It is estimated that more than 60,000 persons have gone through these detention areas and the experience of being detained by the military. Groups are released from time to time, whenever the inadequate accomodations threaten to be even more severely taxed by the influx of more prisoners. However, those released more quickly and in greater numbers belong to the category of detainees under non-political offenses, ranging from murder to pickpocketing. The modus operandi is to hold prisoners for investigations, because as one judge Advocate General’s Office (jAGO) major explained, “one is presumed guilty until proven innocent.” The officers in the various legal sections of the military have expressed satisfaction over the long detention periods. Before martial law, they explained, they had to work fast because of the 36-hour limit on detention; now, after martial law, they can “take (their) time.” Taking their time, of course, means months and months of allowing the prisoners’ dockets, files and dossiers to accumulate in their offices while they play pelota or with their concubines. These officers generally ignore the damage done to the detainee’s life. One such detainee, imprisoned under erroneous information, witnessed, through the months, the death of his only child for want of medical care (he was the only bread-earner in the family) and his wife take up with another man who could feed her. Others have witnessed their wives or relatives suffer nervous breakdowns, while still others were financially or professionally ruined.
The process of securing papers for one’s relatives under detention is a long and tedious one. Although officially relatives are not allowed to follow up the release papers of prisoners, this rule can neither be enforced nor is it operative-for the simple reason that military personnel are too lazy to attend to the processing papers on their own. Five signatures are required by the release papers and in the process of obtaining these signatures, any small occurence may serve to block the whole process. One messenger-sergeant may not feel like taking the day’s batch of papers from one office to another, or a lieutenant given the order to type out a recommendation for release may conveniently forget this over his ten 0’clock coffee break.
Thus, relatives are forced to try to track down the papers of the prisoner from office to office, shedding tears on the carpeted floors of generals’, majors’, colonels’ offices, cajoling lieutenants, sergeants and whoever happens to be around into doing their assigned task, by buying them lunch, snacks or gifts. This system renders the relatives particularly vulnerable to demands for bribes-anywhere from two hundred thousand pesos (about $10,000 to $15,000) for higher-ranking officers. This system of bribery is rampant and exempts no one; bribes go to the highest officials of the Department of National Defense and the Armed Forces down to the lowest constable, private or policeman. Others take their bribes in the form of sexual accommodations, from the wives and/or sisters of the detained ones.
Generally, political prisoners refuse to tender any bribe to anyone, standing firm in their belief in the basic justness of their political commitment, as well as their refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the Marcos dictatorship. This is probably one reason why political detainees stay in the detention centers for months and months on end, and why the Office for Rehabilitation (a misnomer) has formulated a policy of keeping political officers from six months to three years. The Rehab Office claims, on paper, as justification for this policy, to have a rehabilitation program; in practice, however, this merely consists of sending squads of newly-graduated girl psychologists-who are generally ignorant-into the detention centers to give psychological and l.Q. exams to the prisoners. These girls actually spy on prisoners’ conversations and gauge attitudes towards the dictatorial regime of Marcos.
The military always makes a great show out of the handicraft projects within the detention centers. What they do not bother to point out, however, is that these projects were started by the prisoners themselves as a form of self-help, to maintain morale within the detention centers, as well as to extend financial help to the more destitute prisoners and their families. The projects also aid in the organization of prisoners to frustrate the desire of the military to divide and set the prisoners at each other. The military, too, does not bother to point out that these self-help projects, instituted and organized by political prisoners themselves, gained ground and validity among prisoners, despite the actual discouragement and non-help of the Rehab Office. What the Rehab Office points to now as part of their rehabilitation program is actually the result of the magnificent militance of the political prisoners, the collective expression of their refusal to allow themselves to be dehumanized to the level of beasts-which was the primary intention of the military in dumping together a vast number of persons into inadequate detention centers with minimal facilities even for sanitation.
