My EDSA story begins in 1983 when Ninoy Aquino was assassinated. It is is a story that continues today. I write about this in my memoir Ransomed by Love.
In June 1983, I decided to return to Manila, after two years in Cagayan de Oro as a Jesuit Volunteer, to study and teach philosophy at Ateneo de Manila. I wanted to know if I was really called to be in that field, which I loved, but I had hard questions about its practicality in front of the intensifying political crisis of the country.
I landed in Manila in June 1983 and began teaching in the philosophy department of Ateneo de Manila. It was, for sure, an honor to be teaching in the same department where I had spent my college years.
Dr. Manny Dy was then the Chair who hired me that summer. But by the time classes started, Dr. Leovino “Doc Leo” Garcia, who had just returned from Europe where he studied in the University of Louvain, took over.
Doc Leo quickly became my mentor and introduced me to Paul Ricouer and Emmanuel Levinas who also became major influences in my thinking.
The truth is, I loved and still love philosophy. I love thinking and thinking about thinking. I also love to teach philosophy and to teach young people how to think and think about thinking.
The eight years I taught philosophy at Xavier University and Ateneo de Manila were happy years. In the latter, I got to teach many brilliant students, several of whom were also politically involved at that time: Fr. Karel San Juan, now President of Ateneo de Davao University; Gisela Tiongson, who is Executive Director of Jollibee Foundation; global labor leader Ambet Yuson, writers Raul Rodrigo (who died quite young) and Ann Mercado; and Milen Baltazar, Ged Valenzuela and Martin Perfecto who joined the Jesuit Volunteers; and many others.
I lived with Doc Leo in an apartment just outside of Ateneo which we called the “House of Being” as originally most of us were philosophy teachers and students.
Al Alegre, a philosophy graduate who worked as a labor organizer, also lived in that house. I looked up to him, aspired to be like him, inspired by his commitment to the poor and excluded. He is one of the most influential persons in my life.
Al’s arrest in 1984, together with Lino Brocka and Behn Cervantes during a protest action against the Marcos dictatorship, led me to the path of lawyering for human rights. Later, Al and I worked together again in the Commission of Human Rights during the tenure of our mutual friend the late Chito Gascon. I also had the opportunity to work with Al’s daughter Gaby who became a climate and environmental justice advocate.
I was living in the House of Being when Ninoy Aquino was assassinated in the airport on August 21, 1983. My memory of that day is still vivid. It was a Sunday and I was at Fiesta Carnival in Cubao, when I bumped into my Ateneo colleague Professor Tina Montiel who asked me if I had heard the news about Aquino.
I immediately went home to the House of Being, where my roommates were gathered around the radio listening to the live coverage of Radio Veritas.
Politically, I was ambivalent about Ninoy Aquino. Although I liked him personally, I also considered him a traditional politician. When word came that Ninoy was coming back to the Philippines after a stint in Boston, I admit I did not care much about it. I vaguely remember that there were attempts to organize a student contingent to welcome him but I did not pay attention to that.
When I heard the news [of Ninoy’s death], I was both afraid and angry. It was clear to me that his assassination was a game-changer.
Yet when I heard the news, I was both afraid and angry. It was clear to me that Ninoy’s assassination was a game-changer. Decades later, based on my journal, I reconstructed that day and the days that followed in a column entitled “The Rains of August.” I share that account below:
“Many of us remember August 21, 1983. We remember the days following Ninoy Aquino’s murder at the airport: the long lines first in the Aquino residence, later in Sto. Domingo Church; the dignity of Cory, the wife, and Doña Aurora, the mother; the dictator, pale and shaken, trying to pacify an angry people; above all, the funeral march ten (10) days after the assassination.
During the press conference upon her arrival in Manila, on August 24, three days after her husband was killed, Cory was defiant: “Ninoy did not die in vain. He was right about coming back here. God will be the one to give me justice; He alone knows the truth; He alone will give me justice.”
Fifteen years later, in a speech during an August 21 commemoration, Cory recalled how she and her family was surprised upon their return. “What happened to us after Ninoy’s death was completely unexpected.” She said it was a surprise for her family to see on the night of their arrival the crowds that had lined up outside their house. “And to think it was even raining that night,” she added.
