Since 2019, Maria Imelda Josefa Remedios “Imee” Romualdez Marcos has been a senator for the Philippines.
She is the child of former first lady and convicted felon Imelda Marcos and late president, kleptocrat, and tyrant Ferdinand Marcos.
She formerly held the positions of 2nd district congressman for Ilocos Norte from 1998 to 2007, as well as the governor of the province from 2010 to 2019.
During the martial law era that her father oversaw, Imee Marcos began her political career. She was elected Chairperson of the Kabataang Barangay and a member of the Batasang Pambansa (KB).
Archimedes Trajano, an activist, was kidnapped, tortured, and killed during her KB tenure shortly after publicly contesting her election to the position.
Just fourteen months after her father proclaimed martial law in the Philippines, she turned 18 years old, the country’s legal age of majority.
By the time her family was overthrown in the 1986 People Power revolution, the US government had assisted them in fleeing and bringing them to Honolulu, where she was 30 years old.
President Corazon Aquino authorized the Marcoses’ return to the Philippines in 1991 following the passing of Ferdinand Marcos in 1989.
Imee soon entered politics and was elected to the House of Representatives for three terms and served Ilocos Norte for three terms as governor. In the 2019 elections, she won a seat in the Senate.
In American legal circles, Imee Marcos’ conviction in the 1993 Trajano v. Marcos case (978 F 2d 493) before the U.S. district court in Honolulu is credited for revealing the limitations of the act of state concept and opening the door for similar lawsuits.
As a result of the Panama Papers revelations and evidence from her mother Imelda Marcos’s court convictions, she has been connected to the family’s stolen fortune and named as a beneficiary of several offshore holdings.
The Presidential Commission on Good Government is working to repatriate these properties, which the Supreme Court of the Philippines deemed to be “ill-gotten money.”
Imee Marcos Career
Before signing Proclamation No. 1081 on September 21, 1972, Marcos and her siblings (Ferdinand Jr. and Irene) were enrolled in international studies.
The brothers and sisters remained there until they finished their education, but they returned home for Christmas and the summer breaks.
She reached the legal age of majority in the Philippines, 18, fourteen months after the imposition of martial law, and participated in the Martial Law administration in a number of political capacities, including as the Kabataang Barangay chairman and an assemblyman to the Batasang Pambansa.
When the Marcos administration was finally overthrown by the People Power movement in 1986, she was nearly 30 years old.
As chair of the youth group Kabataang Barangay, which would later be superseded by the Sangguniang Kabataan in 1977, Marcos entered politics after returning from Princeton.
From 1975 through 1986, she served as the Kabataang Barangay Foundation’s founding chair. Archimedes Trajano was brutally killed during her tenure. Later in life, she would be found guilty of torturing and killing Trajano.
She was one of two Ilocos Norte assemblymen elected to the Batasang Pambansa on June 30, 1984, under the tutelage of her father’s dictatorship.
The other assemblyman was Antonio V. Raquiza. She technically served in this capacity until the Batasang Pambansa was disbanded following the EDSA Revolution of 1986, which removed their family from power.
Imee Marcos Personal Life
Marcos, the oldest child of Ferdinand and Imelda Romualdez Marcos, was born in 1931. Irene Marcos-Araneta, Aimee Marcos, and Ferdinand “Bongbong” Jr. are her full siblings.
Other half-siblings of hers who are less well-known to the general public include a handful of others.
Included in this are the three children her father had as a common-law spouse prior to his political marriage to Imelda Romualdez with Carmen Ortega of the La Union Ortega dynasty.
Tommy Manotoc, a former basketball coach in the NBA and a golfer, was married to Marcos.
The fact that Manotoc’s divorce from wife Aurora Pijuan, which he had received in the Dominican Republic in October 1982, was not recognized by Philippine law made their union contentious because the Philippines did not have a divorce statute.
Three sons were born to Marcos and Manotoc: Matthew Joseph (“MJ”), a sports agent, and Fernando Martin (“Borgy”), a commercial model and club DJ. Ferdinand Richard Michael (“Mike”) is a lawyer.
During her marriage to Manotoc, she had two stepchildren, one of them being TJ Manotoc, an ABS-CBN news reporter.
Marcos has been in a committed relationship with Singaporean-born, ethnically Chinese businessman Mark Chua since the 1990s when she and Manotoc officially ended their marriage.
In the $64.5 million Ilocos Norte Tobacco Excise Tax Funds Scandal, Marcos and Chua have been implicated.
