Lacson de Arroyo.
Two Marcos children are likewise married to two Aranetas: Junior married Louise/Lisa Araneta; and his younger sister, Irene, married Greggy Araneta, son of architect Luis. The 2016 Liberal Party for president, Mar Roxas, is a grandson of J. Amado Araneta on his mother’s side while his paternal grandfather was Manuel Roxas, first Philippine post-war president.
7.Madrigal – big real estate, banking, and industrialist family brought into prosperity by Vicente Madrigal. The middle generation of Madrigals (whose daughters married a Bayot, a de Leon, two Vasquez brothers and whose two sons married a pair of Abad-Santos sisters) have all passed on and dispersed their wealth to the third generation. Of the Philippines’ top ten older families, the Madrigals are probably the only ones who have sent two daughters into public service. One of Don Vicente’s daughters, Pacita Warns Gonzalez, served as a senator in the late 1950s, and then her niece, Jamby, also held a senatorial position in the 1990s. One of the Bayot girls was married to the current oldest Ortigas scion, Paquito, ex-ambassador to Mexico.
8.Delgado – another well-connected mestizo family who for some thirty years, owned and held the franchise for the Manila Hilton, the first American luxury hotel brand in the Philippines and one of the first high-rises built in Manila. Their other businesses are a freight brokerage concern, supply-chain management, express courier, chassis leasing and repair, and real estate management and development. One of the Delgados also used to be an ambassador to the Holy See, and various Delgados are/have been married to two Magsaysays, a Cojuangco, a Laurel, a Rufino, among others.
When I worked for a bank in San Francisco in the 1980s, I came across a letter from Don Francisco (“Paco”), patriarch of the Delgado clan, asking the bank for an extension of time on his $2 million letter of credit, with their large SF apartment as collateral.
From the pre-war times and going into the 1950s, there were also the
9.Ysmaels – family of Lebanese descent into steel and real estate. They owned the big tract of land which became New Manila. The heirs owned Ysmael Steel and the Fiat franchise for a while.
B.Amongst the more Filipino blood families:
1.Lopezes of Iloilo (Meralco; ABS-CBN, Chronicle newspaper). The Lopezes would soon become the arch-enemies of the Marcoses and their primary target in the dismantling of the old oligarchy. Today, the Lopezes have divested themselves of their majority ownership of Meralco (the Manila Electric Company) and have diversified into other lines of business. (The Lopezes are sort of related to the Aranetas through Victoria Lopez de Araneta. Satellite families: the Jalandonis, Javellanas, Jisons, Lopas, Montelibanos; also allied with the Tagalog Lopezes from Batangas.)
The rift between the Marcoses and the Lopezes continued into the beginning of Marcos’ and vice-president Fernando Lopez’s second term (1970), and its evidence was confirmed recently, at least from the Marcos side, when a memo from Marcos’ own handwritten diary surfaced. Page 12 from his diary, dated January 4, 1970, reads:
“We have to watch the Lopezes and Montelibano. [sic] They are still sore for my veto of their franchise to operate a telephone and telecommunications company anywhere in the Philippines and the NuVue – a cable television company . . .
They are the worst oligarchs in the country. I must stop them from using the government for their own purposes. Piding Montelibano is working on the reclamation project of Republic Real Estate – pending adjudication in the courts. Iñing Lopez strongly urged that I appoint Piding as Secretary of Finance, as if the position were vacant. This was a repetition of the recommendation in 1965.”
From the above, one could foresee the collision course the two forces were headed. By the end of January, 1971, it was all-out, open war between the two camps. Marcos sent his Public Service Commission, the Solicitor General, Bureau of Customs, and Bureau of Internal Revenue to go over the highly lucrative Meralco’s books and operations with the sole purpose of cutting down its revenue. Meralco was the Lopezes’ main cash cow and cornerstone of their pre-martial law empire. (More on this war later.)
2.Cojuangcos - the core of the combined Cojuangco fortune is the large sugar and rice mill in central Luzon called Hacienda Luisita. From three Cojuangco brothers sprang three branches:
(a) the Jose Cojuangco branch. Two of his children with Demetria Sumulong were Jose, Jr. (‘Peping’) and Corazon who married Benigno Aquino II. Cory became president in 1986. Her son, Benigno III (Noynoy) served as president from 2010-16. (One of Peping’s daughters, Mikee is the current International Olympic Committee representative to the Philippines. Surely, that position is not available to the ordinary Juan and Josefa de la Cruz.)
(b) the Ramon and Antonio branch. Playboy Tonyboy comes from this branch whose fortune rests with controversial, majority shares of the premier phone company in the Philippines, the PLDT.
(c) Finally, the Eduardo branch from whom Danding, staunch Marcos ally and crony, came. While he was individually wealthy on his own, he prospered multifold over with his association with the dictator and was, of course, in competition with his cousin (b).
The above (minus the Aboitizes who are not Manila-based) are, more or less, the “ten families” which Imelda Marcos referred to in a recent interview as “owning nearly everything in Manila” when she came into power. Of course, she failed to consider what her own family and Marcos’ combined ownership of property came to in that estimation of hers.
[The Aquinos (of Tarlac) and Imelda’s Romualdez clan of Leyte were perhaps the two most alike and evenly matched wannabe families in terms of drive, ambition, energy, and sibling composition. Both families were composed of children of a first wife and the more go-getting batch of offspring from the second union. Both Imelda and Ninoy were children of their fathers’ respective second marriages. Imelda might also be referred to as “IRM” later in the book.
The second batch of Romualdezes (from Remedios Trinidad) consisted of six children: Imelda, Benjamin (“Kokoy”), Alita (Martel), Alfredo (“Bejo”), Armando and Conchita (Yap). There were five older children (from first wife Juanita), among them Lourdes, Victoria, and Dulce.
The eight Aquino brood were Maur (Maria Aurora Lichauco), Ninoy, Lupita (Kashiwahara), Tessie (Oreta), Agapito (“Butz”), Ditas (Valdes) and Erlinda (Vargas). The first batch had Billy, Tony, Mila, and Paul.
The Aquinos and Romualdezes are actually related by marriage through a Paz Gueco of Pampanga. Gueco married Danieling Romualdez, uncle of Imelda. At one point in the early 1950s, the two clans would have been joined again when Paz Gueco arranged to have a young Ninoy Aquino squire a young Imelda Romualdez, fresh from the province, around Manila. One can only imagine what the union of the two clans would have resulted in had Ninoy first gotten to and proposed to Imelda, rather than Ferdinand.]
Back to the other leading clans and families:
3.the Rufinos – first family of Manila theaters; owned prime Manila real estate due to their first-class theaters. Satellite families – the Pantangco; Padillas; Prietos.
4.the Jacintos (Iligan Steel Mills; and at one time, Security Bank). The Jacintos were one of the first families to run afoul early of Ferdinand Marcos, and their Security Bank soon became a top Romualdez-Marcos crony bank. Satellite families: RJ was married to an Arroyo; then Frannie Aguinaldo.
5.the Concepcions. Two branches—the Joe-Raul-Mely branch who owns Consolidated Foods, Republic Flour Mills, Selecta Ice Cream (among others), and the smaller one which owns the Carrier
