Category: ninoy

Carmen Guerrero Nakpil on the death of Ninoy Aquino

(Around the time of Ninoy’s arrival, Mrs. Nakpil was attending a lunch meeting regarding the Censors Board, which had been called by Mrs. Marcos at the Gloria Maris in the Cultural Center Complex along Manila Bay.)

We had ordered shark’s fin soup and it was just being ladled into our bowls, when a phone rang in the distance. An aide scurried and brought the phone to Mrs. Marcos. She rose to take the call privately, and we continued to attend to the scrumptious soup before us. When she came back to our table, she spoke quickly and tersely, “We’ll have to leave for Malacañang right away. That was General Ver.” J.V. protested, “But the soup! We haven’t even begun!” Mrs. Marcos had already turned her back and was walking to her car at the entrance. We were asked to pile in and we drove to Malacañang at a high speed. Marita Manuel of the Metro Manila Commission, Veronica Veloso Yap and Zenaida Seva of the Times Journal, perhaps sensing a story about the censors’ board or Ninoy’s expected arrival, had earlier turned up at the Gloria Maris, and were sitting at a nearby table. They followed in the other Malacañang vehicles. The air was heavy with dark premonitions. What had happened? No one said a word. Zenaida, who’s a psychic, afterwards said that the hair on the back of her head stood on end all the way to Malacañang.

I remember the arrival of Danding Cojuangco, of Blas Ople and Adrian Cristobal, in rumpled jackets; generals and other army officers; media cameramen, cabinet members, Palace intimates. Everybody was strangely inarticulate, made meaningless remarks, “I just drove down from Baguio,” “I just heard,” essaying smiles that turned into grimaces, asking questions from one another with their eyes, not daring to frame conjectures or elicit information. Everybody was waiting to be told something we desperately needed to know: what had happened? And, what next?

Only J.V. was doing something constructive. He had snatched a page from Marita’s notebook and was calmly, deliberately scribbling, non-stop, one line after another, with no erasures, a simple presidential statement, using neutral words like “assailant” and not “assassin,” “attacked” and not “shot,” a calm statement of facts, assuring swift action and retribution, expressing sorrow, urging calm. Marcos later released the statement exactly as J.V. wrote it, without changing a word.

Sometime during that macabre night, Jolly Riofrir, a cameraman friend of mine who worked under the Information Minister Greg Cendana, approached me, “I saw the shooting,” he said, “I think I have it on film.” Thinking fast, I asked, “Do you have it, the film?” He was trembling, “It’s been taken away from me.” The next time I heard from Riofrir was years later, after Marcos had fallen and Jolly was in San Francisco. He called several times, at long intervals, and it was always to ask me to find someone who would buy and publish the original photos he took on 21 August 1983 at the airport. I never found anyone. Maybe nobody wanted that film, or what was in it.

It was close to dawn when Maria and I decided to leave, found her car on the Malacañang grounds and went home. We had not spoken to one another since we had left the restaurant at noon. We were usually loquacious, tripping over things to discuss and exchange, refute or make fun of. Now we lacked for words. What was there to say? I recollect telling her at last, “Maria, this is the end.” I knew she agreed, but couldn’t even bring herself to say so. Poor Ninoy, I thought. He has had the last word, after all.

Ninoy’s wake and burial were the beginning of the “deluge” which Louis XIV predicted two centuries earlier would be the aftermath of tyranny. In late 20th-century Manila, at the tail end of the Marcos regime, it was more than a storm and an outpouring of rain and lightning (although those literally took place, too). It was like a tsunami, that terrifying phenomenon that afflicts tropical oceans when, after an underwater earthquake, the sea first recedes creating a sinister vacuum on the beaches and then suddenly hurls itself, wave upon catastrophic wave, inland, creating inexorable havoc and destruction.

