Alfred W. McCoy: "Human Rights under the Marcos Regime" - Classic "truth-telling & pursuit of justice."
pepeton j'anton
by Alfred W. McCoy, University of Wisconsin-Madison
August 29, 2001
Paper presented at the “Conference on Memory, Truth-Telling and
the Pursuit of Justice. The Legacies of the Marcos Dictatorship”
held on 20-22 September 1999, Ateneo de Manila University, Quezon
City, Metro Manila, Philippines.
Introduction
More than any other nation emerging from authoritarian rule, the
Philippines provides an example of extreme impunity. While other
restored democracies have attempted an accounting for past crimes, the
Philippines, by contrast, has done little to punish the perpetrators
or purge their influence. Instead, through formal amnesty and informal
inaction, the Philippine state has tried to forget its authoritarian
past and move forward without formal inquiry.
But behind this facade of forgetting, society still struggles to cope
with the mingled legacy of martial law. Indeed, through
commemorations, monuments, demonstrations, and debate, there seems to
be a struggle between the atavisms of the old order and their victims
to shape the collective memory of this traumatic past.
In its own way, forgetting is a form of memory. It is inaction
sustained by concerted political action. It is a collective response
to a traumatic past that carries costs just as high, if not higher,
than the alternative approaches of investigation, prosecution, or
reconciliation. Let us now explore how the Philippines came to this
political state called “impunity,” asking whether
forgetting is an effective way of coping with the legacy of martial
law.
Global Context
During the middle decades of the Twentieth Century, authoritarian
regimes ruled nations around the globe. By 1985, military juntas held
power in over half of the hundred-plus countries that comprise the
Third World. These regimes often imposed a rigid order through
coercion--both implicit threat and actual violence. At the broadest
level, authoritarianism encourages a “culture of fear”
that silences all dissent--fear of reprisal, fear of torture, and fear
of endless incarceration.
As these regimes unravel around the globe, new democracies face a
common problem of restoring civil society among a people that has been
silenced. One of the most immediate questions facing
post-authoritarian nations is how to deal with the legacy of violence
and its trauma. Once the dictators are gone, their transgressions
remain imbedded within society’s collective memory and
institutional fabric, constraining its capacities in unimagined ways.
From remembering to forgetting, from punishment to amnesty, different
nations have tried different ways of coping with the collective burden
of a traumatic past. South Africa confronted this past with a
non-punitive Truth Commission. South Korea imprisoned its former
presidents. Argentina tried to silence its past until pro-democracy
forces forced the formation of a truth commission that produced the
famed report Nunca Mas, or "Never Again." Even today, Indonesia
wavers, painfully, between exploring the excesses of the Suharto era
or succumbing to pressures from the old order to forget. The
Philippines has tried to forget. None of these alternatives comes
without costs. All inflict further trauma upon the victims of
authoritarianism and their society.
In these transitions, memory becomes an arena for political struggle.
In this struggle, there is a debate over remembering and forgetting,
with actors on both sides often driven by their respective positions
under the old order. “The same powers that resorted to State
terrorism are actively are promoting collective oblivion,” wrote
two Argentinean psychiatrists in 1996, adding that this is, “the
usual way that the winners tell the story.” At the most visible
level, this debate is acted out in tribunals, local and global, that
seek justice for the victims of authoritarian rule.
Rather than deal with the enormity of these issues on a global scale,
where they threaten to overwhelm us, let us focus on a revealing case
study--the post-Marcos Philippines. To focus further, let us probe the
legacy of authoritarian terror by examining its impact on a group
often overlooked--the actual perpetrators of authoritarian violence,
the torturers, particularly those in the middle echelons of the police
and military.
Marcos Regime
Looking back on the military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s, the
Marcos government appears, by any standard, exceptional for both the
quantity and quality of its violence. Films such as "Missing" and
"Kiss of the Spider Woman" lend an aura of ruthlessness to Latin
American dictatorships that seems to overshadow the Philippines.
But statistics tell another story. The Marcos regime’s tally of
3,257 extra-judicial killings is far lower than Argentina’s
8,000 missing. But it still exceeds the 2,115 extra-judicial deaths
under General Pinochet in Chile and the 266 dead during the Brazilian
junta.
