Martial law revisited
Forty-four years ago, I lost a job I really loved. Just five years out of college, my life as an adult had just begun. I was a young wife and mother, my older daughter Monica was only a year old. Like most couples starting out, her father and I had plans. We were both happy in our jobs at the Manila Chronicle, and he was lined up at the university where he was teaching for masteral studies abroad. Life was just starting to happen when martial law came down hard on the country and on our hopes and dreams.
I was home with the baby that night, Ed was out on coverage. Getting back past midnight, he said that he met a lot of army trucks on his way home from Roxas Boulevard. Could this be it — the martial law we had been warned about?
In the morning, the newspaper we had put to bed the night before was not delivered. Radio produced only static, the TV showed only endless cartoons — among them Super President. In the last few days, Sen. Ninoy Aquino had issued loud warnings that martial law would be declared by President Marcos. We knew the axe had fallen.
We drove to the office — Ed, Nestor Torre and myself — and found a small group of co-workers standing outside the building. The front door was padlocked, guarded by soldiers. We approached the soldiers to ask if we could get some things we left on our desks the night before. We were ordered to leave.
That was the moment I lost it. The full weight of the warnings about martial law fell on me and I yelled my frustration and anger at its messengers, hurling curses at them and their masters. As the soldiers began to move towards us, Ed and Nestor pulled me back to the car and we drove away quickly, ending up at Tropical Hut supermarket for some panic buying.
Around two weeks before, my brother Jesse gathered us siblings together and told us in strict confidence that he had it on good authority that martial law would be declared soon. We discussed its implications on each of us. At the very least, media and schools would be closely monitored, activists would be arrested wholesale. Business had nothing to worry about. Marcos would need to keep a semblance of normalcy.
Stay in touch and don’t tell a soul, my brother told us. Although I pledged to keep my mouth shut, I told Behn Cervantes, a dear friend, who took the news calmly and thanked me for the heads up.
When Kit Tatad finally came on TV and read the Presidential Decree putting the entire country under martial rule, using the threat of a communist takeover as cover, I realized that journalism as I knew it would be the greatest casualty. With the freedom of information and speech curtailed, Marcos could do what he wanted in total freedom from accountability. And so, the arrests, detention, torture, salvaging, disappearance and other violations of the right to life began with impunity, with the public in total ignorance of what was really going on.
To most Filipinos, the New Society started out well. There was order in society. People followed rules. The crime rate was almost nil. The newspapers that were allowed to publish reported such glowing stories about the accomplishments of the martial law government, it was difficult not to be impressed: food self-sufficiency just months after a devastating typhoon, price controls on basic items, young boys looking well-groomed in short haircuts, curfew that brought everyone home at a decent hour. And the Love Bus! Who could resist those air-conditioned wonders that ferried commuters from Cubao to Makati in style and comfort!
But martial law was boring and tedious. Our political and thought leaders were silenced. Opposition senators and congressmen, independent publishers, columnists, reporters, and the student activists were out of sight. Word soon leaked that most of them had been arrested and detained.
I survived martial law through the kindness of well-placed friends who gave me contractual jobs in and out of government. As a consultant at the Department of Agriculture, I wrote memos to and speeches for Marcos. As a freelance journalist, I got exclusive interviews with President Marcos, Juan Ponce Enrile and Imee Marcos that were published in a major magazine.
It was both exciting and nauseating being up close and personal with the powers that be, but what looked like plum assignments were, to me, momentary distractions. I had a mother and friends who languished in detention, and a country to liberate from oppression. In the 14 years of martial law, 70,000 were imprisoned, 34,000 were tortured, 3,240 were killed, and 390 disappeared.
Thirty years after the restoration of our freedoms, the past is back to haunt us. The ghost of the dictator is seeking a hero’s burial, which the government is willing to provide, purportedly to put closure to the pain of martial law. And the government has made it open season on suspected drug users and pushers, and anyone in the political opposition who dares question the increasingly disturbing body-count in its on-going anti-drug campaign is shamed and persecuted.
It is beginning to look a lot like a return to martial rule, with Marcos as its reconstituted icon. Will we buy it again? Will we again exchange the rule of law for the promise of quiet nights and safe streets, at the cost of the right to life without due process of Filipinos who could very well be your loved ones and mine?
Something to think about — to paraphrase the title of Pete Lacaba’s book of his reportage on the First Quarter Storm — in these days of disquiet and nights of fear.
