Fighting from a Distance: How Filipino Exiles Helped Topple a Dictator
184
Fighting from a Distance: How Filipino Exiles Helped Topple a Dictator
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252095092 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2013 |
| Series: | Asian American Experience |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 184 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
Fighting from a Distance
How Filipino Exiles Helped Topple a Dictator
By JOSE V. FUENTECILLA
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09509-2
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The First exiles Escaping from the Homeland
on September 22, 1972, a nationwide dragnet swept up hundreds of Filipinos deemed hostile to the sudden imposition of martial law that day. They included politicians, journalists, civil rights activists, lawyers, and suspected members of the Communist-leaning insurgent New People's Army. In the days to come, more people would be apprehended and moved to detention centers. President Marcos declared that this drastic action was necessary because these sectors had all threatened to overthrow the government. Months earlier, escalating street protests, riots, and strikes had been characterized as a plot to destabilize the government. As early as August 24, Marcos had vowed in a nationwide address to impose martial law in order to "liquidate [the] Communist apparatus." On September 8, Defense Secretary Juan Ponce Enrile warned that Communists were threatening terrorist attacks in Manila "24 hours a day."
Marcos had been impelled to act, it was reported, because of an assassination attempt on Enrile while he was reportedly riding in his car in the late evening of September 22. Senator Raul Manglapus was in a Tokyo hotel on September 23, on his way to California for a series of speaking engagements, when he read about the assassination attempt in the Japan Times. He had left Manila the previous afternoon. What follows is a slightly edited account of that day, which Manglapus wrote on October 15, 1983, in Washington, D.C. This account appears in A Pen for Democracy, a compilation of published articles, letters, and U.S. congressional testimonies compiled by the Movement for a Free Philippines. It omits details about how those who managed to escape the dragnet made it out of the country, because when it was written, Marcos was still in full control, rounding up more suspects. (By November 16, more than six thousand had been arrested.) Manglapus did not want to divulge the escape routes through unnamed places and countries. For the same reason, some of those who assisted him in evading arrest remain unidentified.
The phone rang in [my] hotel room [in Tokyo].
It was my wife [Pacita LaO or Pacing]. She had luckily managed to reach me before the overseas lines were cut. "Vamos a hablar en espanol," she said quickly. It was the only code she could think of in a country where the Hispanic tongue has all but disappeared except in our Christian and last names. She told me that what I thought would not yet happen, had happened; that martial law had been declared the night before and that soldiers had come to our house to arrest me at 1:30 in the morning. Also, that the soldiers, being told I was away, had not believed it and that they had searched the house for two long hours, opening every door, "including the door to the refrigerator."
She said that soon after the soldiers left, she received a call from Judy Roxas, wife (now widow) of Senator Gerry Roxas, who asked if I could join in forming a legal panel for the release of Senator Benigno Aquino, Senator Jose Diokno, and others who had all been arrested at precisely 1:30 that morning.
"I am sorry, Raul is not here," my wife had replied, "and besides, the soldiers also came to pick him up at 1:30 this morning."
My first impulse was to return home immediately, but my wife would not hear of it. "Why should you come home straight to jail? Go on to the United States. Maybe you can do something there about this."
I protested, "What about you? When will I see you and the children again? And besides, I have money for only ten days!"
"You'll find a job," she insisted, "and don't worry about us. We can take care of ourselves."
When she finally hung up, I could not hold back the tears. I was facing the bleak prospect of a long separation from my family. I was neither emotionally nor financially ready for an extended exile. And there was another immediate problem—although I was supposed to be an expert in foreign relations, I had no idea how far Marcos would or could go in getting me back to the Philippines. Could Marcos, for instance, persuade the Japanese government to bundle me into a Philippine Air Lines plane to Manila? Or, if I managed to leave Tokyo for the United States, would the U.S. government turn me back at Honolulu?
My son [Toby, who had graduated from Tokyo's Sophia University] came up from Fukuoka, in Southern Japan, where he was training at the Matsushita Training Center. We discussed the situation and decided to seek help. I called Shigeharu Matsumoto, the distinguished director of the International House of Japan, who had more than once invited me to Tokyo for speaking engagements. Then I telephoned an American friend, a former classmate at Georgetown Law School in Washington, D.C., who was living in Honolulu with his wife, a Filipino doctor. He agreed to help me through United States immigration and customs.
Mr. Matsumoto came to my hotel with his entire family. They took my son and me to the airport and made sure I got to the right plane to Honolulu. I bade a sad goodbye to my son and took off. Either Marcos was too busy to get me back, I thought to myself, or it simply is not legally possible to do so. I was just beginning to learn by experience the stricter applications of international law on political refugees.
