THE MOUNTAINEER

Edison L. Baddal
Recollections:1983 onwards (2)

BONTOC, Mountain Province -- A quarter of a century after the gruesome murder of Ninoy Aguino, many earthshaking events took place since then. The first was the convulsive reaction of all sectors of society to the murder in which a majority of people perceived it as a high-handed display of might by the powers that be.

The earthshaking protests that followed against the then Marcos administration started in earnest in the gloaming right after Ninoy’s burial. The young people, mostly militant students, who joined the funeral cortege, firmly believed that Rolando Galman was just a fall guy even while Marcos and the military were one in tagging him as the lone gunman.

Despite the media blitzkrieg by the authorities in which they parroted Galman as Ninoy’s killer,people believed otherwise. Thus, while government spin doctors continued to ram down the throats of the people that Galman was the assassin, people had the predominant conception that Marcos and the military conspired to do Ninoy in.

With the authorities having lost all vestiges of integrity, a string of anti-government protests against the Marcos regime engulfed the whole country with the nerve center in the Metropolis. These protest actions became a daily fare in the streets of Metro Manila.

The killing galvanized all anti-Marcos forces and innocent pedestrians became inured to traffic jams and bottlenecks. It was like the 1971 first quarter storm repeating itself when students conducted their virulent protests against Marcos who was then serving the penultimate year of his second constitutional term.

These movements gnawed and disturbed the very center of power to a point that authorities were continually on edge even as the military establishment became paranoid. To make matters worse, the economy nosedived as investment was virtually zero with many banks suffering runs as foreigners withdrew their stashed money and absconded abroad. Invariably, these movements marked the beginning of the end for the then mightly and impregnable Marcos regime that culminated in EDSA I where Marcos, his family and trusted lieutenants were ousted out of power on Feb. 25, 1986.

Madame Corazon Aquino was swept into power on the crest of EDSA I. She restored democracy which saw the proliferation of newspapers in various forms,i.e. daily broadsheets, tabloids, weeklies, bi-monthlies and quarterlies. Freedom of speech, which was restrained and virtually curtailed during the Marcos presidency, vibrantly bloomed during the Aguino regime. Specifically, freedom of expression was on its heyday during the Aquino regime in stark contrast to the Marcos regime which operated like a garrison state.

In fact, Aquino seemed to have created a Frankenstein out of such restored freedoms when she once slapped a newspaper columnist with libel for having written a disparaging piece against her. Meanwhile, Aquino survived seven putsches, two of which were by the skin of its teeth, staged by Marcos reactionaries.Fidel Ramos, Aquino’s successor, etched a notable presidency by designing the remarkable economic turnaround of the country during his watch. Infact, it was during his tenure that economic improvement flowered since the dire economic crisis commenced after the Ninoy murder.

Two EDSAs, on the heels of the 1983 Ninoy brutal assassination, truncated the excesses of the profligate Marcos regime and the despicable Erap presidency which was run like a criminal syndicate. Two illustrious women took charge of the government after them and tried to do things the exact opposite of their predecessors.

While Aquino was the icon of democracy, GMA is moving heaven and earth to pole vault the country’s development in league with its more prosperous neighbors. The nation is faced with a slew of multifarious problems which threaten the bedrock of society but the government is to be credited for doing a lot of spadework to overturn things around for the better.

However, charges of gargantuan corruption continues to cast a dark shadow over its meritorious accomplishments. However, the essence of the Ninoy martyrdom is that Filipinos won’t ever take things sitting down when push comes to shove and worse comes to worst. Still in the light of the morass that the country is in, Filipinos are as resilient and forbearing as ever giving credence to his slogan that “Filipinos are worth dying for” even twenty-five years hence.