An open letter to Marcos Jr.

Events in the past few weeks have convinced me that you have totally forgotten, or chose to have forgotten the martial law years, and what those years have wrought to its innumerable victims, many of whom were from various ethnolinguistic groups among the Bangsamoro. Those dark years of martial law were launched through the decision of your father, your namesake, when he signed the declaration putting the entire country under draconian military rule on Sept. 23, 1972. (Some reports say the declaration was made on Sept. 21).

In his declaration, your father contrived several scenarios of a country about to collapse because of the intense level of violence caused by insurgent groups, like the Communist Party of the Philippines, and its armed group, the New People’s Army, in different places in Metro Manila.

Your father also used the so-called armed conflict between Muslims and Christians in Mindanao over land and political power, including the growing influence of a “Muslim secessionist movement,” as justification for his martial law declaration. But these are refuted in Thomas McKenna’s “Muslim Rulers and Rebels: Everyday Politics and Armed Separatism in the Southern Philippines” (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, p. 159). With news reports from The Mindanao Cross from 1971 to 1972, McKenna argued that “The imposition of martial law was, in fact, the proximate cause, not the consequence, of an armed Muslim insurgency against the Philippine state, and it led to an unprecedented level of violence and disruption in Cotabato and all of Muslim Mindanao.”

In an interview last Jan. 24, you claimed you authored the Bangsamoro Organic Law (BOL) that created the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM). Please jog your memory, former senator, since right at the beginning of the deliberations for the creation of the future autonomous Bangsamoro entity, you were already opposing it vehemently, saying that it was “unconstitutional.” Then you claimed that the BOL was that “substitute” bill that you authored. Are you suffering from some memory loss?

Just to remind you, it was the Bangsamoro Transition Committee that crafted the law acceptable to both the Philippine government and the Moro Islamic Liberation peace panels. The men and women in the committee spent sleepless nights so the Bangsamoro Transition Authority and the BARMM will be established.

On the celebration of the 5th Kudaraten Festival in Sultan Kudarat town last Feb. 7, when you and your running mate, Sara Duterte, were endorsed by several Maguindanaon ruling families, you claimed your father was the key to establishing peace in Mindanao.

But it was your father who plunged us into crisis when he made himself the chief executive of the country and its one-man legislative body too, ruling the country through executive orders, presidential decrees, and other letters of instruction. It was your father who ordered snuffing young activist students’ lives whose main fault was their high levels of idealism to see a country ruled by duly elected officials through a popular democratic process. And he did not even dirty his hands doing all these.

It was also your parents, the “conjugal dictatorship,” that launched the massive plunder of government coffers, bleeding our country dry. Your family is quite privileged though under this administration. Despite your mother’s conviction and a warrant of her arrest, she has not spent a day in prison. You yourself have been convicted of not paying your taxes as a government official, and yet the disqualification case against you has been dismissed, with a Commission on Elections lawyer defending you as not having committed something illegal. Not paying taxes is legal?

I agree that your father’s and your mother’s sins are not yours. You may feign ignorance of what they did during those days while you were in Malacañang, and you have that choice.

But then you have unabashedly claimed authorship of the BOL; and that you have a bachelor’s degree from the University of Oxford. On top of these, you claimed your father was the “key to peace in Mindanao.”

All these claims have been fact-checked and proven to be lies. What do these say about you, dear former senator?

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