We Kept On Moving: My Story of Martial Law

BIMBO CABIDOG

Late afternoon of May 30, 2016 I filed the documents for my claim as victim of human rights violation during martial law, in time to beat the deadline of the Human Rights Victims Compensation Board.

The submission entered my own martial law story into the official records of the government. It was in legalese, but said something of the dark era we recall as the Marcos dictatorship. Here is my story.

As we all know, Ferdinand Marcos while serving the final term of his presidency in accordance with the Constitution signed Proclamation 1081 on September 21, 1972. The step placed the country under martial law, a wily stratagem that indefinitely extended his rule.

Marcos announced the draconian measure three days later when most of the potential opposition have been nabbed and clamped in military stockades by a lightning roundup of his security forces.

The imposition of martial law axed the old liberal democratic model of rule by which Filipino leaders organized the country in the post-1946 independence era. Marcos padlocked Congress – the legislative branch, and governed via presidential decrees. No credible elections happened thereafter.

Martial law was resorted purportedly to meet the threat of an alleged communist takeover. But later, Marcos wove the tale of weaning Philippine society from the stranglehold of the oligarchic rich that dominated the political system and held sway over society as a whole. Both pretexts were made up.

He fabulously called the palace coup a revolution of democracy from the center. Ironically, the new dispensation went into suppressing the political and democratic rights of all citizens.

The first round of arrests netted stalwarts of the opposition in the senate who only a year ago thinly survived lethal injuries from the bombing of the Liberal Party rally at Plaza Miranda. Two early occupants of the martial law cells were celebrities Senators Benigno Aquino Jr. and Jose W. Diokno.

Others by the thousands – students, teachers, writers, media practitioners, religious, unionists, and minor political figures started filling up detention centers all over the country, such as Bicutan.

Marcos sought the people’s subservience with the mantra: “Sa ikauunlad ng bayan disiplina ang kailangan.” (For the country’s progress, discipline is needed.) But more than anything else, it meant silencing critique, and locking up the free-wheeling oftentimes unwieldy Fourth Estate - the suffocating grip of the regime’s propaganda machine.

Quieting dissent and dominating the propaganda war, the dictatorship attempted to culturally and ideologically remold the nation in the fascist dictator’s image and likeness. Controlled media outlets played and replayed the virtues of the New Society with its supposed boons ad nauseam.

But no matter how the regime peddled all of the breaking events to be harbinger of a bright future, the reality could not be erased that they were turning a dark page in the country’s history. The penning of PP 1081 kicked off fourteen tortuous years of an order that unleashed state terrorism, military brutality, “conjugal kleptocracy,” and crony plunder on the people.

Personal Effect

The advent of dictatorship was a life-changing one for me. The story I filed at the HRVCB delved on my warrantless arrest barely a year since, a wrenching experience that pushed me from contained campus politics, as an official of our school’s student government, into radicalism.

The first thing martial law did to me was make me a hunted person. Army intelligence and the then Philippine Constabulary blacklisted me for being a student leader and campus figure active in political discussion circles.

I initially eluded being caught. But operatives of the MIG finally picked me up at a bus terminal with the aid of my father who prevailed on me the night before to come with him “to clear my name.” It turned out to be a surrender.

Incarceration incommunicado in an isolated “safe house” of a military intelligence unit followed arrest. Throughout the detention, only my teary-eyed mother could see me and that was once.

My prison ordeal was spiked with psychological torture. At times, the menacing barrel of a loaded M16 rifle stared at me. It would be used by my custodians to poke at my private part and wake me up in the middle of a sleep.

In her single visit, my mother touched on my studies. I was already at second semester third year in liberal arts majoring philosophy. I told her that maybe the best thing to do is to just ask the university authorities to drop me.

I had to quit college. We would only be wasting money paying for the whole semester without me attending classes. The tuition obligation had to stop.

Several months later, probably finding me harmless, the military transferred me and a co-detainee to a house of a relative of one of its agents, as First Lady Imelda Marcos inaugurated the San Juanico Bridge connecting Samar and Leyte, on her birthday.

The step became a de facto release. A week later, I would walk out of the house and took a passenger ride home with no one preventing.

Release from prison did not offer freedom. Restrictions and obligations hounded me. But being freed offered a choice of whether to perpetually give in to fear and suppression, or take resistance through other creative ways at great risk of paying one’s dear life. I chose the latter.

Four years later, truckloads of soldiers came for me, rake my house upside down, and plant evidence of subversion: a Mao book and a rusty .38 caliber pistol. Bungling on their part and auspicious circumstance let me slip out of a veritable capture.

Flustered by the incident, I decided to shift to the countryside and join the underground in mass politicization and organizing activities up to armed anti-fascist struggle.

