As we mark the 40th death anniversary of Benigno 'Ninoy' Aquino Jr., we feature the lives of three people with their own milestones during the turbulent year of 1983
Marites Vitug remembered it was hot. At that time the world was suffering one of history’s worst El Niño episodes. She cannot remember how she got the information about the assassination. It must have been from beepers. Or from a party line. Or from the group of women writers she was part of. But she did remember what she saw on television. There was no close-up of the dead body lying on the tarmac.
Vitug, who would in a few days’ time become a reporter, went with her women writer friends to Santo Domingo Church in Quezon City. After that, Vitug worked for a think tank, the Ministry of Human Settlements under Imelda Marcos, for a TV magazine where she rubbed elbows with eminent editors such as Ricky Lee and Gary Olivar. The magazine soon folded up. When it closed down, she took a post in the information office of an attached agency of the Ministry of Natural Resources. led by Raul Locsin. She was writing weekly special reports about industries – and getting bored fast.
Covering politics from left to right, she would meet underground leaders, liberals, and rebel soldiers. She would hike mountains in Samar to reach underground camps, join nightly meetings of democratic organizations, visit military camps, and cover the Batasang Pambansa, the rubber-stamp unicameral legislature of Marcos.Besides her reportage, Vitug also wrote with other female writers like Jo-Ann Q. Maglipon, Sheila Coronel, Ceres Doyo, Sylvia Mayuga.
Contrary to the vigor that many people were feeling at the time, Labrador found a dejected campus when he entered the UP Diliman in 1983 as a freshman. This feeling of hopelessness would lift somehow when Labrador joined the UP Mountaineers in 1986, a mountaineering organization established by UP students back in 1977. Having met many people inside the organization, Labrador would describe that experience as “the only time I became more politically aware.”
If it was depressing in UP during ’83, it feels much hopeless now for Labrador. Polarization is intense but superficial because of social media and disinformation. “Here, you’re either Marcos or Leni. Issues get watered down because it’s all propaganda,” he said.usapang barberohe felt people regretted they voted for the President. Sara Duterte should have run instead, they said.
She had made a pact with herself since her 30s to celebrate her birthday somewhere far from home. She had spent past birthdays in Georgia, climbing Mount Kazbek; in Camiguin where she met a German doctor she would be friends with until now. In college she would live through another EDSA, this time to oust Joseph Estrada. She was studying at the Technological University of the Philippines where progressive organizations like Anakbayan were not accredited.
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