OPEN LETTER TO MAYOR ISKO MORENO AND FRIENDS FROM AKSYON DEMOKRATICO

OPEN LETTER TO MAYOR ISKO MORENO AND FRIENDS FROM AKSYON DEMOKRATICO

Dear Mayor Isko Moreno and friends from Aksyon Demokratico,

I write with the utmost respect, and precisely because words do matter I wish to convey to you my thoughts on your recent pronouncements on the Marcos legacy and its impact on the current elections.

I respect positions that you hold though we may differ, and I hope that you can find time to listen because some young people particularly in Aksyon Demokratico are your fervent followers.

There are three things that I wish to bring up:

Revision of the Facts of Our History

Since the declaration of martial law by Ferdinand Marcos nearly half a century ago, the country has been deeply divided over the meaning and impact of Marcos’ rule during some two decades.

As historical records attest to, Marcos and his allies caused the death of democracy in the Philippines. He padlocked Congress, he detained his critics in the Senate, he struck a blow against the freest press in the region, and stoked fear in the hearts of those who dared dissent. He cowed teachers and students into reciting the so-called “glories of the New Society”, and invented a new narrative “deifying” himself and his wife as “malakas at maganda” -- making a mockery of our traditions by demeaning reality masquerading as “truth”.

He established a coterie of beneficiaries composed of his cronies and their so-called “Blue Ladies” as well as favored business allies who to this day compose a “network” complicit in plunder, while the majority in the land suffered a different fate. He designated areas in Northern Luzon as enclaves of improved roads and bridges to become beneficiaries of his arbitrary rule; in contrast, much of the rest of the country suffered benign neglect.

Marcos’ legacy is deep division among our people which can never be healed by his heirs or by one wishes to lead but who in fact has become not only part of the plunder. How? Because he, together with his mother and siblings, have sought to delay and derail the wheels of justice. The recovery of the money stolen from our people has been generally aborted. Those funds could otherwise have been used to deal with our current emergencies in the areas of health, hunger and the livelihood of our people.

For many of us who lived under Marcos’ martial rule, it has never been a quarrel between two families (the Marcoses and the Aquinos) as you recently proclaimed in one of your speeches. Allow me to explain by sharing a story that begs to be shared: I recall my former student, Emmanuel Yap, who was made to “disappear” outside his home on February 14, 1976 as he visited his father and mother never again to re-appear. The last message his family received was that he was in the hands of the military. In fact, eyewitness accounts reveal that he was buried alive somewhere in Montalban. It broke the heart of his father, the former chief justice Pedro Yap, who never recovered from the grief of the loss of his son – a brilliant mind who graduated high school salutatorian and magna cum laude from the Ateneo; initiated his social involvement in Sapang Palay and joined Lakasdiwa and from there the underground upon the declaration of martial law. For me as his former teacher, Manny embodied the Ignatian prayer of generosity.

Reconciliation based on Justice

As you well know, the wounds inflicted by Marcos’ dictatorial have far from healed. At the Commission of Human Rights’ HRVCB (Human Rights Victims’ Claim Board), thousands of human rights victims have become plaintiffs narrating their experiences and those of their loved ones lost or made to disappear, tortured and maimed, detained unjustly and made to suffer unending anguish undergone by themselves and their families. Never have the Marcos descendants who during the time of martial law were active not passive participants shown any remorse. They have neither acknowledged wrong-doing or sought pardon from the people wronged by the dictatorship, instead they rub salt on the injuries sustained by people and re-open the wounds inflicted by the once-mighty Marcoses.

To offer a “unifying leadership” and to ask people to “reconcile” and “move on” without the benefit of a painful process of seeking forgiveness and receiving pardon for wrongs done is to debase the meaning of true unity and reconciliation. There can be no authentic reconciliation without justice, without acknowledgement of the wrongs that must be righted, without restoring what has been taken away, without some form of compensation for serious hurts that have been done to their fellow Filipinos.

It is a grotesque mis-understanding of reconciliation that seeks to be painless, that attempts to be convenient by brushing aside the inconvenient truths that must be confronted, by attempting to forget and erase the past rather than by respectfully remembering the past in order to transform the present and help usher in a future where authentic healing can truly take place.

Restitution

How can we move on without restitution? In fact, we are deceived twice over, as amply-documented ill-gotten wealth plundered from our people are now used in the Marcos campaign that ultimately aims to revise our nation’s history.

We witness the heirs of the perpetrators of one of the best-documented “heists” in living memory now pretending to run for public office without having to go through a rigorous process of accountability. Proofs abound with Supreme Court rulings, the findings of the Sandiganbayan and even the records of Courts of the U.S. concluding that a treasure trove of documents exists which show dollar accounts in their billions, jewelry, paintings, properties here and abroad – all way beyond the supposed accumulated earnings of the Marcoses of US$304,000 from their joint earnings in government from 1968-1986. How ironic that in their numerous court pleadings the Marcos shift their positions from asserting that they own the assets in contention or that they distant themselves from the funds in question – depending on the nature of the court cases.

In fact, the irony lies in this: the Marcos candidacy enables the continuing crime of money laundering; converting the proceeds of the ill-gotten wealth plundered from our people into campaign funds used to promote the pretender’s nth attempt to revise history. By having an administration amenable to their demands such as the burial of the former dictator in the “Libingan ng mga Bayani” to having a solicitor general in the person of an abject Marcos loyalist like Calida, their crimes have been “wished away”.

By dilatory tactics derailing court proceedings by means fair and foul, the Marcos family have evaded the return of ill-gotten wealth. In fact, they have lived on its proceeds and through paid trolls and marketing experts (now exposed in the U.S. Senate Hearings on Facebook showing how “misinformation and lies” have been propagated in different social media fora) they have sought the “re-branding” of the Marcoses. It is collective manipulation at its worst which has now culminated in this audacious run for the presidency that borders on insolence and irreverence aimed at the heart of democratic practice: the electoral exercise that gives the citizens the right to choose their own leaders.

As the world watches in disbelief, the candidate Ferdinand, Jr., who at the time the dictator fled was already governor of Ilocos Norte from 1983-86 and vice-governor from 1980-83, attempts to restore the Marcos legacy. Instead of restoring plundered wealth, he seeks a Marcos restoration. Instead of compensating the victims of repressive rule, the candidate Marcos aggravates their situation by reciting lines that are meant to confound reality and distort the past.

It is hard to imagine for people in other parts of the world who watched in awe as the power of the Filipino people peacefully drove away a tyrant now witnessing an electoral campaign where that same tyrant’s son seems complicit in perpetuating a lie.

This devious “Marcos phenomenon” truly devalues our standing before an unbelieving world.

Prof Ed Garcia,

(One of the framers of the 1987 Constitution, a participant in the First Quarter Storm and the “parliament of the streets” that led to the people power experience in 1986. He taught political science at the UP Diliman campus and at the Ateneo, and worked with scholar-athletes at the Far Eastern University. For two decades he worked in the peace-building organization, International Alert, and Amnesty International in the UK.)

9 October 2021

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Prof. Edmundo Garcia wrote "Servant Leader: Leni Robredo" edited by Danton Remoto and published by San Anselmo Press in three editions.

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