In Honolulu, my American classmate who had been a United States federal officer managed to get me port courtesies. I stayed with my friend and his wife for a week, stunned, groping my way through the first stages of life in exile. The first two days I spent almost entirely in bed, staring at the ceiling, unable to make decisions. On the third day, I decided to call William P. Bundy, former U.S. assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific, whom I had met while I was a senator. I asked him to help me get a job. He called Dr. Harlan Cleveland, then president of the University of Hawaii. Dr. Cleveland invited me to breakfast and promised to look for a position for me at the University. However, I later decided that if I was to live an effective life of exile, I should be near the two centers of American power—New York City and Washington, D.C., just as a century ago the Filipino propagandists of our revolution against Spain had chosen to be around Madrid and Barcelona.
Finally in San Francisco, I met Sister Reina Paz, a Maryknoll sister from the province of Occidental Negros, who had invited me in May of 1972 to come to speak at the inauguration of the Philippine Center in Stockton, California, in August. I told her gratefully had it not been for you, I would be in prison. She worried about me. She was plagued with a mixed feeling: of relief that her invitation had occasioned my evading arrest, and guilt that it had thrust me, quite unprepared, into confrontation with an uncertain life of exile.
I then proceeded to New York City, where I made new friends among those in the Filipino-American community who were willing to deal with a "hunted" man. I subleased an efficiency apartment from a Filipino couple and learned to steam rice and cook such basic Filipino dishes as "nilaga" and "sinigang."
When martial law was declared, General Carlos P. Romulo was in New York City heading the Philippine delegation to the United Nations General Assembly. Learning I was in New York, he sent his daughter-in-law, Mariles Cacho Romulo, to look for me and to invite me to see him.
I had been close to the Romulos since I first served under then Major Romulo as broadcaster in the press relations office of General [Douglas] MacArthur's USAFFE headquarters at the outbreak of the Pacific War [World War II]. When General Romulo landed back in Leyte [province] with General MacArthur on October 20, 1944, I was with the Romulo family in Pagsanjan, in the province of Laguna, where I had evacuated my mother after my escape from Japanese prison two months before. Mrs. Virginia Romulo opened her last can of imported fruit salad to celebrate her husband's landing as well as my birthday, which coincidentally was on that same day.
After the liberation of Manila [from the Japanese], General Romulo had me appointed chief of the Radio Division of the office of President Sergio Osmena Sr. Later, in 1947, I would come to Washington, D.C., to study law at Georgetown University and attempt to conclude my courtship of my childhood friend Pacita LaO, who, with her mother, was also in Washington, D.C., visiting her sister and her brother-in-law, Col. Jaime C. Velasquez, then military attaché at the Philippine Embassy.
When Pacing and I decided to get married in Washington, it was General Romulo who called the Apostolic Delegate, Amleto Cardinal Cicognani, to ask him to officiate at our small wedding at the elegant chapel to the Apostolic Delegation (where Pope John Paul II would stay for his historic 1982 visit) on Massachusetts Avenue. Bobby, the youngest of the four Romulo sons, was our ring bearer. When Carlos Romulo Jr., who was later to die in a plane crash, had his first son by his bride Mariles, I was asked to be the baptismal sponsor.
Thus it was with the confidence of a fellow Democrat and a close family friend that I took the elevator up with my comadre Mariles to General Romulo's Waldorf-Astoria suite in Manhattan. After he told me how much he regretted Marcos's repression of the people and the suppression of the Philippine press which he loved so much, I told him that I felt he would make an ideal leader for an exile movement in the United States, since at least one generation of Americans still remembered him as the Voice of Freedom.
He was going home to Manila, he said, only to "put his things together" and then come back to the United States. I understood this to mean he would come back to lead the exiles' struggle for the return of democracy.
General Romulo came back indeed—not to lead the exiles, but as a defender of the Marcos dictatorship. Marcos had succeeded in enlisting him in lending credibility to the new tyranny before the American people.
It became necessary to look for another leader, and soon it was evident that by default the mantle would fall on me. I was ready to lead even if my wife and family were still back home. But first I was going to try to get them out of the country.
I learned that Pacing had gone to Juan Ponce Enrile, Marcos's defense minister, and had been refused permission to leave. From Cornell University in upstate New York, where Bill Bundy had secured for me a fellowship with a grant from the Ford Foundation, I came down to Washington to talk to several senators about appealing to Marcos to allow my family to join me here as a humanitarian gesture. Among those who agreed to help me were Senators Hubert Humphrey, Ted Kennedy, and Charles Percy. All were turned down by Marcos.
Senator Humphrey's office furnished me with a copy of Enrile's reply on behalf of Marcos. It was an amusing piece. While [Marcos's wife] Imelda's "Blue Ladies," her coterie of sycophants, were traipsing around the world consuming foreign exchange, my wife and family, said Enrile, could not be permitted to leave because "considering [my] stature in the community, the whole matter will in no time become public knowledge as an exception case and would therefore tend to destroy our image of sincerity and impartiality which we are steadfastly aiming to preserve."
