Embedded in worn pages, fading ink, and yellowed clippings is a bloodied history forgotten by many. As the dark legacy of the Marcos family stretches invasively into the present, the country wrestles with a tarnished memory born from historical revisionism.
Project Gunita, an archiving organization dedicated to preserving and propagating materials related to Marcos Sr.’s Martial Law, was established to counteract such erasure. Since 2022, the organization has worked tirelessly to ensure historical records remain as accessible evidence of the regime’s brutality and the people’s resistance.
Co-founder Karl Suyat emphasizes the need for collective ownership of the archives to ensure active preservation and widespread distribution. “Our history is our story,” he affirms. “The story of the Marcos dictatorship is not just a story of the Marcoses or the Aquinos, or the story of the left, or the story of these hundreds or thousands of victims. It’s the story of everyone.”
From rooted to reaching
As grief struck the country’s progressives after the 2022 National Election results, Suyat was restless with indignation, refusing to lie in wait. He knew that with their hunger for power, fascists often first target intellectual repositories—an echo of Martial Law’s past under Marcos Sr. Considering that the former dictator’s son had run a presidential campaign built on “whitewashing [their] family’s dark history,” it became clear to Suyat what he needed to do.
Suyat teamed up with co-founders Atty. Josiah David Quising and Sarah Gomez to transform his personal collection into a public resource. A call for donations led to an outpouring of support from the community, not just in monetary form but in material—books, newspapers, flyers, pamphlets, and other ephemera documenting the Martial Law period. This collective effort gave rise to Project Gunita, which now stands as a radical gesture of sharing truth and information in the face of censorship and disinformation.
True to their origins, Project Gunita’s efforts transcend digitization and preservation. Despite the archives’ fragility, the team has gone out of its way to share and display them at forums, history fairs, and exhibitions. Suyat describes such events as a difficult but necessary practice in narrative-building as he ventures to reach those with fragmented or conflictual understandings of history: “How are you going to tell a very dark, very graphic, but at the same time, very heroic period or episode in our history to an audience that does not [share] the same understanding of the events on the table?”
Such a task becomes more manageable by presenting the materials themselves, because each piece carries the emotional and political gravity as witness to the country’s darkest hour. “These are pages from history,” Suyat explains. “And these are information [and] material that no one can deny.”
Uncovering lost voices
With a mission to battle predominant corrupt machinations, Project Gunita’s progress hinges upon their visibility in the public’s compassion. But given their politically sensitive nature in a polarized nation, the lack of institutional support threatens their advocacies and operations. Through financial restraints, insufficient storage space, and the mystification of historical truth, the absence of aid reveals critical vulnerabilities in their project. In order to address this, Suyat beseeches the government to take a more active role in consolidating public knowledge.
But while such collaboration remains uncertain in today’s administration, Project Gunita remains committed to delivering justice with their current resources. However, with the heavy censorship under Martial Law, under-reporting and under-documentation hinder their ability to fill gaps in the narrative. Thus, in hopes of building a more comprehensive understanding, the team seeks history beyond what is written.
To truly combat historical revisionism, Suyat believes in amplifying victims’ unsung stories: “These stories have to be documented. [Because] they formed a part and parcel of the entire nationwide story of how the people, the Filipino people, survived and resisted the Marcos dictatorship.” Beyond physical fragments of the past, Project Gunita redefines archives through the testimonies of those who lived through its tragedies.
As they reconcile physical records and people’s experiences, Project Gunita bridges the nation’s past and present. In recounting interviews with massacre survivors and veteran journalists, Suyat emphasizes that their stories do not come from a distant history. While the Marcos regime’s survivors continue to plead for justice, Project Gunita’s advocacies for historical transparency strengthen their calls.
A united consciousness
Despite mixed perspectives on Martial Law, Suyat maintains that Project Gunita is not about sowing conflict between sides. Rather, he reiterates its role in establishing a “united front” across the political spectrum. Ultimately, the organization’s call for knowledge and understanding reflects a defiant march toward interdisciplinary action. Drawing from the past, Suyat explains, “Ang isang malaking lesson naman ng pagpapabagsak sa diktadurang Marcos, ay pagkakaisa ng lahat ng mga sektor, uri, at puwersang pampolitika sa lipunan natin.”
(One major lesson from the fall of the Marcos dictatorship is the [need] for unity in all sectors, social classes, and political forces in our society.)
To achieve more nuanced and accessible public understanding, Project Gunita aims to launch its own website. Serving as a “one-stop shop” for all materials on Martial Law, the platform will serve as a lasting voice to the legacy left behind by “every martyr, every victim, and every hero” born from the period.
Project Gunita is not merely an organization, but a movement. By memorializing the stories of Martial Law, they uphold the fight against fascism, revisionism, and falsification. Through every article, photo, and story, Project Gunita aims to build a Filipino nation “rooted in the consciousness of past dictatorship.” Inspiring a culture of accountability through education, the group stands as a fierce clamor for the “conscientization and politicization process of the Filipino people.”
Though it has been 44 years since the end of the Marcos regime, the nation still suffers from prevailing systemic injustice. But underneath the country’s sordid past, Project Gunita continues to inspire resistance through marginalized tales—championing fiery defiance despite all odds.
This article was published in The LaSallian‘s Marcos Presidency Midterm Special. To read more, visit bit.ly/TLSMarcosMidtermSpecial.
