MANILA – Juan Ponce Enrile is not a hero. He never was, and he will never be. 

These words came from a collective statement of over 100 organizations and individuals who oppose the impending burial of Juan Ponce Enrile at the Libingan ng mga Bayani (LNMB) reportedly scheduled on November 22, dubbing it as a form of historical distortion.

Enrile’s remains are scheduled to arrive at the LNMB, according to the post of her daughter, Katrina Enrile.

“Enrile was no ordinary technocrat or politician. His sins against the Filipino nation and his legacy of impunity had inflicted an immeasurable damage to so many of our countrymen,” the joint statement stated. “He never paid for these sins. Neither did he apologize for any of them.”

In a previous Bulatlat story, martial law survivors remembered Enrile as a human rights violator, plunderer, and a “personification of impunity.” He was the defense minister during the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos Sr. and the one who staged an ambush on September 22, 1972, to justify the implementation of martial law.

Enrile remembered as rights violator, plunderer

During martial law, records showed that 70,000 were unjustly arrested, 34,000 tortured, 3,240 people killed, and 737 enforced disappearance. Moreover, some martial law survivors under Samahan ng mga Ex-Detainee Laban sa Detensyon at Aresto (SELDA) said that Enrile was implicated in the massacre of 45 men, women, and children in Sitio Sag-od, Las Navas, Northern Samar in September 1981. The victims, they added, were living within the Enrile-owned San Jose Timber Corp. (SJTC) concession.

“At Enrile’s behest, paramilitary forces who served as SJTC’s security guards cracked down on the villagers for holding a series of labor protests and allegedly supporting the New People’s Army,” SELDA noted. “In one fell swoop, Enrile melded fascist violence with the defense of his economic interests,”

Instead of apologizing, Enrile repeatedly justified the martial law and the authoritarian rule of Marcoses.

“What is being revived now is the same project of historical rehabilitation. This burial will not be a simple act of protocol but an effort to confer honor on a former Defense Minister whose role in the machinery of martial rule cannot be separated from its atrocities, repression, and plunder,” the National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers (NUPL) said in a statement. 

Enrile served four terms in the Senate and was the Chief Presidential Legal Counsel of the current president Ferdinand Marcos Jr., son of the previous dictator. He was also implicated in the 2013 pork barrel scam. But the Sandiganbayan acquitted him, his former chief of staff Gigi Reyes, and Janet Lim Napoles, of 15 graft counts during the promulgation last month, October 24. The three were accused of pocketing P172.8 million of kickbacks from the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF).

NUPL added that Enrile’s burial at the LNMB replicates the same revisionism that marked Marcos Sr.’s interment. The burial of the previous dictator took place on November 18, 2016, which resulted in nationwide protests by human rights groups, sectors, and even personalities.

Read: Widespread outrage over hurried Marcos burial

Widespread outrage over hurried Marcos burial

It also sends the wrong message — according to the collective statement of advocates— “That crime pays, that the corrupt and the powerful can always escape punishment, that murder and corruption would be rebranded in death as ‘heroism’—while so many of their victims continue to endure pain and injustice.”

The collective statement is initiated by Project Gunita, a Filipino academic research organization dedicated to archiving historical materials and resisting the distortion of the Marcos dictatorship.

They listed Enrile’s major sins and the grounds of their opposition to his burial at the LNMB:

1. The conduct of a fake ambush on himself on the evening of September 22, 1972, which allowed the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr. to impose Martial Law;

2. His participation in the so-called Rolex 12, a group of 11 military officials and one civilian who helped Marcos Sr. craft Proclamation 1081;

3. The countless brutal massacres that he waged in Mindanao, as Marcos Sr’s Defense Minister and Martial Law’s chief architect: Manili Massacre (1971), Burning of Jolo (1974), Palimbang Massacre (1974), Pata Island Massacre (1982), to name a few;

4. The brutal killings of 45 residents of Barrio Sag-od, Las Navas, Northern Samar, on September 15, 1981. They were killed by members of Lost Command, a paramilitary group who also acted as private goons of one of Enrile’s logging corporations, San Jose Timber Corporation;

5. His issuances of Arrest, Search, and Seizure Orders (ASSO), Presidential Commitment Orders (PCO), and Preventive Detention Action (PDA) alongside other coercive Marcos decrees, which led to tens of thousands of incarcerations and torture of dissenters and Marcos Sr’s political enemies in military camps and secret safehouses, as well as countless enforced disappearances and executions;

6. His collusion with the late Marcos crony Eduardo “Danding” Cojuangco in the stealing of billions in coconut levy funds from farmers all over the country;

7. The widespread deforestation of the entire Philippine forest cover that were conducted by Enrile’s logging companies and timber concessionaires;

8. His role in cheating the 1986 snap presidential elections, which he admitted in that historic press conference with the late Fidel V. Ramos at Camp Aguinaldo on February 22, 1986; and

9. His equally infamous role in launching seven to nine coup attempts to destabilize the government of the late president Corazon C. Aquino, which left hundreds of people dead (soldiers and civilians alike), “salvaged” progressive leaders such as Rolando Olalia, and scarred the nation in the immediate post-EDSA era.

Moreover, the crimes of the martial law period have already been recognized by Philippine law. The Human Rights Victims Reparation and Recognition Act or Republic Act 10368 stipulates that it is the obligation of the state to acknowledge the sufferings and damages inflicted upon the victims of human rights violations, especially during the regime of Marcos Sr.

“To bury Enrile at the Libingan is to disregard the harm inflicted under martial law and undermine the foundations of reparations, asset recovery, and transitional justice,” NUPL added, emphasizing that LNMB is not a sanctuary for those who dismantled democracy or presided over systematic abuse.

Standing with the martial law survivors, both statements resound a firm exposition: it is a renewed attempt to sanitize the legacy of tyranny. (RVO)

–

Disclosure: Bulatlat is a signatory to the collective statement opposing Enrile’s burial at the hero’s cemetery.