Claim: The father of Marcos Sr. is a hero
Rating: FALSE
Don Mariano Marcos, the father of the former strongman, came to the fore recently after the House of Representatives Committee on Higher and Technical Education approved a proposal seeking to change the name of Don Mariano Marcos Memorial State University (DMMMSU) in Ilocos Norte.
It will be renamed after the son instead.
The bill, refiled from the last Congress, is House Bill No. 2407 authored by Ilocos Norte 2nd District Rep. Angelo Marcos Barba.
Why the hastiness in the change of name? After all, DMMMSU has been in existence since 1982.
Is it part of Marcos’s historical revisionism?
Let us look at the facts.
According to the Kahimyang Project, Mariano Marcos was a school principal and supervising teacher before he took up law and became a hometown politician in Ilocos Norte.
About his death, Kahimyang was dismissive: “In March 1945, during the closing days of the war, Marcos died in La Union at the hands of the enemy.”
His son was as dismissive, according to the New York Times (NYT), when asked about his own role during World War II.
Marcos first accused his enemies that their fathers were Japanese collaborators, but when the same question was asked of him, NYT said, “On the other side, many Filipinos say they believe that Mr. Marcos’s father, Mariano, collaborated with the Japanese as a propagandist, an assertion that Mr. Marcos disputes. He says the Japanese executed his father.”
Reports were sketchy but still grisly about Mariano’s death.
There were collaborative reports and the most recent was by Mamerto Adan.
Citing several sources, Adan said that Mariano became the spokesman for the Japanese troops in Northern Luzon.
In 1945, he was killed not by the Japanese, as his son recalled, but by Filipino guerrilla forces.
“As what Lapham described, Marcos was literally ripped apart. He was executed by drawing and quartering, his hands and feet tied between two water buffalos (carabaos), which were lashed to run in opposite directions. As a warning, his body parts were hung on tree branches, so people won’t follow his treacherous example,” Adan wrote.
The place where Mariano was quartered is in Bacnotan, La Union, on the campus of what was once the DMMMSU campus in La Union.
Why we fact-checked this
Kahimyang used to be a credible history source but was recently compromised by Marcos’ camp. Wikipedia still has the details on Mariano Marcos’ death and it will just be a matter of time before it, too, will be edited out. Let us be wary of revisionism. FC
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