When I wrote about \u201cwhy PNoy copped out\u201d and passed the buck to Vice President Jojo Binay to decide on whether the late dictator should be buried in the Libingan ng mga Bayani (Cemetery for Heroes), I excerpted a portion of Candy Cruz\u2019s April 28, 2011 Facebook message to Aurora Pijuan which was posted in the Internet. Although I do not know her, I found Candy Cruz credible because her \u201clate Dad\u201d was former Ambassador J.V. Cruz, who was a close confidant of Ferdinand Marcos.<\/p>\n
\u201cAu, my late Dad did tell me that those medals were fake. I honestly believe that wily Imee succeeded in sweet talking PNoy. Na bola sya. She’s so good at that\u2014the best politician among them. (She possesses) a combination of a brilliant sense of humour and gift of the gab. I know you’d rather not make a comment on Imee and fair enough. Everyone knows how Imee likes to impress on everyone about her closeness to PNoy during their days in Congress. PNoy sometimes is too good for his own good, and fell for it. She did the negotiating on the Marcos side.\u201d<\/p>\n
I decided not to include the rest of Candy\u2019s Facebook message because it was news enough that \u201cwily Imee\u201d had succeeded in \u201csweet talking\u201d her former House colleague and friend, PNoy, to not reject her personal request to have her father buried in the Libingan. Instead, on February 23, 2011, PNoy asked Binay to study the Marcos request and make a
\nrecommendation by the first week of June.<\/p>\n
At the time, PNoy explained that he did not want his \u201cpersonal bias\u201d to influence the decision. During the 2010 presidential campaign, PNoy expressed his opposition to burying Marcos in the Libingan because of his outrage at seeing his beloved mother, the late former Pres. Cory
\nAquino, humiliated with an invasive \u201cbody search\u201d by Marcos soldiers whenever they would visit his father, Ninoy Aquino, during the eight years he was incarcerated in solitary confinement from 1972 to 1980.<\/p>\n
But there were also other political considerations involved. PNoy wanted the elections in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) to be postponed from August 2011 to May 2013 – synchronized with national elections\u2014to allow his appointed officers in charge (OICs) enough time to enact reforms in that troubled region. The key to postponing the ARMM elections was whether the Philippine Senate would
\ngo along with the bill approved by the House in March postponing ARMM elections.<\/p>\n
The key to the Senate vote lay in the hands of the chair of the Committee on Local Government, Sen. Ferdinand \u201cBongbong\u201d Marcos, who previously threatened to \u201carchive\u201d the bill and allow the ARMM elections to proceed in August as scheduled.<\/p>\n
On Friday, June 3, Vice President Binay released his recommendation to bury Ferdinand Marcos not at the Libingan but in Ilocos Norte \u201cwith full military honors\u201d. On Saturday, June 4, Sen. Bongbong Marcos told the Philippine Daily Inquirer that Binay\u2019s recommendation \u201cseems a
\nreasonable compromise. We just like to bury our father in a way that he deserved.\u201d On Monday, June 6, Sen. Marcos recommended approval of the House bill postponing ARMM elections to 2013 and the Senate approved the bill on the same day.<\/p>\n
So what was in Candy’s April 28, 2011 Facebook message that I excised in my earlier article? Here it is:<\/p>\n
\u201cBut if the inside info that a compromise is in the offing\u2014if not already approved, signed and sealed: full State Burial Honours in Ilocos, and I doubt it if that has changed, it would be such a pity that PNoy had to go through all this song and dance and didn’t simply just come out and say it himself.”<\/p>\n
Candy\u2019s \u201cinside info\u201d was that a compromise had already been reached with PNoy in April that Marcos would not be buried in the Libingan but in Ilocos Norte where the Marcos warlords reign supreme (Imee is Governor, Imelda is Congresswoman and Bongbong is Senator). It was apparently not as important to the Marcoses where the dictator Marcos
\nwas buried as that he be buried \u201cwith honors.\u201d And they got what they wanted. So why all the \u201csong and dance\u201d?<\/p>\n
Politics. If the Marcoses had asked that Ferdinand Marcos be buried with full military honors in Ilocos and PNoy had immediately granted their request, he would have been heavily criticized for betraying his family\u2019s legacy as the “Edsa President.” As it was, by even considering the request to have Marcos buried in the Libingan, PNoy already caught
\nhell from his most ardent supporters in the US.<\/p>\n
By accepting this compromise recommendation of Binay – which he will do this weekend – PNoy will get to appear \u201cstatesmanlike\u201d even if it costs him an ARMM and a leg.<\/p>\n
There is karmic irony in the continued insistence of diehard Marcos loyalists that the late dictator was a war hero. In his book, Waltzing with a Dictator: The Making of American Policy, Raymond Bonner recalled the time when Marcos was interviewed live on American TV by David Brinkley soon after the 1986 snap elections. Bonner recounts that George Will, a conservative American columnist and influential commentator, raised the war medals issue with Marcos noting his claim that Emperor Hirohito had attested to Marcos\u2019 exploits against the Japanese during the war.<\/p>\n
George Will wondered how that could be since \u201cthe only public words by Emperor Hirohito are on marine biology and botany.\u201d Marcos replied that it was in the Emperor\u2019s memoirs. Will, a noted authority on Japan, expressed incredulity\u2014\u201cThey\u2019ve not been published, sir!\u201d<\/p>\n
Will was furious when he then called the White House to inform Pres. Ronald Reagan that their man Marcos was an \u201cinveterate liar.\u201d This criticism of Marcos from the Right laid the groundwork for the Reagan White House to “cut and cut cleanly” its full support for Marcos when People Power challenged his corrupt iron fist rule.<\/p>\n
Who knows? If Marcos had not lied about his \u201cwar medals\u201d, the US might have continued its support for him and he may not have been overthrown.<\/p>\n
(Send comments to Rodislaw@aol.com or mail them to the Law Offices of Rodel Rodis at 2429 Ocean Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94127 or call 415.334.7800).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I wrote about \u201cwhy PNoy copped out\u201d and passed the buck to Vice President Jojo Binay to decide on whether the late dictator should be buried in the Libingan ng mga Bayani (Cemetery for Heroes), I excerpted a portion of Candy Cruz\u2019s April 28, 2011 Facebook message to Aurora Pijuan which was posted in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1380"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1380\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}