With the dictator Marcos, we had needed to mount a revolt to get rid of him. Presumably, since Rodrigo Duterte and Gloria Arroyo were staying for a definite term, we didn’t mind waiting them out. But neither really went away.
Throughout the day today, demonstrations are happening in Metro Manila and elsewhere in the country in protest against a plague of official wrongdoing, primarily corruption and electoral cheating. The irony is that this explosion of public dissent comes after a spell of civic inaction that has gone on for so long it has had the effect of condoning those crimes. Not surprisingly, hardly anyone has gone to jail for them.
This default seems to me to reflect a national trait: slow to heat up, quick to burn out — ningas kugon, as we would say. And I’m inclined to blame it for the steady hardening of the sense of entitlement and impunity among public officials over the last half century. If I may put a date to when it may have set in, I’d say September 21, 1972, exactly 52 years ago today. And since it’s no coincidence that the demonstrations are happening on this day, they could be no more than a symptom of another flukish fever — what we call lagnat laki.
Ferdinand Marcos imposed Martial Law on that day, making himself dictator and proceeding to preside, virtually unchallenged, over a reign of plunder and terror for the next 14 years.
For all intents and purposes, the heating up picked up only on the 12th year, triggered by the assassination of Marcos’s arch rival, Benigno Aquino Jr., on his homecoming. He had been exiled to the United States after being imprisoned for seven years, mostly in isolation, and released only because Marcos dreaded the potentially detrimental consequence to his regime of his most prized prisoner dying in his hands — Aquino required life-saving heart surgery.
Mourners took turns in an endless queue for a last glimpse of their martyr as his body lay in state, and a week later they lined the entire funeral route multiple-deep. But the decisive burn was not ignited until two years later, when military plotters against Marcos sought protection after they had been found out prematurely.
Manila’s cardinal, Jaime Sin, had the prescience to seize the occasion and rally the nation, more for its own sake than for the plotters’. Upon the moral power and influence behind his call, which repeatedly went out on the air, crowds that had built up to a million-strong poured onto EDSA, the main metropolitan highway, and kept vigil for four days until Marcos and her family were forced to flee to exile.
Street protests have not really gone out of fashion notwithstanding the easy accessibility of social media platforms and the high effectiveness of that alternative. I am myself convinced that nothing beats a massive, passionate presence of protesters on the streets.
But good guys are natural underdogs, not only in terms of power and logistics. They tend to be divided by competing, though equally righteous, causes, thus finding it hard to agree on priorities and act together. They are simply no match to the bad guys, who are predisposed to compromise among themselves, being bound by an overriding interest that is negotiable as a matter of honor among their likes — a share in the loot.
The relative absence since Ferdinand E. Marcos’ ouster of any significant unified dissent from civil society and the citizenry in general does not in any way indicate any lack of occasions for it. More than enough number of these have in fact arisen; they just have gone unseized.
President Rodrigo Duterte was one such occasion himself. A self-proclaimed Marcos idolater, he wasted no time dragging the nation down the path to authoritarianism. He tried to replicate nationally his dynastic stranglehold on his native provincial city, Davao, which he ruled as mayor for longer than two decades before turning it over to his children.
He militarized the civilian bureaucracy. He ceded our strategic and resource-rich western waters to China. He waged a war on drugs in which thousands were summarily killed. He persecuted critics. He allowed cronies to exploit a pandemic for obscene profit.
Gloria Arroyo had been another, earlier, occasion. Her own corruption-ridden presidency in fact could have been prevented. Confronted with evidence on audiotape, she admitted having rigged her own election. She apologized on national television and was quickly forgiven. The nation, by its silence, signaled its preference for a cheat. Thus, a movie actor who hadn’t done us any wrong lost by apparent prejudiced prejudgment.
With the dictator Marcos, we had needed to mount a revolt to get rid of him. Presumably, since Duterte and Arroyo were staying for a definite term, we didn’t mind waiting them out. But neither really went away. Duterte has left surrogates in high office — a daughter is vice president, a son is in the Lower House, and another is mayor of Davao; cronies also sit in both houses of Congress. Arroyo herself is in the lower House.
Marcos, although dead all these 35 years — exactly that long on the 28th of this month — didn’t go away himself. Proceeds from his plunder, put at $10 billion, have been bankrolling the family’s campaign for self-rehabilitation.
That campaign itself has been rich in occasions that should have provoked civic action. A mere five years after being booted out of the country, the Marcos heirs began returning home and appearing remorselessly in high-profile social settings.
In no time, they got themselves elected to office — in their own home province, Ilocos Norte, and later in Congress — thus gaining handy corollary influence. Their plunder cases have been dragged out; Ferdinand Jr. has managed to defy a court order for him to pay estate taxes unsanctioned; and his mother, Imelda, sentenced to six years for graft, has managed to stay out of jail.
Today, Marcos’s daughter Imee is a senator, nephew Martin Romualdez is Speaker, grandson Sandro is a member of the House of Representatives, and Ferdinand Jr. is President. That he was proclaimed by an electoral commission headed by his own former election lawyer amid highly credible allegations of anomaly is one issue that precisely incited today’s protests.
Finally, civic action seems heating up, but will it catch fire? And if it did would it burn to term? – Rappler.com
