“SHE never served a day in jail for defrauding her country.”--Catherine Traywild, in a Jan. 16, 2014 profile of Mrs. Marcos in “FP” online
The Sandiganbayan released last Friday, Nov. 9, its decision that convicted Rep. Imelda Romualdez-Marcos, former First Lady to dictator Ferdinand Marcos, of seven counts of corruption and meted out a jail sentence of six to 11 years in prison for each charge.
News stories estimated a total of 77 years though media know the longest period of confinement (“reclusion perpetua”) is 40 years and there’s little chance that she would ever land in prison.
She kept jailers at bay by posting bail, which the anti-graft court allowed. An appeal all the way to the Supreme Court (SC) could take one decade or more. Even if the SC would uphold the conviction, most likely Imelda, 89, would be too old to be confined in a jail cell--though never too old, critics say, to run for a seat in Congress or, for the 2019 election, the governor’s office.
For other things too
Mrs. Marcos had been known for a lot of things, such as the other half of the “conjugal dictatorship” that ruled the country for more than 20 years, her “edifice complex,” being Queen Bee of the Blue Ladies, her “outrageous” demands, and, yes, as the recent Sandiganbayan ruling affirms, corrupt practices that salted away at least $200 million in Swiss banks when she was a government minister. But it’s the notoriety over her shoes that put her up there among wives of authoritarian leaders.
When she, her family and a large retinue of support staff and servants fled the country in 1986, she took with her jewelries, gold bullion, and newly minted paper currency in millions of pesos. She also left behind designer dresses and accessories, including bags and shoes, which could outfit a dozen queens and assorted princesses.
And yet it was the shoes that stood out, drawing amazement and disgust from many people in a country then in the grip of abject poverty. Why the shoes?
Shoes as ‘epitome of excess’
Footwear was something people could relate to and never cease to be amazed about: how many shoes could one need or use? Figures on number of shoes she had stored vary: initial inventory said 1,200; PCGG, the agency tasked to recover stolen wealth, said 3,000; Imelda admitted 1,200. Marikina Shoe Museum got on loan 720 pairs, 253 of which were displayed and the rest stored. Termites, storms and neglect were blamed for damaging the bulk of them, initially kept on display in Malacañang and later sent to the National Museum.
The shoes, believed to be the “epitome of excesses” during the Marcos regime, at first served as propaganda against President Cory Aquino’s predecessor but soon spectators tired of the display. Imelda used it for her defense: “They expected to find skeletons in my Malacañang closet. They found only shoes.” And, as postscript, at the Marikina museum opening in 2001, she said her buying spree for shoes was to help the country’s shoe industry.
Top ‘shoe-holic’
But so many shoes--“lush pumps, strappy numbers, and soft moccasins”--from Christian Dior and Givenchy to Lady Rustan’s labels. For sheer number, every other “shoe-holic” in the world was measured against Imelda and found wanting. With her other celebrity trappings and newsworthiness, not the least of which was her being a dictator’s wife, she was on top of the heap, No. 1 in the list.
That’s why Imelda might be remembered less for all the money that the Sandiganbayan said she stole--for which the anti-graft court declared her guilty “beyond reasonable doubt”--than all those shoes she hoarded.