I will address this column to the millennials, those who were never there when in our youth we grew under the dark clouds of the Marcos dictatorship.
I understand perfectly why there is a creeping revision of those years to the point that the dictator’s son, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., is inching closer to the vice-presidency. My generation and those in power during the last 30 years after we booted the dictator out are to blame for this.
I can only thank the heavens that Leni Robredo has suddenly burst out of the doldrums and is someone much more worthy of the vice-presidency and one who has no fear of exposing the Marcoses and their dark legacy.
In the same vein, I find it appalling that Sen. Gringo Honasan, the same person who led the Reform the Armed Forces Movement (RAM) which resisted the dictatorship from within during its waning years, is so tellingly silent on the obvious Marcos revisionism that is upon us.
The Marcos years were years of control and discipline — at least from the first two years of martial law. But whatever peace was obtained during those years was superficial, covering only the contradictions that were simmering underneath.
These are the facts that Bongbong Marcos cannot assail:
1. His father was already banned by the 1935 Constitution from running for another term in the 1973 elections. Marcos Sr. found a convenient way to extend his stay in Malacañang by imposing martial law on the pretext of building a new society after waging battle against the entrenched oligarchy, the extremely rich families who controlled the political and economic life of the nation.
2. After imposing martial law on September 21, 1972, he did run after the so-called oligarchs, imprisoning most of them but sparing those whom he had debts of gratitude. He also confiscated the assets of these oligarchs (the ABS-CBN network of the Lopezes was one).
3. Instead of selling these oligarchic assets to be used for land reform, as he promised, he merely transferred their ownership to his cronies, ushering in the era of crony capitalism, giving them preferential treatment. Most of these were either classmates or fraternity brothers or golfing partners of the dictator.
4. When Marcos began his presidency in 1965, the country’s foreign debt was only less than $300 million. By the time he was booted out of office in 1986, the foreign debt had already ballooned to $28.8 billion. The Philippine economy was in shambles, burdened by an annual debt servicing of about $3 billion.
5. When Marcos entered his second and final term as president in 1969, the New People’s Army (NPA) of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) was just starting as a small ragtag band of rebels based largely in Tarlac and the outskirts of Manila. By the 1986, the NPA had grown to nearly 100,000 armed combatants with units all over the country except in Muslim Mindanao.
These are just some of the grim facts that accompanied those years of dictatorship. I have not even included the thousands of victims of human rights violations that accompanied those years.
If Marcos revisionists refer to the Marcos dictatorship as the golden years of the country, they must be referring to the gold hoard that Marcos was reported to have surreptitiously spirited out of the country, some of which were left on storage for some time at the Hamburg International Airport. This is part of the same wealth that Bongbong and his family are actively claiming in the courts as theirs.
Without doubt, those years were golden for the Marcoses and their ilk, while the rest struggled to eke a living and while those in the tiny middle class were sliding rapidly down to the lower class.
I blame no one but my generation for the innocence of the millennials about those years when mass media was censored and where those of us who actively resisted the dictatorship had to be ready to be arrested in the dark of night and eventually killed (or in the parlance of that time, “salvaged”), never to be heard from again.
The leaders we elected since we booted the dictator out let their guard down and we with them.
It is not too late, however. As I said in my previous column, those who think Bongbong will make a good partner to a strong president like Rodrigo Duterte will be bitterly disappointed. This is a man with only one ambition: to revise history in favor of his family. Will we allow him to get away with it and be the laughing stock of the world?