Detention Camp: Manila

Editor's Note: President Ferdinand Marcos placed the Philippines under martial law in September 1972. Although Proclamation No. 1081 was dated Sept. 21, an article on www.gov.ph said Marcos signed it on either Sept. 17 or 22. The strongman appeared on nationwide television on Sept. 23 to announce the imposition of martial law as of 9 p.m. of Sept. 22. By the time of the announcement, at least 100 of the 400 personalities to be arrested were already detained at Camp Crame.

This piece was written by Ninotchka Rosca, author of the novels "State of War" and "Twice Blessed," under the pen name Concepcion Aguila. It was smuggled out of the Philippines by UP Prof. Roxie Lim and given to the US-based Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars. It appeared in the Committee's Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars in 1974. It is reposted here with the author's permission.


During the first five hours of the martial law regime, Filipinos were rapidly introduced to a new malevolent military institution, the like of which had not been seen since the establishment of the third Republic of the Philippines in 1946. I am referring to the construction of detention areas and to the illegal practice by the military of holding persons under custody, within the military reservations, for a period of time lasting anywhere from two weeks to two years—the maximum period being determined only by the age of the martial law declaration. 

 

There are detention centers in practically all of the major provincial commands of the military. In certain areas, such centers proliferate, each managed by a major service of the military: army, navy, air force, constabulary, or even the newly integrated police. In the Greater Manila Area, the center of commercial and cultural activity of the country, and where the lavish pageantry of the Miss Universe '74 contest was held, the most famous detention centers are the following: the Men's Detention Center in the gymnasium of Camp Crame, the Women's Detention Center, the PC Stockade, the Metrocom (Metropolitan Command) Detention Area, the CIS (Criminal Investigation Service) Detention Area—all within the military reservation of Camp Crame, headquarters of the Philippine Constabulary. In the army reservation of Fort Bonifacio, on the other hand, there is the catacombic Youth Rehabilitation Center (a misnomer) and the Ipil Reception Center (another misnomer. Within the reservation are also situated the maximum security prison cells where Senators Jose W. Diokno and Benigno Aquino are kept; those who have had occasion to partake of the hospitality of this place have given it its name—a name used even by the military: stalag one, two, three, depending on which cell block one receives his accomodations.

 

There are detention centers in Laguna and Pampanga, in Bicol, in the Visayas (specifically Cebu and Iloilo), as well as in Zamboanga, Cotabato, Davao and Jolo in Mindanao. A detention center, the Sampaguita, was recently inaugurated in Alabang, Laguna, just outside of Greater Manila. This is supposed to be for the exclusive use of those held under non-political offenses; however, names of political detainees, especially the intransigent ones, have found their way into the list of those transferred to this detention center. 

 

I must emphasize that these are only the known detention centers. Others, less heard of, exist in Luzon, the Visayas and Mindanao. Aside from the detention centers proper, the military also maintains a number of private houses, called "safe houses," paid for with unaudited intelligence funds. These houses are plush and they are intended primarily for housing those intelligence agents of the military working in a definite district or area. However, these houses also serve as effective hiding places for arrested persons whenever the military does not wish such persons traced by their relatives or friends. Because these "safe houses" are never officially acknowledged, no rules obtain within these premises as to the manner of treatment dealt out to arrested persons. Several instances of rape have been reported to have occurred within these "safe houses"; the victim or victims are released immediately once the sexual outrage has been accomplished. These victims were ostensibly taken in for questioning, but instead of handing them over to the proper military officers, the agents took them to the "safe houses" where they took turns abusing the women. The most notorious case of this kind was the rape of a Makibaka (a woman's organization before martial law) girl raped by a team of intelligence agents, headed by the infamous Rey San Juan, a civilian employee of the

Intelligence Service of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (ISAF). 

