September 21, 2012 (Part II)

In this post, I continue with the presentation I made at the UP College of Law remembering martial symposium last Friday, the 40th year anniversary of its imposition.

In previous entries, I already intimated that I was captured on September 16, 1973, tortured and interrogated for about two or three weeks, and detained until December 12, 1974.  I use the term “captured” instead of “arrested” because of the absence of arrest warrants.

How does torture feel like, look like?  I am sure a number of you in the audience are members of fraternities and you went through initiations.  I am a fratman and I went through an initiation before getting accepted.  A frat initiation is a dress rehearsal to torture but  is not its equivalent.  Take a fraternity initiation and multiply the intensity, the pain, the anxiety and what have you by a factor of 100 or a 1000 and you will have experienced tactical interrogation at the hands of intelligence operatives.

By and large, fraternity initiation masters want the neophytes to survive the initiation so the latter could graduate as brothers.  In contrast, the aim of tactical interrogators is to extract information.  If one gets maimed or killed as a result, that was the least of their concerns especially if the interrogation is done in their safe-houses.  If the captive dies, there’s deniability.

How reliable is the information extracted captives under duress?  There are two schools of the matter.  One asserts that the data extracted is useful and truthful.  A captive resists or withholds the truth but will do so to stop the pain.  The other school stresses the utility of other means like psychological warfare (sleep and food deprivation, disorientation, and humiliation)  and drug-aided (e.g. ‘truth serum’) questioning.  This approach believes that these techniques, since they are not frontal attacks on the person of the captive, are more effective since they either induce a false sense of security or disorientation.

In my own experience, there was a division of labor between those who deliver pain and those who ask questions.  The pain producers prepare you, soften you up for the inquisitors.  They are like a wrestling tag team.  Sometimes, if the interrogators do not get the info they you have, they send you back to the torturers.

You may have noticed that I am intellectualizing this part of my martial law experience.  It is not because I have forgotten.  It is because I cannot forget even if I wanted to.

After undergoing tactical interrogation, we were sent to the Ipil Rehabilitation Center (IRC), a minimum-security detention center inside Fort Bonifacio (now in the Global City area).  In comparison, Ninoy Aquino was detained in a maximum-security detention facility.  In Ipil, we had both an aboveground and underground organization.  Both were geared to organize our mass escape.  A month before the scheduled mass escape, the coordinators outside were captured.  As a result, the scale of the eventual escape was reduced but was still successful.

 

It was a propaganda coup for the anti-dictatorship movement and perhaps because of the embarrassment it caused, about 200 of us were released from detention on December 12, 1974.  Prior to our release, we were digging escape tunnels.

 

There were many more of us who were released than those who were left behind.  While I was generally happy, I also felt sad because of those still detained.

 

I went home to fully realize that  I now had  a family and that I had new responsibility.  My wife, who was also an activist, evaded capture and gave birth to our first child when I was still detained.  Upon my release, I had to work to support my family even if I did not have a bachelor’s degree.  I got employed in Makati through the help of former activists.  This new persona became the cover for my and my wife’s continued anti-dictatorship activities.

 

Of course, this continuing political activity caused anxieties within our families.  It narrowed our social circles to family and fellow activists.

 

It was a good thing that I eventually joined the UP faculty.  To my mind, it was the best cover.  It also afforded the most expansive environment for political activity, study, and reflection.  It also broadened my social circles to include students, colleagues and other professionals.  Notwithstanding martial law, I felt at home in UP.

 

If I were to sum, martial law made me, shaped me.  It may be over, but I am, together with many others, what I am because of it.

 

I do not consider myself as its victim because I think I emerged stronger.  What I believe is that the entire nation, except the Marcoses, their cronies and minions, were victimized by martial law.  Alas, a great number of them still strut around as if they have done nothing wrong.