Cory described people lining up Mac Arthur highway from Tarlac (when Ninoy’s body was brought there) to Pampanga to Bulacan and then witnessing the sea of humanity around the Bonifacio monument: “I knew that a great change was taking place. . . . It took us more than ten hours from Tarlac to Santo Domingo, because eager crowds would stop us, as they wanted to touch the hearse carrying Ninoy’s body. And as you probably know, it took us eleven hours to reach Manila Memorial Park from Santo Domingo Church.”
I joined that funeral march, walking with Doc Leo after attending the funeral mass at 9 AM officiated by the late Cardinal Jaime Sin.
We walked from Santo Domingo to Roxas Boulevard for eight hours as the funeral hearse slowly wound its way to España, Quiapo where the crowds there were the thickest), and Luneta. It was a throng of people from all walks of life, poor and rich, men, women, and children – millions of them. It would go on for another three hours, arriving only at 9 PM at the Manila Memorial Park in Parañaque.
It rained midway to Luneta from Sto Domingo. Hard. Leo and I were soaked. But this did not make us run for cover. Nor did it scare or drive people away. The harder it rained, the bigger the multitudes grew.
We walked for eight hours as the funeral hearse slowly wound its way to España, Quiapo. It was a throng of people from all walks of life, poor and rich, men, women, and children – millions of them…. It rained midway. Hard. This did not make us run for cover. Nor did it scare or drive people away. The harder it rained, the bigger the multitudes grew.
It felt like the rain was sent by God who cried with us as we mourned the death of a hero. People were singing in the rain Bayan Ko and other hymns of struggle. We were all chanting: “Tama na! Sobra na! Palitan na!” We shouted to Ninoy and his family and to each other: “Hindi ka nag-iisa!”
When we got to Roxas Boulevard, the rain stopped and some even imagined seeing a rainbow (or it could have been the colors of the majestic Manila Bay sunset). That was a good omen, I thought.
Before the Aquino assassination, the resistance movement against the dictatorship was already growing. The Aquino assassination accelerated that process and the funeral march saw all the organized and emergent groups come out of the shadows to join the millions who were still unaffiliated, demanding: “Justice for Aquino, Justice for all.” The slogan was embedded in an iconic streamer with images of Ninoy, Edgar Jopson, Macliing Dulag, Juan Escandor, and Bobby de la Paz.
That transformed the Aquino assassination as not about one man but about the many who were killed and tortured by the dictatorship.
Cory and the Aquino family became the representation of a country oppressed, and the dignity and courage they displayed became a mirror of what we can do with courage, faith, and unity.
I welcomed the rains of August. I prayed that it would wash away the evil in the hearts of men, comfort and heal the grieving and suffering, and make this nation kind and happy again. The rainbow of liberation always follows the rain.”
We did not know it then, but August 21 was the beginning of the final days of the dictatorship.
We did not know it then, but August 21 was the beginning of the final days of the dictatorship.
Three years later, on February 1986, the people power revolution, a combined military-civilian revolt, toppled the dictator. The Marcos family was unceremoniously flown to Hawaii by the United States government which ironically had propped up the dictatorship for the longest time.
In other writings, I told the story of the events of February 1986: how at UP, both teachers and students declared a boycott of classes after the fraudulent elections (the teachers declared through the University Senate a historic pass for all students); how, at the College of Law, the Law Student Government organized the UP Law Liberation Forces and sent a contingent to defend Camp Aguinaldo; how at Ateneo de Manila, there was an intense debate about whether to also boycott classes and go to the streets, a debate cut short by the announcement of Ramos and Enrile that they were defecting from the Marcos government.
On the day the Marcoses fled Malacañang, I was at the gates of the palace with Titay and my mother Inday. There was already a big crowd and we could not get in. We went instead to the Limcaocos, family friends whose house was right beside Malacañang, to get the latest news.
On the day the Marcoses fled Malacañang, I was at the gates of the palace with Titay and my mother Inday. There was already a big crowd and we could not get in.
By the time we went home around midnight, news reports confirmed that Ferdinand Marcos and his family had left the country and Cory Aquino was now President of the Philippines. That night, before going to sleep, I wrote this in my journal:
“Marcos and his family have fled. The dictatorship has been toppled. I am happy with this, but why am I not jumping with joy? Deep inside, I know that the struggle for national liberation is not over as Lean Alejandro was reminding us on radio. I am bothered that this was a military revolt, a failed coup, yes, but this means that Enrile and Ramos will stay in power. I am also worried about the progressive movement. Effectively, in the wrong decisions they made in the last year, they have been marginalized. But still, it has been a good four days. It’s time to rest but there is still a lot of work to do.”
