A Time to Rise, Again!

The author, Cindy Domingo, at the Bantayog ng mga Bayani in Quezon City, where the the names of her brother Silme Domingo and friend Gene Viernes, Fil-Am trade unionists, are inscribed. CONTRIBUTED

SEATTLE – My heart is heavy with sadness and anger as I organize the annual dinner of A Legacy of Equality Leadership and Organizing (LELO) to honor the 41^st anniversary of the deaths of my brother Silme Domingo and his fellow union brother and friend Gene Viernes. Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., the son of the dictator who was responsible for their assassinations in Seattle on June 1, 1981, has been elected president of the Philippines.

Many from Seattle and beyond still remember their cold-blooded murders by Marcos gunmen that took place during afternoon rush hour at the Pioneer Square offices of the Alaska Cannery Workers Union, Local 37, International Longshore and Warehouse Union. It took eight years, three murder trials, and a federal civil suit to bring to justice those who were involved in the murder conspiracy.

Doubting Thomases could not believe it when our families and lawyers won the landmark lawsuit in Seattle’s Federal District Court against Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos and Tony Baruso, President of Local 37. We received a $23.5 million judgment – the first time a foreign dictator had been held accountable for the murder of American citizens on U.S. soil.

We achieved our historic victory in 1989, and here we are today, 33 years later, with the son of the dictator elected as president. His running mate, Sara Duterte, the daughter of another authoritarian, current president Rodrigo Duterte, has won as vice president. Both have defended their fathers’ authoritarian rules. No wonder this Philippine election has been labeled as the most consequential election in decades.

The victory in Silme and Gene’s case was never ours alone. While we realize that the People Power movement in February 1986 was the determinant force that forced the Marcoses to flee to the U.S., it was a culmination of two decades of anti-Marcos dictatorship activism by a cross-section of Philippine society, including overseas Filipinos.

Our exposure of Marcos’ ability to extend his dictatorial rule into the US to attack his opponents helped open the eyes of U.S. lawmakers, the media, and the American people to the repressiveness of a dictatorship heavily supported by the U.S. government. Subsequently, thousands of other victims of torture and murder sued the Marcoses and won judgments also because the Marcoses were within reach of U.S. courts.

However, the Marcoses successfully regained their footing in the Philippine political scene. In 1991, after settling with our families for a smaller sum and given the green light by President Cory Aquino, Imelda Marcos and her family returned to the Philippines to start rebuilding the political power they had lost in 1986.

They still had the funds to help accomplish their goal as the government had retrieved only about $4-B of the $10-B they had embezzled from Philippine coffers. Marcos, Jr. is one of the administrators of this stolen wealth and had been found guilty of tax evasion by Philippine courts. As of now, the Marcoses still have not paid $3.8-B in taxes on their family estate that they owe the Philippine government.

Over the last 30 years, the Marcoses have evaded punishment for their crimes against the Filipino people. The Philippines, known for its political dynasties, has witnessed how Marcos Sr.’s wife and children were able to run and win in elections for offices at the highest levels, from Governor to House of Representatives to Senator. In 2016, Marcos, Jr. filed several legal challenges to nullify Leni Robredo’s vice presidential win but lost in each case. However, 2022 turned out to be the year the Marcoses would have their dream of recapturing the presidency come true.

The Marcoses have spent years and a fortune using social media to rewrite history and to rid the history of Ferdinand Marcos as a dictator. Furthermore, little is mentioned in Philippine history books used in the educational system about the 14 years when he ruled with an iron fist. Historical revisionism further accelerated with the election of Rodrigo Duterte as President in 2016, with Duterte ordering the burial of the dictator in the Philippine Cemetery of Heroes, comparable to Arlington National Cemetery. The Marcos propaganda machinery has utilized YouTube, Facebook, and Tiktok videos to create the illusion that the elder Marcos had ushered in the golden era of the Philippines and all criticisms about the martial law years were fake news.

The Marcos-Duterte slate consolidated their chances in winning the election victory when these two candidates from powerful political dynasties became running mates. Their paid Internet trolls posted non-stop lies and other misinformation about their opponents, mainly targeting Vice President Leni Robredo and her family. Duterte had appointed of key people in the Supreme Court and the Commission on Elections to further ensure their victory.  A few days after the election, members of the opposition have launched protests in view of the violence, blatant vote buying, and election irregularities during the voting.

Amid the despair and tears shed over the result of the election in the past week, there are glimmers of hope for the future.  Vice President Leni Robredo inspired millions of Filipinos through the Pink Movement. Her campaign used the color pink to express their theme to give Filipinos a rosy future, and her supporters became known as the Kakampinks, the portmanteau derived from the Tagalog word kakampi or ally and the English word pink.

During the six months of Robredo’s campaign, hundreds of thousands of Filipinos turned out at rallies all over the country, culminating in a massive final campaign push on the eve of the election, attended by one million people. This movement, led by young people born after the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship era, has the potential to become a strong and vibrant pro-democracy movement, akin to Latin American movements that have transformed politics in countries like  Chile and Honduras over the last five years.

This unprecedented volunteer-driven movement has the potential of pushing for democratic reforms and a more sustainable plan to recover from the severe economic crisis and the devastation brought by the pandemic. This new generation had become inspired by the standards set by the Robredo campaign that promoted good governance, transparency, human rights, participatory democracy, and other reforms to benefit the poor and the powerless, as well as denounced the domination by political dynasties and unbridled corruption that have stifled the country’s development.

The road will be challenging to say the least.  Re-elected officials like Senator Risa Hontiveros, the only opposition force left in the Senate, will need the Kakampink movement to move a progressive agenda and to prevent any rollbacks of social reforms the Filipino people had previously and to prevent state violence as the presumptive president has declared that he would continue Duterte’s bloody drug war that has resulted in over 30,000 extrajudicial killings.

The U.S. and the Philippines have had a long and complex relationship and the U.S. government gives millions of dollars in military and economic aid to its strategic Southeast Asian ally.  Over four million Filipinos live in the US, making it one of the largest Asian American populations in the country, and almost 200,000 were eligible and registered to vote in the recent Philippine elections.  There is a strong basis for U.S. Filipinos and their allies in the broader community to advocate for a fair and just U.S. foreign policy that ensures the well being of Filipinos and the protection of democracy in the Philippines.

I know from my own personal experience that the U.S.-Philippine solidarity movement has an important role to play in defending democracy in the Philippines. Silme and Gene paid with their lives when they threw a spotlight on the Marcos dictatorship’s repression of the Philippine labor movement by bringing the power the U.S. labor movement into the effort to protect the right of Filipino workers to organize.

I remember my last talk with Silme when he came to visit me in Oakland two weeks before he was murdered by the Marcos hired assassins.  By then he already knew that his and Gene’s lives were in danger, having received multiple threats of bodily harm and death from anonymous persons.

He was not his usual jovial self and looked solemn as he told me, “Cindy, it is our duty to do everything we can to fight the dictatorship and help bring back democracy to the Philippines. Our struggle as workers in this country for social justice is inextricably intertwined with the fight of workers for the same cause in other countries.”

Cindy Domingo is a longtime activist in the Filipino-American community and is the co-editor of A Time to Rise: Collective Memoirs of the Union of Democratic Filipinos (KDP) and a contributor to Women Against Marcos: Stories of Filipino and Filipino American Women Who Fought a Dictator.