Two FilAms who died for Filipinos, a cockroach on a dictator

We just marked the 25^th anniversary of the Filipino people’s triumph over the brutal dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos.

Many Filipinos lost their lives in that fight. Two of them were Filipino Americans.

This weekend, FilAms will gather in Seattle to remember two little-known heroes of the battle for democracy in the Philippines.

In June 1981, Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes, two union organizers in Seattle and active members of the anti-Marcos movement in the United States, were shot in cold blood.

The assassinations shocked the Filipino American community. The murderers were later arrested and convicted. But Viernes’ and Domingo’s families and friends suspected that the Marcos regime was involved.

After a long legal battle, a US federal court found the Marcoses liable for the killings. It was a stunning victory for the families and colleagues of the two Filipino American martyrs.

The murders and the victorious legal campaign that followed underscored the role that FilAms played in the struggle to defeat the Marcos dictatorship and restore democracy in the Philippines.

“The ultimate sacrifice,” FilAm activist Terry Bautista said of Domingo and Viernes’s contributions. “Both men were strong and charismatic….  The Domingo-Viernes story deserves attention for Filipinos for its extreme example of the treachery of the Marcos regime and how the work here by US Filipinos served as such a threat [to the regime].”

Domingo and Viernes were both inspired by Filipino working class immigrant parents.

“What motivated them was their parents,” Terri Mast, widow of Silme Domingo, told me in a 2006 interview.

They had both visited the Philippines. Domingo saw his father’s homeland for the first time before he was murdered.

“They were both motivated intellectually and on a personal level by their families,” Terri said.

Domingo and Viernes became part of a Filipino phenomenon in the United States. Responding to the call to challenge the Marcos dictatorship, thousands of young people — Filipino immigrants and Filipinos who grew up as Americans — came together to create a formidable movement against what became one of the most corrupt and despotic regimes in history.

They lobbied political leaders and institutions in the US. They organized protest rallies against the regime. They exposed the abuses of the Marcos government.

They sacrificed their careers, and even their personal welfare, for this cause. Domingo and Viernes lost their lives fighting a tyrant.

For Terri Mast, Domingo’s widow, the fight paid off when she and her lawyers were able to force Marcos to be subjected to a deposition after the dictator and his family fled to Hawaii during the 1986 People Power revolt.

“It was a very strange experience,” she told me. “It was like meeting the devil and seeing him face-to-face… But when you saw him he was this small shriveled sick man.“

The meeting included what she described as “strange and funny” episodes. After returning from lunch to the Marco’s home in exile, they found Imelda at a piano playing the song, “Send in the Clowns.”

“Is she talking about us?” she and her attorneys thought with amusement.

Then there was the incident involving the cockroach on the dictator. It happened when Marcos was answering one of Mast’s attorney’s questions, Terri recalled.

“All of a sudden, I saw this huge cockroach — just huge,” she said. “And it was crawling up him. I was watching and wondering if anyone else is seeing it, watching it climb up him… He was answering a question and all of a sudden his lawyer saw the cockroach, and so he reaches out and slaps it away from him.”

The move startled Marcos, as Terri Mast recalled: “Marcos says, ‘What? Did I say the wrong thing?’ Everyone chuckled, of course. It was one of those light moments.”

Domingo’s daughter, Ligaya, was only four years old when her father was murdered.  “For me, the meaning of it all is really in the struggle that happened after and the work that Gene and Silme were doing.”

“For me, it was pretty inspirational, in terms of seeing the people around me really fighting for the things they believe in, and learning from a pretty young age about the inequality in this world and the injustices and the need to fight for what’s right.”

And there have been many FilAms who have joined that fight. Sadly, they still sometimes find it hard to be accepted as Filipinos.

“I know I’m Filipino, have spent years working in the Filipino community in defense of our civil rights, as well as fighting the fascist rule of Marcos,” Terry Bautista, another veteran anti-Marcos activists, said on a Facebook post.

“The Philippines will always be my home, where I was born, and yet historical currents find me here in the US where my status relegates me to one who must survive, no matter my ethnicity. It is an awkward position to be judged as neither Filipino enough, nor American enough as the political winds change and as social networks ebb and flow.”

(A forum commemorating the assassinations of Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes will be held on Saturday, July 2, 1 p.m. – 4 p.m., at the Wyckoff Auditorium at Seattle University, Seattle, Washington.)

On Twitter @KuwentoPimentel.