Category: ninoy

Mourning PNoy

Luis V. Teodoro

The return of authoritarian rule is a constant threat, and progress an increasingly elusive goal in the Philippines. Democratization and development have too often foundered on the shoals of government indifference, incompetence, and antipathy.

A process that began during the reform and revolutionary periods of Philippine history, democratization has been interrupted, delayed, weakened, and sabotaged by foreign invasion, imperialism, and home-grown tyranny, with some post-martial law administrations paying only lip-service to it.

Development and “modernization” have also found their way in the vocabularies of a succession of regimes. But they have similarly proceeded glacially, if at all, and are continuing to elude this country, as evidenced by the poverty and the feudal relations that sustain it.

In these circumstances, the true measure of political leadership can only be how much it has contributed to either course — or, in this country of declining expectations, how little it has hampered both processes.

It need hardly be said that no one is perfect, and that no Philippine president has ever approached that exalted state.

Benigno Aquino III was no exception. But there are presidents and presidents, and some, despite their similarities, were nevertheless also better than others.

Aquino III’s death at the age of 61 last July 24 was predictably hailed by the fact-resistant hordes that infest both social and old media in behalf of a regime whose knowledge of statecraft is limited to harassing, threatening, imprisoning, and killing anyone who dares tell the truth about it. But his passing also reminded the civic-minded of the difference between presidents. Despite the political and social calamities that have befallen this country, they still believe that the true leaders it needs will save it. These citizens make it their business to carefully weigh who is worthy of their support for president, and in 2010 they chose Aquino. Today more than ever they believe that they chose wisely.

Like many of his countrymen, Benigno Simeon Cojuangco Aquino III was a child of the hierarchic and quasi-colonial political, social, and economic orders that have prevailed in the Philippines for decades. He shared with the rest of the political class the instinct to preserve, enhance, and protect one’s familial and class interests. The Hacienda Luisita issue was, for example, a constant challenge during his term, to which he hardly responded. Although far fewer in number than today’s, the extrajudicial killings that in most cases claim government critics as victims also continued during his watch.

He was no leftist or revolutionary, and he never claimed to be either. Only mildly reformist was his “walang mahirap kung walang corrupt” platform of government, corruption being just one of the many factors behind the persistence of poverty in these isles of want.

Like his predecessors, he also believed the United States to be a reliable friend and ally. To supplement the 1999 Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), he signed with the US the 2014 Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) which gave visiting US troops access to Philippine military bases. He also thought the armed forces’ purely militarist approach to the so-called “insurgency” essentially valid, and supported the “modernization” of its weaponry.

But his father Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, Jr.’s willingness in 1983 to sacrifice his liberty and even his own life in behalf of the anti-dictatorship resistance, and his mother Corazon’s presiding over the restoration of the Republic on whose ruins Ferdinand Marcos, Sr. had erected one-man rule, must surely have influenced and shaped his perceptions of Philippine society and governance.

Among his accomplishments as president was economic growth and the resulting decrease, so claimed government agencies, in poverty incidence. He also defended the country’s rights in the West Philippine Sea (WPS) by bringing the Philippine case to the UN Arbitral Tribunal, before which his designated petitioners succeeded in getting that body to strike down imperialist China’s absurd claims over some 80% of the WPS. But equally important was his remaining true to the Constitutional prohibition against abridging free expression and press freedom. What he did not do was, arguably, as significant as what he did. He never disparaged human rights, and neither did he vilify or threaten its defenders.

One of his first acts as president was to ban the practice of government vehicles’ wendingtheir way through traffic with lights ablaze and sirens blaring, a practice known as “wang wang,” that proclaims to ordinary folk how privileged and self-entitled the supposed servants of the people are.

He was his parents’ son, and was anti-dictatorship. He shepherded through Congress and signed into law the 2013 Human Rights Victims’ Reparation and Recognition Act, through which, rather than a Truth Commission, the Philippine government finally acknowledged that the Marcos regime had indeed committed such human rights violations as illegal arrests, detention and torture, involuntary disappearances, and extrajudicial killings, for which the survivors or their kin deserved indemnification. A landmark law, the Act, as he himself described it, was intended to “recognize the suffering of many during (Marcos’) martial law.”

