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By Cheryl M. Arcibal , Reporter
First of Four Parts
Within hours of the declaration of martial law
on September 21, 1972, the military began rounding up individuals
tagged as subversives by the Marcos administration. The arrests
marked the beginning of a dark episode where summary executions,
torture and other human-rights violations were carried out routinely
and with impunity by the enforcers of what Ferdinand Marcos called
“constitutional authoritarianism.”
With the media under heavy censorship, arrests
were made merely on the strength of an Arrest Search and Seizure
Order (ASSO) or a Presidential Commitment Order (PCO).
For those arrested, it was the first step in a
descent into hell. They were held in the offices and “safe
houses” maintained by intelligence units of the military and the
police, and subjected to tactical interrogation.
Throughout his rule, Marcos had denied that the
interrogators had used torture. “All are treated with a full
regard for their dignity as citizens of the Republic and as human
beings. No one, but no one, has been tortured,” he said in a
speech in 1972.
But the accounts of people who survived the
ordeal of detention prove otherwise.
Neri Javier Colmenares was an 18-year-old
college student and the regional coordinator of the Student Catholic
Action (SCA) when he was arrested on May 12, 1979, in Negros
Occidental.
Now the lawyer for the party-list group Bayan
Muna, Colmenares said he was meeting one of his coworkers in church,
Don Esgra, that day. He had called Esgra to discuss a project
proposal. Unaware that Esgra had been arrested and that their
conversation was being monitored by the military, Colmenares went to
meet Esgra in a restaurant.
“When we were in the restaurant, [Esgra] told
me that he had been arrested and I would also be arrested.
Apparently, he was just allowed to go home and I was set up to meet
with him,” Colmenares said.
As he stepped out of the restaurant, two men
approached Colmenares. “I no longer complained, because I didn’t
think there was a need for me to run. I mean I was then a member of
the SCA and I was its regional chairperson. I thought that was
enough to justify my being an activist. Besides, our advocacies then
were peace, human rights and sakada issues.”
He miscalculated in believing he would not be
arrested. Colmenares was “invited” to the provincial
headquarters of the Philippine Constabulary. There, intelligence
agents and officers under a certain Colonel Lomongo started
interrogating him.
“The first thing they did was make me strip. I
complied although they did not have any warrant of arrest. They told
me ‘We’re going to investigate you because you’re a suspected
member of the New People’s Army.’ I was 18 years old and so I
couldn’t do anything. Then I saw that there were other detainees
in other rooms.”
The interrogators ordered him to write his
confession. “I wrote ‘I am Neri Colmenares, I’m 18 years old,
single. I’m a member of the SCA, etc.’ When one of the men saw
what I had written, he tore the paper and said, ‘This is not a
confession.’”
Colmenares noted that all the actions of the
interrogators were intended to humiliate him. He was made to hold
out his hands, and someone hit them with a ruler. All the time he
was in his underwear only.
“Around seven or eight in the evening, they
told me to put my clothes back on. They left me alone because they
were also torturing other people in other rooms. Afterward, they
came for me again and started asking me questions again. I told them
nothing except that I was a member of the SCA. For my every denial,
they would hit me in the stomach and slap me.”
Not a dream
Colmenares could not believe what was happening.
He thought it was all a dream. “We knew that they kill those they
arrest. So when it finally hit me that I was arrested, I immediately
thought that they could also kill me.”
“I realized that what was happening to me
wasn’t a dream when I was slapped and I tried to avoid the blow. I
turned my head to turn and missed a filing cabinet by a mere inch. I
realized then that I almost got blind because my eye almost hit the
cabinet. It was then I realized that it was for real. I panicked. I
was slapped and blood oozed out [of my face].”
A Captain Olario arrived. “I knew his family
name and not his first name because of his nameplate,” Colmenares
said.
Olario told his subordinates to stop hitting
Colmenares in the face but in the body.
