I am a senior citizen, which means that I was a student when the real Macoy (Ferdinand Marcos Sr.) set up his dictatorship in 1972 (he became president in 1965). That dictatorship fell in 1986 via an uprising but I went on to fight for societal changes when I got older until I was first arrested in 1987.
Meaning that I still had fire in my belly when the politicians who were marginalized by Marcos’ rule staged a comeback when Cory, the widow of former senator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino (who was assassinated in 1983) became president. I actually grew up idolizing some of them.
When I was in first year college, I met some students from Mindanao who were eager to wage armed struggle against the Marcos dictatorship. In our naivete, we thought we could do that by just procuring guns. So we sought out people who could provide us with these. When former senator Jose W. Diokno had a speaking engagement in Cebu, our group sought an audience with him after the speech. Diokno gave us a “lawyerly” advice: seek out either the socdems (social democrats) or the natdems (national democrats) and the Free Legal Assistance Group or Flag can provide legal help if ever anybody in our group got arrested.
I also idolized Aquilino Pimentel Jr. with his gravel-ly voice and was surprised when he claimed he read some of my columns in SunStar. I got printed copies of his speeches and studied them, only to realize that in speaking as well as in writing, the substance is everything. Pimentel was, of course, from Mindanao and during that time Cebu had the Osmeñas in Sonny (John), Emilio or Lito and Serge (Sergio Osmena III). Of the three, I liked to listen to Sonny’s speeches either in English or Cebuano.
Cebu became the bastion of the political opposition when the martial law that Marcos Sr. declared in 1972 got loosened in 1978 because of international pressure. Marcos Sr. held an “election” for a lawmaking body, the Interim Batasang Pambansa or IBP, and the only opposition group that was “allowed” to win was the Pusyon Bisaya from Central Visayas. It was then that I got to idolize Cebuano lawmakers like Hilario Davide Jr., Napoleon Rama, the popular Bisayista Natalio “Talyux” Bacalso and many others.
Nowadays, the center of gravity for politicians have shifted to Mindanao because Cebu has failed to produce the same level of political opposition reached during and after martial law was lifted in the 1980s. In the House of Representatives, the various Cebu districts are being represented by personalities with lower caliber than those we had during and after martial law. Because of this, Cebu hasn’t been able to produce a leader that is so popular nationwide even non-Cebuanos would vote for him or her in the Senate. That’s why I call the years during and immediately after the lifting of martial law as the “golden years” of Cebu politics.
I could not really tell if those golden years will ever be back. But that was a time when the country’s politics was being severely tested. Which only means that the said brand of Cebu politics may only surface if the country gets severely tested again.