Category: edsa

Happy birthday, Lyca!

Lyca Benitez-Brown was my boss for 7 months, April to October, in 1983. She was the executive producer of the Pinoy Sesame and I was her headwriter for the first 45 (of 90) shows of the season.  We found each other again 27 years later on Facebook.  I was working on my 3rd book on EDSA and she graciously shared her story of Radyo Bandido. I haven’t written a love letter in ages, LOL, but one is never too old, I find.

Dear dear Lyca,

I’ve long been wanting to thank you for making me kulit back in ’83 to take on the headwriting of Sesame just on Ketly’s recommendation, even if I had no experience writing for children.  You refused to take no for an answer until it was djahe na — like I was making pa-importante — so finally I said yes, okay, fine, I’d give it a try, even if I was scared half to death.

It was a most challenging, and crazy, time for a free-lancer who never before and never again worked fulltime (except on my own books).  But as it turns out, it was worth the fears and tears, not to speak of the hard work — living breathing Sesame 24/7 for the many months it took me to get the hang of it, and a seventh month to come up with a writer’s guide.

As I moved on to write TV docus and books and blogs, atbp., I found that the rigorous Sesame training always stood me in good stead.  It’s not just the discipline of working / writing with clear goals in mind, but also of taking and handling criticism creatively, rather than tearfully, haha.  I have you and Feny and Sesame to thank for that.

THANK YOU ALSO for Radyo Bandido in the time of EDSA.  So sorry that my EDSA books don’t give you the credit YOU deserve pala for the BANDIDO handle, which was absolutely inspired and so serendipitously appropriate. (Ipapasok ko sa reprint, promise!)

Nation was fortunate to have you and Peque, with your production peeps, on the side of Ketly (and the two boys :-) in those crucial 12 hours of the revolution when the danger of bloodshed was oh-so-real!  Your 2006  essay, “AIR WAR: The Story Behind Radyo Bandido,”  is certainly one for the history books of that wonderfully radical time.

Who would have thought that 36 years later we’d be back battling the Marcos curse yet again, this time on social media where YouTube, Facebook, and Tiktok videos twist martial law and EDSA history to favor the villains.

What works best, I find, are the simplest formats — one falsehood at a time, straightening out the skewed, and skewering the Marcoses in turn.  Yes, time to get back to Sesame mode, but for adults only, for a change. Hope springs eternal.

Happy 70th, Lyca, and cheers to a happy new trip around the sun!

Love,
Angie

The Unbelievable Irwin Ver (updated)

Being reposted on Facebook is Esquire magazine’s 2017 essay “Strange Bedfellows: A Martial Law Love Story” by Aurora N. Almendral. It’s about the romance of the author’s mom, Gemma Nemenzo (sister of Francisco “Dodong” Nemenzo, high-ranking communist in the ’60s and ’70s) and former colonel Irwin Ver (son of Marcos’s AFP chief of staff Gen. Fabian Ver in the time of martial law).

No offense meant to Gemma, whom I met in 1983, Sesame days  (she was the media liaison of the Philippine Sesame Street Project), but Irwin Ver’s pronouncements about Ninoy Aquino and the dictator Ferdinand Marcos are nakaka-offend, being clearly of a piece with Bongbong Marcos’s flippant dismissal of anything negative about his father. In effect, Irwin and Bongbong paint their fathers innocent of any crimes and unjustly ousted by the people.

ON NINOY’S KILLING 1983 | “No, I don’t think he was involved”

Irwin’s story is that, like his father the general, he was at home when Ninoy was shot.

He was watching TV when his father barged into his quarters dressed in pambahay, to tell him something had happened at the airport.

“If he knew that something like that would happen,” Irwin said, to me, to my mother, to my mother’s friends and family, to everyone who has asked him, “he would have been in uniform. He would have been at his office, monitoring the situation. But he was as shocked as the rest of us. No, I don’t think he was involved.”

But But But. According to the Agrava Fact-Finding Board, at around 1:30 PM, AVSECOM commander Gen. Luther Custodio  “reported the incident [read assassination] by telephone to General Fabian Ver who was at the time in his office at Malacañang Park.”

