This video of former President Marcos' home being demolished was recorded two years after President Corazon Aquino left office
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on December 10, 2019 at 07:20
- 3 min read
- By AFP Philippines
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The 52-second video was published here on Facebook on September 26, 2019. It has been viewed more than 218,000 times and shared more than 4,900 times.
The clip shows former first lady of the Philippines, Imelda Marcos, pleading with construction workers to halt the destruction of her home. A logo for the Associated Press (AP) is superimposed on the upper right portion of the video.
The Tagalog-language caption translates to English as: "HOUSES OF MARCOS FAMILY, ORDERED DEMOLISHED BY CORY AQUINO #ferdinandmarcos #marcos #pilipinas #maharlika #ophirians".
Cory Aquino refers to former President Aquino, who succeeded Ferdinand Marcos in 1986 after the dictator was overthrown in the “People Power” revolt. She was president until 1992.
Below is a screenshot of the misleading post:
The same video was also shared on Twitter here and on YouTube here with a similar claim.
The claim is misleading; the video was recorded by the Associated Press in December 1994, two years after Aquino finished her term as president.
A reverse image search of keyframes from the video in the misleading post extracted using InVID, a digital verification tool, found the full video published here on the Associated Press archive website.
The misleading video corresponds from the one-minute 13-second mark to the two-minute five-second mark in the AP video. Below is a screenshot comparison showing the misleading video (L) and the AP video (R):
The video's caption states in part: “In an attempt to recover as much as possible of his allegedly ill-gotten wealth, estimated at as much as five (b) billion U-S dollars, officials have seized numerous assets held by Marcos or his associates in the Philippines and abroad.
“But Imelda Marcos claims that as the administrator of Marcos properties, the commission had no right to sell them and that the property was sold for about half its real value.
“Marcos said that one sequestered property, a residential lot in the posh suburban Dasmarinas Village, was sold for 215 (m) million pesos - eight point three (m) million U-S dollars - in November 1994, although it had not been determined that it had indeed been acquired illegally.
Below is a screenshot of the AP video shot list with the date circled:
The Marcos' home was sequestered by the Philippines’ Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG), an agency that Aquino created in 1986. The PCGG was tasked with recovering the Marcos family’s ill-gotten wealth and assets.
Marcos is estimated to have looted up to $10 billion during his two decades in power by raiding the public treasury among other means, the World Bank estimates.
The home shown in the video was secured by the Philippine government and sold to a private individual. Imelda Marcos later sued the PCGG, claiming that the government had no right to sell her family's property.
The case, however, was dismissed by the government’s Ombudsman on June 11, 1999, the Office of the Ombudsman confirmed to AFP in an email on November 19, 2019.
AFP also obtained a copy of the Ombudsman case resolution, which said that the PCGG did have the right to sell the property previously owned by the Marcos family. Below is a screenshot of a portion of the Ombudsman ruling:
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