 

Within the military reservations, there are also secret, unofficial detention centers—rooms usually within the smaller compounds of the intelligence services headquarters, where newly arrested persons are housed, allegedly for "tactical interrogation." Among these are the quarters within the building of the Constabulary Security Unit (CSU) and the houses within the ISAF compound. The first is headed by the cold-blooded Col. Melendres and directly managed by Col. M. Aure, one of those plagued with paranoiac psychological fears of his family being harmed "by them"—a common enough syndrome among these types of officers. The second is supposedly under Gen. Paz; however, those who have gone through the ISAF detention center also mention a Major Arcega, a Col. Miranda and a Col. Mayo as the ones directly knowledgeable regarding the management of these centers. 

 

 

 

Tactical interrogation includes the following: 1) holding the prisoner incommunicado for weeks or months, depending on the whims of the officers involved as well as the response of the individual to methods of interrogation; and 2) the dreaded "methods of interrogation." The latter includes physical torture (beatings, plucking out the eyebrows hair and pubic hair one by one, pistol whippings, rifle butt blows, karate chops, kicks, burning of the flesh with cigarette butts and matches, burning the genitals of males with lighters), use of electric gadgets (electrodes attached to the genitals and nipples through which electric current is passed), and the use of drugs (the ISAF specializes in injections of sodium pentothal) without medical supervision. In the latter case, one old man appeared to have been given an overdose while inside the ISAF compound, as a result of which he was in stupor for three days. I have been told of cases where the minds of prisoners just disintegrated because of repeated doses of drugs given by the military; of those, however, I have no personal knowledge and would therefore limit myself to the case of this old man.

 

All these methods are intended to break down the "resistance" of prisoners, to make them willing to accede to the military's demands for information on underground activities. In some cases, however, the arrested person does not really know anything and therefore has to suffer interminable torture. Women are not spared this treatment, as in the case of Judy Taguiwalo, a former student of the University of the Philippines. She was kept for weeks in an isolated provincial station where she was beaten up almost every day, made to strip naked and sit on huge blocks of ice. This frail girl's name appeared only in the formal list of detainees when the incident reached scandalous proportions. Noni Villanueva, a former youth leader, suffered electrocutions in the ISAF compound, prior to his transfer to the "open" detention center of Ipil. Others, strangely enough, had their eyebrows tweezed off, hair by hair, or were given rifle butt blows on their ribs. Still others were methodically starved, or not allowed to sleep, or were stripped naked, after physical torture, anchored with leg irons and thrown into small rooms with cement floors with no mats or blankets to protect them from the evening cold or the mosquitoes. A few, because of the drugs employed, have lost their minds. Recently, the CSU put into practice a new form of torture: the arrested persons are given injections of morphine to force them into addiction and the drug is later withheld, in the hope that the anguish of withdrawal would force the prisoner into giving information. Receiving this kind of treatment to this time is Fidel Agcaoili, son of a prominent family in the Philippines and a graduate of an American university.
 

Still others who received their share of ill treatment in the hands of the military were Jose F. Lacaba, newsman and poet, who limped for three days afterwards and who passed out blood in his urine; Fernando D. Tayag, a former student of the University of the Philippines, who up to now is beaten up daily; Levy Balgos de la Cruz, playwright, whose front teeth were smashed by blows from fists and rifle butts and who was offered twenty pesos (about $2) by Col. Diaz as consolation. These are only a few of those who continue to suffer physical, chemical and psychological tamperings of their personalities. Some die from this brutal treatment, especially in the rural areas where the military rules absolutely, through naked terror and power.

 

Subtle psychological tortures are inflicted by those in the lower echelons of the military hierarchy upon prisoners. In the CSU, it has become usual among junior officers to hold a celebration whenever they have taken into custody a considered "prize catch." These officers drink themselves to madness, cavort around their offices, with radios turned up as loudly as possible. Music coming from the offices reverberate through the rooms used as prisons and tension builds within these quarters, among the prisoners—for the latter know, by experience, that after the bacchanalia, the officers and guards will move into the detention quarters to beat up the prisoners. Even the lowliest guard plays with the prisoners. Since the toilets in this compound are situated outside the rooms of the prisoners, groups of five prisoners are marched out at five o'clock in the morning to the toilets where they defecate. Once there and while the prisoners are performing this bodily function, the guards start counting from one to ten and at the last number, whether finished or not, the prisoners are marched back to the detention quarters. Few are able to adjust to this petty form of interference in their physiological functions.

