Benjamin Pimentel’s new book “U.G.: An Underground Tale.” The book profiles Edgar Jopson and traces the “unique and dramatic” odyssey of the most intriguing figure of the First Quarter Storm.
In the aftermath of the January 26 confrontation, as the radicals called for more militance, Edjop and other student leaders of the moderate bloc agreed to a dialogue with Marcos on January 30.
A few months earlier, during the bicentennial anniversary of the Ateneo, Edjop and other members of the Ateneo student council had visited Malacañang at the invitation of Imelda Marcos. Romy Chan remembered it as a social visit in which the First Lady herself showed them around the Palace. But they expected the January 30 meeting to be different. “We had just gone through a sudden awakening,” Romy Chan recalled.
The dialogue was scheduled to start at 2 p.m. But Marcos kept the student leaders waiting for about an hour and a half. According to Freddie Salanga, Edjop was about to walk out when Marcos’s executive secretary, Ernesto Maceda, walked in with the president. Marcos was “arrogant and intimidating’’ giving the impression that he had a lot of things to do and the students were keeping him from his business as president, Salanga recalled.
Salanga later recalled the meeting in the October 10, 1982 issue of Panorama magazine: “It was mid-afternoon by the time the President got to see [Edjop] in the latter’s study, a small room easily jam-packed as much by reporters and student leaders as by curious Malacañang personnel and hangers-on out to catch a glimpse of the boy who had led what was, till then, the bloodiest student demonstration in history.
There the demands of the 26th were threshed out, Edjop’s normally deep baritone quivering at first but then slowly gaining confidence as the President began to nod his head at a number of points he was raising. As the tension eased in the room, people began to notice how like a boy indeed he was, his feet barely touching the polished floor as he sat on a stiff high-backed chair by the left-hand side of the President’s table. To the President’s right was an equally small person, Portia Ilagan, who then headed the National Students’ League, an organization of students from state colleges and universities. To many in that room, it must have seemed highly improbable that these two could have actually marshaled thousands of students, but that was the stark fact.”
As the meeting went on, students were massing right outside Malacañang Palace. The NUSP, the National Students League and other moderate groups had come early, taking their positions at Freedom Park.
KM, SDK and other radical groups had held their own rally in front of Congress, but at around 5 p.m., they began marching to Malacañang.
Journalist Jose Lacaba recounted what happened next:“It was growing dark and the lamps on the Malacañang gates had not been turned on. There was a shout of ‘Sindihan ang ilaw! Sindihan ang ilaw!’ [Turn on the lights!] Malacañang obliged, the lights went on and then crash! a rock blasted out one of the lamps. One by one, the lights were put out by stones or sticks.”
Dicky Castro recalled that, in the darkness that followed, rocks were hurled from inside the Palace at the students mobilized outside, and the youths reacted by hurling them back. That, he said, was when the Palace guards attacked.
Meanwhile, inside Malacañang, another confrontation was brewing. Freddie Salanga’s account continued:“The question of whether the President was going to endorse the demand for nonpartisan elections to the Constitutional Convention was getting pretty near to some kind of resolution, when Edjop finally came up with the surprise demand of the afternoon. He wanted an assurance that the President would not seek a third term by circumventing the Constitution.”
“I am constitutionally bound not to run for a third term,” was Marcos’s calm reply.
But Edjop was adamant.“Mr. President, we want you to sign a document pledging that you will not run for a third term,” demanded the student leader.
“Who are you to tell me what to do!” Marcos shot back, followed by his famous mocking remark about Edjop: “You’re only a son of a grocer!”
Portia Ilagan, in an effort to break the tension, cracked, “Tingling! Ops, break muna! Break!”
Marcos simply shrugged and smiled sarcastically, Freddie Salanga recalled. Jun Pau, who also attended the meeting, said Edjop was nervous. “His voice was louder than usual. When Marcos snapped, we were silent and stunned. After all, it was the President of the Republic who had just barked.
If he had had a gun with him them, I think he would have probably shot all of us right there and then.”
Before the dialogue could proceed, a Palace aide came in with a report on the melee outside the Malacañang gates. The dialogue abruptly ended.
At a little past 6 p.m., Edjop and the other student representatives were seen to the door. But a battle was already raging right outside the Palace. In his account of the uprising, Lacaba wrote: “Jopson and company fled back into the Palace, taken aback by the fury that had broken out at the gates.
They were graciously shown the back door, ferried across the river, and allowed to go home safely, presumably to watch television. They missed out on all the action.”
Edjop may have missed all the excitement––but his car parked right outside the palace gates did not. Some of the more fired-up radicals, aware that the vehicle belonged to the leader of the moderates––the “clerico-fascist reactionary’’ who, four days before, had tried to deny one of their leaders the right to speak––smashed the windows of Edjop’s American Rambler.
The militants were prepared for bigger onslaughts. They commandeered a fire truck protecting the Palace, and sent it crashing through Gate 4 of
Malacañang. With the Palace gates opened, the radicals attacked. Lacaba wrote: “Once inside the gate, the rebels stoned the buildings and set fire to the truck and to a government car that happened to be parked nearby.”
Also covering the event for his school paper was Ed del Rosario who said the students actually were surprised to suddenly find themselves inside the Palace.“I don’t think the students really had any intention of assaulting the Palace. After they had broken in, many of them simply milled around not knowing what to do. The soldiers didn’t have a hard time dispersing them.”
Lacaba’s account continued: “Before they could wreak more havoc, however, the Presidential Guard Battalion came out in force. They fired into the air and, when the rebs held their ground, fired tear gas bombs at them. The rebs retreated; the few who were slow on their feet, or were blinded by the tear gas, got caught on the Palace grounds and were beaten up with rifle butts and billy clubs and good old-fashioned fists and feet.”
The Battle of Mendiola, as the confrontation came to be known, lasted until the wee hours of January 31, boiling over to Azcarraga, now called Recto Avenue, España and Divisoria. When it was over, four students were dead.
During most of that night, Edjop was at his house with NUSP officers and leaders of other moderate groups, monitoring developments and drawing up plans to help students caught in the fighting. Freddie Salanga said he thought his friend was scared. “But as usual he didn’t show it. As usual, he was the one who helped us calm down. We were the ones who were agitated.”
Eighteen years later, during a reunion at Freddie Salanga’s house in Quezon City, a few months before his own death, Edjop’s NUSP friends looked back to that historic day and year. They initially disagreed on whether Marcos provoked the 1970 riots. Jun Pau said Marcos used “the chaotic atmosphere as an excuse to declare martial law.” Romy Chan believed “the Reds, more than anyone else, were responsible for the violence. They had more to gain from the trouble than Marcos.” Pau offered a compromise view: “Let’s just say it was a combination of the Reds and Marcos. Talagang sinundot nila ang mga pangyayari. They really stirred things up.”
