Duterte’s next moves on Aquinos, People Power

Letter writer Reynaldo Escobar called attention to the new Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas notes now bearing the signature of President  Duterte, particularly the P500 bills that still show images of the martyred Benigno S. Aquino Jr. and his wife, former president Cory Aquino (“Filipinos a self-contradictory people,” 1/6/17). Mr. Duterte being a confessed Marcos admirer,  his contempt for the Aquinos, including their son, immediate past president Noynoy Aquino, cannot be gainsaid. He even dodged an appointed interview with Kris Aquino by malingering—not that we thought Kris had anything important to get aired on TV other than her personal scandals.

We predict with little fear of contradiction that, slowly but surely, within his six-year term, Du30 will eventually have the Aquino pictures on the P500 notes erased and replaced with that of the late Ferdinand Marcos whom he has regarded as no less a “hero.” And starting with the denigration of the nation’s decades-old celebration of People Power next month, its total scrapping in the years to follow is inevitable.

Well, if the Filipinos of today are no longer bothered by the atrocities committed by the Marcos family during their dictatorial regime, the heck with history. We all deserve to be mocked and ridiculed the world over.  After their banishment to  ignominy in 1986, the Marcoses have evidently gotten back closer to Malacañang than ever.  Many now think that with Du30’s prognostications and a Marcos-friendly majority in the Supreme Court, which is hearing Bongbong Marcos’ electoral protest against Vice President Leni Robredo, Bongbong’s trajectory—from the ashes of his father’s infamous rule  to the Senate, and now to the vice presidency—is already in the stars. That Du30, on account of serious illness, might just hand over the presidency to him years or months before 2022 is not farfetched.

This government may, indeed, be the fulfillment of the late president Manuel Quezon’s desideratum:  I prefer a government run like hell by Filipinos to a government run like heaven by foreigners. He probably only thought his countrymen were just a little inexperienced and clumsy but learnable in time. He never imagined they would become world-class at plundering a whole nation by the billions of pesos. Well, they have come a long way from hell, baby!

GABRIELLE MICHELLE M. AGUILLERA, gamma.reyna@gmail.com