Three decades since the dishonorable eviction of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his family from their despotic reign, the Filipino people had somehow moved on, even with unhealed wounds inflicted by martial law. The long years after the 1986 People Power Revolution had relegated that horrible era to the dustbin of the nation’s memory. Wanting to forget their suffering, the Filipino people took the convenient path away from what would remind them of their ordeal under the dictatorship.
The seeming national amnesia on the dictatorship is a result of an educational system that never buckled down to teach young Filipinos about the horrors of the Marcos dictatorship. Textbooks sorely lack factual information that would enlighten the young generation on the dark years of martial law. The deafening silence on martial law, so to speak, allowed villains to shamelessly grab their place in history.
But after years of convenient silence, the victims of martial law have been shaken from their seeming slumber. They are now retelling the stories that young Filipinos ought to know. These stories are reviving the terrible memories of martial law under what Primitivo Mijares dubbed in his book as “The Conjugal Dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos.”
Clearly, the huge void of accurate stories and vital information on the Marcos dictatorship has produced uninformed and misinformed generations of Filipinos.
Ramming upon the Filipino people the fulfillment of a campaign promise to settle an admitted political debt, President Duterte gave the go-signal to bury the dictator’s mortal remains in the Libingan ng mga Bayani. Opposition to the burial at the cemetery for heroes swelled in time, chiefly from the victims of martial law. Groups of them raised the issue to the Supreme Court, which eventually voted 9-5 to allow the burial.
The high court’s ruling did not declare the dictator a hero; nevertheless, that was the implication. The burial was carried out clandestinely by the dictator’s heirs, abetted by their supporters and cohorts in the military and police notwithstanding the fact that the ruling had yet to attain finality.
Betrayed and deceived, the Filipino people are boggled by the sheer injustice that undermined the rule of law and the true meaning of being a hero.
Al Ellema is a civil engineer by profession and a writer by accident. He is one of the finalists in the “Our Edsa” essay and selfie contest of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.