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Deafeningly silent, however, was Marcos Jr. on national security management and its criminal consequences: foremost of which is the impunity enjoyed by state security forces in perpetrating massive human rights violations, under all administrations beginning with the Marcos dictatorship.
The fall of socialist regimes and the restoration of capitalism in many countries in the 1990s provoked the view that the current stage of history is also its last. The adherents of the theory that liberal democracy is the pinnacle of political evolution are correct: individual freedom and self-rule are the prerogatives of all of humanity. But democracy has never been as imperiled as it is today by the tyrants who rule in its name. Despite the economic and social crises that afflict not only the poorest countries of the world but also the wealthiest, no alternative seems to be available, the only prospect being more of the same.
“We call on all the concerned sectors to stand together against the continuing wave of red-tagging and terrorist-labelling and to vigorously defend freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of association and the right to peaceably assemble.”
Independence of mind as well as of the Filipino nation that was yet to be was what Rizal, Bonifacio, Apolinario Mabini, and company wrote, fought and died for. And they are inextricably linked, the first being the essential condition for the achievement of the second.
Yesterday president-in-waiting Ferdinand Marcos Jr. named Juan Ponce Enrile as his presidential legal counsel. A key implementor during Marcos Sr.’s martial law dictatorship, Enrile figured prominently in the latter’s ouster by popular uprising in 1986. He still faces charges of plunder as former Senate president.
The accreditation of bloggers that Marcos Junior’s choice for Press Secretary (she will also head the Presidential Communication Operations Office or PCOO) is planning is not new. It was also considered by her predecessor, but abandoned because of problems over which bloggers would join the Malacañang Press Corps in covering the President.
But this week, international attention has turned to the Philippines as Ferdinand Marcos Jr. prepares to become the country’s next president. Instead of stamping out reminders of tyranny, will there be a restoration? With an ousted dictator’s son taking power, will historical documents be destroyed? Will the memories of victims be forcibly erased?
The Easter Sunday Moreno-Lacson-Gonzales debacle is making it clear to anyone with at least a double-digit IQ who the true candidates of the opposition are, and, incidentally, who is succeeding in convincing the electorate that the right leaders are those who can competently address the many problems of the terrible present and lead this country to a hopeful future. It could be a major turning point in one of the most crucial Philippine elections in decades.
President Duterte has just over a month to go in his six-year term. He could help much in enabling the succeeding administration to resume the GRP-NDFP peace talks, by removing a number of obstacles that his presidency has put in place.
If there is any lesson to be drawn from PDP-Laban’s morphing into its very opposite and from the distinct possibility of Mr. Duterte’s eating his own words once he endorses Marcos Jr., it is how totally without principle and self-serving is the ruling elite — the handful of families and their clones that have monopolized political power in this rumored democracy for nearly a hundred years, and for whom changing sides and parties has been as easy as changing clothes, cars, and residences.
What is behind all these is the unarticulated but nevertheless all-encompassing determination to once more, as during Marcos Sr.’s benighted rule, make the democratization that has been long in coming to this country as difficult if not as impossible of an achievement quite simply because its realization would be contrary to dynastic interests.
Dubbed by the media as the “Batasan 6,” the accused (I was one of them) asked the Supreme Court to throw out the case for lack of probable cause. Meantime, under House protection, they stayed within the premises of the Batasang Pambansa for 71 days and nights, and continued to perform their official duties and functions.
The electoral watchdog Kontra Daya (literally, Against Cheating) has found that seven out of 10 groups running for party-list seats in the House of Representatives are in the hands of far from marginalized and far from voiceless sectors and interests.
Going into his final three months in office, President Duterte apparently realized he was far from achieving another one of his 2016 campaign promises: to achieve peace and end the 50-years-plus armed conflict with the underground Left revolutionary movement.
EDSA 1986 was a time of great promise, much of which, besieged by several coup attempts, the Corazon Aquino administration failed to deliver. But it nevertheless removed from power a regime whose abuses, corruption, and brutality have long been established by documentary evidence and those who survived it.
Still, US anti-Russian actions continued. Carpenter wrote: “The Obama administration’s shockingly arrogant meddling in Ukraine’s internal political affairs in 2013 and 2014 to help demonstrators overthrow Ukraine’s elected pro-Russian president was the single most brazen provocation.” That meddling, he concluded, led to Moscow’s seizing and annexing Crimea in February 2014 – “and a new cold war was underway with a vengeance.”
Elections are among those exercises through which a free people are able to delegate their sovereign powers of self-government to their chosen representatives. Surely the Comelec knows that elections have to be free, honest, and fair to be legitimate expressions of the people’s will. It was precisely to make sure that they are, rather than the means through which the oligarchs can endow themselves with a semblance of legitimacy so they can remain in power, that the Comelec was created in 1940 through an amendment in the 1935 Constitution.
Many citizens today, particularly the youth, may think that the Duterte administration invented red-tagging. But they should not be surprised to learn that almost 50 years ago – under his martial-law one-man rule – Ferdinand Marcos Sr. was already sticking that label on those who openly criticized and opposed him. Certainly, the term “red-tagging” was not in use then, but the alleged acts invoked fitted those in the above-cited definitions.
Both China and the US have such an interest, and so do other countries with which the Philippines has trade and other relations, albeit perhaps to a lesser extent. Only the naive would harbor the illusion that no foreign power would support anyone in the May elections and beyond.
In the past weeks, several commentaries in the media have debunked Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s false claim that his father’s tyrannical rule embodied the country’s “golden age.” They pointedly remind us that the Marcos “reign” reeked of corruption and drove the nation’s economy into unprecedented crisis.
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