NOT AGAIN. NEVER AGAIN.

Kicker Daily news reported that Imelda Marcos says she wants her son, Bongbong, to serve the Philippines "like his father."

Omigosh, omigosh. Not again. Never again.

Who wants a return to the bleak winter of human rights in the Philippines that covered two decades?

There will be blood on the streets. The only sound will be the thud of bodies falling after a long day protesting social injustice. And before the blood of the fallen will dry, more fresh blood will flow like a river. Silence will become the norm.

There will be massive hunger despite the opulence of the very few. Bongbong will be fishing into the pocket of the national treasury as if it is the pocket of his trousers.

Everyday, everywhere in the Philippines, everyone will be experiencing the terrors the indigenous peoples in Mindanao and elsewhere are facing right now.

No to Bongbong Marcos!

Imelda says she wants Bongbong to serve PH “like his father”

Posted on October 13, 2015 by Marcus V

Photo Credit: SCMP

Former first lady says she believes her son can reach the top someday
Her son learned a lot from his father, she says
Bongbong earlier said his mother was disappointed in his decision to run only for VP

MANILA, Philippines – Call it a mother’s intuition, but former First Lady Imelda Marcos believes her son Senator Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. has what it takes to become president someday.

“Of course, we can only pray that he makes it so that he will have the privilege to serve the Filipino like his father,” she told GMA News.

She was seen accompanying her son to file his certificate of candidacy on Tuesday but did not go inside the COMELEC building due to the crowd.

Imelda earlier defended her husband’s regime as one of the country’s best eras ever and said her son learned a lot from his parents.

“I want him to to be able to serve the country and benefit the country,” she said. “I think he has the potential there and after all he was 21 years in Malacañang and he saw how his father and mother were dedicated to the Philippines and to the Filipino people, and that was the best time we had in our history.”

The senator himself said his mother was disappointed by his decision to run only for vice president.

“She’s wanted me to become president since I was three years old. Imagine how disappointed she was,” he said.

Nevertheless, the son and namesake of the late dictator also vowed to return the country to its former glory.

In filing his certificate of candidacy on Tuesday, the senator also noted how he was the seventh person to have filed his COC.

“I was told that when I filed my COC that I am the seventh person to file, so the lucky number 7’s still there for us Marcoses,” he said. “I think it’s a good omen.”

The late strongman believed in numerology and frequently pointed to the number 7 as his lucky number.

MARCOS' REIGN OF TERROR WAS REAL. AND EDSA WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT THE OUSTER OF MARCOS ONLY.

A young man says - by way of comment on one of my Facebook posts drumming up support to prevent the return of the Marcoses to Malacanang - that he is not pro-Bongbong Marcos. But what he knows is that Ferdinand Marcos was responsible for a lot of "good things" that happened to this country. He enumerates fly-overs, expressways, transportation, and national roads. I tell him the flyovers -if they are good things- proliferated during President Fidel Ramos' time. SLEX, SCTEX, and TPLEX- those expressways not necessarily "good things" because they happened in the name of privatization of what should be common goods- are recent creations. I ask him what he thinks of thousands of enforced disappearances, murders, tortures, and arrests and imprisonments of suspected and real political dissenters during The Reign of Terror. He says there is a plethora of narratives that make conflicting assertions. He is confused, he laments. So I refer him to credible sites that talk of the horrors of Martial Law. I tell him to read the book, The Conjugal Dictatorship (which my daughter Karminn Cheryl read during her tender years). I inform him that the book was written by Primitivo Mijares who disappeared because of it. I add that Mijares' very young son was tortured then murdered as part of Marcos' reprisal against Mijares for writing an explosive book. I lead him to a site - a discourse on the decision of the Federal District Court in Hawaii holding the Marcoses responsible for human rights violations committed in the name of Proclamation 1081.

I understand why the young do not know about the horrors of Martial Law. The older generation and the system did not do enough to educate them. The education system is complicit in propagating the myth that Martial Law was a bed of roses. The present Secretary of Education- he who is one of the architects of the K-to-12 program that we questioned before the Supreme Court says through a subordinate: "DepEd is not saying that martial law per se is bad. We don’t tell out straight that [it] is good or bad … Our students must make the decision themselves.” Duh. The education system does not encourage critical thinking when it does not provide enough information to help students make a rationale judgment. Well, K-to-12 was designed to create slaves of corporations.