It was evident that Marcos's coup plans had not counted on the formation of a free exile movement, and they were now going to keep my family as hostages to keep me gagged abroad. So it was suggested to Senator Humphrey that "ex-Senator Manglapus be persuaded to return to the Philippines," concluding that "if after having returned he would still think as he now plans, of transferring himself and his entire family to the United States, the matter would be given most sympathetic consideration and understanding at that time."
"Senator," Dan Spiegel, Senator Humphrey's legislative aide, told me with a meaningful smile as he handed me the copy of Enrile's reply, "I hope you won't fall for that last part."
"Don't worry," I replied, "I won't."
I had remained in touch with my wife by telephone. She would move from house to house in Manila to elude phone tapping. After returning to Cornell from Washington, I told her that I had exhausted all overt means of getting her and the family over. She would have to try something else.
Yes, she replied that "something else" was already in the works. She was planning her escape.
It was Maria Teresa "Boots" Anson (now Mrs. Jerry Jumat) organizer of the Christian Social Movement (CSM) for northern Luzon, who first approached my wife with a definitive plan of escape.
The escape plan called for quick and dangerous execution, and on March 21, 1973, Pacing and my three sons, Raul Jr. (Raulito), Roberto (Bobby), and Francis Xavier, aided by a combined Christian-Muslim group, found themselves island-hopping to a third country. My only daughter, Tina, just married to Ben Maynigo, elected to stay behind. For continuing security reasons, not too much detail can now be revealed about the escape.
I can say a little of the harrowing early morning of March 26, 1973, when the telephone rang in my apartment (No. 3F, Fairview Heights, Cornell University) at 3:00 a.m.
"Is this Mr. Manglapus?" a girl's voice.
"Yes."
"Go ahead, please ..."
"Hello ..."
"Yes?"
"Mr. Manglapus?" a man with a slight Chinese accent.
"Yes, yes ..."
"This is Father (fade ...)"
"Who?"
"Father_____________in__________________"
"Oh?"
"Your son Bobby ..."
"Yes, yes, I have a son named Bobby ..."
"Your son Bobby asked me to call you."
"Yes?"
"Your wife and sons are in a boat at the docks. The authorities refuse to let them land."
"Oh no! What's the problem?"
"They came thinking there was no need for a landing pass. But this is required. Can you help them?"
"Yes, yes. I will do what I can."
"They are being given only a few days."
"Is there any danger they might be sent back?"
"I don't know."
"Oh my God! Give me your phone number, please—and beg the authorities not to send them back! I'll start making calls ..."
Start making calls? At three o'clock in the morning? What decent American, the kind that can best be of help, would be awake? Even mad dogs and Englishmen are asleep at this hour!
Ah, but halfway around the world, it is three in the afternoon! Think. Who do I know in that third country? Don't panic. Think. Yes, yes—the president of the university. I visited him once. And his wife came to visit us in Makati [a suburb of Manila]. Call him. He'll help.
"Sorry, he's out of town."
"How about Mrs. __________?"
"She's also out of town."
Don't remember anybody else important in that country. What about the neighboring "fourth" country? Maybe they have a consul in the area who can extend protection.
I called friends there, mostly journalists, and they all promised to help. I was to learn some years later their foreign minister had alerted his consuls around the area to extend a humanitarian hand to my family, transcending political considerations. But as my journalistic friends had insisted, it was not their territory, and it would have had to take direct intervention by the government of the third country to save my family.
Finally, at nine o'clock that morning I reached Bill Bundy on the phone. He promptly went to work, calling the U.S. State Department and his friends in the third country. After some hesitation, the third country government agreed to move my family to their capital, where they were kept in a comfortable home away from public view. After still more hesitation, the State Department agreed to process them for entry into the United States. The political issue was skirted by considering them not as political refugees but as dependents of an alien with a working visa, which I had obtained upon moving to Cornell.
Pacing and the boys landed at Kennedy Airport in New York City on April 6, 1973. They had blazed an escape trail which others would follow later: in 1976 my daughter Tina, her husband Ben Maynigo, her own baby daughter Tanya, and her husband's cousin and housekeeper Perpedigna Bugyong, together with the couple who were the principal planners and executors of the original escape—Jerry and Boots Jumat, accompanied by their children Lara and Wally; in 1978 Bonifacio Gillego, retired Philippine army intelligence officer who was deputy secretary-general of the CSM and my fellow delegate and trusted associate in the Constitutional Convention, followed by Charito Planas, noted woman lawyer who had been a mayoralty candidate in Quezon City [a suburb of Manila]; and in 1980 Gaston Ortigas, dean of the Harvard-sponsored Asian Institute of Management in Manila and chairman of the CSM Manila chapter, followed by his cousin, Fluellen Ortigas, a brilliant youth leader who had been in and out of political prison.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Fighting from a Distance by JOSE V. FUENTECILLA. Copyright © 2013 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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