Post-Aug. 21, 1983 abductions and disappearances

In my thoughts during this week of the 40th anniversary of the assassination of former senator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr.: In God’s time, what is hidden will be laid bare. The same goes for all other occurrences, incidents, and tragedies that presently baffle the be-dumbed and be-numbed among us.

There are suspicions, information, and allegations on what transpired in the upper echelons of the Marcos Sr. dictatorship before Aquino and alleged assassin/fall guy/victim Rolando Galman were both gunned down on the airport tarmac on Aug. 21, 1983. (Read Manuel L. Quezon III’s Inquirer column piece “Mastermind,” The Long View, 8/23/23). But post-Aug. 21, at ground level, there was a trail of criminal incidents that could only have been the offshoot of the assassination such as mysterious disappearances, abductions, etc. More on these later.

Only so much had been laid bare before the Agrava Board that investigated the crime of that decade that led to the imminent downfall of the dictator in 1986. It was not a delight to watch up close the marathon investigation held at the big hall of the SSS building in Quezon City, the members of the investigating board, the suspects, the witnesses, the experts. I thought the drama would never end. For the legally, historically, and “criminally” inclined, there is a compilation of the commission’s proceedings and findings, an offshoot project of the Mr.&Ms. feisty weekly supplement (for which I also wrote and published by Eggie Apostol, later the founding chair of the Inquirer) that reported on the assassination and the people’s rising rage and tyranny’s inexorable fall. But all that was never enough to arrive at the plain truth.

The Sandiganbayan later convicted the military men and officials complicit in the Aquino and Galman assassinations, but the mastermind was not. In 2003, I did a three-part series for the Inquirer on my long interviews (this meant several visits) with the convicts at the New Bilibid Prison in Muntinlupa on the events related to Aug. 21, 1983. No one owned up as the real gunman, but …

The men have all since been released after they had served their sentences. Several have died. One of them was stabbed dead in prison.

Among the gripping incidents that happened after Aug. 21—repeat, after—involved those who were not anywhere near the Manila International Airport where Aquino and Galman were killed, the former while going down the China Airlines Flight 811 steps and the latter underneath or somewhere near it. These persons knew something about Galman or might have been related to him in some way and, therefore, they were in the crosshairs. Galman was a mystery man and whoever hired him and came for him or even vaguely knew who hired him might lead to the truth.

The long interview of the late Mauro Avena (he was also a poet) with lawyer Lupino Lazaro was loaded with damning information. Lazaro, the lawyer of the Galman family, took into his household the grieving Galmans and the families of the missing Oliva sisters. The publication of the interview (“Is the Agrava Board Afraid to Know the Truth?” Panorama magazine, 7/1/84) resulted in Avena, Lazaro, magazine editor Domini Torrevillas Suarez, and the publisher being slapped a whopping P120-million libel suit for each of them from then ambassador at large Eduardo Cojuangco Jr. and a P100-million libel suit from Gen. Fabian Ver, chief of staff of the Armed Forces of the Philippines. But that is another story.

(The entire article is in the book that I edited and cowrote “Press Freedom Under Siege: Reportage that Challenged the Marcos Dictatorship,” University of the Philippines Press, 2019. The book won the National Book Award for Journalism in 2022. It can be purchased online.)

Galman was dead and there were missing persons. Lazaro crossed swords with swashbuckling lawyers in expensive suits. His quest was to find the missing Oliva sisters, Galman’s common-law wife Lina Lazaro, and find out who took them and where they were being held if they were still alive. It was then that names surfaced and those who might have been involved were quick to the draw. Avena’s title “Is the Agrava Board Afraid to Know the Truth?” rattled the ramparts.

Such was the fate of humble folk who happened to live far away, but were in the vicinity where some of the truth might also be. I wish I could find a copy of the Veritas magazine where the great storyteller and author Gregorio Brillantes wrote a piece on the town in Nueva Ecija where Galman was born, his grieving mother who identified him in the morgue because of a scar on his crotch, who did not believe up to her dying day that her son was the assassin. A story well told, one does not forget.

—————-

Send feedback to [email protected]