By Janess Ann Ellao
ABUNAWAS Kali of Maguindanao recalled the dark days of the martial law with so much disdain. If he were in their house on April 20, 1974, Kali would have been killed along with his three uncles via firing squad by soldiers.
“That was how it was for the Moros during the martial law days. Most of our stories are unheard of, perhaps because we are far away from Manila-based media. Soldiers would enter our community and kill everyone along the way,” Kali, now 65, said at the sidelines of the national gathering of Campaign against the Return of the Marcoses to Malacañang (Carmma) on Feb. 22 at the Bahay ng Alumni at the University of the Philippines – Diliman.
The last thing that Kali and the rest of the martial law activists and victims want is the return of the Marcos family to Malacañang. With the vice presidency bid of the late dictator’s son and namesake Sen. Ferdinand Marcos Jr. – the family is only a stone’s throw away from making a comeback to the highest post in the land.
In his pronouncements, Marcos has consistently defended their family’s wealth and has refused to apologize to martial law victims.
For writer and director Bonifacio Ilagan, who is also a torture victim and the brother of disappeared activist Rizalina Ilagan, martial law activists are not just against Marcos’ vice presidency bid just because he is a Marcos. He said that the dictator’s son not only continues to justify the crimes committed against the people during the martial law days but has also benefited from it.
“The present is rooted in yesterday,” Ilagan added sternly.
In a statement, Carmma said that Marcos is “not the guiltless son that he presents himself to be.”
In a decision in 2003, the Supreme Court defined that the Marcos’ family’s ill-gotten wealth as those in excess of $304,000, which was their supposed total legal income from 1965 to 1986. But Carmma said that so far, the Presidential Commission on Good Governance has only managed to recover about $4 billion, a far cry from the alleged $10 billion that the family was able to have amassed.
“While the sins of the father may not be passed on to the son, the son could very well inherit the ill-gotten wealth of the father,” Carmma said in a statement.
The group added that when the senator was only 26 years old, his father appointed him chairman of the Philippine Communications Satellite Corp., where he received a salary of $9,700 to $97,000 “despite the fact that he rarely even went to the Philcomsat office.”
Government auditors later found out that Philcomsat was among the government agencies used to siphon ill-gotten wealth out of the country.
Carmma also belied Marcos’ claims that life was better under martial law. Former vice president Teofisto Guingona said that martial law was not just simply “bad,” as the country “ended up poorer and with tremendous loss of lives and poverty.”
The group said that the number of Filipinos living below the poverty line doubled from 18 million in 1965 to 35 million in February 1986, when Marcos was toppled during the popular Edsa uprising.
“Bongbong continues to defend and promote martial law when Filipinos suffered systematic, widespread, and state-sanctioned enforced disappearances, torture and extrajudicial executions,” Carmma said.
Amnesty International said there were more than 3,200 killed, 70,000 imprisoned and 34,000 tortured under martial law.
In a statement, Carma assailed that Marcos even had the gall to accuse 9,539 human rights victims who filed the Hawaii class suit as purely motivated by compensation. He was reportedly to have said, “They are just after the money.”
During the forum, former Sen. Aquilino Pimentel told the youth that the freedom of speech was curtailed under the martial law.
“A forum like this would not have been possible,” he said.
Carmma referred to the plan to bring Marcos to a higher government position as a “Marcosian plot” to redeem their so-called “family honor.”
But Ilagan said stories of horror, terror and plunder were shared in the day’s discussion as “we want to impress on today’s generation the kind of life we had under the Marcos dictatorship” and to “see through the ‘cool’ façade of Bongbong Marcos, executor of the ill-gotten Marcos estate.”
Joana Cariño, an activist, said Marcos cannot wash his hands from the sins of martial law.
“The victims have long memories,” she said.
Apart from the “sins” he committed during the martial law, Carmma said Marcos has yet to come clean after he was linked to the infamous pork barrel scam, reportedly masterminded by Janet Lim-Napoles.
College Editors Guild of the Philippines president Marc Lino Abila said Marcos was also among those who pushed for the passage of the controversial Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012, which, he added, is tantamount to “e-martial law.”
Abila said, “If there was already Twitter back then, netizens would have been tweeting good riddance to the Marcos family. They would have used the hashtag: #WalangForever to the Marcos family.” (janess ann ellao)
