Thirty Seven Years Ago

I was born at the tail-end of Mar­tial Law. I have very vague mem­o­ries of it. I would have to say that i did not have a first hand infor­ma­tion of it. I heard sto­ries from my dad, but that was about it. I dis­tinctly remem­ber see­ing the images of Ninoy Aquino being shot on the tar­mac of the air­port that will even­tu­ally bear his name (poetic jus­tice!). Oh, as an aside, I am writ­ing this while I’m in Ninoy Aquino Inter­na­tional Air­port! How appro­pri­ate!

I give the floor this week to Randy David. Randy David’s arti­cle below is a great remem­ber­ing of Mar­tial Law, and the dan­gers it still holds for us as a nation. I hope we read it in the spirit of remem­ber­ing but also in the spirit that warns and puts us on our toes. Tides are turn­ing and a bet­ter Philip­pines is just around the cor­ner. But we have to fight for it. And we have to be con­stantly vig­i­lant. We do not want to be caught in a dark­ness that will set us back another 20 or so years and another two or three gen­er­a­tions.

Thirty-seven years ago
By Randy David
Philip­pine Daily Inquirer

When Mar­cos declared mar­tial law in Sep­tem­ber 1972, my wife Karina and I were both just 26. We were uni­ver­sity instruc­tors freshly embarked on an aca­d­e­mic career. Our first-born, a boy, was barely 2 and had just learned to walk by him­self. The rest of our chil­dren, three girls, were born after mar­tial law. Today, my wife is retired from gov­ern­ment ser­vice, and I have less than two years to go before I say good­bye to my career at the Uni­ver­sity of the Philip­pines. Our lit­tle tod­dler has retraced our steps and has become a pro­fes­sor him­self in the same UP cam­pus where we started out as instruc­tors. He and his wife are edu­ca­tors, and their newly-born daugh­ter may likely be one too. Thirty-seven years can indeed con­sti­tute a lifetime—enough to cre­ate a sense of eter­nal recur­rence, of events end­lessly repeat­ing themselves.

The pre­cise feel­ing that I have right now is that, as a nation, we too are back to where we were just before Mar­cos assumed mar­tial law pow­ers. Mar­cos won an unprece­dented sec­ond term in the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion of 1969, one of the dirt­i­est in the country’s his­tory. That term would have ended in 1973, with no pos­si­bil­ity of re-election.

A democratically-elected Con­sti­tu­tional Con­ven­tion was wind­ing up its work in 1972. Mar­cos had done every­thing to shape the final draft of the new con­sti­tu­tion. He wanted the exist­ing term lim­its lifted, under the same pres­i­den­tial sys­tem or under a par­lia­men­tary gov­ern­ment. But the oppo­si­tion was deter­mined to stop him from extend­ing his stay beyond 1973. This was the sit­u­a­tion a few weeks before Procla­ma­tion 1081. The air was filled with rumors of an immi­nent mar­tial law declaration.

The term held lit­tle mean­ing for many Fil­ipinos; it was not yet part of their expe­ri­en­tial map. The clos­est ana­logue to mar­tial law that the older peo­ple could sum­mon was the Japan­ese occu­pa­tion. But we who were born after the war had no expe­ri­ence of this ter­ror either. And so while impend­ing mar­tial law cre­ated in us a vague uneasi­ness we could not grasp, it did not bother us enough to prod us into mak­ing defen­sive prepa­ra­tions. Instead what we chose to imag­ine was the impend­ing end of a hated regime, see­ing in the threat of mar­tial law no more than the hos­tile whim­per of an exhausted presidency.

How wrong we were! We under­es­ti­mated Mar­cos, and over­es­ti­mated our people’s incli­na­tion and capac­ity for resis­tance. When the arrest­ing mil­i­tary forces rolled out into the streets on that early morn­ing of Sept. 23, pick­ing up regime crit­ics, protest lead­ers and poten­tial ral­ly­ing fig­ures one by one, there were no coun­ter­vail­ing forces to block their way, and no radio or tele­vi­sion flash reports to announce their deed. There was only still­ness, a silence occa­sion­ally bro­ken by fran­tic phone calls. We spoke in whis­pers, and learned to com­mu­ni­cate in a cryp­tic lan­guage that pre­sumed the pres­ence of a third lis­tener. As the morn­ing light set­tled in, we were told who had been arrested, but we had no idea who else was on the list.

That morn­ing, the news­pa­pers did not come, the TV screen was blank, and the radio emit­ted only sta­tic noise. Later in the day, Metro Manila would learn what had just hap­pened: the whole coun­try was now under mar­tial law. Fear­ful and con­fused, peo­ple stayed home to await an offi­cial announce­ment from gov­ern­ment. With clock­work pre­ci­sion, Mar­cos had taken over all the reins of gov­ern­ment with­out resis­tance. Even as we had talked about its pos­si­bil­ity, mar­tial law still came as a sur­prise. The ease with which the dic­ta­tor­ship was installed—and the length of time (almost 14 years) in which it was able to rule our lives—still baf­fles me.

Mar­tial law changed the whole polit­i­cal land­scape in our coun­try. It shat­tered all the cer­ti­tudes which had pre­vi­ously gov­erned the sea­sons of our nation’s life. Mar­cos erased all the exist­ing bound­aries of Philip­pine pol­i­tics. While he took pains to cloak his actions in legal pieties, these came through as brazen and whim­si­cal. No one knew how the dic­ta­tor­ship would end. The only thing about which we felt cer­tain was that, to get rid of Mar­cos, every­thing was now permissible—including rev­o­lu­tion. What­ever his ulti­mate motives, Mar­cos had unwit­tingly opened the road to rad­i­cal social transformation.

Edsa I came as a lucky break for the mod­er­ate forces that had joined the bat­tle against Mar­cos in the dying years of the regime. It pre-empted the birth of a mil­i­tary regime and the full ripen­ing of a left­wing rev­o­lu­tion. It recon­sti­tuted the old order, cleans­ing it of traces of the aber­rant order that Mar­cos rep­re­sented. The pop­u­lar forces of dis­con­tent that had fed the rev­o­lu­tion were sub­se­quently absorbed into the pop­ulist cam­paign of Joseph Estrada.

Estrada’s uncer­e­mo­ni­ous ouster from the pres­i­dency in 2001 revived the fault lines of the elite-led polit­i­cal order. The suc­ces­sion of Glo­ria Macapagal-Arroyo and her deci­sion to run for a fresh six-year pres­i­den­tial term in the 2004 elec­tion fur­ther exac­er­bated these insta­bil­i­ties. Ms Arroyo today is in the same posi­tion as Mar­cos in 1972—the posi­tion of some­one who, hav­ing repeat­edly bent the law to stay in power, can no longer afford to relin­quish it. To con­tinue in power at the end of her term, Arroyo has to get her allies to amend the Con­sti­tu­tion, or, fail­ing that, cre­ate the con­di­tions under which she can con­tinue indef­i­nitely as pres­i­dent in a holdover capac­ity. Mar­tial law is undoubt­edly one of the cards she’s hold­ing. Whether or not she decides to play it, I hope we are bet­ter pre­pared than 37 years ago to oppose it.