Sen. Imee R. Marcos (Voltaire F. Domingo/Senate PRIB)
Excluding the February 25 anniversary of the 1986 People Power Revolt from the list of national holidays for 2024 cannot alter the truth about the historic uprising that toppled their late father’s dictatorial regime, Sen. Imee Marcos said on Sunday.
“It cannot be revised because history is very clear,” Marcos conceded in reaction to claims that the decision of her brother, President Marcos, to exclude Feb. 25 as a public holiday was intended to revise history and deodorize the iron-hand rule of dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
The exclusion was spelled out in Presidential Proclamation No. 368, which the Office of the President regularly releases every year to officially designate official nonworking holidays the following year.
The list still included Ninoy Aquino Day on Aug. 21, when former senator and opposition leader Benigno Aquino Jr. was killed upon his return.
Aquino’s assassination at the Manila International Airport sparked the three-year political and economic crises that eventually led to the exile of the Marcos family and their friends that lasted until the former President died in Hawaii in 1989.“I’m not sure if it’s already an absolute exclusion or there will be declaration later because I also did not understand the discussions regarding this,” she said in a radio interview.
Malacañang should clarify
According to the senator, it would be better if Malacañang would issue a clarification on the matter, “but I think we all acknowledge that it is a [national] holiday,” she said.
Martial law survivors and political activists had decried the move, with opposition lawmaker and Albay Rep. Edcel Lagman describing the President’s Proclamation No. 368 as an “inordinate arrogance of the second Marcos administration.”
Lagman, who had personally experienced the abuses during the martial law years, said dropping the annual Feb. 25 celebration was part of a “continuing distortion of the verities about the evils and repression of the Marcos martial era.”
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