The young sugar and rice seedlings planted just a month ago are now under water. Farmers will not be able to harvest these at the end of the season. Old trees are uprooted. Small nipa-style houses made of bamboo and native grass—the preferred dwellings for peasants—are collapsing on top of their waterlogged foundations. News of families abandoning houses and seeking shelter in public schools reaches a frenzied pace as local authorities discourage people from these overcrowded places.
Schools are ordered closed indefinitely. No one knows when classes will resume.
In early September of 1972, we headed back to school after almost two months of continuous rain and flooding. The new campus at Cer-hill was hurriedly completed because the old site was still under water. We were barely at the new school for three weeks when Marcos declared martial law on September 21. School was closed once again.
On the morning of the first day that classes resumed, I remember that it was unlike our usual school routine. We were standing in line on the quadrangle singing the national anthem as two students were raising the Philippine flag. After the usual announcements were made and instead of marching to our classrooms, Ms. Arceo, took a PA system in her hand and announced, “You are not to go to your classrooms at this time. We will let you know when it will be appropriate to enter your classrooms. Stay in the quad until I tell you to go. Do not break out of queue and stay within your own class. I do not want to hear talking at this time.”
Everyone wondered what was going on. We looked at each other, asking questions in whispers. It was puzzling to us why we weren’t allowed back to our classrooms. We spoke in soft voices when the teachers weren’t looking because we knew better than to displease Ms. Arceo. We waited patiently in line in the quad as the sun began to peek through the somewhat cloudy sky. Our teachers walked away and headed into the building. Minutes later, they appeared, each holding a big yellow-brown envelope, the kind that had a red cord tied to its flap.
“All teachers need to be with their assigned homeroom classes at this time. Inspection can now begin,” Ms. Arceo announced.
Teachers filed past the student lines asking each student to open their school bags. They inspected each bag and every metal object such as scissors, nail cutters, tweezers, and anything that had a blade, no matter how dull it was, was taken and then placed inside the envelopes. We were then told that these would be kept under lock and key. We would only be able to use them with permission from teachers and only during approved activities such as Home Arts and Home Economics classes. Was this how martial law was going to be from now on? They would not even allow us to use dull scissors to cut paper in class?
This is weird, I remember thinking. The world that we knew had changed. We were uncertain and somewhat apprehensive about what lay ahead. School was different now. What else would be?
In the first days, weeks, and months of martial law, thousands were sent to prison, shuffled from one military camp to another, slammed in detention centers, and tortured in safe houses. Many of these arrests were arbitrary, without proper arrest warrants, with detainees incarcerated for long periods of time without being charged. Some of those picked up disappeared without a trace. They died either by being shot or succumbed to the injuries they sustained from torture. All were thrown in unmarked graves. In some cases, tortured and mutilated bodies, the handiwork of Marcos’ torture units, were mercilessly dumped on roadsides for public display. Students, priests, nuns, artists, businessmen and women, laborers, union organizers, factory workers, farmers, fishermen, and just about anybody who they suspected was anti-Marcos, were seized in homes, schools, businesses, churches, rice paddies, farms, markets, or anywhere Marcos’ foot soldiers searched for their prey. No place was safe. Hundreds more will be put away over the succeeding years.
The Spanish word, ‘desaparecidos’ did not appear in the Pilipino lexicon, but this phenomenon happened just as it did in Latin America. Instead of desaparecidos, “salvaging” was the word used to describe acts of kidnapping or picking up a detainee, taking them into “safe houses” for torture, making them suffer through harrowing investigations, and finally ending with the victims being mutilated, decapitated, or shot. As in Chile and Argentina in the 1970s, many bodies were never found.
Contemplating on the word, “salvaging,” I am distressed by the incongruity with which the Philippine military reversed its original definition and corrupted it with a callous and contemptuous connotation to describe what they do to “enemies of the state.” Moreover, the phrase, “safe house” was another aberration of lingo, which in martial law took on its opposite meaning. Safe houses were clandestine places, usually motel rooms, private residences, or cells in military barracks, run by intelligence operatives, that were in reality torture chambers. These safe houses struck fear in every citizen because we all knew what transpired in these places. Salvaging cases increased through the martial law years, a phenomenon seen by human rights experts as contributing to the breakdown of the rule of law and the rise of military terrorism in the Philippines.
’Solitary confinement’ was another phrase I heard frequently. Senators Ninoy Aquino and Jose Diokno, the military man turned rebel, Victor Corpus, and captured NPA leaders, Bernabe Buscayno, alias Commander Dante, and Jose Maria Sison, were the most prominent figures who suffered through this particular form of coercion.