Under Marcos, moreover, military murder was the apex of a pyramid of
terror--3,257 killed, 35,000 tortured, and 70,000 incarcerated. In
striking contrast to Argentina, only 737 Filipinos
“disappeared” between 1975 and 1985. But nearly four times
that number, some 2,520, or 77 percent of all victims, were
“salvaged”--that is, tortured, mutilated, and dumped on a
roadside for public display. Seeing these mutilated remains,
passers-by could read in a glance a complete transcript of what had
transpired in Marcos’s safe houses, spreading a sense of fear.
Instead of an invisible machine like the Argentine military that
crushed all resistance, Marcos’s regime intimidated by random
displays of its torture victims --becoming thereby a theater state of
terror. This terror had a profound impact upon the Philippine military
and its wider society.
Under martial law from 1972 to 1986, the Philippine military was the
fist of Ferdinand Marcos’s authoritarian rule. Its elite torture
units became his instruments of terror. On 22 September 1972,
President Marcos, weighing his words with a lawyer’s care,
issued Proclamation 1081 imposing a state of martial law that would
last a decade. Let us mark his words, noting their nuance:
By virtue of the power vested upon me by...the Constitution I do
hereby command the Armed Forces of the Philippines to maintain law and
order...and to enforce obedience to all laws and decrees, orders and
regulations promulgated by me personally.
The president, armed with these extraordinary powers, involved the
military in every aspect of authoritarian rule--media censorship,
corporate management, mass incarceration, and provincial
administration. Backed by his generals, Marcos wiped out warlord
armies, closed Congress, and confiscated the corporations of political
enemies.
Even at its peak, however, the Marcos state, reflecting the underlying
poverty of Philippine society, lacked the skilled manpower and
information systems to effect a blanket repression. As a lawyer,
moreover, Marcos, at first maintained a facade of legality and spoke
with pride of his “constitutional authoritarianism.” But
as the gap between legal fiction and coercive reality widened, the
regime mediated this contradiction by releasing its political
prisoners and shifting to extra-judicial execution or
“salvaging.”
During fourteen years of martial law, the military's elite
anti-subversion units came to personify the regime’s violent
capacities. Under the command of Marcos’s close cousin General
Fidel Ramos, the Philippine Constabulary housed the 5th Constabulary
Security Unit (CSU) and the Metrocom Intelligence and Security Group
(MISG). Officers in these elite units were the embodiment of an
otherwise invisible terror.
The MISG’s commander for twelve years, Colonel Rolando Abadilla,
in the words of his obituary, “towered over other heavies in
that closed, tight-knit, psychotic club of martial-law
enforcers.” Only his former understudy, then Lieutenant , now
Congressman, Rodolfo Aguinaldo of the 5th CSU, could rival his
psychopathic interrogations. Instead of a simple physical brutality,
these units practiced a distinctive form of psychological torture with
wider implications for the military and its society.
Theory of Torture
Let us think a bit about torture. Starting in 1950, the US Central
Intelligence Agency, or CIA, funded several decades of academic
research into “the relative usefulness of drugs, electroshock,
violence, and other coercive techniques” to discover a new
method of psychological torture--perhaps the most significant
revolution in this cruel science during the past four or five
centuries. Instead of the soldier’s natural inclination to
physical brutality, the CIA’s thousand-page torture manual,
distributed to military regimes in Latin America for over twenty
years, teaches psychological tactics to break down what the agency
called a victim’s “capacity to resist.” Through
“persistent manipulation of time,” the interrogator can
break a victim’s will, driving the victim, in the CIA’s
words, “deeper and deeper into himself, until he is no longer
able to control his responses in an adult fashion.”
Significantly, the agency did warn that physical torture weakens the
“moral caliber of the [security] organization and corrupts those
that rely on it.” But the CIA missed an important point that
would emerge from the Philippine experience: psychological torture is
far more corrupting than its physical variant.
