Heroism

RANDY DAVID

Heroes are exemplary individuals who embody a community’s highest values and ideals. “Heroes” and “nation” typically go together because a country’s best-known heroes are those whose lives are intertwined with the nation’s emergence, emancipation, and transformation.

Without any doubt, the Filipino people’s two greatest heroes are Jose Rizal and Andres Bonifacio. Rizal, for offering through his writings and exemplary life a vision of Filipinos as a people capable of attaining the highest achievement within the reach of nations, including that of self-rule. Bonifacio, for organizing and initiating the revolution that eventually freed the country from Spanish colonial rule.

The Filipino nation regularly celebrates their lives and holds them up as models of patriotism, to be emulated by generations of its citizens, particularly the youth. Other communities have their respective heroes, too. The Catholic Church has its martyrs and saints. Revolutionary movements have their ideologues and warriors.

At about this time every year, the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation plucks out of anonymity some four or five Asians, and casts a light upon the heroic work they do to make the world a better place, especially for the poor and neglected sectors of society. Offering innovative solutions to new and existing problems, often in the face of great adversity, these Magsaysay laureates are living heroes in their own way. They serve as models of an alternative life worth living in a materialistic and self-absorbed world.

A hero is thus the closest personification of a value or set of values that a given community desires to preserve, reinforce, and promote. The battle for a nation’s memory is, at bottom, a battle to maintain its core values in a rapidly changing world. There are, however, times when swiftly unfolding events bring out a change in the national mood that contradicts values enshrined in existing state commemorations.

If the theory is right, the resulting cognitive dissonance compels either a revision in action — for example, by abolishing the commemoration of an event, or a change in attitude, such as by offering a different and less dissonant interpretation of what happened.

The 2022 presidential election brought the son and namesake of the former dictator Ferdinand Marcos to Malacañang. The meaning of Marcos Jr.’s election by a big majority of Filipino voters seems to clash with everything that Ninoy Aquino Day, commemorated on Aug. 21 every year, seeks to represent. This special nonworking national holiday, instituted in honor of the former senator and martial law detainee, unavoidably recalls that fateful day in 1983 when, coming home from foreign exile, he was shot to death at the airport while under military escort.

As I argued in last week’s column, Ninoy Aquino’s assassination triggered a national outrage that eventually brought down the Marcos Sr. dictatorship. His martyrdom to the cause of democracy was immediately recognized and was undisputed in the years that followed. The people’s memory and appreciation of his heroism remained stable even after nearly three decades, when his son Noynoy was elected president.

It is remarkable that in a 2011 Social Weather Stations opinion poll on the personalities that Filipinos regard as genuine Filipino heroes, Ninoy ranked No. 3 — after Rizal and Bonifacio. (Thanks to Mahar Mangahas for bringing this out in his column the other day.) Together with Cory Aquino at No. 4, Apolinario Mabini at No. 5, and Emilio Aguinaldo at No. 6 — these names were the only ones that received double-digit percentage mentions. One wonders how the Aquinos would fare if the same poll were conducted today.

What is certain is that President Marcos Jr.’s administration has not seen it fit to remove Feb. 25 (the people power revolution) and Aug. 21 (Ninoy Aquino Day) from the list of official national commemorations. Neither has the administration signified any support for one lawmaker’s proposal to rename the Ninoy Aquino International Airport. It’s not hard to understand this. Not only will doing so appear vindictive, it also directly challenges the Filipino public’s sense of values.

This, however, does not mean that attempts to rewrite history to make it conform with the current political configuration is about to come to an end. As the film “Maid in Malacañang” indicates, the drift of current efforts appears to be toward a reinterpretation of the past in order to paint the Marcoses less as whimsical wielders of power and more as ordinary people with little control over events, and their political enemies less as the self-sacrificing heroes they are held out to be, but more as vicious and opportunistic power players.

Like everything in society, values change. Therefore, our conception of heroism and who our real heroes are is also bound to change. In 1981, writes historian Alfred W. McCoy, Marcos Sr. requested Pope John Paul II to ride a helicopter to bless the giant steel cross atop Mt. Samat in Bataan. By doing so, the visiting pope made Mt. Samat a shrine, “and by analogy honored Marcos as a hero, just as he would soon beatify (Lorenzo) Ruiz as a martyr.”

But only two years later, McCoy continues, Ninoy Aquino came home “to die a martyr before military executioners, stealing the Rizal-like heroism that Marcos so assiduously cultivated and subverting the ideological foundations of his authoritarian regime.”

