SECOND MANDATE

This article was first published in the January 10, 1970, issue of the Philippines Free Press. After Noynoy Aquino’s inauguration, it was reprinted in the July 10, 2010, issue of the same magazine.

Once again, I have Free Press associate editor Ricky S. Torre to thank for digging up this archaeological piece. The reprint carries this introduction:

Right before the First Quarter Storm (40th anniversary this year) and Pete Lacaba’s now-lapidary chronicle of that episode in the Philippines’ modern history, there was this prologue. Ferdinand Marcos had just won in an unprecedented reelection that should have been welcomed with national euphoria. Yet even during the presidential campaign of 1969, there was already a prevailing exhaustion over the political system as wielded by their leaders and the electorate—compounded by the recurrent unrest, alongside the antiestablishment protest movement worldwide.

Although not as much in circulation as “Notes on Bakya,” “The Clash of ’69,” the reportage on FQS and “Prometheus Unbound,” among other highlights of the Lacaba catalogue, “Second Mandate” was and still remains just as significant for (besides its humor) its keen poetic sense of the flavor and spirit of an era: the late Sixties-early Seventies, as it happened primarily in the storyville that is the city of Manila. We reprint this piece, not in any strained and baseless attempt to draw parallels with today’s scene, but simply to present a fine example of journalism as one-take literature. Our gratitude to Pete Lacaba for his permission to reprint this article.—Ed.



SECOND MANDATE

Or, can Spiro Agnew forget the Marcos inauguration and find his way back to The Affluent Society?

By Jose F. Lacaba
(Philippines Free Press, January 10, 1970)


AUSTERITY was the order of the day, but assassination was the talk of the town.

The advance ballyhoo promised that, for once, the program for Inauguration Day would be “brief and austere.” The parade would be a worm compared with the snakes of previous inaugurations; civic participation had been scrapped and military display, normally lasting a full two hours, had been cut down to 40 minutes. Even words and saliva were affected by the general parsimony: reelected President Ferdinand Marcos would deliver “possibly the shortest inaugural address in the Republic’s history.” Afterwards, there would be the traditional dinner for the guests from across the seas, headed by no less than Spiro T. Agnew, household word and Vice-President of the United States of America; but there was to be no expense for Spiro in a waste of shame, the dinner would be not as before—lavish, extravagant, ostentatious—but simple and frugal. Probably limited to two courses: salabat for soup and pinakbet for viand. After the most expensive elections in Philippine history, the Ilocano in Marcos had come out.

Though austerity dictated the veto on custom and ceremony, the fear of assassination demanded that there be no skimping on security. Astrologers and soothsayers are said to have warned the President that he would be killed during his second term, and there was a great deal of talk about Oswalds and Sirhans before Inauguration Day, talk that Malacañang encouraged with its disclosure that a Huk liquidation squad was out to get Marcos. No expense was spared, therefore, to secure the President from suicidal assassins. A helicopter hovered over the Luneta to the end, the navy patrolled the bay, machine guns were perched atop the Independence Grandstand (what were they there for? would they have fired at the crowd if one crackpot had drawn a pistol?), walkie-talkies were everywhere, and the fuzz was as thick as flies in mango season. Uniformed policemen of Manila and suburbs lined the streets, Malacañang guards in barong Tagalog were deployed on the grandstand, constabulary troopers lolled behind it, Special Forces men crouched on the roof, NBI agents skulked around, motorcycle cops raced up and down the boulevard, Metrocom cars were parked at street corners, helmeted members of riot squads gripped their rattan sticks, four or five rows of soldiers in civvies manned the front lines of the sparse crowd, “a modest crowd of unenthusiastic spectators” (Chronicle), “smaller than the usual crowd that packs the park during national holidays” (Times), “perhaps the smallest crowd since the Philippines became independent” (Bulletin)—everybody was there, including, of course, Spiro’s Secret Service complement, on the lookout for an effete corps of impudent snobs brandishing Molotov cocktails.