These CIA techniques are so similar to Philippine practices that we
must ask: did the CIA train these Filipino interrogators? In 1978, a
human rights newsletter reported that the Marcos regime’s top
torturer, Lieutenant Colonel Abadilla, was studying at Fort
Leavenworth. A year later, his understudy, Lieutenant Aguinaldo, was
reportedly going to the United States “for...training under the
Central Intelligence Agency.” Were these officers given CIA
training in either tactical interrogation or torture?
Definitive answers must await further release of classified documents.
At present, we will have to content ourselves with comparison. Reading
the victim’s recollections, the methods of Filipino
interrogators, particularly the theatricality of the future RAM
officers, seems strikingly similar to the counter-intuitive techniques
of the CIA manual. This torture and its terror, designed to inculcate
mass compliance through fear, left a lasting legacy for the
post-Marcos Philippines--a politicized military and a traumatized
polity.
The Marcos’s regime’s spectacle of terror opens us to a
wider understanding of the political dimension of torture--one that is
ignored in the literature on both the human rights and human
psychology. Instead of studying how torture harms its victims, we
must, if we are to understand the legacy of martial law, ask what
impact torture has upon the torturers.
We are only now coming to an understanding of torture. In the past
quarter century, psychologists have discovered that torture victims
suffer lasting psychological damage out of any proportion to the
actual physical harm. A study by Otto Doerr-Zegers of Chileans
tortured by General Pinochet's regime found the victim “does not
only react to torture with a tiredness of days, weeks, or months, but
remains a tired human being.”
These Chilean researchers tried to explain torture’s devastating
impact by probing the peculiar “phenomenology of the torture
situation.” They seem to be saying that torture, as done in
Chile, was a kind of total theater, a constructed unreality of lies
and pain. If torture somehow leaves the victim in a lasting state of
weakness, might it not have the opposite impact upon the perpetrators?
In the Philippines, Marcos’ elite interrogation units practiced
a distinctive form of theatrical torture that I call "the drama of
social inversion"--a variant that relies more on psychological
humiliation than simple physical pain. Through psychological
manipulation and sexual torture, these young Filipino officers broke
their social superiors, priest and professors, gaining a superman
sense that they could remake the social order at will. The Philippine
experience thus teaches us that torture has a transactional
dynamic--just as the torture victim is made powerless, so the torturer
is empowered.
Torture and Class ‘71
We can best see the impact of torture on the Armed Forces of the
Philippines (AFP) by examining the experience of the Philippine
Military Academy’s Class of 1971. Only 18 months after their
graduation, Marcos declared martial making these young lieutenants the
fist of his repression. Whether war, peace, or martial rule, generals
keep to their tents while lieutenants serve on the line and suffer its
fate.
From the time of its founding in 1936, the Philippine state’s
primary defense against coups has been the socialization of its
officers into subordination at the Philippine Military Academy (PMA).
For Filipino officers, the first years of active duty were, moreover,
a second, critical phase in this process of military socialization,
affirming the abstractions learned in the classroom.
Whether they became Marcos loyalists or RAM rebels, officers assigned
to these elite anti-subversive units that regularly tortured suspects
seem transformed by the experience. Many members of Class ‘71
served as officers fighting the dirty war against Muslim rebels in
Mindanao before transfer to civil control operations in Manila. Others
were assigned directly to intelligence units that regularly tortured
suspected subversives. Then Lieutenant, now General, Panfilo Lacson,
for example, joined the MISG right after graduation and spent the next
15 years in this elite torture unit, rising to deputy command under
his mentor Colonel Abadilla.
What was the impact of torture upon the young officers? When torture
becomes duty and officers spend years in a daily routine of terror,
the experience becomes central to their socialization. Such
experiences broke down their socialization into subordination,
transforming them from servants of the state into its would-be
masters. Judging from RAM’s later coups, these experiences also
seemed to foster a theory of social action founded on an inflated
belief in the efficacy of violence.
Group torture built lasting bonds that sustained these officers in
their rise to power. At the 5th CSU, Lieutenant Aguinaldo (PMA '72)
worked with his classmate Billy Bibit and Victor Batac (PMA
‘71), beating victims together and forging bonds that later
knitted into the RAM. Similarly, at the rival MISG, Colonel Abadilla
(PMA '65) and two comrades, Robert Ortega and Panfilo Lacson (PMA
'71), tortured together for over a decade, forming a tight faction
that would rise together within the police after Marcos’s
downfall.