The Ninoy Aquino cases

TONY LA VIÑA

Following the proclamation of Martial Law in the Philippines, petitioner Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. was arrested on September 23, 1972, pursuant to General Order 2-A of the President (Ferdinand Marcos) for complicity in a conspiracy to seize political and state power in the country and to take over the Government.

Aquino was detained at Fort Bonifacio in Rizal province. On September 25, 1972, he sued for a writ of habeas corpus in which he questioned the legality of the proclamation of Martial Law and his arrest and detention.

Aquino then filed before the Supreme Court an action to restrain the respondent military commission from proceeding with the trial of his case set for August 27, 1973.

He challenged the jurisdiction of the military commission to try him for crimes – four counts of subversion, one illegal possession of firearms, and one murder—he allegedly committed and for which he was arrested and detained since the proclamation of martial law.

In questioning the jurisdiction of the military commission, petitioner insisted he was a civilian, and his trial by a military commission deprived him of his right to due process, since in his view the due process guaranteed by the Constitution to persons accused of “ordinary” crimes meant judicial process.

The High Court, in dismissing the petition in Aquino vs. Commission, ruled that the military commission had competent jurisdiction over the accused, reasoning that:

“Martial law lawfully declared, creates an exception to the general rule of exclusive subjection to the civil jurisdiction, and renders offenses against the laws of war, as well as those of a civil character, triable, at the discretion of the commander (as governed by a consideration for the public interests and the due administration of justice), by military tribunals.

“It has been said that in time of overpowering necessity; public danger warrants the substitution of executive process for judicial process.

“The immunity of civilians from military jurisdiction must, however, give way in areas governed by martial law. When it is absolutely imperative for public safety, legal processes can be superseded and military tribunals authorized to exercise the jurisdiction normally vested in courts.”

On whether due process can be guaranteed by a military tribunal, the Court was of the opinion that the guarantee of due process was not a guarantee of any particular form of tribunal in criminal cases.

A military tribunal of competent jurisdiction—accusation in due form, notice, and opportunity to defend and trial before the impartial tribunal present—adequately meets the due process requirement. Due process of law does not necessarily mean a judicial proceeding in the regular courts.

For the Court then, the guarantee of due process, viewed in its procedural aspect, requires no particular form of procedure.

It implies due notice to the individual of the proceedings, an opportunity to defend himself and the problem of the propriety of the deprivations, under the circumstances presented, must be resolved in a manner consistent with essential fairness.

It means essentially a fair and impartial trial and reasonable opportunity for the preparation of the defense.

The procedure before the Military Commission, as described in Presidential Decree 39, assures observance of the fundamental requisites of procedural due process, such as due notice, an essentially fair and impartial trial, and reasonable opportunity for the preparation of the defense.

On the issue whether petitioner’s trial before the military commission will not be fair and impartial, as the President had prejudged petitioner’s cases and the military tribunal is a mere creation of the President, and “subject to his control and direction.”

The Court had this to say: “Prejudice cannot be presumed, especially if weighed against the great confidence and trust reposed by the people upon the President and the latter’s legal obligation under his oath to ‘do justice to every man.’

“Nor is it justifiable to conceive, much less presume, that the members of the military commission, the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, the Board of Review and the Secretary of National Defense, with their corresponding staff judge advocates, as reviewing authorities, through whom petitioner’s hypothetical conviction would be reviewed before reaching the President, would all be insensitive to the great principles of justice and violate their respective obligations to act fairly and impartially in the premises.”

The court added that this assumption must be made because innocence, not wrongdoing, is to be presumed.

The presumption of innocence includes that of good faith, fair dealing and honesty. This presumption is accorded to every official of the land in the performance of his public duty.

There is no reason why such presumption cannot be accorded to the President of the Philippines upon whom the people during this period has confided powers and responsibilities which are of a very high and delicate nature.

The preservation of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution rests at bottom exactly where the defense of the nation rests: in the good sense and good will of the officials upon whom the Constitution has placed the responsibility of ensuring the safety of the nation in times of national peril.

What the Court did here was to reverse the long standing rule on presumption of innocence.

Instead of applying it to Ninoy Aquino, the Supreme Court gave his accusers and judges the benefit of the doubt.

FIDEL V. RAMOS (1928-2022)

Post-EDSA what struck me most about FVR was how tight-lipped he was about the four days, refusing to tell his story to media. So unlike Juan Ponce Enrile whose story in two parts, buttressing his denial of the reformist coup plot that would have installed him in Marcos’s place, was published in the Sunday Inquirer magazine by mid-March ’86.