“Sergeant España, the torturer at that
specific stage, then hit me in the body. Then they used something on
my nape. I felt like I was being electrocuted. My body jerked
forward and then I was also being hit in my chest. That was enough
to knock the breath off me. They would do that every 30 minutes and
then a supposedly good person would come. The torturer would then
leave the room and this good person would talk to me and he would
say, ‘Please cooperate with us because if you don’t . . .,”
Colmenares said.
‘Good guy’
This routine continued for the first three
nights of his arrest. The supposed “good guy” would seek his
cooperation and would leave the room after Colmenares told him that
he did not know anything and that he was just a kid.
“I didn’t get the name of this supposedly
good guy because he was in civilian clothes. The funny thing was
that when this good guy would talk to me, he would caress my clothes
and after a while he would touch my crotch. So I thought, ‘Is he
going to rape me or is he gay?’
“That was when I realized the terror that
women detainees felt when they were being raped by the military and
police officers. I was really frightened then. But this good guy did
not rape me. He would leave and then España with two or three
companions would come back in.”
Around 11 in the evening, the torture came.
Colmenares guessed his interrogators got tired “because they were
also torturing others. They took me out and cuffed me with another
detainee, who I later knew as Danny Monte. We were ordered to sleep
on a desk in the camp. It was a military desk, so it was small.
Around five in the morning I already complained to one of the
soldiers, because the handcuff was so tight already. But the soldier
just told me to bear it.”
Around 7 a.m., Colmenares and his companion were
transferred to a prison cell at the back of the camp. “I think
employees were going to come in and they didn’t want the detainees
to be placed in one room for fear that we would talk. So they kept
us in solitary confinement.”
On his second night, Colmenares was again taken
from his cell and to a room where an officer, introduced to him by a
soldier as “Fried Chicken,” sat.
Colmenares learned later the officer was Lt.
Billy Bibit.
“He told me to squat and then Bibit, España
and Sgt. George Yap would kick me in the back. Bibit was holding a
.45-caliber pistol. They kicked me with so much force that I went
flying to the other side of the room. They were wearing combat
boots.”
Colmenares recalled that even before his arrest,
he already knew Bibit to be the head of the Constabulary Security
Unit (CSU) because there were complaints of human-rights violations
against Bibit’s men.
“When I found out on the third day that he was
Bibit I was really scared because he was notorious in our province
for practicing torture,” Colmenares said.
The worst was yet to come
“On my third or fourth night, they took me
again from my detention cell and to a room where Sgt. George Yap
held office,” Colmenares said. Yap removed all the bullets from
his gun and put back one bullet in the chamber. “He told me,
‘Let’s see if you’re lucky tonight’ and he put the barrel of
the gun in my mouth. The barrel felt so cold inside my mouth and he
told me to say ‘mao’ or something. So when I said ‘mao,’ he
pulled the trigger. That was the worst torture I suffered because I
imagined my brain splattering on the walls.”
Colmenares said Yap repeated the process. “I
was wondering whether he knew that the chamber was empty. Was it
possible that he was just scaring me? Or was it possible that he
didn’t care? If I die, then I die. But he was drunk, so it
probably didn’t matter. One thing could have gone wrong because he
was drunk.”
Colmenares said Yap spoke to him in English and
told him, “You’re not destined to die tonight.”
Then Yap urged him to escape and began pushing
him over the window. “I told him I didn’t have any plans to
escape, because I knew the moment I got out of the window, he could
shoot me and so I was returned to my detention cell.”
Colmenares thought his ordeal was over. But
before the night turned into day, he was again taken out of his cell
by España.
“When we were outside, he told me to kneel and
kneel I did. He asked me if I could see the moon and hear the frogs
and I said yes. Then he told me to take a good look at the moon and
savor the sound of the frogs because it might be the last time I
would be seeing the moon and hearing the frogs. He was holding an
M16 armalite. It was really draining,” he said.
