ABSTRACT
This study analyzes the Libingan ng mga Bayani (LNMB) and the People Power Monument (PPM) as sites of Marcosian historical distortion, supported by the administration of former President Rodrigo R. Duterte (2016–2022). By examining the contemporary phenomenon of negative historical revisionism, this paper presents two historical observations. First, memories and narratives of the 1986 EDSA People Power Revolution are malleable and are strategically manipulated to suit political ends. Second, the Marcosian project of historical distortion, which sanitizes the Martial Law years and demonizes the legacy of the EDSA Revolution, occurred in the controlled spaces of the LNMB and the PPM. Through Marcos's burial in the LNMB in 2016 and the changes in the EDSA Revolution commemoration since 2017, the Duterte government systematically implemented measures to sanitize the memory of the Marcos dictatorship and to discredit and reframe the “EDSA narrative.” These actions reinvented Marcos's authoritarian rule as a justification for Duterte's own version of iron-fist rule in the country. These two places serve as emblematic representations of both a state-supported program of sanitizing a dark past and the complex nature of historical memory, spaces of memory, and public remembering.