 

 

September 21, 2012 (Part I)

This morning, I spoke at a symposium on martial law organized by the UP College of Law and the Alpha Sigma Fraternity together with General Victor Corpus (ret.) and Butch Dalisay, professor of English in UP.  All three of us were tortured and detained during the martial law period.  Admittedly, the most interesting story was that of then Lt. Corpus, who defected to the Communist-led New People’s Army (NPA) in December 1970 but got disillusioned and surrendered to the government, detained for 10 years, and released only after the ouster of Marcos in February 1986.  He will likewise be reinstated into the Armed Forces of the Philippines as commander of the Intelligence Service of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (ISAFP), the same unit hunting him when he was with the communists.

The symposium organizers asked us to narrate our experiences under martial law and to explain how it shaped our lives.  Corpus decided instead to explain the hows and whys of his defection to the NPA.  Butch and I were obedient to the organizers’ preferences.

When my turn came, I emphasized that the imposition of martial on September 21, 1972 was an auto golpe, a power grab of the incumbent Marcos to perpetuate himself in power.  Under the prevailing 1935 Constitution, Marcos was limited to two terms as president and his second term was to end in 1973.

Since the Third Philippine Republic started in July 1946, an unwritten rule was followed by the two factions of the ruling elites organized as two contending political parties–the Liberal Party and the Nacionalista Party.  The rule stipulated that no standard bearer gets re-elected so that each faction takes turns in plundering the public treasury and milking the advantages of incumbency such as percentages on contracts, overpricing, etc.  Furthermore, the property rights of elites who lost the elections must be respected.  “What we stole remains ours” seemed to be the operational principle.

The re-election of Ferdinand Marcos in 1969 through the massive use of “guns, goons and gold” was seen by the Liberals was a rule violation.  Of course, that was par for the course among the elites but it caused great bitterness among the ranks of the defeated Liberal Party that they were ready to cooperate with Marcos’ other enemies.

The first effect of martial law: I did not become an electrical engineer.  In fact, I could not imagine why I ever thought I would become an electrical engineer.  Both of my parents were civil engineers and three of my uncles were engineers.  One of my older brothers was enrolled in engineering.  Upon graduation from high school, I won a 4-year college scholarship from the then National Science Development Board (NSDB), now the Department of Science and Technology (DOST).  I thought it was a good decision at the time.

My inadequacies were revealed in my Physics 44 class.  I had for my classmates the members of the first batch of graduates of the Philippine Science High School (PSHS) like Rey Vea and Mario Taguiwalo (RIP).  I had to memorize formulas to solve problems in projectile motion and the like.  In contrast, the PSHS guys used calculus to derive the formulas and solve the problem.  Memorizing formulas is dicey. If you got the formula wrong, your solution will be wrong.

I will soon join Vea, Taguiwalo, Taguiwalo’s sister Judy, and many others in the UP Chapter of the youth activist group, Samahan ng Demokratikong Kabataan (Organization of Democratic Youth).

In the middle of 1971, I decided to drop out from UP and be an activist in my hometown.  I worked primarily with students, especially my classmates from high school (who were then in college) and senior high school students.  That was where I was when martial law was imposed.

I forgot to tell my audience that martial law also prevented me from being a lawyer.  My father never thought I would actually become an engineer.  He would tell me later that he believed I was more suited for a legal career.  After I got of prison, I went back to school to finish a bachelor’s degree.  I had to go to summer camp to make up for my ROTC (military service) deficiencies.  When a friend asked to join him in taking the UP College of Law LAE (Law Aptitude Examination), I readily agreed if only to escape the misery of the summer camp on the UP DMST grounds.

I passed the written exam while my friend failed.  I was called for an interview.  I agreed once more for a respite from summer camp.  It was a panel interview to determine who among those who passed the written exam will get accepted as incoming Law students.

The questions were routine except the last one.

A panelist decided to be cute and play games.  He asked me: “Mr. Mendoza,  what makes you think you’ll be a hotshot lawyer some day?”

My response: “What makes you think you’re one right now?”

I know I have deviated from my actual presentation last Friday morning but I cannot resist including this vignette.  I was ready to spar the interviewers because I did not have any intention to be a lawyer under martial law.  What, be a lawyer to memorize and apply his presidential decrees and general orders?   No way!