Controversial book about the Martial Law era to be relaunched

Photo: Conjugal Dictatorship Book/Facebook.com

JC Mijares Gurango leads the effort to re-release the book “The Conjugal Dictatorship of Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos”, detailing the revelation that sent his grandfather and uncle to their deaths during the Martial Law era.

Written by Primitivo Mijares, the book contains inside information about the first family including the actual plan of Ferdinand Marcos to stay in power and how he became part of writing false propaganda in favor of the dictator and of declaring Martial Law.

Mijares was the then President of the National Press Club and was a close ally and confidante of the Marcoses. However, Mijares decided to ditch Marcos’ bandwagon and went to the US to reveal everything that he knows before the US Congress.

It has been revealed by Steve Psinakis, an anti-Marcos critic in his 2008 memoir, “A Country Not Even His Own” the details of Mijares’ defection to the US.

“Mijares did, in fact, extort money from Marcos by feeding him imaginary information for which Marcos was ignorant enough to pay considerable sums. While Mijares was still receiving money from Marcos, he was at the same time lambasting him to the U.S. press, causing the Marcos regime irreparable damage. It is no wonder the only natural conclusion is that Marcos had his vengeance and did Mijares in.”

The Marcos Administration had bribed Mijares to keep his mouth shut for the sum of $100,000 but he refused the offer.

He wrote the book in 1975 and it was released in April 1976 in the US, but  was banned in the Philippines – although there are copies of the book that were smuggled into the country and were read by people in secret.

A few months after the release of the book, Mijares was nowhere to be found. Then in 1977, his youngest son Boyet was kidnapped, tortured, and killed.

It took time for the young Gurango to find out the real deal about his grandfather and uncle as it was never even discussed by the family.

In a statement to the Inquirer he said, “I was about 13. My mother was being overprotective, and it annoyed me. So she told me that she had a brother who was kidnapped.”

It was only two years after when he discovered the truth, “when my lola dropped off a big stack of copies of the book ‘The Conjugal Dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos’. She told me it was written by Lolo Tibo. I read it but everything just went over my head,” he added.

“I got to properly read it again a couple of years ago and it was then that I really understood what my lolo had wanted to say,” he said. He then remembered the “kidnapping” incident that his mother mentioned but never really wanted to talk about it.

In an interview with ANC’s “Headstart”, the 19-year-old raised the importance of being able to relaunch his grandfather’s book and why it is still relevant up to this day.

“Just because I was not alive during that time, doesn’t mean that I couldn’t say anything about it . . . It shouldn’t be that I have nothing to say about it. Historians have something to say about it, and it always happens before their time.”

“If you’re a millennial, you have a fresher perspective on things . . . Millennials are in an esteemed position of being able to look at evidence objectively rather than from their own experiences and nothing else,” he added.
The book had been released as a free e-book download from the Ateneo de Manila’s Rizal Library in 2016 and the print version will be launched on Tuesday in the Bantayog ng mga Bayani in Quezon City.