 

It is estimated that more than 60,000 persons have gone through these detention areas and the experience of being detained by the military. Groups are released from time to time, whenever the inadequate accomodations threaten to be even more severely taxed by the influx of more prisoners. However, those released more quickly and in greater numbers belong to the category of detainees under non-political offenses, ranging from murder to pickpocketing. The modus operandi is to hold prisoners for investigations, because as one Judge Advocate General's Office (JAGO) major explained, "one is presumed guilty until proven innocent." The officers in the various legal sections of the military have expressed satisfaction over the long detention periods. Before martial law, they explained, they had to work fast because of the 36-hour limit on detention; now, after martial law, they can "take (their) time." Taking their time, of course, means months and months of allowing the prisoners' dockets, files and dossiers to accumulate in their offices while they play pelota or with their concubines. These officers generally ignore the damage done to the detainee's life. One such detainee, imprisoned under erroneous information, witnessed, through the months, the death of his only child for want of medical care (he was the only bread-earner in the family) and his wife take up with another man who could feed her. Others have witnessed their wives or relatives suffer nervous breakdowns, while still others were financially or professionally ruined.

 

The process of securing papers for one's relatives under detention is a long and tedious one. Although officially relatives are not allowed to follow up the release papers of prisoners, this rule can neither be enforced nor is it operative—for the simple reason that military personnel are too lazy to attend to the processing papers on their own. Five signatures are required by the release papers and in the process of obtaining these signatures, any small occurence may serve to block the whole process. One messenger-sergeant may not feel like taking the day's batch of papers from one office to another, or a lieutenant given the order to type out a recommendation for release may conveniently forget this over his ten o'clock coffee break.
 

 

 

Thus, relatives are forced to try to track down the papers of the prisoner from office to office, shedding tears on the carpeted floors of generals', majors', colonels' offices, cajoling lieutenants, sergeants and whoever happens to be around into doing their assigned task, by buying them lunch, snacks or gifts. This system renders the relatives particularly vulnerable to demands for bribes—anywhere from two hundred thousand pesos (about $10,000 to $15,000) for higher-ranking officers. This system of bribery is rampant and exempts no one; bribes go to the highest officials of the Department of National Defense and the Armed Forces down to the lowest constable, private or policeman. Others take their bribes in the form of sexual accommodations, from the wives and/or sisters of the detained ones. 

 

Generally, political prisoners refuse to tender any bribe to anyone, standing firm in their belief in the basic justness of their political commitment, as well as their refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the Marcos dictatorship. This is probably one reason why political detainees stay in the detention centers for months and months on end, and why the Office for Rehabilitation (a misnomer) has formulated a policy of keeping political officers from six months to three years. The Rehab Office claims, on paper, as justification for this policy, to have a rehabilitation program; in practice, however, this merely consists of sending squads of newly-graduated girl psychologists—who are generally ignorant—into the detention centers to give psychological and l.Q. exams to the prisoners. These girls actually spy on prisoners' conversations and gauge attitudes towards the dictatorial regime of Marcos.

 

The military always makes a great show out of the handicraft projects within the detention centers. What they do not bother to point out, however, is that these projects were started by the prisoners themselves as a form of self-help, to maintain morale within the detention centers, as well as to extend financial help to the more destitute prisoners and their families. The projects also aid in the organization of prisoners to frustrate the desire of the military to divide and set the prisoners at each other. The military, too, does not bother to point out that these self-help projects, instituted and organized by political prisoners themselves, gained ground and validity among prisoners, despite the actual discouragement and non-help of the Rehab Office. What the Rehab Office points to now as part of their rehabilitation program is actually the result of the magnificent militance of the political prisoners, the collective expression of their refusal to allow themselves to be dehumanized to the level of beasts—which was the primary intention of the military in dumping together a vast number of persons into inadequate detention centers with minimal facilities even for sanitation.

