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By Joel C. Paredes, Philippine Center For
Investigative Journalism
Editor’s Note: The first part recounted the
factors that led to Benigno Aquino Jr.’s decision to come home
from the United States and his assassination allegedly by one of the
soldiers assigned to escort him out of the airport.
Last of two parts
Sen. Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr.’s body was
finally brought to the Aquino residence at 25 Times Street in Quezon
City shortly before 6 a.m., August 22. As suggested by his sister,
noted film director Lupita Kashiwahara, he laid in state in his
bloodstained white leisure suit. Thousands upon thousands filed past
his coffin—a simple, open wooden casket draped with a Filipino
flag—in eerie silence.
Ninoy’s widow Corazon and their five children
had yet to arrive from the United States. Lupita said her brother
had intentionally left his family in Newton, Massachusetts, because
of the threats to his life. “He was so concerned with his children
more than anything else,” she told reporters.
I was pleasantly surprised that on Tuesday—the
day Ninoy’s family was scheduled to land in Manila—the
Journal’s banner story was my report on the opposition’s call
for a non-violent political struggle. The press conference had been
held late Monday afternoon, and I thought that since it was coming
in late, it would be relegated to a less prominent spot in the
paper.
At the press conference, Laurel, speaking as
president of the United Nationalist Democratic Organization (Unido),
had challenged the government to work for “genuine national
reconciliation founded on justice that Aquino had advocated.” The
opposition also criticized the lack of security for Ninoy.
By Wednesday (August 24), however, the Journal
was back to giving Malacañang stories priority on the front page.
That day’s banner story: “Foreign media urged: Be fair.”
President Ferdinand Marcos had appealed to the
foreign media to be more fair and objective in reporting on the
Aquino assassination. The strongman was quoted as saying, “For the
best interests of all concerned, this attitude of objectivity will
better inform the people and tone down any partisan passion.”
Above the banner was an “umbrella” on how
the Washington Times said in a Monday editorial that jumping to
conclusions over the killing of Ninoy “would be as stupid as the
crime itself.”
Surge in protests
Malacañang was reacting to the sudden surge in
street protests, with tens of thousands of people paying homage to
the slain opposition leader. It even saw it fit to black out the
news in the major dailies about the protests and the throngs
visiting the dead Ninoy.
It took Ang Pahayagang Malaya, a hard-hitting
fortnightly alternative paper, to come out with the headline
“Nation mourns.” The lead was, “Benigno S. Aquino Jr. now
belongs to the people.” The story went on to detail how thousands
of mourners “came from all over the Philippines to claim him as
their own, these solemn, grieving, dejected Filipinos, at the Aquino
residence . . . where the body of the martyred former senator lies
in state.”
The Journal put the story of the arrival of
Ninoy’s family in the inside pages on August 25, two days after
Cory and her children landed in Manila. It recounted how Cory Aquino
refused the VIP service offered to her and the kids, and noted that
like the other passengers, the Aquinos lined up to have their
passports checked.
The widow did not utter a word. Only the
youngest Aquino daughter Kris, then 12 and the only one in her
family dressed in white, spoke up, telling a reporter that her
mother could not answer questions because she was tired from the
long trip.
Sharing the page with that story was my piece on
the transfer of Ninoy’s remains from the family home to the Santo
Domingo Church in Quezon City. I reported that the Aquino family
would lead the three-kilometer march that would start at 8 a.m. that
day.
A million mourners
Close to 800,000 to a million people joined what
would later be called the “people’s march,” but that story was
downplayed in the mainstream media. So, too, were those on the tens
of thousands who lined up the streets when Ninoy’s remains were
later brought to his hometown in Concepcion, Tarlac. The mourners
shouting, clapping their hands, and waving yellow ribbons as they
watched the caravan of some 300 cars.
Instead, most of the crony papers like the
Journal focused on the five-man commission of jurists that Marcos
had formed to investigate the assassination, and the president’s
offer of a P500,000 reward for the arrest of the perpetrators of the
crime.
Subsequent main stories included those on the
alleged plans of subversives to attack military and police
installations, as well as on the report of Major General Olivas—which
no less than Marcos announced—confirming the identity of the
alleged assailant, Rolando Galman y Dawang, 33, a native of Zaragoza,
Nueva Ecija, but who later transferred residence to San Miguel,
Bulacan.
