I belong to the decades-old organization of former political prisoners which goes by the jaw-breaking name Samahan ng Mga Ex-Detainees Laban sa Detensiyon at Para sa Amnestiya, or SELDA.
SELDA initiated the class action suit in Honolulu which over ten years ago won former political prisoners a .3 billion award to be sourced from the Marcos Estate.
No one among the 10,000 claimants in whose behalf SELDA lawyer Romeo Capulong filed that suit has seen a cent of that award. Few of those still with SELDA expect to.
But another group whose members broke from SELDA in the early 1990s, which calls itself Claimants 1081, is more optimistic. Apparently its leaders
Imee Marcos is anything but clueless; she is, in fact, brilliant and probably one of the few in Congress who use logic rather than rhetoric.
Except for a few, Filipinos view martial law as an evil per se because the only brand of democracy is the American type, which is in many ways a mockery of genuine democracy. Ferdinand Marcos is the only president the Philippines has had who had a real and clear political platform. His tragedy is that he eventually became a victim of the eco-political system that he wanted to reform through DISCIPLINE of oneself and self-policing of the ranks.
Admittedly, the martial law years were played out at great human cost, but isn’t that true for all the presidents from Aguinaldo down to the latest president, that joke of a president called Gloria Arroyo?