By Teodoro L. Locsin Jr.
At 25, I was jobless. It was a Thursday night; it was late, going on midnight. I always worked late, and only after a hot date. That is how I wrote. No other condition would get the juices flowing. I sat at my father’s desk, pounding away on an Underwood typewriter circa 1930s that, if dropped from one story up, will kill him a horse. Soldiers suddenly came into the building and an officer presented himself to me.
“What’s up,” I asked.
“Communists,” the officer said crisply. “We are here to protect you.”
“Thank you; see any, kill ’em,” I joked. I went back to pounding out the cover story of the Philippines Free Press, “the glory of Philippine journalism,” one famous Asian historian said.
I was writing about “Oplan Double Strike”—the implementing blueprint of Oplan Sagittarius, whose exposé by Ninoy Aquino in the Senate I had covered, fingering Colonel Bocanegra (Black Mouth) ferociously. Bocanegra would arrest him later.
A week or so after Ninoy’s Senate show, the office guards told me that people dressed in Army uniforms had dropped a package, “For Locsin Sr.” It contained a document labeled Oplan Double Strike. Its details included even the pretext for martial law—a fake assassination attempt on a top Marcos official.
My Dad called in Pepe Diokno, Ninoy, Chino Roces, Wigberto Tañada and possibly Raul Manglapus.
“What do we do?” he asked.
They said there was nothing to be done, but grin and bear it.
I added that it shouldn’t be long, because Toyota cars were being repainted Metrocom blue at the Toyota main dealership outside Dasmariñas Village, where we lived. Ninoy said, “Well, I am not going up to the mountains. The Communists will kill me. I’ll just stick around, and see what happens.”
If Manglapus was there, it was there where he said that he would push through with a planned US visit and fight from exile.
“Okay,” my Dad said, “C’est la vie.” Those old guys were cool, although none of them was past 50 then.
I was assigned to do the exposé. So there I was pounding away and then I got bored and picked up the phone. I chatted away with the girl at the other end of the line until the officer stood up, looked at his watch demonstratively and said, “Martial law has been declared,” and slapped away the phone from my face. Soldiers swept into the building. I instructed the machinery to be shut down and the shredding of the Free Press cover. It was already printed. Prophetically, it showed Ninoy in the crosshairs of a sniper scope against a background of black. Save me a couple of keepsakes, I told the men at the plant.
I left for home and told my Dad what happened. He was already on the phone with Bishop Eraño Manalo, who offered him asylum in the Iglesia Ni Cristo compound (though he called again to say the compound had been overrun by troops). Gerry Roxas called, offering to hide him in Bahay Puti. I knew Ninoy was in a room at the Hilton. Later, I would learn that he was told to come down, which he did.
Much later, Chavit Singson asked me, “Why did Ninoy, your Dad and the others go with the military?”
“They were invited. That was how the arresting officers put it. I was also invited, but I told the officer to tell Marcos that I declined the invitation, and they left,” I said.
Chavit looked genuinely puzzled. Chavit and Ninoy were thick as, well, whatever but, thick. Chavit was Ninoy’s muscle.
My Dad packed a few things. At daybreak, there was a knock on the door. An officer said they had come for my father. I told them to wait at the door. Through that door, only presidents and justices of the Supreme Court (SC) had stepped in, and they all had to take off their shoes because my mother had a phobia of germs. I told my father the men had come for him. I hugged him with tears in my eyes.
“Stop that,” he said. “It was a war. Our side lost. Maybe, one day our side will win.”
Of course, his side did not win, ever. They just got old. And I only prayed, not that our side would ever win, but that they would live to see Marcos die or fall, whichever came first. But 13 years later, the latter happened—thanks to a massive peaceful People Power Movement, led by a woman out of legend; and a handful of military officers, led by Greg Honasan, under whose wings the defense minister sought protection—he who let himself to be used as the pretext for martial law and the destruction of democracy.
None of the men in that room in the Free Press, who had fought and gambled everything they cherished—their lives, their liberties, their careers, their printing plants—to protect democracy would ever benefit in the slightest from the resurrection of democracy, which was killed to the cheers of almost all the Filipino people or, as US Sen. Mike Mansfield described our countrymen, “40 million cowards and one son of a bitch.”
Indeed, after a spasmodic show of feigned reluctance, the SC no less legitimated martial law, which had only been an executive action. The Court solemnly ruled that “there was no further obstacle to martial law going into the full force and effect of a law.”
How a fact can become a law baffles the imagination of those smart enough to study at Harvard Law, unlike the locally educated guys in the Court.