One great memory I have of that time is when Jose Maria Sison visited the University of the Philippines two weeks after Marcos fled the country in 1986. With Bernabe Buscayno and two other comrades, they were the last four political prisoners to be released on March 5, 1986.
I was a freshman law student at that time and excited to see and listen to Joma.
Before and during law school, I was a philosophy teacher and doing a masteral thesis on Karl Marx. I had read all of Joma’s writings, taught them in my classes both in Manila and Mindanao.
Politically, then and now, I stand for the broadest united front of the left and the center that would fight not only the dictatorship but which would transform the Philippines to a better, kinder, more just society.
Politically, then and now, I stand for the broadest united front of the left and the center that would fight not only the dictatorship but which would transform the Philippines to a better, kinder, more just society.
That day we saw a visionary and revolutionary leader, who was also gentle and funny, and definitely not a bitter person even after eight years of detention, which included torture and months of solitary confinement.
A year later, during the 1987 elections, Joma was instrumental in the founding of the Partido ng Bayan, which would be the first attempt at a broad coalition of the left, including both national democrats and popular democrats, to participate in electoral politics.
I was a campaign volunteer of Partido ng Bayan, specifically as aide to Attorney Romy Capulong.
That experience revealed a Jose Maria Sison committed to a just peace founded on social justice and the liberation of the masses.
When the US-Marcos dictatorship fell, I was already in law school, finishing my first year. Ironically, I enrolled in law school because I wanted to be a human rights lawyer to fight the Marcos dictatorship.
But when the regime crumbled, I knew instinctively that human rights lawyers were needed even more.
My decision to take up law was preceded by a decision not to join the underground and armed resistance against what I was already calling the US-Marcos dictatorship, the preferred term of the National Democratic Front and the Communist Party of the Philippines.
In 1984, as the political crisis of the country intensified after the assassination of Ninoy Aquino, I became active in supporting the progressive political movements in Mindanao, the cause-oriented groups, and even reached out to people I knew who could link me to underground groups.
In one conversation, I asked a comrade to assist me in going to the countryside first for exposure, and maybe later to join the armed struggle. That person, who was also personally close to me, refused. He said I was too tall (yes), a mestizo (no I was not), and spoke too much English (but I can speak Bisaya). In his words, I would not survive in the countryside and would endanger other comrades as well.
I persisted for a few more months in exploring the armed struggle option until the news of Kampanyang Ahos, the bloody purge in Mindanao of CPP cadres suspected of being military deep penetration agents, reached the urban areas in Manila.
Some of my students and other activists I know were tortured and killed in that purge. I had to help a few of them escape from their comrades.
Kampanyang Ahos made me turn away from the underground and instead look for other options.
Decades later, I had an opportunity to revisit this decision in my early years on armed struggle and joining the underground political movement.
At first, I was excited and hopeful about it. But it became clear again that this option was not for me.
I realized I was more of a lone ranger in politics and could not operate with deception, which is sometimes necessary in politics.
In any case, going back to the 1980s, my experience led me to a decision to enroll in law school and to become a human rights lawyer.
By 1984, I had finished my academic courses, passed the comprehensive exams, and was writing my thesis on Karl Marx under the tutelage of Fr. Joel Tabora SJ who had just returned from Germany. I was also seriously thinking of doing a philosophy doctorate in Europe, possibly in Italy as, consistent with my attraction to Marxism, I was interested in writing about Antonio Gramsci.
At the same time, as the political crisis worsened and with armed struggle no longer an option for me, I was uncomfortable with the limited role of philosophy teachers and scholars. I just wanted to do direct action, and law offered skills for me to do just that.
Today, my EDSA story continues.
Today, my EDSA story continues. Two years ago, I established with former Representative Kaloi Zarate a developmental and social change progressive and public interest law firm – La Viña Zarate and Associates. I do my human rights work with that firm, now consisting a dozen lawyers, which I lead as managing partner and as director of Klima which is the climate justice center of Manila Observatory.
Most of our colleagues were not even born before EDSA (and before EDSA 2 which ousted President. My EDSA story continues with my younger colleagues who will continue to work to make this country a better place years after I am gone. END
The book is available in Shopee.