On Sept. 21, 1972, Ferdinand Marcos Sr. declared martial law to save the Republic.
More than half a century later, our beloved Republic still needs saving – and mostly from ourselves.
This is the Philippines today – our leaders are locked in rabid politicking, mostly to bring down archenemies and consolidate power ahead of the 2025 and 2028 elections. Our lawmakers are spending their time and resources on hearings, one after the other, to raze the House of the Dutertes to the ground, forgetting that just a while back they were quick to turn a blind eye on such scandals and atrocities when Rody Duterte was in power. Our laws are being weaponized against political foes or enemies of the state while lawmakers continue to enrich themselves, with no qualms at all in ostensibly displaying their wealth – from million-peso bags to luxury timepieces.
The Dutertes, meanwhile, are plotting their next moves to counter the ongoing political persecution against them.
All these while a great portion of the population are struggling to survive amid rising prices of basic goods. For many Filipinos, it really is a struggle to put food on the table these days or even to just go home on a rainy Friday evening.
I write this on the 52nd anniversary of martial law, which was signed on Sept. 21, 1972 but announced to the public two days after, on Sept. 23.
Martial Law was a dark period in our history and while it no longer exists today, many vestiges of that era are still present – people clinging on to power, curtailment of civil liberties, stark income inequality, lavish parties, etc.
Forgetting curve
#NeverForget has been the battlecry for decades after the martial law years and yet, and yet, a big part of the population has forgotten or has chosen to forget what that period did to our country and our people.
The forgetting curve hypothesizes that memory retention declines over time. This means that a memory is erased when there is no attempt to keep or retain it.
Then there are also the effects of trauma. Studies have shown that victims of trauma tend to dissociate themselves from the experience and, in the process, forget or bury the memory somewhere beneath the untouched recesses of one’s heart.
Whichever it was, there’s no denying that indeed, a great big part of the population has forgotten that once upon a time Ferdinand Marcos Sr. put the country under martial law, supposedly to save the Republic from communist insurgency. The result was a military regime which was marked by a wide range of human rights abuses.
There are individuals who disappeared and to this day, were nowhere to be found. Amnesty International counts 70,000 cases of individuals who were imprisoned, mostly without arrest warrants and charges. Roughly 34,000 were tortured at the hands of the military and more than 3,000 extrajudicially killed.
The biggest proof that Filipinos have opted to forget about Martial Law is what happened 36 years after. On May 9, 2022, the only son of Ferdinand Marcos Sr. was voted back in power as the country’s 17th president.
How did we get here? Perhaps, the masses have become tired of the same elite-centered governance that followed after the 1986 People Power Revolution; tired of all the political bickering between the devil and the deep blue sea and tired of all the colors that did nothing to improve their lives – yellow, red, blue or what-have-you.
But it is also because the people did not see transitional justice and social reconstruction in our country post martial law. It’s the reason they just kept voting back to power the key players of that dark period in history.
Memorialization in the country remains wanting, even to this day, primarily because it is a highly politicized process and it is largely dependent on the will of those in power. In contrast, in Europe, memorialization or the act of honoring victims of atrocities is so strong that dark periods in history such as the Nazi rule have become a huge part of the people’s consciousness.
Transitional justice
Memory floats in our minds but it is etched in our hearts by objects and by new experiences that immortalize or honor such memories.
It is not enough that we commemorate martial law every Sept. 21. We must honor its victims through memorialization and a whole-of-nation effort toward transitional justice.
Our contemporary response as a nation is important to move forward into the future.
President Marcos, if he wants to redeem his family’s name, must seriously put an end to human rights violations and curtailment of civil liberties.
He can start by abolishing the abusive Duterte-era National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict which has been responsible for many arbitrary arrests of student activists who ended up facing trumped up charges.
Moving forward with peace negotiations with all rebel groups is also a must to hopefully reach a peaceful resolution to armed conflicts.
Marcos must also bring to justice the perpetrators of Duterte’s bloody drug war, especially with the ongoing hearings in Congress revealing the key players of that war.
This outbreak of justice fever, a term coined by The STAR columnist Butch Dalisay, must mean so much more for Filipinos than just a break-up of TeamUnity.
Marcos Sr. declared martial law to save the Republic.
Today, under the leadership of his son, Bongbong Marcos, our Republic still needs saving.
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Email: eyesgonzales@gmail.com. Follow her on Twitter @eyesgonzales. Column archives at EyesWideOpen on FB.