Former Senator Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr. should recognize the atrocities committed during the dictatorship of his late father, Ferdinand Marcos, and vow that these will not happen again if the scion wins the presidency in 2022, Deputy Speaker Lito Atienza said Tuesday.
“I am not asking Bongbong Marcos to apologize for his [father’s] sins. I am just asking him to recognize that Martial Law and his father did not do well. We want him to say, “If I become president, I will never do the same,” Atienza, who Senator Manny Pacquiao’s running mate in Eleksyon 2022, said in a CNN Philippines interview.
“Uncontrolled corruption happened then. Kapag sinabing Marcos, I am on the side of truth. Hindi nakabuti ‘yan. [When you speak of the Marcos regime, that was not to the benefit of the nation]. I suffered. I cannot and will never forget that. And I want my children and grandchildren to know that,” Atienza, who was one of the Liberal Party leaders who survived the Plaza Miranda bombing in 1971 during the Marcos dictatorship, added.
Likewise, Atienza said that candidates for the 2022 polls should be clear if “they approve that martial law did good for the country or believe that martial law jeopardized and destroyed the economy of the country because of massive corruption.”
“You either like Marcos, or you don’t like Marcos,” Atienza said.
In August 2016, Atienza expressed support for the burial of the late strongman in the Libingan ng mga Bayani (Cemetery for Heroes), saying it was the communists, not Marcos, who were behind the 1971 Plaza Miranda bombing.
Atienza, a member of the House of Representatives back then as Buhay party-list representative, appealed for Filipinos’ sense of “maturity, fairness and justice” in supporting the hero’s burial for the late dictator.
Marcos, for his part, has repeatedly said that he cannot apologize for things he did not do.
Global rights watchdog Amnesty International has documented an estimate of 70,000 incarcerated individuals, 34,000 torture victims and 3,240 murdered Filipinos by state forces.
A Marcos compensation law, enacted in 2013, provides for financial remuneration to those who survived torture and human rights violations during the late dictator’s regime.
The compensation provided by this law is sourced from the P10 billion of the ill-gotten wealth of the Marcos family which was already retrieved by the Philippine government from a Swiss bank.
Prior to this, the US Federal Court in Hawaii, in 1995, already ruled to grant 10,000 victims of human rights violations during the Marcos regime, as well as their families, worth $1.96 billion dollars worth of compensation. — BM, GMA News
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