Historical irony

By Juan Mercado
Inquirer

“IT’S your fault that i never got to talk to the man,” my son Francis gripes when former senator Benigno Aquino’s death is remembered, as we do today.

Francis was a grade-school kid when our family bumped into Ninoy Aquino at San Francisco’s international airport. We were flying to Bangkok, and Aquino was booked on a Boston flight. The years have blurred most of our chat that day. But we did laugh over my securing a “carrier pigeon” to sneak his article, smuggled from a Fort Bonifacio prison cell under martial law censors’ noses. A sympathetic Air India manager brought it to the editor Theh Chongkadikhij at the Bangkok Post.

In February 1973, the Post published “The Aquino Papers,” a three-part series that challenged martial law. “I will not accept President Marcos’ offer of an amnesty because I do not believe I’ve committed any crime,” Aquino wrote. “He violated our Constitution and broke our laws.”

Information Minister Francisco Tatad cabled a furious 8,000 word reply. Reprisals followed. Aquino and his cell mate, former senator Jose Diokno, were hustled into solitary confinement in Fort Magsaysay, Nueva Ecija — and half-starved to death.

Prison guards turned Corazon Aquino and family away for 43 days. Carmen Diokno and her children received similar brushoffs. “When Cory asked Deputy Defense Minister Carmelo Barbero why, she learned it was ‘punishment’ for the Post series,” Miriam Grace Go reported.

The airport boarding call cut our talk short.

“Why didn’t you introduce me?” Francis groused as Ninoy left. “He’s the next Philippine president.”

That was not to be. While military agents “guarded” Aquino as he descended the service gangway from his China Airlines plane, a single bullet tore into his jaw.

A reporter from The Nation in Bangkok phoned for a reaction. Given United Nations restraints, all I could mumble was: “Marcos claims he heads a ‘command society.’ He has all the powers; so he has all the responsibility.”

As a numb afterthought, I added: “Manila will be renamed Aquino International Airport.”

The censored press suppressed Aquino’s arrival address aborted by that murder. Manuel L. Quezon III may someday publish a second edition of his book, “20 Speeches That Moved A Nation,” and perhaps he’ll see fit to include this speech that never was.

“I have returned of my own free will to join the ranks of those struggling to recover our rights and freedoms through non-violence,” Aquino planned to say. “I seek no confrontation.”

He flayed the supine Supreme Court justices’ abdication of the cherished right of habeas corpus (today a centerpiece in the search for “disappeared” activist Jonas Burgos and similar victims). He would have appreciated the irony in Chief Justice Reynato Puno’s plan to wield the “writ of Amparo” in order to leash some military officers who haven’t learned history’s lessons.

Aquino thought a direct appeal to the ill, isolated Marcos could usher in peaceful change. He saw the danger. “If they kill me, they’re out in two years,” he predicted.

That forecast fell short of the People Power Revolt by two years. Was this stupidity? Or principled stubbornness?

The Duke of Norfolk badgered the imprisoned Thomas More to heed Henry VIII’s demand for consent to his divorce. “Think Master More,” the Duke urged. “Indignatio principis mors est.” [“The prince’s anger is death.”]

More replied: “Is that all, my Lord? Then, there’s no difference between your Grace and me — but I shall die today and you, tomorrow.”

Under the dictatorship’s thumb, Military Commission No. 2 found Aquino “guilty” of subversion. They sentenced him to “death by musketry.”

Censorship ensured that few heard what Aquino said after the sentencing. But Aquino, we’re told, asked the tribunal if they could recall the military judges who sentenced Andres Bonifacio. They could not. Aquino ticked off names of Gen. Mariano Noriel, Col. Agapito Banzon and others. “Today, few remember the names of those judges. But we meet in a fort that is named in honor of the very man they sentenced to death.”

This was historical irony. Bonifacio’s trial has been documented by retired Justice Abraham Sarmiento and others. And deadline-pressed laymen, like us, can only hope that scholars of Ambeth Ocampo’s competence will one day compare transcripts of these two mistrials.

Ninoy’s funeral brought two million mourners into the streets. Thousands tuned in to Radio Veritas, the only station that dared report the rites. “No umbrellas,” people chanted as rain fell. “Only Imelda uses an umbrella!” That was a jeer at cronies who trotted with parasol behind the First Lady.

When the coffin passed Rizal Park, crowds forcibly lowered the giant Philippine flag to half-staff. Did that presage People Power four years later? No one could say. All that the people clung to was the belief that the blood of martyrs is the seed of heroes.

Now a 39-year-old Northwest Airlines pilot, Francis never met Ninoy. But he sees the nation mark his death yearly. And Ninoy’s features grace our currency and stamps. Schools and streets are named after him. So is the Manila International Airport. The Aquinos never demanded a plot in the Libingan ng mga Bayani [Cemetery of Heroes]. The Marcoses have wheedled, unsuccessfully so far, for such an interment.

Sorry old questions, however, continue to fester: Who were the mastermind(s)? Why have they escaped accounting? And who remembers the judges of Military Commission No. 2? Do people give a damn?

Indeed, the “struggle of man against power,” as Czech novelist Milan Kundera once said, “is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

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