The Philippine Supreme Court (SC) has ruled on the issue of the burial of former Philippine President Ferdinand E Marcos at the Libingan ng mga Bayani (LNMB). Nine SC justices (Arturo Brion, Presbitero Velasco Jr, Diosdado Peralta, Lucas Bersamin, Mariano del Castillo, Jose Perez, Teresita de Castro, Jose Mendoza, and Estela Perlas-Bernabe) voted in favour of the burial while only five (Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno herself, and Justices Antonio Carpio, and Associate Justices Marvic Leonen, Francis Jardaleza, and Caguioa) voted against it. The Marcos burial at the LNMB was something that was promised by current President Rodrigo Duterte during his campaign before he went on to win the presidential elections this year.
The ruling ends almost 30 years of uncertainty surrounding the remains of the former president who died in 1989 while in exile in Hawaii. A decision by then President Fidel Ramos to allow Marcos’s remains to be brought back to the Philippines in 1993 re-kindled hope that his body would eventually find its way to the LNMB someday.
In a speech delivered before a small crowd protesting the burial at the Rizal Park last Sunday, former President Benigno Simeon ‘BS’ Aquino III described the prospect of a Marcos burial there as a “desecration” of the cemetery…
“The pro[burial] seems to be one group. The antiburial seems to be so many groups, and in a sense representing the whole political spectrum … I still cling to the hope that there are a lot, if not a very significant majority, who are against this burial and the desecration of Libingan ng mga Bayani,” Aquino said.
Since Marcos’s ouster in 1986, anti-Marcos activists have mounted sporadic protests against the continued persistence in Philippine politics of Marcos’s children and other family members who, since that “revolution”, have been elected to various positions in the Executive and Legislative branches of the Philippine government. Most recently, his only son former Senator Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos Jr came close to winning the Vice Presidency in the 2016 elections — a loss that remains shrouded in controversy amidst electoral fraud allegations that remain unresolved and will likely put the legitimacy of the supposed “vice president”, Leni Robredo, in question for the rest of her term.
As if it weren’t enough that these protests were sporadic, at best, and the fact of the Marcoses’ continued prominence in Philippine politics is an on-going indictment of that merdiocre “activism”, there is also the fact that the top architects of Marcos’s supposedly brutal “Martial Law regime”, former Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile and the former chief of the now-defunct Philippine Constabulary (Marcos’s purported Gestapo), General Fidel Ramos, also went scott-free after the 1986 “revolution”. Even more amazing, both Enrile and Ramos went on to pursue successful political careers with Enrile becoming Senate President and Ramos elected president.
In short, there really is nothing surprising nor outrageous about Marcos’s iminent burial at the LNMB. It is just the logical conclusion of several decades of failed anti-Marcos “activism”. The noisy community of Martial Law Crybabies have no one else to blame but themselves.
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