Before Imelda shuffles off into the afterlife

Aquilino “Nene” Pimentel Jr., speaking on the 35th anniversary of the assassination of Ninoy Aquino, told a TV reporter that Imelda Marcos should disclose what she knows about it before the inevitable happens and she shuffles off into the afterlife. He said Fidel V. Ramos—likewise now in what elderly people call, with a nervous laugh, “the predeparture area”—should do the same.

Although also a former Senate president, Nene Pimentel is not to be confused with his son who carries the same name (and, it could be said, not much else). He is a veteran of the martial law gulags and was a stalwart of the resistance against Ferdinand Marcos’ dictatorship. He is well within limits, whether real or imagined, to call on the dictator’s widow to unravel the continuing mystery.

The truth behind the murder generally regarded as the beginning of the end of the Marcos dictatorship has remained elusive all these decades. Those whose lives were not snuffed out during the dark years but were drastically changed and made miserable by the Marcos iron fist have either departed this vale of tears or are aging, ailing or infirm; the survivors deserve to know who masterminded the deed, and not just be reminded year after year that certain poor bastards are languishing in prison for it. At least one is still at large, still on the lam—and quite possibly capable of finally telling what he knows. That’s if there is justice in this world.

In fact, people were, are still, ambivalent about the matter. The mastermind could have been no one else but the dictator, but he was also seen as correctly assessing what could result from the extermination of his nemesis, and having the sense not to order it. So who did? The question endures.

Among other things, black humor served to uplift flagging morale during the dark years, such as this joke about Marcos’ true-blue loyalist Fabian Ver announcing that the plane bearing the thorn in the then president’s side was en route to Manila:

Ver to Marcos: Sir, padating na daw po ang eroplano ni Ninoy.

Marcos: Oh, shoot.

Ver to subalterns: O, shoot daw! Shoot daw!

People thought, still think, that the then first lady would have been more like it, being as powerful as her mate and purportedly cold-blooded and harebrained enough to conceive of and order the execution of such a plot. (But then, this could merely have been a sexist perspective.)

Now Nene Pimentel thinks Imelda Marcos should set things right on who ordered Ninoy Aquino’s murder, seemingly implying that, at her advanced age, peace of mind—in knowing that everything is now said and done, including a crucial turn in contemporary Philippine history—is most desirable. There is also the suggested question: At her advanced age, when passage into the light is nigh, what has she got to lose?

Yet, it’s not so much what Imelda Marcos—in her prime the Iron Butterfly, Paragon of the True and the Beautiful—would lose, as what her and the dictator’s heirs would lose. Her eldest child Imee Marcos, who continues to draw heavy bombardment for urging critics to “move on” and inexplicably claiming that millennials had already done so, now portrays the fallen status of the Marcoses as a result of a long-running political feud between Ninoy Aquino’s family and hers. How crass. She behaves as though she were speaking to simpleminded folk who do not remember that, in December 1998, her mother admitted the longtime suspicion that the family “own[s] practically everything in the Philippines, from electricity, telecommunications, airlines, banking, beer and tobacco, newspaper publishing, television stations, shipping, oil and mining, hotels and beach resorts, down to coconut milling, small farms, real estate and insurance.”

In an effort to contain the damage of that declaration and other things besides, Imee Marcos quipped that her mother could occasionally get “wild and crazy.” This is all on record, for the benefit of those who cannot see beyond the fakery that the Marcos era was a “golden age.”

How to get at the truth of Ninoy Aquino’s assassination? (In America, the New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani laments how “a disregard for facts, the displacement of emotion, and the corrosion of language are diminishing the very truth.”) The task is arduous and requires the passionate commitment of the millennials that Imee Marcos has insulted and shamed.

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