Only a “fanatical fool” would have dared “penetrate the security cordon,” Brigadier General Vicente Raval of the Philippine Constabulary was quoted as saying, and he explained why: “He would never get past the security line; he would nevertheless emerge alive.” (Figure that out, if you can, and if you can’t, put it down as one of the best and most cryptic non sequiturs of the past decade.)

It was cold on the morning of Inauguration Day, hot towards noon, and uncertain weather all the way. Sun alternated with clouds and shadows, and even while the sun shone, brief showers fell, brief and austere. Umuulan, umaaraw, nanganganak ang bakulaw. Umaaraw, umuulan, nanganganak ang tikbalang. Out in the park the little children played, called by their parents when they wandered too far afield, calling after the balloonman, far and whee; and were utterly oblivious of the occasion, unmindful of Rizal, whose day it was, and even more unaware that at that very moment another hero, the country’s most decorated war hero, was on his way to his second inauguration.

There was earlier a question about the proper way for Ferdinand Marcos to go to his inauguration. No postwar Philippine president had ever been reelected, as the press daily reminded us, and so a thing like this had never happened before. Usually, there was an incoming president to go to Malacañang and there was an outgoing president to receive him and then accompany him to the Independence Grandstand, like a father giving away a bride. When the bride is without a father, what must be done? Ferdinand Marcos came accompanied by his son.

And, of course, by his senior aide, Brigadier General Hans Menzi, resplendent in a white uniform with all braids, badges, and accoutrements in place. Ferdinand Marcos, his hair slick-and-span as usual, was in a barong Tagalog, and so was Ferdinand Marcos Jr., better known as Bongbong, who had gotten rid of his crewcut and now sported a mod hairstyle, hair down low over his forehead, à la early-Beatles. Together, the father, the son, and Hans Menzi set forth from Malacañang, surrounded by scads of security men, to receive, in formal ceremony, what had been bestowed in November: a second mandate.

When they arrived at the grandstand, everybody else was there. Vice-President Fernando Lopez was there, grinning happily and now slouching towards the President to be the first to shake hands; he had himself, when he arrived, shaken hands with all the foreign and local dignitaries within reach, except Rufino Cardinal Santos, whose hand he kissed. Spiro Agnew, whose seat was right behind the President’s, was there, looking like a slim, squint-eyed panda. American astronaut Eugene Cernan was inconspicuous, but the dailies swear he was there. (When you come to think of it, do you have a distinct picture in your mind of the face of any astronaut, cosmonaut, or space explorer besides Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood in 2001: A Space Odyssey? Even John Glenn is difficult to visualize; astronauts all look alike, and they are the faceless heroes of the age.) Gil J. Puyat, Senate President as of this writing, was there, and so was Jose B. Laurel Jr., Speaker as of this writing, his white hair absent from the dome but becomingly long at the nape. Chief Justice Roberto Concepcion wore the black robes of his office, Secretary-General Carlos P. Romulo acted as master of ceremonies, Executive Secretary Ernesto Maceda beamed in the background, Congressman Floro Crisologo was in a white (ramie?) suit, the kind our austerity-conscious grandfathers used to wear when they had their pictures taken. A host of lesser VIPs was there, too, and there was even a small group of whites in top hat and tails, looking like fugitives from a Broadway musical.

Never forget the women. Mrs. Imelda Marcos was there, and the Misses Imee and Irene, dressed in what, from a distance, looked like identical ternos. (“Signs of austere times?” went a society page item “…Mrs. Marcos wore a strikingly simple terno and single pearl earring. No jewelry.” The terno “had a wide front panel of rich hand embroidery reportedly taken from a gown she had worn at the first inauguration of the President in 1965.”) Mrs. Mariquit Lopez was only a little less austere. (She “also picked a jusi terno, slightly embroidered more than that of the First Lady. She also wore a gold bracelet, a single pearl pendant and a pearl ring in addition to pearl earrings.”) And the Blue Ladies were conspicuously in attendance—the bakya crowd among them down on the ground, in a corner behind the platform crammed with TV cameras and technicians, and therefore unable to see a thing; and the bluebloods among them up on the grandstand, occupying the space reserved for, but disdained as too distant by, the press. You could tell they were the blueblooded Blue Meanies by the lift of their eyebrows, the color of their skins and the austerity of their hairdos. The bakya crowd Blues, meanwhile, had to be resourceful; every now and then a couple of them would slip past the snarling policemen and get closer to the action, mingling with the press photographers, all the while giggling and chattering like schoolgirls on a holiday.

