MANILA, Philippines – It was a Sunday. 

Marites Vitug remembered it was hot. At that time the world was suffering one of history’s worst El Niño episodes. She cannot remember how she got the information about the assassination. It must have been from beepers. Or from a party line. Or from the group of women writers she was part of. But she did remember what she saw on television. There was no close-up of the dead body lying on the tarmac.

This was what happened: A man wearing an all-white ensemble stepped out of a Boeing 767-209 jet on August 21, 1983. He was returning to the Philippines after a three-year exile in the United States.

Before coming home, opposition leader and former senator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. said he could not be petrified in a corner by fear of assassination. He wore a bulletproof vest prior to disembarking the plane. Minutes after he came out of the airplane, he was shot on the head.

The image of the sprawled bloodied body on the tarmac of the Manila International Airport would be broadcast on television, splashed on the front pages of newspapers, reported on radio, and described by word of mouth among families and friends.

Vitug, who would in a few days’ time become a reporter, went with her women writer friends to Santo Domingo Church in Quezon City.

In 1983, it was apparent that something was dying, and something new was about to be born.  The assassination of a popular leader was one necessary birthing pain to spark the growing opposition that sorely needed a catalyst.

After the assassination, it seemed like a voice welled out from the cracks of the earth. Vitug wrote of 1983: “The year just past saw the government going through one of its most difficult periods with the rising tide of popular protest almost engulfing those in power. Will it survive? Whether it does or not, the specter of a blood-spattered Aquino will always hang over it.”

The making of a reporter

Vitug graduated from UP Diliman in 1975.  She went on to take her master’s in the same college, which she said later on was a mistake, because she didn’t have any real-world experience to actually know what she wanted to do.

After that, Vitug worked for a think tank, the Ministry of Human Settlements under Imelda Marcos, for a TV magazine where she rubbed elbows with eminent editors such as Ricky Lee and Gary Olivar. The magazine soon folded up. When it closed down, she took a post in the information office of an attached agency of the Ministry of Natural Resources. 

It was in 1979 when she landed a job as a writer in Business Day led by Raul Locsin. She was writing weekly special reports about industries – and getting bored fast. 

She knew then she wanted to do what reporters do. In August 1983, Locsin announced that they would be opening a political beat in the light of the Aquino assassination. At that meeting, Vitug raised her hand and volunteered to cover political affairs. 

“Do you want to be a reporter or a mother?” was Locsin’s question when she missed a couple of work days because she was tending to her child. Those days the newsroom was very macho, Vitug said. 

As a political reporter in 1983, Vitug covered major rallies, figureheads opposing the late dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos, and activists. 

Covering politics from left to right, she would meet underground leaders, liberals, and rebel soldiers. She would hike mountains in Samar to reach underground camps, join nightly meetings of democratic organizations, visit military camps, and cover the Batasang Pambansa, the rubber-stamp unicameral legislature of Marcos.

Besides her reportage, Vitug also wrote with other female writers like Jo-Ann Q. Maglipon, Sheila Coronel, Ceres Doyo, Sylvia Mayuga. They formed a group called Women Writers in Media Now or WOMEN, and met on Saturdays to critique each other’s works. These women wrote about a range of topics such as sexism, press freedom, martial law, and breastfeeding. For Vitug, it was empowering to share a friendship with people who understood the problems she was going through as a woman.

“Turbulent” was the word Vitug used to describe 1983. Those were uncertain times because “it could go either way.”

But during those times too, revolution was a possibility. And that made all the difference. 1983 to 1986 were promising years for the freedom fighters, the radicalized middle-class, and the sympathizers. It was a time of action and infectious energy. 

“It’s as if I never slept in three years,” Vitug said. She would look back at 1983 and say of Ninoy’s assassination, “Were it not for that external event, I wouldn’t have been a political reporter.”

Bleak times

Albert Labrador, a freshman who just recently entered the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman that year to study architecture, lined up with his family at the Santo Domingo Church in Quezon City, to view the dead body of Ninoy still wearing the blood-stained white jacket. Aquino’s mother, Aurora, insisted that Ninoy’s unadorned remains be laid in the casket, wearing the clothes he had on when was he murdered on the tarmac. She said she wanted the world “to see what they did to my son.”

Contrary to the vigor that many people were feeling at the time, Labrador found a dejected campus when he entered the UP Diliman in 1983 as a freshman. 

Labrador remembers some of his architecture professors not showing up to class. There was no motivation because of the lack of building projects. The facilities in UP were severely lacking. It was a difficult time to get inspired, said Labrador. 

At that time, walkouts were the norm. They walked out of class to protest since everybody else was doing so. 

“Alam naming lahat na nagnanakaw ang pamilya,” he said. (We all know the family was looting.)

A self-described centrist and loner at campus, Labrador said rallies were a family thing rather than a “UP thing.” His uncles were friends with Ninoy Aquino, back in their days in San Beda College.

This feeling of hopelessness would lift somehow when Labrador joined the UP Mountaineers in 1986, a mountaineering organization established by UP students back in 1977. Having met many people inside the organization, Labrador would describe that experience as “the only time I became more politically aware.”

In 1986, the EDSA Revolution had already taken place. It was also the same year the mountaineering organization lost four members due to a freak accident at Mount Guiting-Guiting in Romblon. The accident made his induction to the organization somber and solemn. He remembered none of their tents survived in Mount Pulag because they climbed when a Signal No. 3 typhoon hit the area. 

