Imelda Marcos

• 1. Introduction

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  Imelda Marcos stepped onto a palace balcony on the 25th of February 1986, and sang a song to a loyalist crowd while the Philippine government collapsed around her. Hours later, she and her husband Ferdinand fled to Hawaii, leaving behind a wardrobe that press reports worldwide catalogued with disbelief: 15 mink coats, 508 gowns, 888 handbags, and somewhere between 1,060 and 3,000 pairs of shoes. That inventory became shorthand for something vast and difficult to name. She and Ferdinand hold the Guinness World Record for the greatest theft from a government, an estimated 5 to 10 billion dollars taken from the Filipino people. And yet Imelda Marcos did not disappear. She returned from exile, ran for president twice, won four terms in Congress, and lived to see her son Bongbong Marcos win the Philippine presidency. How does a person become that? The answer begins long before the shoes, in a garage in Manila, in a family whose fortunes collapsed when Imelda was a child.

• 2. The Romualdez Years

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  Imelda Remedios Visitación Trinidad Romuáldez was born at dawn in San Miguel, Manila, on the 2nd of July 1929, into the kind of family whose rise and fall could span a single decade. Her father Vicente was a lawyer and her mother María Remedios Trinidad came from Baliwag, Bulacan. Imelda was the sixth of Vicente's eleven children, born to a wealthy clan of devout Catholics from the province of Leyte. Her paternal great-grandfather was a Spanish friar and silversmith from Granada named Fray Francisco Miguel López Silgado, who became parish priest of Pandacan in Manila.

  The wealth did not last. Around 1932, the family's fortune began to decline. Her parents separated for a time, during which Remedios worked for the nuns at the Asilo de San Vicente de Paul. When they reconciled, the family moved into the garage of their own house to avoid further conflict. In April 1938, Imelda's mother died of double pneumonia, leaving six children behind.

  By November 1938, Vicente gave up on Manila altogether, returned to Tacloban, and built a simpler life for the family there. Imelda grew up speaking Waray before learning Tagalog and then English. She attended Holy Infant Academy through high school, graduating in 1948 with a general average of 80 percent across primary and secondary school. Her family's poverty followed her into the classroom: she was frequently among the students who had to apologize for late payments.

  Her uncle Norberto Romualdez served as a Supreme Court Associate Justice, and her younger brother Benjamin, known as Kokoy, would later serve as Governor of Leyte and as an ambassador under Ferdinand's regime. The political dynasty that bore her surname was always within reach, but Imelda herself arrived in Manila in 1952 as a poor relation, living in the house of Daniel Romuáldez, the Speaker Pro tempore of the House of Representatives. Her status there was described as "higher than servants and lower than family members."

• 3. The Eleven-Day Courtship

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  Ferdinand Marcos was already a congressman with a growing reputation when he first spotted Imelda at a budget hearing on the 6th of April 1954. She had come to the Philippine Congress to visit her cousin Daniel. During a recess, Ferdinand asked his journalist friend Jose Guevara of The Manila Times to introduce them. He confirmed that Ferdinand stood at least an inch taller than Imelda before deciding to pursue her.

  What followed lasted eleven days. Ferdinand and Guevara drove Imelda up to Baguio that Holy Week, where Ferdinand visited her daily at the Romualdez family mansion and showered her with flowers and gifts. He arrived with a marriage license and pressed her to sign it. On the 16th of April 1954, Good Friday, Guevara jokingly asked Imelda if she wanted to be "the First Lady of the Land someday," and she agreed to sign. A judge named Francisco Chanco, described as reluctant, married them secretly the next day.

  The church wedding required the blessing of Imelda's father Vicente, which Ferdinand requested by telegram on Easter Sunday. The formal ceremony took place on the 1st of May 1954, at the San Miguel Pro-Cathedral in Manila, the same church where Imelda had been baptized. The marriage required a quiet arrangement: Ferdinand's common-law wife, Carmen Ortega of La Union's Ortega political clan, with whom he had sired three children, was removed from public view.

  The speed of the courtship and the secrecy of the civil wedding set the template for how the Marcos partnership would operate for decades: decisions made fast, arrangements managed out of sight, and public ceremony deployed afterward to legitimize the result.

• 4. The Iron Butterfly

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  By the 1965 presidential campaign, Imelda had developed a political identity distinct from the role of politician's wife. Working-class Filipinos came out to Marcos rallies specifically to see her. Campaign strategists built the entire image strategy around her presence, asking her to wear her signature ternos and maintain an immaculate appearance regardless of audience.

