Marcos, Imelda (1929-…), a Philippine politician and socialite, is best known as the wife of the Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos (see Marcos, Ferdinand Edralin). She held government posts under her husband but was forced to flee with him into exile in 1986, leaving behind a legendary collection of more than a thousand pairs of shoes. After his death, she faced trial on a number of charges of corruption and embezzlement.
Imelda Romualdez was born on July 2, 1929, into a well-connected family in the Central Visayas in Leyte Province in the Philippines. She married Ferdinand Marcos in 1954 after winning a national beauty contest. When Marcos became president of the Philippines in 1965, she assumed the important status of president’s first lady. In 1975, she became a governor of a company called Metro Manila. Later, she became a roving ambassador for the Philippines and visited several countries, including China and Libya. In 1978, she won election to the Interim National Assembly and joined her husband’s cabinet as minister of human settlements. Her influential position allowed her to spend hundreds of millions of dollars of public funds on various building projects, many of which lost money.
After the 1983 assassination of Benigno Aquino, a prominent opponent of the Marcos regime, Ferdinand Marcos’s health deteriorated, and Imelda Marcos became prominent as a government spokeswoman. In 1986, the Marcoses were forced to relinquish control after a popular uprising, and they fled into exile in Hawaii in the United States. In her palace in Manila, Imelda left behind evidence of her compulsive shopping and her passion for clothes. In particular, she had hoarded more than a thousand pairs of shoes.
After Ferdinand Marcos’s death in 1989, Imelda Marcos stood trial in New York in 1990 on charges of embezzlement and fraud. She was acquitted. In 1991, she returned to the Philippines and unsuccessfully ran for president in 1992. In 1993, she was found guilty of graft (corruption) and sentenced to prison. The Philippine Supreme Court overturned the conviction in 1998. She still faced a number of corruption charges, but almost all were dismissed for lack of evidence.
From 1995 to 1998, Marcos served in the Philippine House of Representatives. She was reelected to the House in 2010, 2013, and 2016. In 2018, Imelda Marcos was found guilty of seven counts of graft and sentenced to at least six years in prison. She appealed the verdict, however, and remained out of prison during the appeal.
The family of Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos has also been involved in politics. Their son, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr., served in the House, the Senate, and as governor of the Philippine province of Ilocos Norte. Imee Marcos, a daughter, won election to the Senate in 2019. Imee’s son Matthew Manotoc was elected governor of Ilocos Norte the same year. In 2022, Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., was elected president of the Philippines.
