Martial Law, baby
Forty-eight years ago, a dictator made a cage, an abbatoir, and a milking cow of my country. Now there are people saying those were the good ole days. I have absolutely no idea if they suffer from selective amnesia, are on the payroll of the plunderers and their cronies, or simply never learned to think about what was going on around them.
There was no social media back then, just telephone brigades of frightened whispers into suspect handsets, ears attuned to the slightest sounds of static buzz that tickled your fears that your home landline was bugged — or that the pay phone you were using was tapped and under constant surveillance.
There was no freedom of speech, or of the press — because almost all the newspapers, save one, had been padlocked. The media was under dictatorial control, except for the independent outlets dubbed the Mosquito Press, whose intrepid workers feared daily for their lives. Indeed, many journalists then did not survive the jobs they did, and there is a marker on the grounds of the National Press Club of the Philippines building honoring the memory of those killed in the line of duty — a phrase that has, too often, been applied to members of the working press in my benighted Philippines.
September 21, 1972 is known as the anniversary of the declaration of Martial Law in the Philippines, also known as Presidential Decree 1081. Now that we do have social media, there are so many Marcos apologists — many of them paid hacks, I suspect — who say the two decades of iron-fisted rule, the abrogation of our people’s human rights, and the pillage of our National Treasury were good days. These were the days when self-interest was the rule, and getting ahead meant stepping over someone’s dead body as if it were not underfoot.
Good days? Might I remind everyone that the Philippines went by the sobriquet of “the Sick Man of Asia”? So a challenge was issued over social media, one I found in medias res, so I have no idea who threw down the gauntlet. Nonetheless, I am picking it up.
#MLchallenge, then.
I was born four months after the declaration of Martial Law in 1972. My parents used to tell me I was born screaming, and would rage at any efforts to restrain or shush me. Para akong pumapalag sa hawla, ika nga nila (It was as if I were banging my fists against a cage, they said). They have a name for people like me who were born, or who grew up, during the Marcos years: Martial Law baby. Well, this baby’s all grown up and not forgetting a thing.
I studied at SSC Manila, where our lessons on social justice and social studies were stark contrasts: The values I was taught both in school and at home were at odds with all the shushing and fearful looks I’d get when I’d ask questions, like why all the other newspapers were bundled in the very middle of the Bulletin Today (now Manila Bulletin), which was the “official” and only newspaper allowed unrestrained circulation back in the late 70s and early to mid-80s; or queries about why Imelda Marcos gave me the heebie-jeebies, even when she was so lovely; or why my classmates’ families were leaving the country in the middle of the schoolyear, and whether or not Ferdinand Edralin Marcos was an evil man.
And, if he was evil, why on earth was he still president, after all this time? Why was Voltes V suddenly taken off the air? Why were the poor put behind colorfully-painted walls when they would have been better off having their homes fixed? Why were dismembered and decapitated dead bodies being dumped in the empty lot outside the home of a childhood friend whose father was a lawyer?
When the news that Ninoy Aquino was assassinated in 1983 hit the public eye, I saw someone’s father lying dead, a senator who, presumably, held power. I joined the rallies on Ayala Avenue, with my parents’ blessings, surrounded by nuns of the Order of St. Benedict, and my teachers.
I was, unwittingly, following in the footsteps of my Tita Monet, who’d protested against Martial Law from the very beginning — and she would tell her children to look for her in the police camps in Bicutan or Crame if she failed to make it home after each rally she attended. It was in these police camps to the south and north of the capital, Manila, that people were taken to be tortured and killed, or simply disappeared.
I’d discovered those newspapers hidden in the Bulletin’s folds: Malaya, and the other titles of the Mosquito Press, and I read those and compared them with Bulletin’s staid content under my parents’ watchful eyes. This was the country I was growing up in: Businesses the Marcoses wanted to take were plucked from their owners’ hands, whether they agreed or not.