“When the guns speak, the laws fall silent,” the Court said, quoting as usual, in the manner of provincial Filipino lawyers, a legal adage which, by the way, American lawyers never do, because Justice Frankfurter (I think it was) said it is declassé to quote an aphorism in a legal brief or judicial decision; e.g., dura lex sed lex, which was actually a stone advertisement for condoms or penis sheaths in Ancient Rome, and sui generis, which is tasteless steamed rice rolled in coconut or banana leaves.
“When the guns speak, the laws fall silent” is precisely when those overpaid jerks from local law schools are supposed to speak up. Chief Justice Taney of the US Supreme Court ruled—in the teeth of Lincoln’s evident bias toward blacks—that blacks are nonetheless property under the US Constitution even if he risked removal and imprisonment; and even though Taney personally opposed slavery and had emancipated all his slaves because he was a Catholic who must see all men as the God who made them sees them equal.
Taney knew that Lincoln would ignore the Dred Scott decision and would respond with war if any state attempted to enforce it. But for Taney, it was what the US Constitution said, and it needed affirming by the Court. The Indian SC struck down Indira Gandhi’s emergency power, and told her to unravel martial law. She never recovered from the slap administered by that manly Court. The only virtue of judicial robes is that you don’t have to wear trousers or even underwear beneath, so much the easier to relieve themselves on their honors.
So at 25, I was out of a job. The company lawyer, Joker Arroyo, stuck me into law school, so I wouldn’t get involved in a losing fight.
The job I lost I got at 17, when I learned that my parents were going to Red China to see for themselves what the US was lying about, according to the pioneering journalist Felix Greene in his book China. But that was not my interest. The way into China was by rail from Hong Kong, which, underdeveloped and miserably poor as it was under the British, was still fun to visit as a lot of Filipinos did—for the food, for the cheap girls, for the trinkets sold on sidewalks, whatever.
“Can I go?” I asked.
“Sure,” my Dad said, “but you have to write about it.”
And I did, the Free Press cover story “Meeting the Dragon.”
I even got to stay in a Red Army camp and did bayonet practice. I finally met Africans there, black people I had never seen, except this one time when a black boy at the dry creek bed in Palo Alto, which was my shortcut to and from Lucky Grocery. He demanded that I give him the Three Musketeers chocolate bar in my hand. I swallowed it whole; he beat me up. And there they were again, learning how to take apart and put back together machine guns. Typical.
The China story written and published, I assumed I could go back to collecting my weekly allowance, which was becoming a categorical imperative. My liking for girls had turned into a veritable blood lust and it cost. One steak dinner then was P75 and when a date of mine wouldn’t touch hers, because—she shrieked—a mouse had run over her foot, I took her plate and ate it.
“It didn’t run over the steak,” she said. She was history. Pity, pretty, too. Chinese girl from Philippine Women’s University.
I asked Dad, “Um, ah, my allowance is late.”
“No, it isn’t,” he said. “Go get it from Aner [the Free Press office manager].” I went to Aner, who said, “Now why will I give you money? You don’t work here.”
And I knew I had been sold into indentured slavery. So there I was, first a proofreader and then a proofreader, and then a copy editor, and a copy editor still. In the Free Press. there was no job description. You did any work given to you. At the same time, I was writing think pieces, editorial articles, and even editorials—the one I did on the Yuyitung deportation to Taiwan detention had the French IPI president telling my father, “He has a perfect command of the imperfect subjunctive.”
Eventually, I covered Ninoy exclusively. No other papers touched him, but he and I had shared interests and passions that my father and the other older stalwarts of the Republic had already outgrown.
When my father was in detention and interrogated by the military, they showed him, one after another, the articles I had written projecting Ninoy as “Superboy” and pushing his political agenda at the expense of Marcos.
My articles were the evidence justifying my Dad’s arrest and detention. The military asked him, “Are you Teodoro L. Locsin Jr., the author of these articles?”
“I am,” he said and the military accepted it, although they knew better. Later, Munding Reyes, the immigration commissioner, clarified for me, “The President said that only one Locsin would be taken in.” Congress was padlocked, and so was the Philippines Free Press, which at the time had the most modern printing press in Asia outside Japan, where we bought it. All that was lost to the silliest venture imaginable: The defense at any price of the democracy of a people who cheered its destruction. All because none of those who undertook its defense had ever asked themselves the crucial question: Democracy, sure, but democracy for what?
Image credits: AP/Olivier Matthys