A Dark Page In The Past

BIMBO CABIDOG

Ferdinand Marcos on his second term as president with the so-called Rolex generals getting the final details of how to execute Oplan Sagittarius, the plot to impose martial law and put the entire country under one man rule.

When Ferdinand Marcos Sr. declared Martial Law in September 21, 1972 were the communists about to seize power? This was what he made as reason, but history would belie it. There was no imminent danger to the nation from the left, or real threat of oligarchs trampling upon traditional democratic institutions and taking over the country, as he harped on.

Now, looking back, it is very clear that Martial Law was not a recourse to save the country from communism. It was neither, as Marcos would idealized it, a “revolution from the center” to stop the powerful economic and political cliques of the right from doing harm.

The draconian measure was simply a palace coup to extend his rule beyond the term provided by the 1935 Constitution. It was a move to centralize power under one man. What a tragic fate it spelled for the people.

The enactment of Proclamation 1081, suspending normal governmental institutions and suppressing political rights, cast a pall of gloom over the entire nation. The archipelago fell into an eerie silence. No newspapers showed on the streets. Radio and TV broadcasts went off the air. The citizenry talked in hushed tones. Everyone waited with bated breath for what was going to happen.

Over the week, bits of news slowly trickled building a hazy picture of the situation. Folks began to know that Senator Ninoy Aquino, Senator Jose W. Diokno and other major personalities in the political opposition were captured and detained. Down the line, activists and alleged subversives were rounded up and brought to stockades or tortured in unknown “safe houses.”

Both chambers of Congress were shut down. Political parties were not allowed to exist anymore. Organizations especially those that proliferated in the climate of dissent following the tumultuous First Quarter Storm in 1970 were disbanded. Even campus associations including student councils were suppressed. There was only one way to override the edict: go underground.

Considered a bastion of freedom, the Fourth State was shuttered. TV and radio stations were seized. Printing presses and editorial offices were padlocked. The widely read Manila Times newspaper and the favored maverick weekly mag Philippine Free Press, so with others in the liberal print media, disappeared from the stands. Through duress and actual force, Marcos gagged expression.

In the ensuing state of repressions, little dreams of young people like me would be dashed. Because of my prior engagement in university politics, and involvement in off-campus youth organizing and protests, I earned the honor of landing in the Military Intelligence Group’s blacklist. Before long, state agents were already after my skin. Less than a year after the declaration of martial law, I would be welcomed to one of Marcos’s detention cells.

Since then, life took a shaky turn. One door shut. In it my poor father saw the prospect of a bright future, the only one he could offer to me. It flew in an instant. Another door swung open and sucked me in. There I found myself in uncharted and turbulent waters. I floundered and tossed in stormy straits. Sailing was rough all the time. And I didn’t know which shores to head.

Was martial law worth the agony, sacrifices and deaths inflicted on the nation? Marcos wielded the powers it gave to be a dictator of unequalled rapacity in the country’s history. He fleeced the public coffers and carted billions of dollars to foreign shores to hide in private accounts. But not only did he plunder, he murdered. And the list of those who succumbed in that night is very long. What did the citizenry gain? Did the country end up any better, any safer?

It ended up much worse. Three years before Marcos’s ouster, the country’s Gross Domestic Product started on a steady trend of negative growth. The economic decline sent banks into holidays and subsequent closures. Investments took flight. As markets crashed, the financial system nose-dived. The government tail-spun towards bankruptcy it had to beg for loan from Singapore.

The pretext for the declaration of Martial Law was the specter of communism swallowing the whole country. The Utopian vision of a classless and stateless society should of course be a dangerous proposition only to the capitalist ruling classes. The spook about totalitarian rule, supposedly accompanying it, was merely a Cold War myth. Nonetheless, forty four years since, the Communist Party of the Philippines, along with its armed wing the New People’s Army, has not even hurdled yet the first stage of armed struggle to capture political power. It still languishes in what it calls the strategic defensive phase. So what danger did it pose in 1972?

Where was the fearful challenge to the country during Marcos’s ascension to authoritarian rule? It wriggled at the embryonic stage of revolution, a ragtag idealistic band of recruits from the academe merging with remnants of Lava-Taruc’s Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan (HMB). Debacles after debacles in the war front saw it conducting a guerrilla warfare of running without hitting, until the top leadership was snared by the enemy and locked in Marcos’s jails.

There was no subversion on a general scale that was about to topple democracy Philippine-style. The actual subversion was that of Marcos’s palace coup striking down the liberal-democratic government that existed under the 1935 Constitution. The communists were not poised to take over. He was. With martial law, he arrogated to himself the powers of the three equal counterbalancing branches of state.

Marcos lied to the nation. In the guise of quelling rebellion, he perpetuated himself in power. And under cover of monumental deceptions he suppressed civil liberties, trumped democratic processes, cancelled voting, and warped governance. He jailed, tortured and murdered detractors. He amassed wealth while the country turned into a basket case. For fourteen years he succeeded with lies.

But not for long could the dictator cheat history. On February 25, 1986 he was ousted by a popular upheaval that saw millions of unarmed citizenry match up to his tanks and cannons. A pundit once said: “Those who sow the seeds of deception will reap the whirlwind of the people’s fury.” Marcos literally finally did.

With his ignominious flight on that fateful night of February, as the masses he had oppressed for years surged at the gates of the palace, went a dark page in the nation’s history. But now, thirty years after the fall, his family members are hell-bent in burying him – or what passes off as him, at the Libingan Ng Mga Bayani, and the new government has given permit. Subtly, the vestiges of the past taking heart from the generation that did not directly experience want to revise history.

Now, the government of Rodrigo Duterte is killing its own people waging a misguided war against drug. There isn’t even a semblance of due process, as in the time of Marcos, when supposed narco elements are shot dead and tagged user, pusher or dealer. The police do not care to investigate, for it also is involved in the mass slaughter under the contrived alibi that arrested suspects fought. The skies on human rights are once again dimming.

I have added four decades to that time when I was barely a young man taking the cudgels of a fight for freedom, as many other young men like me did. I am again having that chilly feel of de javu as a climate of undeclared martial law, forgoing with the rule of law, and rabid persecution of those who dare to disagree or criticize the leadership blanket the land. Is the nation turning another leaf, much similar to that page of past that shifted 44 years ago today?