Our struggle against the Marcoses continues

Senator Lorenzo Tañada in a defiant pose, raises a clenched fist from inside a police van. INQUIRER FILE

The day Bongbong won, I found myself thinking of a photo published in Newsweek in 1978.

It showed Senator Lorenzo Tañada in a defiant pose, a clenched fist raised from inside a police van. He had just been arrested in a brutal crackdown launched by the Marcos dictatorship shortly after the 1978 Batasan elections.

I have never forgotten about that photograph, that image of courage and conviction.

Tañada was the campaign manager of the opposition election campaign that many considered pointless and doomed to fail.

In fact, the candidates of the Laban campaign all lost in an election now remembered for massive fraud and political brutality. But it was an inspiring campaign that ended with a bang. On April 6, 1978, the Laban movement staged what many from my generation still remember as a momentous event — the Noise Barrage  protest that rocked Metro Manila.

After the elections, the dictatorship launched a vicious crackdown that led to the imprisonment of opposition leaders like Tañada and young activists who spearheaded the campaign.

Tañada a was already 80 years old then. I was only 13. But I never forgot about what he and others tried to accomplish against tremendous odds.

I instinctively knew that their fight was also my fight, that it was for my future.

In many ways, what they did helped young Filipinos like me to prepare for the final confrontation that eventually ended a dark chapter in our history in 1986.

As I mentioned in a Facebook post, there are 13, 12, 11 year olds who witnessed and were part of VP Leni Robredo and Kiko Pangilinan ‘s campaign who will also never forget what they witnessed. A campaign led by a vice president who spent the last six year being threatened and bullied by a thuggish president and a political rival who defends the memory and the legacy of one of the most brutal regimes in world history.

It was a poorly funded long shot campaign. But in seven months, it sparked a revolution. I wrote in October, before Leni Robredo announced her candidacy, that she could win — even if she doesn’t become president.

Leni Robredo will not be the country’s next president. But she scored a spectacular victory: the launch of a new movement that will, in many ways, help correct one of the biggest mistakes of our generation, the Martial Law Babies.

We lived through a dark chapter in our history, when a dictator ruled with an iron fist, looting, killing, torturing, abusing our nation. We helped defeat the Marcos regime. But we failed to pass on the lessons of that terrible time in our history. We failed later generations to understand the regime of lies and greed that nearly destroyed our country.

We will mark the 50th anniversary of the declaration of Martial Law which launched the Marcos dictatorship in 1972.

Our fight against it is not over.