“Ang ganda talaga ni Imelda, ano?”

“Naku, si Ramil O, ’ando’n pala si Ramil Rodriguez!”

“Alin ba d’yan ’yung astor… ’yung nagpunta sa buwan?”

“Si Agno, hindi ko makita si Agno.”

“Sabi ko na sa ’yo mag-high heels ka, ayaw mong makinig.”

After the solemn preliminaries—21-gun salute, national anthem, invocation—came the small parade. No need to bore you with the gaudy details. Suffice it to say that the parade boldly gave the lie to the charge that the country has fallen victim to a creeping militarism. Militarism isn’t creeping in this country, it’s marching proudly, head held high, chest out, stomach in, and a finger on the trigger. The Special Forces and the Philcag contingent weren’t cringing nor hiding their heads in shame because of the controversy that swirled about them; they even got more applause than the PMA cadets, and it is reported that when the Philcag passed by, Agnew stood up as a gesture of respect. Note also that whoever prepared the program, when they decided that austerity called for a shortened parade, kept the soldiers and kicked out the civilians. Civic participations would have been a bore, of course, but the choice of what to exhibit on Inauguration Day sent tiny chills down the spine as one watched the parade of men and armaments unreel. Garrison state, anyone?

Throughout the parade, Ferdinand Marcos and Fernando Lopez stood on the proscenium (or whatever they call it) of the grandstand stage, each in his fashion. Marcos was ramrod straight, a true military man, saluting smartly when the colors passed by. Lopez had the sick look of a man who has been forced to forego his morning ablutions, if you know what I mean, and when the colors passed by he had his hand over his heart as if his heart was itchy. Obviously, the Vice-President was bored by the whole affair. While Marcos struck a heroic pose from the beginning and stuck to it to the end, squinting into the sun like Clint Eastwood without the slim cigar, a premature monument if ever there was one, Lopez couldn’t keep still. He scratched his nape, scratched his crotch, scratched his ears, picked his nose, rubbed his fingernails, folded his arms, dropped them to his sides, held his hands together before him, dropped them to his sides, held his hands together behind him, dropped them to his sides, stared morosely around, scowled, tried to hide his scowl by puckering his lips, and probably wished he were splashing around in his swimming pool. He was at least very human, which made him rather endearing. Besides, this was his third time to review a parade as Vice-President; he expected no surprises.

Happily for Mr. Lopez, it was all over in about the time it would have taken Barbra Streisand to finish “Don’t Rain on My Parade” and “When the Parade Passes By.” As a matter of fact, it was over so soon that the program committee found itself with time on its hands. Things had gone so smoothly the program had rushed ahead of schedule. A little time had to be killed before the Vice-President could take his oath of office at 11:55 a.m. This—not para magpalapad ng papel, as it seemed at the time—was the reason why the mixed choir and the Manila Symphony Orchestra that had already sung “Lupang Hinirang” and the “Marcos March” or something, now burst into an unscheduled singing of “Dahil sa Iyo.” Naturally the First Lady, delighted, joined in the singing.

When the singing stopped, it was time for the swearing in. The oaths of office, administered by the Chief Justice, were in Pilipino. Lopez and his Ilonggo accent struggled manfully, but charmingly, through his oath. The President, as if to reinforce his heroic image, recited his from memory. Ako, si Ferdinand Marcos, ay nanunumpa, etc., etc. Patnubayan nawa ako ng Panginoon. Historical footnote: it was the first time the two highest officials in the land said their oaths of office in Pilipino.

