February days

Once more we are into February and there will be celebrations to celebrate the EDSA people power revolt. My family and I were still in London when the series of events that led to the ouster of Marcos was happening. We did our own revolt there. When I was appointed to be a member of the EDSA people power revolution during former President Gloria Arroyo’s term, I went to a few meetings and eventually resigned.

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So I will write something different for my column today. This is an excerpt from my book “Imelda Romualdez Marcos: The Verdict” which will be launched soon. Here is an excerpt from the new book.

“My family and I also returned after the EDSA Revolution in February 1986. But it was not quite the homecoming I had expected. I now know that I suffered from an exile’s imaginings of what homecoming would be. I thought it would be one of joy and triumph and that there would have been no cause for regretting the long years of homesickness. Those are the illusions of exiles returning home.

When I arrived, I looked for those who had been our friends during the struggle, the oppositionists who sought shelter in my home in London (it became known as the Pedrosa Hilton because board was free). There was Geny Lopez and his wife, Chita, the family of Sonny Alvarez, Raul Manglapus, and Jose Diokno, among others in the Ninoy Aquino Movement International that we had represented in Europe. There were also the most active Fil-Americans in San Francisco, the family of Dr. Mallari.

The friendships were broken and were no longer what they had been when we were struggling. Except for an inner circle close to the Aquinos, I only heard heart-wrenching stories of disillusion from those who had worked hardest and heard complaints that it was not possible to even get near Cory’s Malacañang with its thick cordon sanitaire. Some of them were cronies of the previous administration and of course, the top guns of Filipino oppositionists associated with Marcos’ erstwhile political partners, the Lopezes, in the United States. How could politicizing workers in Europe that we worked with during our exile matter to the elite that were empowered with what was euphemistically called the People Power Revolution? The political work that mattered was done in Washington and getting America’s powerful elite in government to switch its support from the Marcoses to the Lopezes…

It was to be expected, but still, some of us raised our hopes that the well-born wife of Ninoy Aquino would rise above her class. It turned out she was apolitical and more concerned with the advancement of the fortunes of her family. Like my friends in the Opposition, I was deluded into believing that the rhetoric of revolutionary fervor would be the guiding light of the new government of which his widow was now the head.

Meanwhile, I had more important things to contend with in the aftermath of the “revolution.” I had to pick up the broken pieces of my life and meld it with the persona I had become after 20 years of exile. When I trace the events that led me to write the book, I find that these fell together like a jigsaw puzzle that could not have been put together by my own efforts. I began to understand what destiny meant. It was almost as if I was led to it by circumstances thrown my path. As Tolstoy said, we are free on our own individual actions to make choices but we are not free in deciding the big picture and all the events that we recognize only in hindsight when these had been put together.

Frankly, I was not fully aware of what it would lead to when I decided I would write the book, whatever the odds. Writing it changed my life forever, and with it also my husband and children’s lives. It was as if I was led into it and there was no escaping it when the deed was done. It is paradoxical that the saddest and the happiest events came from our long life in exile.

We returned to Manila from exile in 1987, a year after the People Power Revolution. The younger children were still in school in London so it was not possible for us to just up and go to join the merrymaking and skirmishing among the exiles on who could enter the closed circle of Cory Aquino’s inner court. As political exiles in Europe, we did not count as far as the mainstream opposition, Aquino, Lopez et al were concerned. The main opposition could only come from the US.”

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Back in Manila after a 20 year exile, I am once again in opposition to President Benigno Aquino III. How else could I be? I received a report from The Unyon ng mga Manggagawa sa Agrikultura this week that he and his family, the Aquinos have reclaimed ownership of the 6,453-hectare Hacienda Luisita. The farmer-beneficiaries who were supposed to own the land under the agrarian reform program are back to sakadas or plantation workers. According to the Unyon ng mga Manggagawa sa

Agrikultura the Aquino family sold the Central Azucarera de Tarlac to a businessman, Martin Lorenzo, but the company remains under the control of the family, through the President’s first cousin, Fernando Cojuangco, who is a first cousin of the President.

UMA acting chairman John Milton Lozande said the sale was made to avoid paying back farmer-beneficiaries some P1.33 billion in proceeds from the sale of lands in Hacienda Luisita and to abort the distribution of land to farmers and farmworkers.

MISCELLANY: Umberto Eco, a favorite author, has died at 84.

One of my favorite quotations comes from an Eco book – “Foucault’s Pendulum.”

“That was when I saw the Pendulum. The sphere hanging from a long wire set into the ceiling of the choir swayed back and forth with isochronal majesty. I knew – but anyone could have sensed it in the magic of that serene breathing – that the period was governed by the square root of the length of the wire and by pi, that number which however irrational to subhuman minds through a higher rationality binds the circumference and diameter of all possible circles.”

I have been to Paris many times but I have not observed the magical movement of “Foucoult’s Pendulum.” I will, the next time I go.