THE VIEW FROM TAFT

The Marcos regime’s mistakes and miscalculations culminated in the EDSA People Power Revolution that restored our democracy.

first-hand accounts that slipped Marcos’s censorship dragnet and ironically, from the international media that had sent a sizable delegation to accompany Ninoy Aquino from Taipei on that fateful China Air Lines flight. Among the internationally noted journalists on that flight was Sandra Burton of TIME magazine.

I turned on the car radio and heard the confirmation from a station that had had no choice but to affirm the story for fear of completely shattering its credibility and being scooped by competitors. There was no room anymore for denial, not then at least.

I rounded up Margie and my three and a half children (Margie was then pregnant with our youngest) so that we could go home and regroup with the many others opposed to Marcos. I was crying while driving in the torrential rain. I was dazed, angry, and anxious; everything felt surreal. I could not believe that his assassination, which Ninoy Aquino had talked about when I was with him on the phone sometime in 1981, would come true.

Even during that summer of 1981 in Los Angeles, I had dismissed that scenario as extreme even for Marcos. The dictator, emboldened perhaps by Ronald Reagan’s then unconditional support for him (and Imelda), made the most foul and gruesome of the scenarios come true.

And that proved to be Marcos’ fatal mistake — with many more mistakes being committed by a rattled regime. The mistakes and miscalculations culminated in the EDSA People Power Revolution that restored our democracy.

Under different circumstances and ethical norms, Ninoy Aquino would probably have qualified to be buried at the Libingan ng mga Bayani. Now, preparations are being made to bury Marcos at the Libingan. Senator Alan Peter Cayetano, one of two staunch supporters of President Duterte in the Senate, disagrees. He says that if Marcos is to be buried at the Libingan, we should change its name to Libingan ng mga Bayani at Diktador. We could add more to that description, but we would rather not, for after all, there could be an exodus from that hallowed place that started with Celeste Legaspi and her family’s removing the body of Celeste’s father, National Artist for Visual Arts, Cesar Legaspi, in protest of the Marcos burial, before Sept. 11, the strongman’s birthday.