There is no doubt that Gen. Ver was monitoring the situation. Two days previously, August 19, his order to Custodio was to “return Aquino to his point of origin on board the same aircraft he took in coming in.” He must have realized after that there was no way China Air Lines could simply immediately turn around and fly Ninoy back to Taipei. Early on the morning of August 21, he revised his instructions, ordered Custodio to: “Arrest Aquino and turn him over to the Military Security Command in Fort Bonifacio.”

That the general was nakapambahay lang, as Irwin claims, means nothing. It was a Sunday, after all, and his office was right next to his home in Malacañang Park (correct me if i’m wrong). How he was dressed, or not, has no bearing on whether or not he was monitoring the situation. Unless it was deliberate, if true, to give the impression, in case the shit hit the fan, that he was off-duty and completely uninformed and uninvolved and innocent, or something silly like that.

In November 1984 the Agrava Board’s Majority Report (that so displeased the dictator) unequivocally named Fabian Ver (and 25 others) indictable for the “military conspiracy in the premeditated killing” of Ninoy Aquino.

ON MARCOS IN THE TIME OF EDSA 1985 | “He did not want to kill his own people”

Irwin’s kuwento is that he was at the Palace sometime after Marcos’s high-noon oath-taking.

The same day, Colonel Irwin Ver, head of the presidential guard, favored son of General Fabian Ver, Marcos’s most loyal aide and Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, was at Malacañang Palace. Irwin saluted Marcos, who was still dressed in the barong he wore for the cameras. Despite the oath-taking performance, Marcos seemed to have already accepted defeat. Irwin had not. Our position is still defensible, Irwin reported, ready to fight off an attack from the rebels. “No,” Marcos said. He did not want to kill his own people. Irwin recalled seeing the sadness in Marcos’s eyes, and for a moment he feared that he himself might cry.

Drama queens. Question is, what were they so sad about?  Were they sad about not killing their own people? Or were they sad because their officers were defying orders to kill the people.

Surely Irwin Ver remembers the very eventful morning of February 24, Day 3 of the four-day EDSA uprising. By then, Enrile and RAM had left Camp Aguinaldo and joined Ramos in Camp Crame.

Early that morning, according to Alfred McCoy [Veritas Special Edition, Oct 1986], Fabian Ver gave the signal for an all-out attack on Camp Crame by riot police using tear gas, Marine artillery, helicopter gunships, and low level jet bombers.

Riot police teargassed the human barricades in Libis / Santolan and cleared the way so that two battalions of Marines led by Col. Braulio Balbas were able to enter Camp Aguinaldo, from there to take positions within sight of Camp Crame.

Meanwhile, Sikorsky gunships were ordered to fly to Camp Crame and bomb two helicopters parked there to prevent Enrile and Ramos from escaping by air. Instead Col. Antonio Sotelo led the 15th Strike Wing’s seven gunships bristling with rockets and cannon to Camp Crame and defected wholesale.

CAMP AGUINALDO ► Looking down from the high ground of Aguinaldo’s golf course, Balbas had awesome firepower “boresighted” on the rebel headquarters only 200 meters away: 3 howitzers, 28 mortars, 6 rocket launchers, 6 machine guns, and 1000 rifles. [McCoy]

CAMP AGUINALDO, 9:00 AM ► General Josephus Ramas gave Balbas and his Marines the “kill order.” With his artillery ready to fire at pointblank range, Balbas lied to Ramas. “We are still positioning the cannons and we are looking for maps.” Ramas: “The President is on the other line waiting for compliance!” [McCoy]

CAMP AGUINALDO, 9:20 AM ► Ramas again barked the command through the radio: “Colonel, fire your howitzers now!” Balbas replied, “Sir, I am still positioning the cannons.” [Cecilio T. Arillo. Breakaway. 1986. page 77]

At some point Balbas radioed Tadiar, made certain that the order had been cleared with / by  Marcos. But even so, the Marines could see that even Camp Crame’s grounds were teeming with people.  Balbas just could not order his men to fire. “We will be hurting a lot of civilians,” he said to Tadiar.

Just about then, over at the Palace, a Sikorsky gunship sent by rebel chief Fidel Ramos to rattle not harm the Marcoses, fired six rockets on the Palace grounds. Damage was negligible but the Marcoses and the generals freaked out.