Emergence of RAM
In retrospect, the Reform the Armed Forces Movement, or RAM, seems the
most visible manifestation of Marcos’s impact upon the military.
Led by middle-ranking regulars largely from PMA’s Class of 1971,
RAM plotted a coup d’état against the Marcos dictatorship in
1986 and then, failing to seize power, launched five more against his
successor.
By 1985, many RAM leaders had spent a decade in extraordinary
operations involving torture. The empowerment of torture emerges
clearly from one instance involving Lieutenant Colonel Hernani
Figueroa (PMA '66), RAM’s original chairman. As a Constabulary
commander on Samar Island, Colonel Figueroa led anti-subversive
operations that included systematic torture. He directed the torture
of Fr. Ruperto Kangleon, a night of terror that the priest described
in statement shortly before he died in January 1984. On his 51st night
of detention, Fr. Kangleon was brought before Colonel Figueroa, who
entered the room with the drama of an actor striding to center stage:
[Colonel Figueroa’s] initial declaration, ‘Father, the
general has decided that we start interrogating you tonight’ was
enough to unleash that fear that was building up inside me for these
past two months. I felt cold sweat, sweat broke all over my body and I
thought I was going to faint.
For several hours, predator and prey fenced around verbally, one
sizing up the other....[I]rritated with the futility of that
encounter, Ltc. Figueroa finally said: 'Since you refused to
cooperate, Father, we will be forced to use other means. We cannot
allow ourselves to be taken for fools.'
With that finality in his words, my interrogator called in one of his
agents. The latter started to blindfold me with a not-so-pleasant
smelling red bandanna. Blindfolded I was taken for a short but bumpy
jeep ride.
In his description of what followed, Fr. Kangleon crafts a metaphor
with profound implications for our understanding of torture and its
impact upon the future RAM rebels:
Inside I was made to sit on a stool. I felt a small table being placed
in front of me. Then, I heard voices--new voices! Three or four of
these voices...took their places around me. And with actors in their
places, the most crucial stage of my detention started to unfold.
‘Now, Father, you are going to answer our questions!’
‘ ‘What's the name of that sister you used to visit at the
Sacred Heart College? She is your girlfriend, ano? You are fucking
her? How does it feel?....’
‘ ‘OK, take off his shirt. Oh, look at that body. You look
sexy. Even the women here think you are macho. You are a homosexual,
ano?’
‘ ‘Lets see if you are that macho after one of my
punches.’ A short jab below my ribs.
‘ ‘You better answer our questions or else you will get
more of this.’ With that, a short blow landed in my solar
plexus.
‘I was already quaking with fear. The psychological and physical
aspect...of my interrogation had finally taken its toll. I finally
broke down. 'Yes. Go call Ltc. Figueroa. I am now willing to
cooperate.'
Within the confines of this chamber, he is no longer a protected
priest. Naked and blind, he capitulates to the power of Colonel
Figueroa and calls out the name of his tormentor as his savior.
After a decade in Marcos’s safe houses, the RAM leaders
translated their experience of torture into a theory of political
violence. In reply to a question about RAM’s coup planning
during a July 1986 interview, Captain Rex Robles (PMA ‘65),
RAM’s psywar specialist, plunged into a reverie of blood and
terror:
One time I remember was in November [1985], when our discussion ran
until 2:00 in the morning about the crown of power...You have to kill
a lot of people to do this. Are we prepared to shed a lot of blood?
That’s my belief....You have to kill. You have to have the
stomach to kill cold bloodedly a lot of people. Because power does not
stay on the head of people by itself. It has to be actively
maintained--and by blood, especially blood--until people realize that
you are serious about it. And they will fall back and say, 'Hey, this
guy means business. We have to follow him...'
Torture and Coup Tactics
After a decade as understudies in Marcos’s theater of terror,
the RAM colonels emerged on the national stage in the mid-1980s
emboldened by this sense of mastery to launch six coup attempts. Not
only did torture inspire their many coups, it induced an illusory
sense of personal power that made them inept tacticians and
incompetent coup commanders. No other military in the world launched
so many coups with so little success.
