Martial law honcho rewrites history

MANILA
The principal architect and administrator of Ferdinand Marcos’s martial rule in the Philippines is out to revise history. And he might succeed in doing so.
Juan Ponce Enrile, currently the Senate President here, has just written his memoirs. In it, reports say, he washes his hands of all liability for the evils that martial rule wrought on the Filipino people and nation. Like Pontius Pilate during Jesus Christ’s trial, Enrile blames all others but himself.
By the way, I say “reports say” in the previous paragraph because I have no intention of reading this guy’s rewritten history. I am a nobody, but I will not soil my hands by holding this guy’s revised account of what transpired before, during and after martial rule, a dark period in Philippine history where many Filipinos gave up their careers and even lives in opposition to Marcos and his henchmen like Enrile. These martyrs of course include Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, who was murdered at Manila International Airport in 1983. Ninoy is the father and namesake of the current president, Benigno Aquino III.
On the day Marcos imposed martial law on the Philippines, Sept. 22, 1972, an incident involving Enrile helped to precipitate Marcos’s heavy-handed clampdown on civil rights in the country. Enrile, who was then secretary of defense, was ambushed at a swank golf club, his official car sprayed with bullets by unknown assailants. Enrile survived the attack, but Marcos used the incident as a justification for making martial rule the law of the land.
Key opposition politicians, again including or foremost of who was Ninoy Aquino, were rounded up. Publishers of the major newspapers and their senior reporters and columnists were immediately thrown in jail. Other activists were caught in the dragnet too.
Many of the imprisoned politicians, newspapermen and activists would languish in jail. Ninoy Aquino rotted in a detention camp for seven years, but was given a medical furlough to seek care for a weakened heart in the United States. Many Filipinos in North America remember Aquino from those years when, with Raul Manglapus and other activists, they nagged the American government to unlock itself from its unholy embrace of the despot Marcos. I believe Ninoy also went to Toronto to rally the Fil-Ams there against Marcos.
Marcos would rule the Philippines with the heavy hand of martial law for another 14 years, on top of the seven years from 1965 to 1972 when he was an elected president. The day Ninoy Aquino was brutally killed on the tarmac of the airport in Manila was the beginning of the end of Marcos. But it would still take another three years and another Aquino (Cory Aquino, Ninoy’s wife and the current president’s mother, would become President after Marcos) to finally get rid of Marcos. In the now-famous People Power revolt of February 1986, Marcos finally turned tail and scurried off to exile in Hawaii, where he would die later.
And yet today, Marcos’s chief henchman, his defense secretary Enrile, is alive and kicking. He is today busy rewriting history.
Enrile, as martial law administrator, signed all government orders to arrest anyone and everyone that was to be arrested. He signed all orders that padlocked the Congress, newspapers and broadcast stations, and even businesses that didn’t toe the martial-law government’s line. And yet today Enrile claims he was just a minor player simply following Marcos’s orders.
Foremost of his current revisionist handiwork is to deny that his alleged ambush on the day martial rule was imposed was staged by him and Marcos. Yes, it was fake. And Enrile himself said so during the 1986 People Power where he had broken away from Marcos because Marcos at that time had suspected that Enrile was making a move against him and Marcos wanted to pre-empt Enrile’s moves by getting rid of him first. During those times, getting rid of people literally meant killing them.
In his new book, Enrile is reported as saying that the ambush was real and not staged as has been widely believed and, indeed, confirmed by Enrile himself in 1986. Enrile may get away with this act of revisionism if his new account of events in 1986 isn’t contradicted by historians and eye-witnesses.
Here’s an excerpt from Raymond Bonner’s 1987 book, “Waltzing with a Dictator”: “As the defense secretary’s blue Ford with tinted windows, accompanied by a heavily armed security detail, rounded the back of the Wack Wack Golf Course [in Mandaluyong, a Manila suburb], gunmen opened fire. Bullets riddled the right front and back doors of the Ford and shattered the windshield. Enrile, however, wasn’t in the Ford, having decided, miraculously it seemed, to ride in his security car. ‘God saved him,’ Enrile’s wife, Christina, told an American official at the time. But God had had nothing to do with it. Marcos and Enrile had staged the ‘ambush,’ as the final justification for martial law. At 9:00 P.M. the order implementing martial law was signed.”
As far as I know, this account by Bonner of the New York Times, wasn’t denied or contradicted by Enrile at the time. And indeed, reports at that time had Enrile admitting that the “ambush” was staged.
(One of Marcos’s main claims to justify martial rule was that the Communists had gained so much strength that they were a threat to the government and to democracy. In “Waltzing with a Dictator,” author Bonner wonders why, if the Communists were the problem, why was it that the first to be arrested were politicians and journalists, and no Communists?)
Enrile now claims in his new book that the ambush against him was real. What to believe? Either way, Enrile lied. If the ambush wasn’t faked, then he lied during the 1986 People Power revolt, when he said that the ambush was staged. And if the ambush was faked, then he’s lying today when he says otherwise. The question then is, when did Enrile lie?
As Senate President, Enrile presided over this year’s impeachment trial and conviction of then-Chief Justice Renato Corona. For running a tight ship during the impeachment trial, Enrile has won plaudits from the public and is currently enjoying good press.
And so, while he’s smelling like roses, Enrile is taking advantage of his revived reputation to strike at history and rewrite it. And he might get away with it. Filipinos have a short memory and in the haze of time they might have forgotten the real story of Enrile’s complicity with the despot Marcos to inflict one of the darkest periods of Philippine history upon the Filipino people. And the younger generation of Filipinos today know practically nothing about the wickedness of martial rule, which took place before they were born.
So, will Enrile get away with his historical revisionism of erasing his diabolical role in martial rule? Only if we Filipinos allow him.