At that stage Colmenares felt the officers were
no longer interested in extracting information from him but were
just toying with him.
Colmenares said España squeezed his throat,
causing him to throw up.
Later that day, his jail warden, a certain
Sergeant Olona, took him to the hospital because he could not eat or
drink.
On the way to the hospital, the warden told him
they would have to inform his parents about his hospitalization
since the military could not afford to pay for it.
“The problem was my parents didn’t know I
had been arrested, because they [military] never allowed me to make
a phone call. Several members of the intelligence unit came with us
and went to my parents’ house. You could just imagine the trauma
my parents suffered. It was 11 or 12 midnight and there were two or
three jeepneys full of military officers and they told my parents
that I would have to be taken to the hospital,” he said.
“I was lying inside a jeep and I heard my
mother cry and ask what had happened to me. But one of the
intelligence officers told me not to tell my parents or anybody what
had happened to me,” Colmenares said.
He spent two days in the hospital, handcuffed to
his bed and heavily guarded.
“My parents were so worried although I
didn’t tell them anything. But they could see the marks and wounds
and I think they knew then that I had been tortured. Marcos was
already infamous then for the tortures that were going on inside
military and police camps.”
When Colmenares was released from the hospital
and taken back to detention, the military was through with him.
“I was still lucky compared with other
detainees because I heard they were burned by cigarettes and my
being an 18-year-old at that time probably saved me because they
knew I couldn’t be an NPA member,” he said.
Colmenares was detained for eight months. The
cases of subversion and illegal possession of firearms against him
were dismissed because the military lost interest to prosecute.
Colmenares was represented by an Attorney
Palermo, who later became a judge, and Francisco Cruz of the Free
Legal Assistance Group.
Sexual abuse
For a woman, the worst nightmare would be sexual
abuse from her arresting officers.
Erlene Dangoy was arrested on March 19, 1985, on
suspicion of murdering Erlinda Batulan in Davao City. Dangoy was 16.
She said she was arrested by a combined force of
police and the Integrated Civilian Home Defense Force (ICHDF) and
was later on detained at the Philippine Constabulary/Integrated
National Police jail in Davao.
She said Batulan was murdered in the Panacan
Relocation on the same day and she was taken to the office of Sgt.
Daniel Corral, the commanding officer of the Sasa Police Station.
Dangoy was interrogated and tortured in
Corral’s office.
“When I was not able to say anything about
their allegations, they slapped and kicked me. They subjected me to
electric shock by inserting live wire under my fingernails and
wrists. Then they splashed me with water. Force was applied to my
hands while bullets were inserted between my fingers. I was forced
to eat bits of newspaper and was struck with a .38-caliber pistol,
making me lose consciousness. When I recovered, Jun Orogo, an ICHDF,
tried to stab me with a kitchen knife. I was so frightened then that
I did not notice that urine and blood had flowed from me. Again I
collapsed and when I came to, I was beaten. They pulled my hair and
slapped me because they thought that I was play-acting,” she said.
But her torture did not end at physical pain.
Her arresting officers told her to dance naked.
“I was so ashamed I was not able to take such
degradation. I screamed and cried and sat down to stop the
humiliation. They forced me to stand up. They kicked me, pulled my
hair and at gunpoint threatened to kill and bury me in a secret
place. I was forced to follow what they wanted. They were laughing
as they watched me dancing.”
Dangoy’s interrogation began on March 20. “A
group of military men asked me about the ‘Kalihukan’ [a term
they used for the NPA Movement]. They asked me if I was really the
one who killed Erlinda Batulan. I told them I had no knowledge of
their accusations. They slapped me and told me I was lying.”