CAMP AGUINALDO ► Balbas got a “frantic call” from Col. Irwin Ver, Commander of the Palace Guard, ordering a “full attack” on the rebels. Lying boldly, Ver said the Palace was hit and they suffered 10 casualties. [McCoy]

Yes, Irwin Ver himself, who would have us believe that Marcos did not have the heart to kill his own people.

That Malacanang presscon where Marcos tells Ver that his order was NOT to attack Crame? That was pure palabas. As in moro-moro. Dramarama sa umaga. The dictator saying one thing and doing the opposite. Messing up the narrative, as always.

ON FABIAN VER & MARTIAL LAW | “It felt like a war situation”

As a son, Irwin is loyal to his father’s memory and defends his reputation. … He knows there were many regrettable abuses of power at the lower levels of government, but insists that Marcos never ordered foot soldiers to commit arrests, torture, and disappearances. “It felt like a war situation, a combat situation. We were both on the offensive and the defensive. It is not uncommon that would happen,” said Irwin, “that some soldiers would act on their own.”

True. Marcos had nothing to do with foot soldiers, but he had everything to do with the generals who lorded it over the police and military forces, the Rolex 12—topped by Ver, Enrile, and Danding–in particular, who implemented his orders and  benefitted greatly (got rich) in / over the 14 years of martial law.

General Ver became the fall guy for the Marcoses. He went into hiding and spent his life on the run, using fake passports and assumed identities, in part because he could not afford defense lawyers for the cases the American and Philippine governments were mounting against him. He died without seeing his family again.

… In the accounting of misdeeds after the fall of Marcos, General Ver was associated with the corruption that came with unfettered power—and his sons have inherited an on-going case for plunder.

Irwin would have us believe that his Dad didn’t share any secrets with the family. Like, who was the mastermind of the Ninoy murder?

Irwin believes his father did find out, but he took the knowledge to his grave. “It’s better you don’t know,” General Ver told him, “You’re still in your military career.”

And yet Irwin Ver has stories that make me wonder. Take this one about Marcos and Ninoy in Inquirer‘s “Marcos: ‘My best successor is Ninoy'” by Fe Zamora back in August 2010:

On at least four occasions before May 8, 1980, Marcos sent his most trusted officer, AFP Chief of Staff Gen. Fabian C. Ver, to deliver a note to Aquino at his detention cell in Fort Bonifacio. On the last two visits, Ver asked his son, Col. Irwin Ver, commander of the Presidential Guards, to join him.

Ver told his son they were to bring a letter to the detained senator. The younger Ver expressed surprise; he thought all along that Marcos and Aquino hated each other’s guts. Ver explained that Marcos actually admired Aquino, that Marcos even saw him as “brilliant enough to be president someday.”

Selective sharing? Propaganda? Anything to help along the story that Marcos could not have ordered Ninoy killed because he admired Ninoy, Ninoy was his friend? Anything to help Bongbong get elected in 2022? Anything to bring back the happy days when the Marcoses reigned supreme and the Vers, too, in their own fashion?

I wonder how the Nemenzos really feel about that. #NeverAgain #NeverForget

*

Sources

“Strange Bedfellows: A Martial Law Love Story” by Aurora N. Almendral. Esquire Magazine. Sept 22 2017. https://www.esquiremag.ph/long-reads/notes-and-essays/strange-bedfellows-a-martial-law-love-story-a1999-20170922-lfrm3

Reports of the Fact-Finding Board on the Assassination of Senator Benigno S. Aquino Jr. Mr. & Ms. Publishing Co. 1984. pp 205, 40.

Veritas Special Edition. “Coup!” by Alfred McCoy, Marian Wilkinson, Gwen Robinson. Oct 1986. http://edsarevolution.com/chronology/day3.php

Chronology of a Revolution 1986. Vol. 1 of DUET FOR EDSA. Published by Eggie Apostol (1996). Edited by Lorna Kalaw-Tirol.  http://edsarevolution.com/chronology/

 

Reinventing EDSA

agree with luis teodoro that “EDSA 1986 was truly revolutionary — and it is for that reason that, though they have never found the words to explicitly say it, the power elite fear it.” it is also why enrile has tried to re-invent it in terms of “military primacy”. i say it’s time we the people reinvent EDSA, level up the non-violent activism, get our acts together, in the run-up to 2022.  #hopespringseternal

 LUIS V. TEODORO

The 35th anniversary of the 1986 civilian-military mutiny known as EDSA I — or as its participant-adherents then called it, the People Power Revolution — that overthrew the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship and forced him and his family to flee to Hawaii, USA came and went this year with hardly anyone noticing.

