Part 12
Comparing the human-rights records
STATISTICAL facts about the human-rights violations in the Philippines as noted by the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) belied the accusation that Marcos is a human-rights violator compared to those recorded during the time of Presidents Aquino, Ramos, Estrada and Arroyo.
Even if none of those violations could be directly attributed to Marcos, the statistical figures presented by the CHR, on its face value, was more than enough to refute his detractors who tagged him a dictator. As per record, less than 50 alleged violations were noted during the period before the declaration of martial law (from January 1965 to September 21, 1972) and roughly 1,500 for the remaining 14 years (up to February 1986) he was in office.
In the case of Mrs. Aquino, who had been hailed as the defender of human rights, the 16 months that she ruled as a revolutionary dictator by virtue of her scrapping of the 1973 Constitution (from 1986 to 1987), close to 800 alleged human-rights violation were recorded. From 1987 to 1992, she logged more than 9,000 alleged human-rights
violations, including the bloody carnage of protesting farmers and students in 1987 after the police indiscriminately fired on them, killing 12 and wounding several others. Another carnage also occurred in Hacienda Luisita after the Mendiola incident and many innocent civilians were also killed and wounded.
Those days of infamy, under the supposed era of newly regained freedom and democracy, shattered the myth of Mrs. Aquino as the people’s restorer of their rights.
Ramos, for the six years he stayed in office (from 1993 to 1998), recorded more than 7,000 alleged human-rights violations, while in the three-year rule of Estrada (1998 to 2000) just over 100 incidents of alleged human-rights violations were recorded.
In the case of the Arroyo administration, it turned worse because of extrajudicial killings and forced disappearances, where more than 900 were recorded. More worrisome was the fact that the CHR, the Karapatan Foundation and IBON Foundation have listed an aggregate of more than 10,000 alleged human-rights violations, a figure that caught the attention of the United Nations representative on human rights.
Aquino’s human-rights violations: Facts and figures
TO the current generation of Filipinos who had to rely on textbook accounts and biased media reports of the martial law years up to the Edsa revolt, Ferdinand Marcos was a tyrant and oppressor and the Aquino couple, Ninoy and Cory, icons of democracy.
However, unknown to the general public, Mrs. Aquino’s regime, compared with Marcos, was tainted with a more gruesome record of human-rights violations during the period from March 1, 1986, to December 1991 with the number of warrantless arrests and detentions reaching an alarming level of 15,999 and extrajudicial executions of 1,733 cases, including 189 that occurred in 1990 alone.
Records in Congress, the Human Rights Commission (HRC) and Task Force Detainees of the Philippines (TFDP) for the same period showed 335 cases of disappearances and 146 cases of massacres, which happened between March 1, 1986 and 1989, including the infamous Mendiola carnage that claimed the lives of 12 farmers who joined a protest against the takeover of Hacienda Luisita and Aquino’s defective agrarian-reform policy at the Mendiola Bridge. A subsequent massacre also occurred inside Hacienda Luisita were many farmers died of bullet wounds.
Mrs. Aquino’s dismal human-rights record was also mirrored in figures during her term, showing a total of 71,111 families, 23,424 individuals, 229 barangays and 207 sitios affected by 464 cases of forced evacuations; 20 cases of segregation which affected 2,306 individuals and 1,675 families; and 23 cases of economic and food blockades, affecting 8,925 families and 427 individuals in 36 barangays in the countryside. Of the 8,925 families affected, 4,024 were victimized in 1990.
Former Supreme Court Justice Abraham Sarmiento, one of four Philippine-based oppositionists who Ninoy said he admired the most, also drew attention to the massive human-rights violations under Cory Aquino.
He noted that from 1988 onward, an average of 200 persons have been arrested daily, with 94 percent of the arrests done illegally. He reported 4,408 political detentions in the 21 months from January 1989 to September 1990. Of those arrested, 535 showed signs of torture, 109 disappeared following their arrest, 218 people died from massacres while 157 were wounded in 54 cases of frustrated massacres. It was estimated that from 1988 until April 1991, over 1 million people suffered injuries in the course of the government’s counterinsurgency drive.
The Philippine Alliance of Human Rights Advocates (PAHRA), in a report covering January 1987 to September 1991 stated that the rights of over 20,700 persons were violated as a result of 18,281 arbitrary arrests, 701 involuntary disappearances, 1,000 extrajudicial executions and 727 summary killings.
The Children’s Rehabilitation Center also reported that from 1988 to 1989, the rights of 346,789 children were violated.
The TFDP documented human-rights violations during the first 1,000 days of the Aquino regime (March 1986 to November 1988) as follows: 11,911 cases of illegal arrest, 705 summary executions, 88 frustrated summary executions, six deaths associated with cruel treatment of prison conditions, 125 massacres with 480 fatalities and 138 wounded, 136 counts of frustrated massacre, 1,676 torture victims, 224 involuntary disappearances, 25 civilian deaths in counterinsurgency-related hostilities, 37,133 dislocated families in 64 refugee camps and 500 families in 37 barangays were subjected to food and economic blockade.
The disturbing figures came about despite Aquino’s creation of the Commission on Human Rights on May 5, 1987, through Executive Order 163. The book Lost in Time noted:
“Aquino experienced how difficult it actually was to defend democracy. It was a lot easier to condemn her predecessor, Marcos, and to keep on ascribing to him problems that plagued her reign. To her dismay, the human-rights class suit against the Marcos Estate in America did little to spare her regime from intense criticism for its own human-rights record.”
The late nationalist Renato Constantino, whose house was raided by government agents in August 1988, added:
“The success of Mrs. Aquino’s advisers in institutionalizing vigilantism, food blockades and other counter-insurgency measures shows us that… the Aquino administration cannot keep up with its own rhetoric of upholding human rights even in its narrow sense.”
So, while the illusion created was that the Aquino government is markedly different from that of Marcos since it was not as politically repressive as its predecessor, this perception was accepted in a shrinking group of Cory believers.
Granting that Mrs. Aquino was sincere in her human-rights pronouncements, this was contradicted by factual record. The figures on human-rights violations could be more as other incidents committed by the military, the communists and the secessionists were not documented at all.
To be continued
To reach the writer, e-mail cecilio.arillo@gmail.com.