Remembering more than the shoes: The real legacy of the Philippines’ Marcos family

As the late Ferdinand Marcos’s son and namesake takes over as president following this week’s elections, writes Borzou Daragahi, the family’s history merits attention

The Marcos family holds the distinction of being in the ‘Guinness Book of World Records’ for having carried off the largest-ever theft from a government (AFP/Getty)

A little more than 36 years ago, before the Arab spring and even before the wave of popular uprisings that accompanied the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, the people of the Philippines took to the streets and overthrew a brutal, corrupt western-backed dictator who had tortured thousands and stolen billions.

But all many of us remember of the 1986 People Power Revolution is the vast shoe collection of Ferdinand Marcos’s wife, Imelda.

The former beauty queen, now 92 years old, had amassed a vast collection of more than 1,000 pricey shoes in a country where poverty was rife, democracy had been crushed by her husband, and security forces jailed, tortured, disappeared and murdered dissidents.