Fecal Politics: On Torture under Martial Law

By Vicente L. Rafael

Pinoy Times columnist Pete Lacaba, recently wrote about the time he spent in prison during the Martial Law years. He vividly recalled the conditions of his cell at Camp Crame which had no bathroom. He and his cell mates were forced to urinate kneeling down into empty biscuit cans. Each morning, a group of them were designated to empty the containers. They would walk out of the cell “carrying the foul smelling cans like the Three Kings bearing incense,” and dump them outside. More problematic, however, was the matter of defecation. Access to a toilet was dependent on the moods and availability of guards who had to be hailed by the prisoners with shouts of “Sir, etsas! Sir, etsas!”while banging on the iron bars. If the guards failed to come, Pete and his cell mates were forced to relieve themselves on old newspapers. These were then folded and set aside to be thrown the next day when allowed by their jailers. Once, a fellow prisoner in a fit of rage threw his fetid bundle towards the sleeping quarters of the guards. In retaliation, all the prisoners were subjected to what Pete calls “romansa militar, alyas karinyo brutal.” Not until the prisoners had organized themselves and protested the lack of facilities did they finally get a toilet of their own.

In response to the internet edition of Pete’s column in the listserve Plaridel, some readers wrote back about their own attempts at maintaining some sort of sanitary dignity while subjected to the routines of dehumanization in prison camps. Maria Cristina Rodriguez, for example, recycled the newspapers regularly brought by her mother while she was incarcerated at Camp Dangwa in Benguet. She consumed the paper twice, reading the news and then using it for collecting her leavings. Along with the urinal that was left in their cell, she and her fellow prisoners would deposit their remains by a canal near a volleyball court used by the soldiers. She recalls how they took particular pleasure in leaving behind their stench for the entire camp to smell, reminding their jailers of something they could not capture, much less domesticate.

The history of prisons is often regarded by scholars as integral to the rise of modernity. In the West, punitive institutions were seen to play the role of defining, separating, disciplining and reforming individuals into modern subjects capable of internalizing the law. Such a concept was introduced to the Philippines by the United States. Colonial rule, as the historian Michael Salman has so nicely argued, was modeled after prison reform then in vogue in the U.S. at the beginning of the twentieth century. Like prisoners, colonial subjects were to be modernized and disciplined, kept under the watchful eyes of colonial rulers and elite collaborators. Once reformed, they were to be paroled, as it were, and given their independence.

As with most other colonial institutions, the model of the reformatory prison (with the possible exception of the Iwahig Penal colony) was never fully realized. In the post-war era and through the Martial Law period, jails primarily became dumping grounds for so-called dangerous and subversive elements. Far from being institutions for the rehabilitation of criminals into modern subjects, prisons came to be governed by the most feudal forms of relations. In the military stockades, the lingua franca of power was torture, both mental and physical, spoken by the State through its chief interpreters, the prison guards. Held in place (“prison” comes from the Latin prehendere, to lay hold of), the individual was cut off from his or her society and introjected into the cavities of a system of deprivation, violence, and unceasing humiliation.

The nodal point of any system of incarceration is of course the prisoner’s body. It is the body and its various functions that are targeted for containment for the purpose of reform or, in the most extreme cases, death. On the way towards these two possibilities, the body, especially in the case of political prisoners, is treated as the dangerous repository of secrets which must be dug out, of truths that must be laid bare, invariably by force. Guards and prisoners find themselves in the most intimate relationship as torturers and tortured, one seeking to extract hidden knowledge from the deracinated body of the other. The prisoner’s body thus becomes the site on which the power of the State is performed. Its bruises, broken bones and bloodied flesh are the signs of the torturer’s ability to make the incarcerated body speak.

But as the accounts of Pete Lacaba, and Maria Cristina Rodriguez show, the State’s victory is never complete and always subject to challenge. That is because in prison, the incarcerated body continues to live. It thinks, thinking enough to eat, for example, and in eating reproduces itself day by day, seeking to adapt to if not transform the conditions it finds itself in. Eating whatever wretched food it is given, it knows enough to give something back to the world from which it has taken a part of. The body lives by taking and giving, and so always leaves behind a piece of itself. Urine and shit are not merely waste products incidental to the body; they are proof positive of the body’s continued capacities to keep on living by giving back to the earth the remains of its reproductive labor. In this sense, we can think of urine and shit as that which every body gives “birth” to.