To illustrate this, one may cite the case of a former detainee who tried to help her colleagues within the detention center. This detainee had the water system repaired, at her own considerable expense, and to start off the self-help projects bought six sewing machines for delivery to the detention center. However, the military refused to allow these machines into the center and a few days later, the detainee herself was transferred, in the middle of the night, to the isolation of the stalags, blindfolded and flanked by armed escorts. While the detainee, a prominent name in the Philippines, has since then been allowed to return home, to this day she does not know the reason for that cloak-and-dagger evening; only those who remained in the detention center deduced the logic behind her sudden transfer.
Despite such incidents as this, however, the prisoners continued to try to set up their self-help projects, largely by appealing for financial and material help outside the military. Friends responded and the projects were set-up-which left the military with nothing to do except attempt at cooptation. Besides, certain officers also saw that these projects could be a source of lucrative income-not for prisoners but for themselves, since the products made by the detainees were considerably well-crafted and exquisite. Many of those involved in the self-help projects among the prisoners were among the best minds in the country, of artistic and creative bent: poets, painters and others.
These projects are important to the detainees, not primarily for financial reasons but for the purpose of strengthening the detainees’ sense of self-respect-for within the detention areas, erosion of dignity and dehumanization are the guiding policies of the military.
I stayed in one of these detention centers for quite a while and the most telling form of non-physical torture that one can suffer inside is the constant military effort to instill in a person a sense of his own worthlessness, his isolation from the larger community of the Filipino nation. In the ISAF, for example, officers deliberately discuss plans in front of a prisoner, mentioning possibilities of raids on the houses of his friends and comrades, as well as surveillance or arrest of his friends and comrades-all in an effort to instill a sense of helplessness in the prisoner.
I stayed in one of these detention centers for quite a while and the most telling form of non-physical torture that one can suffer inside is the constant military effort to instill in a person a sense of his own worthlessness, his isolation from the larger community of the Filipino nation. In the ISAF, for example, officers deliberately discuss plans in front of a prisoner, mentioning possibilities of raids on the houses of his friends and comrades, as well as surveillance or arrest of his friends and comrades-all in an effort to instill a sense of helplessness in the prisoner.
I stayed in one of these detention centers for quite a while and the most telling form of non-physical torture that one can suffer inside is the constant military effort to instill in a person a sense of his own worthlessness, his isolation from the larger community of the Filipino nation. In the ISAF, for example, officers deliberately discuss plans in front of a prisoner, mentioning possibilities of raids on the houses of his friends and comrades, as well as surveillance or arrest of his friends and comrades-all in an effort to instill a sense of helplessness in the prisoner.
Even the WACs-Women’s Auxillary Corp-are not exempt from this rudeness of behavior and pettiness; some WACs have even participated in the beating up of female detainees. One special form of harassment is the use of the public address system, normally intended for paging detainees to go to the visiting room or the offices for official matters. The WACs and the guards play with the public address system and sing songs in their awful voices-usually banal pop songs. It is next to impossible to stop this kind of activity once it gets started, for it is a prevalent Filipino myth that one can make a sudden rise to fame and fortune through the jukebox, stage or cinema; so for afternoons on end, hour after hour, or during evenings, the guards and the WACs take turns at pouring their terrible singing voices into the public address system, whether detainees are resting or not.
Every little privilege that one gets in the centers has to be pled for and paid for; no matter if the order has already been given by a colonel, it is still the lower officers and the guards who must implement such orders. The officers in charge of these detention centers are chosen, it appears, on the same basis as the guards. The OIC obtains his sense of power from the amount of tearful supplication he can wring from the prisoner and his relatives. From time to time, he threatens prisoners with the cessation of all privileges, including visiting hours and the use of the telephone. He derives his inspiration from his superiors, who, to keep their prisoners on their toes, would cancel, from time to time and without any reason, visiting privileges or the open house-a day when relatives can enter the centers and at least touch their loved ones inside, talk to them without the barrier of chicken wire or bring their children to be caressed and kissed.
