From Marcos to Marcos

FIFTY-TWO YEARS ago today, we as a nation suffered the greatest betrayal in all of our contemporary history. 

In the dead of night, Ferdinand Marcos imposed martial law without declaring it, made himself dictator, and proceeded to preside over a reign of plunder and terror. He decimated the crop of potential leaders for the next generation and drove the nation to bankruptcy.

No commemoration, not in a case like this, serves any useful purpose without stocktaking — without keeping account of lessons learned, if any, and lessons yet to be learned. Well, after a half-century’s separation from the crime, we had better be able to show something. 

We did get Marcos out in the end, but not after 14 years, and not after we had lost the one man who might have somehow shortened our misery, if not redeemed us. On the 12th year of martial law, on August 21, 1983, Benigno Aquino Jr., Marcos’s arch-rival, came home from exile hopefully intending just that. 

After seven years of imprisonment, Aquino had been allowed to go on exile in the United States, but only because he needed life-saving heart surgery and Marcos dreaded the consequence of him dying in his hands. Three years later, paying no heed to threats to his life, Aquino flew home. Coming down his plane on a concealed makeshift stairway escorted by soldiers, he got a bullet in his head even before he could set foot on home soil.

It had taken yet two more years before things came to a decisive boil. A prematurely uncovered coup against Marcos and a call to action by Manila’s Cardinal Jaime Sin combined to provide the trigger for four continuous days of a million-strong street vigil that was to bring Marcos down from power and drive him and his family to exile. 

Widely copied by other repressed peoples elsewhere, it has gone into world history to our account: Philippine People Power Revolution, February 22-24, 1986.

A generation from that proud moment, we elected a Marcos devotee president — Rodrigo Duterte — and after him a full-blooded heir: Ferdinand Marcos Jr. He rules us today.

Speaking of lessons learned.