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The ache in my again is a ghost that refuses to depart. Age is simply making it worse.
It started 42 years in the past, on September 21, 1983 at Mendiola Bridge. I can nonetheless really feel the vibration of the rattan truncheon because it landed on my backbone, swung by a Western Police District officer, as protests went haywire when a phalanx of truncheon-wielding anti-riot policemen moved to disperse us with water cannon, tear gasoline and gunfire.
We have been there within the shadow of Ninoy Aquino’s assassination on August 21 to commemorate Martial Legislation’s eleventh anniversary, uniting protesters fueled by a grief that had lastly changed into defiance. I survived the chaotic massacre, eleven others didn’t.
The bruise on my pores and skin pale many years in the past, however the trauma settled into my marrow. It taught me the brutal lesson of Marcos’ constitutional authoritarianism: that the state can break your physique, lie in regards to the motive, and belief that the overwhelming majority of individuals will merely look away and transfer on.
I got here to America in 1992, when the nation nonetheless felt civil. Folks argued, however they didn’t deal with disagreement as treason. The authority confirmed its face, not cover behind a masks. Guidelines mattered, even after they failed.
As an immigrant, that civility made me imagine I had lastly left the shadows of Martial Legislation’s “salvaging” — our grim euphemism for abstract executions and extrajudicial killings — and the haunting ghosts of the desaparecidosfor due course of.
Then I watched the video of the ICE operation in Minnesota that killed Renae Nicole Good, a 37-year-old widowed mom of three, on January 7, 2026. And my again began aching once more.
The anatomy of a lie
Inside hours of her demise, the acquainted script rolled out with mechanical precision. President Donald Trump and Homeland Safety Secretary Kristi Noem branded her a “home terrorist,” claiming she had “viciously run over” an agent.
However I watched the footage with the cynical eyes of somebody who has seen this film earlier than. I noticed an agent standing on his personal two toes, unhurt. I noticed a automotive making an attempt to tug away from a terrifying swarm of armed males. I noticed pictures fired point-blank right into a driver’s window.
“At a really minimal, that girl was very, very disrespectful to legislation enforcement,” Trump doubled down.
Within the Philippines, we had a phrase for the lie that follows the bullet: nanlaban—“she fought again.” It’s the state’s all-purpose absolution, designed to shut the case and silence the nationwide conscience.
A latest ProPublica investigation documented that over 170 US residents have been wrongfully detained, tased or put in a chokehold by federal brokers in simply the primary 9 months of 2025. Worse, The Guardian stories that 2025 was ICE’s deadliest 12 months in 20 years, with 32 individuals dying in custody.
These are residents dragged from their automobiles, snatched from their properties and disappeared right into a system that denies them a telephone name or a lawyer.
Deja vu
When Consultant Ilhan Omar not too long ago warned that the present administration’s rhetoric more and more echoes the “logic of martial legislation,” she spoke of the normalization of federal power and using emergency powers as strange instruments of governance.
For these of us who’ve lived via the Marcos dictatorship, we all know Martial Legislation doesn’t arrive abruptly in a grand ceremony; it arrives by proclamations, justified as “short-term” and “protecting” till the extraordinary turns into the on a regular basis.
Authoritarianism survives not solely via power, however via exhaustion and normalization. Concern does the remaining: worry of being deported, worry of being thrown to “Alligator Alcatraz,” worry of being killed like Renee Good.
As Stephen Colbert bitingly summarized this week: “Obey or die. And in case you die, it’s your individual fault for not obeying.” It’s a doctrine that replaces the Invoice of Rights with a requirement for absolute submission to masked authority.
Why can’t America cease him?
Folks usually ask: That is America, why can’t the establishments cease him? We Filipinos know the reply higher than anybody. You don’t cease a strongman with “the legislation” as soon as he has already swallowed the judges and the generals.
When federal authorities block native investigators — as they did in Minnesota by reducing out the Bureau of Legal Apprehension — the checks and balances grow to be nothing however scrap paper.
The ache in my again shouldn’t be nostalgia. When the state begins to masks its face and demonize its victims, the trauma doesn’t merely return, it stays. And no quantity of bodily remedy can ease the ache.
However again ache or not, I’m a road parliamentarian by coronary heart. I grew up within the custom of leaders like Pepe Diokno, Lorenzo Tañada and Chino Roces who understood that when the official halls of energy are hollowed out, the true legislature strikes to the streets. They taught us that protest shouldn’t be mere criticism, however a mechanism of democratic accountability when formal channels fail.
I didn’t come to America to be a spectator to energy; I got here as a result of this nation taught the world that rights will not be presents from the state however calls for made by the individuals.
If I keep dwelling now, nursing an ache that received’t go away, I’m rehearsing the obedience that authoritarians depend on. – Rappler.com
Oscar Quiambao is a former reporter for The Philippine Each day Inquirer who now lives in San Francisco.
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