The Aquino legacy

This year, we commemorate the 37th anniversary of the People Power Revolution which happened on Feb. 22-25, 1986.  Eight years ago, my wife Neni Sta. Romana Cruz and I published a book, The Aquino Legacy: An Enduring Narrative, a collection of essays focusing on the legacy of the Aquino family.

I have decided to reprint the Preface which was primarily written by my wife because the passages are so relevant, especially today. It has been edited for this column because of space constraints.

We feel that this is especially critical these days as history is in serious danger of being rewritten and altered by individuals who seek a kinder and more heroic portrayal of themselves in the memory of a nation. This has greater relevance today as the dark period of martial law is being dismissed and glossed over as an epoch that must now be forgotten. We feel this urgency even as some quarters urge us to “move on,” as if the remembrance of things past and sordid and painful posed an obstacle to our progress and maturity as a nation.

Many of us bear the scars of martial law – some more deeply than others. Many are burdened with traumatic stories that need to be told over and over again – for healing comes with every retelling.

These essays are compiled especially for the millennial generation or Generation Y, those who reached young adulthood around the year 2000. This is the generation that may only know Ninoy and Cory as the parents of Kris and PNoy or the faces on our currency bills. The group that may see the EDSA People Power Revolution as a peaceful and festive everybody’s party on the traffic-choked highway.

This millennial generation, as future leaders and opinion makers of the land, must never forget the deplorable and unlamented years of martial law. This generation must never allow these to happen again if it truly values the meaning of democracy.

The lives of Ninoy and Cory Aquino may appear more like magical realism than stark reality, for truly, how does one weave such a drama even with the most imaginative conjuring?

There is the charismatic opposition freedom fighter assured to be president of the land, suffering years of isolation and detention, then returns home from exile, only to be swiftly assassinated at his homecoming on the tarmac of the airport that now carries his name. There is the non-politician widowed wife forced to carry on her slain husband’s anti-dictatorship struggle, and emerges as the president after the ouster of the dictator. And of course, there is their only son, as reluctant a presidential candidate as his mother, who becomes the country’s fifteenth president ten months after his mother’s death.

How can one family be fated to endure all that? But such are the incomprehensible ways of fate and destiny.

The Aquino Legacy: An Enduring Narrative has a deliberately chosen subtitle that attempts to capture the degree of untold pain and suffering that the family has lived with over the years, never quite gone even with the public commendation that was to come decades after. Their saga is more than timeless, their story as a family meant to be documented and remembered in history books.

We as a people are often justifiably accused of being bereft of historical memory. Tragic mistakes of the past are unnecessarily repeated. It is not that today’s youth and young professionals have forgotten what the People Power Revolution was all about – they never knew enough about it in the first place.

We do not mean to deify Ninoy and Cory Aquino as they themselves were the first ones to admit how mortal, how vulnerable, how flawed they were. We were not privileged to have met Ninoy, but Elfren had worked closely with President Cory in Malacañang for five years. Neni was the first Filipino journalist to sit down with Cory for an interview upon her return from Boston in 1983 (thanks to Eggie Apostol of Mr. & Ms. Magazine who sent her on that “big” assignment), and continued on to have close to two dozen one-on-one extended interviews and many private conversations, besides.

Let this book allow today’s millennials to approach the fascinating tale of the Cojuangco-Aquino family with greater interest and curiosity, and less trepidation about cold, hard-nosed historical facts. Straightforward historical accounts and commentaries have been juxtaposed with human interest essays, many of which have not seen publication before. We felt that the inclusion of the interviews with individuals closest to Ninoy and Cory would offer a fresh and a different perspective on them as revered national figures – and of PNoy as the highest official of the land.

We offer this book to the youth, to the millennials, for them to understand, value and preserve the hard-fought historical gains in the restoration of democracy in 1986. It is a continuing myth that it was a miraculous, instant four-day revolution that overthrew the dreaded dictatorship. For the long, arduous struggle that climaxed in the much-publicized EDSA People Power Revolution actually began years back, in 1978, with the organization of LABAN (Lakas ng Bayan or People Power), Sen. Ninoy Aquino’s political party, and the noise barrage for the Interim Batasang Pambansa elections. It may come as a rude awakening to the millennials that the freedom they enjoy today was not available to us during the dark years of martial law. There is no disputing that the struggle for democracy is unfinished and continues on today – a struggle that every citizen must partake in, to achieve a free and more equitable society for every Filipino.

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