Indeed, Sigmund Freud theorized that young children often confuse the vagina with the anus. Consequently, they conflate giving birth with defecating. In addition, children subjected to the demands of toilet training realize early on a kind of power they have over their parents with regard to the giving or withholding of their feces. Thus the anus is regarded as the location for the passage of a thing that can cause either horror or pleasure when delivered at the appropriate moment. Shit in this context comes across as either gift or threat: a token of submission that the child offers to its parents by way of recognizing their authority, or a weapon with which to terrorize those on top and repel their demands.

Freud’s insights into fecal matter help us think about the experiences of imprisonment which often entail the return to an earlier, more elementary stage of existence. The State seeks to apprehend, in all senses of that word, the body in and through its incarceration. However, the sheer material reality of the body means that the State cannot totally comprehend its workings. The State cannot, for example, expect the prisoner to stop urinating and defecating unless it also stops feeding it, in which case the prisoner will die. Dead prisoners deprive the State of objects on which to assert its will. After all, domination requires the maintenance, however minimal, of that which is to be dominated. Even in the Nazi death camps, exterminated prisoners had to be replaced by more prisoners in a logic exactly the same as that of an assembly line. Keeping the prisoner alive, however, means acceding to some of his or her needs, such as the need to defecate. Like the child gaining leverage over the parent, the prisoner through her or his feces is able to talk back to the prison guards. In the case of Pete and his cell mates, this meant having some way to protest their conditions to the point of having a toilet built for them. In Maria Cristina’s story, it meant turning shit into a weapon of revenge, releasing its smells as a way of interrupting the play and leisure of the guards.

This last consideration is extremely significant. The translation of feces from an abject source of embarrassment into a potential weapon of vengeance is perhaps the most telling instance of a kind of rebellion: the refashioning of the body from an object of captivity into an agent of its own liberation. Drawing upon its resources, the body fights back in ways difficult for the State to localize much less contain. For it is not shit itself, but its smell that disorients and disturbs. Odor can neither be conceptualized nor detained. It always escapes, only to linger on. Where shit serves as the evidence of the body surviving and living on, fecal odor is the body’s ghostly emanation. It assails the mind and the senses, penetrating the borders and check points of social conventions and political regimes.

The stories of Pete and Maria Cristina remind me of another group of political prisoners. In the late 1970s, incarcerated members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) launched what came to be known as the “Dirty Protest,” refusing to submit to the brutally invasive bodily searches of their British captors. As brilliantly described by the anthropologist Alan Feldman in his book Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland, the IRA prisoners decided to stop washing, brushing their teeth, and shaving while refusing to put on prison garb. Instead they went about naked, wrapped only in their filthy blankets. They also refused to do their business in toilets where they were routinely beaten up by the guards. They began to shit and urinate in their cells. Even more dramatic, they spread their shit on the walls and floors, creating an unbearable stench which made it extremely difficult for the guards to enter their cells. And they did so continuously for about five years. The fetid nature of their prisons meant that guards risked being swallowed up into what essentially had become the extension of the prisoner’s anal cavity. Fecal matter effectively created a wall protecting inmates from guards. It repelled the latter with a stench that clung to them long after they had left work. Thus was the relationship between inmates and guards reversed, as torturers were held hostage to the intractable remains of those they had tortured.

 

Martial law and the ideological time warp

By Raul Pangalangan

WHY DO those who are old enough to remember martial law make great effort today to mark its 40th anniversary? Because many of us are worried that the next generation seems blasé about a return to dictatorship and some even sound like they would relish it.

I have in the past looked at the pedagogical challenges to remembering that era. The kids’ minds today are wired differently. They are more attuned to specific issues (think environment), not grand causes (think liberalism). We tell them about the systemic roots of a problem but they are more moved by the human drama. And yes, they want the rawness of that drama because they suspect anything edited to have been scripted or manipulated. Finally, they are impatient for real solutions in the here and now. Preach to them “protracted struggle,” and they say, “You mean it will take more than one sem?”

But even for us oldies, there is actually a fundamental problem. We downplay the role of ideology in the proclamation of martial law, and portray it as nothing more than a power grab by Ferdinand Marcos and his cohorts—Marcos for love of power, the cohorts for love of money—and aided by the United States.

The result is that, until the present, we disregard the place of the Left in the martial law story. Remember that martial law was Marcos’ response to the communist threat, that he blamed the communists for the Plaza Miranda bombing (and he was telling the truth, ex-communists now tell us!), that his human rights victims were mostly leftists, and that until the death of Ninoy Aquino, the campus and religious Left (and of course the armed underground component) were the only ones who dared oppose Marcos. Finally, the whole Bagong Lipunan ideology and the Marcos trilogy of books on his “revolution from the center” were needed to counter the Left’s comprehensive vision.

