Mercado: Struggle against forgetting

Sunday, August 21, 2011

OUR paths crossed, for the last time at San Francisco International Airport. The family and I were flying, via Cebu, to my United Nations duty station in Bangkok. Former senator Benigno Aquino was booked on a Boston flight. Our final chat comes to mind on the 28th anniversary of his murder today.

As a Senate reporter, we covered Ninoy. We were in the first group arrested when Ferdinand Marcos clamped on martial law. Together, we filed futile habeas corpus petitions before the lapdog Supreme Court of Marcos.

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At Frisco airport departure gates, we reminisced over our securing a "carrier pigeon": an Air India manager. He sneaked Ninoy’s article, smuggled from a Fort Bonifacio prison cell, to the Bangkok Post. That was February 1973.

“I will not accept President Marcos’s offer of an amnesty because I do not believe I’ve committed any crime,” Aquino wrote in the first-ever challenge to martial law. “He violated our Constitution and broke our laws.” The furious 8,000-word Malacañang reply never mentioned Ninoy’s name.

Reprisals followed. Aquino and Sen. Jose Diokno were hustled into solitary confinement in Fort Magsaysay. Corazon Aquino, Carmen Diokno and families were not allowed to see them for 43 days as “punishment.”

Flight boarding calls cut our talk short. “Why didn’t you introduce me?” our 12-year old son Francis groused as Ninoy waved goodbye. “He will be the next president of the Philippines.”

That was not to be. A single bullet tore into his jaw on Manila International Airport’s tarmac.

In Bangkok, the Nation phoned for a reaction. “Marcos claims he heads a ‘command society.’ He has all the powers; so he has all the responsibility,” we numbly mumbled, adding: “Manila will be renamed Aquino International Airport.”

“I have returned of my own free will to join the ranks of those struggling to recover our rights and freedoms through non-violence,” Aquino planned to say before death cut him short.

“I seek no confrontation.” He flayed the supine Supreme Court justices’ abdication of the cherished right of habeas corpus.

Ninoy’s funeral brought two million mourners into the streets. They tuned in to Radio Veritas, the only station that dared report the rites. “No umbrellas,” people chanted as rain fell. “Only Imelda uses an umbrella!” At Rizal Park, crowds forcibly lowered the giant Philippine flag to half-staff. That presaged People Power in 1986.

“Just a housewife, Marcos sneered when Corazon Aquino agreed to lead the fractured opposition.” Wives should stay in the bedroom. Marcos lived long enough to see the housewife installed by People Power as the country’s 14th President. Cory’s funeral dwarfed those of Ninoy.

Ninoy’s and Cory’s features today grace our currency and stamps. Schools and streets are named after him. So is the Manila International Airport. The Aquinos never demanded a plot in the Libingan ng mga Bayani.

The Marcoses, in contrast, wheedled for such an interment. They’ve wooed the Garcias of Cebu for a joint crack at the 2015 polls--a move that bets on fabled truncated Filipino memory.

Indeed, old questions fester. Who were the mastermind(s) in Ninoy’s killing? Why have they escaped accounting up to now?

Now a 44-year-old Delta Airlines pilot, Francis never got to talk to Ninoy. From his Minneapolis base, he sees the nation mark Aquino’s death yearly. “It’s your fault I never met him,” he will josh this old man again.

Indeed, the “struggle of man against power,” as Czech novelist Milan Kundera once said, “is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”