I vote for Leni
On Feb. 26, 1986, the day after People Power chased Ferdinand Marcos and his entire family out of the country, Makati Business District office workers marched on Ayala Avenue, the leaders of the march holding up a large streamer with the words “NEVER AGAIN!” Never again will they let a tyrant rule over the land, the marchers vowed. Never again will they submit to Conjugal Dictatorship, they swore. “Never again” reverberated all over the land.
Now looms the return of the evil People Power banished from the land in 1986. The specter of Ferdinand Marcos the Dictator, as he was generally known, and “Greatest Robber of Government” as the Guinness Book of Records describes him, is coming back to life. There is now BBM, which stands for Babangon muli and for Bongbong Marcos. Babangon muli implies that President Ferdinand Marcos will rise again. He will rise again in the person of his son Bongbong. And Bongbong Marcos as president will bring about a new Golden Age.
Bongbong’s vast and lavishly funded propaganda machine has been propagating these past six years the fiction that the Ferdinand Marcos presidency was the Golden Age — the years of robust economy, construction of magnificent infrastructures, and enduring peace and order — of Philippine history. The pre-election surveys indicate that the majority of the people believe the story.
The folks in the countryside were too distant from the center of power and those belonging to the low socio-economic strata were too pre-occupied with meeting their basic survival needs to have been aware of the ransacking of the national treasury. People who were born during the martial law years were too young to realize how hard life was then.
These people assume that the son is capable of replicating the supposed achievements of the father. They do not take cognizance of the fact that the son does not have the brilliance of mind, the zeal for work, and the perseverance to finish what he had set out to accomplish to be capable of beginning another Golden Age.
Philippine history books prescribed as textbooks in schools gloss over the atrocities and abuses of martial law. Not only that, Philippine History as a subject was removed from the high school curriculum in 2013. The truth is the Marcos Presidency was a horrific period in the annals of the country — 13 years of tyranny and 20 years of looting.
Ferdinand Marcos swore twice, in 1965 and in 1969, to uphold and defend the Constitution but disregarded it totally when he held on to the post of president after his term had expired under that Constitution. He promulgated laws and decrees that the basic law of the land had not empowered him to do. He made a travesty of the 1973 Constitution, which was drafted based on his promptings, by usurping the powers vested by that Constitution before it was ratified.
Upon proclamation of martial law, he ordered his troops to arrest and detain his political opponents, militant student and labor leaders, and media critics. According to Task Force Detainees, more than 70,000 citizens were arrested and detained, and at least 2,250 tortured and salvaged, from the time martial law was imposed on Sept. 23, 1972 to October 1985. In most cases, no charges or complaints were filed against those arrested. Many gave gruesome accounts of beatings with rifle butts, burning of private parts, the water cure, electric shock, and savage gang rapes.
He muzzled the press. He shut down media establishments and imposed government control over the other means of communication. He padlocked printing machines and broadcast facilities. However, he reopened within hours Kanlaon Broadcasting System Channel 9, a broadcast facility owned by his crony Roberto Benedicto, to announce the proclamation of martial law and to propagandize his New Society.
He subjugated and prostituted the judiciary. He turned the Supreme Court, which in the early 1950s earned the sobriquet “the last bulwark of the civil liberties,” into a political instrument by packing it with fawning former classmates and docile followers. He reduced the judiciary into a submissive adjunct of Malacañang. By issuing LOI No. 11, which required judges to submit their resignations, a judge could be dismissed from the service for any fancied cause by simply accepting his resignation. The judiciary could only do the despot’s bidding.
He politicized and corrupted the officer corps of the military. He licensed commanding generals and provincial commanders to exercise political powers previously exercised by civilian authorities. Generals regularly sat in Cabinet meetings and even in his party, the Kilusan Bagong Lipunan, caucus sessions. Many amassed unexplained wealth. A number of generals ran smuggling, gambling, drug, and even carnapping syndicates.
He looted the country clean. The Imelda Marcos trial in New York gave the minutest details of this thievery. The details were never disputed. If the jury acquitted Imelda, it was because the naïve members (Americans) of the jury fell for the ludicrous claim that Imelda never knew of the 20 years of looting.
He forced takeovers of flourishing business enterprises and received kickbacks and commissions from multinationals doing business in the Philippines. He skimmed foreign aid and other forms of international assistance.
He issued decrees and executive orders so that his cronies would have monopoly of certain industries: sugar, coconut, tobacco, banana for export, cigarette, plastics, synthetic fiber, construction, logging, broadcast media, print media, and catering for multilateral summits and international conventions. He ordered the government to guarantee the loans the companies of his cronies got from government-owned financial institutions. When his cronies’ companies failed to amortize the loans, the government absorbed the obligations.
Speaking of special friends, First Lady Imelda Marcos had her own coterie of friends, infamously known as Blue Ladies. She and the Blue Ladies embarked on chartered flights a number of times to go on unbridled shopping sprees in New York, their travel and hotel expenses and fabulous purchases charged to the Philippine government.
The Marcos years were also known for soaring prices of basic commodities, long lines for rice rations, frequent widescale blackouts, the construction of white elephants, huge foreign borrowings, and an economy ever on the brink of collapse.
Leni Robredo lived through eight years of martial law, including the tumultuous years between the assassination of Ninoy Aquino and the Snap Election, as a teenager. If she as a young woman did not get a full grasp of the iniquity of Marcos’ martial rule, I am sure her father, Antonio Gerona, a municipal trial court, would have pointed out the immorality and malevolence of that horrific period in our history.
When pre-election polls on preferred presidential candidates showed high ratings for Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte and Bongbong, prominent personages of civil society approached VP Leni to convince her to oppose either of the two scions of authoritarian presidents. Leni said she would decide to run for president only if she was chosen as the standard bearer of a united opposition and if Ferdinand Marcos’ son Bongbong runs for president. “I don’t want him to win,” she declared.
On Nov. 17, 2021, Bongbong and Sara agreed to run as a tandem, Bongbong as the candidate for president and Sara his vicepresidential running mate. That made Leni decide to accept the nomination of the coalition of the pro-democracy forces.
Said Leni Robredo on Oct. 7: “We should change not just the surnames of those in power, the corruption, the incompetence, the lack of compassion must be replaced by competence and integrity in leadership. We should be prepared to take out entirely the agendas, the interests, the very people, and kind of politics that is the root of all that we are going through right now.
“Today, I stand with full resolve: We must free ourselves from the current situation. I will fight. We will fight. I offer myself as a candidate for the Presidency in the 2022 elections.”
I vote for Leni. ■