Review of Rigoberto Tiglao's "Debunked: Uncovering hard truths about EDSA, Martial Law, Marcos, Aquino, with a special section on the Duterte Presidency”

                                                        

Rigoberto Tiglao can boast of a distinguished career in métiers ranging from being a prolific writer, a respected journalist, a foreign ambassador, and a Philippine presidential chief of staff and press secretary. 

“Debunked: Uncovering hard truths about EDSA, Martial Law, Marcos, Aquino, with a special section on the Duterte Presidency” is a 2018 compilation of Tiglao’s compositions that were published in Philippine newspapers in the period extending from March 2010 to January 2013. 

In these pieces, Tiglao offers himself as a mouthpiece of counterpoint to the historical sacred cows of what he derisively refers to as the “Yellow Cult.” This moniker covers the followers of the late Benigno (Ninoy) Aquino Jr., his wife Corazon Aquino, and their popularizing and commemoration of the 1986 EDSA I revolt that toppled the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos.

While for millions of Filipinos EDSA I has been envisaged as an restorative article of faith for Philippine democracy. For others of Tiglao’s cynical ilk it has been rendered as a “divisive” and undeservedly consecrated historical phenomenon, a spent force in any case. By part-veracity, part-misrepresentation, and part-subjective validation, Tiglao attempts to dispel his readers of the “Yellow Narrative” version of what really happened in that fateful duration.

Tiglao tries to eviscerate the legacy of EDSA I by playing the always handy colonial card. He thoroughly credits the Reagan administration of the United States for forcing Ferdinand Marcos out of power. In an egregious act of omission, Tiglao tables infinitesimal recognition for the Filipino people in effectuating EDSA I’s ultimate outcome. 

In his self-styled posture of the nonconformist slayer of Philippine historical “myths”, Tiglao contemptuously writes in regards to the EDSA I People Power revolt about “America’s role in bringing the Yellow Cult to power while we remained a nation without control of our destiny.” 

It was Washington that gave Marcos the final push into exile. Not least of all though, it was Filipinos themselves with their bravery and courage (it would have been far easier for Filipinos to have stayed in the safe confines of their homes the same way they did in 1972 when martial law was declared) that forced America’s hand in ushering out the dictator. Would the United States still have shown Marcos the door had Filipinos not come out and bodily protected the rebellious soldiers in the two EDSA camps, thereby inspiring and keeping in motion the moral and political momentum that undermined the regime for good?

It is more than just a rhetorical question whether Washington would have stood by and allowed Marcos to do his worst at EDSA I had there been no mass of civilians insulating the barricaded soldiers from harm. It was, despite what Tiglao claims, his countrymen and women who made all the difference not only between a peaceful and violent denouement, but also between Marcos staying in power and Marcos leaving.

It is a delicate balancing act to rebuke what was in hindsight the insufficiently reformist themes of EDSA I without coming across as a Marcos apologist. In the terminal analysis this is the trap Tiglao falls into as he hammers away at the EDSA I and the Aquino legacies from Ninoy to Cory to their son Noynoy, and at the same time bends over backwards in vindicating Marcos’s actions with a stream of absolutions, rationalizations, convenient lacunae, sleight-of-hand revisionism, and charitable opinionating. 

Nowhere is Tiglao more complicit of these adulterations of the historical realities of the Marcos presidency than when the author writes of the martial law order and the social conditions that the dictator oversaw throughout his rule. 

What Tiglao asserts about martial law is not completely off the mark although he wrongly lays blame for it on the Liberal Party, then headed by Ninoy Aquino, and on the Philippine Communist Party for enabling “the excuse for the strongman [Marcos] to impose martial law, and to perpetuate himself in power beyond his constitutional term.” 

The Communists, more so than the Liberal Party, contributed to the unrest that eventually led to martial law by radicalizing the First Quarter Storm protests against Marcos beginning in 1970. By contrast, the Liberal Party was the moderate opposition that unnerved Marcos. Liberal Party members accused Marcos of corruption, human rights violations, and of planning to subvert the constitution in order to extend his presidency.

Tiglao once again mixes up cause-and-effect. He paints the Communists, headed by Jose Maria Sison, and the Liberal Party as the parties responsible for the implementation of martial law. Again, he is right in favoring the idea that the Communists and the Liberals poured fuel on the fire that was the socio-political conditions amenable to the suspension of civil rights. All the same, their efforts were not the cause but rather the symptom of a nascent martial law apparatus that nefariously operated as an institution of perks and privileges for Marcos loyalists, of organizational unaccountability, of economic greed and inequality, and of creeping authoritarianism.

Aside from persistent charges of economic graft and mismanagement—-which Tiglao largely explains away or avoids altogether—-along with the suppression of democratic rights, it was an open secret that Marcos desired to stay in office past the constitutional two-year term for chief executives. More political opportunism than social necessity, martial law would be Marcos’s instrument for doing so. He exploited the First Quarter Storm by turning it into a pretext with political self-preservation and unbridled power in mind.

From the start, Tiglao tries to present as much verisimilitude as his rendering of Philippine history will allow in order to convince readers of the incontrovertible “truth” of his positions. This is not to say that Tiglao errs on the side of reckless casuistry. Indeed there is something to be said for when he wonders aloud about why the Aquino family may have minimized efforts to conduct a deep investigation into Ninoy’s murder, or when he lashes out at the machinations of the Philippine economic elite, or when he bursts the bubble of EDSA I’s matinal image as the long-awaited, irreversible impetus towards a whole new world for Filipinos.

As Tiglao settles on his conclusions however, he allows his opprobrium for the “Yellow Cult” to cloud his objectivity as well as his empathy and compassion on some important popular conceptions, the sanctity of which has provided Filipinos with a vital sense of a liberal democratic identity.    

In reading “Debunked,” anyone with a liberal democratic sensibility would have good reason to be apprehensive about what Tiglao hinges a bulk portion of his book on. With at times educated and informed surmises, at other times with short shrift and patchy evidence, combined with an aggrieved persistence and a tendentious set of preferences intended to influence his audiences away from the supposedly Yellow-tinted, conspiratorial-ridden conventions of Philippine history, Tiglao leaves a great deal to be desired in his columns. 

Tiglao betrays an overwhelming urge to cast all available light on his historical and political polemics. But in the middle of all his logic-stretching deconstructionism and denialism, Tiglao suitably develops historical amnesia in passing over virtually any meaningful mention of Ferdinand Marcos’s appalling world-class corruption, plunder, cronyism, and human rights performance. 

Tiglao also carries on a toxic flirtation with authoritarian rule, an implicit advocacy of the military takeover of Malaysia’s Sabah region in the late 60s, a disturbing whitewashing of Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody war on drugs, and a deferential acquiescence of his apathy in defending Philippine sovereignty against China.

There are not a lot of precedents in Philippine history where a political commentator with the public portfolio that Tiglao possesses dares to express what he believes are hard counterfactuals to accepted historical verities. As a result, he suffers adverse reactions for making his boundary-pushing outlier voice heard. This is the price Tiglao is willing to pay for disseminating contentious views that are sure to sow doubt and discord in a society that is in dire need of empowerment, knowledge, and solidarity.

ALLEN GABORRO