Like his predecessors, he too was critical of the press. He complained about what he thought was its inordinate focus on his private life, and the bias against his administration by some broadcast and print practitioners identified with the regime prior to his. But he never threatened, insulted, or harassed journalists. He thought the numbers in the killing of journalists in the country’s rural communities that have been going on since 1986 exaggerated. But he did not justify the killings by blaming the victims and accusing them of corruption.

He answered the hardest questions even from his harshest press critics rationally, with civility, and, one must add, coherently. Although he did lose his temper at times, usually with his own officials, he never barred any journalist from covering his Office or his press conferences. Neither did he use the powers of the presidency to shut down any media organization the reporting of which he thought unfair and offensive.

Journalists were confident that they could report, monitor, and criticize his acts and policies and subject them to the closest scrutiny without fear of retaliation or petty vindictiveness. Without self-censorship and government hostility, the full exercise of press freedom and free expression was possible, although not always realized, during his six years in office due to reasons other than government intervention. He thereby convinced the nation and the world that he valued those rights as a necessary pillar of democratic governance.

Benigno Aquino III was a well-meaning, fairly competent product of this time and place. What he was not was a tyrant. Neither was he a brusquely anti-human rights, grossly incompetent and abusive poor excuse for a president and head of State.

Hounded as it was by such calamities as typhoon Yolanda and lapses in executive judgment like the Luneta hostage-taking crisis and the Mamasapano debacle, his term was far from perfect. It was neither an international embarrassment nor so bad as to deserve summary dismissal and total disparagement. But some of the worst enemies of the people are manufacturing misleading and totally false “information” about it for the meanest political reasons.

Every death diminishes us all, and Benigno Aquino III’s is no exception. But the Filipino people should mourn not only his passing but also the end of that less trying time when he was in office.

Comparisons, so the adage goes, are odious. But how can anyone with an iota of awareness of what his term was truly like avoid them in the context of the horrible present?

dead links #ninoybook

pre-pandemic i had been working on a ninoy book for some 18 months na.  napatigil lang ako noong mag-lockdown at nabalikan ko lang in july.  so, to refresh my mind, i’ve been reviewing the whole thing from the top, double-checking my sources, especially those online, finally bothering to note the date i last accessed each of them.

to my dismay, some links that had never failed me before lead nowhere bigla. dead bigla.  #five so far.

the first on ninoy’s writings, smuggled from jail in 1973 and published by the Bangkok Post, that led to his and pepe diokno’s disappearance from fort bonifacio for that month-long solitary confinement in laur. “The Aquino Papers” 2010/05/11 by Miriam Grace A. Go  May 5 2010.  https://www.seapa.org/the-aquino-papers/

the second, on “The struggle against forgetting” by Juan L. Mercado, who helped get ninoy’s stuff published abroad.  Aug 19 2011. https://thedailyguardian.net/opinion/the-struggle-against-forgetting/

the third on steve psinakis: the “Anti-Marcos renegade’s years of living dangerously”.  June 3 2009. Rogue’s 2008 State of the Nation Issue  http://rogue.ph/steve-psinakis-1932-2016/

the fourth on the “Enduring nightmare of the Manila Film Center”.  http://rogue.ph/enduring-nightmare-manila-film-center/

and the fifth, “Hello Ninoy, Goodbye Ninoy” by Sol Jose Vanzi, on the weekend of ninoy’s homecoming and assassination. August 20, 2018. https://news.mb.com.ph/2018/08/20/hello-ninoy-goodbye-ninoy/

someone’s (some ones?) cleaning up, erasing historical facts that hurt the marcos revisionism? are authors and websites complicit in these erasures? reminds me of kahimyang.com that i thought was kinda makabayan if not anti-marcos. well, not anymore. anti-ninoy na siya.  posting stuff like  “Marcos – a great man unjustly judged at the wrong time by the wrong minds”.  argh.

ninoy wasn’t perfect but he was one bright star

and he was for real, nothing like the three “brightest stars” kuno … “shining” in the sky … that duterte claims himself, go, and cayetano to be.  hello.  not one of them, not all of them together — kahit isali pa natin si inday sara at ang buong konggreso — can hold a candle to ninoy.

