The PR man reluctantly took it, and minutes later, boarded his plane. After he found his seat, he became curious about its contents. He opened it gingerly, not knowing quite what to expect. It was then that he saw stacks of cash, filling the briefcase to the brim. He had already been paid for the work that he did, but this was his reward for doing exactly what Marcos wanted.
We heard many stories of Imelda’s extravagant shopping sprees, where she spent millions of dollars in a single day on her visits overseas. We joked about it between friends, as the two plundered the country. But in truth, their trickery and dishonesty was no different from people smelling the odor of rotting fish in the market. Like rotting fish, their profligacy stank, and the stench was impossible to conceal. Everybody knew about the deception, though we did not know what to do about it. We dared not even talk about it in public, particularly in the early days of martial law. But the stink was never far away. Many said that the Marcoses had a marriage of convenience. Whether or not it was true, the “conjugal dictatorship,” they forced on Filipinos kept the couple in power for years. To my teenage mind, Marcos claimed full ownership of the dictates of tyranny and despotism. Never mind that such despots like Papa Doc in Haiti, Idi Amin in Uganda, Moammar Gaddafi in Libya, and the military juntas of Chile and Argentina were forcing similar regimes to their own peoples in other parts of the world. Those other despots did not influence my young life. It was the despot Marcos who did.
As for Imelda, her vanity and hunger for material things were insatiable. She lived in splendor while the poor masses were left living under bridges and scavenging the Smoky Mountain garbage dump for food and scrap to sell. The budding feminist in me cringed each time she waxed romantic about the famed Filipino woman and her beauty. I later on realized that she used beauty to mask her delusions about both the country and her own humble origins. Surface beauty, in her mind, could cover up the rot that was engulfing the Philippines. I am reminded of an anti-smoking poster ad I saw in a women’s toilet years ago. The message read, “Smoking stinks no matter how you dress it up.” Next to this was a picture of a beautiful woman, perfectly made up and looking very classy, but with a cigarette stuck to her mouth. Like the message in the poster ad, it seemed Imelda had to beautify everything, and in so doing, did not have to deal with the ugly, the sordid, the macabre, the despicable, and the unspeakable. In many ways, she was not unlike many Filipino women, who are reticent in talking about difficult subjects, even when the consequence of not doing so was their own suffering, physical or otherwise. Many of these women preferred to suffer their indignities in silence, leaving it to God, or so they prayed, to be their sole judge and avenger. Their silence helped create an environment ripe for injustice or exploitation. Imelda maintained, even in her older years, and long after Marcos was overthrown, that her husband’s imposition of martial law was something good.
“There was no Filipino executed under martial law even if he was convicted of murder or given a death sentence. Walang Pilipino (No Filipino). That was what martial law can be proud of. It was a compassionate society and it was a benevolent leadership…”
She went on to say,
“We never had such a terrible violation of human rights. In fact, we had no human rights case whatsoever here in the Philippines.”
For someone with this moral turpitude, Imelda was apt to say anything of a husband who would keep her in the lap of luxury, and in a position of immense power. She showed little regard for the thousands that were killed and the more than 70,000 incarcerated. One could make a case that both Ferdinand and Imelda suffered from psychological complexes, and that the excessive powers they bestowed on themselves made abuse and corruption inevitable. As for me, the effect of my own lingering wound, at that point, had gone much further than I could ever imagined. It also became the mask that I preferred to wear instead of facing the truth about what truly happened to me as a political prisoner under martial law in the Philippines.
I believe to this day that Marcos needed to be brought to his knees in the same way he brought the country to its knees with violence and savagery. It must be said that the Philippines was no stranger to cruelty, as they endured the beastliness of colonial rule by three different countries over a span of more than three hundred years. But even such a long-suffering and overly patient people have their limit. The 1986 People Power Revolution saw to that. After more than twenty years, Filipinos were ready to replace Marcos.
I never met Ferdinand or Imelda personally, yet they invaded the physical and mental spaces of my life for such a long time. It is time I would not have given them voluntarily. By making me one of the thousands of political prisoners, they became the center of hate, of the turmoil that resided within me after I was sent to prison. I found it difficult to see myself as a victim because I had always seen myself as a plucky girl. But it would be foolhardy not to acknowledge that I was indeed a victim. Indeed, I acted like one and hated myself for it. Yet, despite the pangs of victimization I felt, it was harder still, when I heard so many stories of people, and more specifically of people I knew, who suffered terribly at the hands of the regime. Political prisoners during that period, it is now acknowledged by human rights experts, tended to suffer worse than those handed down prison sentences upon a conviction of a serious crime. With this knowledge, I hated Marcos all the more. The more I saw their images on TV, the more I felt the anger personally. Perhaps I did not know any better. I was young, shaken, and psychologically wounded after my incarceration. Could one really hate so much, I asked myself as I got older. Why did I think that they were evil personified? It was not until I was much older and long after I had left the country that I did what I should have done all along: pity them. Of course this revelation came only after so many years of being unable to let go of the anger and the hate.
