‘Unrecognized, unatoned, unrepented’ by Marcoses

Odd, while police readily have shot dead 1,105 drug arrestees who were about to draw rusty .38-caliber revolvers, they did not deign shoot to at least incapacitate a “businesswoman” who fired an Uzi submachine gun at them. That happened last week in Manila, as the cops were evicting on court orders Mary Lou Bhalwart-Estrada from a hotel she had misappropriated. Bhalwart reportedly pulled out the firearm from her desk drawer, and shot at the court sheriff and cops – a capital offense, she cannot swear it was in self-defense. All the while she was shouting at them to try and get her.

An Uzi’s maximum effective range is 200 meters, and rate of fire is 600 rounds per minute. The cops were just a few steps from Bhalwart. Fortunately no one was hit. The outgunned cops called in the SWAT, which negotiated to pacify and book her. Is the Uzi licensed at all? Whether or not it is, it must be confiscated for misuse, and Bhalwart charged with attempted homicide. Having decided to let her live, the cops must ensure she stays in jail. If let to post bail, she might commit worse next time around. They’re likely to encounter her again, for she is facing a string of criminal cases.

Many times before, Bhalwart was in the news for land grabbing. Billed as a “businesswoman-civic leader,” she is president of Rhema International Livelihood Foundation Inc. In a report in 2010 her Rhema Foundation wrested ownership of a building in Manila by virtue of digital copies of two land titles dated 1923. One was in Spanish, the other in English. The latter appeared to be a judicial form of the Commonwealth of the Philippines. It had many erasures using correction fluid, an oddity because land authorities normally order a court annotation of corrections, if not reissuance of a new document with no alterations. More than that, there was in 1923 yet no Commonwealth, which was established in 1936 (see http://www.philstar.com/opinion/638439/land-grabbers-defy-senator-malaca%C3%A3%C2%B1ang).

Also in 2010 Bhalwart sued then-senator Manny Villar and congresswoman Cynthia Villar for plunder. Allegedly the couple’s real estate firms had erected subdivisions in Parañaque City on land she inherited from her father. Then they collected right-of-way compensation when the government expropriated part of the land for roads. Bhalwart’s estate supposedly was part of 500,000 hectares in Metro Manila and Southern Tagalog once titled to the Santiagos and later the Rodriguezes. A Pasay City judge once ruled the incredible title as valid. That title supposedly originated from the master deed of the entire Philippine archipelago to one Tallano. Many earlier attempts to grab land from the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City, and the nearby fabled Manotok Estate also cite the Tallano deed.

In 2012 a lot owner in a posh Quezon City subdivision decried the invasion by squatters in behalf of Rhema Foundation. The illegal occupants, backed by the barangay captain, kept chasing away with bolos her workers who were fencing off her property (see http://www.philstar.com/opinion/787319/owners-unfenced-vacant-lots-beware).

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So long as US troops remain in Mindanao, there can be no peace, says President Rody Duterte. The Moros remember the 1906 massacre in Bud Dajo, Jolo, by the US Army. Freedom-fighting ancestors had ambushed a colonial patrol, then retreated to the village up the volcano crater. In counterattack, the superior armed invaders slew every man, woman, and child in sight, more than 600. Corpses were piled up five feet high. The US soldiers then looted the dead for war booty, and posed for photographs. In one of those, shown by Duterte at the recent ASEAN Summit in Laos, a soldier proudly held up his rifle, with one booted foot on the bare chest of a female fatality.

Five years earlier in Samar island the US Army also had massacred thousands of males. Katipuneros had wiped out an encampment of invaders in Balangiga town. In retaliation, the reinforcements were ordered to kill all males aged over 10 years, and transform the province into a “howling wilderness.” About 50,000 reportedly were slaughtered. US soldiers took as war booty the two bells from the Balangiga church. A photograph of blindfolded Filipino boys being led to the firing squad so moved Mark Twain to denounce the atrocities in the colonial war. Few Americans today know about the anti-imperialist essays of the news correspondent and author of “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn.”

At the same time in Southern Tagalog the US forces employed “re-concentration” to flush out the Katipuneros. They would order villagers to flee to the poblacion, then starve the holdouts presumed to be freedom fighters and their families. Tens of thousands of Filipinos perished in Cavite, Laguna, and Batangas, forcing Gen. Miguel Malvar to surrender to end the genocide.

President William McKinley justified the colonization of the newly founded Republic as America’s “manifest destiny” to “civilize and Christianize the natives of the Philippine Islands.” Strange that he would aim for such, when as early as 1611 there already was in Manila a University of Santo Tomas. Harvard College would be founded only 25 years later. To this day the Bells of Balangiga adorn the US Army battalion’s camps in Wyoming and Korea.

“Unrecognized, unrepented, unatoned” by the US, laments Duterte spokesman Ernesto Abella of the painful episodes of history of Filipino-American ties.

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Will the Duterte administration now get it that the opposition to the burial of Ferdinand Marcos at Libingan ng mga Bayani (Cemetery of Heroes) is also due to painful historical memories?

Tens of thousands of freedom fighters were murdered, abducted, tortured, raped, and imprisoned without charges during Marcos’ martial law, 1972-1986. Some of those are narrated in the books “Tibak Rising: Activism in the Days of Martial Law” and “Subversive Lives: A Family Memoir of the Marcos Years.” both published in 2012, 40 years after. Recently about 75,000 victims and heirs filed for recompense under a new law. Earlier 7,600 of them won in a Honolulu court $2 billion in civil damages – yet unpaid – against the Marcos estate. The Presidential Commission on Good Government reports to have recovered $4 billion in cash, art, real property, and corporate assets looted by Marcos and cronies.

Now Marcos is to be glorified, his despotic rule revised as benevolent, and his plunder forgotten. But there will be no peace, for the atrocities remain “unrecognized, unrepented, unatoned” by his family.

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