We rail at why Bongbong Marcos is inching closer to the top slot for Vice-President as shown in the surveys. We find it revolting that the son of a dictator that our generation abhorred and resisted so vehemently is now the darling of the youth—at least for some of them. And we are angered when Bongbong says that politicians should stop judging his father and allow historians to weigh his dad in the balance. “Such hubris! Such callousness!” we shout in protest.
And yet Bongbong and his followers have every reason to be confident when they say, “Ah, but the Marcos years were the best our country every had!”
We need not look further to find reasons why there is an on-going revision of history: three decades on and we still see Filipinos queuing to leave the country to work as nurses, caregivers, welders, domestic helpers and construction workers abroad. We see equally long lines of commuters stranded in Manila’s malfunctioning MRT trains even as we are aghast as we join other motorists going through so many long lines of vehicles in chaotic near-standstill traffic there as well as here in Cebu. And, perhaps the crowning glory of them all, the patent failure of government even to release such a simple thing as new car plates, much less, new car registration stickers that we have been promised since 2012.
And there at the top of this all is a president that bears the family name Aquino, the very nemesis of Marcos. The irony is not lost on us all. The equation for the innocent who now root for Bongbong is really quite simple: if this Aquino son has totally failed in the simple work of ensuring the printing of a car sticker or the noble task of bringing to justice his own Cabinet members who have made a mess out of the MRT, then surely we can try his opposite, a Marcos son, who has had a sterling record in the Senate compared to this Aquino son who virtually did nothing there but was rewarded with Malacañang.
And so we see Bongbong Marcos riding upon a false sense of hope, armed with a patent failure of forwarding the gains of EDSA by those who benefited from that revolution, the oligarchy – the pre-Martial Law elite – that Marcos replaced with his own.
We delude ourselves by celebrating EDSA as a holiday every February 25th as if things have changed for the teeming masses of poor who inherited their condition from their poor parents who were eyewitnesses, nay, even active participants to a promise that has vanished into thin air 30 years later.
While I will not vote for Bongbong, I can appreciate the kind of savvy that he has. (No other country in the world has ever welcomed back a dictator’s family, after all.) And so he has seized the hour and will probably soon seize the day amid a palpable undertone of dissatisfaction across the board over the Aquino presidency’s failures in governance and its selective approach to weeding out corruption in government (read: You are with my party, so why worry?)
Just what were the failures of EDSA that we now see the possibility of a Marcos comeback? EDSA, to the uninitiated, are those tumultuous days between February 22 and 25 in 1986 that we ballyhoo to the world as our contribution to democracy in the form of a non-violent revolution that toppled an entrenched dictatorship.
Those four days were a bright shining moment when we thought we could change our world and the destiny of our country. On the fifth day, however, reality took over. And then it was downhill from then on.
The first thing our dear president Cory Aquino did wrong was to happily announce to the US Congress, just a few months after EDSA, that we were honorable men and women and that because of that we would honor our foreign debt. That debt at the time reached something like 27 billion dollars, after just 2.2 billion dollars when Marcos declared martial law 14 years earlier.
Cory brought us to our knees just to please US banks that loaned millions of dollars to prop up the Philippine economy even if they knew that their money was lining the pockets of the dictator Marcos and his cronies.
And despite, or more aptly, due to these cronies’ monopolistic control of large sectors of the economy, the signs of failure and crisis were in the air by 1982, prompting Ninoy Aquino, Cory’s exiled husband, to return to the country to challenge Marcos and bring the country back from the edge, even in the face of death, which unfortunately did happen on August 21, 1983.
Three years later, we find Cory proudly beating the drums for American banks as she proudly vowed to honor Marcos’ debts. Such callousness! Such hubris! You might say. She returns to a struggling Philippine economy, faltering on the weight of paying interests on a huge foreign debt that no one even knew even existed under Marcos. Only Cebu under Gov. Emilio “Lito” Osmeña, would turn out to be a bright shining beacon of development from then on. So much so that whispers of seceding from Manila and the Philippines were beginning to come out in the open in Cebu.
Meanwhile, the same banks Cory kowtowed to graciously granted Mexico and later Argentina generous terms so that they would not default on those loans. Cory Aquino had just inaugurated the gradual demise of the promises of EDSA.
(Next week, more failures of EDSA)