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By Johnna Villaviray
and Ric Puod, Senior Reporters
Former senator Benigno Aquino Jr. jetted to
Manila 20 years ago today, confident that the worst that could
happen was to be arrested, paraded as a political turncoat and then
sent to limbo inside Fort Bonifacio.
An astute political mind rivaling that of his
ailing archenemy, Ferdinand Marcos, Aquino was convinced that the
dictator was aware that a high-profile killing would plunge the
country into a deeper political and economic quagmire.
Aquino was dead wrong.
Seconds after arriving on a noon flight from
Taipei, he was felled by a single bullet at the back of the head.
His supposed assassin, Rolando Galman, was gunned down just as
immediately by men of the Aviation Security Command (Avsecom).
It was 2:30 a.m. in Boston when the family
Aquino left behind first heard of the news. A reporter from
Japan’s Kyodo News agency called, asking for confirmation about
the shooting. The call was followed by two more from other news
agencies.
“I was hoping and praying that all these
reports were false,” recalled former President Corazon Aquino at a
recent forum organized by businessmen.
A fourth caller, Congressman Shintaro Ishihara
of Japan, confirmed that her husband had been shot dead.
“It was so shocking. The initial reaction was
shock because we were so far away. It did not feel real until we saw
images of it on TV,” recalled Kris Aquino, who at the time was
aged 12 and the youngest of the former senator’s five children.
“My mom told us to pray.”
A religious family, the Aquinos always resorted
to prayer when faced with adversity.
In the political turbulence that followed
Aquino’s murder, his widow assumed his role as a moral anchor for
the opposition, leading prayer rallies to ensure that public shock
and frustration did not deteriorate to street violence. And when she
took power in 1986, she habitually sought God’s and her
husband’s guidance before making policy decisions.
The family also tried not to cry.
Kris recalled that it was part of her and her
siblings’ training to always remain strong owing to the unusual
circumstances of her father–he had been a war correspondent at 17,
the youngest mayor of the Aquino’s hometown in Tarlac, who
eventually became the biggest threat to the Marcos regime.
“When he left, there were no dramatics. Hindi
naman kame teleserye na me bilin-bilin pa,” said Kris, whose foray
into the entertainment business, colorful personal life and
gregariousness have made her the most controversial of the Aquinos.
The Aquino family life had always been
intertwined with politics–husband and wife came from political
clans enjoying the stature of the Marcoses in Ilocos Norte and the
Romualdezes in Leyte–and revolved on the promising politician’s
career.
His son, Benigno Aquino III, acknowledged that
family decisions, although a consensus, ultimately followed his
father’s position. “We would discuss, but in the end agreed on,
what he decided on,” said Benigno III, or Noynoy, who now serves
as a district representative for Tarlac.
The family first lost Aquino in 1972, when he
was arrested and convicted of subversion by a military court. In
1980 he was allowed to leave detention in Fort Bonifacio, his home
for most of the martial-law years, for a heart bypass in the United
States.
Aquino’s murder ended the family’s blissful
three-year self-imposed exile in the suburbs of Boston.
Within four days the family was back in Manila
and right smack in the middle of an opposition movement, stretching
the limited patience of the Marcos regime already beset with
insurgency, a contracting economy and the waning confidence of its
chief patron, Washington.
Kris described her family’s sojourn in the
United States as “God’s way of giving our family a chance to be
a family,” acknowledging that she and her siblings were arguing
against their father’s decision to return to Manila and to his
detention cell.
“I didn’t want to come back. I wanted to
become an American citizen. But he said it really isn’t possible.
He said: ‘The Philippines is my home,’ ” she explained.
Kris was set to start school in Manila that
September but was supposed to travel with her father. Aquino
eventually decided to leave her youngest daughter behind because he
was traveling with falsified documents.
The preparations he made for the trip to Manila
didn’t seem as though he expected death upon arrival, although he
apparently entertained the possibility of an attempt on his life.
Aquino wore a bulletproof vest just before China Airlines flight
C811 touched down, joking that he was not protected enough to escape
a bullet in the head.
