Part 13
Aquino and her allies in the oligarchy had a lot more enemies
IT would not be surprising, thus, if one day victims of human- rights violations will also seek to attach her estate and those of her surviving family, including Hacienda Luisita, for compensatory damages similar to what was done by supposed Marcos victims of human-rights violations.
That there were more human- rights violations during the Aquino regime could perhaps be explained this way: Corazon Cojuangco-Aquino and her allies in the oligarchy had a lot more enemies than the Marcoses had.
With her enemies growing the longer she stayed in power, she accepted as a “gift” a $75,000 bulletproof Mercedes-Benz 560 SEL in November 1986. It probably wasn’t illegal at the time, for she still enjoyed dictatorial powers and could have legitimized the acceptance of the gift, even if it was not necessary at all since the Marcoses left behind bulletproof vehicles in the presidential garage when they were forced into exile.
With social discontent starting to brew as a result of the patent incompetence of a vengeful Cory administration, the street protests started again to grow.
The Mendiola massacre
IT was in 1987, or a few months after the Edsa revolt, that members of the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP) started a vigil at the Ministry of Agrarian Reform (MAR) to press demands for agrarian reform. They set up crude tents, clearly intending to stay until their demands were heard.
Soon, they were preventing MAR employees from getting in and out of the compound.
On January 19 KMP leader Jaime Tadeo, a member of the Constitutional Commission who had refused to sign the new Constitution that would be submitted to the people for ratification that February, arrived to seek an audience with then- Agrarian Reform Minister Heherson Alvarez. Tadeo was, however, told that Alvarez would be available the next day yet.
When the dialog pushed through the next day, all Alvarez could promise was that the KMP’s demands would be brought to President Aquino’s attention. The following evening, Alvarez advised Tadeo to just wait for the ratification of the 1987 Constitution and for the government to implement the charter’s provisions on agrarian reform.
But Tadeo had already rejected the Constitution, believing that Congress would be dominated once more by landlords and oligarchs who were certain to oppose any radical agrarian reform changes.
On January 22, 1987, the KMP-led protesting farmers left the MAR compound to march to Malacañan Palace. Along the way, they were joined by other leftist organizations: the proletarian Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU), the Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (Bayan), the League of Filipino Students (LFS) and the urban poor organization Kongreso ng Pagkakaisa ng Maralitang Lungsod (KPML). By the time they got near the Mendiola Bridge late in the afternoon, they were some 15,000 strong.
Waiting for them were units of the Philippine Constabulary, the police and the Philippine Marines, under the overall command of Major General Ramon E. Montano, chief of the PC/INP’s Capital Command, and Task Force Commander Col. Cesar Nazareno (whom President Aquino would later name director general of the Philippine National Police).
According to the Citizen’s Mendiola Commission (as cited by the Supreme Court on March 19, 1993), the body created to determine the facts of that day’s bloody events, violence just broke out spontaneously as the protestors and law enforcers face off even before a dialog could be arranged. There was an explosion and then came empty bottles and rocks hurtling through the air.
As the marchers breached the police lines, gunshots rang out, prompting the activists to disperse and run toward Claro M. Recto Avenue. But the gunshots continued, as the government forces pursued protesters, all the way to Liwasang Bonifacio on the other side of the Pasig River.
After the smoke had cleared, 12 marchers lay dead. Sixty-two others were wounded, 12 of whom, fortunately, sustained only minor injuries. Several of the wounded subsequently succumbed to their wounds (thus, accounts vary as to the number of fatalities, from 12 to 17 to 19).
The protesters sued the Aquino government and the military officers involved in the dispersal operation before the Branch 9 of the Regional Trial Court in Manila. On May 31, 1988, Judge Edilberto G. Sandoval held that inasmuch as the impleaded military officers had been charged in their “personal and special capacity,” the government could not be held financially liable by the complainants.
The lawsuit against the government failed to prosper because the State invoked its immunity, which led to the dissolution of the Presidential Commission on Human Rights (PCHR) following the resignation of most of its members, led by former Sen. Jose W. Diokno (one of Ninoy’s most-admired political leaders).
The PCHR commissioners resigned in protest over the referral of the investigation of the Mendiola Massacre to a new body, the Citizens’ Mendiola Commission. They felt that the PCHR was not only stripped of its jurisdiction; the seeming loss of confidence in the PCHR had also irreparably damaged its credibility.
The Mendiola Massacre was a message written in blood that the peasants cannot intimidate the Aquino administration. President Aquino faced a credibility crisis: to many, the sincerity of her agrarian reform program, in the wake of the Mendiola Massacre, depended on the fate of Hacienda Luisita. The nationalist Renato Constantino wrote of President Aquino in June 1987: “She dangled the probability of a sweeping land reform but has not taken concrete steps to show how this would apply to her family’s Hacienda Luisita.”
To be continued
To reach the writer, e-mail cecilio.arillo@gmail.com.