 

To illustrate this, one may cite the case of a former detainee who tried to help her colleagues within the detention center. This detainee had the water system repaired, at her own considerable expense, and to start off the self-help projects bought six sewing machines for delivery to the detention center. However, the military refused to allow these machines into the center and a few days later, the detainee herself was transferred, in the middle of the night, to the isolation of the stalags, blindfolded and flanked by armed escorts. While the detainee, a prominent name in the Philippines, has since then been allowed to return home, to this day she does not know the reason for that cloak-and-dagger evening; only those who remained in the detention center deduced the logic behind her sudden transfer. 
 

Despite such incidents as this, however, the prisoners continued to try to set up their self help projects, largely by appealing for financial and material help outside the military. Friends responded and the projects were set-up—which left the military with nothing to do except attempt at cooptation. Besides, certain officers also saw that these projects could be a source of lucrative income—not for prisoners but for themselves, since the products made by the detainees were considerably well-crafted and exquisite. Many of those involved in the self-help projects among the prisoners were among the best minds in the country, of artistic and creative bent: poets, painters and others.

 

These projects are important to the detainees, not primarily for financial reasons but for the purpose of strengthening the detainees' sense of self-respect—for within the detention areas, erosion of dignity and dehumanization are the guiding policies of the military.
 

I stayed in one of these detention centers for quite a while and the most telling form of non-physical torture that one can suffer inside is the constant military effort to instill in a person a sense of his own worthlessness, his isolation from the larger community of the Filipino nation. In the ISAF, for example, officers deliberately discuss plans in front of a prisoner, mentioning possibilities of raids on the houses of his friends and comrades, as well as surveillance or arrest of his friends and comrades—all in an effort to instill a sense of helplessness in the prisoner.

 

In the "open" detention centers, this process continues day after day and all—even the lowliest military personnel—take part in it. The guards in the detention centers seem to have been especially chosen for their moronic intellectual capabilities and their malice. These guards spend their time insulting visitors, making it difficult for the detainees to see their relatives even during visiting hours, making hoary and sexual remarks to the female detainees, and trying to provoke the male prisoners so as to have an excuse to beat them up. They steal the small amounts of food and clothes which relatives manage to send their relatives within the detention centers. They are so avaricious that they would even steal a cheap bottle of after-shave cologne; in one instance, the guards ate up four steaks sent the prisoners by a kind-hearted hotel owner. They play for hours with their guns, with the result that not a few have accidentally shot each other, and do guard duty while drunk. They speak foully, their language interspersed with putang 'na mo (you whoreson) or hindot (fuck). They do mean and small things to harass the detainees. They are like evil children given guns and uniforms that vest them with power and they have little understanding of the meaning of martial law, the loss of fundamental freedoms for the entire nation as a whole. They generally have lumpen backgrounds and behave in such a manner.

 

Even the WACs—Women's Auxillary Corp—are not exempt from this rudeness of behavior and pettiness; some WACs have even participated in the beating up of female detainees. One special form of harassment is the use of the public address system, normally intended for paging detainees to go to the visiting room or the offices for official matters. The WACs and the guards play with the public address system and sing songs in their awful voices—usually banal pop songs. It is next to impossible to stop this kind of activity once it gets started, for it is a prevalent Filipino myth that one can make a sudden rise to fame and fortune through the jukebox, stage or cinema; so for afternoons on end, hour after hour, or during evenings, the guards and the WACs take turns at pouring their terrible singing voices into the public address system, whether detainees are resting or not.

 

 

 

Every little privilege that one gets in the centers has to be pled for and paid for; no matter if the order has already been given by a colonel, it is still the lower officers and the guards who must implement such orders. The officers in charge of these detention centers are chosen, it appears, on the same basis as the guards. The OIC obtains his sense of power from the amount of tearful supplication he can wring from the prisoner and his relatives. From time to time, he threatens prisoners with the cessation of all privileges, including visiting hours and the use of the telephone. He derives his inspiration from his superiors, who, to keep their prisoners on their toes, would cancel, from time to time and without any reason, visiting privileges or the open house—a day when relatives can enter the centers and at least touch their loved ones inside, talk to them without the barrier of chicken wire or bring their children to be caressed and kissed.

