Marcos, Martial Law, Mindanao
/I still do not remember peoples' names to this day, and not because of the fecklessness that comes with old age. It's because of a quotidian reminder that our political officers kept pounding in our brain: remember the alias, not the real name, so that if -- and when -- the military arrests and tortures you, you won't compromise your comrades. We embraced this mantra as “activists” (not cadres, alas) of the communist revolution against the "Marcos fascist regime." It became a habit even after Marcos had fallen and I had moved to more politically tolerant climes.
I watched armed Marines patrol the areas adjacent to the Diliman campus of University of the Philippines (UP) the morning of September 23rd while on my way to ROTC training and we were told there was none on that day. I would learn a few years later that the Marines were sent to confiscate the high-powered guns of the guards of the nearby Iglesia ni Kristo compound that early morning (https://opinion.inquirer.net/78812/forget-sept-21). Then my mother told me to come home.
In Ozamiz, I would receive the wound that made the second scar I still bear today. This involved two neighborhood toughies, the brothers Boy and Ric Tecson, who took me into their fold in exchange for playing on their basketball team. Their parents did not have enough money to send them to college, and they ended up being drafted (my mother saved enough to send me to UP). When the Moros waged their war of secession, they were part of the first AFP units to confront the well-armed Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF). Boy was soon killed; Ric survived, but not for long. His unit was moved to Cagayan de Oro to deal with the New People's Army (NPA) "threat," and there, he would die in an ambush. I still feel the pain of losing my first two best friends who died as cannon fodders of the dictatorship's war. I missed drinking tuba and Tanduay with them.
My generation of Mindanawons experienced martial law in different ways. Those in the war zones suffered the most: 50,000 killed, half a million displaced, some scattered to as far north as Baguio, others as far south to Borneo. The first full recounting of the burning of Jolo is The Siege of Jolo, 1974, written by Tausug and Jolo resident Agnes Shari Tan Aliman. She published it last year, 47 years after that fateful event that is seared in the minds and hearts of Tausug and many others from that the historic town. (https://su.edu.ph/alumni-update-may-10-16-2021/) Maguindanaos hid their gongs for over a decade, excavating these precious heirlooms only after they felt that the 1996 peace agreement between the MNLF and the government was holding. In a Maguindanao community in 2010 with my friend Rufa Guiam, a Mindanao State University professor, one of my most cherished sights was that of an elder teaching a child how to beat gongs rhythmically, as shown in the two photos below.
People invent argots and attach new meanings to old ones to make sense of their worlds destroyed by war. "Bob" was a term Americans used to describe the hairstyle of women deciding to leave their homes for work in World War II as the United States sent its army to the European Front. Peasants and communist guerrillas in Central Luzon changed the World War II meaning of hapon (Japanese) to refer to postwar units of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) "invading" their villages. We invented the word evacuateer for Moro and Christian refugees fleeing the war in Lanao del Sur to settle informally in our hometown.
Military abuses made it easier for the rural and urban poor to join the communists. State cruelty also turned priests and nuns into sympathizers of the movement. They would open parish doors to families displaced by military operations and rebels on the run, extend financial support, and form social action and human rights centers to protect their tormented flock. The result was the growth of the Communist Party of the Philippines' largest and most dynamic regional organization, the Mindanao Commission. However, once a paranoid Party started killing and torturing many of its own shortly after Marcos fell from power, the "people" turned against their "vanguard." The NPA survived, but the CPP's urban structure splintered and never regained its pre-1986 strength. From these acts of violence emerged two grotesque political phenomena.
One was the anti-communist vigilante groups (https://www.nytimes.com/1987/04/04/world/right-wing-vigilantes-spreading-in-philippines.html), most of them with millenarian fantasies, a few of them developing a cannibalistic fetish for their victims' livers and ears, and others becoming drug syndicates. The Sagrado Corazon Señor in Initao, Misamis Oriental and the Alsa Masa of Davao City represented the first type, the Manero brothers of North Cotabato the second (http://tingug.com/2018/04/17/remembering-the-danse-macabre-of-north-cotabato/), and the Kuratong Baleleng of Misamis Occidental the third (https://www.rappler.com/newsbreak/iq/177255-parojinog-family-history-kuratong-baleleng/).