Feb. 25 has become for most Filipinos just another anniversary of this or that incident in history whose meaning has eluded them for years, or the birth or death date of someone they were told in elementary school did something that made him a hero. Exactly why an incident or a certain date is important is something they haven’t bothered to find out. Jose Rizal? Didn’t he have a girl in every port? Tirad Pass? Is that where that anti-American guy died? And EDSA 1986? Wasn’t that the incident that ended the administration of the best president the Philippines has ever had?

As in previous years, only the usual platitudes and motherhood statements emanated from Malacañang Palace. It was as if the biggest bureaucrats in government feared that saying something meaningful could educate the mass of the citizenry enough for it to harbor such dangerous ideas as that they’re the true sovereigns of this country and that government officials serve at their pleasure. That’s as likely to happen as this country’s making it out of the Medieval Ages and into the 21st century, but one could almost hear President Rodrigo Duterte asking his staff if it’s that time of the year again, and can’t we just forget about EDSA I?

Not that Mr. Duterte has ever given the event any importance. Since 2017 he has studiously avoided attending any ceremony marking its anniversary, thereby pointedly sending his followers the message that it is really nothing to celebrate. It makes perfect sense for a president who counts the surviving Marcoses among his most reliable partisans and closest allies. But beyond the demands of that alliance — and even his declared preference for defeated 2016 vice-presidential candidate Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr. to succeed him should he decide not to complete his six-year term — is the fear of an EDSA I repetition, or even of the year 2001’s EDSA II, when another president, Joseph Estrada, was also removed from office through direct people’s action.

Although referred to as a “revolution,” EDSA 1986 was true to that word only in one sense. It certainly was not an economic revolution, since it didn’t transform the economic system. The land tenancy anomaly survived it and even emerged stronger than ever; inviting foreign investments into the country is still the main development strategy of Marcos’ successors as it has been since 1946; and industrialization has never been seriously contemplated as economic policy. Neither was that “revolution” a social upheaval: it did not end the vast inequality, the social injustice, and the poverty that still afflict millions of Filipinos.

But it was a moment of mass empowerment, the precedents of which go back a hundred years to the Reform and Revolutionary periods of Philippine history. For the first time since the country declared its independence, and after decades of tolerating corrupt and incompetent misgovernment from 1946 onwards, some two million Filipinos braved the tanks, the helicopter gunships and the mercenary soldiery of a murderous dictatorship to declare that they had had enough of the human rights violations, the torture, the enforced disappearances and the extrajudicial killings of the regime, and that it was time to end the lies and the deceit of a self-serving kleptocracy that had brought only dishonor to this country and suffering to its people.

It was in that sense that EDSA 1986 was truly revolutionary — and it is for that reason that, though they have never found the words to explicitly say it, the power elite fear it. 

Mr. Duterte is not alone in wishing it and its example away. His predecessors were equally focused on getting the people to forget both EDSAs, and for entirely the same reason.

Although he was one of the leading figures of EDSA 1986, former President Fidel Ramos, for example, repeatedly discouraged its repetition supposedly because the political instability it would signify would discourage foreign investments. Joseph Estrada’s removal from office via EDSA II naturally made him, his family, and his allies leery of anything similar, while Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo allegedly contemplated declaring martial law out of fear that an EDSA III could depose her.

Himself accused of fomenting a military putsch during the coup-plagued presidency of Corazon Aquino, former Senator Juan Ponce Enrile, instead of discouraging the celebration of EDSA I as well as EDSA II, encouraged remembering both differently. Like Ramos, he was, after all, also one of the 1986 event’s leading figures, and apparently believed that something similar could propel him to power. Rather than admit that what overthrew Marcos in 1986 and Estrada in 2001 was the people’s direct action, he declared at some point when he was eying the Presidency that it was the military that had done the deed.

