Ten Days That Shook The Nation

BIMBO CABIDOG

I have always believed that the main root of the force that makes people subservient to a dictator is in their mind. For eleven years of Marcos’s dictatorial rule, the people obeyed fear. Then all of a sudden the same fear no longer mattered.

His face in the last photos at the China Airlines plane en route to Manila showed that former senator and martial law detainee Ninoy Aquino had it. Premonition of a dire event wrought his demeanor. The brave mien and the wry smile, presumably to hide fear, revealed it all the more.

No normal human being is exempt from fear. But like many of his countrymen, who defied and fought the brutal reign of Ferdinand Marcos, Ninoy Aquino subdued it. There is a time when courage saves a life. In that fateful time of his return, not yielding to fear ended his.

Thirty three years ago today, Ninoy alyas Marcial Bonifacio calmly followed the military contingent that came on board his plane to fetch him. Had he given in to fear, there could have been a struggle, the coterie of media folks around him could have ganged up and wrestled him out of hold, and maybe, just maybe, the military men could not have simply taken him to his rendezvous with death.

But Ninoy ordered fear to get thee behind. The members of the international media who accompanied him on the ill-fated journey were prevented by the soldiers from trailing. Down the side stairs of the airport tube, at the last steps to the tarmac’s floor, the man was shot.

The last shots of that homecoming came from a camera in a window. One captured Ninoy sprawled face down on a pool of his own blood. Another sequence-shot caught him being lifted up to the van by troopers.

Fear has been conquered. The ruthless and treacherous murder at the tarmac shocked the nation. Over the next ten days, it would shake the pillars of strength of the Marcos dictatorship.

Most in the revolutionary movement never gave much to Ninoy, before that fateful homecoming. We knew, yes, he suffered the worst acts of cruelty under Marcos’s apparatus of repression. He spent years of hard incarceration in the strongman’s detention camps, and one time agonized through months of solitary confinement stripped down to bare physical essence. Then, he was tried in a zarzuela and finally sentenced to death by musketry by a kangaroo court. 

Still, we held our reservations.

At last, after seven years of toughing it off in the toughest conditions of a garrison state, the need for a heart bypass procedure whisked Ninoy to self-exile in America. Even in that state of peace and security, harsh fate never let up on him. Then time to go home.

Ignoring the dire warnings of Imelda Marcos, the ironclad better half of the conjugal dictatorship, he beat back to homeland cutting three years of sojourn on foreign soil. The trip turned out to be fatal. An obstinate bullet, as the world already knows, stopped him.

Until his date with martyrdom, Ninoy was only among many of us who suffered the same hard fate, some worse like his. Hundreds of us fell, hundreds vanished into the night. Those left to carry on did not give up the strife in the most daunting and harrowing passes, going to clandestine meetings in the shadows of slum dwellings, organizing and raising political consciousness up to the remotest interiors of the countryside.

But Ninoy? He still was doubted for his political persona, for tinges of power ambition, and for suspected connection with the US Central Intelligence Agency that orchestrated the deadly coups against President Sukarno in Indonesia, and Salvador Allende in Chile.

I conceded it to him. Ninoy was full of energy, magnetic and intense. In a dinner meeting with our student council at the mezzanine of a posh downtown hotel in Tacloban City, I asked him two questions. One was about Raul Manglapus, who reportedly led a squatter rally outside the extravagant wedding anniversary of media magnate Eugenio Lopez. The gist was that the squatters could not even help themselves to a viand of tuyo (dried fish), but the Lopez party was throwing expensive food  like it was running out of fashion. To exacerbate the insult, champagne flowed from a fountain.

To cap the story, I asked: Weren’t the two parties (at that time), the Liberal Party and Nationalista Party just the same kind of stuff, like Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola?  He answered that NP Manglapus was sour graping, because he was not invited. He was just taking the urban poor for a ride. But when he was ushered inside, the demonstration stopped. Of course, he being an LP stalwart, Ninoy ticked in some confusing words about why the LP was different, and how it was pursuing principled politics.

I followed up. The news is that Marcos will declare martial law. If it is indeed declared what will you do? His answer was short as it was blunt: “I’ll go to the hills!” The meeting meandered up to late evening. Then he signed off to take some rest.

