Martial Law Stories: Never Again to Martial Law
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In mid-2010, then Vice President Jejomar Binay visited the Youth Rehabilitation Center (YRC) in Fort Bonifacio in Makati City where scores of political prisoners were held during the martial law period from September 1972 onwards. Here he takes a look at the inside of the isolation cell or "bartolina" where newly arrived detainees spent 10 days before being sent to cell blocks inside the main building. The prison, built during the American colonial era, is now the Makati City Jail.
As I opened the door, I stared down the barrel of a .45 caliber pistol, and as a gruff voice declared, "PC kami" (We're from the Philippine Constabulary), I knew in an instant that my ordeal had just begun.
Marcos lowers the boom
I was a student at the University of the Philippines (UP), pursuing a course in AB Political Science when I got involved in the First Quarter Storm of 1970, the series of protest actions that shook the nation to its foundations. Like many other activists at the time, I had to go underground when martial law was declared.
I recall that we spent a week or so in the big house of a youth activist somewhere in Novaliches, Quezon City, even before the formal announcement of martial law, which took place on September 23, 1972.
We kept close watch on developments—who had been picked up by the military and what new policies the Marcos regime had formulated—so that we could decide on our next moves as part of the underground movement.
A week later, we decided to split up and go home, since none of us had been on the military blacklist and could thus continue to work in the underground without fear of imminent arrest and detention.
While a number of activists and political dissenters had been picked up in the days after Proclamation 1081, we went about our task of organizing student youth in Metro Manila.
But I grossly underestimated military intelligence and thought I was beyond its reach.
Arrest
About 10 of the dreaded PC operatives entered our residence, went up to my room and ransacked its contents for about two hours. They took away two battered portable typewriters and two huge boxes of books they considered "subversive." Among them were three volumes of selected works of Mao Zedong, and various books by Marx, Lenin, and Ho Chi Minh.
They asked me where I kept a gun. I told them I had none.
They put me in handcuffs before making me board a Toyota Land Cruiser that wound through city streets until we ended up in Camp Crame after about 20 minutes.
“I was subjected to severe torture—fist blows to the head and abdomen and kicks to the body—which left me in extreme pain for days thereafter.”
The arresting team consisted of elements of the 5th Constabulary Security Unit (CSU) and the National Intelligence and Security Authority (NISA). They showed me an Arrest, Search and Seizure Order (ASSO) issued by then-Secretary of National Defense Juan Ponce Enrile for alleged violation of Republic Act No. 1700, or the Anti-Subversion Law.
Earlier, though fully aware that I had become "hot"—that is, a prime target for arrest by state security forces because three other members of our underground organizing group had been collared in a meeting place in Pasig City near Manila—I nevertheless decided to go home to our family residence in Quezon City as I had nowhere else to go. That was a big mistake, as it turned out.
Earlier that night, the evening of June 13, 1973, sometime after dinner, I could make out the shadows of about a dozen armed men in the dimly-lit street where our house stood. Half of them were in civilian clothes, the others in fatigues, taking up positions.
Not long after that, they knocked on the door.
The raiding team also hauled in my father, a lawyer with the Public Service Commission, because he demanded that I be assured of my constitutional right to due process. He spent the night in detention in the office of the commanding officer of the 5th CSU but was released the next day.
Like all others who were arrested for political offenses during the first year of martial law, I spent the next 10 days undergoing "tactical interrogation."
Upon arrival at the CSU office, I was immediately slapped on the left side of the face by someone whose identity I learned later was a sergeant at the National Intelligence Service Administration (NISA).
The next day, I was interrogated by Lt. Rodolfo Aguinaldo who asked me where my older brother, Antonio, or Tonyhil, was hiding. Tonyhil was the Secretary General of the militant youth group Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan (SDK) before the declaration of martial law in September 1972. When I replied that I did not know his whereabouts, Aquinaldo repeatedly pummeled me with blows to the head and body.