In February 1986, RAM launched first coup attempt with an abortive
attack on Marcos’s Malacañang Palace. After months of planning,
RAM’s leader, Lieutenant Colonel Gregorio “Gringo”
Honasan (PMA ‘71), crafted a strategy riven with a fatal
contradiction. In the space of just ninety minutes after midnight, RAM
planned to overwhelm General Fabian Ver’s 7,000 palace guards
and capture the capital in a bold, two-stage coup. In the first phase,
Colonel Honasan and twenty commandos would paddle across the Pasig
River and capture the first couple asleep inside the Palace. In the
second phase, several thousand rebel troops would rally to Honasan and
secure Malacañang from loyalist counter-attack.
Although RAM’s colonels were convinced of their plan’s
perfection, more experienced officers feel that it had the makings of
disaster. Their strategy fused two irreconcilable military
operations--a commando raid requiring perfect secrecy and mass
military revolt needing widespread knowledge. Colonel Honasan’s
attack on the palace could be compromised by even the smallest leak.
Yet the second phase required the participation of over two thousand
rebel troops--a number so large that secrecy was humanly impossible.
As it turned out, Honasan’s plan would have led his commandos to
certain death. Not only was their plan flawed, but its execution was
less than perfect. Overestimating his own ability to inspire loyalty
and underestimating his enemies, Honasan’s core group suffered
leaks almost from the start. In the week before RAM’s coup,
every detail was known to almost every covert agency in Manila--the
CIA, the DIA, Australia’s ASIS, and, most importantly, General
Ver’s Presidential Security Command (PSC). Acting on this
intelligence, Ver ordered a Navy demolition team to line the palace
river front with a cluster of 500-pound bombs. Instead of arresting
the plotters, Ver decided to let Honasan’s commandos launch
their rubber rafts. If Honasan had actually put his paddle in the
Pasig, the river would have risen from its banks in a thunderclap,
vaporizing his commandos. Instead of a coup that placed RAM's patron,
Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile, in the palace, RAM’s revolt
collapsed into a mutiny that was saved from extinction by the people
power revolution that made Corazon Aquino president.
In November 1986, with Enrile now Defense Minister in President
Aquino’s cabinet, RAM organized a “general's coup.”
In the weeks before the coup, RAM revealed their inflated sense of the
efficacy of violence by creating a climate of terror. RAM operatives
detonated a series of bombs about Manila, invoking the memory of the
1971 Plaza Miranda bombing and unleashing black propaganda blaming the
president's deceased husband, Senator Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino. On the
eve of the coup, the top RAM leaders salvaged the leader of the
nation’s largest labor confederation, Rolando Olalia. On
November 13, Olalia's bound body was dumped, head and torso bleeding
from torture. Government investigators later concluded that RAM had
salvaged Olalia to spark chaos and create unstable conditions for
their coup.
On the night of November 22 and 23, RAM mobilized its rebel forces for
a coup. But AFP Chief of Staff Fidel Ramos remained loyal to President
Aquino and worked the phones to mobilize an effective counter coup.
Within 24 hours, the rebel forces were "boxed in" and returned to
barracks without firing a shot. RAM’s coup collapsed.
Impunity
After five more failed coup attempts between 1986 and 1990, surrender
remained the only option for RAM’s leaders. Facing charges for
crimes of murder and rebellion, the RAM colonels were determined to
lay down arms in ways that would guarantee immunity. Through a mix of
bluff and violence, they not only won an absolute amnesty but they had
also placed their leader in the Senate--launching him on a path to the
presidency of the Philippine Republic.
In October 1995, the RAM rebels and government representatives met at
Camp Aguinaldo to sign a peace agreement ending the group’s
seven-year revolt. Under the terms of the accord, RAM agreed to a
“permanent cessation of hostilities” and promised to
“commit itself to democratic processes.” In exchange, the
government would reinstate all rebel soldiers into the armed forces
and grant “a general and unconditional amnesty for all offenses
committed in pursuit of their political beliefs.” After years of
maneuvering to escape prosecution, RAM had finally won impunity for
crimes of rebellion, murder, and torture.
