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The Boy Who Fell From The Sky
Introduction to Marcos Martial Law Never Again by Raissa Robles

On the morning of May 31, 1977, residents of Antipolo — a mountainous municipality just east of Manila — saw a military helicopter circling low over a deserted area. Minutes later something fell out of the helicopter onto the rocks below. Then the aircraft clattered away.

Curious residents ran to see what had fallen.

They found the bloody, battered corpse of a young man. He had been cruelly treated. His head was bashed in, there were burn marks and dark bruises all over his body. On his torso, an examining doctor would later count 33 shallow wounds apparently gouged with an ice pick. Several meters away from where the body had fallen, somebody found an eyeball.

The police came, took the corpse to a funeral parlor and started the process of identifying the remains. Somebody remembered a news story about a teenager who had been missing for more than two weeks. He was 16-year-old Luis Manuel “Boyet” Mijares, son of Primitivo, a former aide of the dictator, President Ferdinand Marcos.

Later that day, the phone of Manila Judge Priscilla Mijares rang. Journalist and family friend Teddy Owen tried to break the news about her son gently to her, advising her to send somebody to the Filipinas Funeral Parlor to identify the victim.

The person she sent called back with the devastating news: “It’s your boy.” All that remained of her good-looking boy was a mangled, tortured body.

He had been kidnapped, because shortly after he vanished the family had started receiving phone calls demanding a ransom of P200,000.By then, Boyet’s sister Pilita recalled, a Philippine Constabulary official named Panfilo Lacson (who became a Philippine Senator in 2001) had been assigned to the case and managed to trace one of the calls to a building inside the University of the Philippines (UP) in Diliman, Quezon City.

Although the family told the kidnappers they would pay the ransom, the calls suddenly stopped.

Over the objections of the police, Judge Mijares had followed Owen’s advice to leak the news of her son’s kidnapping to the dailies. The news came out on May 30.

The next day, Boyet’s mangled body was found.
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You wish you could point to the criminal scum and order them to be shot. Someone cuts ahead of you in traffic? Bang! You wish you could make rape jokes. They’re just words, right? Why don’t these wimps get how funny it is to say you want to violate a woman? Your mother, your wife, your sisters, your friends: why don’t they get it?

Clearly, Duterte has struck a vein in the Pinoy psyche. He is the figurehead of a genuine people’s movement. As a social scientist would put it, his rise is based not on a political machine, but on Keynes’s “animal spirits”. That this unpredictable outsider may soon be president of this republic speaks to how well the candidate and his campaign team understand the deepest, most primal fears and needs of the Pinoy.

Duterte’s words are not calculated to impress the voters. He doesn’t have to calculate. He’s just saying the words that are already in your head. He is your walking, talking, preening, strutting id. The id is the part of your personality that contains your most basic instincts. It is where your needs, wants, desires, impulses, sex drives, aggressive drives come from. It is not affected by reality, logic, right or wrong. It only has one master, and that is the pleasure principle. It wants immediate satisfaction, it does not care how.

Read our column at InterAksyon.

Your choice for President is Jejomar Binay.

You think that the administration of President Benigno Aquino III has been a flop. You have become more discontented with your lot in life since 2010. You see that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, and every day the gap grows wider. You want a chief executive who is close to the masses. Gestures like attending your relative’s wake really mean something to you. Allegations of corruption do not bother you. Observing Philippine politics has turned you into a cynic: you have concluded that everyone steals anyway, so you might as well support someone who gives something to the poor, be it free movies or a birthday cake. What did those political elites ever do for you? When people make fun of the candidate’s height or appearance, they mock you as well.

Your choice for President is Rodrigo Duterte.

You believe that the biggest problems of the Philippines are lawlessness and a lack of discipline. You’ve reached the conclusion that left to their own devices the Filipinos will descend into anarchy and chaos, and that the only way to stop this is to elect a leader who will rule with an iron fist. Perhaps you are nostalgic for the Marcos regime, or being too young to remember it, harbor grand illusions about the “New Society”. In any case you believe that criminals do not deserve due process, and should be punished immediately. Human rights violations do not bother you because you think that your own human rights are already being violated by law-breakers. Not only are you pro-death penalty, you want an instant death penalty for criminals. In the event that the executed turn out to be innocent, they are acceptable collateral damage. You want a leader who will scare the people into obeying the rules.

Read our column at InterAksyon.com.

1. Traffic is the most visceral issue in Metro Manila. Number coding and changing the agency in charge of managing the traffic have not worked and are not going to work. The MRT and LRT should’ve made a big difference, but they are so badly, ineptly run that they aggravate the problem. Even if the bus operators are somehow made to cooperate, the Bus Rapid Transport system that has been proposed since the 1980s is not going to make a dent because hundreds of new cars further clog the streets every month. What are you going to do about the traffic? What are you going to do about the road infrastructure? (And if the head of the Department of Transportation and Communications, who has not only failed dismally at addressing traffic congestion but has callously dismissed the daily distress of motorists and commuters as “non-fatal”, also happens to be the head of your political party, are you going to keep him in that position?)

Read our column at InterAksyon.

Text spam is so much spicier during campaign season. Apart from the real estate offers from people you don’t know, and award notifications from raffles you never joined (Apparently I just won a brand-new car and P350,000, and stand to lose more if I am stupid enough to call their number), there are anonymous messages commending or attacking certain candidates. This spam from last week is so clever, it requires a second reading to determine whether it is praising or slamming the candidate.

“Friends, suportahan natin ang kafatid nating si ______! # ___ sa balota. At huwag kalimutan, Ang Ladlad #28 sa party list!”

What does it mean?

Read Ladlad o Laglag? our column at InterAksyon.com.

Barack Obama in Central Park, 1981. Photo from VF.com.

Interesting piece in Vanity Fair about Barack Obama’s relationships with two ex-girlfriends, one of whom allowed her journals to be used in a biography of the American president.

This bit jumped out at us.

The routine with Barack was now back and forth, mostly his place, sometimes hers. When she told him that she loved him, his response was not “I love you, too” but “thank you”—as though he appreciated that someone loved him. The relationship still existed in its own little private world.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that when you say “I love you” to another person, the reply you don’t want to hear is “Thank you.”