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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?

Monica Feria (1954-2016)

Sept. 22-23, 1972: OUR LIVES CHANGED OVERNIGHT  

That whole week before Sept. 22, 1972, the University of the Philippines was aflame with rallies and teach-ins. Opposition leader Ninoy Aquino had warned that the declaration of martial law was imminent. Midweek, up to 30 busloads of students had been mobilized for a civil liberties rally at Plaza Miranda.

It was capped that Friday by a bonfire and rally around the UP campus. We headed home past 10 p.m., walking with close friends and significant others down the more dimly lit roads of the campus’ faculty housing area.

Those were heady days. Being able to criticize the government and speak your mind was something the university community had taken for granted—as were family life, school privileges and the idea of moving on to adult careers.

Looking back, I still sigh at the realization that many of the things we take as givens in life are actually very fragile. Overnight, from just before midnight to the early morning of Sept. 23, everything was shattered: Our house was ransacked, the family torn apart; the university was closed down and neighbors and friends bade quick goodbyes. No teach-in ever prepares you for such a morning after.

‘Paul Revere’

We were sprawled on the porch that night relaxing from the exertions of the day’s rally when a professor and some students came running up the steps, calling for my mother, who had already gone to bed. The military was storming the campus, they said, huffing. “They are ransacking the faculty center,” wake up your mom, they urged us.

If anyone would be on the military “order of battle,” it would be my mother, Dolores Feria, a professor of English and a writer who was identified with the radical teachers movement. My American mother and Filipino father had met as students in the United States, married and returned together to the Philippines in 1946. The day she arrived, my mother started teaching at UP.

It was sometime between midnight and 2 a.m. Actually, my mother had already been awakened by our voices on the porch. Professor Rolly Yu, whom we would later nickname “Paul Revere,” advised us to “leave the house immediately,” but not to try to leave the campus because it had been cordoned off by the military.

‘My books, my books’

A meet-up place at dawn when the situation hopefully became clearer was agreed on. Rolly took off as quickly as he came, saying he was going down the street to warn Petronilo Daroy, another teacher identified with the radical movement on campus. Another in the group scurried to see if professors Flora Lansang and Dodong Nemenzo had been warned.

“My books, my books!” my mother repeated frantically, as we helped pile them into a big suitcase and, with the help of friends, dragged it across the backyard and hid it in a bush in a neighbor’s garden. My father, also a literature professor, relieved my mother of her heavy typewriter so she could pack a few clothes before we—my father, my mother, my sister and myself—all dashed off to a neighbor’s house. (A third sister was married and no longer living at home.)

It seemed only minutes later that we heard a truck come to a screeching halt in front of our now empty house. We heard loud raps on the door, then pounding as they broke it down. They turned on all the lights and from a crack in the jalousies of the neighbor’s house, we could see soldiers with Armalites surrounding our house, arm-length apart. We could hear closet doors being opened and banged shut.

Bursts of gunfire

Suddenly, we heard bursts of gunfire from afar. It seemed to come from down the road in the direction of the athletic field. We shuddered at the thought of a massacre of students trying to escape. (Only the next day did we learn that the gunfire had come from an encounter just outside the UP boundary between Marcos’ soldiers and the guards of the Iglesia ni Cristo who were defending their radio station. We would learn later, too, that soldiers had smashed their way into dzUP, axed the transmitter tower at the College of Engineering, and took over the UP Press.)

All radio stations went dead. When dawn broke, one of the boarders at the house we were hiding in stepped outside and bumped into a soldier. “Martial law na ba?” she asked, and he nodded.

When it seemed the soldiers had left the area, we ventured out to look around. At a rise in the road, we saw a car driven by a student leader coming to collect those who had escaped the first swoop. Speech and Drama professor Behn Cervantes, one of those who escaped, was already in the car.

My mother, who had by then decided that she would join her students and other colleagues in the underground resistance movement, embraced my father and climbed into the car with her briefcase and typewriter.

We picked up bits of what happened that night from others who had slowly made their way out of their homes. Flora Lansang of the College of Social Work and Community Development and the wife of the late journalist Jose Lansang was the only teacher in our area (Area 1) who was not able to escape.

Harvest of detainees

Lansang’s daughter, Risa, said her mother was taken to the Camp Crame gym where she later shared a room with journalist Amelita Reysio Cruz, a Manila Bulletin columnist, and other women detainees. At the gym’s main court she met up with professor and journalist Hernando Abaya, and later,

Nemenzo, among other academics. It was evident that the academe was only one of many sectors systematically targeted in the initial martial law salvo.

