Walk for LIfe Catholic protest against the dealh penalty and extrajudicial killings. INQUIRER FILE
NEW YORK—This week will mark the 31st anniversary of the People Power uprising that booted out the conjugal dictatorship—to use the murdered Primitivo Mijares’s book title of his exposé of Marcos’s corrupt regime—and put in its place a political novice, a widow dressed in yellow.
Tita Cory, as people affectionately called Corazon Aquino, embodied the hopes of an embattled and embittered nation that finally the country might rise to its feet and move firmly on the path of good governance towards a just, equitable, and humane society.
That was the dream, anyway.
What was happened since? Of the five presidents who came after Cory, Joseph “Erap” Estrada was forced to withdraw, convicted of illegally amassing wealth while in office, while Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, or GMA, was thought to have manipulated the elections so she could win, as well as committing the crime of plunder. She was placed under hospital arrest during Noynoy Aquino’s term and was released only relatively recently.
Under Rodrigo Duterte’s watch, the country seems to be going backward, further perhaps than Estrada’s and GMA’s missteps. Here is a president who has made pointed references to the imposition of martial law and encouraged a culture of murderous impunity. Hence, “salvagings,” as they were termed during the Marcos years, are back with a vengeance, with a more precise if less dramatic name, “extrajudicial killings,” or EJKs.
The body count is now close to 8,000, and anyone who believes this isn’t a war on the marginalized, on the least of our brethren, needs to check into the nearest psychiatric ward. On this note, it may have taken the Catholic bishops an inordinate, even inexplicable, length of time to condemn these state-encouraged killings, but they have finally spoken out, most conspicuously Luis Antonio Cardinal Tagle, following the lead of Archbishop Socrates Villegas, head of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP).
At a Rizal Park early-morning rally attended by thousands, Villegas explained why the gathering was being held at that particular time: “This is simply because [it is] during this time when victims are found along the road or in garbage heaps.”
President Duterte of course is no fan of the Catholic Church, pointing to its own abuses. Which is a convenient way of sidestepping the legal, moral, and ethical issues here. Besides, the former Davao City mayor is close to the Marcoses, and has made public his preference for Bongbong Marcos as his second-in-command instead of Vice-President Leni Robredo, who has spoken out against the EJKs.
Moreover, Duterte, defying public opinion and with the support of a spineless Supreme Court, allowed the stealthy burial of the rogue dictator at the Libingan ng Mga Bayani (Heroes Cemetery), even though the dead man, while he was alive, had only baseless claims—what today would be termed “fake news” or “alternative facts”—to the stature of a hero, only perhaps to a statue.
Duterte acts as though the constraints on presidential power were unnecessary, that as Big Daddy he knows it all, and that the other two branches of government should salaam before him. He’s feeling his inner Strong Man (though it ain’t so inner anymore and maybe never was, with Davao his testing ground). Should you cross him, watch out, as his arch-critic Senator Leila de Lima is learning, being charged with drug trafficking and facing the possibility of jail. The key witnesses against her are criminals, the sort who will attest to being in the Garden of Eden and witnessing Eve bite into the apple—if that is what the government wants. In return, apparently, all drug charges against these lovely characters will be dropped and they can then resume leading the lives of upstanding citizens.
As for commemorating the People Power phenomenon, Malacañang’s emphasis is on a low-key observance of those wonderful February days. The president’s office has made noises about how the country should move on. This is tantamount to a New Yorker saying, “Fuhgedaboutit!”
The kind of history that Rodrigo Duterte, the Marcoses, and their minions, prefer is what the late poet Alffredo Navarro Salanga describes in his short but brilliant poem “A Philippine History Lesson”: “History that / moves us away / from what we are.” Burying the inconvenient truth of a tyrant—now that would be one hell of an extrajudicial killing.
Copyright L.H. Francia 2017
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