  She described herself at this stage as "a butterfly breaking out of its cocoon," a phrase a foreign journalist transformed into the label "the iron butterfly." The description proved more accurate than the original metaphor. She befriended all 1,347 delegates of the Nacionalista Party Convention until Ferdinand won the presidential nomination on the 21st of November 1964. When Fernando Lopez refused the vice-presidential nomination multiple times, Imelda met with him personally, recounted the couple's hardships, and cried in front of him until he relented. She then produced a document for him to sign on the spot.

  Ferdinand later told the press that it was Imelda who had delivered the one-million-vote margin he needed to win the general election. She campaigned in Leyte and Manila, using her singing voice to reach voters with local folk songs. Ferdinand was inaugurated as the tenth president on the 30th of December 1965, and Imelda officially became First Lady.

  She moved quickly. Within three years she had initiated a 12-million-peso social welfare plan, overseen the construction of welfare villages from Quezon City to Pasay to Tanay, and launched a seed dispersal program that distributed 309,392 kits to more than 1,500 towns by 1968. She was elected chairman of the board of the Cultural Center of the Philippines in March 1966, a position Ferdinand arranged partly to counter the perception that she was simply a politician's wife.

• 5. Power Without Title

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  The Dovie Beams scandal gave Imelda something she had not previously possessed in public: grounds for an independent political agenda. President Marcos had met the American actress Beams when she arrived in Manila in 1968 to star in Maharlika, a propaganda film about Ferdinand's wartime exploits. According to Beams, the two had an affair and she recorded their encounters with Ferdinand's full consent. When those recordings were played at a press conference, cabinet members including Cesar Virata and Gerardo Sicat later recalled that Imelda used the resulting humiliation as leverage to expand her own authority.

  On the world stage, she became a de facto vice president. Ferdinand rarely left Malacañang Palace, so Imelda traveled in his place. She was present when President Lyndon B. Johnson offered the Philippine war damage claims, with agreed funds going to her Cultural Center project. For the CCP's gala opening on the 8th of September 1969, US President Richard Nixon was invited but sent California Governor Ronald Reagan and his wife on Air Force One instead. Palace accounts suggest this trip seeded the closeness between the Reagans and the Marcoses.

  In 1975, after King Faisal of Saudi Arabia was assassinated, Imelda wanted to extend condolences in person. Women were not welcome in the Saudi court. She gained entry through her personal connection to the surgeon who had previously performed heart surgery on the new king, becoming the first woman guest honored there. By 1978, she had been appointed Ambassador Plenipotentiary and Extraordinary, traveling to the United States, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Cuba. She counted Richard Nixon, Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro, and Josip Broz Tito among her personal acquaintances. She traveled to Iraq to secure oil and to Libya to negotiate a peace treaty with the Moro National Liberation Front.

  At home, Ferdinand issued Presidential Decree 824 in 1975, making Imelda Governor of Metro Manila. In 1978, he appointed her Minister of Human Settlements. From those two positions she oversaw the construction of the Philippine Heart Center, the Lung Center of the Philippines, the Philippine International Convention Center, the Coconut Palace, the Manila Film Center, and the Calauit Safari Park. She also secured the Miss Universe 1974 pageant for Manila, requiring the Folk Arts Theater to be built in under three months.

• 6. The Edifice Complex

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  The Cultural Center of the Philippines became the premier symbol of what critics called Imelda's "edifice complex": a compulsion to commission massive, grandiose public buildings at impossible speed and public expense. Designed by architect Leandro Locsin on reclaimed land along Roxas Boulevard, the CCP Complex covered approximately 21 hectares. An initial grant of 90,000 pesos came from the Philippine-American Culture Foundation. Upon completion, the total cost represented a roughly 50,000 percent increase over that original budget. Construction material prices had risen 30 to 40 percent during the period, but the scale of the cost escalation went far beyond that explanation.

  Imelda called the complex the "sanctuary of the Filipino soul." The architectural style she favored was Brutalist: fortress-like, massive, designed to produce an impression of grandiosity. On the 4th of July 1966, she invited the Beatles, then touring the Philippines, to perform at a private event in the Palace. The band declined. The result was an order to lock down Manila International Airport, mobs threatening the band's hotel, and a reported tax assessment issued to their manager.

  The San Juanico Bridge, linking the island of Samar to Imelda's home province of Leyte, was promoted by the administration as Ferdinand's gift to his wife. Funded with foreign loans from Japan's Overseas Technical Cooperation Agency, it was completed on the 2nd of July 1973, Imelda's birthday. Engineers and economists quickly called it a white elephant, constructed decades before traffic volume could justify the cost.

