Martial law, Binay
Just a few hours after then Defense secretary Juan Ponce Enrile staged his own fake “ambush” in Wack-Wack Subdivision in Metro Manila, Ferdinand E. Marcos implemented Proclamation 1081 that placed the entire country under martial law on Sept. 23, 1972 (although he signed the said proclamation on Sept. 21, 1972).
Marcos’ instruction to his generals was to immediately arrest Sen. Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, Sen. Jose “Pepe” Diokno, and publisher Chino Roces. In a few hours, the whole country became one huge concentration camp as more than 70,000 moderate political oppositionists, social activists, students, labor organizers, religious leaders, and plain dissenters were all arrested and detained in different detention centers.
Dictatorship was completely imposed when Marcos shut down all publications, TV and radio stations and banned rallies and demonstrations. Congress was padlocked and the Supreme Court went into the pocket of Mr. Marcos. His control of the entire nation was total and absolute with the open support of the U.S. government.
Marcos’s cronies led by Juan Ponce Enrile, Eduardo Cojuangco, Rodolfo Cuenca, Roberto Benedicto, Kokoy Romualdez and others had a field day plundering the economy to benefit themselves and the dictator.
The Marcos couple was described as a “conjugal kleptocracy” with the joke going around that Imelda Marcos became an expert in mining because of her greedy habit of saying “This is mine, this is mine, and this is mine.”
Because of Marcos’s desire to perpetuate himself in power and the growing resistance to his corrupt regime, human rights violations were committed starting from unlawful arrests and detention, torture, murders and forced disappearances. Thousands were reportedly tortured, salvaged and countless disappeared under the Marcos dictatorship.
To help martial law victims, Sen. Jose W. Diokno founded the Free Legal Assistance Group (FLAG) in 1974. Another group, MABINI, was also organized by, among others, the then struggling human rights lawyers Jejomar Binay and Rene Saguisag.
Recently, Vice-President Binay sang a new tune on Marcos, downplayed the massive human rights violations committed during martial law and praised the late dictator’s son, Sen. Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. whom he has been eyeing to be his running mate in the coming 2016 presidential elections and who never apologized to the nation for the atrocities committed by his father.
Binay’s shameless act may have surprised millions of decent Filipinos and the thousands of victims of human rights violations during the Marcos dictatorship. The scores of human rights lawyers who were brutally murdered by the Marcos military may now be turning in their graves.
But to those who know Binay, his condemnable act is not surprising. This unfortunate country is infested with thousands of opportunistic traditional politicians (trapos) but the greatest trapo and the most outrageous of them all is Jejomar Binay.
In his desperate obsession to become president, Binay will not even hesitate to have a compact with the devil just to realize his fading dreams for the presidency.-Democrito C. Barcenas