Risa said her mother saw oppositionist Senators Benigno Aquino Jr., Jose Diokno and Ramon Mitra, and former Sen. Soc Rodrigo, there. Politicians from the provinces like Lino Bocalan of Cavite were also there. Detainees from the press included Teodoro Locsin Sr., publisher of Philippines Free Press, and the magazine’s staff writer, Napoleon Rama; Luis Mauricio of Philippine Kislap-Graphic; Amando Doronila, editor of the Manila Chronicle; Max Soliven, columnist of The Manila Times; Jose Mari Velez of Channel 5; Rosalinda Galang of The Manila Times; Rolando Fadul of Taliba; Go Eng Kuan and Veronica Yuyitung of Chinese Commercial News; radio commentator Roger Arienda; Ruben Cusipag of The Evening News; Roberto Ordoñez of The Philippines Herald; and Manuel Almario of Philippine News Service.

Chino Roces, the publisher of The Manila Times, it was reported, drove himself to Crame when he heard that some of his people had been rounded up. He managed to escape the first swoop because he was not home when the soldiers went to his house.

Among the labor sector leaders were Cipriano Cid, Rosendo Feleo, Bert Olalia and his son Jun, and Ignacio Lacsina. UP student leader Jerry Barican was there with activists from other schools. Also, there were assorted gunrunners and big-time criminals. (It would not be possible to mention all the names of those caught in the first round-up here. Also, we did not really know the big picture at the time.)

I stood on the road with my father watching the car carrying my mother move away from the neighborhood I had lived in for 17 years. We did not know when we would see her again. My father turned to me and told me it was best if the family split up for a while and we agreed on where each should go and how we would contact each other. “Take care of yourself, kid,” he said. More than his words, I could feel the pain of a father having to tell his youngest daughter this. I could not at the time grasp what would happen. All I knew was that sometime during that long night, I had left my girlhood behind.

Epilogue: About a week after the Sept. 22-23 crackdown, my eldest sister and I, together with some friends and neighbors, returned home to clean up and were pounced upon by military agents (they had a lookout in front of the house who was pretending to be an ice cream vendor) and brought to Camp Aguinaldo for questioning. They questioned us for two days about my mother’s whereabouts, before releasing us after failing to get any information. My father, Rodrigo Feria, lost his teaching job that week at the University of the East, a victim of a notorious Marcos order to purge schools of “subversive links.”

We never went back to that house on campus. My eldest sister, Stephanie, migrated to the US. My other sister, Chuki, and I had to look for jobs. Dolores Feria was eventually captured in 1974 together with other UP writers Pete Lacaba and Boni Ilagan. She was detained for two years. She returned to teaching after her release and retired in 1984. Part of this account was refreshed in her essay, “Underground Letter: The Imminent Death of a University,” which is included in her book “Red Pencil, Blue Pencil.” She wrote two other books, including “The Barbed Wire Journal,” a prison diary, before her death in Baguio City in 1992 at the age of 73.

Amending the Charter: More of the same?

Luis V. Teodoro

Even some members of the House of Representatives and of the Senate were themselves surprised by House Speaker Feliciano Belmonte’s and Senate President Franklin Drilon’s announcement that they would convene both chambers as a constituent assembly that will propose and approve amendments to the 1987 Constitution.

Although the House has passed its own version, the Senate is after all still in the process of addressing such contentious concerns as the Bangsamoro Basic Law. And as seemingly premature as it may be, both the representatives as well as senators are this early already in election mode, and generating media if not citizen interest in who’s going to run for what post and with whom in 2016.

Both Belmonte and Drilon as well as other proponents say they will consider “only” the economic provisions of the Constitution and will stay clear of amending its political sections. In much of their statements, they’ve been consistent with the implication that the amendments won’t be as crucial as amendments to the Charter’s political sections, while at the same time contradicting themselves by declaring that those amendments are absolutely necessary.

The speed with which they suggest the amendments should be adapted — in fact the revelation that the economic provisions can be amended wholesale solely by adding the phrase “unless otherwise provided by law” — also suggests that despite their attaching the word “only” to them, they actually and in reality believe them to be crucial.

The economic provisions Congress would target are presumably those in Article XII (“National Economy and Patrimony”), which consists of 22 sections.

The original of Section 11, for example, partly provides that “no franchise, certificate, or any other form of authorization for the operation of a public utility shall be granted except to citizens of the Philippines or to corporations or associations organized under the laws of the Philippines, at least sixty per centum of whose capital is owned by such citizens.”