Like the bright grade-school kid who knows the capital of every province in the country and can recite “Psalm of Life” at the drop of a hint, Ferdinand Marcos is something of a showoff, and he showed off superbly in his inaugural address, which again he delivered from memory. His memory is terrific but, as even so loyal a partisan as J.V. Cruz noted, “the President looked far more concerned with making sure that his memory did not fail him than with the substance of what he was saying.” I used to be a school orator myself and I know that, after the rigorous rehearsals, once you get on the stage you’re no longer aware of what you’re saying, and you won’t even care, so long as you enunciate the practiced syllables clearly and remember when to raise your voice, when to lower it, when to pause, when to make a gesture, when to take a few steps forward, and when to give the audience a long piercing look (when you can’t remember the next word that will cue you on the next sentence and the rest of the speech). Marcos delivering his inaugural address reminded me of my high-school days; he looked like an earnest Voice of Democracy contestant in the elimination rounds taking great care not to muff his lines. In fact, he ended his speech like a VOD contestant: “The wave of the future is not totalitarianism but democracy.”

The inaugural address itself sounded like a high-school declamation piece. It was entitled “To Transform the Nation—Transform Ourselves” (even granting that titles need not be complete sentences, isn’t there something grammatically fishy here? We Must Transform Ourselves? Let Us Transform Ourselves?), and it contained such gems of sophomoric oratory as “…in the inexorable march of history no tears are shed for the fallen, no sympathies wasted on the weak….” Besides being studded with high-sounding clichés (“billowing fields of green,” “faint of heart,” “in this spot of the universe, a people strong and free”) and pious platitudes (“we labored to transform this nation into the very finest among God’s nations”), it sounded like a parody of the John F. Kennedy speeches, especially in passages such as: “…cross the frontier of the new decade…”, “Now in all humility we inform all Asia that we know the nature and quality of our tenuous peace; and that it is also a demanding peace…”, “I ask not sacrifice from the self-sacrificing…”, “Let not this generation pass without seeking to learn anew that in this great meeting place of eastern wisdom and western advance…”, “…seek not from government what you cannot find in yourself….”

Rumor has it that Mr. Marcos discarded all the drafts submitted by his speechwriters and labored over a draft of his own. It is not hard to believe the rumor.

The speech begins with the kind of high-flown literary Tagalog even the serialized novels and the movie tearjerkers are beginning to abandon: “Ang aking dinatnan ay isang pamahalaang nasa bingit ng kapahamakan at pagkariwara, isang pamahalaang nag-udyok ng takot bago ito nagbigay ng pag-asa; sakbibi ng pag-aatubili, hinamak ng kawalang-tiwala sa sarili, lugami ang kanyang kabuhayan, hungkag ang kanyang kaban,” etc., etc. That isn’t even constructed the way a Tagalog sentence should be constructed, and the reason is that it is a transliteration of what follows next in English: “We found a government on the brink of disaster and collapse, a government that prompted fear before it inspired hope; plagued by indecision, scorned by self-doubt, its economy despoiled, its treasury plundered,” etc., etc. If the same thing was going to be said in English all over again, what was the point of saying it in Pilipino? To impress Spiro Agnew?

He may have been impressed by what Mr. Marcos said next.

The President demanded “sacrifice” and “self-discipline” from the powerful and the privileged, demanded of society that it “chastise the profligate rich who waste the nation’s substance—including its foreign exchange reserves—in personal comforts and luxuries,” and made it clear that under his administration, “wealth, position or power will not purchase privilege; wealth and power shall not outrage the conscience of our people.”

The beginning of a new decade, said the President, called for a lot of new things: “new national habits, nothing less than a new social and official morality”; “a new ethic” with which “we will surmount most of the grave problems we are confronting now”; “a new heart, a new spirit that springs out of the belief that while our dangers are many, and our resources few, there is no problem that cannot be surmounted given but the will and courage.” Under this new morality, “any act of extravagance in government will be considered not only as an offense to good morals but an act punishable with dismissal from office.”

The President promised to set the example.

“I pledge a leadership of the severest quality in integrity, morality and discipline.”

