Category: marcos

Marcos cronies and the golden oriole of Isabela

…. Under Marcos, logging licenses and timber concessions were given out as gifts and favors to select family members, close friends, politicians, and supporters. Shared out like a great cake, the forests of northern Luzon were sliced up in unequal portions and distributed to the privileged few. Marcos’ mother, an uncle, a brother, a sister and her husband, were concessionaires to hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest in the provinces of Cagayan, Isabela, Nueva Vizcaya, Aurora, Quirino and Quezon. They installed themselves as board members and shareholders of newly formed lucrative logging companies and timber processing plants….

Rachel AG Reyes

joma sison, plaza miranda, ninoy aquino

it was while i was writing marginal notes to the ishmael bernal anti bio, grounding a “dialogue” between bernal and jorge arago (both leftists at some point) in the culture and history of their times, when i found myself forced to deal with senate president jovito salonga’s studied view that it was cpp chairman jose maria sison who had ordered the bombing of plaza miranda in august 1971, and not, as we all had believed, president marcos.

sison has always denied it.  of course.  but salonga was known for rectitude and probity; he would not have charged sison so unequivocally if there had been any doubt in his mind.  and in this light there is no ignoring related questions raised re ninoy aquino who was expected at that miting de avance of the liberal party of which he was secretary-general.  it is said that he was just delayed by a party that he had had to attend; but it is also said that he had been warned to stay away from plaza miranda by a kadre friend, thereby insinuating that ninoy had not only saved only his own skin, but even that he had been complicit in the bombing.

i wondered if that was why ninoy stayed and submitted to arrest in september 1972 instead of going underground or fleeing into exile — he felt that he deserved some punishment for plaza miranda?  perhaps he could have done something to prevent the carnage?  but what if maybe, if there had been a warning, it had come too late to warn anyone else?  more recently, as i was reading up on the affair and writing this blogpost in my head, i wondered if the discovery that sison was responsible for plaza miranda may have affected the way that senator salonga had felt about ninoy, given the latter’s admitted links to the cpp-npa.

steve salonga, a friend from u.p. days and on facebook today, was quick to enlighten me via private message:

I looked positively at those links [of Ninoy with the CPP-NPA]. That happened way before Miranda and has no relation to later events. Most of what you hear about that today was actually trumped up ‘evidence’ during Ninoy’s military trial for murder.

Dad began hearing the ‘scuttle-butt’ about JOMA ordering the Plaza Miranda operations as early as 1982. Although it wouldn’t be until 1990 that testimony at a senate blue ribbon comm hearing would expose the whole fiasco.

The rumors that Ninoy knew about the bombing before the fact are true, but then, so did we. At that time we had raw intel of a plan to bomb our campaign sorties. But nothing definite. After Miranda, the rumors about Ninoy surfaced. But neither Dad nor I believed any of it. We knew Ninoy was at a party with Doy Laurel at the Sky Room at Jai Alai. We also knew he would follow shortly after that party. We never changed our mind about his innocence.

just the same it boggles the mind that when ninoy came home from exile, he timed it so that he landed on the tarmac on the 21st of august 1983, twelve years to the day since the plaza miranda bombing.  at the very least, it tells me that august 21, 1971 was a critical juncture in his life that he deemed worth marking.  with his death, as it turned out.

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Truth about blast first told in Sierra Madre by Jovito Salonga
Revolution by assassination? by Max Soliven
Days of Shame: August 21, 1971 and 1983 by Rigoberto Tiglao
Once upon a ride to the Plaza Miranda bombing Part 1 by Mauro Gia Samonte
Part 2 …  Conclusion 
Ninoy Aquino, the Plaza Miranda bombing and Japanese collaborators
Jose Maria Sison Arrested by Dutch Govt for Murder
Victor Corpuz, Joma Sison, Martial Law, Plaza Miranda Bombing

HAIL TO THE CHIEF

Raffy Aquino

During her interpellation in yesterday’s oral arguments on the Marcos burial at the Libingan, Chief Justice Sereno suddenly mentioned the case of “Galman vs. Sandiganbayan”. Not a few lawyers, myself included, looked up in surprise. While it was one of the 18 decisions where the Supreme Court called Marcos “authoritarian,” it had no substantial connection to the legal issues being argued.

But as she read part of the decision in that case into the record, it became apparent she was addressing herself not to the petitioners but to her brethren and to the institution they collectively represented. Through Galman, she was reminding the Court that the judiciary should never again bend the knee before an overbearing and belligerent executive; she was rallying the High Tribunal to the great constitutional standard of judicial independence and warning that such independence could rest only upon the extraordinary moral courage of each of the magistrates seated around her.

