Juan L. Mercado

To generations used to the marketplace exchange of information in this digital age, martial law represents the country’s excursion into the alien and bizarre.

Information was not for everyone. Truth could be subverted for a higher good, like security or survival. Journalists, who did not sieve information with the sensitivity of the state, had to be muzzled before they could do more harm.
Information, lives—like scraps of paper, these were lost in the bureaucracy created to hold up one man’s rule.

Juan L. Mercado and Dr. Resil B. Mojares were among those who were “neutralized” or “invited”—euphemisms for the directive to military intelligence agents to take into custody political and non-political leaders after President Ferdinand E. Marcos signed Proclamation 1081 on Sept. 21, 1972, which placed the country under martial law (ML). Continue Reading

In a local paper, a columnist was suspended for more than a month by its owners who, the columnist said, were requested by a politician-relative who was then caught in an election campaign turmoil.

In a local radio station, a commentator quit after he was ordered to “cease and desist” in his “one-sided attacks” against a public official.

In a Manila-based paper, the contract of a columnist was not renewed when her columns ran “on politically partisan grooves.”

In those cases, the inside story was not publicized and was only whispered about in coffee shops and bars. In all cases, the will of management prevailed. Continue Reading