His shadow

PINOY KASI
His shadow

By Michael Tan
Inquirer
Last updated 00:22am (Mla time) 09/20/2006

Published on Page A13 of the September 20, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer

ANNIVERSARIES like September 21 tend to narrow people’s attention to some event. So, 9/21, like 9/11, is remembered as a dark day, but with much too little discussion of the events and circumstances that led to the fateful day. In the case of martial law, we reduce history to a presidential proclamation, and then forget how much was still to unfold in the days and years that followed.

Surfing the Internet for materials on martial law, I stumbled on a Time article dated Jan. 22, 1973, describing how within the first 100 days of martial law, Marcos had vacillated between allowing more freedom or more repression, even as he plotted constitutional change.

We need to remember how martial law was really just a last desperate act on Marcos’ part to keep himself in power. Under the 1935 Constitution, Marcos could be president only for two four-year terms. Into his second term, he had a constitutional convention (ConCon) organized in 1971 to revise that Constitution and move the country into a parliamentary system that would allow him to remain as head of government. It was an unpopular move, even among delegates to the Constitutional Convention, and there were exposés of how the delegates were being bribed to toe Marcos’ line.

By declaring martial law in 1972, Marcos could find other ways to revise the Constitution. “Citizens’ assemblies” were hastily convened to discuss the proposed new constitution in preparation for a plebiscite. Marcos promised free discussions, but quickly took all that back, accusing politicians of using the citizens’ assemblies to return to the ways of the pre-martial law era. He issued a presidential decree declaring rumor-mongering a subversive crime.

Martial-law babies

Thirty-four years have passed since that fateful declaration of martial law. When I first began teaching at UP in 1985, I had martial law babies, students who had known no other president except Marcos.

Today, we have the Edsa babies -- those born after the Marcos era. Sometimes though, I wonder if they are more properly called the grandchildren of the Marcos era, given how they still live, as we all do, in his shadow.

Let me share a story to make my point. Just last week, I got a call from someone in an urban poor community in Quezon City. Mang Ramon (not his real name) had been picked up by the police following a complaint from a neighbor who claimed Mang Ramon had vandalized his van. Within an hour, he was transferred first to a station precinct and then to a jail in Quezon City, all without any papers served or formal charges filed. The policemen advised him to just pay up -- even a few hundred pesos -- so they could close the case.

Filipino kibitzing became useful here. Several of his relatives, including two young children and neighbors accompanied him to the precinct and later to the bigger police station, and refused to leave. One of them eventually called me to ask for help, but since it was at night, I had difficulty contacting lawyers. I advised them to just keep on with their vigil, and not to agree to any of the police demands. I could tell this was another instance of hulidap, policemen in cahoots with some cheap racketeer to extort money.

The next day, I brought one of Mang Ramon’s neighbors to UP’s Office of Legal Assistance and the lawyer agreed that the policemen had no business detaining Mang Ramon. He was eventually released and his case was referred to the barangay captain, but the complainant apparently sensed he wasn’t going to get away with his scam and never showed up for the hearings.

The policemen and the complainant are lucky. Mang Ramon thought of filing counter-charges but decided it might not be worth the hassle. But he and his neighbors are more confident now that they can protect themselves in the future. They were aware of the rackets and scams involving the police, but they didn’t know that the police couldn’t just barge into their homes, much less drag them to jail, without proper papers.

Too democratic?

“They violated my human rights,” Mang Ramon told me in Filipino. I was struck by his use of the formal “karapatang pantao,” reminding me of the lectures human rights groups would conduct during martial law. In a way, Mang Ramon was benefiting from the human rights consciousness and networks that emerged during the dictatorship. At the same time, his feeling of helplessness and resignation also reminded me how little has changed, how terribly vulnerable people are.

Worse, I hear people rationalizing that it wasn’t really that bad under Marcos, that his dictatorship was benevolent, that we had a “smiling martial law.” There’s even a yearning for another authoritarian ruler, with people arguing that our problems today are rooted in our being “too democratic” and that we have “too many rights.”

Marcos’ “smiling martial law” came about not so much because of his benevolence but because of how the nation responded. His first 100 days of martial law, as reported in Time, showed how he would test the waters, and I believe he would have been far more brutal if civil society -- human rights groups, people’s organizations -- had not kept him on the defensive.

This 9/21 anniversary, we should be reflecting on the parallels between Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and Marcos, especially her determination to perpetuate herself in power. What worries me is that the tactics Marcos resorted to -- a citizens’ assembly and a plebiscite, political assassinations, arrests without warrants, illegal detention -- are all taking place under Arroyo even without martial law.

We still live in Marcos’ shadow because his dictatorship unleashed the worst in the Filipino. He politicized the military, giving it unprecedented power without an understanding of how that power must come with responsibility and a respect for human rights. He showed how the Constitution and constitutional processes could be so easily manipulated and mangled, how constitutional bodies like Congress could be turned into an auction house, the members themselves available to the highest bidder.

Marcos showed, too, how public service could become a venue for legalized extortion. Oh, but how Marcos would be so delighted if he could see how the Presidential Commission on Good Government, set up to investigate his kleptocracy, has so deteriorated.

And if Marcos were alive today, he’d be amazed at how one of his initiatives, the systematic export of Filipino workers, could bring so much “peace” to the nation in terms of a complacent citizenry, content to live off the overseas workers’ remittances and balikbayan boxes, even as Arroyo claims the credit for the nation’s economic survival.

The Marcos dictatorship casts a long shadow, but only because we have short memories.