The day Ninoy began to live forever

Even for a people with notoriously short memories, 35 years isn’t too distant a past. Many Filipinos who came of age during the Marcos martial law years still remember that fateful Sunday afternoon of Aug. 21, 1983, when yellow ribbons that suddenly sprouted all over the metropolis fanned the giddy expectation of viewers glued to their TV sets.

The opposition leader Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. was coming home from exile on that day, and his impending arrival had sent an undercurrent of excitement through a citizenry long under the jackboots of Ferdinand Marcos’ dictatorial regime. Even the Marcos-controlled media had conceded coverage of the arrival.

Aquino was among the very first of Marcos’ most outspoken critics to be arrested when martial law was declared in 1972. Yet, despite being kept in solitary confinement for seven years, the former senator had remained the charismatic leader of the opposition, a threat that the dictatorship had tried to neutralize with trumped-up charges of murder, subversion and possession of firearms. Sentenced to death by a military tribunal, Aquino was allowed to leave the country for medical treatment in the United States after he suffered a heart attack.

After three years in Boston, Aquino decided to come home, against the advice of family and friends. “I return from exile and to an uncertain future with only determination and faith to offer—faith in our people and faith in God,” he said in his prepared remarks, which he never got to read. Minutes after the plane landed in Manila and he was led out by military escorts, Ninoy Aquino was dead.

There is still no forgetting the shock, confusion and anguish that replaced the public’s earlier exhilaration at the plane’s arrival when the TV cameras panned to the figure of a man in white sprawled on the tarmac, blood slowly blooming under him. Aquino’s martyrdom was the sacrifice that united a fractious opposition, galvanized the citizenry, and powered street protests that eventually led to the 1986 Edsa Revolution and the fall of the dictatorship.

But, alas, memories fade and the narrative is inexorably molded by the politics of the day, helped these days by unaccountable social media.

“He’s no hero; he’s not even a Filipino but a naturalized Malaysian,” one ignorant Facebook post read. “Why name the airport after a traitor and a communist?” said another—posted by one Larry Gadon who had petitioned a return to the old name of the current Ninoy Aquino International Airport. “Did Ninoy mastermind his own assassination?” a columnist piled in, using, as proof of his preposterous premise, Aquino’s own intimations of death upon arrival (“Be ready with your camera because this action can become very fast,” he told the international journalists who accompanied him on the trip. “In a matter of three or four minutes, it could be all over…”)—conveniently forgetting, of course, that Imelda Marcos herself had gone to the United States to warn Aquino of supposed threats to his life, to dissuade him from coming home.

The well-organized campaign by trolls and shadowy operators to pervert history, aided by technology and flaky memories, is aimed at one thing: to disparage and diminish the heroism of Aquino.

Unassailable firsthand testimony, however, trumps such insidious revisionism. The recent passing of eminent writer and journalist Carmen Guerrero Nakpil, for instance, had mourning colleagues and admirers digging out her magisterial account of that historic day and its aftermath. Here are words that deserve to be carved in granite, taught in school—and reposted on social media ad infinitum:

“The killing of Ninoy, the hero Filipinos had learned to love and had waited for desperately, shook the earth beneath their feet. An eerie silence followed at his wake, as people filed in their mute thousands to look at his poor, bloodied body, and when it was placed on the flatbed truck of flowers and carried through the streets, millions rushed in, pressing forward, carried on peaks of sorrow and anger till they came to his grave. The photos of the funeral procession show, not individual people, but one, huge, engulfing sea of humanity, sweeping
everything before it…

“Ninoy did not die on that sunny Sunday afternoon in August 1983 at the Manila International Airport, for that was when he began to live forever in the hearts of his countrymen. It was Ferdinand Marcos who died that day, and he knew it.”