Utterly Repulsive Resolution

Utterly Repulsive Resolution

OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT AQUINO

Dear President Aquino,

BAYAN CANADA and MIGRANTE CANADA find utterly repulsive and demeaning the resolution signed by 219 members of Congress led by Sorsogon Representative Salvador Escudero III that calls for the burial of the body of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the country’s heroes’ cemetery, Libingan ng mga Bayani.

History in the Philippines’ not too recent past is full of the horrors that the Filipino people endured during the Marcos dictatorship — from economic plunder, gross human rights violations including summary executions, enforced disappearances, massacres, torture, illegal arrests and detention, hamletting and forced evacuation, to environmental degradation, the trampling of our national sovereignty, the continuing poverty and the export of Filipino workers overseas.

We must never forget that it was under the Marcos dictatorship that the Philippines began to systematically export people at a time of huge unemployment and socio- economic crises. Originally designed as a stop-gap measure, dictator Marcos never let it go and post-Marcos governments institutionalized the labour export policy as the country’s chronic economic crisis went from bad to very worse.

Giving the dictator Marcos a hero’s burial is a mockery and a desecration of the Filipino people and their struggle for national and democratic changes and their determination to overthrow a hated regime. Part of this overall national opposition was the people’s power revolt that ousted him and drove his family out of the Philippines in 1986.

The recent monetary compensation given to the many human rights victims of the Marcos dictatorship (though largely symbolic and inadequate) is one explicit proof that the Marcos dictatorship is indeed guilty of gross human rights violations.

BAYAN CANADA and MIGRANTE CANADA, two Canada-wide alliances of Filipino organizations encourage you not to act on the resolution. To act positively on the resolution gives the wrong message to the Filipino people and those overseas that the dictator Marcos did no crime against the Filipino people and thus, worthy of a hero’s burial.

To allow the dictator Marcos into the Libingan ng mga Bayani is to wipe clean his bloody regime and re-write our history. This must never be allowed to happen.

Dr. Chandu Claver
Christopher Sorio
BAYAN CANADA
MIGRANTE CANADA
April 12, 2011