PROTESTS took place Sunday in Manila over President Rodrigo Duterte’s plans to honor the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos with a state burial.
About 2,000 people gathered in heavy rain to denounce Duterte’s plan to move Marcos’ remains from his hometown in Ilocos Norte to the National Heroes’ Cemetery in the capital, Manila, next month.
“We would be the laughing stock of the entire planet,” Senator Risa Hontiveros, one of four members of parliament to attend the Manila rally, told AFP.
She called Marcos an “unrepentant enemy of our heroes”.
Hontiveros made her statement even as Malacañang said Duterte will not change his decision to allow the burial of the late strongman in the Libingan ng mga Bayani.
“The President’s stance, remains firm: There is clarity in the regulations governing the late President Marcos’ burial,” Presidential Spokesman Martin Andanar said in a statement.
“The President shall therefore remain undistracted and it shall be governance as usual with his full and undivided attention in winning the war against drugs, criminality and corruption.”
Marcos’s family have kept his preserved body on display after he died in exile in 1989 following a popular revolt three years earlier, demanding that it be buried with full honors in the Heroes’ Cemetery.
Marcos was elected president in 1965 and declared Martial Law in 1972, allowing him to rule as a dictator while he, his family and allies enriched themselves through massive corruption and his troops brutally stamped out dissent.
But Duterte, who has styled himself as an anti-corruption crusader, defended Marcos, noting that his father had served in the Marcos Cabinet and he himself had even voted for Marcos before.
Duterte has previously said that he won the May 9 elections partly with the support of the Marcos family who remain influential in their bailiwick in the northern Philippines.
A small protest was also staged by human rights victims outside Duterte’s southern hometown of Davao city, where candles and flowers were placed outside the city hall, television reports said.
The protests Sunday were joined by the Marcos-era victims of torture and imprisonment, as well as by the relatives of the victims of extra-judicial killings that historians say claimed thousands of lives.
Protesters shed tears during the three-hour protest and organizers launched a signature campaign to try to reverse Duterte’s decision.
“I was jailed when I was young. It’s so hard to imagine that he will be buried in the Heroes’ Cemetery,” former Marcos prisoner Danny Tang told AFP.
University of the Philippines professor Ricardo Jose alleged that in order to win war medals for bravery, Marcos faked his service record in the anti-Japanese resistance when Japan occupied the country in World War II.
“There are World War II heroes buried there who sacrificed their lives…. But here’s one guy who distorted things in his favor,” Jose told AFP at the rally.
Duterte spokesman Martin Andanar told reporters Sunday that while the leader allowed protests against the burial plan, he “remains firm” it will be carried out. With Sandy Araneta