MikeLigalig.com

The Marcos regime’s 3,257 extrajudicial killings exceed the 2,115 extrajudicial deaths under Gen. Augusto Pinochet in Chile, University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Alfred McCoy told a conference on the legacies of the Marcos dictatorship at Ateneo de Manila University.

Here, 35,000 were tortured and over 70,000 imprisoned, McCoy adds in his paper “Dark Legacy.” Add 737 Filipino desaparecidos, or the disappeared, including Cebu Redemptorist priest Rudy Romano.

The Marcos regime intimidated by random displays of torture victims—becoming a theater state of terror. This had “a profound impact” upon the military (think Jovito Palparan) and society.

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At the 5th CSU, one Lieutenant Aguinaldo (PMA ’72) worked with classmates Billy Bibit and Vic Batac (’71), beating victims together and forging bonds that later knitted into the Reform the Armed Forces Movement. At the MISG, it’s said, Colonel Abadilla, Robert Ortega and Lacson tortured together for over a decade, forming a tight faction that’d rise together within the police after Marcos’ downfall.

RAM colonels drilled in inflicting pain emerged in the late 1980s. Egged on by cashiered Juan Ponce Enrile, they launched six coup attempts. “No other military in the world launched so many coups with so little success.” They got away scot-free.

Freed from judicial review, the torturers of the Marcos era have continued to rise within the police and intelligence bureaucracies, allowing the pervasive brutality of martial law to persist.

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In September 1992, the US District Court in Honolulu ruled Ferdinand Marcos guilty of systematic torture. It held his estate liable for damages to all 9,541 victims and awarded nearly $2 billion in damages. It’s the biggest personal injury verdict in legal history. And in 2013, President Benigno Aquino III signed the Human Rights Reparation Act.

The trauma of Marcos’ terror remains deeply imbedded within society’s collective memory and institutional fabric. “The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory,” historian Milan Hubl cautions.

Has memory of “death from a thousand cuts” been smudged out? Is Sept. 21, 1972, beyond our capacity to remember? Most students today, surveys tell us, have the sketchiest notions of Marcos’ “unanimity of the graveyard.” The sense of stewardship, for nurturing restored freedoms is patchy.

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As the country grows economically, it must recover its full fund of social capital by remembering, recording, and, ultimately, reconciling, McCoy adds. A society cannot grow without a sense of justice.

Hence the crucial role played by today’s prosecution of those behind the pork barrel scam, as underpinned by a President, Ombudsman and Commission on Audit, flawed by errors yet bearing impeccable credentials that buttress ongoing trials…

So, speak, memory.

(E-mail: [email protected])

http://opinion.inquirer.net/

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