Rebel without a clue
Faith
By Patricia Evangelista
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 04:01:00 12/07/2008
Filed Under: Torture, Human Rights
On Aug. 28, 1987, Col. Gringo Honasan, future two-time senator of the republic—the same fugitive who jumped from a second-floor townhouse in an attempt to elude police arresting him for his involvement in a 2006 coup attempt—led 2,000 heavily-armed rebel soldiers against the Malacañang Palace gates. When the attempt to take over the Aquino government broke under the Presidential Security Group, the rebels retreated, and without warning fired their guns randomly at civilians walking through the streets of old Manila. Eleven lives were snuffed out that night.
I write this to illustrate how arbitrary violence can be, especially in the hands of the dangerous multitude who carry arms and function under a messianic principle of the greater good. A 1986 interview with Honasan disciple Navy Capt. Rex Robles, published in Alfred McCoy’s “Closer than Brothers,” talks about his willingness to shed blood to maintain power. Robles fancied himself a historian, but said “once you get my goat because you have been unfair to me, then I fight you.” He did not mind being killed, but warned all who attempted to “make a good job of it,” because if he escapes, “I don’t start with adults. I start with children. I enjoy that. I enjoy chopping the extremities before finishing people off.”
When Raymond Manalo sat on the dusty blue couch in my living room eating a Wendy’s Bacon Mushroom Melt, I did not have difficulty believing that the men he identified as soldiers made him swallow his own piss, or that they used rusting metal chains to whip him into submission. I asked if his urine spilled to the ground when he was forced to piss into a 1.5 liter Coke bottle with his wrists manacled. I asked how it felt to have chains bite into skin. I asked if he wanted to die then, asked him what death smelled like, asked him whether he put sugar in the cup of coffee he drank the morning when armed men dragged him out of his home in 2006.
I have received letters, many of them, about Raymond Manalo, and the story I wrote about him two weeks ago. How brave you are, some said, perhaps unaware that there is no bravery required when you’re young enough not to be afraid, and old enough to have a reasonable estimate of your own relative unimportance to the powers that be. Twenty-three-year-old Manila-based writers with delusions of their own influence are never abducted, as to silence them would cause bigger trouble than simply allowing them to type themselves away into boredom and apathy.
How shocking, said others, shocking to read of the students Raymond saw raped with lengths of wood and poked at with cigarette butts. How like martial law. How like the war. How like Mexico and Spain and Burma. How impossible, said many others, impossible for such things to happen. Is she sure of her story? Can she prove it? Did she check her sources?
Those questions are reasonable of course, if you are unaware that the source is Raymond Manalo, that the story he established in various courtroom affidavits is the same story etched into his head after more than a year of torture and beatings and meager meals of rotting pig slop. Early in October this year, the Supreme Court upheld a Court of Appeals decision granting the Manalo brothers the privilege of the writ of amparo—aimed at protecting from harassment by security forces. In its ruling, the high court said it found Raymond Manalo’s account of his and brother’s detention and torture to be “harrowing” as well as “clear and convincing.”
A week later, Raymond Manalo put on a baseball cap and brought the Commission on Human Rights and Karapatan to Limay, Bataan, to the fields where he claimed the 24th Infantry Battalion had held him and other political detainees.
Human rights workers found decaying items on the supposed gravesites, such as shoes, slippers and a piece of cloth. These were the places Manalo claimed bodies had been burned and buried. The military refused to admit the existence of the detachment, although an initial investigation by the CHR “seemed to confirm the existence of the camp.” Former Bataan Vice Gov. Rogelio Roque told this paper that the 24th IB used to occupy the area, which is adjacent to a lot he owns.
“Everybody knows that the 24th IB was there until they left about a year ago,” Roque said.
It is easier to doubt Manalo’s testimony, in spite of the long, tedious court cases the mothers of Sherlyn Cadapan and Karen Empeño attended for years, in spite of Maj. Gen. Jovito Palparan’s series of alternating admissions and denials that contradict the testimonies of the uniformed men who testified to protect him, in spite of United Nations rapporteur Philip Alston’s 2007 report that implicated members of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, including the same Jovito Palparan that Manalo claims to have spoken to.
What is difficult to believe is not the fact that the government has continued to condone these actions—that is something we have come to expect of this government, but the fact that it can happen, that an average man, in a reasonably sound state of mind, can take a match, insert it into a man’s penis, and strike it on fire. It is not human; it is not possible. Torture, after all, is a concept even the most closed countries in the world have readily condemned, with 183 countries stamping their agreement in 1993 that torture “is one of the most atrocious violations against human dignity.”
And yet recent literature have come to the conclusion that torturers are usually “normal people” who are simply indoctrinated to believe that their victims are deviants, are deserving of punishment. “We are God; we are the law,” say Argentine torturers to their victims. In 1972, Fr. Edgardo Kangleon of Western Samar was told, naked and blind, by his torturers that “In this place where you are now, we are the judge.” In 1995, research on Philippine torturers by Dr. June Lopez showed that torture is “learned behavior.”
I will tell you I have learned to believe. This, after all, is the Philippines, the writer’s paradise of magical realism, pearl of east, land of the sun, cradle of the brave, where so many things—God, election results, and evidence of torture—can only be accepted on faith.
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Email: pat.evangelista@gmail.com
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