On this day in 1983, Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino Jr. flew home to Manila after three years of exile in the United States. He was a former senator and the best known opponent of President Ferdinand Marcos, and he expected to be arrested on landing. He wore a bulletproof vest under his shirt for the flight, and he told the journalists travelling with him to keep their cameras ready, because whatever happened would happen very fast.
He was shot on the airport apron, minutes after the aircraft doors opened, while being escorted to a vehicle that was to take him to prison. Rolando Galman, the man accused of the shooting, was killed there as well. Two deaths on a stretch of concrete, in the space of a few minutes, in front of people who had come to record an arrest.
The airport carries his name now. The twenty-first of August is marked in the Philippines each year, a day off work in a country that has spent four decades deciding what to say about it.
The funeral Mass at Santo Domingo drew a crowd that took most of a day to move through the city, and the procession to the cemetery ran some eleven hours. The yellow ribbons people tied to trees along the route stayed up for months afterwards, faded, and were left where they were.
Marguerite, he began as a reporter — he covered the Korean War while still in his teens — and he kept writing through seven years of imprisonment, letters and notes and statements composed in a cell. A man who spent his life putting things down on paper so they could be read later.