If you collected all the hundreds of bodies of suspected pushers and addicts who have died in the drug war initiated by President Rodrigo Duterte and placed them in one pile, they still would not have the power to outrage some Filipinos as one cadaver in an air-conditioned crypt in Ilocos Norte. What is the threat of encroaching “narco politics,” defined as the takeover of the state by drug lords, after all, to people still obsessed with old-fashioned “necro politics,” or the power of politically prominent corpses to determine this nation’s future?
Regarding the approval by Duterte of the immediate burial of former President Ferdinand Marcos at the Libingan ng Mga Bayani, one thing seems clear: the current President is violating no law and is exercising his legitimate authority to have the remains interred there.
As Duterte himself explained it last Sunday, the burial of Marcos’ still-controversial remains is allowed by the military’s own rules. And the military is directly under Duterte, who vowed to have Marcos buried at the cemetery even during the campaign earlier this year.
As a former president and an ex-soldier, Marcos had met the requirements for burial at the cemetery, according to Duterte. And right now, only Duterte can reverse the decision he himself made on the final disposition of the former dictator’s unburied body.
Because Duterte is who he is, he actually challenged those opposed to his decision to take to the streets in protest. And immediately, the anti-Marcos forces—a mishmash of the remnants of the two Yellow regimes and the above-ground Left—realized that they have got a new (and, in their eyes, a bigger) bone to pick with Duterte.
This is no longer about the human rights of drug pushers and addicts or the powerful and wealthy people who make them do the dirty work of the narcotics trade for them. This is a purely political decision by Duterte that strikes at the very heart of the long-running—but increasingly flagging—anti-Marcos movement.
Duterte must be stopped, in their view. But how, when he appears to be standing on his usual firm legal ground?
If Duterte were some other president, I would speculate that he decided to allow the Marcos interment to “bury” the drug war killings issue. Then I remember that Duterte promised to go after the drug syndicates and bury Marcos in the military cemetery—and many other things, besides—during the campaign.
If you consider Duterte’s anti-drug campaign a dare to the bleeding-heart rights advocates whom he detests, his decision on the Marcos burial is his version of a double dare to the people who want to keep the old dictator unburied in order to perpetuate their peculiar brand of politics. And I suspect that if you scratch many of the people protesting Duterte’s campaign against drugs, you will find underneath the jaundiced hide of an anti-Marcos campaigner.
Duterte has shown that he will back down to no one, once he’s decided to go on a course of action that he is convinced is correct. So, will the anti-Marcos crowd take Duterte on, knowing not only that he has the advantage legally but also that the vast majority of Filipinos may be on the President’s side on the matter of burying Marcos and the divisiveness that his being un-interred represents?
Excuse me while I get some popcorn.
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If you notice, the people opposed to the Marcos burial at the military cemetery keep talking about the “message” that Duterte’s decision will send and the “spirit” of various laws that supposedly prevent him from allowing it. They will gladly discuss the “historical context” of the burial because they cannot build an actual case to stop it.
But to me, all of this hand-wringing is nothing, if they do not file charges in court, craft a law in Congress to change the rules (as Leila de Lima has proposed) or hold rallies and physically prevent the soldiers assigned to put Marcos in the ground from doing their job. And the reason they will not do that is simple: they are scared.
The anti-Marcos campaigners fear, for instance, that the 14 million voters who chose Bongbong in the last elections have made them irrelevant—or at least no longer the dominant force that they thought they were still. They are also afraid that the 91 percent of Filipinos who trust and admire Duterte will not lift a finger to support them in what they believe to be their all-important crusades, whether it’s to stop the Marcos burial or to give a peso to pay for Leni Robredo’s legal defense.
They are terrified like Noynoy Aquino was, in the twilight of his barren and vengeful term, that the future generations will no longer see Marcos as evil incarnate—mainly because Marcos accomplished things that two Aquino presidencies never got close to doing. They fear, in the end, being exposed as political frauds who never did anything of real and lasting benefit for the people who were not their relatives, mahjong cronies or firing-range friends.
The fear and loathing of Marcos is as intense in some people now as it was before, long after the dictator died. It’s just that a lot more people think that those who supplanted him are even more loathsome than he ever was.
