By Aira Leigh Bagtas | Special to the BusinessMirror
THE Ateneo de Manila University and Rizal Library gave Edita Burgos, widow of press-freedom hero Jose “Joe” Burgos, digitized copies of their newspaper, WE Forum, to thank her for donating the original copies to the Rizal Library.
Joe Burgos was the founder of Ang Pahayagang Malaya (now Malaya Business Insight) and WE Forum, two political newspapers used in the fight against the dictatorship of Ferdinand E. Marcos. Burgos was named one of the World’s Press Freedom Heroes of the 20th Century by the International Press Institute in 2000.
University President Fr. Jose Ramon T. Villarin, SJ, and Rizal Library Director Dr. Vernon Totanes gave the copies to Mrs. Burgos on September 9 at the Xavier Hall Board Room.
Mrs. Burgos was accompanied by Prof. Johann Frederick Cabbab, former dean of the University of the Philippines School of Library and Information Studies. Also present was Joey Lagumen of the Rizal Library, who converted the original newspapers into the microfilmed and digitized formats.
The copies of WE Forum are currently being modified for public use and access.
The first copy of WE Forum was pubhlished on May 1, 1977. It began as a campus newspaper and evolved into a political newspaper during martial law. Since the Burgoses didn’t want to go underground, they had to first come out as a school paper. Its original writers and staff members were students from different schools around the University Belt.
“Mr. Burgos really had the heart for students,” Mrs. Burgos said. “He gathered and trained them to be brave, uncompromising journalists.”
Without any capital, the Burgos family pursued the publication of the paper. Mrs. Burgos said they had to borrow a table and a typewriter for the journalists and even printed their papers using the printing press of Joe’s father, Jose Burgos Sr., a pioneer publisher of community newspapers.
“I was the managing editor. I cleaned up the office, collected sales and used whatever we got from that for the next issue. That’s how WE Forum started. It was very crude,” she said.
The paper received documents and records—proof of President Marcos’s wrongdoings—from the Burgoses’ friends in high government positions. With these, WE Forum researched on Marcos’s fake medals and nonexistent war exploits and wrote an article about it.
Not long after, an angry Marcos gave a speech while holding their paper, saying, “Ipapakain ko ito sa publisher, sa printer, sa editor ninyo,” Mrs. Burgos said.
That article put them in the line of fire so that on December 7, 1982, WE Forum was raided. Though they were tipped off by their friends, the raid itself was a dark experience.
“They took everything,” Mrs. Burgos said. “The printing press, the office, the vehicles—even the rice that was supposed to be for the employees. They broke all the furniture inside the office,” Mrs. Burgos added.
That night, everyone listed in the staff box was arrested. WE Forum was sequestered.
The assassination of Benigno Aquino on August 21, 1983, triggered the inevitable: Joe Burgos torridly began publishing Ang Pahayagang Malaya to inform the Filipino people of the truth about martial law. His staff came mostly from the rank and file of The Times Journal, then published by Benjamin “Kokoy” Romualdez, Imelda Marcos’s younger brother. Romualdez was incensed by the employees’ forming The Times Journal Employees Union that he retrenched wholesale all union officials and members, at least 300 of them.
Mrs. Burgos described martial law as a time of the negative: No one could freely say what they wanted, no one could say anything bad about the government and no one could go out of their homes freely.
“How can you deny martial law when there were thousands of victims of extrajudicial killings? How can you explain the thousands who claimed they were victims? And they have the scars to prove that,” Mrs. Burgos asked. “To say or write that martial law never happened means a denial of history.”
Because Marcos apologists and historical revisionists spread false tales about martial law, Mrs. Burgos encouraged young people to discover the truth for themselves.
“Young people should know there are lies that should be uncovered,” she said. “If they could only use their skills in social media, look for what happened during martial law, they will see that so much power was concentrated in one man and this was used to enrich his family.”
Mrs. Burgos added that she doesn’t blame millennials if they knew very little about martial law. She admitted part of the blame is on the older generation for not writing and passing on what happened during that era.
“I firmly believe Marcos should not be buried in the Libingan ng mga Bayani. He does not deserve to be buried alongside heroes,” she said. “If he is buried there, it will be a symbolic action of not only forgiving, but forgetting what the Marcoses did more than 30 years ago.”
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For her, allowing the burial is just like saying that the Marcoses had clean hands, that the dictator was a hero. “Not only did he not help his country, but was the cause of his country’s being impoverished,” she said.
But, more than the languishing poverty that has haunted millions of Filipinos for years, it was the massive violation of human rights hurled against students, farmers, the urban poor and anyone who spoke against the dictatorship that is the legacy of the Marcos regime.
“My effort is very small; isang tao lang ako,” she said. “But if millions of people rise against injustice in any form, just like what happened after Aquino was assassinated, the Philippines will remain a free and independent country.”