He would meet his wife within the organization. He described his wife and his daughters as people who were made of more leftist stuff than him. There would be arguments within the family, but he would relent that his “kids and wife were far more better informed than me so I defer to them.”

“Maybe the remembrance [of Ninoy’s death] is more relevant in light of the fact that political deaths are still rampant,” he said.

If it was depressing in UP during ’83, it feels much hopeless now for Labrador. Polarization is intense but superficial because of social media and disinformation. “Here, you’re either Marcos or Leni. Issues get watered down because it’s all propaganda,” he said.

He recalled recently having a conversation with friend, more of what they call in Filipino as usapang barbero (barbershop talk), which actually is a good source of knowing the public’s mood. In that usapan he felt people regretted they voted for the President. Sara Duterte should have run instead, they said.

“We are a nation of conservatives. We like strong leaders, we like strong men. That has not changed. That was the case during Marcos’s time and it’s still the case today.”

“The only way to change the country is for something like an assassination of a popular leader [to happen],” Labrador added. “And even if that takes place it won’t fix our conservatism, it won’t fix our values.”

A child of 1983

Sherilene Soroño was born two weeks before the assassination. Having recently turned 40, she is now beset with the weight of living in a forgetful nation, like other children born in 1983.

Soroño was born on August 9, 1983, at 10:35 am. Her mother had to go to the hospital in Parañaque during what she recalled a stormy day. For her 40th birthday this year, Soroño celebrated in Sagada, which she called her happy place. She described the life she’s leading as “very untypical”: single, no boyfriend since birth, and always hitting the road. 

She had made a pact with herself since her 30s to celebrate her birthday somewhere far from home. She had spent past birthdays in Georgia, climbing Mount Kazbek; in Camiguin where she met a German doctor she would be friends with until now. 

She had to reclaim the date since her 5th birthday was the same day her father, a man whom she never had the chance to know much about, died. She remembered her birthdays that followed were tinged with grief, because the remembrance of death overshadowed the celebration of life. Her mother would serve pancit every August 9, as if in mourning. They had to visit the church to pray for her father’s death anniversary. Her mother would eventually follow his father to the grave 35 years later.

As a kid, she would remember seeing a thick crowd every year during August 21, when people would visit the graves of Ninoy at the Manila Memorial Park in Parañaque. Later, Cory Aquino too would be buried in the spare white grave beside Ninoy. This is the same cemetery where her parents were now buried.

Past birthdays and mourning seasons, Soroño grew up in the heady days of the post-EDSA years. She gained consciousness in the overprotectiveness of a single mother and in the absence of a father who, before dying, was a seafarer and only went home for two months a year. Soroño recalled they would send telegrams and cassette tapes to their father while he was out at sea to give updates on their lives. 

In a spur of nostalgia during the wake of her mother in January 2023, they waded through these tapes and played one that featured his uncle who was a military man, doing a mock interview with Soroño and her brother. 

“Wala na kaming kakainin kasi may coup d’etat!” she said in the usual manner of kids with no fears, no responsibilities. (We won’t have anything to eat because there’s a coup d’etat.)

Coup attempts were a fact of life during the Cory Aquino administration. 

But they felt safe. “Mom made us feel there was nothing to fear,” Soroño said. 

Her lolo, with whom she was close with because of the summers they spent in Lanao del Norte during high school, was a huge fan of Fidel V. Ramos. 

In college she would live through another EDSA, this time to oust Joseph Estrada. She was studying at the Technological University of the Philippines where progressive organizations like Anakbayan were not accredited. 

She voted for Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in 2001 during the first presidential election she participated in as a qualified voter. She thought Arroyo, a petite powerhouse, could make things better. In 2016, much to her chagrin, most of her family voted for Rodrigo Duterte. 

Soroño said that as the years went by, she became increasingly jaded. Like many people her age, Soroño had thought of migrating to another country. 

“Being a woman in my 40s, childless, husbandless – and I have a good paying job – I can do whatever I want. But I still want to move elsewhere.” 

But she was also one of the 780,000-crowd at Ayala Avenue where former vice president Leni Robredo and former senator Kiko Pangilinan held their miting de avance in 2022. Filled with hope not just because of Robredo but because of her effect on people, Soroño promised herself, “If she wins, I will quit corporate. I will work for an NGO.”

On May 9, 2022, she recalled suffering from anxiety and had to go offline from social media. Initial election results were already showing a huge gap between Robredo and Ferdinand Marcos Jr. On top of her worries, her mother was already getting really sick. 

A recurring death

The airport where Ninoy was killed is now known as the Ninoy Aquino International Airport, where Filipinos – lured by other countries’ prosperity, hampered by tedious pre-boarding procedures and perennially delayed flights – die a thousand deaths every day. They had done so in the past decades when democracy did not live up to its promise, in the past years under a drug war, and they continue to do so when, after a dictator’s son rose and became the 17th president. People grieved but no one raised a fist out in the streets.

The children of 1983 were slowly realizing they live in a nation condemned to a thousand political killings, the cyclical ravaging of passing storms and bouts of El Niño, and constantly forgetful memory.

Forty years later and they find themselves in the ebb of history. Was it all worth dying for? – Rappler.com