Hoy, Enrile, I accept your challenge, liar

In imposing martial law on Sept. 21, 1972 Ferdinand Marcos invoked the presidential powers vested on him by the 1935 Constitution. He then proceeded to mangle that Constitution. He closed down the Legislature and gagged the Judiciary that the fundamental law set as co-equals of the Executive. He suppressed basic freedoms – of speech, choice, and of the press, to assemble, and for redress of grievances. He went on to rule by decree for 14 harrowing years. During that one-man rule at least 3,240 were sworn to have been killed and 7,000 jailed and tortured for being political dissenters. That is according to Amnesty International.

The soul of any Constitution is the Bill of Rights. Article III, Section 1 of the 1935 Charter stated: “No ex post facto law or bill of attainder shall be enacted.” Simply put, it forbade retroactive criminalizing of any action. No law may declare a person guilty of crime and punish him without trial.

Yet that is what Marcos did in Presidential Proclamation 1081. By generic self-legislation he outlawed youth, labor, farmer, professional, even church-based organizations, for supposed “subversive” aims. No objector was tolerated. He linked nationalists and liberals, democrats and moderates to the armed rebellion of the communist New People’s Army. Thus did he justify the arrest and imprisonment of non-conformists without court warrant or hearing.

With that backdrop I accept the challenge of Juan Ponce Enrile. He taunts people to name anybody who was killed or jailed for political or religious beliefs under martial law. Belatedly I have learned about his online video with Bongbong Marcos Jr. His is a crude attempt to fool millennials 46 years after Marcos Sr. imposed harsh military rule. Enrile architected that dictatorship for Marcos.

I was one of the thousands rounded up and imprisoned after martial law was imposed. I was then a 17-year-old college sophomore. Held incommunicado from my parents, I was punched, kicked, clubbed and deprived of sleep for nights in a row inside Enrile’s army camp. At one point, on the night of Dec. 30, Rizal Day, I along with another college student was made to dig my own grave. It was part of routine psychological pain infliction. Months later I was released along with several political detainees. It was because, we learned later, certain western parliamentarians were inquiring about the human rights violations under Marcos’ dictatorship. Unfortunate others were transferred to years of “rehabilitative” military prison.

The jailing of youth activists was through Enrile’s fiendish counsel. He boasted in his video with Bongbong that Marcos had tasked him as justice secretary to prepare the legal grounds for martial law. To him can thus be blamed in part the mangling of the basic law of the land. He then administered that military rule as defense minister of Marcos. There is blood on Enrile’s hands.

National leaders have criticized Enrile for lying. Ex-senator Heherson Alvarez recounted the killing of his brother Marsman, and Rep. Edcel Lagman the abduction of his brother Hermon, both by Marcos thugs. Former Senate president Aquilino Pimentel Jr. reminded Enrile of his political imprisonment several times for opposing Marcos. In the annals of history was the 1983 assassination of opposition leader Ninoy Aquino at the Manila International Airport while in military custody. Countless others – millennials and elders – voiced indignation against the Enrile-Bongbong online video.

Ironically it was during Enrile’s Senate presidency in 2013 that a law was passed to recompense the families of victims of martial law atrocities. That law, which he signed, is the basis for the updated figure of 11,103 victims killed, tortured, and jailed under him.

Some say that Enrile at age 94 might be senile. In 1972 one of Marcos’s justifications for martial law was the ambush days before of Enrile’s convoy. When Enrile broke from Marcos in Feb. 1986, supposedly because fed up with Marcos’s abuses, he confirmed that the ambush was staged. Recently in his commissioned biography, he claimed that it was genuine. That is not senility. That is outright “manufacturing of facts, lying to the people, manipulating of events,” that he tries in vain to dispel in the video.

At the start of his break from Marcos, Enrile cried to the public that he would be killed. Cardinal Jaime Sin rallied Filipinos to surround the camp and defend him from Marcos’s reprisal. Enrile owes his life to the people. The least he can do is stay loyal to them, not to his former patron.

Marcos’s martial law atrocities were accompanied by his plunder of the national wealth, estimated at $10 billion. Before and after his death in 1989, the government has recovered at least a third of it. Martial law victims who filed suit in the Honolulu court continue to discover hidden Marcos estates and looted artworks.

Enrile at 94 can still be held culpable for crime. He’s on trial for multi-million-peso plunder of state funds through pork barrels during his Senate presidency. He is out on bail only on humanitarian grounds of agedness.

The Tagalogs have a saying: “Mabuti pa ang linta, kapag nabusog sa pagsipsip ng dugo ay kusang bumibitaw.” Some people’s greed is insatiable.

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