Story by J. C. and E. C.
With the echoing sound of a reversing truck, a mix of lies, debts, and lives piling onto the nation’s grave, setting the foundation for monuments of deceiving glory that have stood the test of time.
Despite democracy dawning over the country in 1986 after a 21-year reign of tyranny during Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s martial law, efforts to expose the atrocities committed under the late strongman’s watch have been suppressed and vilified.
Still casting shadows over the need to steer history to the truthful course are the structures built under the extravagant Marcoses’ edifice complex. In which architecture glosses over our dark past, turning an exiled family into celebrated figures once again. With a familiar name back in Malacañang, new edifices start revising history anew.
Blueprints of Indoctrination
Among the many weapons in the Marcosian arsenal, infrastructure empowered by Imelda’s edifice complex remains the most enduring in their relentless desire for the absolute submission of the nation to the envisioned “Bagong Lipunan.”
Trademarked by a Brutalist architectural style, these overdesigned and vanity-driven structures were at the forefront of the late dictator’s claim to greatness and concealed brutality. And with unchecked executive power under martial law, the conjugal dictators’ whims and caprices underpinned the projects, plunging the country’s pockets into deep crisis and spilling innocent blood in its scaffoldings.
With a price tag of $2.3 billion, the mothballed Bataan Nuclear Power Plant (BNPP) built in 1984 stands as the most staggering blow to the ballooning external debt incurred by the dictatorship. Marred by safety concerns and a crony corruption scheme, the most expensive construction project of the strongman only gathered dust and never fully saw the light of day. The capless expenditure of the tyrannical tandem left the country scrambling to pay off a $28.3 billion outstanding debt, a bill that crippled the future of the Philippine economy as taxpayers bore the burden for over 40 years after the ousting of the Marcoses.
Shady financing revealed only one-half of the hideous face concealed under the imposing makeup of the edifices. For the now decaying Manila Film Center, erected to appease Imelda’s salivation for international recognition, approximately 169 lives became casualties. The botched management that led to workers buried in quick-dry cement came through the rushed instruction of the First Lady, rotating 4,000 workers between three shifts across 24 hour-periods.
Yet, amid insurmountable evidence of economic recession and human rights violations during the rise of these edifices, a substantial portion of the populace remains zealous of the period and its figureheads.
When asked how this propagandistic success came to be, Dr. Gerard Lico, a professor from the University of the Philippines (UP) College of Architecture, explained the innate prowess of architecture and the Marcosian edifice complex’s illusion of progress and permanence.
“Of all art forms, the architecture is the most tangible. Sometimes the employment of monumentality overwhelms the human scale. Thus it has the power to enthrall, power to suspend disbelief,” Dr. Lico said. “If you look at the buildings of the Marcos regime, they rely on both modernism and classical proportions; classical because it’s timeless and modern because it projects certain narratives of progressiveness.”
Meanwhile, UP Instructor John Carlo Santos, specializing in Philippine literature and cultural studies, saw the structures as a means to redirect attention away from the regime’s corruption.
“The Heart Center and Kidney Center, why are they positively seen? ‘Because I am sick. Hence, I will go to the NKTI (National Kidney Transplant Institute), to the Heart Center. They directly benefit me. Therefore, I do not care if they are politicized or if they are from corrupt means’,” Santos said.
Ongoing construction
The late strongman’s namesake seemed to not only inherit his name but also his affinity for constructing deceitful lies packaged within concrete slabs. Vowing to usher in a “Golden Age of Infrastructure”, President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. unveiled his flagship infrastructure program, Build Better More (BBM). Yet similar to the late parents’ edifices, fragility haunts the BBM project of their son.
In his recent State of the Nation Address, Marcos Jr. flaunted the completion of over 5,500 flood control projects in various parts of the country, which cost taxpayers P244.57 billion. Several days later, the vaunt of the chief executive was sent down the drain as several areas in the country were submerged in flood and state of calamity due to Super Typhoon Carina-enhanced southwest monsoon rains.
Diving deeper, cracks can also be traced right away within the BBM project’s blueprints. In pursuit of what Dr. Lico claimed was a “restoration” and “image-making” antic, Marcos Jr. obsessed with constructing roads and bridges, comprising 32 percent of the 111 planned projects, over mass transit. To fund these infrastructures, the administration doubled down on acquiring foreign loans, exacerbating the external debt crisis to a staggering $3.9 billion.
Despite the hefty sum of taxpayers’ money being poured into a slew of expressways, the ailing state of their daily lives remained. Millions of commuters still spend hours every day suffering from the globally crowned worst metro area traffic along the arteries of Manila. Meanwhile, the landmark P700-billion New Manila International Airport in Bulacan would displace and trample upon the livelihood of at least 700 fisherfolk.
When infrastructures’ foundation remains hinged on a wicked blueprint, they would never serve Filipino taxpayers’ needs. By weaponizing edifices to bolster his influence, the dictator’s son reveals the same chinks as his father. The concrete relics of the dictatorship, done under the gun, are doomed to crumble due to being compromised structurally. Cut from the same cloth, Marcos Jr.’s architecture would only remain a fragile, deceiving monument that falls short of genuine progress and development.
Demolishing the Pillars of Deceit
As the heir to the plastic throne attempts to herald another age of autocratic rule, the means to this end become all the more familiar. Through the caulk-like reapplication of the edifice complex, the cracks of a harrowing past become sealed and the foundations of a disturbing future reinforced.
It is, however, in the best interest of the truth-seeking masses to oppose the false narratives of the Marcosian edifices by equipping each other with tools of criticality that drill beneath the swindling surfaces. The masses, then, as Dr. Lico sees, would be warded from overwhelming aesthetics and guided to delve deeper into the trenches of power dynamics and perpetuated symbols.
The stories and meanings embedded within the facade of these structures should not be forgotten. By acknowledging the existence of their imposed ideas, unearthed are the veiled truths of the edifices that fuel the counter-narratives of the oppressed.
Similar to any object, the architecture and deceptive images constructed by the Marcoses are destined for an inevitable collapse. In the past, countless empires and tyrants have fallen. Even the Filipino people are no strangers to ousting foreign brutality and a ruthless, homegrown dictator.
Dispelling the deceiving darkness covering the edifices serves as the light banishing the shadows of Marcosian propaganda. Interwoven within the sealed cracks of lies is the truth, the foundation for engineering the masses’ resistance against the perennial shackles of oppression chaining them.
After all, history shows that only through resolutely fighting for the truth and resisting lies and injustice can the country free itself from the ghosts of the past.