But in January 1998, Senator Honasan’s path to the Palace was
momentarily blocked by sensational revelations in the Olalia murder
case. Two sergeants, both members of RAM's death squad, testified that
the top rebel leaders had ordered Olalia’s brutal salvaging and
then tried to conceal the crime by murdering six members of their own
death squad. In April, after a delay of twelve years, the Justice
Department finally filed charges against thirteen RAM members for the
murder of Olalia. In the end, the RAM leaders may well get away with
murder because their lawyers are insisting that these crimes were
covered by amnesty. Nonetheless, the filing of these charges forced
Senator Honasan to withdraw from a 1998 vice-presidential campaign
that could have been his first step towards the presidency in 2004.
Though RAM and its spectacular coups have now faded, the legacy of
martial law lives on in the Philippine National Police (PNP). Whether
RAM rebels or Marcos loyalists, members of Class ‘71 in the PNP
have continued to their relentless rise to power, though often guilty
of serious human rights abuses.
In 1991, then Defense Secretary Fidel Ramos merged the Constabulary
with local police to form the new Philippine National Police. Since
there was no investigation of past human rights abuses, torture and
salvaging have continued inside the PNP. In 1997, the last full year
of the Ramos presidency, the AFP recorded only 81 human rights
violations, while the PNP were responsible for 1,074--43 percent of
the nation’s total. Today, the daily press carries regular
reports of police torture, salvaging, and other human rights abuses.
Under President Estrada, Class ‘71 has continued its rise to
power within the PNP. In the first months of his administration,
Estrada. acting as his own Interior Secretary, appointed members of
Class ‘71 to key regional and national commands, making them the
most powerful cohort in the police. Among those promoted were three
classmates who personify the successive stages of Class
‘71’s descent into violence. The new PNP regional
commander for Northern Mindanao, Ruben Cabagnot, was responsible for
the hazing death of a plebe at the PMA. The PNP commander for Central
Mindanao, Tiburcio Fusilero, did 40 assassinations for Marcos and led
RAM’s 1989 coup in Cebu. The commander of the powerful
Presidential Task Force on Organized Crime, Panfilo Lacson, was deputy
director of the notorious MISG and was indicted in 1995 for the brutal
massacre of eleven suspects in his custody. Other members of Class
‘71 with questionable records were also promoted the
PNP--notably General Victor Batac, a Marcos-era torturer and the chief
strategist of RAM’s revolt.
Impunity and Civil Society
The Philippine military has thus, like its counterparts in Argentina
and Chile, achieved “impunity” for its crimes and coups.
As a recent phenomenon, impunity is a little understood process with
far-reaching ramifications. At the VI International Symposium on
Torture at Buenos Aires in 1993, delegates defined impunity as
“the fact that, even in countries where dictatorship has given
way to democratic rule, many torturers and other violators of human
rights go unpunished.” In some nations, the military wins
impunity directly by negotiation and in others, such as the
Philippines, indirectly by forcing a political stalemate.
The Philippines provides an example of extreme impunity. Even in the
most difficult of transitions from dictatorship, many of these new,
weak democracies have still managed to win concessions to justice.
From remembering to forgetting, from punishment to amnesty, different
countries have tried different ways coping with the collective burden
of a traumatic past. In comparison with other post-authoritarian
nations, the Philippines has done very little to punish human rights
violators or purge their influence from the military.
Impunity has left what University of the Philippines historian Maris
Diokno has called the “entrenched legacy of martial
law”--a lingering collective malaise that, subtlety but
directly, shapes and distorts the nation’s political process.
Since Marcos’s fall, each succeeding administration has, by
action and inaction, allowed impunity to deepen. During her first
months in office, President Corazon Aquino appointed four human-rights
lawyers to her cabinet and seemed strongly committed to the issue. But
battered by repeated coup attempts, she abandoned any attempt to
prosecute the military for past crimes of torture and murder. Her
successor, President Fidel Ramos, transformed impunity from a de facto
to de jure status. That is, he bestowed the imprimatur of a lasting
legality upon an impunity that had been, under Aquino, a short-term
compromise. Moreover, his administration elevated former torturers to
positions of power. Most recently, President Joseph Estrada is
completing this process by offering members of the Marcos regime both
symbol and substance of exoneration.
