Myth and karma
The first time Ferdinand Marcos Jr. ran for national office, in 1995, he failed to make it to the Senate. He was well outside the winning circle. It took him another 15 years, until 2010, to decide to mount another Senate campaign. Finally, a quarter-century after his family was chased out of the presidential palace, he was elected a senator of the Republic—the same high office from where his father launched his takeover of the presidency.
The younger Marcos has ambitions of his own; he is running for vice president—ostensibly as the running mate of the ailing Sen. Miriam Defensor Santiago, but in places such as Davao City as the all-but-official vice presidential candidate of popular Mayor Rodrigo Duterte. (His Duterte-Marcos tarps are all over the city.)
He is running both as an opposition candidate, against the record of the Aquino administration, and as a unifying figure, someone who can bridge differences with personalities like Santiago, who rose to fame as a trial judge defying the wishes of the Marcos dictatorship, or Duterte, whose mother was at the forefront of the anti-Marcos struggle in Davao.
More to the point, he is running both as a Marcos—notice that his first official campaign sorties are meant to consolidate his support in the region his father built as the “Solid North”—and against the Marcos reputation, by disavowing any knowledge of the workings of the Marcos regime. It is a complicated game “Bongbong,” as he is better known, is playing, but so far it seems to be working in his favor. He continues to run a strong second to Sen. Francis Escudero in the surveys, and despite the animus he has generated in many parts of Mindanao because of his role allowing the proposed Bangsamoro Basic Law to bleed to death, he seems genuinely enthused about his chances.
He is also helped in large part by the presence and active participation of Marcos supporters on both online and social media. Indeed, in these contentious arenas, there is a great deal of Marcos myth-making—as though the excesses of crony capitalism, the painful contraction of the economy in the early 1980s, the torture, disappearance or death of thousands of human rights victims, the plight of the Joel Abongs and the nameless construction workers who died in the rush to build the Manila Film Center, the assassination of the Macli-ing Dulags, the Evelio Javiers, and, yes, the Ninoy Aquinos, all happened in a parallel universe.
Bongbong lost in 1995 because the memories of his father and mother’s often brutal, sometimes decadent, rule, even after a decade, were still fresh. He won in 2010 because those memories have faded, or have been replaced with glamorous images of his mother Imelda, his sister Imee, and a nephew or two as celebrities. In 2016, he has a chance of becoming vice president because the myth-making online and on social media is having an effect.
To the surviving victims of martial rule, this is an abomination. Many of them have now gathered to form Carmma, the Campaign Against the Return of the Marcoses to Malacañang. The play on the word “karma,” of course, is both description and hope.
Marie Hilao-Enriquez, chair of the human rights group Karapatan, summed up the thrust, the single-minded purpose, of the movement: “We suffered during martial law under a Marcos who muzzled us and raped the economy. His successors learned from him, as the pork barrel shows. We fought martial law and we will fight Bongbong Marcos’ vice presidential bid.”
Carmma takes square aim at Bongbong, and especially his positioning as someone too young to have known anything about the excesses of the Marcos dictatorship. He is “not the guiltless son that he presents himself to be,” said Bonifacio Ilagan, of the Samahan ng mga Ex-Detainees Laban sa Detensyon at Aresto or Selda.
Carmma listed the young Marcos’ own involvement in affairs of state, including his appointment as chair of the board of the Philippine Communications Satellite Corp. The controversial Philcomsat, Enriquez said, was later proven to have served as a conduit for moving ill-gotten wealth out of the country.
Another convenor, professor Judy Taguiwalo, took offense when a TV reporter asked if Carmma was secretly supporting someone’s presidential candidacy. “We are not anti-Marcos because we want to be in Malacañang. Our motivation has always been true freedom and democracy,” she said.
There, right there, is one reason we are at this pass:
Politics relativizes even the sins of martial law.