Sacrifices Under A Fascist Rule

You may not be detained. But still, your liberty is curtailed and your rights are denied. You do not enjoy the freedoms citizens have in a genuinely free country. That is what fascist dictatorship is all about.

Free speech that is saying something negative about the dispensation landed you in jail. Independent and objective press was banned. Organizing by the citizenry was taboo. Only one organization could be formed, the Kabataang Barangay chaired by Marcos’s daughter Imee.

An off-the-cuff question could kill you, like Archimedes Trajano, a student of the Mapua Institute of Tachnology who was abducted, tortured and mangled beyond recognition before his lifeless body was dumped in the street, for asking about the qualification the dictator’s daughter to head the youth.

Under the prevailing Orwellian atmosphere, the thought of still going back to my studies no longer attracted. I realized that a human being’s true worth was not inside the four walls of the classroom insulated from the harsh realities of the outside world.

You find your exact humanity and gain your proper education in the midst of the people’s struggle against the ills that beset them. You become the whole person that you intend to be in the fight for what you believe in.

That was easier said than lived. To no longer go back to school, to cease from something I have been doing everyday since childhood and gotten accustomed as life itself, struck too hard and painful. I felt like being taken away from a habitat and losing the means to breath.

I had moments of doubts and hesitation. But the die, as Shakespeare said, has been cast. I summoned the courage to face the specter of an uncertain and perilous future.

Then again, the condition of my parents made it all the more agonizing. A college education was the strong foundation that they wanted to give me. They nursed the dream of my becoming a professional and successful person one day. I imagined their frustration and thought I may not bear it.

It broke my heart to know theirs breaking. Nonetheless, I and thousands of others in the same predicament took the sacrifice, for the nation’s sake.

It was not simply a matter of choice anymore. If I still wanted to pursue studies, the climate of repression turned me off. Fascism curtailed academic freedom and a truly meaningful education. It designed schooling not to set learners free with the truth, but to make them slaves by deception.

I could not see myself getting a college education that meant doing and parroting what the totalitarian state bid. For me, such was not the environment for intellectual growth to occur.

Before, I chalked little achievements in the academe, campus and society: debating instructors, scoring high grades, writing an article for a university mag, getting a break in one of the local radio stations, and hitting ambitious social goals for a better tomorrow. Proclamation 1081 dashed them all. There wasn’t anything anymore in those spheres to go back to.

On to the Fighting Front

I left campus-based activism for the more promising in terms of social change: guerrilla warfare. I said goodbye to the cozy comfort of the university and my neighborhood. I shirked the enticement of untroubled genial life in exchange for treading treacherous mountain trails lurking on the edge.

That probably was the least traveled road, poets talk about, the road of hard strife and dangerous living that my mother would never wish for me. But the urge to resist choking repression and get a better deal for the country got me through.

I survived a turbulent time, where I wasn’t taking cover in some secured haven. I am now a sexagenarian, among other things a living witness to the horrors, violence and injustice that Filipinos endured when the dictator Ferdinand Marcos ruled, fiercely repressive, forcefully deceptive.

No, I was not just a witness. I played a revolutionizing part. Along with countless freedom warriors, I fought against the brutalization that was not only physical but mental, that forced lies as truth.

I was once amused by a quote from a foreigner that spread like wildfire in the latter part of the dictatorship. It said: “The Philippines is a country of 48 million idiots and one son of a bitch.”

The guy was blindly wrong on the 48 million. There were candles of compelling moral sense and right thinking being lighted in that long dark night. They were of youth activists, lumad and peasant fighters, trade union organizers, cadres and urban poor community leaders pushing back the engulfing darkness.

Some would be snuffed by the murderous regime. But many others would light up again replacing the extinguished ones. The lighting continued until the brooding climate of fear, repression and violence began to melt from the flagrant burst of millions of flickering flames auguring liberation.

Like those of the other 70,000 who were subjected to warrantless arrest, incarceration, torture, forced disappearance and murder, my initial experience of martial law was of victimization. It is the state from which Imee and Bongbong Marcos, bratty scions of the dictator, tell us now to move on.

Well, I tell them: we did and kept doing so. The struggle we waged against authoritarianism with their father’s strangulation of the people’s core human liberties that culminated in February, 1986 when the dictator hurriedly flew out of the country prove that we have moved on from the initial shock of martial law. 

We kept moving on from one battle to the next throughout 14 years of iron rule. We have moved on from being mere victims of atrocity to deciders of our fate, fighters for freedom, champions of democracy, and forgers of our nation’s destiny.

The same kinetic spirit still prevails to this day in the struggle to frustrate the remnants of the dictatorship who are bent at revising history and regaining political power.

Our kind shall keep on moving, because we do not forget the past. We persist to make sure that the country has no more of it, and that the unfortunate rise of a fascist dictatorship will never happen again!