A different prism on martial law came over the weekend from a Filipino who grew up in Argentina. To mark the 42nd anniversary of Marcos saving “democracy by bayonets,” Bino A. Realuyo wrote about “my belated awakening” that came mostly from a Buenos Aires education.
A poet and novelist, Realuyo worked as community organizer, then as educator. He recalls “seeing historical parallels” while studying “La Guerra Suciat.” Jorge Rafael Videl and Ferdinand Marcos were great architects of repression.
In Argentina’s “dirty war” thousands of dissidents were kidnapped, tortured and killed. Under Marcos 3,257 were “salvaged” and over 737 disappeared, named desaparecidos.
Marcos was the only Filipino president I lived under. Books and news were sanitized even then. I remember curfews, power outages, little else. My love for books began in readings of history and encyclopedias. I joined and won history quiz bees in high school, my young mind having the capacity to memorize dates and facts. But there was little understanding of why history happens.
I didn’t know I lived in a climate of repression. People like us lived too far from the inner circles of politics, as many Filipinos do even now. Luckily, my international education allowed me to become more critical of the world around me, search for truth, and increase capacity to understand.
Why did Martial Law happen? How did it impact the country? Why does the Philippines continue to be beleaguered by graft and corruption?
Some answers came years later. Realuyo today reluctantly accepts that “Filipinos don’t grasp the power of these two words: Nunca Mas (Never Again).
Many Filipinos confuse (Catholic) forgiveness with these two wrought sisters, denial and powerlessness.
That “history repeats itself” axiom was nurtured in the Philippines is beside the point. Perhaps, it is totally moot at this historical impasse. “There is very little room to move in this discourse. History is tight, and fast.”
Fact: The Marcoses have been back in office for years. Fact: Many are rallying to revise historical truths, creating heroes and fairy tales out of 14 years of Marcos (abuses). Fact: Many of the new generation of Filipinos, in the motherland or beyond, don’t understand a drop of the martial law concept, much less its corollary.
Realuyo’s prism, however, skips over, say, mothers of the “disappeared” in Argentina. Every Thursday, since 1977, desaparecido mothers, in white head scarves, walk around Plazo de Mayo. How do they differ from mothers of still unaccounted for activist Jonas Burgos, and UP student leaders Sherlyn Capadan and Karen Empeno? Both groups are aging, their ranks dwindling.
His prism throws no light on Chile or El Salvador. Is there relevance between murder of paramilitary killing of bishop Oscar Romero and Fr. Fatuso Tenorio who served indigent tribal people in North Cotabato for 39 years?
A UN Commission later established that death squad leader Roberto D’Aubuisson ordered a sniper to kill Romero, who denounced junta abuses. The probe into who gunned down Fr. Tenorio in October 2011 stalled as Armed Forces Eastern Mindanao Command washes its hands.
Tenorio “sought justice for lumads or indigenous people, dispossessed of their land, harassed by armed men, when government seemed to abandon them,” Kidapawan bishop Romulo de La Cruz recalls. Siding with the oppressed “can earn you enemies who go after even the kindest of men.”
“Punishment is not revenge or even justice,” the late Jesuit sociologist John Carroll wrote. It is the community reaffirming values seriously violated. Not to react as a community would be to reduce a “common conscience” to personal preference–and invite collapse.
Willingness to forget Marcos’ crimes reflects weakness of common conscience. “We forget at the cost of betrayal. Unless (the country reaffirms) those values, it may be condemned to forever wander in the valueless power plays among the elite.”
Is there a middle ground between tragic sentimentality and common sense? Realuyo asks. Is there a place where people who don’t think, those who do, and the many who don’t care can meet?
The Philippines is a country of either/or: rain or shine. The day after September 21, we move on to the next topic. Celebrity controversies have more lasting power in our conversations than issues of national interest. “No lessons learned. No real life applications.”
How we can move the populace out of poverty and bring them to the educated middle class with power and decision making. The powerlessness of the poor is the root of social putrefaction. Indigents are meaningless to the powerful few and so-called Catholics who live off them.
We see this reenacted in Filipino movies all the time. Except it is not fiction. Like other dictatorships in the world, Marcos’ “New Society” was all about using the poor as pawns. The bigger the poverty, the longer the party.
Granted that the Marcos years deserved to be relegated to the evil sections of history. What has really happened since? Have we had great leaders? Have we improved governance? Or have we bred more crooks, more thieves, and more corrupt officials?
Joseph Estrada became the first Philippine president ever to be convicted for plunder, former president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is in detention, facing corruption trial. Presidents Fidel Ramos, Corazon and Beningo III were personally clean.
“The Marcos clan returned because they know they could,” Realuyo notes.
The question is not “Why did they?”
It is:”Why would they not?
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