The killing of Ninoy, the hero Filipinos had learned to love and had waited for desperately, shook the earth beneath their feet. An eerie silence followed at his wake, as people filed in their mute thousands to look at his poor, bloodied body, and when it was placed on the flatbed truck of flowers and carried through the streets, millions rushed in, pressing forward, carried on peaks of sorrow and anger till they came to his grave. The photos of the funeral procession show, not individual people, but one, huge, engulfing sea of humanity, sweeping everything before it.

During the wake, I called Lupita Aquino (later Kashihawara), Ninoy’s sister, who had been my friend for years. But now Ninoy was dead, shot by a still unknown gunman as he descended the plane that brought him home, and we were all sunk in the terror and chaos of that terrible moment. I told Lupita that I felt very bad about Ninoy and that I wanted to go to his wake, but that I was afraid it would be taken amiss, and I’d only be causing trouble. She objected to my defensiveness and insisted that I go to pay my respects. I thought it best to stay away, after all. Some of the Marcos officials who had gone to the wake had been attacked, their cars stoned and rocked by an angry crowd of mourners.

The Marcos police stayed away, too, and although the government TV channel televised the ceremonies at the Santo Domingo church, the print media coverage of the endless funeral procession was ridiculously censored. I watched TV, alone in my bedroom, with deepening despair. A few days later, I was with Mrs. Marcos at the opening of one more of the series of commodity stores she had been sponsoring. Apparently, she had decided to continue to do what she had been doing, despite the abyss at her feet. She had summoned her usual support staff, but only I came. We sat together on the sidewalk in front of the store and I imagined a sniper on one of the nearby rooftops taking aim at us. Imelda did not look at all bothered. She was quiet but showed no apprehension.

I asked her whether she and the President had watched Ninoy’s funeral on TV, and she said, yes, they’d done so, together, in his bedroom. And that they’d been crushed, struck dumb by the enormity of what they were seeing on the video screen. She added that they had felt overwhelmingly humiliated because they had little inkling of the public mood, and that Marcos had said, “So, after all these years, all our efforts, our trying and striving, it has come to this?”

I was aghast. Had their isolation misled them so completely that they never even suspected people hated them with such unnerving passion? They simply could not plumb the depths of the people’s rage, could not accept the evidence of their wrath. How was it, I asked myself, that they did not know?

I am sure EDSA began the day Ninoy was killed. The Marcos’ empire crumbled, not in February 1986 when, disfigured and bedraggled, he fled in that American helicopter out of Malacañang. It happened almost three years earlier when Ninoy Aquino fell dead on the tarmac.

The body in that open coffin beneath the catafalque at the church of Sto. Domingo and, later, on the bed of white and yellow flowers on the truck that moved slowly through the mass of mourners was Ninoy’s. But Ninoy did not die on that sunny Sunday afternoon in August 1983 at the Manila International Airport, for that was when he began to live forever in the hearts of his countrymen. It was Ferdinand Marcos who died that day, and he knew it. The yellow-clad street demonstrations that followed, the gruesome campaign for the Snap Election and the joyous, invincible wave of people on the city’s circumferential highway called EDSA in February 1986, were only the post-mortem.

I had not been seeing the forest for the trees for years. I probably knew less about the facts of the Marcos regime than the outsiders who kept up with gossip, and certainly much less than the bold, ingenious reporters of the “mosquito”-turned-dragon press. The massive outside forces gathering outside were not readily apparent to minor insiders like me. But I sensed the inevitable outcome and, with mixed feelings, I watched it approach. I did not know then that it would take almost three years and that it would come in the shape of a startling spectacle: countless unarmed and disorganized civilians, massing instinctively on a highway to protect 200 soldiers in an army camp, and hovering between tears and laughter, with prayers, tanks and street food, would, without a single shot being fired, expel a tyrant they had come to detest. The world hailed it as a marvelous, new, political invention by Filipinos, who called it EDSA, after Epifanio de los Santos, the turn-of-the-century scholar who had lent his name to the radial highway in Metro Manila. But in August 1983, only God knew that.

