FIVE years since the dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr. was given a hero’s burial, we declare our strongest conviction against the comeback of the Marcoses to the highest seat of power in the land.
Marcos is no hero. Not an inch of heroism runs in the veins of a deposed tyrant who plundered the nation by the billions and amassed wealth from the nation’s coffers. Billions of pesos remain unrecovered up to present — burying Filipinos deep in debt and in poverty for generations to come. There is nothing heroic in plunging the country into landlessness and unemployment, which worsened throughout the Marcos dictatorship and stirred great social unrest.
There is no inch of heroism in the thousands of killed, disappeared, detained and tortured under the barbaric dictatorship of Marcos. Those who survived these atrocities live on to endure the sufferings they experienced, which were revived and resurrected each time the Marcoses brag about themselves and claim that the martial law era was an era of progress and development the country needed.
Let all these historical facts of atrocities and realities resound and reverberate louder and clearer. While the Marcoses spent years to rehabilitate themselves back to power, with the post-Marcos regimes’ failures to fully hold them accountable, it did not take long to reveal how the hero’s burial is part of the grand scheme of the Marcoses’ return to Malacañang.
The dead dictator may have been buried, but the horror lives on with the dictator’s son Marcos Jr. poised to snatch the presidency in 2022. The hero’s burial is only the beginning of such attempts, aided by the Marcoses’ alliance with Duterte.
When many of the martial law survivors have not lived on to see this coming, we call on the succeeding generations to take on the task of rejecting the evil alliance of Marcos and Duterte.
We strive to recognize and celebrate the heroism of the victims and survivors of martial law — those who risked their lives and contributed immensely to Marcos’ ouster in 1986. We reject the lies and deception of the dictator’s son who parades himself as a harbinger of “change and progress,” slogans which he just borrowed from his father anyway, while he remains to be made answerable for the sins and crimes of his family.
We assert that the Marcoses be made accountable for all the crimes of plunder, graft and amassing of ill-gotten wealth that they continue to enjoy and now use to prop up themselves in the electoral race. We continue to demand that Imelda Marcos be put to jail for crimes of graft, which is only a minimal punishment for their grand crime of conjugal plunder.
We stand against the perpetuation of state-sponsored attacks against the Filipino people, that were widely used against protesters, dissenters and opposition to the dictatorship, and have become the policy of repression in the regimes after Marcos, up to the fascist Duterte regime.
We oppose how the Marcos-Duterte alliance seeks to amalgamate the whole state machinery, and their cohorts among the ruling classes, to further oppress and exploit the Filipino people, to the desires of their foreign masters.
Finally, as they seek to bury the Filipino people in historical lies, we call on all generations from the martial law era to the present: as we continue to pursue justice and accountability, now is the time to put the dictators and tyrants in the dustbins of history. – CRISTINA PALABAY, secretary general, Karapatan Public Information Desk
