It is September 22, 1972. Defense Secretary Juan Ponce Enrile is on his way home to the posh Dasmariñas Village in Makati on this spookily silent Friday night. His car is part of the convoy which includes his bodyguards. All of a sudden, the nocturnal stillness is shattered. From nowhere, gunfire bursts. It comes from a speeding car that races away. The targeted car, now stationary, is riddled with bullets. It is Enrile’s car. Luckily, he is inside the car of his security aide. And they are unharmed.
[Image above shows the bullet-riddled car of Juan Ponce Enrile]
Moments after, which is around nine, Ferdinand E. Marcos, the president of the land, signs a proclamation that places the entire nation under Martial Law. Marcos has considered the attack on his defense secretary as the last straw that broke the camel’s back. Enough is enough. Hours later, all opposition politicians and press people, including known government critics, are rounded up and thrown into prison. In the wee hours of the next morning, all media establishments are seized and closed. There is a blackout of news as to what is happening all through the day.
[Image above shows the newspaper headline about Martial Law]
Sunday morning is afloat with silent rumors. It is not until three in the afternoon when Press Secretary Francisco Tatad goes on air both on television and radio to declare that Marcos has issued Proclamation No. 1081 which has placed the Philippines under Martial Law.
Enrile goes on to discharge his main task: to implement Martial Law on behalf of his superior, President Ferdinand E. Marcos.
Fast-forward to February, 1986.
It is Saturday, the 22nd of February. Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile and Lt. Gen. Fidel V. Ramos and their handful of close military supporters are holed up in Camp Crame, the sprawling military compound along EDSA in Quezon City. They have just proceeded there after news reached them that they would be arrested by President Ferdinand E. Marcos. They are now holding a media conference where Enrile said he had broken away from Marcos. “I am bothered by my conscience,” he says. According to him, Marcos is not the genuine winner of the just concluded snap presidential polls. In his province alone, he was ordered, which he duly complied with, to cheat presidential candidate Corazon “Cory” Aquino (widow of slain opposition senator Benigno S. Aquino) out of 300,000 votes. “What I am doing today is an act of contrition,” says the 62-year-old Enrile. He says that the alleged attempted assassination of himself some fourteen years ago was stage-managed. It was a fake ambush, in other words. “Had I known martial law would be used to suppress our people, I would not have supported it,” he ruefully claims. Enrile knows what is at hand. Marcos still controls the military. Anytime from now, the forces loyal to the president may come. He knows his end is near. And he is resigned to such fate. Thus, he declares, “The hour of reckoning is here for me now. At least I will die with a clean conscience instead of serving this illegitimate regime. For me, it is more honorable now to die fighting this regime than to die fighting for it.”
[The news about Juan Ponce Enrile's "act of contrition"]
[The news about the falsity of the attempted assassination of Juan Ponce Enrile]
Sunday night, the 23rd of February. Inside Malacañan Palace, the NBC’s “Face the Nation” crew is conducting an interview with the ailing 68-year-old President. “The moment we hit them, they will be wiped out…We are in control of probably 98 or 99 percent of the military,” cockily declares Marcos. He has just declared a state of emergency in light of the revolt of his two top men, Defense Secretary Enrile and Lt. Gen. Ramos, the deputy chief of the armed forces and his relative.
Earlier that day, Marcos has gone on air on television in a special address where he demanded the immediate surrender of the rebels or he would send “the tanks and guns on them to wipe them out.” This has sent shivers to the rebels.
But then, something out of the ordinary happens. The people start to rise. They go out, thousands upon thousands; no, they are millions, and they march toward the military camp where Enrile and Ramos have barricaded themselves. They defy the military forces trying to approach. They rant against Marcos, the dictator, and chant, “Co-ree, Co-ree!” It is the start of EDSA I, the “People Power Revolution.”
In a matter of days, Marcos and his family will fly out of the land. It is the end of his two-decade rule. Cory Aquino is installed as the first woman president of the Philippines.
Fast-forward to September, 2012.
It is a virtual who’s who in the Philippine scene. The affair this Thursday evening is one for the books. President Noynoy Aquino is there. So are former Presidents Fidel V. Ramos and Joseph Ejercito Estrada. Then too is the former First Lady, Imelda R. Marcos, widow of former strongman Ferdinand E. Marcos who died in 1989 while in exile in Hawaii.
