HIDDEN TRUTHS DURING MARTIAL LAW

Sept. 25, 2016

(These are excerpts from a commentary by Mr. Rigoberto Tiglao in manilatimes.net last Sept. 23. It details facts and figures which show Martial Law was not as bad as detractors of former President Ferdinand Marcos have been painting it to be for the last 30 years.  Details which have NEVER BEEN REPORTED or acknowledged by Marcos critics:.)

In (Ferdinand) Marcos’ Five Years of the New Society (published in May 1978), the strongman stated that 2,083 members of the (Armed Forces of the Philippines) AFP had been “dismissed and penalized for various abuses, including torture and ill-treatment of detainees and 322 had been sentenced to disciplinary punishment.” (Armed Forces chief of staff) General (Romeo) Espino as well as Jose Crisol, Deputy Defense Secretary in charge of civilian relations, had also reported that 2,500 to 2,900 military personnel were discharged as a result of complaints by detainees. In a speech marking the lifting of martial law in January 1981, Marcos claimed that more than 8,800 officers and men had been dismissed from the AFP because of human-rights accusations against them. While obviously self-serving assertions, no Yellow narrative has ever reported these claims by Marcos and his officials, and to this day, these figures have not been disputed.

Rabid anti-Marcos writers also routinely claim that during the regime, 50,000 Filipinos were detained. This is a half-truth as while this many probably would have been detained in the first few months of martial law. However, reports, even by the Amnesty International that has been critical of martial law, point out that many of those detained in these first months were released a few months after,  that by 1980, there (were) only 1,913 political prisoners, and by 1981 – to prove that martial law was indeed lifted — only 243.I believe that there was indeed a drastic reduction of political prisoners after martial rule was stabilized,  since in December 1974, I was among probably a thousand out of the 1500 detainees released from (a) Marcos prison euphemistically called Ipil Rehabilitation Center, which was the biggest in the country, in the “spirit of Christmas”,

In a cut-and-paste book on the Marcos years totally based on narratives of biased sources and second-, and even third-hand accounts — funded I was told by either Manuel Lopez or his clan and rushed as a propaganda tool against Bongbong Marcos’ bid for the presidency — the author claimed that the dictator’s detention camps were “similar” to the USSR’s (the then Union of Soviet Socialist Republics)  horrific prisons that made up the so-called The Gulag Archipelago, depicted vividly in Nobel laureate Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel of that title. I nearly fell off my seat reading that. That’s total rubbish I  can speak of what Marcos prisons were because I was there, together with my late wife Raquel, in five detention centers, spending most of my 21st and 22nd year of life on this earth there.

These were the detention cells of the Philippine Constabulary’s 5th Constabulary Unit in Camp Crame, that of the Intelligence Service of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (ISAFP) in Camp Aguinaldo, that of the National Intelligence Coordinating Authority in its headquarters at V. Luna Road in Quezon City (where it still is) as well as Ipil Youth Rehabilitation Center and the maximum security Youth Rehabilitation Center both in Fort Bonifacio. As an actual detainee, I owe it to history to correct these distortions of what happened. I was told the author was promised that the book would be distributed to all high schools as a required textbook, if the Yellow candidate Mar Roxas had won. With 7 million high school students , the author would have been a multi-millionaire. 30