(The day after his inauguration, “moved,” he said, “by the strongest desire and the purest will to set the example of self-denial and self-sacrifice for all our people,” the President decided to give away “all my worldly possessions so that they may serve the greater needs of the greater number of our people.” All his properties, “by a general instrument of transfer,” were to go “to the Filipino people through a foundation to be organized and to be known as the Ferdinand E. Marcos Foundation,” the purpose of which was to advance “the cause of education, science, technology and the arts.” As Gene Magsaysay would say, no comment—not yet.)

After the inaugural address, the President and his family went back home to Malacañang, where they signed the registry book again, as they had done the first time they moved into the place.

“Glad to be back,” Ferdinand Marcos reportedly wrote.

And Bongbong: “Me next, I hope.”

Nobody got assassinated, but Metrocom men, according to a news report, “arrested two men they said were loitering near the grandstand on suspicion they were on an assassination mission.” One man was said to have a tear-gas gun; the other wore a PC lieutenant-colonel’s uniform and brown civilian shoes. They were taken to Camp Crame.

AQUINO: THE SHELVED STORYLINE

Wearing a two-decade-old T-shirt
for The Aquino Movie that never was
(Photo by Kris Lanot Lacaba)

Sometime after the momentous events that would come to be known as the EDSA Uprising, or the People Power Revolution of 1986, or EDSA 1, film director Lino Brocka got me to write a storyline for a film on Ninoy Aquino that he was planning to make, with Phillip Salvador in the title role. I don’t remember now if Lino was already a member of Cory Aquino’s Constitutional Commission at the time, but in the end the project got shelved, Lino walked out of the Constitutional Commission, and the two of us ended up doing Orapronobis (given the title Les insoumis in France, Fight for Us in the U.S.), a film that was highly critical of the role armed vigilantes and paramilitary groups played in the Cory administration.

A few years later--towards the end of the Cory administration, if I am not mistaken--film director Tikoy Aguiluz tried to revive the project. He even distributed T-shirts to announce the making of The Aquino Movie. This project, too, never got off the ground.

Today being the 26th anniversary of Ninoy’s martyrdom (and coincidentally the 38th anniversary of the bombing of Plaza Miranda, besides being the 96th birth anniversary of my late father-in-law, the poet Serafin Lanot), I’m posting this shelved storyline for all it’s worth.


AQUINO

Storyline by Jose F. Lacaba


AUGUST 21, 1983. Former Senator Benigno Aquino Jr., 50, well-known in his country by his nickname Ninoy, comes home to the Philippines after three years of exile in the United States. He’s traveling on a fake passport under the name Marcial Bonifacio, and underneath his white shirt he’s wearing a bulletproof vest, aware of the danger that awaits him under the ruling Marcos dictatorship--the regime that kept him in prison for seven years, then sentenced him to die by musketry, and finally, when he suffered a heart attack in his prison cell, grudgingly sent him into exile.

When the plane lands at the Manila International Airport, soldiers in uniform and plainclothesmen come up and order Aquino to disembark. American and Japanese journalists traveling with the former senator attempt to follow, but a burly plainclothesman blocks their way. Aquino walks down the ramp alone, followed by a uniformed escort. Suddenly shots ring out. Aquino falls to the tarmac, face down, arms outstretched like one crucified, blood oozing from his head.

In an instant, members of a SWAT team guarding the airport grounds are pumping bullets into another man in civvies named Rolando Galman. The authorities will later claim that Galman was a Communist hitman who somehow broke past tight airport security to assassinate Aquino. It is a story that most people find too incredible to believe, especially since the dictatorship’s propaganda machines have for decades been trying to depict Aquino as both a Communist stooge and a CIA agent.

During the week-long wake for the assassinated senator, a long and endless line of mourners come to the Aquino house day in and day out to view the remains. At a time when a gathering of more than a dozen people is decreed by the dictatorship to be punishable by death, this expression of sympathy for the deceased is also supremely an act of protest.

