August 21, 2016 marked the 33rd anniversary of the assassination of Senator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, Jr. at the tarmac of the national airport that now bears his name. That event triggered a complete overhaul of the existing political order three years later when his widow Corazon Cojuangco-Aquino seized the presidency in the guise of a revolutionary government.
As expected, the cable television channels featured documentaries on the so-called 1986 Edsa People Power Revolution which installed Mrs. Aquino to power, and about Ninoy and his wife. A number of newspapers and magazines also featured materials about the dreadful event at the airport, and recollections from people close to the couple. The recollections consisted of personal opinions about the assassination and praises for the Aquino couple, completely ignoring facts which put the Aquino widow in a bad light.
At the end of the day, it was the same old story. Almost stupefyingly, these anniversary materials all portrayed President Ferdinand Marcos as the villain, the dictator, the crook, the hated leader who was forced to flee the country when the crowds at Edsa swelled.
The surge in anti-Marcos propaganda takes place not only every August 21, but also during each anniversary of the Edsa revolt, the death of Mrs. Aquino, the death of President Marcos, and the day Marcos placed the Philippines under martial law.
Details of the assassination story are available in many books and periodicals. Repeating them in this essay will only be surplusage. Instead, other, more important concerns must be raised.
President Marcos created a commission headed by then Supreme Court Chief Justice Enrique Fernando to investigate the assassination. Even before the Fernando Commission officially convened, Mrs. Aquino did not hide her distrust in the panel. With Mrs. Aquino’s blessings, her friends in the anti-Marcos camp like ex-Senator Lorenzo Tañada filed a petition in the Supreme Court questioning the authority of Fernando as the head of the commission. Soon thereafter, Fernando resigned from the commission, and the case became moot.
Finally, when then Assemblyman Arturo Tolentino, an acknowledged constitutionalist and a staunch Marcos ally in the Batasang Pambansa, revealed that the creation of the Fernando Commission was legally infirm, the commission was dissolved.
Surprisingly, the Aquino camp claimed authorship of the demise of the Fernando Commission.
The second panel to investigate the assassination was the Agrava Board, headed by then retired appellate court magistrate Corazon Juliano-Agrava. Even if it’s creation had no legal infirmity, and its panel members were not identified with the administration, Mrs. Aquino still refused to recognize the impartiality of the board.
In time, four of the five members of the Agrava Board came out with a report implicating several officials in the highest echelons of the military establishment, including General Fabian Ver, the chief of staff of the Armed Forces of the Philippines. Almost overnight, Mrs. Aquino and her allies praised the board’s majority report.
Even Mrs. Aquino’s own brother-in-law, Agapito “Butz” Aquino, offered to raise funds, through his August Twenty-One Movement, for the construction of a prison to house the military personnel implicated by the board.
From the way Mrs. Aquino comported herself, however, it was certain that if the Agrava Board submitted a report exculpating the military from any involvement in the assassination, Mrs. Aquino would have denounced the group. That is to be expected, of course, but then the record indicates that Mrs. Aquino distrusted the Agrava Board from Day 1.
What is the point here? By refusing to recognize the impartiality of the Agrava Board from the start, Mrs. Aquino assured herself of an excuse to denounce the board if its ultimate report would not have been to her liking. To paraphrase a local saying, Mrs. Aquino was paddling her canoe simultaneously on two rivers.
For reasons undisclosed, the foregoing was not reported in those pro-Aquino anniversary documentaries and feature reports.
The president is the head of the executive department of the government, as well as the commander-in-chief of the AFP. That means the president has control over all the intelligence establishments of the state, including the National Bureau of Investigation, the Philippine National Police, and the investigation units of the AFP.
When Mrs. Aquino held the presidency from February 1986 to July 1992, she did bother to exercise her power and prerogatives as president to unearth what the Agrava Board was unable to disclose—the mastermind of her husband’s assassination.
Mrs. Aquino’s sycophants and historians may suggest that she was too above-board to abuse the powers and prerogatives of her office, especially when she had to demonstrate to the public that she was the opposite of her predecessor, whom she identified as abusive.
That’s a lame excuse. It erroneously assumes that as the widow of the slain senator, Mrs. Aquino has the option not to ressurect a sad chapter in her life.
To state the obvious, unmasking the mastermind of the Aquino assassination is important not only to Mrs. Aquino and the Aquino family, but also to all Filipinos. The fact that the top political opposition leader of the Philippines was gunned down in broad daylight, at a public airport, while under military escort, and in the presence of local and international media, is enough to vest in the public the right to know who planned Ninoy Aquino’s assassination.
For many, Mrs. Aquino’s inaction when she was president is very disturbing.
Like his mother before him, President Benigno “P’Noy” Aquino III never bothered to ascertain, during his incumbency, who organized his father’s assassination. P’Noy’s inaction and disinterest are both surprising and unnatural. Under ordinarily circumstances, the only son of a murdered father is almost certain to do everything in his power to find out who was responsible for the murder, and to keep on searching for the truth until he is successful, or until he himself is dead.
This, too, was not reported in those anniversary documentaries and feature reports.