Finding the Philippine courts and Human Rights Commission
unsympathetic, some 10,000 Filipino torture victims mounted a massive
litigation against Marcos in the US federal courts. As President Ramos
moved towards an absolute amnesty for torturers between 1992 and 1995,
the US District Court for Hawaii was aggressively pursuing a massive
class-action suit against the Marcos estate--providing Filipino
victims justice that they were being denied at home. In September
1992, the US District Court in Honolulu found Marcos guilty of
systematic torture and held his estate liable for damages to all 9,541
victims--later awarding nearly 2 billion in damages, the biggest
personal injury verdict in legal history. In January 1995, President
Ramos sparked controversy by announcing that his government would
oppose awarding Marcos’s Swiss assets to these torture victims.
In an angry editorial, The Philippine Daily Inquirer, blasted the
“moral bankruptcy of the Ramos administration’s
position.” In a biting, personal attack on the president, the
paper reminded him that as commander of the Constabulary under Marcos
“it was his men who were conducting the dreaded evening arrests,
who were applying the water cure to extract confessions and
administered electrical shocks to genitals of political
detainees.”
The Philippine past provides ambiguous lessons about the likely
consequence of forgetting as a means of coping with collective trauma.
In past century, the Philippines has suffered the brutality of
military rule four times--Spain’s martial law of 1896-98, the US
military regime, the Japanese occupation in World War II, and
Marcos’s martial law. No matter how great the brutality, in the
aftermath the Philippines has coped with the collective trauma by a
period of forgetting followed, often decades later, by a sense of
outrage. Spain’s defeat and retreat removed Spanish violators
from any accounting. In the decades following the Philippine-American
War, the nationalist elite chose to forget the brutality of the U.S.
Army’s pacification and instead pursue a negotiated
independence. After World War II, society chose not charge Filipinos
who had collaborated with the Japanese and the US military prosecuted
most of the Japanese war criminals, reducing the new Philippine
Republic to mere spectators.
Nonetheless, this most recent bout of forgetting is seems unique. The
excesses of the Marcos era were perpetrated by Filipinos officials who
remain within the country’s jurisdiction. Once again, the
Philippines has allowed America, through Hawaii human rights case, to
act as arbiter of its standard of justice.
Between the poles of local impunity and global justice, the
Philippines emerged from the first decade of the post-Marcos period
with signs of a lingering trauma. This jarring juxtaposition--between
the US granting justice to Filipino victims and their own
government’s attempt to deny it--indicates that the trauma of
Marcos’s terror remains deeply imbedded within society’s
collective memory and institutional fabric. The activist ex-priest
Edicio de la Torre has sensed, since Marcos’s fall in 1986, a
deep need for reconciliation among both victims and perpetrators.
Freed from judicial review, the torturers of the Marcos era have
continued to rise within the police and intelligence bureaucracies,
allowing the pervasive brutality of martial law to persist. Under
impunity, culture and politics are recasting the past, turning cronies
into statesmen, torturers into legislators, and killers into generals.
Beneath the surface of a restored democracy, the Philippines, through
the compromises of impunity, still suffers the legacy of the Marcos
era--a collective trauma and an ingrained institutional habit of human
rights abuse.
Conclusion
As the Philippines reaches for rapid economic growth, it cannot, I
would argue, afford to ignore the issue of human rights. If the
Philippines is to recover its full fund of “social
capital” after the trauma of dictatorship, it needs to adopt
some means for remembering, recording, and, ultimately,
reconciliation. No nation can develop its full economic potential
without a high level of social capital, and social capital cannot, as
Robert Putnam teaches us, grow in a society without a sense of pure
justice........END.............
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Pepeton
Lunar_Eclipse
"pepeton j'anton" <pusong...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:ad0e6863.03052...@posting.google.com...
> More than any other nation emerging from authoritarian rule, the
> Philippines provides an example of extreme impunity. While other
> restored democracies have attempted an accounting for past crimes, the
> Philippines, by contrast, has done little to punish the perpetrators
> or purge their influence. Instead, through formal amnesty and informal
> inaction, the Philippine state has tried to forget its authoritarian
> past and move forward without formal inquiry.