National Democratic Front chair Antonio Zumel (left) with human rights leader Larry Ilagan and Soledad Duterte, 1988. (Photo by Rene B. Lumawag)
The other phenomenon is the strange amalgam that is Rodrigo Duterte. Digong is the son of a Marcos loyalist father and a Cory Aquino supporter mother. He was a kanto boy (ne’er do well) who became an angry anti-American (https://www.mindanews.com/picture-stories/2019/07/history-in-photographs-by-rene-b-lumawag1/) and one of the human rights lawyers who defended the left-wing Bagong Alyansang Makabayan. The origins of the Left's avid support for Duterte in 2016 can be traced back to the early 1980s, when Bayan was a major player in the Davao protests. As mayor, Duterte presided over the extrajudicial killings of drug suspects even as he lent his official support to LGBT causes and the health of sex workers. He nationalized his drug war to deadly effect when he became president and unashamedly hailed the authoritarianism of Ferdinand Marcos. "Tatay Digong" also attained a popularity that matched, if not topped, that of the democrat "Tita Cory" Aquino.
KMU secretary-general Erasto "Nonoy" Librado and Partido ng Bayan Cotabato congressional candidate Gregorio Andolana with former Bayan human rights lawyer and then Mayor-elect of Davao City Rodrigo Duterte. (Photo by Rene B. Lumawag)
Mindanawons differed in opinion regarding Marcos' island-wide infrastructure program. Some worried that the AFP would use this road system to coordinate counterinsurgency operations, but others saw it as a giant step in connecting the different hubs that would eventually cohere into one island economy. If the Tausug' and the Maguindanao' held largely negative memories of Marcos, the Maranaos were more supportive of him, thanks to the patronage he bestowed their most powerful warlord, Ali Dimaporo. That warmth, however, has not automatically extended to the present, with Lanao del Sur hedging its bet before going for Ferdinand II in the last election.
Marcos also did a number on Mindanao's economy. With no force challenging him, he sped up the corporate exploitation of Davao del Norte's, Davao del Sur's, as well as South Cotabato's soil-rich plains, turning them into enclaves producing bananas and pineapples for the global market. Marcos sat back as fishing fleets harvested school after school of tuna. Many in Panabo, Tagum, and Davao City argue that the plantations brought them modernity, and General Santos residents contend that the tuna industry placed their town on the global map, thanks to Marcos (https://fnbreport.ph/2642/discovering-the-truths-behind-davaos-banana-industry/). A smaller group disagrees, arguing that these provinces never financially benefited from the tuna, the bananas, and the plantations; in fact, the corporations left the soils and seas depleted. And there are no signs of reversing these two growing environmental nightmares.
The broader political picture, of course, will show a Marcos regime that was brutal and corrupt. But in it are patches of "success" that made many people and communities believe that the dictator brought about a Golden Age. That illusion was easy to dismiss in 1986. Today, it is the prevailing opinion.
I do not wish to end with this fraught recollection. After 1986, I made a promise to myself that my passionate opposition to the dictator must also include making fun of him, his rapacious and vulgar family, and his brutal regime. So, while I will never forget the pain, the fear, and the anger of living through those 15 years, I also find solace and make myself smile with this wonderful description of a fleeing Marcos by the late Nick Joaquin in his book The Quartet of the Tiger Moon: Scenes from the People Power Apocalypse (1986).
The National Artist wrote:
"Not all the media folk who toured the Palace that midnight saw the most pathetic evidence of Mr. Marcos’s funk during his ‘hora de verdad.’ In his bathroom were found his black combat boots, his trousers, and a mess of disposable diapers. Boots, trousers and diapers were all soiled with excrement. In a moment of shock or a fit of panic, Mr. Marcos had shitted in his pants. That he could no longer control his bladder was evident during the campaign, when he traveled with a urinal. It now appears that he had also lost, or was losing, control of his bowels too—and this would explain why the Marcoses had boxes and boxes of disposable diapers. At any rate, it seems all too proper that one of the last things Mr. Marcos did in the Palace was to defile it."
Patricio N. Abinales was a UP freshman when Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law. He was 30 years old, and sitting on the middle of EDSA, along with thousands of others when news reached them that Ferdinand Marcos had fled to Hawaii.
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