Someone asked me some time ago why I was obsessed with surrealism. Why, for example, is this blog entitled Surrealist Manifesto, after that fairly outdated declaration by ancient Frenchman Andre Breton? Why is my thesis focused on surreal works of literature, etc.
The honest answer is that I live in a surreal environment. I live in a house in Quezon City– the New Jersey of Manila’s New York (only QC’s cooler than Jersey, and Manila’s filthier than NY). I share a roof with my parents, my younger brother, three dogs and a hundred thousand cats. Across the pond is the University of the Philippines, where I have been studying in for roughly six years already. This city is located in the same Metro as the capital of the country. The Philippines is a third world country located somewhere in the ass crack of South East Asia. So what’s so surreal about that?
I’ll just let the latest national fiasco speak for itself and repost something a better writer than myself has written.
Three hundred men, says Velmonte, a professor emeritus at the University of the Philippines School of Medicine. Three hundred heavily armed men, with one search warrant for an alleged NPA rebel named Mario Condes.
When the men in uniform rode out of the Velmonte property, they had with them 43 cuffed and blindfolded prisoners. None of them was named Mario Condes.
Lt. Col. Noel Detoyato, spokesperson of the Army’s 2nd Infantry Division, said those arrested were ranking New People’s Army leaders. “We have been conducting surveillance operations against that group. We are sure that those persons were really NPA members.”
Detoyato’s certainty is in conflict with the behavior of the gentlemen of the 202nd Infantry Battalion. The 43 captives were interrogated, asked again and again to admit their affiliations with the NPA. On Thursday, six days after the raid, the military claimed it had five new warrants of arrest, because one of the 43 had confessed.
It is odd why confessions are so vital if Detoyato’s evidence is so clear. Odder still that these warrants were not served on Feb. 6.
According to 62-year-old Dr. Alexis Montes, he and the other detainees were woken up in the night to be interrogated. His wife Evelyn says her husband told her of the electrodes attached to his head, sending shocks through his body when his answers failed to please his interrogators. Montes says they brought him outside, cuffed and blindfolded, tied to a chair, and jabbed at his chest with sharp objects. And then he would shove himself backward, backward, away from the sharp sticks, backward into a stream of water. Twice this happened, he says, twice he found himself under water, half-drowning and blind.
The military does not deny the cuffing or blindfolding. Its chaplain says it was necessary in the investigation. The blindfolds stayed on for 36 hours.
In a list distributed by the Armed Forces of the Philippines, Linda C. Murillo, alias Glenda Cervantes Murillo, alias Yaga, alias Maureen, is 26 years old, with a second year high school education from Daraga high school. The military says she is the head medical of the Albay provincial committee. It is assumed the military means the NPA.
Glenda does not know if she was really pregnant when the men in uniform brought her into Camp Capinpin. She only knows that her period had been delayed for weeks by the time she was arrested.
It happened on the second day after the arrest. Blood, punching out from between her legs. It lasted a long time. There might have been chunks of flesh, or there might not. They never took off the blindfold. She is grateful they unlocked her cuffs long enough for her to wash herself. The others were forced to wait for a guard to take the trouble.
The military doctor who saw her the next day said she was not pregnant. It was tension that made her suddenly bleed, he said. Glenda sits on a cot in a padlocked room with six other women. The purple polish on her toenails is chipped. Her eyes dart; her hands clench and unclench. Glenda still does not have her period.
The AFP says it was not its intent to deprive the detainees of counsel. Perhaps it is necessary to question how it is possible to accidentally refuse a 27-year-old woman named Mercy Castro her right to an attorney.
According to the military, Mercy Icban Castro, alias Maria Mercedez Icban Castro, a graduate from Justino Sevilla High School, is a member of the Center for Health and Development. In Camp Capinpin, she stays alone in a small cell with green netting over the bars. She smiles and smiles, this Mercy. She smiles even when she says she is tired. They told her to be grateful she was alive. They ignored her requests for counsel. They told her it was her fault she was where she was. They said they would drown her. In the dark, behind her blindfold, she could not tell who was speaking to her. They told her she was pretty, these men with all the questions. They told her how they wanted to pinch her, kiss her. When she went to the bathroom with a female guard, she could hear men speaking around her. She worries about what they saw when a woman guard pulled down her panties.
The gentlemen in uniform tell us these are criminals, high-risk prisoners, dangerous to the country. The military tell us to believe them, even as Montes shows the red marks on his chest and the lines on his wrists.
They say they found guns and explosives. They say seven of these people were part of a raid in San Narciso.
It is possible the military is correct; it is also possible it is not. There were no witnesses that morning of Feb. 6 when the soldiers came in with their white sacks to find explosives under beds. It is possible these 43 are members of the NPA. It is possible they were making bombs; it is possible they were conspiring against the nation. It is possible all 43 of them were responsible for the Fall of Bataan, the assassination of Ninoy Aquino, and the bombing of Plaza Miranda. Yet it does not matter what is possible. It does not even matter what is true. What matters is that 43 men and women were tortured by the gentlemen of the Armed Forces and denied their rights as Filipinos.
The government wonders why so many run to the mountains to read Marx and learn the patterns of battle. It wonders at the recruits who erupt from forests with stolen guns. It is because of days like last Saturday, sunny and bright, when the military proves true every last line of leftist propaganda against the government, when it is made patently clear that there is no law, that those who carry guns believe themselves above it, judge and jury, for God and country. It is because of men like Col. Aurelio Baladad of the 202nd IB, who stood in the Court of Appeals last Friday, casually defying the Supreme Court’s writ of habeas corpus. It is not unreasonable to believe that the military’s treatment of the “Morong 43” may have recruited more NPA rebels into the mountains than any seminar held in Rizal. It is why the AFP will fail, again and again, in its mission to quell the communist rebellion.
This is what a democracy is at its most basic: one man’s right to wipe his own shit from his own ass, instead of waiting for a soldier to take the trouble. The gentlemen who guard democracy need to remember that without their guns and six-by-six trucks, they are as vulnerable as anyone else.#