President Marcos said he was prompted to make
the announcement himself “because of speculations in media and
other sectors of the country about Aquino’s killer.”
Crony, ‘mosquito’ press
Marcos was apparently irritated that while his
political operators had effectively gagged the mainstream media on
the protests, the so-called “mosquito press” and the independent
radio commentators were having a field day reporting the public
perception that the strongman had a hand in the killing, if not
being the “mastermind” himself.
It was not that we in the mainstream media were
sitting on our hands. Just like other enterprising journalists who
covered the wake, for instance, we got the reactions of the
political opposition and prepared feature articles on how people
from all walks of life were paying tribute to the slain opposition
leader. But those stories never saw print.
The people saw through the stories in the crony
press. They knew the reports about planned attacks by subversives
were part of the Palace’s desperate efforts to sow fear, to
dissuade angry mourners from attending spontaneous protest actions
that were organized initially by leftist groups, but were attracting
even members of the elite.
By then the “parachutists”—the foreign
journalists based in Hong Kong and as far as the United States and
Europe—had descended on Manila, covering the spontaneous
demonstrations. They reported to the rest of the world that the
public outcry was no longer just justice for Ninoy Aquino, but also
for the resignation of President Marcos and the restoration of
democracy. For us in the local press, it hurt that people were now
relying on the foreign media for news about our own country.
We also became targets of the public’s
outrage. As my team and I prepared to return to Manila after
covering the convoy to Tarlac, a group of young men blocked our
service vehicle. The men hit our Land Cruiser and demanded that we
report the “real news,” that we all get out of the vehicle. I
told the driver and photographer Johnny Villena to just stay inside,
while I did the “negotiating.” Luckily, the youths allowed us to
leave after I asked them to give us a chance to do our work as
newsmen. But as we drove away, we could hear them shout, “Sa totoo
lang [Be on the side of truth]!”
If only we could. On the eve of Ninoy’s
burial, we confronted the desk about the local press being seen as
villains and pawns of the powers-that-be. We wanted to believe the
desk was sympathetic to our plight, but we knew our paper was
getting instructions from the Palace and that the Presidential News
Desk was screening all our articles and deciding which could come
out the next day.
History turns a page
When we heard that the funeral procession would
be a protest march from the church to the Manila Memorial Park, we
from the local press agreed to cover the event as a group, in part
because we knew we had become unpopular with the people and may well
be lynched by a furious mob. But no harm came upon us and we were
proud to have been part of the millions upon millions of
rain-drenched Filipinos who walked the entire 26-kilometer route to
pay respect to Ninoy Aquino.
Malaya publisher-editor Jose Burgos estimated
that more than seven million people escorted Ninoy, whose coffin was
placed on an elevated platform on a 10-wheel truck bedecked with
yellow chrysanthemums and sampaguitas, to his final resting place.
The day after the funeral, Malaya carried a piece by Burgos in which
he observed, “Unity, yes, the stricken sea of humanity which paid
homage to Aquino was obviously capable of demonstrating, but
yesterday, it was a sense of unity that could no longer be
suppressed but rather had to be poured out defiantly, albeit
peacefully.”
Malaya columnist Antonio Ma. Nieva also wrote,
“I know, as surely as I believe in fate, that history turned a
page that day in a way that inexorably altered the lives of 42
million Filipinos. The day is huge and vast, and awesome in a very
real sense, and I try to etch it in mind: The vast throng jammed, in
some areas 50 abreast, along a 10-kilometer stretch at the heart of
Manila, the sober faces, the unspoken grief.”
My paper mentioned the funeral as well, but only
briefly. It was in the lead paragraph of a page-one story that was
spread across three columns. The piece, with the headline
“Lightning kills 1, injures 9 at Luneta,” began: “An overseas
job applicant was killed and nine others were injured yesterday when
a lightning bolt struck an acacia tree where people were perched to
get a better view of the funeral cortege of former Sen. Benigno
Aquino Jr.” It was accompanied by a photo—not of the funeral
march, but of the victims of the freak accident.
It was a “scoop” by the Times Journal and
its sister tabloid The People’s Journal. Nobody else bothered to
report the incident.
The piece was a tragedy in itself. After 25
years, all I can tell people is that I did not write it.
Editor’s note: Joel C. Paredes comes
from a family of journalists and had worked with various newspapers
in the Philippines and abroad. He had also served as president of
the Brotherhood of Media Unions in the Philippines and co-founder of
the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines.
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