Excerpted from Legends and Adventures, part of Carmen Guerrero Nakpil’s autobiographical trilogy. Published online by the Presidential Museum and Library with the permission of the author and with the assistance of her daughter Lisa G. Nakpil.

marching

the last time i marched was on the day after ninoy’s funeral, to liwasang bonifacio for an anti-marcos rally. it was the first gathering of leftists and yellow peeps since the assassination and, if memory serves, marcos’s metrocom was nowhere to be seen. just the same, medyo mahigpit ang security, every group marshalling its own ranks, for fear, i supposed, of infiltrators who might make trouble.  gigi duenas (de beaupre), an old friend from u.p. basement days, and i found each other early on, neither of us with any particular group, and so we mostly moved around as speeches were made.  we squatted (literally) by the leftists for a while — i remember nelia sancho, seated on the ground, may baong lata ng skyflakes.  but the yellow brigades, there was no joining them, no getting past their marshals, even if i was wearing a yellow top, and that was disappointing.

when it was over gigi and i walked all the way back to metromag (central bank bldg) where we found marita manuel, ishmael bernal, marilou diaz-abaya, and jorge arago hanging around the backdoor steps of the met museum watching marchers walk by.  heto na ang mga aktibista, sey nila in welcome.

i don’t know that i’m still up to a march in these my lola days (daze), but see you on august 26.  scrap all pork barrel in all its incarnations!

 

august 21, 1983

It had been three years since Ninoy first declared that the Filipino is worth dying for, and he proved it on the 21st of August 1983 when he came home, was escorted off the plane by Marcos’s military, and assassinated in broad daylight, allegedly by an ex-convict.

Ninoy never saw the yellow ribbons adorning trees and street posts or heard the people, anonymous no longer, sing “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” in welcome. Ninoy is dead, long live Ninoy! Yellow was the color of the movement and Radio Veritas the voice of the opposition. Veritas, owned and operated by the Catholic Church, was the only station that dared broadcast the assassination and relay the nation’s shock and dismay. No one doubted that Marcos was to blame, never mind who pulled the trigger. Even the elite minority was offended – if he could do it to Ninoy he could do it to them.

The message of Ninoy’s sacrifice was not lost on the people. Ninoy’s courage touched them, roused them from their apathy, rekindled their sense of collective worth. The Filipino is worth dying for. Then and there, thousands of his admirers who joined the ’78 noise barrage under cover of darkness dared step forward in the light of day and be counted among the grieving. They came in droves to Ninoy’s and Cory’s home in Times Street, Quezon City and quietly, bravely, lined up for a glimpse of his bloody remains and to bid their fallen hero goodbye. On the day of the funeral, millions left their homes and workplaces to march and line the streets where Ninoy’s casket would pass, and they raised their fists, sang Bayan Ko, cried “Ninoy, hindi ka nag-iisa [you are not alone]!”

from the chapter “EDSA Roots, Marcos Times” of EDSA UNO, A Narrative and Analysis with Notes on Dos & Tres to be launched September 1, if the heavens permit.

The Day Manila Fell Silent

By Ninotchka Rosca

Ironically, the most quiet day in Manila of contemporary times began with noise: a loud pounding on the glass door of a penthouse apartment I was using at the time. The friend who was hollering and shouting and bruising his knuckles on the glass, blurted out, as soon I slid the door open, “martial law na…[martial law already]” A split second of silence; then I pivoted and clicked on the radio. Nothing but white noise. Turned on the TV. Nothing but a white screen and static. Distraught friend said, “no TV, no radio station… everything’s closed down.” We eyeballed each other. The previous night’s last news item on TV flashed into my mind: a still photo of a car, its roof collapsed, windshield shattered; a male voice saying that the car of the Secretary of National Defense had been attacked but he had not been in it… It was truncated news; I thought, “what? An empty car was bombed?” As I was going to bed, I noticed that the government building behind our apartment building was all lit up: floor after floor, from top to bottom, blazing with lights. I said then, “something’s happening; and it’s happening all over the city.”

Read on…