Medical and dental services are supposed to be available to the prisoners-but getting to the dental and medical clinics of the military reservations entails a long labyrinthine process-and it is only a tribute to the physical program instituted by prisoners among themselves that not everyone has succumbed to disease or infection. One female prisoner who had a tooth extracted in the dental clinic of the military reservation had her cheek sutured to her gum. When she complained, the dentist told her off, saying that she should be grateful for the free services and that all prisoners should be summarily executed, for purposes of economy.
One female detainee suffered a miscarriage due to the shock of arrest; however, it took hours and hours before she could be brought to the hospital, because the OIC could not be found; he was in all probability playing pelota. Detainees in need of medical attention have discovered, to their chagrin, innumerable obstacles: no typewriters in the guards’ offices and therefore disposition forms could not be filled out and the OIC could not sign the forms; or the sergeant left by the OIC was practically illiterate and could not type out a simple note authorizing the guards to escort a detainee to the hospital; or the OIC refused to take the responsibility of deciding and had to wait for orders from his superiors while the detainee was slowly exsanguinating before him.
Once, however, the detainee finds himself in the hospital, his sufferings do not diminish; they continue-for doctors and nurses share the common military attitude that prisoners should not be viewed as human beings. The sick one is dumped into a filthy, bug-infested hospital bed after a cursory examination and left there to fend for his life, with rare visits from the doctors and only his idiotic armed escort for company. One doctor goes around happily recounting how one of the detainees he operated upon for a gunshot wound in the thigh died of pneumonia. They blithely write off as suicide, or attempts at suicide, the results of manhandling suffered by detainees at the hands of the military. Fractured bones and smashed skulls are described as death from natural causes.
The nurses are particularly offensive-and one of the most notorious is Lt. Col. Lopez, former head nurse of the Crame Station Hospital. This woman delighted in berating prisoners at the top of her voice every morning, insulting and refusing to allow visitors to see their sick relatives. Col. Lopez flaunts her power but despite the numerous complaints against this woman, she was even promoted by the higher echelons of the military.
Sickness, too, does not exempt anyone from the physical tortures of the detention centers. Ricardo Lee, a well-known writer, young, thin and orphaned as he was, was beaten up by military men, despite the fact that he had rheumatic fever. Lee spat out blood as a consequence of this experience.
I was lucky to have been deported out of the particular detention center where I was staying, but many-hundreds of them all over the country-remain at the mercy of this sub-human species of military men. Filipinos no longer call military men by their formal labels; they are all lumped as hapon-Japanese, in memory of the atrocities inflicted upon Filipinos by the Japanese Imperial forces during the Second World War. These hapons keep behind bars some of the best minds of the country, among them Dr. Bienvenido Lumbera, the Philippines’ top expert on Filipino literature; Dr. Ricardo Ferrer, a top economist of the National Economic Development Agency, also under detention; and, ironically enough, in a country where the Miss Universe contest reached unprecedented heights of excess and extravagance, two beauty queens have suffered arrests: Ms. Nelia Sancho and Ms. Maita Gomez, the latter apprehended but a few days before the Miss Universe happening.
These facts regarding detention in the Philippines are well hidden from the eyes of foreigners, who are beguiled by a few cleaned-up streets of the tourist area and by the successive circuses of extreme tastelessness launched by the dictator’s wife, Imelda Marcos. Some Filipinos abroad, feasting their senses on the balikbayan troupes and the Pangkat Kawayan (groups sent out by the dictator Marcos for propaganda purposes) have also succumbed to these enticements. They have, like the people of Marie Antoinette, eaten cake-and the frothy easy frosting, so smooth to swallow, so delightful to take into one’s body like a soporific, needing no effort nor tears, obscures for them the hard and bruising image of countless Filipinos masticating their daily diet of beans and fish within the detention centers, chipping their teeth, in the process, on the stone-infested small mound of rice. It is easy to relax and go one’s way overseas, but in the Philippines, though Van Cliburn may play sweet music, he cannot overpower with piano notes the cries of anguish and pain, and the murmured anger that continually rises from those secret chambers of the military reservations. The latter are the best schools for rebels and revolutionaries in this country.