Charges of subversion, indefinite detention, the increasing use of military tribunals, and the growing cases of military lawyers prosecuting civilian cases in civil courts (leaving political detainees with very little legal maneuvering) were all too common occurrences. Cruel and inhuman punishment was made official policy under Marcos with activists sometimes suffering a fate worse than that reserved for criminals convicted of heinous crimes. On top of this, Marcos once brazenly announced, “No one but no one has been tortured,” while Amnesty International was simultaneously interviewing dozens of detainees and preparing reports to be sent to human rights organizations around the world. Then, compounding this deceit, he claimed that there were no more political prisoners, a statement he announced in light of an upcoming Papal visit. This demoralized the families of those waiting to hear from their detained sons and daughters. Amidst this repressive display of abuse grew a pernicious culture of denial in which, to this day, very few if any, soldier, general, or Marcos crony has been prosecuted or punished. By the account of Alfred McCoy, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, military murder under the Marcos regime was at the “apex of a pyramid of terror, with 3,257 killed, 35,000 tortured, and 70,000 incarcerated.” Seeing these statistics, I realized I was a mere number among many.
Years ago, I read the following passage in a book:
“…the violence enveloping the country erupted on all fronts, completing a development that had began in 1964 with the appearance of the first guerillas, trained in Cuba by one of Che Guevarra’s aides-de-camp. Coexisting in Argentina were: rural and urban Trotskyite guerillas; right-wing Peronist death squads; armed terrorist groups of the large labor unions, used for handling union matters; paramilitary army groups, dedicated to avenging the murder of their men; para-police groups of both the Left and the Right vying for supremacy within the organization of federal and provincial police forces….”
This passage is from Jacobo Timerman’s account as a political prisoner during the rule of the military generals in Argentina in the 1970s. Timerman, a journalist, newspaper publisher, and person well known to the Argentinian elite, was arrested by the military junta in 1977, four years after my own arrest. Reading the above passage from his book, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, I thought that if someone were to read the passage to me without invoking Argentina, I would have said without a doubt that the author was talking about the Philippines during the time of Marcos. It is not surprising to me that the political affairs in Latin America mirrored those that occurred in the Philippines during the same period. But what I find incredulous is this: truth and reconciliation commissions in
these countries were established aimed at uncovering the truth, with the purpose of identifying those buried in mass graves, thereby providing some comfort to victims’ families.
No such truth commission, excluding the one set up to recover what the Marcoses have stolen from the Filipino people, was ever put in place in the case of the Philippines, despite the fact that Marcos has since left the country and died. No person who participated in atrocities during the martial law years has ever been punished. What is it, I asked, that makes Filipinos different from Latin Americans in confronting truth? Why do Filipinos not find the need to rectify what was done to its citizens and to the country? Do they not care? What has happened to their sense of civic responsibility, not to mention their moral and ethical obligations? Has their fear obliterated their spirit? Why, I wonder, can’t they be more like those in other countries who have sought the truth and justice for those who have suffered?
There is, I observe, an uncanny similarity between the savagery of the military juntas in these Latin American countries and that, which was perpetuated by Marcos’ military. It is understood that some of these South American soldiers were trained in the United States. The same can be said of some Filipino generals trained by Americans. It was these generals and military elites who sharply demarcated the lines between them and us. ‘Us’ are the “madlang tao,” (the hoi polloi) and them—the soldiers who spilled the blood, the cronies who ran away with the country’s riches, and appropriated it as their own, and those in government service who abandoned their civic duty and responsibility as caretakers of the people.
Decades later, as Latinos, and consequently, the Rwandans, and South Africans willingly confronted the dark periods in their history; the Philippines glaringly ignored its moral obligation to seek the truth. This is the country that showed the world in 1986 that they could overthrow a dictator peacefully and without bloodshed. It was a shining moment for the country.
Now, it needs to embrace a shining moment once again.
It would be so once the country could bravely look at its past in order to salvage what could be saved in a culture of violence and willful disregard for humanity.
I read Timerman’s book long after I left the Philippines. It was not possible to read it while I was still living there, as it is not a book that was available under martial law. Besides, my subconscious would likely not cope well with a book that contain images so disturbingly and hauntingly similar to the ones I saw, heard, and experienced in the Philippines in the 1970s. As I read books like Timerman’s, I began to see myself in the stories, and harrowing as the experience was, it paved the way for me to begin unearthing the feelings and experiences I buried long ago. Alicia Partnoy’s book, The Little School, her tales of disappearance and survival illustrated that stories similar to those in the Philippines were not rare. As I read her short tales, they triggered flashbacks of what I had seen and heard: a man with a bloodied shirt and fresh gunshot wounds was found in the rice fields one morning as a farmer awoke early to tend to his crops; a young man in denims and a T-shirt with his rubber flip flaps missing from his bloodied toeless feet, his corpse callously dropped and splayed across the highway. Vehicles had to swerve to avoid hitting him and his body became gored beyond recognition. Then there was a body whose head was covered with a black cloth tied with a string around its neck. It was discovered in the shallow waters of the Pampanga River, the same river running behind my parents’ house. A classmate, who left for school one early morning, saw a spectacular burst of fire from a car parked in front of the school. There was a man burning inside. By the time I arrived at school that morning, all that remained was a raging fire that had once been a car and a man. Then there was Olalia’s corpse at the detention camp’s entrance.