A curfew was set and anybody seen out on the streets after the curfew hour was picked up by police. If you were a pretty girl, and one identified as an activist, you were likely to be on the receiving end of sexual harassment or rape. By the integrated military and police force. If you were an activist, you would likely be held for interrogation, and tortured. Perhaps even disappeared, or killed, or both. Latin America’s teapot dictatorships did not hold the monopoly on desaperacidos. If you were male and sported long hair, you’d get a haircut, whether you agreed to one or not.
Where people in other countries would simply say “bye” when they’d part ways, we bid each other goodbye with a wish for safety: “Ingat (take care).” This two-syllable imprecation crossed the lips of all the people, rich, poor, middle-class and it was our farewell as much as “kain na (come and eat)” was our greeting for friends and family — not that “mabuhay (literally, live long and prosper)” we greet foreign tourists with.
The poor were kept quiet using a combination of fear and Nutribuns, with some bulgur wheat donated by the United States and repackaged to look as if the government had bought it for distribution to the slums of impoverished masses Imelda Marcos hid from Pope John Paul II’s view with brightly-painted and hastily-erected hollow-block walls. As if the hunger was solved simply by blocking the view.
When EDSA 1986 happened, my father heeded Cardinal Sin’s call. He’d parked his battered gray Ford Laser in front of a tank, the only thing between that machine of war and the Armed Forces of the Philippines armory on Santolan St. My Tito Greg had already fought for flag and country during World War II. He’d survived the Death March, and internment at the POW camp in Capas, Tarlac. He still went to stand on EDSA, saying the country needed him again, and, malaria or no malaria, he would heed her call.
When the Marcos family of murdering plunderers fled, I read all the reports on the grave damage they did to our economy, the killings done in their names and at their orders, the behest loans we are still paying off as “foreign debt.” They took away our freedoms so they could impoverish us, and keep us ignorant to the immense harm they and their cronies had visited upon this archipelago and its people for two decades. I am not about to forgive or forget that. I will not let the public forget that, either. There is no justice without reparation and punishment of the criminals who did this to our nation.
When my countrymen ended the Marcos dictatorship with People Power in 1986, 107,240 Filipinos were listed as the primary victims of human rights violations. Some 70,000 Filipinos had been the subject of arbitrary, warrantless arrests. About 34,000 more had been tortured. The miltary and police had killed 3,240 of the Filipinos they were supposed to serve and protect. At least 484 media outlets had been shuttered. That’s the human cost, in lives lost and broken, and in jobs and job opportunities — not to mention press freedom — destroyed.
The 20 years of Marcos’ strongman rule had then cost the country $683 million, assets that were deposited in various Swiss bank accounts and declared as ill-gotten wealth, based on a July 2003 Supreme Court ruling. A total of between $5 billion and $10 billion was estimated to have been plundered from my country across the two decades the Marcoses were in power. Our country is still paying for those “behest loans” taken out in our collective name, and stolen from us, to this day. People who weren’t even born when the Edsa Revolution happened are paying taxes that help pay these debts. The money that should have gone to health care, the delivery of social services, infrastructure projects, and the welfare of the people was gone, and we were left holding the hole-riddled bag — and we are still paying for that as I write this.
I was born in a cage, and I knew it. My soul knew it. I felt that like a raging storm in my blood. It is a very huge reason why I am the journalist I trained myself to be, from the third grade on, without looking back and with no regrets. I was a student activist from the fifth grade. I am still an activist now.
Freedom is a precious thing we stand guard over with our lives. I would choose to die fighting for, and defending, that freedom than live in comfort under anyone’s tyranny. I would, to my last breath and the last drop of blood in me, fight for freedom, and I have done this every day I’ve been a journalist, on campus, or out there as a member of the working press.
I will not stop defending our freedoms. I have daughters now, and I will protect them, and this country’s children, with everything I can bring to bear. I will not give this fight up. Ever.