At a Mass just before the funeral, we hear Corazon “Cory” Aquino, the assassinated senator’s widow, newly returned from exile in the United States, speak quietly about her husband, and now we go back in time to follow the political career that will end in the spilling of blood on an airport tarmac.

In the early Fifties Ninoy Aquino is the Boy Wonder of Philippine journalism. At the age of 18 he is a war correspondent in Korea. At 20 he is covering the last dying moments of French colonialism at Dien Bien Phu, the British counter-insurgency efforts in Malaya. On his return home he helps negotiate the surrender of the supreme commander of the Huks, the Communist-led People’s Liberation Army.

One year after his marriage at the age of 21 to the heiress of the largest landed estate in the country, he becomes the Boy Wonder of Philippine politics. In quick succession he becomes the youngest mayor of a Philippine town, the youngest governor of a Philippine province, and the youngest senator in the land. He’s a young man in a real hurry.

By 1971, the fourth year of his six-year term as senator, Aquino is already being touted as the opposition party’s best bet for the presidency--the only man, when he comes of age, believed capable of trouncing the wily President Ferdinand Marcos or the beautiful First Lady Imelda Marcos in a presidential election.

But in 1972, one year before the presidential election, Marcos declares martial law. On the pretext of saving the republic from the Communist menace, Marcos shuts down newspapers, magazines, and radio and television stations, then hauls opposition politicians, student activists, trade unionists, peasant leaders, journalists, teachers, poets, along with a few token smugglers and drug dealers, into military prison camps.

The very first person to be picked up is Senator Ninoy Aquino.

The night before the official announcement that martial law has been declared, military officers interrupt a party caucus at the Manila Hilton and arrest Aquino. He is taken to Camp Crame, where he undergoes the experience of being fingerprinted like a common criminal. He is thrown in with other political prisoners in the Camp Crame gym. A few hours later, he is led out, along with ten other men, and driven to Fort Bonifacio, another military camp in Metro Manila, where a detention center for maximum-security prisoners has been established. It is here in the Fort Bonifacio prison that Aquino will be spending most of the next seven years.


MARTIAL LAW WILL BE A TURNING POINT IN THE SENATOR’S LIFE. Up until then, he has been the most wildly successful Filipino politician not only because he is blessed with a boyish charm, a rapid-fire speaking style, and a razor-sharp mind, but also because he has been a skilled practitioner in the politics of guns, goons, and gold. Though he can give tit for tat in a political debate, he has not hesitated to counter terror with terror when the occasion called for it. Seven years of imprisonment, however, will turn him into a Gandhian disciple, an advocate of nonviolent resistance.

One summer night in the sixth month of martial rule, Aquino and Jose W. Diokno, another imprisoned opposition senator, are handcuffed and blindfolded and bundled out of Fort Bonifacio. The two have become symbols and rallying points of resistance: the fact that their names both end in NO is made much of by people voting “no” in the martial law regime’s rigged plebiscites and referenda.

A helicopter brings the two prisoners to Fort Magsaysay, a heavily guarded military camp in Central Luzon, sandbagged and ringed with barbed wire. They are then led to separate, solitary, brightly lighted cells, where they are stripped of wedding rings, watches, shoes, all personal belongings.

In solitary confinement, practically blind without his eyeglasses, Aquino paces his cell barefoot for hours on end. To keep himself from going mad, he sets his mind to recalling every little detail of his life. He starts a one-way conversation with the God who has never occupied a central place in his life, raising questions about the injustice he has been suffering.

Meanwhile, Cory Aquino has been given a package containing her husband’s personal effects. Cory and Diokno’s wife Nena trudge from one military office another, asking about their husbands’ whereabouts, trying to find out if their husbands are dead or alive. In one office, the military man in charge earnestly searches his files, then confesses to the two women that he does not know where Senators Aquino and Diokno are. Several weeks of anguish and near-despair pass by before Cory Aquino, Nena Diokno, and their children are finally allowed to visit Aquino and Diokno in Fort Magsaysay.