During the first few days of my detention at CSU, other military officers took turns interrogating me about the whereabouts of Tonyhil and other leaders of the underground. When I told them that I really did not know where they could be in hiding, I was subjected to severe torture—fist blows to the head and abdomen and kicks to the body—which left me in extreme pain for days thereafter.
At one point, I was brought to the NISA office on East Avenue in Quezon City where other intelligence operatives again subjected me to intensive grilling and torture so that I would give them information about the underground movement.
I was kept inside a small detention cell at CSU for about ten days along with others arrested for alleged subversion.
The whole time, military men kept asking me to give them information on the promise that they would have me released if I cooperated with them. One of them asked me where they could find the printing press of "Ang Bayan," the official newsletter of the banned Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). Another said he had studied at the University of the Philippines and was a member of the Beta Sigma fraternity, although he appeared to be the first part of the "good cop, bad cop" interrogation tactic.
In the jail cell I occupied with 15 other detainees, everyone narrated their stories of torture in the hands of interrogators.
One detainee who did organizing work among the urban poor in the Tondo area was hit repeatedly in the shins with a metal bar, leaving almost even black marks on them, as in a ruler.
A student from the University Belt in Manila was pummeled in the groin so hard that he urinated blood and could not walk for days, he said.
Still another, suspected by the military of having been a crew member of a small fishing vessel used by the underground movement to smuggle high-powered rifles from China in 1972, was also heavily tortured and had grown weak and emaciated from the ordeal. Our jailers made him clean the big, black limousine of then-PC Chief (and later President of the Republic) Fidel V. Ramos every morning.
From Camp Crame, many political prisoners were moved to three detention centers in Fort Bonifacio.
Detention
A 1931 picture shows the US military prison close to the Pasig river in Fort McKinley (later Fort Bonifacio). The building became known as the Youth Rehabilitation Center (YRC) during martial law.
After the harrowing experience of torture, both physical and psychological, in the hands of the Philippine Constabulary, I was transferred to the maximum-security Youth Rehabilitation Center (YRC) at Fort Bonifacio towards the end of June 1973.
I never found out why they considered me a high-risk detainee. What I remember is that a lawyer with a Muslim-sounding name from the Judge Advocate General's Office or JAGO asked me what I thought about the land reform program of the Marcos administration. I think I answered that I doubted it would succeed. He wrote down my answer in a sheet of paper and asked me no further questions. He must have thought I was an incorrigible activist who deserved to rot in prison for a long, long time.
I was immediately brought to a bartolina or isolation cell where I spent another ten days before being transferred to a cell block that held about 40 to 50 other political prisoners. There were about 250 political prisoners in the detention facility that also held common criminals charged with serious crimes, including kidnapping-for-ransom, murder, and bank robbery.
I spent a total of 18 months or one-and-a-half years in prison without having been formally charged in any court, whether civil or military. While many of the political prisoners were arrested for alleged violation of the Anti-Subversion Law, few were actually subjected to formal court proceedings, except the 67 on the military backlist of alleged hardcore subversives. Thus, I consider my arrest and torture and subsequent prolonged detention as arbitrary and, therefore, illegal.
In the company of aging Huk commanders, big-time criminal syndicates and military detainees, hundreds of political prisoners awaited their fate, separated from family and loved ones for months and years on end. A few endured ten or more years of prison life in the prime of their youth.
YRC is the same prison where, two decades earlier, poet and labor leader Amado V. Hernandez wrote his well-known work, "Isang Dipang Langit" (A Square Foot of the Sky), referring to the view from his cell in solitary confinement where one only saw a piece of the sky outside.
While we were detained at Fort Bonifacio, the military discovered in October 1974 a plan by the political detainees to escape from prison through a tunnel which they had secretly dug for months. I wrote a lengthy account of the escape plan for Rappler, the online news site, in 2014, or 40 years later.
