FVR: Erap attempted Libingan burial for FM in 1998

MANILA, Philippines - Shortly before he was sworn in as president in 1998, Joseph Estrada – now Manila mayor – had tried to have the remains of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos buried at the Libingan ng mga Bayani, former President Fidel Ramos disclosed the other day.

In early June 1998, a few weeks before Estrada was to be sworn into office, Ramos said he was told that there was digging being done near the rotunda at the heroes’ cemetery around which former presidents are buried.

Ramos said he later received a report from then defense secretary Fortunato Abat that the digging was done apparently on Estrada’s orders.

“I ordered that it be stopped,” he told STAR editors at the Ramos Peace and Development Foundation office in Makati.

“Maybe there was already an agreement (between Estrada and the Marcos family) to have him buried there,” he added.

Estrada could not be reached for comment as of press time.

Ramos said he recently visited the Libingan to see where the burial plot reserved for him as a former president was located. The place supposedly reserved for Marcos was just several meters away, he said.

Ramos was Armed Forces vice chief of staff when he and then defense minister Juan Ponce Enrile led some generals and junior officers in breaking away from the Marcos regime and in calling for the strongman’s resignation.

When Marcos ordered loyalist officers to attack the mutineers holed up at Camp Aguinaldo on EDSA, Manila archbishop Jaime Cardinal Sin appealed on radio to the people to march to the camp to protect Ramos, Enrile and their supporters. Estrada, then mayor of San Juan, remained loyal to Marcos.

Some two to three million people were said to have heeded the cardinal’s call and filled a long stretch of the highway outside the camp. The event would be called EDSA people power revolution.

As defections to the camp of the mutineers swelled, Marcos and his family fled to Hawaii on Feb.25, 1986 on a US military aircraft.

He was to remain in exile until his death in September 1989. The debate over whether to allow his remains to be interred with honors at the Libingan ng mga Bayani began immediately after his death.

Estrada’s declaration of his desire to have Marcos buried and given full honors at the heroes’ cemetery was met with protests even before he assumed office.

“We are Christians and we should respect the dead,” he told the media then. Marcos’ preserved remains are in a refrigerated glass casket displayed in a family mausoleum in Ilocos Norte.

In his recent US trip, President Aquino again spoke against allowing a hero’s burial for Marcos who was widely believed to have ordered the assassination of his father and namesake on Aug.21, 1983.

Aquino had even earlier rejected a recommendation from Vice President Jejomar Binay that Marcos be buried and given military honors – but in the late president’s home province of Ilocos Norte.

An administration ally, Sen. Francis Escudero has also called for a Libingan ng mga Bayani burial for Marcos.

The senator’s late father, Sorsogon Rep. Salvador Escudero III was Marcos’ agriculture minister.