King of the hill

If Sen. Ferdinand Marcos Jr. would have his way, any talk of human-rights violations in the country should always and only be seen through the prism of equivalency. The excesses of his father’s 13-year martial law regime, for instance, are no different from the supposed human-rights abuses committed under the succeeding presidencies of Corazon Aquino, Fidel Ramos, Joseph Estrada and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. In severity, brutality, proportion and degree, they are all the same, and therefore deserving of one blanket, carte blanche condemnation—if condemnation is to be made at all. Ferdinand Marcos, who so ran the country to the ground that he had to be chased out of it by popular revolt after 20 years, was, according to his son, no better or worse than his successors, all of whom had their own moments of heavy-handed governance.

To calls made by presidential spokesman Edwin Lacierda that the Marcos family first apologize for the thousands of people killed during the long, dark night of martial rule before it demands that the former president be accorded a hero’s burial, the senator tweeted, his dismissive sneer virtually stamping itself on the text: “Firstly, which human rights victims is he referring to? The ones during martial law; the ones during Cory’s term including those killed in the Mendiola massacre; or the victims during Ramos’, Erap’s and GMA’s terms, including the Hacienda Luisita massacre?”

It’s the kind of remark that, if made during the days immediately preceding the Marcoses’ flight from Malacañang, when fresh and ever more shocking evidence of their perfidy was the nation’s staple breakfast every day, would have roused public indignation. That it did not spoke volumes of how all but a dim memory remains of the country’s recent brush with disastrous, bloody authoritarianism. Nowadays, weary from the unfulfilled promises of Edsa 1 and disgusted at the rank betrayal of Edsa 2, people are wont to sigh, shrug their shoulders and move on—the very cynicism Senator Marcos is adroitly appealing to with his deliberately cock-eyed appraisal of history and its insistence that Marcos was no aberration, that martial law wasn’t as bad as it has been cracked up to be.

Marcos Jr. and his family could get away with it, too, given our race’s generally forgiving, sentimental spirit. Imelda Marcos has reinvented herself as an eccentric dragonfly of a woman given to creating tacky trinkets, and high society and mainstream TV alike purr their niceties.

But the Marcoses haven’t reckoned with one thing: the records. There are still enough of them coming out, mercifully, to jog fading memory. Marcos Jr. may deny till he turns blue—or yellow, for poetic justice—the atrocities committed under his father’s watch, but independent and judicially accepted documentation exists of some 10,000 victims of torture, warrantless arrests, enforced disappearances and “salvaging” or extra-judicial killings. The number of Filipinos thrown in jail by the martial-law government may have actually reached 30,000. Now, the reality of the repressive regime that spawned those figures has just been reconfirmed by no less than the Armed Forces of the Philippines, which, in a rare and welcome act of candor, recently declassified and turned over documents relating to the martial law era to the Commission on Human Rights. The papers, said to be so voluminous as to occupy one big room, date back some 39 years, from the time Marcos signed Proclamation No. 1081 in 1972, until he was booted out of power in February 1986. Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin has called the release an effort “to bring closure… and to ensure that we will never commit the same mistakes again.”

Commission on Human Rights Chair Etta Rosales says it’s only the start of “a process of healing based on truth, transparency, fairness and justice.” To gain a fuller picture of the crushing cost the nation bore under the Marcos dictatorship, more documents need to be declassified. Sen. Juan Ponce Enrile has also called for the opening of the records of Marcos’ spy agency, the defunct National Intelligence and Security Authority.  We suggest that copies of these documents also be sent to Marcos Jr., for his belated, but never too late, education. It’s high time he learned that when it comes to human-rights violations in this nation’s history, his father is, bar none, king of the hill and top of the heap.