By Walden Bello
first posted on inquirer.net
WHEN 216 of my colleagues co-authored a resolution supporting the burial of former President Ferdinand Marcos in the Libingan ng mga Bayani, they probably did not realize that their collective gesture would kick up a tempest. Most of them signed on, I would hazard, out of pakikisama with the moving force behind the measure, Representative Sonny Escudero of Sorsogon, who has bipartisan respect as a senior member and is widely regarded as a “nice guy” by other members of our august body. Had Rep. Imelda Marcos been the one pushing the measure, I doubt that it would have gotten a tenth of the signatures it eventually got.
Contrary to widespread public perception, the resolution has not been passed by the House. It has not even been discussed in the relevant House Committee, and when it is taken up there, it is likely to die an early death. But be that as it may, the Escudero resolution has provoked controversy, given the House an image of being party to a rewriting of history, and is proving to be big distraction from the ills besetting the country. The president has delegated the vice president to resolve the issue, and the vice president is now polling the country by text. A huge waste of energy and terribly expensive, if you ask me.
But there is, in my view, a solution, and that is for a few brave souls to constitute themselves into a special operations team to raid the mausoleum in Batac and liberate the dictator’s mummy from its temporary quarters, where many of the old man’s fake war medals are also stored.
Before I proceed, however, I would like to say that, aside from the dictator’s corpse, I know of only two other bodies of departed heads of state that are still around, those of Ho Chi Minh and Lenin. If I recall right, Stalin’s mummy was disconnected from its chemical preservatives when he fell into disfavor with the old Soviet Communist Party way back. I think of the three still around, Ho Chi Minh’s corpse has the strongest claim to being kept chemically alive. He is after all, the father (or uncle?) of his country, and is an inspiration to many people around the world, including yours truly. Lenin? Well, really, with the old Soviet Union gone, his remains should probably be interred as well--six feet under.
But to return to the topic at hand, I would task our body snatchers with giving the dictator’s mummy a decent burial in some undisclosed site, one that they would not reveal even under pain of torture, which is why only TNL’s need apply. A friend told me that it would necessary to sprinkle garlic on the corpse and drive a stake through where its heart used to be—you know, just to make sure. I would veto that though, since this is all about giving a lost, restless soul a decent burial that it deserves after serving over 20 years as a tourist attraction, not about desecration—though I must admit the possibility of resurrection did cross my mind.
Oh, what I would give to lead such a team! It would be a fitting end to the relationship I’ve had with the old man since he changed my life and made me an anti-fascist activist nearly 40 years ago. Snatching his body would a nice way of saying farewell.
After all, it was the old man that made me embark on direct action as a career. It was he who inspired me to lead a takeover of the Philippine Consulate in San Francisco in 1978, from which I and my partners emerged with our hands up as captives of the city’s SWAT team for a two-week sojourn in the county jail. It was he who made me and my friends seize the Philippine Embassy in Washington, DC, in the name of the new government, on February 26, 1986, during which we got drunk on champagne and passed around cigars to celebrate the revolution and I nearly passed out in the Ambassador’s chair. It was he who, in the darkest days of martial law, drove me, in desperation, to put on my Kermit the Frog costume and, along with Charito Planas, dressed as Miss Piggy, push our way into the International Monetary Fund, saying we were Mr. and Mrs. Ferdie Marcos and we wanted to see the Managing Director to get our hands on our personal share of the latest structural adjustment loot.
One of the things I miss being in Congress is the opportunity to engage in such unparliamentary but politically necessary acts to save our people from being consumed by those devastating events that combine the sublime, the ridiculous, and the evil such as the old man’s being buried in Libingan. The one time I did something in my present incarnation that harked back to my pre-Congress career as a street activist was during a privilege speech last August, where I called Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo a criminal that belonged not to Congress but to the New Bilibid Prison in Muntinlupa. Though that act was a pale imitation of a real street action, but it led to a silly charge of unparliamentary behavior before the House Ethics Committee lodged by a humorless Minority from which my uncomfortable colleagues in the House Majority are still trying to extricate me.
But again, I digress. Since I owe so much of my political formation to the man from Batac, I feel I owe it to his troubled soul to put his earthly form out of misery by having its buried it in a place that will be known to neither man nor beast—the same place, high in the Sierra Madre, where the riches he craved so much—Yamashita’s treasure—also lie. Wherever he is now, even if he is in that special hell reserved for murderous despots, the old man will probably appreciate this, and so will the Marcos family, who will finally be released from the foolish promise they made to him on his deathbed that he would be interred in Libingan since they will now have the perfect excuse, unless of course he reveals the place to them in a s?ce.
I am tempted and might still be crazy enough to lead the team of body snatchers myself. It would probably earn me a jail sentence, but who knows I might luck out and find GMA in the cell beside mine (though, God forbid, not in my cell!).
*INQUIRER.net columnist Walden Bello is a member of the House of Representatives and a senior adviser of Focus on the Global South, a policy research institute. He can be contacted at waldenbello@yahoo.com.
