Amante: A plague on certain houses
ON the day the dictator declared Martial Law, my parents fought. My mother, who was then seven months pregnant, went out for a walk but came home to an irate husband. She recalls explaining that she didn’t believe the declaration posed any immediate threat but, being a newsman, he was prone to worry.
When my mother gave birth some seven weeks after that, my father was away in Baguio City, because Martial Law had cost a lot of broadcasters their jobs, and an opportunity had opened up for him to manage a radio station there. By the time he came home for a brief visit, I was a month old. My mother tells me it took some persuading before I would let this serious young man with large ears cradle me. It took about half a year more for him to convince the network to send him back to Cebu, where my mother and I waited.
Other families suffered far more painful and extended privations than we did after Ferdinand Marcos declared Martial Law some 15 months before his second and supposedly last term as president was set to end. One of them was that of Primitivo Mijares, although at the time of the declaration 46 years ago, the man was still in Marcos’s good graces. “Most of the pieces I had written as news stories or columns, about how excellent the thoughts, acts, and deeds of Marcos were, were actually dictated by Marcos,” Mijares wrote in his book, “The Conjugal Dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos,” published in 1976.
After years as Marcos’s favorite propagandist, Mijares decided to testify before a US congressional sub-committee in 1975 about the electoral fraud, corruption, and illegal arrests, among other atrocities, that he had seen in the Marcos regime. He later wrote that he had realized that Marcos “imposed Martial Law, not to save the country from a Communist rebellion and to reform society, but to hold on to the presidency for life.” On the night before his testimony, Mijares wrote, he received a long-distance call from Marcos himself and Presidential Assistant Guillermo de Vega, and the latter offered him US$100,000 if he would not testify and leave the US instead. But testify he did.
Primitivo Mijares disappeared in January 1977, a year after “The Conjugal Dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos” was published. “Four months later, his youngest son was kidnapped and murdered,” Raissa Robles wrote in “Marcos Martial Law: Never Again” (Quezon City: Filipinos for a Better Philippines, Inc., 2016). About two weeks after he disappeared, Luis Manuel Mijares was dropped from a helicopter in Antipolo, his body marked by burns, bruises, and “33 shallow wounds apparently gouged with an ice pick,” Robles wrote. Someone had bashed his head in. He was 16.
Millions of families survived Martial Law without having to endure what the Mijares family did, but this is not to say we suffered no harm. No dictator’s goons laid a hand on our loved ones, yet the corruption of our public institutions and the systematic looting of our national coffers harmed us all, present-day Marcos apologists included.
Thirty-two years after the ouster of the Marcoses, we still do not know the full extent of Martial Law’s atrocities, which is one of the reasons the call to “move on” rings hollow. But what we do know—what has been documented, so far—should be enough to keep us asking questions. For instance, a bunch of deposits in March 1968 to the “William Saunders” and “Jane Ryan” accounts in Switzerland supposedly amounted to some US$950,000. Adjusted for inflation, that would amount to some $6.87 million this year or about P371 million, and that’s merely a tiny fraction of what the Marcoses were believed to have amassed. The numbers are staggering.
There, too, are the names. Dr. Juan B. Escandor, Milagros Lumabi-Echanis, Hilda Narciso, Fr. Rudy Romano, Loretta Ann Rosales, Ninotchka Rosca, Archimedes Trajano. They are among thousands, many of whom did not live to tell their Martial Law stories, who left behind families scarred, for years, by their absence. Look their stories up.