[Philippine corruption] Fighting from a Distance How Filipino Exiles Helped Topple a Dictator #1/493

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.)¹ 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.