The abuses resumed in the evening. “I was
again taken out of the room where I was kept. Held at gunpoint, I
was taken by an officer to an unlighted room where two military men
were waiting. I could not see their faces, because the room was very
dark. One of them ripped off my clothes. I screamed, but they
covered my mouth. The other one came nearer and squeezed my breasts
and touched parts of my body including my genitals. I was unable to
move because I was held by the other soldier. All I could do was cry
and scream. Then they ordered me to dance to the music from the
radio cassette. When I refused and instead sat down, they scrubbed
my body with hot pepper from my face down to my feet. I felt the
indescribable pain and burning sensation all over my body. They were
laughing at me while I was in anguish.”
Two days later, her arresting officers tried to
force her to sign a “prepared typewritten statement” but she
refused and was again subjected to torture. She was then forced to
sign the paper, which she was not even able to read.
“On March 23 I was taken to the place where
Batulan was killed. They wanted me to guide them and to pinpoint my
alleged companions in the killing. I refused but they forced me to
go with them.”
Dangoy had also been deprived of food and water
since she was arrested, causing her to collapse on March 24.
The following day, her mother was able to visit
her, but Dangoy did not tell her about the torture for fear that her
arresting officers would also harm her.
“On that same morning, Father Jack also
visited me. He came to check out how I was treated and to see my
condition inside. Still, I didn’t tell Father Jack out of fear.
When the priest left, the [commanding officer] called me at his
office and warned me not to tell anybody, not even my parents or
relatives about the things they’d been doing to me. They told me I
would be transferred to the barracks the same day.”
On her transfer to the barracks of the PC/INP
jail, Davao Metrodiscom, Dangoy was first kept at the Guardhouse,
Post No. 1, on the road at the gate of the barracks.
“One of the guards told me not to sleep inside
the cell [a room where the detainees were first kept before being
transferred to a regular center. It was also in this place where the
detainees were tortured while under interrogation] instead he told
me to sleep at the beddings of the military guards [a double-deck
bed]. Because of hunger and exhaustion, I managed to sleep early.
Capuyan
Around 12 midnight, I was awakened when I
noticed that somebody was kissing me while holding my arms. When I
opened my eyes, I saw a uniformed man whose namecloth read ‘CAPUYAN.’
I struggled to free myself and tried to stand up but he retaliated
with fist blows to my stomach and my thighs, causing me to lose
consciousness,” she said.
When Dangoy woke up, her hands were tied and her
mouth gagged. Her thighs and other parts of her body ached and all
her underwear had been either torn or removed.
“Capuyan threatened, ‘If you tell the other
guards or your parents, I will kill you and your parents. Then I
will leave this place!’ I was so very affected by the threats that
I didn’t tell anybody of my experience,” she said.
But the incident was repeated the next day. “I
did not have the strength to fight back because I had not eaten
since March 19, the day I was transferred to the barracks. I felt
like I was already dead because of the pain, fatigue and general
weakness of my body. When he left, I tried to scream, not fearing
what would happen to me, but no sound came from my lips.”
On March 28 Capuyan raped her again.
The next day Dangoy was transferred to the
women’s cell. While her mother was able to visit her, Dangoy still
did not tell her of her ordeal.
“On 10 April I felt I was already strong
enough to share with my fellow detainees the things that had
happened to me. I told them everything in tears. The next day, I
wrote to the Davao Lady Lawyers’ Association and to TFDP [Task
Force Detainees Philippines] seeking their help. Assistance was
extended to me a few days after.”
After her disclosures, Dangoy was taken to a
Colonel Kahulugan, the commanding officer of the PC/INP jail.
Kahulugan questioned her about her allegations of rape against
Capuyan.
“The commanding officer slapped me and told me
that if I continued to file a case against his subordinate, he would
kill me when I was released. I replied that no matter what he would
do to me I would still file the case. They laughed at my statement .
. .,” she said.
“After several days I was again pulled out of
our cell and together with a policewoman, was taken to a military
doctor for a checkup. The doctor touched my bust. It seemed that it
was another way of molesting me, for he also touched even my private
parts.”
After that, Dangoy was taken out of her cell
from time to time. “I was then still afraid to refuse. They
repeatedly asked me if I would still file a case. I told them that I
would, to show them that I was not afraid of their intimidations. I
told them they could only stop me if they killed me,” she said.
