By Tony Lopez
Among today’s Filipino journalists, few, if any, can perhaps match the length and depth of my coverage of Ninoy Aquino and his widow, Corazon Co-juangco Aquino. Every year too, during the martial law years, Ferdinand Marcos granted me an exclusive interview, something no journalist at that time had the privilege. So I heard both sides of the political fence. I have seen the folly of the past, I see the present in that light, and I can perhaps anticipate with some confidence, the wisdom of the future.
The only thing I missed was visiting Ninoy during his three years of exile in Boston. I didn’t have the time to do that.
My Asiaweek reportage of Ninoy’s assassination and his funeral is the best there is at that time. Every single copy of the 10,000 copies printed of the assassination and the funeral issues was sold out on a single day, a publishing record for a foreign weekly. I covered extensively the six years and four months of the Cory Aquino presidency. This is an important point to consider because I will do later an analysis of the Cory Aquino presidency.
As a journalist, I had my first glimpse of Ninoy when I was a business reporter of The Manila Times. The senator used to drop by the Times offices in Florentino Torres Street, Sta. Cruz, Manila, bringing merienda to the editors and staff of the paper and its sister publication, Taliba. Ninoy had a way with newsmen that readily captured their friendship, if not support. He assiduously cultivated the political backing of Chino Roces. The Times then had greater circulation than all the other newspapers combined.
When martial law was declared in September 1972, I lost my Times job but quickly joined two newspapers, the newly formed Times Journal and the Mainichi Shimbun, Japan’s oldest daily. Three years later, I joined Asiaweek, then a struggling Hong Kong-based weekly which was later acquired by The Readers Digest and then, Time Warner of New York, as a sister company of Time Magazine.
As a foreign correspondent, I covered the Aquino trial for subversion, rebellion and murder. Covering Ninoy was something that required courage in those days. No Filipino journalist wanted to read nor publish his press statements. You would never know whether the military was shadowing you on the way back to the office from the hearings of the military tribunal which Ninoy refused to recognize and which had a decidedly anti-Ninoy bias. In 1977, the opposition leader was later convicted and sentenced to die by musketry. Upheld by the Supreme Court, this conviction, I believe, laid the foundation for Ninoy’s assassination by the military on August 21, 1983. With daylight murder, the military in effect executed Ninoy’s death sentence six years later. Whatever doubts the military had about killing Ninoy were removed by that conviction.
Ninoy was jailed for seven years and seven months. During Christmases and some special occasions, he was given extended furlough (a privilege never given the jailed Joseph Estrada) and he would stay at his Times Street home in Quezon City. He gave interviews and welcomed select foreign correspondents like me with a warm heart and an even warmer hospitability. On more than one occasion, he would ask Cory to make coffee for Ninoy and me, with some cookies too. That was Cory, the dutiful, uncomplaining housewife. In a dozen years, she would be president of the Philippines.
Being a former journalist himself, a very good writer and the most dynamic of political leaders at that time, Ninoy made good copy. (Jose W. Diokno and Jovito Salonga claimed to be more brilliant but they had intellectual arrogance; cancer-stricken Diokno confessed to me at his hospital sickbed that the first time he met me, he wanted to punch me, because of the way I asked questions; while Salonga lectured me on the phone that no one could rival him in terms of prosecutorial talent).
During my visits at his Times Street house (it had so many rooms where Ninoy could conduct meetings simultaneously yet separately with different groups of people), we would retire to a small private room for my interview.
Ninoy made me feel very important with the exclusive uninterrupted attention he gave me. There was a time he typed his answers to my anticipated questions para di ka na mahirapan, he said. Then, he would ask me questions on the situation, in the political and security context. He accepted the fact that he was a captive of the military and that Ferdinand Marcos was his jailer. There was another time, he gave me several poems typewritten and autographed by him, regalo ko sa yo, he said.
Among today’s Filipino journalists, few, if any, can perhaps match the length and depth of my coverage of Ninoy Aquino and his widow, Corazon Co-juangco Aquino. Every year too, during the martial law years, Ferdinand Marcos granted me an exclusive interview, something no journalist at that time had the privilege. So I heard both sides of the political fence. I have seen the folly of the past, I see the present in that light, and I can perhaps anticipate with some confidence, the wisdom of the future.
The only thing I missed was visiting Ninoy during his three years of exile in Boston. I didn’t have the time to do that.
My Asiaweek reportage of Ninoy’s assassination and his funeral is the best there is at that time. Every single copy of the 10,000 copies printed of the assassination and the funeral issues was sold out on a single day, a publishing record for a foreign weekly. I covered extensively the six years and four months of the Cory Aquino presidency. This is an important point to consider because I will do later an analysis of the Cory Aquino presidency.
As a journalist, I had my first glimpse of Ninoy when I was a business reporter of The Manila Times. The senator used to drop by the Times offices in Florentino Torres Street, Sta. Cruz, Manila, bringing merienda to the editors and staff of the paper and its sister publication, Taliba. Ninoy had a way with newsmen that readily captured their friendship, if not support. He assiduously cultivated the political backing of Chino Roces. The Times then had greater circulation than all the other newspapers combined.
When martial law was declared in September 1972, I lost my Times job but quickly joined two newspapers, the newly formed Times Journal and the Mainichi Shimbun, Japan’s oldest daily. Three years later, I joined Asiaweek, then a struggling Hong Kong-based weekly which was later acquired by The Readers Digest and then, Time Warner of New York, as a sister company of Time Magazine.
As a foreign correspondent, I covered the Aquino trial for subversion, rebellion and murder. Covering Ninoy was something that required courage in those days. No Filipino journalist wanted to read nor publish his press statements. You would never know whether the military was shadowing you on the way back to the office from the hearings of the military tribunal which Ninoy refused to recognize and which had a decidedly anti-Ninoy bias. In 1977, the opposition leader was later convicted and sentenced to die by musketry. Upheld by the Supreme Court, this conviction, I believe, laid the foundation for Ninoy’s assassination by the military on August 21, 1983. With daylight murder, the military in effect executed Ninoy’s death sentence six years later. Whatever doubts the military had about killing Ninoy were removed by that conviction.
Ninoy was jailed for seven years and seven months. During Christmases and some special occasions, he was given extended furlough (a privilege never given the jailed Joseph Estrada) and he would stay at his Times Street home in Quezon City. He gave interviews and welcomed select foreign correspondents like me with a warm heart and an even warmer hospitability. On more than one occasion, he would ask Cory to make coffee for Ninoy and me, with some cookies too. That was Cory, the dutiful, uncomplaining housewife. In a dozen years, she would be president of the Philippines.
Being a former journalist himself, a very good writer and the most dynamic of political leaders at that time, Ninoy made good copy. (Jose W. Diokno and Jovito Salonga claimed to be more brilliant but they had intellectual arrogance; cancer-stricken Diokno confessed to me at his hospital sickbed that the first time he met me, he wanted to punch me, because of the way I asked questions; while Salonga lectured me on the phone that no one could rival him in terms of prosecutorial talent).
During my visits at his Times Street house (it had so many rooms where Ninoy could conduct meetings simultaneously yet separately with different groups of people), we would retire to a small private room for my interview.
Ninoy made me feel very important with the exclusive uninterrupted attention he gave me. There was a time he typed his answers to my anticipated questions para di ka na mahirapan, he said. Then, he would ask me questions on the situation, in the political and security context. He accepted the fact that he was a captive of the military and that Ferdinand Marcos was his jailer. There was another time, he gave me several poems typewritten and autographed by him, regalo ko sa yo, he said.
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