In the foreword to the book “Subversive Lives” (on the saga of the Quimpo family of activists), Filipino-American historian Vicente Rafael asks why “there are no monuments to communism in the Philippines” and why, for instance, even the Bantayog ng mga Bayani dedicated to martial law victims honors them as “nationalist martyrs” rather than as communist cadres.

He replies: “[It means] that there is something about [communism] that defies commemoration and mourning [that the role of the Left] remains unassimilated into the dominant narrative [and] seems peripheral to nationalist consciousness.” He explains: “Monuments act as tombs that bury and so keep in place the ghosts of the past. They allow those in the present to commemorate the dead and thereby overcome their absence. [Communism] haunts the nation in ways that cannot be fully accounted for, much less entombed by the historical narrative of nationalism.”

Just consider the weeklong homage to the martyred youth leader, Lean Alejandro, who was assassinated 25 years ago as a prelude to a coup attempt against Cory Aquino. How many of the published tributes openly acknowledge that he was leftist? Why is it that, long after RA 1700 (Anti-Subversion Law) had been repealed, we continue to sanitize his leftist roots and highlight instead the altruism and spirit of self-sacrifice that indeed the Left embodied then?

My answer is that, once upon a time, it made good strategy to downplay ideology and find common cause with all groups. Indeed if Ninoy’s death was the beginning of the end for Marcos, it was because it mainstreamed the anti-Marcos opposition, from the underground Left to the parliament of the streets. Until then, the opposition to martial law came from the periphery, but with Ninoy’s murder, it arrived literally at Ayala Avenue’s confetti-strewn marches.

But if it made sense to hush the Marxist jargon then, why does it persist to the present? There are several possibilities. One, maybe we should confront the obvious. Cold War propaganda is so effective that, long after the USSR has crumbled and Communist China has become capitalist, Filipinos still look askance at communism. Do leftist party-list groups openly declare themselves communist, I wonder?

Two, maybe that isn’t just the fault of the running dogs of US imperialism. After all, the communists had their own killing fields and their revolution had begun to devour its own proverbial children. They have also degenerated into brigands who extort revolutionary taxes from legitimate businesses. For instance, they sabotage cell sites and cause the delayed transmission of our text messages. That certainly can’t endear them to the Filipino public. And contrast that to the Marcos children today: bright, sophisticated and articulate. Even without the Marcos mystique, they can give any politician a run for his money.

It is time to discard the notion that the communist threat was merely a convenient excuse for martial law. Perhaps the threat was bloated but it was there, and it was just a matter of time. Martial law thrived for the first few years because Marcos offered a vision of a New Society that Filipinos craved then and still seek today, and our hope is that we can find it without the pain and agony that the martial law nightmare wrought upon countless innocent lives.

Communities of memory

By Randy David

A few days ago, I participated in a forum to explore the purpose and methodology of establishing a “museum of memory” that would contain and preserve memories from the dark period of martial law. The concept behind this is prompted by the strong feeling that today’s young people hardly have an idea of what happened during the 14 years of the Marcos dictatorship. The premise, of course, is that the memory of this period must not be allowed to fade because, if Santayana is correct, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

On the initiative of the Edsa People Power Commission and the National Historical Commission, three specialists from Latin America were invited to share their insights and experiences on the establishment of museums, parks, and monuments commemorating the struggle against dictatorship and state violence in their respective countries. The three guests—Eugenia Ulfe of Peru, Patricia Tappata of Argentina, and Lelia Perez of Chile—spoke with great wisdom about the complex struggle to recover the voices of the countless victims of repression and their sometimes frustrating quest for justice when the dictatorship ended.

The exercise of memory, they said, is but one of the four essential tasks of a post-authoritarian government if it is concerned with healing and reconciling the national community. The other three are: truth, justice, and reparation. Listening to them, one realizes that the main reason we have been poor at remembering is because, in the first place, we failed to document in a sustained and systematic way what happened during that period, particularly in the remote towns and among the less prominent sectors of our society. That failure has left an empty space in our own consciousness.

The idea of setting up a process to hear the victims and to confront the perpetrators of state violence was from the outset rejected as divisive. The successive coup attempts launched against Cory Aquino’s presidency served as stern warnings that the government would be making a big mistake if it started digging up inconvenient truths about martial law.