How has the Philippine justice system dealt with the Marcoses and his cronies? Almost nothing. After EDSA, everyone went home and, save for a few, everyone slept, as if EDSA was about ousting Marcos only. It should have been about changing a rotten system, not just of the guards.

Because the people, dead tired from The Reign of Terror, snatched a power nap which evolved into deep slumber after Marcos was haled to Hawaii, they were oblivious to the shadow of darkness creeping back. Many abandoned their activism---although some invoke their invaluable contribution to the anti-Martial Law movement when hit by waves of nostalgia or when they are confronted by a small voice within indicting them for having become part of the infrastructure of a system they once denounced. Some Marcos old guards managed to ingratiate themselves to the ensuing dispensations including the one headed by Corazon Aquino. Remember the lawyers from the original The Firm that helped prop up the Conjugal Dicatorship. Yes, they are still around. The Marcos cronies reclaimed their economic thrones. Eventually, so did the Marcoses. Former First Lady Imelda Marcos is a member of the House of Representatives. Imee Marcos is Ilocos Norte Governor. The only acknowledged presidential son Bongbong Marcos, a remorseless Reign of Terror denier, is a Senator and might become the next Vice-President of this country.

Thus, I am not surprised that young people today think that the Marcos Regime was not that evil because if it was, why do not the textbooks say it? Why is Imelda in Congress instead of in jail? Why are her children in power and not in jail? Why are their cronies back and are amassing more wealth? Why are the personalities who were operators of the engine of Martial Law everywhere in the bureaucracy, in Congress? EDSA was stolen from the people by the very forces it was supposed to eradicate.

And let us not miss this: Who among the present candidates for Philippine President is sterilized from anything Marcos? Candidate No. 1 tried unsuccessfully to convince President Benigno Aquino to inter that wax in Batac, Ilocos Norte in the Libingan ng mga Bayani although during Martial Law, he was a human rights lawyer with the broad resistance movement. Candidate No. 2 cavalierly said that if elected, he would do what Pres. Aquino refused to do. Candidate No. 3 asserted that Marcos had the best intentions when he issued Proc. No. 1081 that plunged the nation in darkness. Candidate No. 4 was raised by parents who, cozy with Marcos, used their celebrity status to enhance the Marcos rule. By some accounts, this candidate has Marcos' blood running through his/her veins. S/he could have joined anti-Marcos student movements during the dark days but s/he did not. Candidate No. 5 was never known to have been involved in the struggle against Marcos even if s/he was old enough to do something. I believe that if you are not a part of the solution, you are a part of the problem. You cannot claim innocence with your silence. Others fell in the dead of night one by one. Indigenous peoples became squatters on their lands. People sacrificed, even their very lives to bring about systemic change. S/he could have at least spoken out. Nada. Now, s/he speaks as if s/he founded The Resistance during that horrible period. "Avoid candidates who want Martial Law to return." Yet, s/he sleeps with forces that terrorize indigenous peoples. Isn't there Martial Law in the militarized indigenous territories? Go to these territories, my friends, and feel the terror that envelopes IPs' existence. Then come back and convince me that Martial Law is too dead to produce a phantom.

Now we are left with only these "Marcosian" people to choose from as we seek to elect a President. We should not nurse illusions that the elections will produce genuine change.

The education and justice systems failed us and the generation/s after us. They operated under the same old structure so entrenched that it could not be dismantled after Marcos was kidnapped by the Americans and brought to Hawaii. Remember, even Pres. Cory's presidency could not punish her husband's killers. Very sad if not tragic. But it is symbolic of how the justice system could still perpetuate injustice as it did during the dark years .

And did our fate as a nation and as individuals change fundamentally in the aftermath of Martial Law? Sure, our gags were removed but in IP territories, dissenters get arrested, disappeared, or murdered for speaking out against the mad rush of corporate vultures to pillage their domains in the name of profit. But was EDSA only about freedom of speech? Was it not about freedom from want and poverty also? Was it not about freedom of choice, too?

The failure of the post-Martial Law system-- the same old wine in a different bottle-- to make the criminals of Martial Law accountable, to banish the Marcoses from government, to ensure that the people will remember the horrors of Martial Law, to soothe the deep and ineffable pain and damage inflicted by The Reign of Terror does not mean that The Reign was fiction. It was real. Martial Law was not fiction. It was real. The Conjugal Dictatorship was not fiction. It was real.