Could it have been because, as some pundits suggest, FVR was not really part of the aborted RAM coup — the reformists who were caught in Malacanang and presented to the public by Marcos named only Enrile’s boys of the MND and not Ramos’s of the PC-INP?  But historian Alfred McCoy (“Coup!” Veritas Special Edition, Oct 86) named Vic Batac Jr., Ramos’s chief intelligence officer, as one of the three masterminds (along with Honasan and Kapunan). And in a 1991 interview Gen. JoeAl confirmed that Ramos was in on it from the start.

JOSE ALMONTE: We planned the whole action mainly under two offices: the Ministry of National Defense and the office of Gen. Ramos, then PC Chief and AFP Vice Chief of Staff. His closest aides and the chief of his security, Sonny Razon, were members of our core group; they kept the general informed of meetings and developments [http://edsarevolution.com/chronology/day1.php]

But because Ramos didn’t rush to join Enrile in Camp Aguinaldo for the Feb 22 presscon, he gave the impression that he might have changed his mind or was having second thoughts. But I think he was just making pa-importante, choosing to flirt first with Alabang Coryistas who were urging him to resign from the Marcos government. I also think that he wanted to send the message that he was not at the beck and call of Enrile. I daresay he was confident that Enrile would not do the breakaway presscon without him.

LEWIS M. SIMON. RAM recognized that while a significant number of officers and men were prepared to line up behind Enrile, his long political and personal association with Marcos had tainted him in the minds of many more. And this was doubly true among the civilian power structure, the wealthy businessmen who’d emerged as an anti-Marcos force and the large middle class who’d tirelessly marched and demonstrated ever sine the Aquino assassination. Ramos’s image was much cleaner. [Worth Dying For (1988) page 265]

In October 86, when historian Alfred McCoy confirmed the reformist plot that Enrile had denied (“Coup!” Veritas Special Edition, Oct ’86), I figured that FVR’s silence had to do with keeping intact what relationship he had with Enrile: he didn’t care to contradict his fellow Bandido’s account, the better to keep communication lines open perhaps, or to avoid fueling  anti-Cory sentiments, what with Enrile and his RAM-boys mounting foiled coup after foiled coup to topple Cory ’86-’89.

In August 1990 when I heard that he was running for president in ’92, and that his team was looking for a biographer, I jumped at the offer, sabay tanong if he would finally tell his EDSA story, sabay send ng print-out of my draft chronology, mostly from news reports of the four days along with Enrile’s, Butz Aquino’s, and McCoy’s accounts, along with data from Nick Joaquin’s The Quartet of the Tiger Moon (1986) and Cecilio Arillo’s Breakaway (1986), among others.

My draft was a hundred or so pages pa lang then but substantial enough, apparently, for FVR to say yes to an EDSA project, never mind the biography. In our interview sessions in Camp Aguinaldo and Ayala Alabang, he would often check out my chronology, though never  to correct any of it, rather, to remind himself of details and statements he was reported to have made during the four days. Very careful, very measured in his words, he was able to tell his story without ever commenting, one way or another, on Enrile’s own statements, except to say that he concerned himself only with military affairs and left the politics to Enrile.

And yet there he was, five years later, playing politics to the hilt, revving up for a presidential campaign that he would win, against all odds.  Never mind that he changed his mind about publishing the EDSA book he commissioned, I imagine for some greater good involving Enrile and the reformist-loyalist military who were still smarting from the last, the bloodiest, the failed 1989 coup attempt.

It is interesting, in an occult way, that FVR was rushed to Makati Med a few days before he died, which may have been a day or two after, if not the day itself of, Enrile’s oathtaking as Marcos Jr.’s Chief Presidential Legal Counsel. The outpouring of tributes for FVR hailing him as the best president ever hopefully gives Marcos Jr. and Enrile pause, to take stock, and maybe resolve to do FVR even better.

***

President Fidel V. Ramos — an appreciation by Stephen CuUnjieng

FVR’s firm and soft legacies by Cielito F. Habito

Philippines’ Fidel Ramos sought Beijing ties but also showed South China Sea defiance by Raissa Robles

‘Tabako’ by Ma. Lourdes Tiquia

Once he’d been a statesman by Manuel L. Quezon III

The president who freed the skies by Milwida Guevarra

FVR: The unwritten biography by Ambeth Ocampo

FVR’s out-of-the-box style of leadership by Jarius Bondoc

Statesman by Alex Magno