Without anything approximating a truth commission, the most that could be produced was a list of the victims, and even this was incomplete. Because some of the central figures of martial law were part of the new government, it was difficult to bring any of the military leaders responsible for the tortures, disappearances, and illegal detentions to trial. Later, a general amnesty formalized the self-induced amnesia that set in almost as a precondition to the survival of the new government.

Reparation was one area where something valuable could have been accomplished. Yet even this was denied the victims. When the latter sued the Marcoses before American courts demanding compensation for the victims of human rights violations, judgments in their favor could not be enforced without the consent of the Philippine government that had claimed prior rights over all Marcos properties. To this day, the government has refused to compensate the victims of human rights violations during martial law. Yet, it did not think twice about paying the debts owed to financial institutions that were incurred by the Marcos regime.

The three Latin American guests said that symbolic reparation is often more important to achieving closure than material reparation. This entails giving the victims and their kin the chance to recover their dignity and validate their experiences. This can only be done if their stories are allowed to be freely told, collected, and preserved. These stories must be situated in the broader context of the events that marked that period. Someone’s imprisonment or torture or rape in the hands of military captors must not be treated as a cause for stigma or shame, to be buried as a family secret. Only in this sense can truth be redemptive.

From all this, wrote the Jewish philosopher Avishai Margalit in his thought-provoking work, “The ethics of memory,” we may glean an ethics of remembering that must be distinguished from the politics of memory or the psychology of memory. An ethics of memory implies an obligation to remember and also to forget. It involves complex attitudes and sentiments that come with what he terms “thick” relations—relations that are “moored in shared memory.”

“Thick relations are grounded in attributes such as parent, friend, lover, fellow-countryman.” The operative themes that mark such relationships are those of loyalty and betrayal, gratitude and love. “Thin relations, on the other hand, are backed by the attribute of being human.” These are our relationships to the “stranger and remote.” Here, the operative themes are usually those of respect and humiliation. Margalit says that ethics refers to how we should live with those who are bound to us by shared memory. Morality refers to the rules that govern our relationships to the rest of humanity.

Read in this context, it becomes clear that the project of a museum of memory has to confront the tricky issues posed by the ethics of remembering. This cannot be done by a committee working separately from the communities of memory that alone must decide what to remember and what to forget. The purpose must be neither merely to exhibit the trauma of the past nor to demonize the perpetrators. If it is to succeed, a memory museum cannot have any other purpose than to reawaken the values of loyalty, forgiveness, gratitude, and solidarity that hold us together as a people bound by thick relations.

Sotto ever trying hard

By Oscar P. Lagman, Jr.

TWENTY YEARS ago, I wrote in this space under the title “Unfit for the Senate” that senatorial candidates Ramon Revilla and Tito Sotto were not qualified for the Upper Chamber of Congress. Revilla had run for the Senate in 1987 and lost ignominiously, as he should have since he did not have the credentials to be a senator. But among the senatorial candidates in 1992 he ranked No. 3 in the surveys. His resume had not changed significantly from 1987, when he was rejected resoundingly by the electorate, to 1992, when he was regarded more highly by the same electorate. That was because he ran as Jose Bautista, his real name, in 1987 and as Ramon Revilla in 1992.

I ventured the opinion in the same article that if Sotto were to run as Vicente Sotto he would meet the same fate that Jose Bautista met in 1987. I wrote then that the Harvard-trained and veteran legislator has said he was not seeking reelection to the Senate because he did not relish the thought of debating with the likes of Tito Sotto, the master of toilet humor and sick jokes, host of the asinine TV show Eat Bulaga.

I wrote further that Senator Enrile should have perished the thought of debating with him as Sotto was not capable of engaging in such cerebral activity, as gauged by his participation in the Great Debate on the RP-US Treaty. His best effort in that discourse consisted of getting Eat Bulaga child star Aiza Seguerra, then too young to understand the issue, and the sex star Nanette Medved, a foreign citizen, to join the pro-base rally at the Luneta and leading the chant “Yes to the bases.” Such was Sotto’s grasp of the burning issue of the time.

Both Sotto and Revilla were elected to the Senate that year, Sotto placing first among the winners, no doubt by virtue of his popularity among what columnist Tony Abaya referred to as the “squealing masa,” the shrieking audience of the inane Eat Bulaga. As Sotto continued to appear in Eat Bulaga during his first term, he was elected in 1998 to another term. In all those years he was hardly heard in the Upper Chamber of Congress.

Then came the historic impeachment trial of President Joseph Estrada. When the former Securities and Exchange Commission chair Perfecto Yasay testified, Sotto stood up and addressed Yasay. This is how the dialogue went:

Sotto: Can you tell this court the telephone service provider that you use for your cellphone?

