ABSTRACT
Ferdinand Edralin Marcos was born September 11, 1917, in the town of Sarrat in Ilocos Norte, the poor and rugged northern area of Luzon. Ferdinand Marcos, brilliant, charismatic, wily, was a confidence man, a human being who believed his own falsehoods. During the Marcos era, hundreds of thousands of Filipinos emigrated from the Philippines to the United States; Filipinos became the second-largest Asian American group. In an ill-conceived military plan prior to martial law, Marcos organized a Filipino Muslim military group with the code name of Jabidah, and planned to train it on Corregidor prior to infiltrating it into Sabah. By the end of the Marcos era, the flight of brains and money, the loss of confidence in the man and the regime, the growing anxiety of international financial institutions, and the anger of the World Bank accelerated economic collapse. During the last years of the Marcos era, the economy declined approximately 15 percent.