Years after I was released, I remained afraid for both myself and for the countless others who suffered similar fates. In my own reckoning, the prison I faced was not only the one with the four walls in the camp, but rather in my own mind. I was convinced that true freedom was no longer a possibility. How could I not think this when we were not allowed to speak our minds? How could I not believe this when there were times I felt that my movements were being monitored? As repression escalated, so too did my angst. So too did the national angst. The country’s collective psyche was damaged and it would take a long time to repair it. I long ago accepted that it was not a healthy one to begin with. Even before Marcos, Filipinos had long suffered at the hands of colonial masters: the Spaniards for more than 300 years, the Americans for more than 50 years, and three years of brutal Japanese occupation during WWII. By the time all three entities had left this archipelago country, we’d lost any sense of national pride and of truly owning our destiny. When Marcos unleashed his repressive tactics on a people who had already been subjugated, vanquished, and tyrannized by former colonial rulers, the result was a population that was brought to its knees.
It is also a country whose adults often failed their children. I came to this conclusion because of what happened to me when I was fifteen. When I look back and ask myself why Ms. Arceo at my school allowed the soldiers to take me away, I am saddened by the knowledge that here I was failed. When I reflect on why the Marcos government could not distinguish between a true radical and a girl of fifteen, who could not have plotted subversion nor would have the means to overthrow a government, I realize that adults failed in their role as protector. When the adults around me preferred only to remember the young girl who was arrested, then again the adults failed. I had become, as Toni Morrison once wrote in the foreword to her novel, one of those children described in The Bluest Eye.
“The death of self-esteem can occur quickly, easily in children, before their ego has “legs,” so to speak. Couple the vulnerability of youth with indifferent parents, dismissive adults, and a world, which, in its language, laws, and images, re-enforces despair, and the journey to destruction is sealed.”
The faculty at S
t. Scholastica’s Academy failed to protect me as a student who innocently thought she was just going to school that day and never imagined that it was going to be the backdrop behind which her world would turn upside down. Other adults in my community chose not to wrap their arms around me, when after being released by the military, I was desperate for warmth, both physical and emotional. Their silence in my presence and their hesitation to be around someone who had been labeled an enemy of the state were far removed from the cultural mores and practices Filipinos are so proud of with regards to protecting one’s own blood and preserving the spirit of family and community.
As I reflected on this experience years later, I realized that there exists a form of duplicity in the Filipino value of strong family bonds and reality. I would even argue that this duplicity has much to do with the Catholic religion and the way in which it permeated our entire language and culture. This realization dawned on me one day when I was conversing with my sister, Timmee, about certain aspects of the Filipino culture. I mentioned the extreme prudishness of many Filipinos and how this attitude, for example, has seeped through the language.
“What is the Kapampangan word,” I asked my sister, “for a lady who becomes pregnant without being married?”
“Mesira yang dalaga,” she said.
“Yes, that is correct,” I replied. “Isn’t it interesting how we describe her in that way? To invoke the word, ‘mesira,’ which as you and I know means ‘broken,’ aren’t we allocating a non-value to her? She no longer has value because she lost her virginity and with it her prospects for being married. Being mesira to me has a kind of finality about it. That is the concept as we know it in Kapampangan. ‘Mesira’ cannot be fixed. But we all knew, when we were growing up in the 60s and 70s, that calling someone, “mesira yang dalaga,” also implied that nothing more could be done about it. She is broken and cannot be fixed. She cannot be touched and she will go on to raise her illegitimate child, who, like herself, will be ostracized and made a pariah. It was a judgment we imposed on them because, in our minds, they broke not only the rules of propriety; they also were not good Catholics. And the priests of our church never admonished us for treating women like this. How sad.”
The image of the shunned woman in town, like Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, was what I had become after prison. Though I had not gotten pregnant, I somehow began to understand how these women felt, for I, too, was ‘mesira,’ i.e., broken, unfixable, and suffering from no small amount of low self-esteem.
But I also knew this: the adults who preferred to see me only as the ‘one who was sent to prison’ not only failed me as a child but also made them accomplices to the cruel and savage world created by Marcos. As I got older and my political knowledge deepened, it became clear to me that the violent actions of the government imposed a debilitating effect on the administration of justice. This crystallized my belief that a government, which wages a war on its own people rather than protecting them, is a government created out of malice and greed. Adults have failed. The government has failed. Caught in the middle were people who were far too often rendered helpless and, consequently, became lost souls. It was even more disheartening for me to think of the possibility that every Filipino in that dark period abdicated any sense of responsibility towards our shared human condition.
As an adult, I comprehend that there will be times when we will fail our children. We will err in their rearing as our parents erred in theirs. But the mistakes we make, I always hope, would be the kind that would not smash the spirits and the true nature of our children. I take the view that these mistakes can be turned into learning opportunities for both parents and children. The most tragic of the consequences of my incarceration as a young girl and the one that proved to be the most difficult to regain was the loss of my free spirit. Along with me, there are thousands of Filipinos who suffered the same fate and whose journeys to regaining their true nature are not yet complete. To my mind, the legacy of martial law and the repressive Marcos years will always loom large and will overshadow whatever attempts are made to seek the truth and to carry out justice. I also believe that it will be a continuing disservice to all Filipinos if there is no serious attempt to confront the truth and punish those culpable from that inglorious period in history. We are all still waiting, though four presidents have taken office after Marcos was thrown out of power. Moreover, some of the extrajudicial killings during Marcos’ time continue to occur in some parts of the country to this day.