>
when Gunter Grass was awarded the Bremen City Prize for his work THE TIN
DRUM, Bremen local authorities refused to endorse the award as Germany,
then, wanted to bury the Nazi past.... and not relive it. Although it was
the TIN DRUM that made Grass some sort of an authority in the lit. world,
his country wasn't willing to acknowledge him as a brilliant novelist (and
TIN DRUM as a brilliant novel) because of its honest portrayal of the Nazi
Reich.
i guess, Philippines' treatment of the Marcos past, her refusal (or her
government's refusal) to relive IT is nothing new.... there's nothing
surprising about it...
pepeton j'anton
You raised an interesting (if factual) point. However, those who have
"chosen" to ignore their past (history) are doomed to commit "exactly"
the same mistakes, over and over again. As indeed, seems to be the
obvious case with the Philippines, which has been portrayed in another
classic critical review of the same period (the marcosian martial
era), by Fr. John Carroll, S.J. as "a nation in denial."
While some may agree with your somewhat blase' observation that "IT
is nothing new....there's nothing surprising about it..." I would hope
that there are more (of us) who are still sensitive and will continue
to be indignant by the fact that Marcos' lawlessness and violations of
human rights and dignity - to this date remain unpunished...and have,
therefore, encouraged succeeding administrations (and a disensitized
society)to be flagrantly tolerant about intolerable crimes against
humanity.
Pepeton
Renowl
bureaucracy from politics, the military or from the civil service. bush
after saddam fell wants to ban senior baathist from iraq.
the philippines found out that smart, rich and ambitious individuals are
hard to suppress because they have a bad habit of rising from the bottom no
matter what. check out ople, check out inrile, honasan, and many others[ yes
also lacson ] . smart, ambitious and rich people are like magnets no matter
how morally or ethically corrupt they are they will draw supporters like
magnets so you just cant ban them from existing . so bush ban on baathist
in iraq sounds quixotic to me. i bet you in 10 years many of this
baathists will be back in another form or another party just like inrile,
honasan, lacson, imee , bong bong, ople, etc etc....
pepeton j'anton
Renowl, you posted a very intriguing issue here. Your observations
suggest the following question: (In the case of the Philippines)-
"Why does the Pilipino society tolerate lawlessness with impunity?"
There has to be a more understandable (reasonable) explanation or at
least a theory why - after all the risks and sacrifices of EDSA ONE,
the Pilipino nation was too quick and too easy to "forget" (without
necessarily forgiving)the heinous crimes of the Marcos dynasty? I
maintain that the Marcoses were never forgiven, because they were
never penitent, and they never apologized nor as for forgiveness from
the Pilipino people. Reconciliation without retribution is an
illusion.
Is life so dear, and peace so sweet, as to be exchanged for the price
of immunity?
My theory is, the Pilipino nation has not quite matured yet, that's
why. It still does not know nor understand the principle of justice
in a truly democratic society. And having so-called "bloodless
revolutions", and taking pride and great honor in this achievement,
has become the trademark of the country. Unfortunately, because of
this, the price of a change in government has come rather cheaply. It
only takes a few demonstrations, sensationalized media hype and
propaganda, more debates and argumentations...and a lot of
talks....and when there is an abundant supply of anything, the price
becomes cheap. Under these sets of circumstances, a change in
administration does not equate to a change or reform in government.
Like I always say, change is unavoidable. It is inevitable. However,
progress is optional (only). That is what has been happening to the
Philippines. It has changed (administrators), but it has not
exercised the option to progress. And that is simply because, the
whole nation has not quite understood the philosophy and principle of
law
duty, right, responsibility and accountability required in a
democratic society.
That is why, I maintain, that we are still incapable of
self-governance and self-rule.
The effect of this is what we are seeing, and which you have
cited...i.e., the continuous presence in the government of people like
Enrile, Honasan, Lacson, Ople, Imee and Bongbong Marcos, and all those
people who have not been brought to justice.
Am I suggesting, therefore, that before the Philippines becomes a
self-sufficient and well-functioning democracy, that it will have to
pay for its
maturity, literally with the "blood of its own people"? It is really
beginning to look like that.
Pepeton