Dangoy said Capuyan did go to jail, but she
thought that it was just a ploy by the military to show that it was
not siding with anybody.
Pregnant
“Two months after I was raped, my menstruation
hadn’t come. I was afraid then that I might be pregnant. And I was
not wrong. I conceived. I was confused. I could not accept bearing
the child of the man who raped me. I then thought of abortion. At
first, I was afraid that my [attempt] wouldn’t be successful.
Fortunately, I succeeded. I was bedridden for two weeks, as a
consequence of the abortion.”
In May Kahulugan tried again to persuade her to
drop the case, even suggesting that she marry Capuyan. Dangoy
refused. Even Capuyan’s mother begged Dangoy not to pursue the
case.
On July 16, 1985, Dangoy was released through
the TFDP and Attorney Pucot, but she was dismayed to learn that
Capuyan had escaped from prison.
Iron hand
Even renowned scientists tasted the iron hand of
the Marcos regime.
Dr. Rogelio Posadas was described as the “only
Filipino expert in the relativity theory of Albert Einstein,”
while Dr. Ester Albano-Garcia was one of the few Filipino organic
chemists in the country at the time.
Posadas was arrested on suspicion of being an
explosives expert for the communist rebels. Even before martial law
was declared in 1972, military authorities charged Posadas with
subversion in 1971, but the case was dismissed for lack of evidence.
Posadas and Albano-Garcia had pushed for
“drastic reforms” in the advancement of science in the country
at the time.
On January 12, 1976, intelligence agents
arrested Posadas, his wife Linda and their three-year-old son at the
house of a friend in Quezon City.
Posadas was a doctor in physics and former chair
of the Department of Physics of the College of Arts and Sciences of
the University of the Philippines. Linda was a physics instructor at
UP.
On that same day, Albano-Garcia and her husband,
Jerrold Garcia, another physicist, were also arrested.
They were taken to different safe houses and
interrogated by the 5th CSU Unit of the PC.
“During their interrogation, all were
subjected to varying degrees of physical and mental tortures
including pistol whipping, body punches, kicks and electric shocks
in the military’s effort to ferret out incriminating information.
They were held incommunicado for more than a month,” said a report
included in the claim forms of human-rights victims collected by the
Task Force Detainees of the Philippines (TFDP).
Linda also narrated that upon her arrest, she
and her son were separated from her husband and blindfolded. They
were made to stay in a bedroom for two hours. There she was
interrogated by several men and a woman.
Linda’s son was taken away from her and
brought to another part of the house.
Linda “was interrogated by a man, who brought
her in front of an air conditioner turned on full blast, and pressed
her back to the slats of the air-conditioner. Everytime [Linda]
answered ‘I don’t know’ to the questions posed by the
unidentified male agent, a piece of her clothing would be forcibly
taken from her until she was only wearing her panty,” another
report said.
After some time, she was allowed to put on her
bra and half-slip and her son was brought to her.
Around 4 p.m. of the same day, Lt. Rodolfo
Aguinaldo of the 5th CSU resumed interrogating Linda Posadas. She
was subjected to the air-conditioner treatment.
The next day, mother and son were taken to 5th
CSU headquarters in Camp Crame.
Aguinaldo had also interrogated and beaten up
Posadas. Only after 70 days was Posadas committed to a regular
detention center.
The arrest of Posadas prompted letters from
mathematicians, physicists, students and professors from the
University of Pittsburgh, University of Oxford and the Universite
Libre de Bruxelles, appealing to Marcos to release him and his wife
and treat them humanely while in detention.
Then Dean Francisco Nemenzo Jr. of the CAS of UP
appealed to Marcos to free Posadas and Albano-Garcia, saying they
were ‘internationally-recognized” for their contributions in
their fields.
To be continued
Part 2 |Part
3 |Part 4 |
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