What Aquino probably didn’t foresee, nor did
anyone, was the immensity of the cult following that Aquino’s
death generated–office workers shredded telephone directories into
confetti, which they showered on anti-Marcos rallies, teenagers wore
yellow T-shirts sporting Aquino’s face and children waved their
hands into a letter “L,” signifying Laban, the main political
opposition party. All that culminated in the 1986 People Power
Revolution that sent the Marcos family into exile in Hawaii.
None of that, however, including a retrial that
found 16 policemen and soldiers guilty of the crime, helped settle
the mystery surrounding the double murder. Conspiracy theories still
abound.
Noynoy is entertaining the possibility that his
father’s murder could be a “favor” initiated by people hoping
to get in the good graces of Marcos, but Kris said the thought that
people outside the strongman’s immediate circle were behind the
murder was unthinkable.
“Nagbubulag-bulagan tayo [We’re turning a
blind eye to the mastermind]. We’re kidding ourselves if we
pretend not to know who’s behind the murder. And I really think
the person who’s behind it is dead,” she pointed out.
Time helped the family rationalize Aquino’s
killing, although they share the same enmity toward the men the
Supreme Court sentenced to life imprisonment.
“I hate their guts, sorry. I don’t care if
they’re suffering, because they killed my dad,” Kris said.
Former President Corazon Aquino, a devout
Catholic whose administration’s values centered on forgiveness and
national reconciliation, was as reluctant to absolve those found to
be directly guilty of her husband’s murder.
But former senator Juan Ponce Enrile, who served
as Marcos’s defense minister during the 1983 murder, said
President Aquino had no one to blame but herself.
“She did not exercise her prerogative as
President to bring forth justice. So if the family are complaining,
they should not, because they reneged on their obligation to bring
out the truth,” Enrile said.
Enrile acknowledged that he has his suspicions
about the brains behind the murder, but hinted that he did not
suspect Marcos.
“I could not talk directly to the President
[Marcos], because he was isolated. He had just had a kidney
operation and so I had to talk to him over the phone,” Enrile
recalled his first conversation with the strongman after Aquino’s
killing.
Enrile was one half of the coup that helped
install Aquino’s widow at Malacañang in 1986, but has since then
gone his separate way. He now belongs to the political opposition
and is hounded by suspicions that, if only after the fact, he had
knowledge of what happened on the tarmac of the Manila International
Airport on August 21, 1983.
The country has gone through a lot since 1983,
and so has the Aquino family, which has been rocked by a series of
personal difficulties and triumphs made public fare owing to the
public character assumed by its matriarch, only son and youngest
daughter.
But amid all that, Aquino’s murder remains the
biggest tragedy to hit the family.
Noynoy said it was “not a conscious
decision” not to personally supervise the retrial of the Avsecom
men, but said his mother was trying to balance the interest of the
family and the demands of the country and the economy.
He added that they were careful against
perpetrating injustice in their quest for the truth.
“We could be victimizing certain people [in
our quest for justice], and then you have another cycle of
oppressed, who in turn will rise up [and be the next oppressors]. It
will be a vicious circle,” Noynoy said.
The Aquinos’ decision, although criticized,
helped the nation recover from the excesses of authoritarian rule
and restored democracy in a country that had chafed under martial
law.
Kris said her father’s death stood for hope,
which is now the theme of the family’s commemoration of his 20th
death anniversary.
Unlike in previous years when they kept the
remembrance an affair exclusive to the family, the Aquinos are
hosting revelry at The Tent in Fort Bonifacio, where the former
senator was jailed between 1972 and 1980, to acknowledge 20
nongovernmental organizations continuing Aquino’s work.
Kris acknowledged that her family still bear the
burden of her father’s death but that they find consolation in the
thought that her father “died the way he would have wanted to
go.”
“The greatest tragedy would have been, he
always said, if he got run over by a Boston taxicab and had a
meaningless death,” she said.
“The way he lived his life culminated in a
hero’s death, which, I’m sure, was the way he would have wanted
to go.”
(To be continued)
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