Bongbong Marcos now wants us to forget Edsa.
But we simply can’t. Memory stakeholders are an integral part of the natural order of things. There are millions of Filipino voices who can retell the tumultuous days of February 1986. Edsa was the kind of event that makes you remember where you were at that precise moment.
Yet even first person witnesses do not only comprise memory stakeholders. Those who were born after Edsa now have access to memory markers such as written narratives, memorials, and archived periodicals of the day. One such impressive memory stakeholder is Project Gunita started by young human rights advocates who were not even born during martial law. They have digitized volumes of publications from the so-called mosquito press, in a bid to counter Marcos Jr.’s historical distortionism.
First person memory stakeholders can rest easy that the toil and sweat of documenting the Marcos martial law and the four days of the People Power Revolution will remain in public memory long after we have departed this world. The problem is not short memories. It is the Marcoses who see remembering as their problem, not ours.
One such memory stakeholder is Teresita De Lima. This year, she will turn 74 and lives in tranquil retirement in the eponymous town beside Lake Buhi in Camarines Sur. In February 1986, Teresita was a young 34-year old reporter of the Philippine Daily Inquirer. Her boss then was the outspoken former detainee Louie Beltran. The publisher then was Inquirer’s original, the pivotal anti-dictatorship campaigner Eugenia Duran “Eggie” Apostol.
When the stretch of Edsa began to teem with people after the call of Jaime Cardinal Sin on February 22, Teresita kept to the newsroom because that was the standing order of Beltran to her. “He did not want me to go to Edsa because he wanted me alive.” Beltran told her that there were many Marcos loyalists who could go after her head after she had covered the Comelec count of the snap presidential elections.
As we all know by now, that Comelec count ignited the fuse for what was to come. It was February 9, 1986. Computer technicians were hired for the 1986 Comelec National Tabulation Project at the Philippine International Convention Center. Suddenly they detected a discrepancy between the computer tabulation reports and the tally board figures. Their immediate reaction was one of indignation and a betrayal of trust. The computer technicians, numbering 35, walked out of the PICC plenary hall because they did not want to have anything to do with a count that had become spurious.
Teresita de Lima witnessed the dramatic tension of that walkout. Even before that turning point, she had been doggedly writing stories about the many preceding events, from the Comelec to Cory Aquino’s legal team. For the latter, her sources were Rene Saguisag and Joker Arroyo. The two had tipped her about an impending implosion that turned out to be the walkout of the 35. She was in the right time and the right place.
And so for the rest of the four days at Edsa, Beltran had kept Teresita at the newsroom, which was located at the Port Area, in a building owned by Inquirer incorporator Betty Go Belmonte.
Life in that newsroom was tense. Beltran had to take medicines to calm his nerves. They all thought that anytime the state’s forces would raid them and close the publication down, then bring them all to detention.
“But I was fearless. Not just out of my character or that I had believed in the public service I was doing. I was ready to die if the Marcos forces would have had me killed. I was ready to offer my life. The only thing I feared was leaving my children.” Teresita had stayed in Manila only to do newspaper work. She had left her children to the care of her parents in Buhi, Camarines Sur.
“The newsroom had only a skeletal staff because many were at Edsa for stories.” In fact, she was the only reporter left in the news desk. Beltran had assigned her to receive all the phone-in reports. The landline phone was the only means of communication. Teresita’s work was to key in all the reports on the typewriter. “I had a stiff neck doing all that.”
She remembers her colleagues who were at Edsa to cover the events there: Joey Nolasco, Bing Formento, Rickie Beltran, Fe Zamora, and her friend Belinda Olivares Cunanan – now that it is safe to mention names after 39 years.
The only time she had left the newsroom was when she had gone to Club Filipino for Cory’s oath taking earlier that day of February 25. It was a gift to her from Rene Saguisag – “He insisted that I witness Cory’s oath taking at Club Filipino.”
After the Marcoses fled that evening, Eggie Apostol asked her: “Tess where do you want to go? Inquirer will give you an all-expenses 3-day vacation to Hongkong or go home for a visit to Bicol.” She chose Bicol. “Of course I chose Bicol. I wanted to embrace my children.”
Today she recalls a warning from Louie Beltran said to her before the snap elections of February 7. “He told me in front of Eggie: ‘Hay naku De Lima. Walang mangyayari sa mga balita mo. Hindi papayag si Marcos na matalo sa election.” (Hey De Lima. Nothing will happen to your news. Marcos will not allow himself to lose the election.)
She recalls replying to the editor in chief: “Malay mo magmilagro.” (Who knows, there might be a miracle.)
And the rest is the history that Teresita de Lima retells to the present generation of Filipinos. Marcos Jr.’s forgetting is a work in dire pointlessness.
The views in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of VERA Files.