It is close to midnight and Imelda Marcos is dancing in a trademark pink butterfly gown at a small Philippine town fiesta with adoring voters who still revere her dead dictator husband.
At an age when many others are in nursing homes, the tireless 83-year-old is on the campaign trail, aiming to keep her seat in parliament in next week’s mid-term elections and continue her family’s remarkable political resurrection.
“It’s funny because the older I become the more committed I am and the more I feel I can do it,” Marcos said at the weekend from the family’s home in the north of the country before heading to the fiesta.
Photo: AFP
Ferdinand Marcos’ widow is seen as a certainty to win after first being elected to Congress in 2010, representing half of Ilocos Norte Province, whose voters have stayed loyal to the family throughout decades of tumultuous politics. However, the matriarch has eyes on a bigger prize — a return to the presidential palace as first mother via her son, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, who is eyeing a 2016 run for the top job.
“You always have dreams for your children, and the more they can serve the people, the better,” Marcos said when asked about her son’s presidential ambitions.
Ferdinand Jr, popularly known by his nickname, “Bongbong,” appears well-positioned for a presidential run after one in three voters nationally elected him to the senate for a six-year term in 2010.
Their political fortunes have come a long way from 1986, when millions of people took to the streets in a bloodless “people power” revolution to end the patriarch’s two-decade rule of the country.
Ferdinand Marcos, his wife and their cronies were accused of stealing billions of dollars. Human rights campaigners said thousands of the regime’s critics were murdered or jailed, while martial law also muzzled the press.
Imelda Marcos’ giant shoe collection and other extravagances — while the majority of the population endured crushing poverty — came to symbolize the excesses of her husband’s rule.
However, the government is winding down a global wealth hunt for the embezzled Marcos billions, and the family has beaten every charge of corruption against it.
At the fiesta in Paoay town on Saturday night, Imelda Marcos evoked her glory days as she paraded around a dance floor.
In between dance numbers on the sultry night, a male politician running for a local post sat next to her and furiously wielded a red fan.
Other politicians stood on stage to publicly express their support, and she delivered the headline speech of the night.
Early the next day she began traveling around the district showing off her public support to a group of journalists via a series of orchestrated campaign events.
At each town the media were guided into “mothering centers,” small clinics she has had built across her district offering a hodge-podge of services from medical care to handicrafts training.
During stops she cradled babies and shared native cakes with old women. Two aides handed out toys and dolls to children, and money to a few adult supporters.
Honesia Aknam, an elderly woman with blackened stumps for teeth, embraced her political idol in the hill town of Nueva Era and later gushed as she showed a 500 peso (US$12) bill that she said a Marcos aide slipped into her hand.
“I’ve not seen her for a while so I came here. She looks beautiful still, like a young woman,” Aknam said.
Showcasing phallus-shaped portable shrines and pink penis candies, Japan’s annual fertility festival yesterday teemed with tourists, couples and families elated by its open display of sex. The spring Kanamara Matsuri near Tokyo features colorfully dressed worshipers carrying a trio of giant phallic-shaped objects as they parade through the street with glee. The festival, as legend has it, honors a local blacksmith in the Edo Period (1603-1868) who forged an iron dildo to break the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman’s vagina that had been castrating young men on their wedding nights. A 1m black steel phallus sits in the courtyard of
HIGH HOPES: The power source is expected to have a future, as it is not dependent on the weather or light, and could be useful for places with large desalination facilities A Japanese water plant is harnessing the natural process of osmosis to generate renewable energy that could one day become a common power source. The possibility of generating power from osmosis — when water molecules pass from a less salty solution to a more salty one — has long been known. However, actually generating energy from that has proved more complicated, in part due the difficulty of designing the membrane through which the molecules pass. Engineers in Fukuoka, Japan, and their private partners think they might have cracked it, and have opened what is only the world’s second osmotic power plant. It generates
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
Hundreds of Filipinos and tourists flocked to a sun-bleached field north of Manila yesterday, on Good Friday, to witness one of the country’s most blood-soaked displays of religious fervor, undeterred by rising fuel prices. Scores of bare-chested flagellants with covered faces walked barefoot through the dusty streets of Pampanga Province’s San Fernando as they flogged their backs with bamboo whips in the scorching heat. Agence France-Presse (AFP) journalists said they saw devotees deliberately puncturing their skin with glass shards attached to a small wooden paddle to ensure their bleeding during the ritual, a way to atone for sins and seek miracles from
RSS