21/08/2026
๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ | ๐๐ก๐ ๐๐ข๐ฅ๐๐ง๐๐ ๐ข๐ง ๐๐๐ฅ๐๐๐๐งฬ๐๐ง๐ โ๐ฌ ๐๐ญ๐๐ญ๐๐ฆ๐๐ง๐ญ
Written by: Jan Denver Claude Regencia | Editor-in-Chief
"There is no reconciliation without justice."
When Kiko Aquino-Dee was asked whether the Aquino and Marcos family could ever reconcile, his response pointed to one specific condition.
Justice.
More than four decades after the assassination of former Senator Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino Jr., that condition remains unanswered. And perhaps nowhere is that more evident than in the carefully worded statements released every Ninoy Aquino Day.
This year, Malacaรฑang once again commemorated Aquino's sacrifice. It spoke of democracy, national unity, and the enduring lessons of history. Yet amidst the familiar language of remembrance lies a silence that is difficult to ignore.
It's even more striking seeing that the one sitting at Malacaรฑang today is the son of the dictator who ordered him surveilled, who kept him in prison for nearly eight years without real trial, and whose soldiers controlled the tarmac the moment Aquino was shot dead upon his return home. Forty-three years later, the son occupies the very palace his father was forced to flee. And each year, it falls to him to decide, publicly, what this day should mean.
Still open. Still unanswered.
There is only so much an irony this pointed can be left to note in passing before the wound it points to gets dressed each year in the comfortable language of "unity" and quietly buried beneath it again.
In 2022, his first Ninoy Aquino Day in office, the Palace issued no statement at all. Neither did the National Historical Commission of the Philippines.[1] The few government accounts that did acknowledge the date largely used it not to mourn Aquino but to brand him a communistโon the anniversary of his own murder.[2] In 2024, the observance itself was shifted off August 21, the actual date of his death, moved two days later to stretch a long weekend for tourism.[3] A senator's assassination, rescheduled for convenience.
What might look like a simple act of carelessness becomes a deliberate choice repeated often enough to be a pattern, and, a pattern repeated often enough to be a method.
Whoever controls how a nation is permitted to remember also controls what that memory can demand of the present. For four years now, this administration has shown precisely what it does with that authority: it withholds comment when comment is expected, it moves dates when dates carry inconvenient weight, and when it finally speaks, it speaks in language broad enough to avoid the one fact that would cost it something; who did this, and to whom.
The consequences extend well beyond the Palace's press releases. An entire generation of young Filipinos has come to weigh the martial law years against vague, softened talk of order and infrastructure, because the historical record has spent thirty-six years being worn down by people with every reason to wear it down. A history remembered only for roads and bridges is a history with no one left to answer for the disappeared, the tortured, and the silenced.
Ninoy Aquino Day carries any real meaning only when it is allowed to implicate the presidency that observes it. This presidency exists, in part, because of an unfinished trial. In 1985, the Sandiganbayan acquitted every soldier charged in Aquino's murder, including then Armed Forces Chief of Staff Gen. Fabian Ver, the officer a government fact-finding board had already named as the highest-ranking conspirator. The Supreme Court later struck that verdict down as a "sham." Only in 1990, after Marcos Sr. had already fled the country, did a second trial convict sixteen military men. Ver was never among them. He had already left with the Marcoses and died abroad in 1998, never having answered for what the board that investigated him said he did.[4][5]
His assassination only delayed what he was killed for opposing. To honor his courage while carefully avoiding who ended his life therefore becomes reduced to a quieter form of erasure, repeated once a year, in full view of the country.
So let it be said plainly. Say who was held responsible. Say who escaped accountability. Say who has spent decades softening the memory of what happened.
That is what vigilance actually asks of us; not some empty sentiments like "never again," nor a moment of silence and nothing after, not even a slogan plastered across a tarpaulin and forgotten by September; but, the discipline to keep the โspecificโ from dissolving into the โgeneral.โ
To remember Ninoy Aquino honestly is to resist the temptation to make his death abstract. Because history becomes easiest to forget when its names, its victims, and its perpetrators are replaced with safer words.
And that temptation is precisely what vigilance demands to refuse.
๐จ: Jan Denver Claude Regencia
Sources:
[1] "Marcos Not Moving 'Ninoy Aquino Day' Observance This Year," Philippine Daily Inquirer, August 21, 2025, https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/2098519/marcos-not-moving-ninoy-aquino-day-observance-this-year.
[2] "Remembering Ninoy in Marcos Jr.'s 2nd Year as President," Rappler, August 21, 2023, https://www.rappler.com/philippines/ninoy-aquino-day-marcos-administration-august-2023/.
[3] Presidential Communications Office, "PBBM Moves Observance of Ninoy Aquino Day to Aug. 23," Proclamation No. 665, s. 2024, August 15, 2024, https://pco.gov.ph/news_releases/pbbm-moves-observance-of-ninoy-aquino-day-to-aug-23/.
[4] "Agrava Report on Ninoy Aquino Slay: Groundbreaking Search for Truth," Philippine Daily Inquirer, August 22, 2021, https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1476905/agrava-report-on-ninoy-slay-truth-seeking-groundbreaking;
[5] "Ninoy Slay Case Closed, High Court Decides," Philippine Daily Inquirer, https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/631129/ninoy-slay-case-closed-high-court-decides.
