The pain in my back is a ghost that refuses to leave. Age is only making it worse.

It began 42 years ago, on September 21, 1983 at Mendiola Bridge. I can still feel the vibration of the rattan truncheon as it landed on my spine, swung by a Western Police District officer, as protests went haywire when a phalanx of truncheon-wielding anti-riot policemen moved to disperse us with water cannon, tear gas and gunfire.

We were there in the shadow of Ninoy Aquino’s assassination on August 21 to commemorate Martial Law’s 11th anniversary, uniting protesters fueled by a grief that had finally turned into defiance. I survived the chaotic bloodbath, eleven others did not. 

The bruise on my skin faded decades ago, but the trauma settled into my marrow. It taught me the brutal lesson of Marcos’ constitutional authoritarianism: that the state can break your body, lie about the reason, and trust that the vast majority of people will simply look away and move on.

I came to America in 1992, when the country still felt civil. People argued, but they didn’t treat disagreement as treason. The authority showed its face, not hide behind a mask. Rules mattered, even when they failed. 

As an immigrant, that civility made me believe I had finally left the shadows of Martial Law’s “salvaging” — our grim euphemism for summary executions and extrajudicial killings — and the haunting ghosts of the desaparecidosfor due process.

Then I watched the video of the ICE operation in Minnesota that killed Renae Nicole Good, a 37-year-old widowed mother of three, on January 7, 2026. And my back started aching again.

The anatomy of a lie

Within hours of her death, the familiar script rolled out with mechanical precision. President Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem branded her a “domestic terrorist,” claiming she had “viciously run over” an agent. 

But I watched the footage with the cynical eyes of someone who has seen this movie before. I saw an agent standing on his own two feet, uninjured. I saw a car trying to pull away from a terrifying swarm of armed men. I saw shots fired point-blank into a driver’s window.

“At a very minimum, that woman was very, very disrespectful to law enforcement,” Trump doubled down.

In the Philippines, we had a word for the lie that follows the bullet: nanlaban—“she fought back.” It is the state’s all-purpose absolution, designed to close the case and silence the national conscience. 

A recent ProPublica investigation documented that over 170 US citizens have been wrongfully detained, tased or put in a chokehold by federal agents in just the first nine months of 2025. Worse, The Guardian reports that 2025 was ICE’s deadliest year in two decades, with 32 people dying in custody.

These are citizens dragged from their cars, snatched from their homes and disappeared into a system that denies them a phone call or a lawyer. 

Deja vu 

When Representative Ilhan Omar recently warned that the current administration’s rhetoric increasingly echoes the “logic of martial law,” she spoke of the normalization of federal force and the use of emergency powers as ordinary tools of governance.

For those of us who have lived through the Marcos dictatorship, we know Martial Law does not arrive all at once in a grand ceremony; it arrives by proclamations, justified as “temporary” and “protective” until the extraordinary becomes the everyday.

Authoritarianism survives not only through force, but through exhaustion and normalization. Fear does the rest: fear of being deported, fear of being thrown to “Alligator Alcatraz,” fear of being killed like Renee Good.

As Stephen Colbert bitingly summarized this week: “Obey or die. And if you die, it’s your own fault for not obeying.” It is a doctrine that replaces the Bill of Rights with a demand for absolute submission to masked authority.

Why can’t America stop him?

People often ask: This is America, why can’t the institutions stop him? We Filipinos know the answer better than anyone. You don’t stop a strongman with “the law” once he has already swallowed the judges and the generals. 

When federal authorities block local investigators — as they did in Minnesota by cutting out the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension — the checks and balances become nothing but scrap paper.

The ache in my back is not nostalgia. When the state begins to mask its face and demonize its victims, the trauma does not merely return, it stays. And no amount of physical therapy can ease the pain.

But back pain or not, I am a street parliamentarian by heart. I grew up in the tradition of leaders like Pepe Diokno, Lorenzo Tañada and Chino Roces who understood that when the official halls of power are hollowed out, the true legislature moves to the streets. They taught us that protest is not mere complaint, but a mechanism of democratic accountability when formal channels fail.

I did not come to America to be a spectator to power; I came because this country taught the world that rights are not gifts from the state but demands made by the people. 

If I stay home now, nursing an ache that won’t go away, I am rehearsing the obedience that authoritarians rely on. – Rappler.com

Oscar Quiambao is a former reporter for The Philippine Daily Inquirer who now lives in San Francisco.