Should the scheme prosper, it could be amended to read: “Unless otherwise provided by law, no franchise, certificate, or any other form of authorization for the operation of a public utility shall be granted except to citizens of the Philippines or to corporations or associations organized under the laws of the Philippines, at least sixty per centum of whose capital is owned by such citizens.”

Again, Section 14, which bars foreigners from practicing their professions in the Philippines, could be amended to read thus: “The practice of all professions in the Philippines shall be limited to Filipino citizens unless otherwise provided by law.”

Other than these provisions, there have also been suggestions that the ownership of mass media organizations, currently limited to Filipinos, should be opened to foreign ownership.

The intent, say some proponents, is to open the country further to foreign investments and to institutionalize free trade. Others of a more expansive outlook declare that the amendments are necessary for the Philippines to “keep pace” with international developments, the argument being that the world is much more open today, implying and even declaring that the protectionist clauses of the 1987 Constitution are “outmoded” and no longer (or have never been?) necessary.

The “openness” that supposedly characterizes the world order that’s been mentioned by, among others, Senator Serge Osmeña, refers to the voluntary and at times forced relaxation and even total abolition by many countries of restrictions on trade and foreign investments. Although it is difficult to trace when it began, what is now often called neo-liberalism was aggressively driven by the United States during the presidency of Ronald Reagan and by the British during the prime ministership of Margaret Thatcher.

“Neo-liberalism,” say Dag Einar Thorsen and Amund Lie of the Department of Political Science of Norway’s University of Oslo, is “a loosely demarcated set of political beliefs which most prominently and prototypically include the conviction that the only legitimate purpose of the state is to safeguard individual, especially commercial, liberty, as well as strong private property rights.” Further, it argues that “the state ought to be minimal or at least drastically reduced in strength and size.”

These political principles “could apply to the international level as well, where a system of free markets and free trade ought to be implemented. The only acceptable reason for regulating international trade is to safeguard the same kind of commercial liberty and the same kinds of strong property rights which ought to be realized on a national level.”

The attempt to amend the Constitution, although seemingly in keeping only with the decades-old policy of attracting foreign involvement and investments as the primary engine of economic development, would actually go even further, consistent with these neo-liberal protocols, which emphasize non-intervention by the State in commerce and trade.

Is the 1987 Constitution, because of its protectionist economic provisions, “outmoded” then? In the first place, foreign investments have been getting into the country despite the Constitution, while, again despite the Constitution, both local and foreign media groups have found ways around the ban on foreign ownership of the media.

The prohibition on foreign ownership of land does seem more difficult to evade, but there are more than rumors that through the expert navigation by lawyers through the turbulent waters of Philippine law, there have been and are exceptions that have resulted in de facto foreign control over land.

These realities notwithstanding, the point seems to be to so open the country to foreign corporations and interests that it would practically reduce State intervention and supervision to zero, or somewhere approximating that level.

Which raises a fundamental question as to the role of the State in human affairs. Is that role, as neo-liberalism claims, solely that of assuring the free and untrammeled operation of corporations, or is it to assure justice and fairness, as well as the welfare and well-being of everyone?

Critics of neo-liberalism say that, reduced to bare essentials, what the doctrine is all about is “profit over people.” To that, the counter-argument is that, as Thorsen and Lie note, “Free markets and free trade will, it is believed, set free the creative potential and the entrepreneurial spirit which is built into the spontaneous order of any human society, and thereby lead to more individual liberty and well-being, and a more efficient allocation of resources.”

Unfortunately, there’s the Philippine example to consider. As supposedly dynamic and rapidly growing as the Philippine economy has been in a regime that for decades has been basically neo-liberal, the fact remains that it has hardly dented the incidence of poverty and unemployment, among whose indicators is the continuing flight from these shores of thousands of Filipinos every day, among whose consequences is the devastation of family lives. To these human problems that are among the responsibilities of the State to resolve, is the solution even heavier doses of the same alleged cure?

More than a century of Lope K. Santos’ Banaag at Sikat

By Elmer Ordoñez

As a columnist in English I cannot ignore intellectual trends in Filipino, which has been the preferred language of many professors in their fields (notably Ateneo, UP, La Salle, all elite schools) – which is only just and necessary in a country whose discourses are dominated by English.

Maria Luisa Torres Reyes’ Banaag at Sikat: Metakritisismo at Antolohiya (NCCA, 2011) is one of numerous examples of scholarship in Filipino. This belies the hoary claim of the elite in English that Filipino does not have the vocabulary for intellectual discourse. An Ateneo professor of English, Torres Reyes edits KritikaKultura, a bilingual e-journalon linguistic studies, literature and culture.

