Daddy led Cebu’s anti-Marcos forces

If there was one day I would rather forget, that would be Sept. 21, 1972, the day that our lives had changed. I was only 5 years old and there was much I didn’t understand.

But I remember my father, Ribomapil “Dodong” Holganza Sr., hurriedly turning on the radio inside the room, looking very alarmed. President Ferdinand Marcos had just declared martial law.

I used to sleep with my parents in their room where there were much ribbing and cuddling. But that night, I could hear only his hushed conversation with my mother, Rosie.

“What would happen now?” he asked my mother.

My dad was not pro-Marcos. A few years ago, he was Cebu City administrator and concurrent secretary to the mayor, Sergio Osmeña Jr., Marcos’ political rival.

When Osmeña left the country, Daddy retired from politics to run a business, but this did not stop those who didn’t like Marcos from going to his office across the Basilica del Sto. Niño in downtown Cebu City. They would stay there and talk for hours about increasing human rights violations, mysterious disappearances of activists, their friends or family members and warrantless arrests by the military.

Pocket rallies

In the late 1970s, though the opposition was not popular, my dad started organizing pocket demonstrations by brave Cebuanos who could no longer take the abuses under martial rule. To many people, he was no more than Cebu’s biggest trouble rouser.

During the demonstrations, the military would hose them down with water tainted with color so the protesters could be identified. To prevent the military from identifying him, Daddy always brought an extra shirt.

Sometimes, he kept an entire bag of clothes in the trunk of his car in case he had to leave for days to escape the wrath of Marcos’ minions who didn’t like seeing his street demonstrations. With my father gone for days at times, gone too was our peaceful life as a family.

Our lives changed.

During martial law, the opposition would field him as a token candidate in sham elections.

He had to run.

My dad would always lose and I could not understand. It was embarrassing, but this was how he explained it: He had to run even if he knew he would lose just to keep the opposition alive and the Marcos forces on their toes.

And on their toes they seemed to have been as the national government began paying attention to Cebu when my father was able to gather thousands of people to march on the streets fighting for freedom at a time when Manila kept still out of fear of the dictator.

Daddy’s rallies drew national opposition stalwarts like Lorenzo Tañada, Jovito Salonga, Jose W. Diokno, Salvador “Doy” Laurel, Cesar Climaco, Ramon Mitra, Raul Manglapus, Eva Estrada-Kalaw, Joker Arroyo, Aquilino Pimentel Jr., Rene Saguisag and others who appeared to have found a safe haven among the throngs of Cebuanos, all freedom-loving descendants of Lapu-Lapu.

He finally got the ire of the dictatorship.

About noon of Christmas Day in 1982, several hours after our family’s fun-filled noche buena, the sound of loud footsteps roused me from my nap. Mommy was frantically running down the stairs while listening to the booming voice of a radio announcer with a chilling flash report.

Rebel ‘safe house’

My father and eldest brother, Joeyboy, were arrested in a rebel “safe house” on Bonifacio and Lopez Jaena streets in the crowded downtown district. For a 15-year-old, who had never heard of the word safe house before, the report smelled of irony, but it did not come as a shock.

My father had it coming. After all, he had become the top leader of Cebu’s anti-Marcos movement who galvanized thousands of Cebuanos to join his so-called Freedom Marches long before the rest of the country took to the streets to unite in protest.

The Christmas Day flash report said my father and brother were in a safe house with other “rebels.”

Oh, the irony of the word “safe house,” I thought anew.

There was nothing safe about the way we lived our lives since Daddy started leading the Cebu opposition in the late 1970s.

As Mommy entered the living room with the transistor radio still clutched in her hand, she quickly surveyed the rest of us, as if keeping count of who were left among her loved ones.

Calmly, she then called the first person she knew could help her, Daddy’s fellow opposition leader and popular radio commentator Inday Nita Cortes-Daluz, who had not heard the news then. The rest of us stood wondering, what was going to happen to us now?

As the AM radio continued blasting reports of the military raid on “Bonifacio Street near Mabini,” I couldn’t help but think that the paradox of Daddy’s life had finally reached its pinnacle.

Real test

Named after Philippine heroes RIzal, BOnifacio, MAbini and del PILar, Tatay and Nanay couldn’t have possibly guessed that the real test of the mettle of their youngest son Ribomapil’s character would come in a district named after the heroes. Pictures of my father taken moments after their arrest showed him visibly confused though still apparently determined.

As he sat on that curb, handcuffed and disheveled, I read the thought that must have raced through his mind then.

Knowing him as I do, he must have figured with neither bitterness nor anger: The Filipino nation is worth this little inconvenience.

Days after their arrest, then Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile flew in to check on their latest catch.

Litany of Marcos’ sins

Perhaps expecting an apology for being a problem to the Marcos administration, the dictator’s top security officer asked Dad if he was now ready to relent in support of Ferdinand Marcos. Instead, my father recited a litany of Marcos’ sins against the people. That earned him and my brother, Joeyboy, a guaranteed stay in jail for nearly three years with no bail and no trial.

My father was a moderate but back then, there was no room for any kind of protest.

In a letter he wrote from his cell in 1985, he bewailed that while he, my brother and countless others were rotting in jail for crimes that they did not commit, “it is revolting that all around us are people who are truly the enemies of the state, the real subversives who have been subverting the faith and confidence of the Filipinos in our democratic processes, who pillage and plunder the patrimony of this nation, and yet are enjoying their loot and power very well beyond the reach of our anemic, discriminatingly inutile judicial system.”

Always the brilliant political analyst, my father projected in that letter written a year before the 1986 Edsa People Power Revolution that “the oppressed Filipinos have already passed their darkest night, and we are now witnessing the flickering lights of the early dawn of our salvation; that the days of tyranny are about to end; that the wounded tigers in office now roaming and wildly pillaging in the corridors of power may soon be swept away by a flood of an enraged humanity; that true democracy shall be restored from the ashes of a nation torn and shattered to pieces by a reckless and irresponsible leadership; and the Filipinos shall vow that never again shall we let another tyrant rule our beloved land.”

On January 25, a month short of the Edsa People Power Anniversary this year, my father passed away. He died knowing that while Filipinos may never again let another tyrant rule over our beloved Philippines, the same political and social ills are still very much around with exactly the same lessons to be learned.

Looking back at Daddy’s sacrifices and how our family suffered for years, I have to ask without bitterness or anger: Was it really worth all our inconvenience?

Rosemarie Holganza-Borromeo, the youngest of Ribomapil Holganza’s six children, was news chief of ABS-CBN Cebu and later, press officer of Interpol-Lyon’s Incident Response Team during the 2008 MV Princess of the Stars sea tragedy that killed hundreds of passengers. She now works as a media consultant based in Cebu.