AFP, MANILA: Protests took place Sunday in Manila over Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s plans to honour the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos with a state burial.
About 2,000 people gathered in heavy rain to denounce Duterte’s plans to move Marcos’ remains from his northern hometown to the National Heroes’ Cemetery in the capital, Manila, next month.
“We would be the laughing stock of the entire planet,” Senator Risa Hontiveros, one of four members of parliament to attend the Manila rally, told AFP.
She called Marcos an “unrepentant enemy of our heroes”.
Marcos’s family have kept his preserved body on display after he died in exile in 1989 following a popular revolt three years earlier, demanding that it be buried with full honours in the Heroes’ Cemetery.
Marcos was elected president in 1965 and declared martial law in 1972, allowing him to rule as a dictator while he, his family and allies enriched themselves through massive corruption and his troops brutally stamped out dissent.