CEBU City north district Rep. Raul del Mar is among the five of 10 Cebu lawmakers who voted for House Bill 7376, which seeks to abolish the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG) and transfer its functions to the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG). This is an interesting development considering that del Mar is a veteran of the struggle against the Marcos dictatorship.
But times have changed. After the former dictator Ferdinand Marcos was ousted by the 1986 Edsa People Power uprising, his successor Corazon Aquino sought to rebuild the country’s tattered democracy and recover the loot that the dictator successfully hid using various schemes. Because the task is complex and painstaking, an agency like the PCGG had to be created.
The act did pay off, with the PCGG reporting in 2016 that it had recovered around P170 billion of the loot from the estimated P230 billion to P464 billion that Marcos and his cronies plundered, per Transparency International. But as the years passed, so did the country’s political wind shift its direction, with the Marcoses successfully recovering their political influence.
The influence-peddling peaked in the 2016 presidential elections when the Marcoses forged an alliance with then candidate Rodrigo Duterte. Duterte’s win meant that the Marcoses’ political influence would reach the highest levels, allowing them to dismantle some of the anti-Marcos acts of the post-Edsa 1 governments. This as the revision of the narrative of the Marcos years intensified.
Incidentally, these are happening as veterans of the Marcos struggle get old and are being pushed away from the limelight, and new generations born after Edsa 1 and who never experienced the excesses of the Marcos years begin finding their political voice. This has given the Marcoses the daring to negate much of the gains of the Edsa uprising.
Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s near-win in the 2016 vice presidential race. The burial of the dictator’s body in the Libingan ng mga Bayani. And now, the abolition of the PCGG and the transfer of its functions to the office of Solicitor General Jose Calida, a known Marcos ally. Everything is clicking well for the Marcoses.