[Image above is courtesy of the Philippine Daily Inquirer]
Presently, the man in focus is the elderly statesman in Philippine politics. Juan Ponce Enrile. He is the Senate President. He is 88 years old, yet still sharp and brilliant. The place is in the posh hotel, The Manila Peninsula. It is September 27, 2012. The event is the launching of his memoirs, a 754-page autobiography which Enrile has jointly written with one Nelson A. Navarro, one of those against whom Enrile had issued an arrest order way back in August, 1971, for alleged complicity in the Plaza Miranda bombing in Manila.
President Aquino, son of former President Cory Aquino, is the main speaker of the event. He says that Enrile’s memoirs would “allow future generations not just to explore other perspectives; it empowers (them) to avoid the errors of the past.” Part of his speech is thought-provoking; he says: “We will be held accountable to our Maker for this. But we will also be held accountable to human history, and here the often-misquoted words of Edmund Burke come to mind. We are familiar with the saying, ‘For evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.’ What he really wrote, I understand, was this, ‘When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.’”
The words re-echo to the listeners in the jampacked hall. All good men must associate to fight off the wicked men. Else the good are bound to fall, one by one. It will be a contemptible struggle.
We presently find this contemptible state of affairs before us—the contemptible struggle between truth and falsehood.
What is truth? This was the question asked by Pontius Pilate some two thousand years ago. It is a question which only honest men can answer. Who amongst us can answer what is truth?
For more than two decades, or twenty-two years to be exact, we believed the truthfulness of this remark by Juan Ponce Enrile. He said that his 1972 ambush was a fake one. It was a statement more than a solemn oath; it was a statement Enrile made out of a sense of impending death. He knew how ruthless Ferdinand Marcos was. He knew how wicked Marcos was. He was Marcos’s second hand man. He knew that turning against Marcos was unforgivable. And he knew that by rebelling against Marcos, he was to meet the supreme penalty of death. Which was why Enrile spoke in front of the people, saying, “What I am doing today is an act of contrition.” And so, he asked forgiveness for having taken part in the staged ambush on that fateful night of September 22, 1972. The audience in 1986 when Juan Ponce Enrile admitted the fakery of his 1972 ambush was not only the Filipino people; rather, the whole world heard his admission, his confession.
Yet, now, in his memoirs, Juan Ponce Enrile is telling us the opposite. He says that, and I quote from the news from thePhilippine Daily Inquirer, “the ambush was real and took place in Wack Wack Subdivision where ‘a speeding car rushed and passed the escort car where I was riding. Suddenly, it opened several bursts of gunfire toward my car and sped away.’” The report further says: “Enrile says his political opponents spread word that the ambush was faked to justify the imposition of martial law.”
For twenty-two years, that is, from the time Enrile made his confession, which was “an act of contrition,” using his own words, in 1986 up to the present time, this statement stood out as truth: The 1972 Enrile ambush that precipitated the declaration of Martial Law was fake.
And this truth erased from our consciousness the falsehood that the 1972 ambush was real. A falsehood that had stood in existence for fourteen years (from 1972 to 1986) had finally been cast off to oblivion.
It is a case of truth prevailing over falsehood. Which should be the case. Which should be the natural order of things.
And so, us, the Filipino people went on to live our lives knowing that truth is and will always be with us.
Then, suddenly, something extraordinary springs out. Falsehood is trying to mount a resurrection. Though buried six-feet under the ground for more than two decades, falsehood appears to have gotten back its life and wants to protrude back into the surface; it wants to knock truth out of the picture; no, it wants to “bump off” truth, to efface truth from the face of the earth.
Is this now a case of falsehood triumphing over truth? Has the world turned upside down? Has the world gone insane?
Who amongst us would want falsehood to be victorious over truth?
Would you?
I am reminded of what then Gloria Macapagal Arroyo's Presidential Spokesperson Ignacio Bunye had said way back in 2003 when he warned “rabble-rousers” against any attempt to create chaos on May 1, 2003, the second anniversary of the EDSA II Revolution that toppled former President Estrada from his post. Bunye was reacting to what Juan Ponce Enrile (an Estrada ally) had claimed about the alleged plot which the Arroyo government was planning purposely to cause turmoil and blame it on the opposition. “Look who’s talking,” Bunye said over a radio interview. Recalling that Enrile faked his own ambush in 1972 which led to the imposition of Martial Law, Bunye remarked, “We believe that people don’t have short memories. We know that (Enrile) himself spread the canard of false ambushes and he’s really adept at such practices.”
Could the “canard of false ambush” successfully make a resurrection?
Could it?
