September 21 is the Anniversary of Martial Law
52 years ago, Dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr declared Martial Law. For more than 20 years, his regime murdered activists, starved families, and plundered $10 billion from the Filipino people. Today, the Philippines is still recovering from these injustices.
Damayan actively opposes the historical revisionism of Dictator Ferdinand Marcos’ Martial Law, propagated by his family, including current Philippine President Ferdinand "BBM" Marcos, Jr. We also fight to ensure that the Marcos family and other corrupt politicians never exploit and abuse the working class ever again. During Martial Law, the Marcos administration imprisoned 70,000 human rights activists, journalists, lawyers, students, and others who opposed them. The government tortured more than 30,000 Filipinos and impoverished farmers, factory workers, and the working class. National debt soared by $28 billion, Filipino families grew hungry, and the Marcos family indulged in riches.
As a Filipino migrant workers organization in NY, Damayan attributes family separation and forced migration of working-class Filipinos to the Marcos Labor Export Program (LEP). Marcos codified the program in 1974 to push Filipino migrant workers to leave the country and work overseas to send remittances back home. It is also appalling for the dictator’s son to have become President, using his family’s ill-gotten wealth to rise to power and with his family never being held accountable for their internationally recognized human rights violations. Damayan actively fights against the historical revisionism that the Marcoses perpetuate, through erasures in school textbooks to social media false news.
Damayan urges all Filipinos to never forget the Marcoses’ grave abuses against the Filipino people. The scars of Martial Law still bleed to today: families still grieve the activists they lost, survivors still remember the torture they experienced, and the Philippine economy is still recouping from the $10 Billion plundered. Fight with us to make sure that Marcos’, Duterte’s, or any government’s abuse of the Filipino people will never be forgotten—and never happen again.