Our group sent Ninoy off at the DZR Airport at four in the morning. The place was still quite dark, but his private plane loomed large enough to be in quick sight. Another day for Ninoy, he was climbing the skies again for the next hop. As we bid him goodbye, we had the feeling that we were waving at the next president of the republic. A few months later, Marcos had him in jail.

More than a decade since that meeting, Ninoy's bravery at the Manila International Airport tarmac easily spilled to the rest of the nation. Right at that hour, some radio stations would no longer be deterred from covering the negative event and the succeeding events later.

On that day, I had just finished an advertising job contract. With the small fee, I hurried to Cubao to shop and buy new clothes. At past mealtime, I sensed something was amiss. Then I heard Ninoy has been shot.

I did not finish shopping anymore, but went home in record time. From one o’clock PM to twelve in the evening, my ears were glued to the radio for continuing account on Ninoy. 

Throughout the next days, tension hovered over the metropolis. The Luzon grid plunged into total blackout, fueling talk of revolution. Conversations even in our devil-may-care neighborhood did not leave the topic of the ex-senator’s murder.

A few days later, I was at Ninoy’s wake. The taxi I rode had a hard time squeezing into the jam of people and vehicles around the Sto. Domingo Church, that afternoon when my whole physical constitution brought me to have a look at an old acquaintance, and bid him my last farewell. The driver was telling me, as if to put one on Marcos, “The NPAs are here!” I smiled in silence glancing furtively if he was looking at me.

The queue going to Ninoy’s coffin inside the church was kilometric. By the time I caught up at the tail end, it already wound into a side street stretching down to Quezon Avenue. But I piled in patience to have my last glimpse. I said to myself: “Perhaps, if you were able to make good of your word, we may have met in the hills.”

The moment given for a glimpse and prayer was brief. But it was more than enough for the image inside the glass to be etched in my memory until now. He was not the debonair young senator anymore that I met in Tacloban, eleven years back. Gone was the burst of life, the overflowing energy and vitality. But in there lurked a different force. From the dead man riddled with bruises and a bullet hole, a current of electricity conducted, went through the air, and touched the gathered mass of watchers at the church.

Ninoy’s face shone despite the ugly marks. It was a portrait of long years of tortuous struggle. That struggle would purify the traditional political persona that darkened in him. Finally, martyrdom distilled pure sincerity from all the seeming pretensions. In that state, having given it all, he became a figure of overarching influence for someone definitely lifeless and speechless.

The stretch of ten days after Ninoy's death up to his internment became a study in mass consciousness raising and political education. Folks were talking, feeling having to to talk of topics that were once taboo. Monday morning quarterbacking rose in corner stores. Marcos was being analysed, from his Maharlika body to his lupus erythematusos, from his military strength to his Imelda weakness, from his Presidential Decrees or Palakol ng Demonyo to his presidential plunder, from his being Genuine Ilocano to his fake medals. As always, fear in the hearts of men headed for the exit.

Workers who did not go out to rally on the slogan, “Sahod Itaas, Presyo Ibaba!” piled out of their factories to join the call “Justice for Aquino, Justice for All!” Protests even in the rarefied corporate joints of Ayala Avenue were on a groundswell. Marches were breaking ground. Numbers in them were breaking records.

Suddenly, it became fashionable to tie a headband and join the demos. Paper waste and Yellow Pages were shredded and flushed out the windows of buildings to shower confetti as marchers, who were becoming a daily phenomenon, passed by. On a cue, cars would instantly blow their horns and a noise barrage would engulf the city.

All of the bravery was a product of the ten days that shook the nation into waking up from eleven years of slumber and masochism. From the day of the assassination to the day when Filipinos turned up in a mammoth crowd to send the martyr to his final resting place, the long lethargic political fault lines began moving and sending tremors and aftershocks. Although Ninoy died, his fight took a life of its own.

There is no mistaking the period of turmoil and alignment triggered by the assassination of August 21. It was a time of unease, but it was also a time of assurance of triumph. It was a time of anxiety, but it was also a time of anticipation of great things to happen. It was a time of anger, but it was also a time of telling everybody to be patient for the end of the dark force was near. And the great wonder about it was no one ever expected this to happen.