One month after their inexplicable transfer to Fort Magsaysay, Aquino and Diokno are brought back to Fort Bonifacio. Not long afterwards, the trial of Ninoy Aquino--by a military tribunal whose members have been personally handpicked by Marcos--begins. He is charged with participation in a Communist conspiracy to overthrow the government, subversion, illegal possession of firearms, and murder. Aquino tells the tribunal: “Some people suggest that I beg for mercy. But this I cannot in conscience do. I would rather die on my feet in honor than live on bended knees in shame.”

One year after the declaration of martial law, Aquino is taken to Malacañang Palace for a one-on-one dialogue with Marcos. “Why don’t you just give up and join me?” Marcos asks. But Aquino is unyielding.

The trial resumes, and drags on for years. At one point, after his lawyers point out the unconstitutionality of a military trial for a civilian, Aquino announces he will no longer participate in the proceedings. In the summer of 1975, he begins a hunger strike. It is a protest fast that does not even get reported in the mainstream media, which are still tightly controlled by the dictatorship. It lasts for 40 days, during which time the once roly-poly Ninoy, refusing all food and drinking only water, loses nearly 45 pounds.

Towards the end of his fast, his wife Cory has to help him along as he staggers to get to the bathroom, where she gives him a bath like a baby. Three folding chairs are lined up from his steel cot to the bathroom so that he can stop and rest along the way. Jaime Cardinal Sin is allowed to visit him to administer the last rites.

On the 40th day of the hunger strike, Aquino collapses and loses consciousness. He is rushed to a military hospital and force-fed.

Dragged back into court in 1976, Aquino tells the military tribunal: “To acquit me, you have to declare Marcos guilty. This you cannot do.” Indeed, it does not. In November of 1977, the military tribunal hands down its decision: death by musketry. Sentenced along with Aquino are Bernabe Buscayno, better known as Commander Dante, chief of the Communist-led New People’s Army (NPA), and Victor Corpus, a renegade military officer who in 1970 defected to the NPA with a cache of firearms from the Philippine Military Academy.

The international outcry against the death sentence stuns Marcos, and he is forced to promise a re-opening of the Aquino trial. The death sentence is never implemented.

In 1978 Marcos calls for an election for his newly established parliament. Aquino is allowed to file a certificate of candidacy--but he is not permitted to leave his prison cell to campaign. His seven-year-old daughter Kris does the campaigning for him. Ranged against the opposition ticket led by Aquino is the administration party led by Imelda Marcos. The campaign heats up, and on the eve of the election, Metro Manila erupts in an unprecedented noise barrage that is in large part a show of support for the opposition coalition, which is named Laban (meaning: "Fight"). Cars go around the city dragging tin cans. Churches ring their bells. Tens of thousands of residents come out into the streets banging pots and pans and shouting the opposition party’s name and slogan: Laban! Laban!

But the ballot boxes have been stuffed even before the noise barrage begins. The election results show Imelda Marcos topping the polls and her party making a clean sweep. Led by former Senator Lorenzo Tañada, the grand old man of Philippine politics, a group of about 600 stage a funeral march for the “death of democracy.” All 600 are arrested and brought to Fort Bonifacio on charges of sedition and subversion.

In March of 1980, after seven years and seven months in solitary confinement, Aquino suffers a heart attack while doing push-ups in his prison cell. A triple heart bypass is deemed necessary, but Aquino refuses an operation in the the Philippines, afraid that heart surgeons can finish him off on orders of the dictator. Knowing that the world will condemn him if Aquino dies in prison, Marcos reluctantly agrees to let Aquino go to Dallas, Texas, for an operation at the Baylor Hospital, internationally renowned for heart surgery.

Aquino is made to promise that, while in the United States, he will not do or say anything that will embarrass the Marcos regime.


THE TRIPLE HEART BYPASS IS A SUCCESS. Afterwards, Harvard offers Aquino a fellowship in international studies, and he decides to accept it. His family is allowed to follow him to Boston.