Yasay: “I used at that time Piltel.”

Sotto: “Digital, analog, GSM?”

Yasay: “I was using an old Motorola set.”

Sotto: “Okay, thank you.”

That was the extent of Sotto’s participation in that significant chapter of the country’s history.

After the trial had been aborted, Sotto tried to justify his “no” vote on the opening of the Jose Velarde envelope by saying that he had consulted legal eagles including former justices of the Supreme Court, and all of them advised him to oppose the opening of the envelope. To have to consult legal luminaries on whether to open an envelope thought to contain incriminating evidence against Erap meant he was incapable of making even such a simple decision.

Having served two consecutive terms in the Senate he was ineligible to run for re-election in 2004. He ran again in 2007 under the banner of TEAM Unity, the coalition backed by then President Arroyo. It will be recalled that Gloria ran for the Senate in 1995 and for vice-president in 1998 as a look-alike of Nora Aunor — obviously to win the votes of the “squealing masa.” Had she found a party to sponsor her candidacy for president in 1998, which she had originally wanted to do, Sotto would have been her running mate. Anyway, demonized because of his “no” vote on the opening of the Jose Velarde envelope, as Senator Miriam Santiago put it, Sotto ended up in 19th place in that year’s senatorial race.

To keep his name in the consciousness of the voters, he was appointed in 2008 as chairman of the Dangerous Drug Board by his patron Gloria. During the Lower House’s inquiry in 2009 into the alleged bribery attempt to release the Alabang Boys arrested in a buy-bust operation, Sotto somehow was able to insert himself into the inquiry. He tried mightily to participate in the deliberations but since he was only peripherally connected to the issue at hand, he did not get any chance to voice his thoughts. But at one point, Quezon Congressman Danilo Suarez, another Gloria loyalist, asked Sotto, “Why are there Caucasians in PDEA operations?”

It seemed from the irrelevance of the question that Suarez was merely giving fellow Gloria ally the chance to get some exposure as the inquiry was being televised live. Sotto answered: “The PDEA is structurally different from the US DEA.” The answer equally irrelevant to the issue being resolved and Sotto having gotten his exposure, though fleeting it was, Suarez dismissed the matter. Sotto remained a mere onlooker/listener for the rest of the session.

In 2010 Sotto ran again for the Senate. To distance himself from the discredited Arroyo, he ran under the banner of the National People’s Coalition, the party of Boss Danding Cojuangco, who quietly supported the candidacy of Noynoy. Sotto got elected this time.

Then came the impeachment of Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez, Arroyo’s first line of defense against future criminal charges. There was nothing Sotto had done since the Erap impeachment trial in 2001 to qualify him to sit as judge in the impeachment of Gutierrez. In response to the wide speculation that he, being an ally of Gloria Arroyo, would vote to acquit Gutierrez, the Inquirer quoted him as saying: “People should not be judgmental and avoid speculating on the individual stand for each senator. They’re not helping the Senate any by doing that.” Bothered by the wide speculation that he would vote according to the bidding of his former patron, he declared that there are 23 republics in the Senate, implying that all senators are independent minded.

Yet, in the trial of Chief Justice Renato Corona he admitted that he went by the wishes of the people when as judge he should have decided on the basis of evidence presented for his evaluation. Said he when he cast his vote: “The real judge in this trial is the citizenry. They heard the two sides. In my conscience, I have heard their decision. And for them I vote guilty.”

In his speech against the RH Bill, he said his son died five months after he was born, attributing his death to complications arising from his wife taking the oral contraceptive pill Diane. However, information indicated that the product Diane became available in the market only after his son had died, destroying completely his sob story. He didn’t sound credible from the beginning. Here is a macho man (what with his mustache and beard) sobbing like a little boy whose large scoop of ice cream had just fallen on the floor. It was obviously plain acting, and it was bad acting, including on the part of his former detractor Enrile, who was not moved one bit by the “emotional breakdown” of Corona during the latter’s trial but who came to console the sobbing Sotto.

Tito Sotto should stop trying to sound and look like a senator in the mold of the senators of the 1950s. The more he tries, the more he reinforces his image as the intellectually challenged student of Wanbol University, the fictional school in the TV variety show Iskul Bukol.

In fact, the TV clip wherein he let out a guffaw after saying he could not have plagiarized Robert Kennedy because what he said was in Tagalog, a language Kennedy did not know, could pass for a scene in Iskul Bukol.