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By Cheryl M. Arcibal , Reporter
Second of Four Parts
EXACTLY three years before Ferdinand Marcos, his
family and closest associates fled the country on February 25, 1986,
the Free Legal Assistance Group (FLAG), a group of human-rights
lawyers, filed a civil complaint against 12 military officers, led
by the Armed Forces chief of staff, Gen. Fabian Ver.
The complaint cited allegations of the
“illegal” arrest and torture of 20 persons, mostly young
activists, between February and March 1982, and sought at least
P6.45 million in damages.
Besides Ver, named defendants were Lt. Col.
Panfilo Lacson, Cols. Fidel Singson, Rolando Abadilla, Gerardo
Lantoria, Galileo Kintanar, Maj. Rodolfo Aguinaldo, Capt. Danilo
Pizaro, First Lts. Pedro Tango, Romeo Ricardo and Raul Bacalso, and
Master Sgt. Bienvenido Balaba.
Lacson is now a senator. Abadilla and Aguinaldo
have since died.
All the defendants were members of Task Force Makabansa,
a composite group from military intelligence units during the
dictatorship.
The 27-page complaint was filed before a Quezon
City court. The complainants said they were arrested on suspicion of
being “communist-terrorists,” and that they were illegally
detained and interrogated, denied their right to a lawyer and held
incommunicado from their relatives.
They charged that while detained in the
headquarters of the Metrocom Intelligence Security Group in Camp
Crame, the Philippine Constabulary headquarters of the Military
Intelligence Group-15 in Bago Bantay, Quezon City, the headquarters
of the Naval Intelligence Service Group and various “safe
houses,” they were “invariably [subjected to] physical and
psychological harm, torture and other brutalities.”
Liability in torture cases hard to prove
Among the tortures inflicted on them were
physical blows to the body, strangulation, humiliation, threats of
death and harm to their families, electric shock to genitals and
other parts of the body and sleep deprivation.
The complaint, it would turn out, was just the
tip of an iceberg. According to Torture Philippines: Law and
Practice, a book published by FLAG and the Foundation for
Integrative and Development and Studies of the University of the
Philippines in 2003, the Marcos regime was accountable for the
killing of 3,257 people, 737 of whom had disappeared, and the
detention of some 70,000, 35,000 of whom suffered some form of
physical and psychological torture.
Evading questions
The cases of torture are widely documented
through the victims’ memoirs, affidavits, depositions and
interviews. Yet almost two decades after the fall of Marcos, the
persons identified behind the atrocities have yet to air their side.
The alleged perpetrators have either evaded
questions on their human-rights abuses or resorted to vague
admissions of the excesses against political prisoners during
Marcos’s term.
Even now, when some of the implicated military
and police officers have entered politics, been appointed to
government offices or are quietly leading private lives, they refuse
to break their silence.
Senator Lacson refused to grant an interview
about his case in 1983.
“The senator would rather not comment on the
issue,” Lacson’s media handler said.
Jose Manuel Diokno, the late Sen. Jose
Diokno’s son who is now handling the case, said all the defendants
named in the complaint did not file any answer but instead moved for
its dismissal.
Billy Bibit, now the Customs collector in the
Port of Cebu, also refused to comment.
Contacted through the telephone, Eunice Aguilar,
a member of Bibit’s staff, said Bibit was “not comfortable
anymore” with his alleged record of human-rights violations.
“He does not want to look back at that
again,” Aguilar said.
Those willing to talk about the human-rights
violations were apparently not involved in it.
A source said Gen. Honesto Isleta, formerly of
the Civil Relations Service (CRS), was among those who took part in
the torture of Akbayan Rep. Loretta Ann Rosales. This allegation was
denied by both Isleta and even Rosales, who said Isleta could not
have been present during the times she was being tortured.
Now a born-again Christian and a member of the
Bangon Pilipinas movement, the party of the Church leader and former
presidential candidate, Eddie Villanueva, Isleta does not think the
military needs to apologize for the alleged abuses during Marcos’s
term.
In an interview he said he was not aware of any
torture of detainees during martial law.
“We were the unit of the Armed Forces created
to bring it closer to the people, so we were more concerned with
civil relations. Civil military relations is only information,
public information, propaganda, psychological operations against the
enemy and troop information for our own people,” he said.
The main job of CRS, Isleta added, was to show
the people that martial rule was not against them.
He conceded that the military may have committed
abuses but that they were never discussed.
“Whether as a colonel or as an individual, I
have not heard of these tortures. I visited the detention centers as
part of my job in the CRS. I visited [Camp] Crame and [Fort]
Bonifacio as part of my job to inform, but I’d never heard of any
torture personally,” he said.
Even with the judgment of a Hawaii court
awarding compensation to human-rights victims during the
dictatorship, Isleta, who chose early retirement only to be recalled
to the service after the 1986 EDSA Revolution, doubted the veracity
of the claims of the torture victims.
“We never taught our soldiers to [torture] . .
. I don’t know where they got the idea. We teach them civil
relations. . . . How can you gain the trust and the confidence of
the people if you harm them, torture them?” he said.
In the latter part of the interview, however,
Isleta allowed that there may have been abuses by the military
against civilians and other detainees, but stressed that soldiers
were trained to follow orders.
“I will not deny that some people were
hotheaded. Maybe they thought ‘we’re now under martial law and
we’re the military . . .’ Sometimes, Filipinos tend to abuse the
little power given them, [but] I think the Armed Forces has done a
lot of reconciliation. It has publicly apologized,” he said.