It is a quiet, idyllic time for the Aquino family. Ninoy Aquino immerses himself in books, and his children, enjoying the company of their father for the first time in their lives, get the impression that he is renouncing politics and starting a new life in America, a life of scholarly contemplation. But before long, Aquino is on the speech circuit, addressing Filipino exile groups, lambasting the conjugal dictatorship of the Marcoses with his old impassioned eloquence and mordant wit. Reminded of his promise to the Marcoses, Aquino replies: “A pact with the devil is no pact at all.”

Three years after coming to America, Aquino learns from reliable sources that Marcos is suffering from a crippling disease, lupus erythematosus, and is on the verge of death. It is time, Aquino decides, to return to the Philippines.

On one of her shopping sprees in the States, Imelda Marcos summons Aquino to her hotel and tries to dissuade him from going back home. There are reports, she says, that Aquino will be killed if he returns: the Communists are out to get him. The members of Aquino’s own family try to persuade him to remain in Boston, where they have spent some of the happiest moments in their family life. But Aquino has made up his mind, and the danger to his life only adds to the lure of his country’s siren call. He quotes Gandhi to justify his decision: “The willing sacrifice of the innocent is the most powerful answer to insolent tyranny that has yet been conceived by God and man.” He solemnly declares that “the Filipino is worth dying for,” but he also manages to joke: “I would rather die for a cause than be run over by a Boston taxicab.”

The Marcos regime has warned all international airlines that their rights to land or transit in Manila will be cancelled if they take Benigno Aquino Jr. But secret sympathizers in a Philippine consulate come up with a passport carrying Aquino’s photo but in the name of one Marcial Bonifacio.

In August of 1983, Marcial Bonifacio boards a plane in the company of a gaggle of foreign journalists. On a stopover in Taipei, he tells the journalists: “You have to be ready with your cameras because this action can become very fast. In a matter of three minutes, it could be over. I am taking some precautions. I have my bulletproof vest. But if they hit me in the head, there’s nothing I can do.”

It is practically a prediction of what is to come when the China Airlines plane lands at the Manila International Airport.

When Aquino’s body is taken to the cemetery to be buried, the nation witnesses the biggest outpouring of grief and rage ever. Tens of thousands join the funeral march, and hundreds of thousands line Metro Manila’s major streets to catch a glimpse of the casket and to offer food and drinks to the marchers. It takes nearly twelve hours for the funeral cortege to reach its destination. Halfway through, a sudden rainstorm drenches the crowd and floods the streets, but hardly anyone runs for cover. It is the longest funeral march in the country’s history, but it will hardly merit mention in the dictatorship’s controlled media.

Within days of the funeral, the anti-dictatorship protest movement--heretofore limited to left-wing militants and disempowered opposition politicians in the cities, and armed Communist guerrillas and Muslim secessionists in the countryside--spontaneously balloons into a broad, massive popular front that cuts through classes and ideologies and involves hundreds of thousands, even millions, in almost daily demonstrations. Many of these protest actions are festive affairs, marked by the spirit and satiric humor of the theater of the absurd, which explains why this period of upheaval will later be known as the Confetti Revolution. But some rallies are raucous events that end in violent dispersal by riot police armed with truncheons, tear gas, and water cannons.

In November of 1985, more than two years after the Aquino assassination, an ailing Marcos is forced by public pressure and international opinion to call a snap election. Cory Aquino, housewife and mother and a martyr’s widow, is prevailed upon to run for President: she is the only one who can unify the fractured opposition against the still formidable Marcos political machine.

Like her husband before her, Cory Aquino is cheated of victory in the counting of the ballots. She calls for a nationwide campaign of civil disobedience. In February of 1986, a rebel military faction attempts a coup. Marcos gets wind of the plot and starts to move to crush the rebellion. But for four days in February millions of people come out into the streets and surround the military camps where the rebels are holed up. People power, armed only with rosaries and flowers, defies tanks and planes. On the fourth day, the dictatorship falls. The Marcoses are forced to flee to Hawaii.

Cory Aquino assumes power as President of the Philippines. In her inaugural speech, she acknowledges the country’s immense debt to her husband for the restoration of democracy. But for the vagaries of history, it is Benigno Aquino Jr. who should have been President.


THE END