were he still alive, ninoy would be 87, retired na siguro but still nakiki-alam malamang, still holding forth with his ten-centavos worth on every issue under sun and moon, leveling up popular discourse at the very least.  what i’d give for some informed intelligent talk about nation, with wisdom that comes from age and experience, with credibility that comes from integrity and love of country.

one thing his political opponents couldn’t fault ninoy for, ever, was corruption.  and so they hit him hard with the communist card, tagged him a godless enemy of the state, without evidence other than that he was friendly with certain anti-america anti-bases huks and communists, but then so was marcos, friendly with certain other anti-america anti-bases communists but secretly, of course, in the run-up to martial law.  [read joseph paul scalice’s Crisis of Revolutionary Leadership: Martial Law and the Communist Parties of the Philippines, 1959–1974 (2017)]

which is not to say that ninoy couldn’t have played his cards better.  i can understand, for instance, that he thought it a great idea to facilitate, hasten, a meeting (which would have happened anyway without his help, it is said) between the communist ideologue joma sison and the rogue huk bernabe buscayno, but did it have to happen in / around hacienda luisita?  of course nakarating ang intel kay marcos, and of course marcos exploited it to the hilt.  ninoy laid himself wide open for that.

i like to think that ninoy didn’t have to die just so we could topple marcos.  i like to think that we would have toppled marcos with ninoy himself leading the way.  but i guess that would have been a different kind of battle.  enrile, for one, might not have given way to ninoy the way he did to cory.  and then, again, who knows.

ang nakahihinayang sa lahat, ninoy never, it would seem, considered the possibility, in case he was killed, that cory might take up the struggle in his place.  because if he did he might have prepared cory better, and noynoy too?  or did he try sharing the christian democratic socialist ideology with his family but their eyes glazed over?

maybe they would all have tried harder had they known how much ninoy was loved and admired for standing up to marcos, even in exile, and had ninoy known how eagerly we awaited his return.  but then how was he to know, when marcos controlled all media, and he continued to denounce ninoy as communist, and we had learned to keep our mouths shut, or else.  almost like now.

we had no idea then how many we were (legion! pala) who believed in ninoy and trusted him to lead the way forward, that is, until he was taken from us, murdered on the tarmac, our one great hope.  no wonder the love and the hope spilled over and embraced cory and the children in grief.  the rest is history, ika nga.

nowadays, we have no idea, either, how many we are who desperately desire a better life for the marginalized and impoverished masses and a just and equitable social and political order for all.  but little do we really know what it would take to achieve these goals.

what we need is a ninoy, nay, we need many ninoys, who have the welfare of the masses at heart, and who have the expertise to pick up where ninoy left off, craft a credible and sustainable development program (beyond BuildBuildBuild and PPP) toward systemic change that would be worth uniting behind. 

in an interview with nick joaquin, ninoy said that in 1967, when he ended his gig as manager of hacienda luisita to run for the senate, it took eight men to take over his job. [The Aquinos of Tarlac page 278]

eight is a good number, for starters.  but, yeah, ninoy is a hard act to follow.

*

What if Ninoy arrived safely and led the…?

Gerardo P. Sicat 

…  Philippine history would have been very different. He was always preparing for high office – ultimately, that of the presidency. His meteoric rise from intrepid journalist, to town mayor and then governor of Tarlac Province and then to senator of the Republic was designed to lead one day to that final goal of challenging for the presidency.

He was so unlike his wife, Cory, to whom the presidency became a possibility once he was assassinated. This was also the same phenomenon to Noynoy, whose mother’s untimely death months before the presidential elections of 2010 catapulted him to a candidacy that he did not actively seek. These two accidental presidencies would not have happened, And the nation would have been led by one who was preparing for the job almost all his life.

When capable leaders steer a nation, great things could happen. Singapore and Malaysia were guided by leaders with great vision and enormous capability and preparedness. From 1966 through to 1982, Marcos piloted the nation well and forward. And Fidel Ramos, hampered by a short fixed term, solved major problems of the nation that he faced. Suharto, despite his absolute power, steered Indonesia from a greater abyss of the unknown and consolidated what is today a better nation.