Maria Lourdes Sereno was appointed Chief Justice in 2012. Yesterday, she became the Chief.

SATURNINA GALMAN, et al. vs. SANDIGANBAYAN, FIRST DIVISION, et al. G.R. No. 72670 September 12, 1986

“…There has been the long dark night of authoritarian regime, since the fake ambush in September, 1972 of then Defense Secretary Juan Ponce Enrile (as now admitted by Enrile himself was staged to trigger the imposition of martial law and authoritarian one-man rule, with the padlocking of Congress and the abolition of the office of the Vice-President.

“As recently retired Senior Justice Vicente Abad Santos recalled in his valedictory to the new members of the Bar last May, “In the past few years, the judiciary was under heavy attack by an extremely powerful executive. During this state of judicial siege, lawyers both in and outside the judiciary perceptively surrendered to the animus of technicality. In the end, morality was overwhelmed by technicality, so that the latter emerged ugly and naked in its true manifestation.”

“Now that the light is emerging, the Supreme Court faces the task of restoring public faith and confidence in the courts. The Supreme Court enjoys neither the power of the sword nor of the purse. Its strength lies mainly in public confidence, based on the truth and moral force of its judgments. This has been built on its cherished traditions of objectivity and impartiallity integrity and fairness and unswerving loyalty to the Constitution and the rule of law which compels acceptance as well by the leadership as by the people. The lower courts draw their bearings from the Supreme Court. With this Court’s judgment today declaring the nullity of the questioned judgment or acquittal and directing a new trial, there must be a rejection of the temptation of becoming instruments of injustice as vigorously as we rejected becoming its victims. The end of one form of injustice should not become simply the beginning of another. This simply means that the respondents accused must now face trial for the crimes charged against them before an impartial court with an unbiased prosecutor with all due process. What the past regime had denied the people and the aggrieved parties in the sham trial must now be assured as much to the accused as to the aggrieved parties. The people will assuredly have a way of knowing when justice has prevailed as well as when it has failed.

“The notion nurtured under the past regime that those appointed to public office owe their primary allegiance to the appointing authority and are accountable to him alone and not to the people or the Constitution must be discarded. The function of the appointing authority with the mandate of the people, under our system of government, is to fill the public posts. While the appointee may acknowledge with gratitude the opportunity thus given of rendering public service, the appointing authority becomes functus officio and the primary loyalty of the appointed must be rendered to the Constitution and the sovereign people in accordance with his sacred oath of office. To paraphrase the late Chief Justice Earl Warren of the United States Supreme Court, the Justices and judges must ever realize that they have no constituency, serve no majority nor minority but serve only the public interest as they see it in accordance with their oath of office, guided only, by the Constitution and their own conscience and honour.”

When a leader betrays his people

Rex D. Lores

… What is deeply disturbing about President Duterte’s decision is the clear disconnect between his rhetoric and reality. On one hand, he is pursuing a devastating campaign against criminality and corruption; on the other, he is coddling the memory of a tyrant whose crimes and corruption stagger our imagination.

On one hand, he is attacking oligarchs who accumulated wealth over decades; on the other, he is praising a discredited leader who became the country’s greatest oligarch overnight by illegally seizing the assets of the elite.

Marcos’ rise to power started with a lie, and he prevailed for so long through the legislative and executive branches of government largely on his capacity to manipulate or conceal the truth. It started with his claims of heroic exploits as a soldier in World War II, claims found fraudulent and without a scintilla of evidence in US Army archives.

Employing these improbable claims, he captured the central seat of power. Thus, the disingenuous argument goes, Marcos is qualified to rest with our heroes. The trouble with this argument is that, bereft of moral reasoning, it is blind to the infinite harm Marcos inflicted on the social fabric.

It smirks at the historical truth: Marcos’ wanton violation of the Constitution, the brutality of his regime, the astronomical external debt he incurred, the collapse of our economy, and the stunning wealth he stole to become the world’s second most corrupt leader of all time.

As flagrant and unconscionable as these atrocities may be, they were not the worst. The most damning was that Marcos derailed the hopes and aspirations of at least three generations of Filipinos, deepening our despair and our desperation.

Death cannot be a cleansing sacrament to alter Marcos’ sordid and bloody legacy. The impunity of Marcos’ long despotic rule will burden our sense of national dignity for generations to come. And how we reckon with this design to rehabilitate Marcos as a national hero has enormous implications on our values as a people, on the nature of our future, and on the efficacy of our political culture.

To bury Marcos in the heroes’ cemetery mocks the valor, dignity, and sacrifice of martyred Filipinos. But even more, it mocks our national esteem and our shared civic values as a democratic society.