Marcos and Gloria: Parallelisms

A Baguio forum discussed the several parallelisms between Ferdinand Marcos’s martial rule and President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s “rule of terror.”

BY Abigail T. Bengwayan
Northern Dispatch
Posted by Bulatlat

BAGUIO CITY — “It was a strange morning. Wala masyadong tao, walang dyaryo, walang programa sa radio (There were very few people around, no newspapers, no radio broadcast).  But there were military trucks all over. Little did I know that Ferdinand Marcos declared Martial Law that day.”

These were the recollections of martial law victim and survivor Neri Colmenares of his youth in his hometown of Negros on Sept. 21, 1972 in a forum this week on state terrorism under the Macapagal-Arroyo administration. He is now a human rights lawyer with the Committee for the Defense of Liberties (Codal).

“It was a bleak day for the Filipino people, as no one was spared from the crackdown and curtailment of human rights,” he said. Tens of thousands of people were killed during Martial Law, while torture was a standard operating procedure of the military; dispersals in rallies were carried out not only to arrest but to kill, he recounts.

“Ferdinand Marcos’ regime lived on torture, on violation of people’s rights—as in the GMA (Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo) administration now,” he said.

Colmenares discussed several parallelisms of the Marcos regime and the president administration before an audience of church representatives, people’s organizations, students and journalists.

“Undeclared” martial law

Colmenares, one of the prospective private prosecutors in the mothballed House impeachment against Macapagal-Arroyo, said the present administration and the military carry the same mentality and components “in the sense that people’s rights are expendable once it counters the state’s definition of national interest.”

“The regime believes that any attack on the person of the president, the administration, or electoral fraud is an attempt to overthrow the president. In our case where human rights workers are killed alongside progressive leaders and members, there is definitely a problem to that,” he said.

Citing data from the human rights alliance Karapatan, Colmenares said that human rights violations have escalated under Macapagal-Arroyo’s rule. From January 2001 when she assumed presidency to January 30 this year, 4,027 cases of human rights violations were documented, involving 223,796 victims. He said 411 of these are extrajudicial killings with over 100 people killed in a year or one person killed every three days.

“Involuntary disappearances are one of the most cruel forms of human rights violations, because the victims’ families will never have a closure,” he said. This undeclared policy of human rights violations, he added, is another similarity between the two regimes. He stressed that at present, human rights violations are not sporadic, but national in scope, as in the dark years of martial law.

“The modus operandi of the killings is similar: political attack sa papatayin, the kill and the absence of condemnation and investigation,” he said, stressing that the impunity clouding the current regime is another parallelism.

“Nobody is punished for the death of thousands, as in the case of Gen. Jovito Palparan,” he said. The president promoted twice the “Butcher of Mindoro” for his campaign to cleanse Oriental Mindoro province of human rights activists. Some of the more prominent cases include the abduction and killing of Karaparan-Southern Tagalog secretary-general Eden Marcellana and peasant leader Eddie Gumanoy on April 24, 2004.

Lomibao guilty

In her testimony, martial law victim and survivor Joanna Cariño recounted that Philippine National Police Chief Arturo Lomibao was one of her arresting officers and responsible for her torture in the 1970s.

“To date, Lomibao has not yet been held accountable,” Cariño said.

“I was already a student activist here in UP Baguio when Martial Law was declared. When arrests took place, my sisters and I slipped out of Baguio toward Pangasinan, but we were later arrested and detained for two years,” she recalled.

Still a human rights advocate to date, Cariño also stressed the need to challenge the present government for its atrocities against the Filipino people.

“I was a victim of martial law, I survived martial law, and I say never again to martial law!” she stressed.

The first political assassination took place in Baguio City during Macapagal-Arroyo’s term on March 9 this year. An unidentified man gunned down Romeo Sanchez, Bayan Muna (people first) regional coordinator for the Ilocos region, in the City Public Market. The killer remains at large. Northern Dispatch/Posted by Bulatlat  

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