Remembering Ninoy Aquino
Meeting in San Francisco to form a new alliance of antimartial law groups from across North America, we received the news that the former senator was assassinated at the Manila International Airport. Talks were suspended for a while to enable everyone to listen to the media broadcasts. My wife called from Montreal to say that Canadian reporters were already asking about the reactions of the Filipino community.Since his arrival in the US in 1980 Ninoy had become the leading traditional opposition leader—overshadowing Raul Manglapus who was then head of the Movement for a Free Philippines (MFP). Sonny Alvarez used to act as right hand man of Manglapus; this time he was accompanying Aquino around in his speaking tours. Ninoy with his audacity and eloquence readily won the support of the Filipino expatriates who previously thought only of making a life in the US and gave if at all cavalier assistance to antimartial law groups.
The new alliance formed in San Francisco was independent of the MFP and other groups identified with premartial law political leaders like Manglapus, Alvarez, Raul Daza, Serge Osmeña and oligarchs like the Lopezes—whom pro-Marcos Teodoro Valencia called “steak commandos.” There was bound to be ideological differences between antimartial law groups. The tags “libdems,” “socdems” and “natdems” were not that well defined or understood at the time. But alliances and coalitions were formed. Ninoy seemed open to meeting all groups.
We saw the crucial role of Ninoy in reaching out to the once apathetic Filipino expats in North America. He really had a gift—the gift of gab that can move crowds and the mass. His death roused even those in the community who thought it was an honor to have as guests Philippine embassy people in their June 12 celebrations. Everyone saw a turning point in the struggle against the dictatorship, and the beginning of the end of Marcos’s rule.
It was in a Toronto hotel in 1982 when I was introduced by “brod” Ruben Cusipag (one of the journalists jailed by Marcos) to a wan-looking person lounging at the hotel lobby. Ruben didn’t mention our names, and for a moment Ninoy’s eyes and mine locked. Just about the same time, we blurted, “brod!” Ninoy and I belonged to the same batch (’50) of the oldest frat in UP.
I gave Ninoy a batch of publications including accounts of war in the countryside. While waiting for his turn during the forum, he read avidly the “subversive” publications. That was the last time I saw him.
Back in the 50s he was a staff member of the Philippine Collegian which I then edited. When the Korean War broke out, he was sent by The Manila Times as a war correspondent. He was not quite 18 at the time, but endeared himself to the soldiers of the 10th BCT (battalion combat team) by writing about them in a personal way in his dispatches. In one of his furloughs we asked him to send us special reports for the Collegian. This he did at least twice, and the Collegian became the only student paper with a war correspondent.
I would see him again a few years later (1954) at The Manila Times as a fellow staffer, and I couldn’t quite get over seeing him one evening stride to the city room with a holstered pistol at his side a la Gary Cooper in High Noon. He had just come from his meeting with Huk leader Luis Taruc who surrendered to President Magsaysay’s emissary. Why the side arm? You can never tell, he said. He later toured and wrote about Southeast Asia and was said to have met with the CIA during the Sumatran revolt in Indonesia. His detractors said he was a CIA agent. I remember Ninoy saying he had dealings with the CIA but did not work for them.
He became more of a public figure when he entered politics, first as town mayor, then governor of Tarlac, and later senator of the republic. As governor, he invited a UP group headed by Dr. Ricardo Pascual to set up a UP college in his province, and showed us the old capitol building as possible campus site. The UP branch was set up in the sixties, functioned for a while, and ultimately gave way to another state college or university.
In his public life as senator Ninoy was unstoppable in his quest for the presidency. In a frat alumni meeting held at Wack Wack with the Laurels, President Marcos and his nemesis Ninoy Aquino, both brods, were brought together to smoke the peace pipe as it were. But this did not stop Ninoy in the Senate from delivering his scathing speeches about the Marcos administration. Marcos had his turn during martial law and, after seven years of detaining Ninoy, banished his brod to the US. The frat was divided into pros and antis.
His audacious return to the Philippines under the name of Marcial Bonifacio (in a passport issued by a brod in Taipei), we all thought, was in character—from the time he would ride along in a US bomber raiding enemy positions near the Yalu on the Korean-Chinese border, to his adventures in Indonesia affairs or in Huk-controlled Central Luzon, his relentless attacks on the Marcos regime, enduring seven years of prison and going on a hunger strike, to that moment of truth when he left his family in the US and finally boarded the plane from Taipeh back to the Philippines.
His death or his martyrdom is still shrouded with mystery (and so is the death of his brod, Col. Baltazar Aguirre, killed in his car rammed by a truck reportedly owned by a military intelligence chief; the colonel was said to have a line to Ninoy). When will it all be known?
But as what Ninoy would have quoted, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” I remember this quote from one of his dispatches on the Korean War.