Shortly after the discovery of the plot, we were all made to line up at the basketball court after breakfast, and told to take off our shirts and pants. After the search, the military found, we were told later, six caliber .45 pistols, two grenades and assorted subversive documents. We were kept incommunicado for the next two weeks, with the suspected leaders of the escape plan singled out for interrogation by military intelligence. One of the leaders, a frail fellow from Tondo, was brought to the headquarters of the Military Police inside Fort Bonifacio and tortured to reveal all that he knew about the escape plan. He appeared dazed and confused from the experience when he was brought back to our cell block, as he told us that at one point the MPs made him fit inside a drawer of a metal filing cabinet and they repeatedly kicked the sides of the cabinet.
Map of Fort Bonifacio in Taguig
Release
I was released from detention on the morning of December 16, 1974 along with a big number of other political detainees. There was a brief ceremony at Camp Crame where military and police officials warned us against fighting the government and to instead support the Marcos government in its effort to build a "New Society."
They also told us to report to our arresting units, first on a weekly and later on a monthly basis. I religiously complied with this condition for my release to avoid re-arrest or any form of harassment or intimidation by the military.
After my arrest and detention on flimsy charges of taking part in underground activities—a charge which was never proved by the martial law government—I decided to go back to school.
Back to UP
My arrest in June 1973 and detention until December 1975 had interrupted my studies at the University of the Philippines. After my release, I decided to go back to school in the summer of 1975 after working for three months as manager of a small office supplies store- cum-candle factory in Manila owned by a distant relative.
At UP, I managed to reconnect with other ex-detainees who had also gone back to school.
I enrolled in various courses leading to a degree in Political Science from 1975 to 1977 but was unable to finish my course as I had to find immediate employment after my father passed away in September 1976.
I found work initially as project development officer at the Metro Manila Commission that held office at the Quezon City Hall compound. But after three months, I applied for work at the Philippine Center for Advanced Studies (PCAS) at the UP Asian Center in Diliman as technical editor.
It was while I was working at the President's Center for Special Studies (PCSS) from 1979 onwards as writer-editor when opposition leader Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino was gunned down at the Manila International Airport on August 23, 1983.
Less than three years later, with popular outrage at the Marcos regime reaching its peak, the People Power Revolt in February 1986 took place, sending the Marcos family fleeing in exile to Hawaii and bringing Cory Aquino, Ninoy's widow, to Malacañan to the preside over the restoration of democracy in the country.
50 Years After Martial Law
Two years from now, in 2022, the country will mark the 50th anniversary of the declaration of martial law in the Philippines.
Today, half of the population—the youth—will have no recollection of that dark period in our contemporary history when Marcos imposed a dictatorship for 14 years until his overthrow via People Power in February 1986.
But for those who lived through those trying times, martial law will always remain etched in our memory.
For all those who went through the early to mid-‘70s and had to endure arrest and detention for political activities, memories of martial law will always come back to haunt us.
There are many more stories besides those of the 10,000 or so victims of torture and other human rights violations who came forward to file a class suit against the Marcos estate in a Hawaii federal court in the late 1980s. They won the case, with the judge issuing an order for the Marcos family to indemnify the victims a total of $2 billion, if I'm not mistaken. So far, the victims have each only received $2,000. Many of them are now old or have died without ever obtaining justice for their ordeal under martial law.
With the current political dispensation in the Philippines not hesitating at all to use the mailed-fist approach against perceived critics and political dissenters, is a repeat of martial law possible at this time? That, of course, cannot be dismissed outright, as due process and the rule of law seem to have been conveniently thrown out the window—defenestrated is how others technically inclined would describe it—in not a few cases. More recently, Congress passed a draconian anti-terrorism bill that many fear would only bring about a state of virtual martial law. But the stories of thousands upon thousands of those who were arbitrarily arrested, tortured and detained, as well as others who simply disappeared and are believed to have been killed outright under mysterious circumstances, should serve to remind us that dictatorship under any form is totally unacceptable, and that we should make sure that the same thing does not happen again in our country.
Ernesto M. Hilario
Ernesto M. Hilario studied Political Science at the University of the Philippines and has worked for various government agencies, NGOs and mainstream media since 1978. He writes a regular column for the Manila Standard broadsheet and also works as a freelance writer-editor.
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