Arguments justifying torture
Asked to cite the specific conciliatory moves
and the occasion the apology was given by the military, Isleta
insisted that the military was just following orders from the
commander in chief, Marcos.
Isleta was certain some soldiers were
dishonorably dismissed from the service owing to excesses committed
during martial law.
The same arguments were used by other military
officers to justify the methods they employed to extract information
from detainees.
In the book Closer Than Brothers: Manhood at the
Philippine Military Academy, the author Alfred McCoy, a professor of
Southeast Asian history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison,
recalled the response given by Lt. Victor Batac when he was
confronted about the human-rights abuse record of his unit, the
Fifth CSU.
“Alone among the RAM [Reform the Armed Forces
Movement] leaders, Batac has been forced to respond to allegations
of torture. While he was speaking at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison in October 1986, the local Amnesty International
chapter confronted him with the Fifth CSU’s record of torture.
‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘we were aware of abuses in the unit.’
Admitting that comrades ‘may have been guilty,’ Batac explained
that torture arose from ‘individual initiatives to get information
in a short time,’ . . . Batac still insisted on the state’s
sovereign right to do ‘anything necessary’ to protect itself.”
Batac was identified by a journalism student,
Maria Elena Ang, as the officer who ordered her to strip, be tied to
a chair and directed her torture. Batac denied involvement in
Ang’s torture, but McCoy said Ang insisted that Batac was present
at the time.
Batac’s invocation of the right of the state
to protect itself was the same line that a military officer used to
justify brutal means to get information from suspected communists.
“We want to use persuasion but of course, if
this fails, we will use iron fist . . . the right hand does not know
what the left is doing. . . . You see, good communists are dead
communists. . .,” said Col. Ishmael Rodrigo, commanding officer of
the Regional Security Unit 5 in Camp Crame, during his interrogation
of the activist Edgar Jopson in 1979.
Even in the Aberca v. Ver case, the military
officers charged with torturing political detainees never bothered
to answer the allegations and instead relied on technicalities to
defend themselves.
The defendants in the case, through their
counsel, former Solicitor General Estelito Mendoza, argued, among
others, that the plaintiffs did not have the right to file a court
case against them, because they were just performing their
“official duties.”
They also said the plaintiffs were barred from
questioning before a court their arrest and detention since the
privilege of the writ of habeas corpus had been suspended. The writ
forces a government body to produce a person in its custody before a
court to show that he is safe and sound and to justify his
detention.
Constitutional safeguards must be observed
However, the Supreme Court, in its decision on
April 15, 1988, threw out the arguments postulated by the military
officers.
Although the Court upheld the duties of the
military officers to defend and protect the security of the state,
it nevertheless reminded them that the Constitution still guarantees
and protects the “right and liberties” of the individual
citizen.
“The Constitution remains the supreme law of
the land to which all officials, high or low, civilian or military,
owe obedience and allegiance at all times,” the Court said.
“We have no quarrel with their duty to protect
the Republic from its enemies, whether of the Left or of the Right,
or from within or without, seeking to destroy or subvert our
democratic institutions and imperil their very existence. What we
are merely trying to say is that in carrying out this task and
mission, constitutional and legal safeguards must be observed;
otherwise, the very fabric of our faith will start to unravel.”
Tools of torment
A January 1986 report by the Commission of the
Churches on International Affairs, World Council of Churches, in
Geneva, Switzerland (Background Information on Human-Rights
Violations in the Philippines), listed the common methods of torture
practiced in the Philippines:
• The “ashtray”—Burning the skin,
usually the face, neck and abdomen, with cigarette butts.
• Pulling off fingernails—Sometimes the
finger is afterward dipped in acidic solution.
• The pompyang (cymbals), known in other
countries as el telefono or golpes de campaña—Slapping of both
ears simultaneously, often rupturing the eardrums if done repeatedly
or with great force.
• The water cure, also known as “Nawasa”
(the former acronym of the waterworks system)—Pouring gallons of
water into the victim’s mouth and nostrils, inducing a feeling of
drowning. Sometimes the torturer covers the victim’s face with a
piece of cloth or a towel and uses muddy water. Other times, he uses
carbonated drinks instead of water.
• “Wet submarine”—Submerging the
victim’s head in water or in a soiled toilet bowl. The effect is
similar to the water cure.
• “Dry submarine”—Covering the
victim’s head with a plastic or cellophane bag, causing
suffocation.
• Electric shock, also known as “Meralco”
(the electric service company)—Applying to the victim’s body,
usually the genitals, electric prods or wire attached to ordinary
household current.
• Russian roulette—Spinning the cylinder of
a revolver loaded with a single bullet, usually a dud, and pulling
the trigger the moment it stops.
• Rape and sexual abuse in the treatment of
women detainees.
• Solitary confinement—Isolating the
prisoner in a cell, usually cramped and poorly ventilated. Social
contact even with fellow inmates is forbidden. Some detainees were
in extremely prolonged military detention.
• Psychological or mental torture—This is
said to be one of the worst forms of torture. The victim is told
that if he does not cooperate with the torturers, harm will come to
his family, for example his wife will be raped or the children
killed. Psychological pressure may also involve convincing detainees
that they have already been abandoned by their family or have been
implicated by their friends.
To be continued
Part 1 |Part
3 |Part 4 |
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