  In Manhattan, Imelda bought four prominent buildings: the Crown Building at the corner of 57th and Fifth, 40 Wall Street (later renamed the Trump Building), the Herald Center, and the building at 200 Madison Avenue. She declined to purchase the Empire State Building, explaining that she felt it was "too ostentatious." Her art collection ran to 175 pieces, including works attributed to Michelangelo, Botticelli, Raphael, Canaletto, and Claude Monet.

• 7. The Theft and Its Scale

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  In 1989, Guinness World Records credited Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos jointly with the largest theft from a government ever recorded, estimating the total at 5 to 10 billion dollars. In a 1985 report to the US Congress House Committee on Foreign Affairs, US Ambassador Stephen Bosworth estimated the accumulated stolen wealth at a figure that his source, economist Bernardo Villegas of the Center for Research and Communication, described as conservative, suggesting the real figure was closer to 13 billion dollars. Another CRC economist, Jesus Estanislao, suggested the total could reach as high as 30 billion dollars when accounting for wealth accumulated since the 1950s.

  The PCGG's first chairperson, Jovito Salonga, placed his estimate in a range that became the most widely cited international figure. Philippine official records showed that Ferdinand's presidential salary ran to 60,000 pesos annually from 1966 to 1976, and 100,000 pesos annually from 1977 to 1985. Imelda's salary as Minister of Human Settlements amounted to 75,000 pesos per year, totaling roughly $304,372 over the full period.

  In March 1968, Ferdinand and Imelda opened accounts at Credit Suisse in Zurich using the aliases William Saunders and Jane Ryan. These were subsequently moved into dummy foundations. After the 1986 EDSA revolution, Swiss courts froze the accounts. On the 21st of December 1990, the Swiss Federal Supreme Court ruled they could be transferred to the Philippine government pending a final Philippine court ruling. Switzerland released a total of 683 million dollars in Marcos funds to the Philippine treasury in 2004. By 2018, approximately 3.6 billion dollars of an estimated 5 to 10 billion dollars had been recovered through compromise deals and sequestration cases.

  In October 1988, a federal grand jury in Manhattan indicted Imelda on charges of racketeering, conspiracy, fraud, and obstruction of justice for allegedly using 103 million dollars in stolen government funds to buy Manhattan real estate and art. Tobacco heiress Doris Duke posted 5 million dollars in bail. Criminal defense attorney Gerry Spence led her defense. In July 1990, following a three-month trial, she was acquitted after characterizing herself as "a poor widow who knew nothing about her husband's activities."

  In February 1995, the United States District Court for the District of Hawaii awarded 1.96 billion dollars to 9,539 victims of human rights violations under the Marcos dictatorship. On the 9th of November 2018, the Sandiganbayan convicted her on seven counts of graft and corruption for funneling funds to Swiss foundations while serving as Governor of Metro Manila. The sentences ranged from six to eleven years per count, totaling a minimum of 42 years and 7 months. Newsweek listed her in 2009 as one of the "greediest people of all time." Her response was: "I plead guilty. For me, greedy is giving."

• 8. The Return and the Legacy

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  Ferdinand Marcos died in Hawaii in September 1989. His son Bongbong was the only family member present at his deathbed. On the 4th of November 1991, President Corazon Aquino allowed Imelda and her children to return to the Philippines to face formal charges, partly to persuade Swiss courts to release Marcos funds to the Philippine government. Imelda returned to politics immediately.

  She ran for president in 1992, finishing fifth out of seven candidates. She won a congressional seat representing Leyte's first district in 1995 despite a disqualification lawsuit that reached the Supreme Court. She withdrew from the 1998 presidential race to support Joseph Estrada, finishing ninth among eleven candidates. She won three more terms in Congress, serving the second district of Ilocos Norte from 2010 onward, before her 2018 graft conviction forced her to withdraw from a gubernatorial race. Her grandson Matthew Manotoc won that race instead.

  The term "Imeldific" entered Philippine English and eventually spread internationally. It describes anything exaggeratedly ostentatious or in bad taste, applied to clothing, architecture, and decor. People Magazine's Carlos Lopez used the word as early as April 1986. Atlantic columnist Anne Soukhanov helped establish its place in international dictionaries. British producer Fatboy Slim and musician David Byrne released a concept album about her life called Here Lies Love in 2010, which became a rock musical. The title came from a phrase Imelda said she wanted written on her tombstone. The Broadway transfer opened on the 20th of July 2023, and ran until November 26 of that year.

  A portion of her shoe collection is kept at the National Museum of the Philippines. Another portion is displayed at a shoe museum in Marikina. Her son Bongbong Marcos, whose path to the Philippine presidency she had been working to clear at least as far back as 2019 according to the documentary The Kingmaker, was inaugurated as president. The documentary, directed by Lauren Greenfield, debuted at the 76th Venice Film Festival in August 2019 and holds a 97 percent fresh rating.