Her book is metacriticism, the study of criticism or reception of Lope K. Santos’ Banaag at Sikat since 1907. Santos’ novel (along with its criticism in Filipino) established early enough the capability of Tagalog for handling ideas like socialism.

As editor of Muling Pagsilang, the Tagalog version of El Renacimiento, Santos published in his weekly journal excerpts of his novel Banaag at Sikat for almost two years – read by the intelligentsia and the workers involved in struggle in the first decade of American Occupation. The novel was issued in book form (1906).

Lope K. Santos took over the labor movement, together with Crisanto Evangelista, Herminigildo Cruz, and others when Isabelo de los Reyes and DominadorGomez were arrested for leading mass actions of workers in 1902 and 1903 respectively. Both leaders of the Union Obrero Democratico de Filipinas were “balikbayan” ilustrados who brought with them books on socialism which circulated among nationalists and labor leaders. Santos peppered his novel with discursive passages – uttered by progressive characters like Delfin and Felipe and in exchanges like those between Delfin and lawyer Madlang Layon — alluding to socialist thinkers like Marx and Engels, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Proudhon and Malatesta.

Santos was 25 years of age when he wrote Banaag at Sikat in the thick of labor organizing and demonstrations. (Rizal was 23 when he wrote Noli Me Tangere). Anarcho-syndicalism was the dominant ideology at the time. Crisanto Evangelista persevered in the labor movement (ultimately becoming a Marxist-Leninist when he founded the Partido Komunistang Pilipinas) while Santos (heavily indebted because of his novel) was elected to represent labor in the First Philippine Assembly in 1907, and later to the Senate. He also became governor of Rizal and director of the Institute of National Language (Surian ng Wikang Pambansa).

The critical reception of Banaag at Sikat began right after its publication with an introduction by Santos’ colleague Gabriel Beato Francisco who felt that while the novel was meritorious it was too early (“hindi pa panahon”) for socialism. This was countered by Godofredo Herrera in a three-part essay, followed by Manuel Francisco in a two-part essay, agreeing with Gabriel Francisco. Herrera had a rejoinder in two parts, and so did Francisco also in two parts.

No reviews came out in the 20s. There was renewed interest in the 30s when Teodoro Agoncillo commented that the novel was a “socialist tract” implying it was propaganda and not “literary.” The ‘formal’’ weaknesses (e.g. the didacticism) of the novel were echoed in Juan C. Laya’s review in 1947, and those of Romeo Virtusio and Vedasto Suarez in the 60s, and Rogelio G. Mangahas in 1970. Epifanio San Juan, Jr. using the Marxist approach wrote that contrary to what critics had said about the long speeches, the latter were integral to the thrust of the socialist novel. Comments in passing or as parts of critical essays of other writers (Macario Adriatico, ResilMojares, Soledad Reyes, Virgilio Almario, Inigo Regalado, and others) are cited in Torres Reyes’ assessment.

In 1980 Gregorio C. Borlaza tried to connect the novel to the aims of the “Bagong Filipinas” of the Marcos regime. His essay appropriates the novel to suit the purposes of the New Society – like what was done to a progressive film “Juan Makabayan” where at the end was the claim that agrarian reform was already being carried out.

Torres Reyes noted that formalist or normative criticism runs through the essays and notes except for that of San Juan.Jr., and that there is consistent “dichotomizing” of the dualisms “form and theme,” “intrinsic v. extrinsic,” and “text and context.” The prevailing aesthetics during the turn of the century could only be what was taught in Ateneo or UST which surely included Aristotlean notions of plot, character, conflict/resolution and themes carried over to the University of the Philippines where Agoncillo imbibed the craft of fiction in the 30s. New Criticism, Marxist, Freudian and archetypal approaches may have informed the criticism produced during the 50s through the 70s—.followed by structuralism/post structuralism and post-modernism. Subjective or impressionistic criticism plays a role in judging literary works.

Torres Reyes’ metacriticism is one of its kind. While there may have been studies of the history of criticism in the country, Torres Reyes’ focus on a particular book generates interest in the contexts of the novel and the author, his times or milieu, influences, his literary contemporaries (like Valeriano Hernandez Pena, Modesto Santiago, Francisco Lacsamana, Faustino Aguilar and the “seditious” zarzuelistas) at a crucial period – whence took place the beginnings of the workers movement and its repression, the staging of nationalist plays, the ban on the Filipino flag and the hanging of patriot Macario Sakay as a “bandit,” parliamentary struggle for independence, proletarian or social realist literature in what some call the “golden age” of the Tagalog novel.

After more than a century Banaag at Sikat, for all its “esthetic” shortcomings, has a secure place in the literary canon as the first proletarian novel in the country.