The Other
Early one evening, just a few days before Christmas in 1968, my family was about to sit down to dinner, when an aunt, my mother’s younger sister, barged in unexpectedly and slumped down on a kitchen chair. She was pale and looked visibly frightened. Following behind her was Cesar. Usually a calm and quiet fellow, he too looked agitated.
“Could someone please give me a glass of water,” pleaded my aunt. Someone quickly got up from the table and granted her request. Earlier that day, my aunt, a grocer in town, had asked to borrow the vehicle along with Cesar to take care of some business.
“We were driving on one of the streets in Villa Victoria when a truck pulled up and stopped in front of us,” she began. “They blocked our way and Cesar was forced to stop. Four men quickly got out of the vehicle. I could not see their faces as they were covered with black cloth with just slits for their eyes. They pointed their guns at us and demanded that we hand over the Jeep. They said they would not harm us if we give it up without a fight. I was shaking so much I could barely get out of the Jeep. Cesar came around to my side to help me. They took the keys from him and just a few minutes later, they were gone.” She paused then continued. “We were at the edge of Villa Victoria, next to the rice fields and it was very dark. I am sure the men chose this spot because there were no street lights around,” she lamented.
“I have never been in that place before and I was scared too,” Cesar added.
“How did you get back to town?” someone asked.
“Cesar and I walked a few blocks until we saw lights on the main highway and waited on the side of the road until we were able to catch a calesa.” Thank God, we did not have to wait for long till one came along,” she replied.
They related more details about what happened, but told everyone that it would be very difficult to identify the thieves and that only one spoke.
“Did he speak in Kapampangan or in Tagalog,” another relative asked.
“It was in Tagalog,” my aunt said. “I was so nervous that I couldn’t tell you if he was native Tagalog or a Kapampangan speaking in Tagalog. Or he might have been Ilocano. Who knows? Maybe Cesar would have known if the guy spoke with a Visayan accent.”
“I don’t know. I was too scared to notice,” Cesar said.
We sat around the table, quietly transfixed by their story. Soon, as we recovered from the initial shock, assurances were uttered, everyone comforting my aunt and our driver that they were now safe and out of a dangerous situation.
Christmas won’t be a lot of fun this year, I thought, what with Ima losing the vehicle she needs for her business. We all felt gloomy as dinner was served. My aunt cried as she told my mother how badly she felt about losing the Jeep. Despite reporting the theft to the police, it was never recovered. We found out later that similar car thefts had occurred in recent weeks. We also heard that while there were known vehicle thieves operating in that area, members of the underground movement were involved too. The rebels were allegedly selling the vehicles to finance their operations. We never found out who was to blame, but time and again, we heard other stories like this: either in the form of vehicles being stolen, or rebels forcibly taking over land and farming it to feed their growing army. I do not possess adequate proof that the left condoned these crimes, but these stories persisted when I was growing up.
To this day, one hears similar stories, despite the town having evolved into a prosperous city. In 1968, my mother’s vehicle was stolen at gunpoint. In more recent years, my f
amily was subjected to criminal wrongdoing at the hand of leftist rebels. This time, a group of armed rebels laid claim to a piece of land in the village of Kulubasa in Pampanga that has been in my family for generations. Tang had loaned it to his brother to farm, until one day, these men visited him and demanded that he surrender the land to them. My uncle had no choice; they apparently told him that it would be best that he cooperate or else. That “or else,” was what shut him up. He would not risk his safety or that of his family. Refusal was not an option. We still have the title to the property, but I doubt if we will get it back.
I found this to be a reckless way to treat innocent civilians. What an unacceptable way to win the hearts and minds of Filipinos, I thought. Why would the left use the same land-grabbing technique that the oligarchs and wealthy exploited for their own ends? It did not make sense and it made it easier to presume that there was no difference between the sides. What distortions would they make to justify their claims to truth? Were they not concerned about losing their direction in transforming Philippine society? Aside from moral and ethical grounds, any semblance of democracy, or for that matter, any attempt at civil society transformation, dissipated as soon as the movement for social and political change resorted to criminal activities and justified their actions in the name of dissent. In other words, these rebels committed the crimes with the belief that they possessed a higher calling in attempting to transform a capitalist-based society into a more just and equitable socialist society. Now, many will argue that there is no justification for any crime. To this I agree, though at the time I had little to no inkling that the left behaved so abhorrently during that period. What happened to my family in 1968 was before martial law and, yes, it was true that violence and brutality were common in many parts of the country then. But the land-grabbing incident carried out in our farm happened after Marcos had already left the country and a new government was in power. Their actions planted serious doubts in my mind as to their real intentions and cemented the negative impressions I was beginning to form about them.
A Thousand Little Deaths Page 9
