Think about it
Martial Law, first press job remembered
By Jun Velasco
“If life is to be sustained, hope must remain even where confidence is wounded or trust impaired,” Erik H. Erikson
LAST Friday, we were at the Commission on Human Rights particularly at the HR Victim’s Board at Virata Hall, U.P. Diliman.
We checked on the status of the Marcos compensation fund for former Martial Law detainees. No, we’re not after the money, otherwise we would have gone there three years ago.
We were told by CHR deskman, Atty. Dexter (we forgot his surname) that about 50,000 claimants (50% are fake – Atty. Dexter) have gone to the office now headed by new chairwoman Lina Sarmiento (in lieu of Etta Rosales).
It was fellow detainee Tony Hombrebueno who had continually annoyed us to show up at the CHR office warning that May 30, 2015 was the final deadline.
We saw former Ateneo activist Chito Gascon and other familiar faces of the Quarter Storms who must also had the habit of filing at the last hour.
By the way, our incarceration at the PC barracks in Lingayen and Camp Aquino (Selda 4342837) from Sept. 23, 1972 to October 22, 1972 was an indelible episode in our life.
Being young at 24 years, we found the experience horrific. We could not reconcile one’s quest for the truth as a greenhorn journalist — beginning with the venerable Sunday Punch and as a contributor to the Weekly Nation and Weekly Republic in their poetry and features sections as sufficient reason for the authorities to clamp us in jail!
Did your stories on the young firebrands in Manila, Baguio and Dagupan do us in?
We wondered how the super wealthy Edgar Japson became the spokesman of the masa.
We would hang around his house on Paris Street along Roosevelt Ave. to get the latest on the rallies.
Once a cover story of the Republic edited by D.H. Soriano and Amadeo Dacang was our interview on the militants Crispin Aranda, Sixto Carlos, Carlos Sta. Romana, our kabayan Ben Maynigo and many others.
In Dagupan, we loved to indulge in discourses with Nestor Pulido and Manny Cornel, Johnny Sison and the Hombrebueno brothers, which led the military to conclude that we were “red.”
These “activism” days were hard to shake off from memory, for they enabled us to admire these bespectacled young man and woman with their portrayals of another word, an egalitarian society and not this one imposed by the rich. That view had its start in 1966 when hardly had we finished college then, Ermin Garcia, Sr. took us in as a correspondent with a promise to take as a staff member after finishing our journalism course.
We couldn’t forget one meetings when Ermin Sr. called us and Manny Cornel warning us “not to use the pages of the Punch for your word war.”
EG was killed while he was putting the paper to bed. He was no doubt a great journalism martyr, for which he was honored by Quezon City officials by naming a street in Cubao after him.
Which struck us – and strikes us till now – why Pangasinenses and Dagupenos kept looking the other way when a real and true hero of the realm is right in their midst? Ermin’s inaugural speech as president of the Pangasinan Press and Radio Club became the core of our speeches when we ran for the federation of the provincial press club. Ermin Sr., by the way, was the first FPPC president.
Our hunger for understanding the roots of the nation’s tumult that rocked the nation in 1969 of mired us in dialectical materialism – the wind beneath the clash between rich and poor. Our stories were reduced by the military as a bias for the restless poor they named Communists.
We left UP Diliman past 1 P.M. with “expensive driver” Orly Guirao and wife Evelyn settling for a gastronomical delight at the Chix and Treats on Gonzales Street at Loyola Heights, in front of Mirriam College.
Late in the afternoon, we found ourselves with the wifey, Cathy, at the lovely home of a remarkable woman, Dingras native, Consuelo Dancel –Sison, 94, widow of Atty. Domingo Sison of San Fabian.
We were impressed by her ecstatic accounts of her fireworks against Mayor Erap and Senator Johnny Enrile in connection with her stand as president of the Preserve Intramuros Movement.
Isn’t activism’s agelessness refreshing and full of hope?
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