Hawaii’s deep ties to Marcos, Aquino

Ferdinand Marcos was highly popular among many Filipinos in Hawaii throughout his reign and still has strong remembrance, "particularly among old-timers," says Rose Churma, president of Hawaii’s Filipino Community Center.

"The Marcoses have been very generous to their hometown of Ilocos Norte," Churma said. "The roads are nice. He brought in a lot of infrastructure to improve the place. He made sure it got its share of the pork barrel, I suppose. He did a lot of things that were aloha."

The Marcos family remains popular. Former first lady Imelda Marcos has filed her certificate of candidacy to renew her term as Ilocos Norte’s second district representative in the Philippine House of Representatives.

In the 2010 election, the Marcoses’ son, Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr., 55, won a six-year Senate term; and their daughter Imee, 56, was elected governor and will also seek a second three-year term.

About 80 percent of the Filipino population in Hawaii have ethnic origins of Ilokano, the third-largest language in the Philippines, points out emeritus professor Belinda A. Aquino, past director of the Center for Philippine Studies at the University of Hawaii-Manoa.

In a recent paper, Aquino wrote that "to his Ilokano followers and admirers, he was still their ‘beloved’ compatriot and venerable Apo (Ilokano term of respect for ‘leader’ or prominent old person)."

However, Aquino added, "Just as Ilokanos were not all Marcos followers, not all of the loyalists were Ilokanos."

Benigno Aquino III, who was elected president of the Philippines in 2010 and signed the "Compensation Act" into force last month, has his own political legacy and familial following in Hawaii. No relation to the UH professor, his father, Benigno Aquino Jr., was a Filipino senator who was an opponent of Marcos and was assassinated at the Manila airport in 1983 upon returning from his self-imposed exile to the United States.

That prompted Aquino Jr.’s widow, Corazon Aquino, to run and be elected president, succeeding Marcos in 1986, and she served until 1992. She was greeted warmly in Ho- nolulu in 2004 when she accepted the East-West Center Foundation’s Asia Pacific Community Building Award in 2004. She died in 2009 from cancer.