Hope for freedom
As the months of detention dragged on, it became painfully evident to Ka Bel that justice would be elusive under the dictatorship. The labor leader escaped from prison in 1984 and sought refuge among the peasants of Central Luzon.
Beltran eventually won back the liberty he risked his life for. After People Power toppled the Marcos dictatorship in February 1986, he was offered general amnesty by the new government. The charges of sedition and rebellion against him were eventually dismissed by the courts for lack of merit.
Ka Bel went on with the struggle for workers rights, assuming the leadership of the KMU after Lando Olalia, Ka Bert’s son, was abducted and brutally murdered in November 1986. He would later on head the KMU, the Bagong Alyansang Makabayan, and the International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS) as chair before winning a seat in Congress under Bayan Muna in 2001 and AP in 2004.
The elder Olalia, however, did not live to see freedom. With his health deteriorating after two weeks in solitary confinement, Olalia was transferred to the Camp Crame Hospital Room 1, exactly in the same room where Ka Bel spent nearly two months in confinement last March. He was later transferred to the V. Luna Hospital, where he died under house arrest on December 4, 1983.
History repeats itself, they say. Twenty-four years after that fateful afternoon on August 18, 1982, Beltran finds himself in the late Felixberto Olalia’s shoes: detained by a new dictatorship, struggling against illness under police custody, falsely charged with rebellion, and yet firm on regaining freedom and justice.
Nearly six months have passed since Ka Bel was illegally arrested and arbitrarily detained by the Arroyo administration on February 25, 2006, yet there are no indications that the government is willing to set him free, or to even let him attend Congress’ last 100 days of session. Despite yearning to escape again like what he did in the 1980s, Ka Bel says that he will not do so in deference to his oath of office as a duly-elected congressman.
Whenever Ka Osang feels despondent over what seems to be another long struggle under a new dictatorship, she always finds strength in a letter that Ka Bel wrote while in the PC-INP Stockade on May 26, 1983:
“Mula noong ika-18th ng Agosto 1982…ako’y nakakulong nang walang nababanaag na kalayaan at katarungan. Ngunit nananatiling malakas ang aking kalooban at buhay ang pag-asa na magwawagi ang simulain na ipinaglalaban natin, kasama ang sambayanan,” he wrote (Since the 18th of August, 1982…I have been unjustly jailed without seeing any hope for freedom and justice. But my resolve remains strong, and I remain hopeful that the causes and the ends that we are fighting for will triumph, along with the masses). Bulatlat
