to one man
upon the imposition of martial law in the Philippines.
 It will be recalled that the blueprint for a proposed New Society that is at best an illusion now in
the Philippines called for the mighty interplay of three major arms of an authoritarian government
MARCOS IS THE LAW
Backed by an oppressive martial law. President Marcos has transformed the Philippine judiciary
into a submissive adjunct of the executive for the purpose of assuring the Oriental dictator's claimed
infallibility
Thus, anybody who might dare oppose Marcos or challenge the constitutionality of his acts or the
weight of evidence of charges filed or caused to be filed against his enemies might as well abandon all
hopes of succeeding in this stage of judicial development in the Philippines.
By his imposition of martial law on Sept 21,1972, Marcos created a climate of fear so pervasive in
the country. Then, in a series of decrees and orders, he gave all sectors no choice but to do his bidding.
The fearsome power of martial rule was dramatically demonstrated by Marcos in the firing squad
execution of opium dealer Lim Seng on Jan. 9, 1973.
While it is true that Lim's execution was demanded by the people, the only public blood-letting
thus far resorted to by the martial regime was calculated more to make all sectors aware that the
dictator would not hesitate to press the trigger—when necessary.
The dire message of this two-pronged "propaganda of the deed" resorted to by Marcos in the Lirn
execution was not lost to the Supreme Court of the Philippines.
The high court lost no time in choosing the side of Marcos in selectively deciding some of the
"urgent" cases brought against the dictator.
Of course, Marcos set out his own infallibility - insofar as forces within the Philippines
weremconcerned — when he imposed martial law.
A major prop to such claim infallibility was spelled out by Marcos on the day he proclaimed martial
law when he issued General Order No. 3, providing among others:
"I do hereby further order that the Judiciary shall continue to function in accordance with its
present organization and personnel, and shall try and decide in accordance with existing laws all criminal
and civil cases, except the following:

"1. Those involving the validity, legality or constitutionality of any decree, order or acts issued,
promulgated or performed by me or by my duly designated representative pursuant to Proclamation No.
1081, dated Sept. 21, 1972. xx x"

Aside from promulgating General Order No. 3, Marcos resorted to other significant ways, either
subtle or crude, in subjugating the Supreme Court and the other inferior courts of the land, to wit:
1) By beaming messages to the Supreme Court, when the occasion demanded, that a judicial
rebuff would compel him to dismantle the existingmartial law apparatus and pave the establishment of
military junta-ruled revolutionary government.
 2) By issuing Letter of Instructions No. 11, by which the President required all presidential
appointees, including judges, but excluding members of the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals, to
submit their resignations, thereby making them serve at the absolute pleasure of the President.
3) By taking the official position, through his Solicitor General, in cases pending before the
Supreme Court that the imposition of martial law automatically suspended the privilege of the writ of
habeas corpus, thereby making such posture a virtual order to the high court.
4) By demonstrating his capacity for abrogating at will the normal procedural and substantive
function of the courts when he promulgated Presidential Decree No. 385, dated January 31,1974.
5) By carefully screening new appointees to the Supreme Court who are approaching the age of
65, the retirement age, and increasing the salaries of justices, but making them feel by example that the
P300.000.00 lump sumretirement pay of a Supreme Court justice could be had "only for good behavior."