That claim is only partly true, however. Elements of the military were indeed involved in both uprisings, but without the millions massed at Quezon City’s Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (EDSA) between Camps Crame and Aguinaldo, those rebel units would have been overrun by the superior numbers of Marcos’ military loyalists. It was civilians — nuns and priests and middle-class folk — who faced Marcos’ tanks and shielded Ramos, Enrile, and their military cohorts from being attacked and annihilated in 1986.

It was also an event 14 years in the making. Without the heroic efforts of Church people, journalists, writers, teachers, students, artists and many other sectors to provide the citizenry from day one of martial rule, the information that finally led millions of men, women and even entire families to mass at EDSA from Feb. 22 to 25, the dictatorship would have prevailed. The same commitment of the same sectors was similarly indispensable to the success of EDSA II.

As untenable as Enrile’s re-invention of EDSA I and II may be, it seems that Mr. Duterte is of the same view, although not necessarily because of Enrile’s say-so, and without publicly admitting it. The same assumption of military primacy as Enrile’s is evident in his unending courtship of the officers corps — his packing his government with retired generals, and his putting the interests and welfare of the soldiery above those of everyone else’s in terms of perks and salaries. Rather than the people shielding him from the military, it would seem that Mr. Duterte is anticipating the possibility that the military might have to shield him from the people.

But could he be mistaken in assuming that the military will be true to him no matter what the cost? There are no indications so far that it won’t be. And as for the possibility of something like another People Power uprising occurring, that, too, seems hardly likely. After decades of disinformation and forgetfulness, the Filipino masses have yet to learn the revolutionary lesson as well as the meaning of both EDSA events.

Mr. Duterte and company are in the rare and privileged position of being protected by both the seemingly boundless loyalty of the military and the cluelessness and apathy of the heirs of a generation that brought down a seemingly invincible tyranny. That makes it so much the worse for the future of the interminable work-in-progress that is Philippine democracy.

Historical revisionism and fake news

Amelia H. C. Ylagan

History is always the most revered authority, and the ultimate teacher. It is empirical proof of expected results from conditions and contexts as naturally presented by science or as conjured and executed by minds. What has happened, has happened, and there is always a lesson learned.

But the life that History gives to concepts and principles can be limited not only by the durability of physical archives but the fickleness of minds — who may carelessly forget lessons learned, or, worse, actively tamper with facts and data to suit biases and whitewash personal culpability in the deconstruction and revision of what may be a notorious Past.

An example of negative historical revisionism is David Irving’s controversial book, Hitler’s War (1977), where the dictator Adolf Hitler is shown as innocent of the Holocaust and that only Heinrich Himmler and his cohorts masterminded and executed the genocide of six million Jews in Nazi Germany between 1941 and 1945.

Are Filipinos about to accede to a revision of history over the 14 year-dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos — editing out as well the glorious EDSA People Power Revolution that ended the most notorious period that killed about 3,240, imprisoned 70,000, and tortured 34,000 people from 1972 to 1981, according to data of Amnesty International?

On the 48th anniversary of Marcos’ declaration of Martial Law, an online conference on historical revisionism titled “Balik Ka/Saysay” was held from Sept. 21-25 by the Ateneo University-based Asian Center for Journalism (ACFJ) and Consortium on Democracy and Disinformation, in partnership with Tanggol Kasaysayan and Bulatlat. The conference focused on disinformation and the machinations of politics, on the inadequacy of education, and extensively described the exacerbating influence of social media and fake news on perception and the formation of new mores and values.

Keynote speaker at the ACFJ webinar was novelist Lualhati Bautista (Dekada ’70 and Gapo) who went underground during the Marcos martial law, and despite the strict censorship imposed by the government, wrote about the anxieties and fears of ordinary Filipinos in those tremulous times. “Never forget; never again!” was her heart-wrenching message. But for those listening to her recounting of the hounding and torture of those who defied Marcos then, her horrible reminiscences might have fallen differently on unreceptive ears of those who did not directly experience martial law. How devastating to hear a young reactor at the conference, a self-proclaimed “fan” of Ms. Bautista for her art, dismissing the pathos of a dark history by concluding a long-winded to-and-fro on doubting what may be “exaggerations” in the telling of the martial law situation then. “It is not my context,” she might have said in so many words, as she quite directly insinuated to this aghast listener who has seen Lualhati Bautista’s horrible scenarios in the context of 48 years ago.