 

Medical and dental services are supposed to be available to the prisoners—but getting to the dental and medical clinics of the military reservations entails a long labyrinthine process—and it is only a tribute to the physical program instituted by prisoners among themselves that not everyone has succumbed to disease or infection. One female prisoner who had a tooth extracted in the dental clinic of the military reservation had her cheek sutured to her gum. When she complained, the dentist told her off, saying that she should be grateful for the free services and that all prisoners should be summarily executed, for purposes of economy.

 

One female detainee suffered a miscarriage due to the shock of arrest; however, it took hours and hours before she could be brought to the hospital, because the OIC could not be found; he was in all probability playing pelota. Detainees in need of medical attention have discovered, to their chagrin, innumerable obstacles: no typewriters in the guards' offices and therefore disposition forms could not be filled out and the OIC could not sign the forms; or the sergeant left by the OIC was practically illiterate and could not type out a simple note authorizing the guards to escort a detainee to the hospital; or the OIC refused to take the responsibility of deciding and had to wait for orders from his superios while the detainee was slowly exsanguinating before him.

 

Once, however, the detainee finds himself in the hospital, his sufferings do not diminish; they continue—for doctors and nurses share the common military attitude that prisoners should not be viewed as human beings. The sick one is dumped into a filthy, bug-infested hospital bed after a cursory examination and left there to fend for his life, with rare visits from the doctors and only his idiotic armed escort for company. One doctor goes around happily recounting how one of the detainees he operated upon for a gunshot wound in the thigh died of pneumonia. They blithely write off as suicide, or attempts at suicide, the results of manhandling suffered by detainees at the hands of the military. Fractured bones and smashed skulls are described as death from natural causes.

 

The nurses are particularly offensive—and one of the most notorious is Lt. Col. Lopez, former head nurse of the Crame Station Hospital. This woman delighted in berating prisoners at the top of her voice every morning, insulting and refusing to allow visitors to see their sick relatives. Col. Lopez flaunts her power but despite the numerous complaints against this woman, she was even promoted by the higher echelons of the military. 

 

Sickness, too, does not exempt anyone from the physical tortures of the detention centers. Ricardo Lee, a well-known writer, young, thin and orphaned as he was, was beaten up by military men, despite the fact that he had rheumatic fever. Lee spat out blood as a consequence of this experience. 

 

I was lucky to have been deported out of the particular detention center where I was staying, but many—hundreds of them all over the country—remain at the mercy of this sub-human species of military men. Filipinos no longer call military men by their formal labels; they are all lumped as hapon—Japanese, in memory of the atrocities inflicted upon Filipinos by the Japanese Imperial forces during the Second World War. These hapons keep behind bars some of the best minds of the country, among them Dr. Bienvenido Lumbera, the Philippines' top expert on Filipino literature; Dr. Ricardo Ferrer, a top economist of the National Economic Development Agency, also under detention; and, ironically enough, in a country where the Miss Universe contest reached unprecedented heights of excess and extravagance, two beauty queens have suffered arrests: Ms. Nelia Sancho and Ms. Maita Gomez, the latter apprehended but a few days before the Miss Universe happening.

 

These facts regarding detention in the Philippines are well hidden from the eyes of foreigners, who are beguiled by a few cleaned-up streets of the tourist area and by the successive circuses of extreme tastelessness launched by the dictator's wife, Imelda Marcos. Some Filipinos abroad, feasting their senses on the balikbayan troupes and the Pangkat Kawayan (groups sent out by the dictator Marcos for propaganda purposes) have also succumbed to these enticements. They have, like the people of Marie Antoinette, eaten cake—and the frothy easy frosting, so smooth to swallow, so delightful to take into one's body like a soporific, needing no effort nor tears, obscures for them the hard and bruising image of countless Filipinos masticating their daily diet of beans and fish within the detention centers, chipping their teeth, in the process, on the stone-infested small mound of rice. It is easy to relax and go one's way overseas, but in the Philippines, though Van Cliburn may play sweet music, he cannot overpower with piano notes the cries of anguish and pain, and the murmured anger that continually rises from those secret chambers of the military reservations. The latter are the best schools for rebels and revolutionaries in this country.