The Marcos half-century (2)

LAST week, I posited the argument that the past 50 years or so is what you can call “the Marcos half-century,” since Ferdinand Marcos loomed large in the political, economic and cultural life of our nation, a shadow we thought we had escaped but is a ghost that continues to haunt us.

Ninoy Aquino would have been the other consequential leader of the half-century. I remember the great journalist Teodoro Benigno once said Marcos and Ninoy were “the two leaders who knew the Filipino heart and the Filipino soul very, very well.” But before Ninoy could carve his own niche, he became the sacrificial martyr of the Marcos regime in 1983. His funeral, bigger than that of the Father of India, Mahatma Gandhi, turned him into a national hero by public acclamation.