HOW far a big chunk of people’s thinking has shifted can be seen in recent developments. There was, for example, President Duterte’s “I am willing to resign” talk and boosting the stock of Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. by announcing his preference for the son of the late dictator to succeed him. Days later, there was the other Marcos child Imee smiling broadly with presidential daughter and Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte during the gathering of her Hugpong ng Pagbabagong (HNP) party.
Yet there was a time in the years immediately after the 1986 Edsa people power uprising, that a mention of the Marcos name would invite howls of derision. Marcos loyalists carried the cause of the Marcoses but their number was too small they were more of nuisance than a force to reckon with. Who would have thought the Marcoses would resurrect?
The country reached a historic corner when about 16 million Filipinos made Rodrigo Duterte president, in the process demonizing his predecessor, Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III, the son of the martyred Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. and former president Corazon Aquino. That’s thanks to social media, a product of modern technology that the Marcoses, using their ill-gotten wealth, used to the hilt.
Duterte’s socialist posturing, which partly won over the revolutionary Left, ended up being a mirage because as has been shown now, he tends to be more fascist than socialist. In this sense, he has more in common with the late dictator than the other presidents after Cory. Which means that we are closer now than ever to the return of the Marcoses to Malacañang.
This is ironic, especially if one considers that 35 years ago today this country also reached a historic corner leading to the toppling of the Marcos dictatorship three years later. The Marcoses and Duterte may want us to forget but Aug. 21, 1983 can no longer be erased from history books.
I had joined the struggle against the dictatorship at that time, choosing a path less traveled in the mountains. I was on a short break and was back in our old house in Barangay Sambag 2 when Ninoy returned from exile in the United States. That return wasn’t covered by the controlled media but the Catholic Church’s Radio Veritas boldly did it.
My late father had his radio set tuned in to Radio Veritas for reports on Aquino’s return. When the airplane landed at the Manila airport, reports that shots rang out at the tarmac soon followed. My father gently shook his head. “Patay na,” he said to me softly. Reports of two bodies sprawled on the tarmac did confirm that. The other body was that of the supposed gunman Rolando Galman.
The dictator Ferdinand Marcos was so powerful he could have anybody killed and forget about it. He may not have been the mastermind in Ninoy’s assassination but he planted the seeds of impunity that made Aquino’s death possible. On this, I will have to quote George Santayana for the millennials to hear:
”Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”