“It is not my context” is the obvious indifference of most of the younger generation that did not see the excesses and horrors of martial law played out in reality. Adding cold emotion to whatever near-boiling empathy might be brought by stories told by seniors is the obtrusive social media virtual reality replete with ready fake news that the younger generations might have made its instant real Reality — their “context.”

At the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) theater showing early in the year of Kingmaker, a documentary by Emmy-winning filmmaker Lauren Greenfield about former First Lady Imelda Marcos, an open forum was held mainly to wrap up for attending groups of students from various schools, the “Never Again” information campaign of rights groups to educate the younger generation about the perils of autocratic government. Resource person Etta Rosales, tortured and imprisoned in Martial Law, gave inputs and answered questions from the students. It was the same basic concern of the Youth: “What is in it for Me?”

Recalling that open forum, and reviewing the ACPJ conference on historical revisionism, it sends chills through this older person to realize that a better way must be found to protect those who have not personally experienced Martial Law and its excesses from the frightful chimera of History repeating itself. The protective instinct of the Elders must work within the context of the Youth, in their Reality and in their Present — and perhaps resignedly acquiesce to their focus on “What is in it for Me.”

University of the Philippines Professor Francisco A. Guiang in a comment about historical revisionism cites the historian Carl L. Becker who said that “Every generation writes its own history… we build our conceptions of history partly out of our present needs and purposes…” (1955). Hence, while the older generations might be concerned about the immoral revision of their history, the younger generations are focused on writing their own, based on their present needs and purposes, their values and principles, taught to them by their parents by example, or by individual collective experiences and environments.

It must be admitted that in the 14 years of the Martial Law experience, victims and beneficiaries all have been writing history by the acceptance, refusal or compromises made then, and many have effectively rewritten and revised that history in the 34 years after the euphoric EDSA People Power Revolution, directed by changing individual and collective present needs and purposes. Some guilt might lie in admitting that the older generations might not have shown good example and firm guidance to the younger generations as to the values and principles that urged the collective judgment then that martial law the way Marcos did it was wrong and unconscionable.

Why did the Filipino people allow President Rodrigo Duterte to bury the dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the Libingan ng Mga Bayani? We have revised History. Marcos is now a hero.

The Marcoses plundered the country’s coffers, with various estimates putting the amount at between $5 billion to $10 billion, as reported by ABS-CBN in 2017. The Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG), the body going after the Marcoses’ ill-gotten wealth, is still recovering this money; over the past 30 years, at least P170 billion have been recovered. The Supreme Court dismissed in 2018 a civil suit seeking the recovery of over P50 billion in moral damages and P1 billion in exemplary damages sought by the PCGG over the Marcoses. The Sandiganbayan in 2011 junked the case, saying the PCGG failed to prove that the defendants connived to amass ill-gotten wealth.

In 2008, former First Lady Imelda Marcos was acquitted of an $863-M corruption case involving 32 counts of illegally transferring wealth to Swiss banks abroad during her husband’s 20-year rule. Would you wonder why the documentary Kingmaker did not jar the young viewers at that open forum held after the screening, despite the first-person account of Etta Rosales of her torture during Martial Law? Imelda is guiltless. History has been re-written.

It seems that the onus of responsibility to keep the integrity of history clearly rests on those survivors of Marcos’ Martial Law. Alas, so few of the older generation still have the passion to pursue the noble upholding of the Truth. At least those who still care that History must not repeat itself for the younger generations must devise and design active ways, albeit from physically deteriorated capabilities (but still-solid minds) to inculcate values and principles above present needs and wants of the younger generations.

The best way can only be to always visibly and audibly, strongly oppose corrupt and immoral practices in present-day government and society in general that, in the wisdom of age and experience, can be a useful template for the younger generations. The older generations are still writing their history, and their legacy.

Amelia H. C. Ylagan is a Doctor of Business Administration from the University of the Philippines.