Remembering Ninoy Aquino

Today, the nation marks the 35th anniversary of the brutal murder of former senator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. at the tarmac of the Manila International Airport.

The assassination of the opposition leader ignited a firestorm of popular protests against the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, the perceived author of the murder of Ninoy Aquino. Millions viewed the bloodied body of Ninoy inside an open casket and millions more joined the funeral cortege.

The brutal murder of Ninoy was the beginning of the end of the Marcos dictatorship. It is true that before the August 21 event, resistance to the dictator Marcos was being waged by the radical left, which became stronger due to the abuses of the Marcos regime.

But it was Ninoy’s murder that galvanized the opposition to Marcos’s rule as the once timid middle class, the businessmen, and finally, the military, cast their lot with the masses and caused the ouster of the dictator in those exhilarating days of February 1986.

Following the overthrow of President Marcos, formal democracy was restored in the country. While the democratic project has been far from perfect, it gave the nation relative stability with a new Constitution that guarantees civil liberties, due process, and the rule of law.

Yet, the democratic space that we have enjoyed through the ultimate sacrifice of Ninoy Aquino and thousands of other activists who offered their lives in the struggle is now threatened by a looming authoritarianism. The Constitution is under siege and assaulted in all fronts, with thousands of drug suspects being liquidated without due process.

Aside from violating the rule of law with the unabated extrajudicial killings of suspects, the Duterte regime has weakened our political institutions with the appointment of cooperative justices in the Supreme Court, a robot in the Office of the Solicitor General, and a friendly appointee in the Office of the Ombudsman.

Duterte’s unabashed desire to get rid of Ma. Lourdes Sereno as the Supreme Court Chief Justice, his spineless Solicitor General’s egregious act of filing a quo warranto proceedings against Ms. Sereno, thus depriving the Senate of its exclusive constitutional power to remove a Chief Justice, Duterte’s subtle command to the Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET) to unseat Vice-President Leni Robredo so he can allegedly resign as president, his advocacy of a Federal Constitution with a Transitory Provision giving him dictatorial powers, are all portents of darker things to come.

Unless President Duterte is stopped in his sinister plans to become a dictator, all that Ninoy Aquino and other heroes’ sacrifices to restore democracy in this country, shall have been in vain. – Democrito C. Barcenas