It.Was.Real.

I am so proud that I will be voting for a senatorial bet who fought the Marcos Dictatorship and was imprisoned and tortured as a very young man for his fierce resistance. He never strayed from the cause pushing for genuine and meaningful change in the Philippines as a human rights lawyer, as a member of Congress, as a human being.

I am proud to be voting for Neri Colmenares.

‪#‎VoteColmenares‬

WHY RODY DUTERTE?

...This man, despite his dirty mouth, draws voters and indigenous activists like me. Along with his new "loveteam partner" Miriam Santiago, he is the first among the presidential candidates to notice and denounce the latest atrocity committed against the Lumad: the burning of their evacuation center. He has always championed the rights of the Lumad and has always matched rhetoric with action.

He is a self-confessed killer of people he self-righteously and arbitrarily judged as rapists, murderers, kidnappers, or drug lords, but he has not killed a single activist in the struggle to dismantle structural/national oppression or a single indigenous person protecting ancestral domains. In fact, he has been providing shelter to internally displaced IPs. The other candidates consider IPs invisible - we haven't heard them say anything about the issue even if it is burning right before their very eyes. Two candidates are said to be using the private planes of people connected to abusive mining in IP territory. Any candidate who supports corporate mining on indigenous land is automatically off my list.

So do not judge me, a human rights lawyer and activist before anything else, for gravitating towards this foul-mouthed, dirty old man named Rody Duterte even if my husband, Leandro B. Yañgot, is committed to campaigning for Mar Roxas. With the exception of Grace Poe and Santiago, your candidates have meaner, harsher, and dirtier human rights records. Human rights violations are not just about killing without due process. They are also about neglecting to do your job well or looking at your job as a way to upgrade your burning presidential ambition, resulting in the death of thousands of people in a storm. They are about keeping quiet as a Cabinet official, even if you could have spoken out while DSWD was hoarding and later burying food worth millions of pesos meant for disaster victims. They are about stealing from government coffers millions or billions of pesos that could have gone to alleviating the economic tribulation of the poor. Poverty, hunger, and lack of security in times of disaster are human rights violations, too, as serious as death. At least, death ends suffering but how about those who remain alive?

Friends, if your main criterion in choosing a candidate is his/her position on who should or should not get buried in the Libingan ng mga Bayani, that to me is not enough. Besides, the other candidates may be anti-Marcos and spewing anti-Marcos rhetroic but where were they and their families during the anti-Marcos days? When they got to the helm of power, what did they do to reverse the after-effects of the Marcos presidency? One pandered quite solicitously to foreign interests, and indefatigably worked for the same Marcosian solutions to economic ills - the solutions friendly to hacienderos, abusive domestic and foreign corporations, the elite. One claims to be indigenous but what has he done for indigenous peoples? He ruled a city that benefits immensely from the oppression by corporations of indigenous communities. The big corporations wantonly plunder ancestral domains and pay taxes as residents of his city. His city gets a large share from the Internal Revenue Allotment. His city is rich because of indigenous sacrifices and unabated suffering, among others. The resource-rich LGUs where the IPs are remain to be this country's poorest and they deal with the environmental degradation wrought by corporate pillage. Very Marcosian situation. You are anti-Marcos? How can you support these candidates who continue the same anti-people policies of Marcos?

I am indigenous and I look at the world with indigenous eyes. I am engaged in development work and work with communities. I hold office in my shoes and where they take me, and not in some posh four-cornered room. I look at the world from that vantage. For that matter, I look at the elections with the same eyes. I will vote for a candidate who has been kind to the most oppressed people in this country, who are fighting to protect the country's last living lung (even if he is condescending at times. I have not forgotten that he said, "Let an Ifugao or Badjao run, but please... not an American." I wish I could force him to gargle with the strongest laundry soap.).

And he is not "epal". In fact, he seems to be destroying his own campaign. He exaggerates his flaws and does not talk about the Samaritan acts he did for people in distress. But actions speak louder than words.

So, please stop asking why I, a human rights lawyer, am supporting Duterte who supports a Marcos burial in Libingan ng mga Bayani and I will stop asking why you are supporting one I perceive to be anti-people. With the exception of Grace Poe and Miriam Santiago, the candidates are all killers, all human rights violators, all evil.

I chose the least evil.