By
Menchu Aquino Sarmiento
The flurry of anti-Marcos activity at the
start of the campaign period may seem a bit late in the game. Pres. Corazon C. Aquino allowed the Marcoses
to return from a scant five year political exile in 1991. Since 1992 or barely a year after their
comeback, the Marcos matriarch, the eldest daughter and the only son have held
simultaneous elective posts.
The saga of the Marcos
Dynasty is an outrageous case study of impunity in our sad republic’s brief
existence. This year, Sen. Bongbong
Marcos (aka BBM) is a serious contender for the Vice Presidency, or just a
heartbeat away from the Presidency. It
is a nightmarish possibility for the tens of thousands who had been imprisoned
or tortured during the Marcos Martial Law.
Back in 1999, when he was Ilocos Norte Governor, BBM sneered that “Some
of these people who are claiming to be human rights victims have never been
victims except (of) their own greed.”
With less than three
months to go till the elections, the last week of February began with the
launch of CARMMA: Campaign Against the Return of the Marcoses to Malacanan at
the UP Bahay ng Alumni. Many in the
crowd were silver haired, and needed canes or a strong arm to lean on. Still they were in fine voice chanting the
familiar: “Marcos, Hitler, Diktador, Tuta!”
It was profoundly moving to see how those who had once locked arms and
stood down fire hoses, truncheons and teargas, now struggled to go up the low
stage. Their decades-old dream of a
truly democratic Philippines eludes them but they are not giving up. Time may not be on their side but they fight
on for restorative justice.
This added to the
urgency of the Feb. 23, 2016 launch of the first sixty pages (foreword,
introduction and chapter one) of the exhaustive history “MARCOS MARTIAL LAW: NEVER AGAIN” by
investigative journalist and political blogger Raissa Robles
[https://raissarobles. com] and published by Filipinos for a Better
Philippines. The full book will be out
before April. Robles has been writing
about the Marcoses and other potentates for decades. Since she is a journalist first and foremost,
she was waiting for a bona fide historian to get around to writing a history of
the Marcos Martial Law, particularly its systemic use of torture, “salvaging”
and forced disappearances. Her title
makes it clear that this is not a generic martial law but one which BBM’s
father Ferdinand E. Marcos created and kept going for 14 years.
BBM claims that the
sins of the father should not be vested on his children. Human rights lawyer and former senator Rene
Saguisag, who wrote the book’s foreword, drily notes: Ang bunga ng mabolo ay mabolo. In English, the fruit does not fall far from
the tree. Robles found records showing
that the Marcos children who reached adulthood midway through the Marcos Martial
Law, were co-signatories in bank accounts holding billions of dollars, and
Euros. The death of at least one
promising young man: Archimedes Trajano, has been linked to Imee Marcos’
government security detail.
Robles reflects that
“Marcos Junior probably won his Senate seat due to the rise of an ominous
demographic: by 2010, more than half of Filipino voters had been born after
1986, the year the dictator was chased out of office in a peaceful popular
“People Power” uprising. From 1986 to
2015, no school book detailed the human rights abuses of his father’s brutal
reign.” She warns: “Bong Bong Marcos may not be our past, but he
could be our horror-filled future.”
(Get a free copy of MARCOS MARTIAL LAW: NEVER AGAIN by emailing filipinosforabetterphilippines@
gmail.com)
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Menchu Aquino Sarmiento and author Raissa
Robles with first copies of the book.
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