Facts about Marcos wealth and plunder by Charlie Avila

(Editor’s note: This is a brand new series starting this issue.)

Treasure talk in the Philippines dates back to World War II.

February 1942

Most countries tried to hide their wealth when they realized that the enemy was about to attack. Spain shipped all of its gold reserves to Russia for safekeeping. (Guess who never saw their gold again?)

In the Philippines, while the Americans and Filipinos were holding off the Japanese at Bataan, President Quezon had twenty tons of the treasury’s gold bullion and silver pesos loaded on the submarine USS Trout and taken to Australia. Another 350 tons of silver pesos, worth more than USD 8 million was dumped in the waters off southern Corregidor in May 1942 and several million dollars in paper currency were burned after the serial numbers were noted and radioed to Washington.

August 1942

During the middle part of 1942, the tide of battle began to turn. Japan was losing. Any planned movement of treasure back to Japan had to change – if only as a temporary measure. When the Japanese Imperial Army rolled victorious through Asia, it systematically pillaged each country, shipping raw materials to Japan to further their war effort.

What is little known is that the Japanese did not stop with raw materials. The plunder of each country they occupied was absolute. All banks, treasuries, and other depositories of wealth were looted. Even the dead bodies of the enemy were violated. Gold teeth were ripped out, fingers with rings cut off. Museums, temples, churches were not spared, along with the temples of vice – gambling, prostitution, smuggling, opium, money lending.

A group of Japanese officers, assisted by a special engineer brigade, began burying treasure. They took months of excavation to build elaborate tunnel systems and complexes large enough to hold trucks and sometimes deep enough to be below the water table.

The Japanese built the first underwater tunnel from Kyushu, furthest south of the four major islands, to Honshu, the largest island, in 1942. They had the technology – no doubt about it. Marcos believed in the treasure. After he became president, a large number of military were assigned full time to treasure hunt under the secret leadership of his most trusted General Fabian Ver, who was actually his cousin.

Progress reports to Marcos about various treasure site excavations were found in the palace after the EDSA Revolution. Aside from Ver, the team included many army generals.

1949 – 1950

It can be said that Marcos came from a poor family and that he made his first million as a first-term congressman in 1949 and 1950 selling import licenses. He bought a Cadillac to celebrate his new status. Before then there was no outward indication of any wealth.

1954

When Marcos courted Imelda in 1954, he brought her to a bank vault and showed her stacks of hundred dollar bills but no gold bars. He didn’t open his first overseas bank account till 1967. But in 1988 and thereafter the Marcoses decided to talk like it was settled doctrine that he had began accumulating gold toward the end of the war.

One day Marcos explained to Enrique Zobel de Ayala that he reminted gold bars in Hong Kong in 1946 and accumulated more through various treasure hunts but kept everything secret because other countries might have legal claims until 1985 because of the statute of limitations.

This makes the whole story tragicomic, if true, in that 1985 was the beginning of the end – going all the way to the EDSA people’s urban revolution of 1986. (to be continued in the March 2010 issue)