DAVAO CITY (MindaNews /21 November) — So, there. It’s done, finally.
What many of us thought to be, well, unthinkable, has happened: the noontime burial of the late stongman in the Libingan ng mga Bayani.
It hasn’t been ten hours since the 21-Gun Salute at the cemetery, and the feeling of being in a Brechtian play still isn’t wearing off.
I’d spent the better part of my Twenties fighting Marcos. Not that I was in the underground movement.[]
But in the perilous fringes I was, writing stories about state-sponsored violence in the countryside, immersing myself, albeit briefly, with the mundane lives of the guerrillas, soaking my brain into the tomes of literature on liberation theology.
As a “church journalist,” if ever I knew one, I’d been frisked on a sidewalk, without warning, by someone I didn’t know, who spoke not a word while staring me down, leaving me shaken and utterly violated at broad daylight while passersby went about their business. Together with colleagues in a taxi, I’d been pointed a gun at, by some plainclothesman who wasn’t twenty feet away, and who’d tucked away his .45 caliber with the nonchalance of somebody paying a jeepney driver.
These were nothing compared to what countless others had gone through.
For simply speaking out against Marcos and his New Society, people were routinely abducted. Many were tortured out of their minds by military upstarts who would later on become VIPs. Many were killed. The Left found itself heavily infiltrated. And eventually, it, too, began killing its own. It was a nightmare.
So when, at the outset of the presidential campaign, Duterte declared he would allow FM’s burial at the Libingan, I balked. My first thought was: What would the victims of martial law say, if they could speak now? The next questions painfully came out of my head like oversized newborns sliding from the wombs of troubled deliveries: Doesn’t Duterte’s decision dishonor the martyrs of the dictatorship? Doesn’t it—or he—mock the memories of the victims and their survivors?[]