As for desaparecidos, I knew someone who disappeared too. I was barely a teenager when it happened. My aunt, whose part-time business was running a small fleet of jeepneys as public transportation vehicles, plying the towns of San Fernando and Mexico, was upset one day because one of her drivers failed to show up for work and was still missing after several days. She heard through the grapevine that he had been abducted. His body was never found.
A few years ago, while doing research for this book, I returned to the Philippines, and while there, I visited an organization called the Task Force Detainees of the Philippines. It is a non-profit organization that advocates for the rights of political prisoners as well as it provides their families with support and other types of assistance during their incarceration. In addition, TFDP regularly reports on the status of political detainees, and the extent of extrajudicial killings that continued to occur even after Marcos had been driven from power. One particular book that caught my eye as I was visiting their library was entitled, Pumipiglas. Turning its pages, I read accounts of torture experienced by those who were picked up by the military over the years. It also described the conditions under which detainees lived out their incarceration. Some detainees in a Davao del Norte jail, for example, endured the
“… the practice of dumping political prisoners in small cells together with prisoners charged with murder, homicide, theft, robbery, drug-pushing and the like. There were no health facilities to speak of. The sick were simply referred to the jail administration, which only looked into emergency cases. Water had to be coaxed out of a rundown water pump.”
While I was able to have my meals delivered by my family during my incarceration,
many were not so lucky. Detainees in Lanao del Norte experienced the following:
“No breakfast…. For prisoners there is really no such thing as a regular 11:30 lunch. The guard in charge arrives at his convenience. One cup is given to each prisoner to cook for himself. Once a week, they are served a little meat. Nothing else is given; no salt, no vegetables …. On top of these, very often, the prisoners do not get fuel to cook their food…They have to eat the rice half-cooked to save fuel for the next cooking.”
Recalling the conversation I had with my cohort at the army camp and his description of the life led by detainees in other military camps across the country, conditions like these seemed implausible at the time. But as I spent more time at the library, I realized he had been telling me the truth. As I went through pages and pages of these accounts, I came across countless instances of military abuse. Reading through the accounts, I discovered similarities: the methods used to extract information from the victims, the brute force of their interrogations; all one can do is ask: why? Change the names and the places; the story is the same.
Among the most notorious agencies of the military was the Philippine Constabulary, or PC for short. To me, it simply cannot be mentioned in the same breath without invoking martial law. The members of the Philippine Constabulary were not soldiers who protected Filipinos; they were Marcos killers, on the front-line positions of Marcos’ war against his own people. They were his assassins who sought out revenge and exacted retribution against members of the underground, or those simply suspected of harboring dissidents. They were the murderers who bragged about their brutal slayings, with Marcos promptly awarding them with military medals of honor or courage, which after a time catapulted them to the top echelons of the military. The zealousness with which they discharged Marcos’ orders contributed a great deal to the country’s descent into savagery. Partnering with para-military units, the most infamous of which was the CHDF, or the Civilian Home Defense Forces, they became martial law’s lethal “weapons” in dispensing pain, suffering, and brutal death to the opposition, or to anyone they deemed unsympathetic. It was once again ironic that the Marcos government gave the name Civilian Home Defense Forces to this para-military group. CHDF was no friend to civilians. I heard many personal accounts of disappearances in Pampanga and other places, all perpetuated by the CHDF. Later, Marcos went even further by integrating the national police into the military. From that point on, state sponsored terrorism eclipsed the rule of law.
The realities of the political instability of the 1970s were
well known, especially to those who suffered in its hands. Whoever takes the care to peer closely at the time and space where chaos reigned, soon learns that alternatives for accord were running out. The solution, in many cases, was to seek out options elsewhere, preferably outside of the country’s borders. By the time I graduated from university, I knew it was time to leave the Philippines.
Faces Of The Enemy
Despite the well-fortified and deeply financed Marcos arsenal of repression, insurgency was inevitable. Marcos could not have been a more effective poster boy for recruiting young people from cities, towns, or barrios into the underground movement. Each and every atrocity committed by the government inflamed more of the country’s disaffected youth, provoking them to join the ranks of those who fled to the hills. The remainder of the Philippine population endured instability, uncertainty, and frustration. On top of all these, poverty prevailed.
If the Philippines were a theatrical stage, in one very small corner would stand the growing ranks of the disaffected, crowded together but muzzled, and given little voice. In another, slightly bigger corner, were the weakened and browbeaten workers in government service, who were expected to nod and cower, as Marcos remained imperious. Members of the military and Marcos’ cronies occupied a third and much bigger corner. Finally, occupying the largest corner was Marcos himself and his wife, Imelda. From a theater enthusiast’s vantage point, there was only one conclusion to be drawn in the unfolding political drama: the destructive path of authoritarianism had begun. Conjugal dictatorship, was, as a former Marcos ally called it, the name of the game. No agreeable option to provide even just a sliver of hope brightened the horizon.
A Thousand Little Deaths Page 7
